Galatea Resurrects #17 (A Poetry Engagement)

Issue No. 17 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2011-12-22T22:25:00.000-08:00

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

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Nicholas Manning Reviews IRRESPONSIBILITY by Chris Vitiello

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews HOW PHENOMENA APPEAR TO UNFOLD by Leslie Scalapino

Allen Bramhall Reviews AT THAT by Skip Fox

T.C. Marshall Reviews ETHICS OF SLEEP by Bernadette Mayer

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CRAYON by Allison Benis White

Laura Trantham Smith Reviews UTOPIA MINUS by Susan Briante

Moira Richards Reviews IN PARAN by Larissa Shmailo

Philip Troy Reviews THE FEELING IS ACTUAL by Paolo Javier

Eileen Tabios Engages THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT PAINTERS SHOULDN’T TALK: A GUSTONBOOK by Patrick James Dunagan

Logan Fry Reviews IN THE COMMON DREAM OF GEORGE OPPEN by Joseph Bradshaw

Eileen Tabios Engages TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION by Andrea Rexilius

Thomas Fink Reviews PARTS AND OTHER PIECES by Tom Beckett

T.C. Marshall Reviews TO LIGHT OUT by Karen Weiser and DUTIES OF AN ENGLISH FOREIGN SECRETARY by MacGregor Card

Allen Bramhall Reviews CITIZEN CAIN by Ben Friedlander

William Allegrezza Reviews FORTY-NINE GUARANTEED WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH by Sandy McIntosh

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews THERE’S THE HAND AND THERE’S THE ARID CHAIR by Tomaz Salamun

Eileen Tabios Engages MY LIFE AS A DOLL by Elizabeth Kirschner

Gabriel Lovatt Reviews THE USE OF SPEECH by Nathalie Sarraute, translated from the French by Barbara Wright

Logan Fry Reviews PORTRAIT OF COLON DASH PARENTHESIS by Jeffrey Jullich

Eileen Tabios Engages STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE by Matthew Cooperman

Bill Scalia Reviews THE URGE TO BELIEVE IS STRONGER THAN BELIEF ITSELF by Erin M. Bertram

Kristin Berkey-Abbot Reviews FAULKNER’S ROSARY by Sarah Vap

Micah Cavaleri Reviews KYOTOLOGIC by Anne Gorrick

Tom Beckett Engages AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY GENDER, PRURIENT OMNIBUS ANARCHIC, RESTITUTIONS FOR A NEWER BOUNTIFUL VERB, COCK-BURN, OUR BODIES . . . ARE BEAUTY INDUCERS, THE ULTERIOR EDEN, ASYMPTOTIC LOVER//THERMODYNAMIC VENTS, all by j/j hastain

j/j hastain Reviews A GOOD CUNTBOY IS HARD TO FIND by Doug Rice

Eileen Tabios Engages 60 TEXTOS by Sarah Riggs

Bill Scalia Reviews BEAT THING by David Meltzer

Logan Fry Reviews HANK by Abraham Smith

T.C. Marshall Reviews EXPLORATIONS IN NAVAJO POETRY AND POETICS by Anthony K. Webster and THE PRINCIPLE OF MEASURE IN COMPOSITION BY FIELD: PROJECTIVE VERSE II by Charles Olson, Ed. Joshue Hoeynck

Eileen Tabios Engages TEENY TINY #13, Edited by Amanda Laughtland

Allen Bramhall Reviews ANTIPHONIES: ESSAYS ON WOMEN'S EXPERIMENTAL POETRIES IN CANADA, Ed. Nate Dorward

Gabriel Lovatt Reviews VACANT LOT by Oliver Rohe, translated from the French by Laird Hunt

Eric Wayne Dickey Reviews PUNISH HONEY by Karen Leona Anderson

Eileen Tabios Engages INSIDE THE MONEY MACHINE by Minnie Bruce Pratt

Pam Brown Reviews SLY MONGOOSE by Ken Bolton

T.C. Marshall Reviews HOW LONG by Ron Padgett

Neil Leadbeater Reviews A HERON IN BUENOS AIRES by Luis Benítez

Jean Vengua Reviews THE WISDOM ANTHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHIST POETRY, Editor Andrew Schelling

Eileen Tabios Engages WAIFS AND STRAYS by Micah Ballard

T.C. Marshall Reviews THE NEW TOURISM by Harry Mathews

Guillermo Parra Reviews HOW’S THE COWS by Jess Mynes

T.C. Marshall Reviews THE WIDE ROAD by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian

John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews THE COMMONS by Sean Bonney

Pam Brown Reviews PERRIER FEVER by Pete Spence

Jim McCrary Engages MARROWING and THE NAME OF THIS INTERSECTION IS FROST, both by Maryrose Larkin

Tom Beckett Reviews THE NAME OF THIS INTERSECTION IS FROST by Maryrose Larkin

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews “NEITHER WIT NOR GOLD” by Ammiel Alcalay and STREET METE: VERTICAL ELEGIES 6 by Sam Truitt

Eileen Tabios Engages RADIATOR by NF Huth

Genevieve Kaplan Reviews SPEAKING OFF CENTRE by James Cummins, CORPORATE GEES (VOLUME V) by Christopher William Purdom, KITCHEN TIDBITS by Amanda Laughtland, FROM HERE by Zoë Skoulding with images by Simonetta Moro, and TWO HATS APPEAR WHEN APPLAUDED: AN IMPROVISATION by Raymond Farr

L.S. Bassen Reviews IT MIGHT TURN OUT WE ARE REAL by Susan Scarlata

rob mclennan Reviews THREE NOVELS by Elizabeth Robinson

Patrick James Dunagan & Ava Koohbor Review THE TELLER OF TALES: STORIES FROM FERODWSI’S SHAHNAHMEN, Translated by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Tom Hibbard Reviews SELECTED POEMS by Nick Demske, A MYSTICAL THEOLOGY OF THE LIMBIC FISSURE by Peter O’Leary, HOSTILE WITNESS by Garin Cycholl, UNABLE TO FULLY CALIFORNIA by Larry Sawyer, AIN’T GOT ALL NIGHT by Buck Downs, and ANSWER by Mark DuCharme

Jeff Harrison Engages THE DANGEROUS ISLANDS (A NOVEL) by Séamas Cain

Eileen Tabios Engages ALIENS: AN ISLAND by Uljana Wolf, Trans. from the German by Monika Zobel

Kristin Berkey-Abbot Reviews LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN: INTERVIEWS ON SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY AND OTHER WORKS by Barbara Henning

G. Justin Hulog Reviews ARCHIPELAGO DUST by Karen Llagas

Allen Bramhall Reviews FRAGILE REPLACEMENTS by William Allegrezza

Eileen Tabios Engages RED WALLS by James Tolan

Juliet Cook Reviews COMPENDIUM by Kristina Marie Darling

Bill Scalia Reviews WHAT THE RAVEN SAID by Robert Alexander

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews SEE HOW WE ALMOST FLY by Alison Luterman

Sunnylynn Thibodeaux Reviews THE INCOMPOSSIBLE by Carrie Hunter

John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews 908-1078 and THE PERSIANS BY AESCHYLUS, both by Brandon Brown

Benjamin Winkler Reviews WE IN MY TRANS by j/j hastain

Mary Kasimor Reviews T&U&/LASH YOUR NIPPLES TO A POST/HISTORY IS GORGEOUS by Jared Schickling

Jeff Harrison Engages T&U& LASH YOUR NIPPLES TO A POST HISTORY IS GORGEOUS by Jared Schickling

rob mclennan Reviews APOLLINAIRE’S SPEECH TO THE WAR MEDIC by Jake Kennedy

Megan Burns Reviews LUCKY by Mairéad Byrne and A REDUCTION by Jimmy Lo

Paul Lai Engages KĒROTAKIS : by Janice Lee

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews CLEARVIEW by Ted Greenwald and THE PUBLIC GARDENS: POEMS AND HISTORY by Linda Norton

John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews KAZOO DREAMBOATS OR, ON WHAT THERE IS by J.H. Prynne

Gregory W. Randall Reviews THE HOMELESSNESS OF SELF by Susan Terris

Jim McCrary Reviews MY COMMON HEART by Anne Boyer and ISSUE 8, Newsletter from James Yeary

Megan Burns Reviews A TOAST IN THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS by Akilah Oliver

Eileen Tabios Engages INFO RATION by Stan Apps

Bill Scalia Reviews THE MORNING NEWS IS EXCITING by Don Mee Choi

Micah Cavaleri Reviews ACOUSTIC EXPERIENCE by Noah Eli Gordon

Jim McCrary Reviews COLLECTION by Megan Kaminski, MANTIC SEMANTIC by A.L. Nielsen, LVNGinTONGUES by G. E. Schwartz, and PO DOOM by jim mccrary

Eileen Tabios Engages BLUE COLLAR POET by G. Emil Reutter

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews IF NOT METAMORPHIC by Brenda Iljima

Eileen Tabios Engages THE ULTERIOR EDEN: A SERIES OF GENUFLECTIONS, RUMINATIONS AND GYROSCOPES by j/j hastain

INTERVIEW
Tom Beckett Interviews NF Huth

FEATURE ARTICLE
“Make a Wish…and Blow out the Candles: An Explication of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie” by Nicholas T. Spatafora

THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE
Paul Lai Reviews AUTOMATON BIOGRAPHIES by Larissa Lai

ADVERTISEMENTS
Poets on the Great Recession: Poets reflect on the Great Recession, and its impact on their Poetry. Because

"To bring the poem into the world / is to bring the world into the poem."

Poets On Adoption:
Poetry: it inevitably relates to -- among others -- identity, history, culture, class, race, community, economics, politics, power, loss, health, desire, regret, language, form and genre disruption, love ... as well as the absences thereofs. The same may be said about Adoption."

BACK COVER
A Thousand Words Plus...!

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2011-12-22T22:23:00.000-08:00

Wow. 108 new poetry reviews!

I also consider Poetry to be a creature. And I tease xir -- and vice versa -- many times. Earlier this year, I did an "angelic poker" bet: that for Galatea Resurrects' 17th issue I'd receive a hundred new reviews. At the time I placed that bet, I thought it'd be nearly impossible. That's why I made the bet. I do that with Poetry all the time. And as is ever the case, Poetry does not disappoint ... though it costs me in this instance a bottle of wine.

Entonces: Thanks as ever to GR's numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. In addition to some wonderful feature articles, we have, not a hundred but, 108 NEW POETRY REVIEWS this issue! (By "new poetry review," I mean a new review of a publication, so if a publication is reviewed twice, that's 2 new reviews. Books reviewed are mostly poetry books but can be other genre if authored by poets.) Poetry has enhanced my love of lists so here are GR's latest poetry-lovin' stats!

Issue 1: 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)
Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)
Issue 7: 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 9: 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)
Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 14: 64 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)
Issue 15: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 4 projects were reviewed twice)
Issue 16: 73 new reviews (2 projects were reviewed twice)
Issue 17: 108 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)

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

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews
Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews
Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews
Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews
Issue 14: 40 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 15: 43 out of 72 new reviews
Issue 16: 49 out of 73 new reviews
Issue 17: 73 out of 108 new reviews

I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review. Obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies HERE. Future reviewers also should note that the next review submission deadline is April 15, 2012.

As of Issue No. 17, we are pleased to report that GR has provided 1,029 publications with new reviews (covering 412 publishers in 17 countries so far) and 70 reprinted reviews (to bring online reviews previously available only viz print or first published in now-defunct online sites). With this issue, we increased our coverage of poetry publishers by 26 to 412 publishers. This is important as I feel that much of the ground-breaking poetry work is being published by independent and/or relatively small presses who (by the nature of their work) are not always as well-known as they deserve to be.

*****

Such excitement around here! It's no wonder that we and Galatea Resurrects also has now come to be the subject of a ... college student's paper! Please go HERE to see excerpts from University of Colorado college student Drew Butler's paper on us!

*****

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

*****

From our family to you: Happy Holidays!

With much love, poetry, vino and fur,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
December 22, 2011

IRRESPONSIBILITY by CHRIS VITIELLO

2011-12-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Irresponsibility by Chris Vitiello
(Ahsahta, Boise, ID, 2008)

{I realised today that this review was written precisely one year ago, on a rainy evening in east London. Before the riots… Before the strikes… Sometimes we let things lie wet for a while. Then we come across them, and hang them out, and the colours seem brighter. NM, Paris, 1st of December 2011}

One evening this week I returned from work exhausted. The weather hung low over London, I was distracted and generally disheartened by professional uncertainties. I looked around my still relatively new apartment. Still no internet. Never a TV. Only books.

These moments can be revelatory. What do you feel like reading during these instants? I scanned across my bookshelves, volumes like so many jars of vaguely nauseating candy, reiterating an internal monologue: “too dreary”, “too pretentious”, “too confessional”, “too old”, etc. I then remembered Irresponsibility had recently arrived.

I wanted to read it. To reread it.

But why… This is never so easy to say. I wanted to read Irresponsibility because I had felt, on first reading, that these poems had come out of a time of crisis, had been made in the midst of a certain erosion and decay of belief. Of a world and a worldview. Of the beach and of knowledge, sanded episteme and unclear epistemologies.

A coming-to-terms.

I was not in crisis, but I wanted to feel the edges of my disheartened self. I remembered what I took to be the book’s concern with questions of knowledge: of what we know, and how, and what good it does us.

I felt it did not shy away from this possibility: it does us no good.

Closing your eyes is
lying to yourself about fooling yourself
(24)

I liked this. I wanted this. I remembered too Irresponsibility’s resolutely intellectual analyses. I wanted this too. I want poems to be smart, dense forms of an interlocking logos, to scream into our faces: THINK. Or to persuade us, cajole us, but with an end to knowledge. “And reference—we’ve all got that going on” (27). Indeed. As:

If the idea is optimally down
Or moved along and the sentences are dull
Or all the same length or awkward I’m
Not going to do anything about them
(27)

I want my poetry, sometimes, not to give a damn. Cadiot and Hocquard are here: the French literalist vantage points. But I wasn’t overly interested in this. But visible at least, in this: “self-reflexivity”. I like self-reflexivity mainly because it shows the term itself to be a pleonasm. Only reflexivity is possible. Self-reflexivity is just the doubling of an inevitable circle, a fairground mirror reflecting into infinite space.

Writing is reflexive if flexible. Irresponsibility makes no apologies. I love it for that. I like books to tell me why they are they (not them), and why they are there, instead of just pretending that everyone finds their ontology obvious. No ontology is obvious. The existence of a book is never clear. It is usually, or used to be, seen as miraculous. In this way, Irresponsibility is like a charming drunk who never stops introducing and reintroducing himself, only in ever more engaging ways.

Introduction and reproduction. “To see the wind I look at the trees”. I forget which page this is from: imperfection. Mistakes being important. Perception and the limits of knowledge.

This week, I had been reading Robinson Crusoe and marveling again at Robinson’s desire for finite order. For measured understanding, precision and exact charting, which then gives way to absolute obliquity and obtuseness in such lines as : “Today I shot something that resembled a cat”.

This is of course a paraphrase, but I want to introduce error into criticism as Vitiello does to poetry. As has been rarely done this well before. “Making a mistake is an argument” (82). This is of course dangerous. “Exploitation instructs” (82).

I remembered defending Vitiello against a friend who stumbled across Irresponsibility’s several pages of listed prime numbers. I presented this as perhaps the problem of ways of knowing, of the quest for certainties, of the comfort and rocky grappling point such numbers may give us faced with the sea, wind and sand, which imagologically dominate the book, setting up permanency and transigency as two primary rhetorical devices. When my friend said this was a vain “idea-gesture” like so much conceptual art (valuable for what it stands for, not what it is), I replied that Vitiello’s list of prime numbers moved me.

I was being honest. I felt how small and absurd we are in our naming and recording. Robinson putting his foot on Friday’s head and presuming “Master”.

To be is the verb behind all verbs
except to be
(27)

There is only cause and contingency all the way back, in language as in metaphysics, and we do not know the maker. So, “stop reading here and do something else for 45 minutes” (67). I didn’t obey, but I am thankful for the order.

It is important, I think, that the listed time is “45 minutes” and not “1 hour”.

Think about this.

My friend asked why Vitiello punctuated his “great lines” (“Everything points to not writing things down” [36]) with other “less interesting random stuff”.

I said this was an apt summary of my life.

“Writing this erases what it actually is” (20). One would have thought erasure had been exhausted by Mallarmé. But our own erasure is more than a trope.

Often, I get tired of saying that books are “extroardinary” or “adjective”.

I wanted to read Irresponsibility when I didn’t want to read anything else.

There is nothing to add after this.

*****

Nicholas Manning's new collection Homo Sentimentalis: A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy - which Kent Johnson has called "probably the greatest single-poet book of love poems in the field of avant American poetry since For Love by Robert Creeley" - is forthcoming in early 2012 from Otoliths Books. His study of sincerity in 20th century poetics is forthcoming from Éditions Honoré Champion. He teaches comparative literature in France, where he is the founding editor of the The Continental Review and maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals.

HOW PHENOMENA APPEAR TO UNFOLD by LESLIE SCALAPINO

2011-12-22T22:17:00.000-08:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

How Phenomena Appear to Unfold by Leslie Scalapino
(Litmus press, Brooklyn, 2011)

Although I’ve never much cared for Leslie Scalapino’s poems and often found her public appearances extremely trying How Phenomena Appear to Unfold encompasses substantially significant work. Scalapino’s passionate dedication to poetry: articulate, troublesome (as well as usefully troubled) is daring and lives comfortably within itself. Alive in rich exchange of ideas and feelings together, Scalapino crucially thinks with her body in writing. She delves into crossways where otherwise divergent paths of mind, soul, spirit, and heart are to be witnessed brought together. It’s a precision tinged challenging of historical orders of thought, particularly those of Occidental origin. It is poet’s work: a life work. Brilliant and energy giving: generously demanding. You should read her. As she says, commenting upon Beckett, the consideration she offers of work by others demonstrates, “the way we ‘as reading’ are inside Beckett’s seeing.” Scalapino enacts a de-mummification of active thinking in writing. Such “seeing” from out her perception of sight should not be missed.

This is both an expansion and a re-working of the previous 1989 edition of a collection by the same title. As Scalapino writes in her Preface, the writing “is conceived as an ongoing, flexible structure that incorporates demonstrations of its gestures, such as poem-plays and poem-sequences alongside essays” and she has enlarged this new edition “omitting some pieces and adding by interweaving twenty-one new essays (only three of which had been published in previous books) and seven additional poetic works.” It is her stated intent that “the unfolding structure of the book mime and demonstrate—be (and be seeing) the process and the instant of—the inside and the outside simultaneously creating each other.” The conversation is internally resonant with itself. Reading this book is an experience of deep immersion into Scalapino’s critically creative gears and shafts. And she provides the necessary tools to get dirty with her.

Philip Whalen is a central re-occurring poet whose work Scalapino turns to as mirror to her own. While her take on Whalen may often be arguably self-serving, it is not the “nonsense” I am previously guilty of having been in agreement with a fellow poet of finding it to be. Her extrapolation of “Whalen’s view that the poem precedes thinking” is quite of use in digging beneath Whalen’s somewhat commoner appearing surfaces, too often his own humbleness allowing for his work to evade such deep penetration of its brilliance. Scalapino locates our awareness to instances where Whalen clearly demonstrates that “the poem thinks itself, being ahead of the person” as she strives towards articulating her own practice of the poem as entity in the process of its creation. Like Whalen, she would relinquish her control over writing in order that the writing acts on its own; that, no matter whatever else, it finds its own way. As she writes of her own work, “it is phenomena as being one’s mind. ‘Seeing’ is not separate from being action and these are only the process of the text/one’s mind phenomena. Writing is therefore an experiment of reality.” And commenting on Whalen’s work, again: “The poem is one’s always leaping out of one’s mind, not being in the same moment of one’s mind there.”

Scalapino’s writing has ambitious agendas. In her essay/talk “Disbelief” an enlarged version of what was originally presented on a panel discussion concerned with the body and Language Poetry, she interweaves comments made by poet Suzanne Stein on an early draft of the writing she shared with her. Discussing her poem series “that they were at the beach—aeolotropic series,” Scalapino writes “The effort again is also to thereby actually change the fabric that is the past, literally.” And Stein responds “to change the body’s past/ or the single body’s past is one thing, to change the historical past [which doesn’t exist anyway] is an undertaking with terrible implications. I don’t disagree with you, I’m just frightened by it.” This triggers Scalapino to in turn respond that yes there is “a terrible implication which I don’t intend, but which is occurring in some of the writing as also events, similar to tactics of some political regimes, is the rewriting of history supplanting what did occur with what did not occur” yet she admits “the implications of changing one’s own actual historical events are also terrifying whether or not introducing simply rewriting: voiding events would be to have no history and therefore no bounds or ‘life.’” She does not back away from declaring this impulse behind her writing, “This was in fact my purpose.” As Scalapino elsewhere remarks on Alice Notley’s poem “White Phosphorus,” with her use of quotation marks to cluster words and phrases, “The ‘form’ has become an apparatus, a device for transforming actual life and death.”

Scalapino also acknowledges in “Disbelief” various rifts she experienced as they arose within and around the Language poets in 70s-80s San Francisco. She relates “My language, which I intended as study of individual’s thought-shape and sensations, Ron Silliman apparently saw as self-expression. Thus he criticized me in letters (“You refuse to question self.”)” And tells how she was “critiqued a number of times by poets for “originality” while being told that there is no such thing (all ideas and gesture are appropriated.)” The deep irony of such fraternity-like hazing activity is not lost on Scalapino.

In the early ‘80s in San Francisco the phrase “Language bashing” or “Language basher” arose (from Ron Silliman?) as a term for those who criticized Language poetry, appropriated from the term “gay bashing” (meaning episodes of beating or even killing people who are gay). That is, critique of Language poetry was equated with a civil rights or human rights violation. As if any criticism were inherently wrong and violent. This sequestered and sequestering tendency obviously is anti-social. Yet I think this insular gesture was related to the sense that a social communion was possible. That is, actual community ‘there’ was the ideal.

As she notes at the end of the essay, her “critique is not of the Language movement as such but of sexism and gender custom as the social construction of reality.” In a final bit of scrappiness, she adds showing a terrific bit of spunk that the essay “though an afterthought on my part, is a contribution as a part of memoir” to The Grand Piano/ An experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-80 then being published serially as authored by her Language peers.

In a good, gruff extended squabble extrapolated from out her book R-hu Scalapino takes Marjorie Perloff to the mat. At issue are negative remarks made by Perloff in an early review of Scalapino, dismissing her work as inferior to that of Silliman, along with remarks Perloff delivered both publicly and privately at the Page Mothers conference in San Diego. Perloff spoke to the effect that not only were women poets unable to reach as fine an experimental poetics as men, but also that they were unable to articulate an adequate theorizing of their own work. Perloff stated that this is her own function since she is “the critic, you are the poets.” Which Scalapino understands as “meaning, you cannot think about what you are doing.” Naturally, Scalapino knows what Perloff doesn’t get, namely that “for poets conception is the art.” Scalapino tidily sums up any and all future consideration of Perloff’s work:

Perloff has been instrumental in popularizing Language writing, yet doing so by praising works in terms of a socially and poetically/conceptually conservative interpretation. It would be good to now return to the works and reassess the range of their interpretations.

In her terseness, guided by a strict adherence to a set of principles to which she aligned herself early on in her writing, Scalapino’s criticism shines with crystalline clarity. Other extensive writings are gathered herein on Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Grenier, and Michael McClure among others. Litmus press has provided a wonderful service publishing this collection. This is a fine and beautiful book produced with an eye for emphasizing the high quality of the poetics behind its shaping. It’s good, good stuff.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in Gleeson library at University of San Francisco. His most recent book is There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTONBOOK (Post Apollo, 2011), other writing of his appears in Amerarcana, Barzakh, The Critical Flame, Fulcrum, House Organ, New Pages, Poetry Project Newsletter, Rain Taxi, Sous les Paves, Switchback, and Wild Orchids.

AT THAT by SKIP FOX

2011-12-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

At That by Skip Fox
(Ahadada Books, Buffalo, N.Y., 2005)

More than a decade ago, as humans count the days, I (your steamed reviewer) received a manuscript from Skip Fox. My wife Beth Garrison and I were suddenly and surprisingly in charge of Potes & Poets Press at the time. My writin’ friend Stephen Ellis encouraged Skip Fox to send us something. We published that something, What If. The present book lingers in the same delight as that one. Officially, I believe it stands as follow up to the earlier triumph.

At That cascades in a specific flow that I think embraces a very now thing. Skip Can I Call You Skip writes in a journal fashion of oddlots expressed in poetry time. My fancyspeak wants to suggest an enviable relationship to the encumbrances of words all over the place.

What I mean, and I am sure you are happy to know I mean something, is that Fox works on reception. That’s the journal thing. To receive ideas, observations, visions, and what the heck. Poets transmute, they don’t make up.

At That consists of a bookful of sections. It looks like sections may reach one page in length, most are less. Pagination stops at 186.

Fox numbers the sections, which instills the feeling that the book follows chronology. You know, like a journal. Numbers are missing, which suggests that Fox wielded a blue pencil. Good for him.

The sort of active presence that Fox presents in this jumble excites me as poetry should. He delivers his reading, his rumination, his observation, and even his poetry. Lines of definition blur. I love it.

According to my research, poems are clunky, pretentious things 97% of the time. We don’t need more scholastic aptitude traps that simply recharge emphatic old signs of culture. We just need an eye meeting phenomena and allowing words to flow around the events. Fox has a method that propounds interest, rather than rational reflection. I like it.

Fox calls a toilet a “turd hog”, among “Definitions for the New Millennium”. That is some fleck from the other side. The book is full of them.

Quoting seems almost against the grain here. I could leaf thru and note high points. Those high points would be the unresisted, currently. They would and will change.

This book wants a Reader to lift it, open it, stop at a succession of words, and then colon (:), something more… You go on from here. That seems like poetry to me.

*****

Allen Bramhall is the author of DAYS POEM (Meritage Press), among other things...

ETHICS OF SLEEP by BERNADETTE MAYER

2011-12-22T22:13:00.000-08:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

Ethics of Sleep by Bernadette Mayer
(Trembling Pillow, New Orleans, 2011)

MIND BOOTY

Stunned positively by the first few poems in this book, I avidly gobbled it up. It starts with “Max’s Dream” that reports just that in a maturing kid’s voice. It has the poetics of the dream-report that seem easier than they are until you try it. That piece sets up the next several pages that form one long piece called “The Buttered Key” (13-19). That title has to be a reference to getting a key to slip into a reluctant lock, a metaphor I guess. The poem has thirteen pieces in it, all called “A dream called …” something. These pieces are each one long “run-on” sentence long. That breathlessness gives the tumble of dream and something more to them. They have lines kind of but are more about the enjambments of dreaming rather than enjambment in poetry unless there’s no difference which maybe there isn’t; get it?

My favorite, of course, is the last, which starts:

A dream called Conversation with Ted Berrigan. That’s it for the rest of
the glow, there’s the lace and the prolific by the ocean’s
rose hip blossom pressed to recall the ignorance of homilies
there’s a whole lot more the spider who swings down and around
the green gangrene of influence like your toes might fall off
if you don’t get to holding hands very soon,

and ends:

                                                Chicken pot
pies and jazz with Ted while he’s the vice presidential
candidate.
            “What side are we on?” I say
            “I don’t know, the last cut on the first side I guess,”
            he says.
(19)

What social linguists have called the “parsimony principle” sets in here and directs us to make something of what we’re given in the directest way possible; I get an accuracy of image and memory packed with feeling from the first part and an open joke from the last that also is bound to the memory of LPs dear to my heart almost as Berrigan is and must be to Bernadette.

After that comes an eight-page poem composed almost entirely of questions that asks:

Have you read the sonnets of Rototeille?
Are you reading books in the middle or in the center?
Have you found a number of genres?
Did the snow park separate at the top & slide down on bellies?
Try to describe everything.
(22)

The modern mix of the mundane and the deeper is used here, as well as the trick of curious elisions, to get a sense of mystery and meaning from these queries. The un-question there that I stopped on to me relates a set of questions all at once, like “what did it look like?” and “how did it smell?” and “what were the sounds?” etc., but a writer too has to put in or allude to “what were you thinking?”

There is a three-person conversation/interview at the back of the book that relates some thinking one might do about this work. Dave Brinks comments:

Truthfully I would discourage anyone to begin with your work who doesn’t want to feel frustrated as far as writing reviews, and not because your works are difficult, because they’re not; but simply because your works have too many delights which just aren’t easily pinned down. (89)

He says this right after commenting on an “angry review” of her Poetry State Forest that Bernadette mentions. Brinks says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was written by someone who was just experiencing the initial struggles of finding their own way of talking and writing about poetry at the same time.” This I take to be an accurate assessment based on Bernadette’s practice and its debt to Gertrude Stein’s dictum about talking and listening at the same time being the basis for genius and how the gossip of her aunties on a Baltimore stoop gave that idea to her. The genius of Ethics of Sleep and much else in the Mayer oeuvre is based in the talking mind. She gives it both a lot of permissions and a lot of modernistic editing, but it is the voice in the head that rattles us nicely in Mayer’s works.

The cover blurbs for this book on the back are hilarious and to the point. I bet somebody made them up, but I also bet that the purported speakers wouldn’t take them back if they could.

We finally understand how the brain works!
--John Lilly, M.D.

I’m leaving all my money to Bernadette Mayer because she’s the best writer, especially Ethics of Sleep.
--John Ashbery

I have to agree with Ashbery, even though I know if I called him he might say he has never seen this cover nor said or written those words. The poems between the covers have an ethic of their own; they sound as if taken straight from a tired brain but have much more going on. The poems are written not rattled off. There are lines or bits that re-appear here and there in different contexts in the book as if to prove this. “On Sleep” appears here in a version that is better spaced than the one that New Directions published in Scarlet Tanager in 2005. This spacing makes a difference and again shows a level of attention to how a poem reads that is consciously writerly; in Ethics of Sleep, we see a poem built of units—some are lines and some are chunks of thought or anecdotal reports of worry and insomnia—each given equal weight and having something of their own about them and about sleep. Here are a few:

You could only feel the air like cold’s envelope surrounding the body
like sleep

Sleep is the stealing of beds inside and outside
and the simple finding of them

I do not know how to write commercially though some commercial writers who are quite successful also cannot sleep I’ll bet sleep means something, look it up in Skeats Etymological Dictionary. Let me tell you what I’m worried about, my unbent block of wood under rails, my slipping sinking gliding dormant soul of myself, I am worried about these things: [and then a list]

I know how to attend to the moment of the text and all this writing about oneself, this is not the point. I worry about that. Maybe if you went to Harvard it’s o.k.. Besides not going to Harvard I worry about the other mistakes I’ve made in my life, I won’t trouble you with a list.

This is a work in progress. I invite you to contribute to it. A railroad tie is called a sleeper, that’s why we sometimes sleep like logs
(57-59)

This is progressive work. It builds momentum, and not just for itself but for others who might read it and weep with the sense of possibilities for their own writing.

Bernadette is a treasure.
--Johnny Depp

*****

T.C. Marshall is busy occupying his life, seriously supporting movement actions on the Cabrillo College campus where he teaches and in the S.F. and Monterey Bay areas where he lives. He has been writing and publishing poetry since first grade, literary criticism since his college days in the U.S. and Canada, and nature writing here and there. His latest publications include online essays and reviews as well as poems online and on paper in magazines. His next project is a set of poems incorporating photos to be published on a blog, all of which were originally posted on FaceBook. They are called Post Language.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CRAYON by ALLISON BENIS WHITE

2011-12-22T22:12:00.000-08:00

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews

Self-Portrait with Crayon by Allison Benis White
(Cleveland State University, OH, 2009)

Beyond Grief and Melancholy

Self-Portrait with Crayon is an exquisite first collection of poetry by Allison Benis White. Comprising of thirty-five prose poems, vignettes and fragments of text, this work contains a strong, elegiac voice that speaks of memories, loss and intimacy through haunting — and sometimes, disorienting — embodiments. The body of a young ballet dancer that dominates as an image throughout the book is one of these haunting presences. An imaginary conversation with Degas and inspirations from fleeting dance scenes further evoke the mysterious drama of disappearance(s) that a young girl had lived through, as well as unresolved feelings that would subsequently define her private space.

Closely knitted with a train of consciousness that moves from poem to poem, this debut collection is in itself an intact poetry. Like a long breath that floats and lands, it shifts from a monologue to a meditative diary entry without being confined to the definition of a prose poem. Impressions are blurred, and pronouns have no names. Even the book’s title is rather revealing about the overall texture — and form — of the work. What does it mean to draw a self-portrait with a crayon? What does it render? What is inside the lines? Is the portrait the lines or the sketch? Can we also see, or even feel, the image with the gesture of the sketch?

There are many lines I greatly admire, and here is just a short list:

There is a hinge at the end of a lake boat, but I still don’t know how to draw the fear of        separation.
            — “Waiting”

And the weather in my calves and hands and neck outside the fabric of my dress. I felt safest, suddenly held as I turned to go, in the arms of a man I didn’t know.
            — “Portrait of Mlle. Helene Rouart”

It was Santa Monica and waves rushed toward a collective sigh. Twice, under my breath, I said no. A necklace unclasps here, like touch. Closer. It is only love that requires a face.
            ¬— “At the Seaside”

But what good is her voice without her ear?
            — “The Song Rehearsal”

Sometimes it helps to think of this or nothing.
            — “Melancholy”

Reading Allison Benis White’s poems remind me of the Romantics — Keats, Bryon and Shelley. The world is wounded, perhaps lost and gone. Yet something always remains, lingering in the background, to be seen obliquely, to be felt or understood differently. It may be too sweeping to simply treat these poems as writings on grief and sadness. There is also beauty and elegance, something sincere and unyielding. Other than the dead, there are survivors. The poet comes from a place where few words are crucial. And this brief review does no justice to the emotional density of these poems, quiet and sensitive, which certainly merit an attentive read in an ever noisier world.

*****

Fiona Sze-Lorrain's book of poetry, Water the Moon (Marick, 2010) is an Honorable Mention for the 2011 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Translations of Bai Hua, Yu Xiang and Hai Zi are forthcoming from Zephyr Press and Tupelo. An editor at Cerise Press, she is also a zheng concertist. (www.fionasze.com)

UTOPIA MINUS by SUSAN BRIANTE

2011-12-22T22:10:00.000-08:00

LAURA TRANTHAM SMITH Reviews

Utopia Minus by Susan Briante
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2011)

Susan Briante’s second full-length collection, Utopia Minus, resists its own intense lyricism, augmenting its images at every turn with their social context, the conditions of their production, the conditions that produced those conditions. As the layers accrete, the collection becomes a study in overlay, a meditative archeology, not only of landscapes, impersonal and intimate, but of bodies themselves. In the layers, Briante sifts trafficopters and magnolias, boxwood and chemicals, old airport, new airport, a marriage gone to seed, a new one forming.

Here, the landscape, the signage, the body (his and hers), and the forms of industrial decay come together: “a pilot light at the back of my throat” (3). This is nearly cyborg, but without the triumphalism, without the progress narrative, the ambition. This is the mixed matter body of postindustrial participation—sacked, generative—the suburban landscape of “ruins in reverse” where, as the epigraph culled from Robert Smithson attests, “the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.”

In this condition of ruin, Briante reveals a thoroughly comingled landscape of human/natural/built. It is the “season/ of circulars” (71) and there is “a cell phone tower built to look like a pine tree” (67). Indeed, the land and machines are stamped with the human: we move through “small gasps of prairie” (4) and “the lawn mower bares its teeth” (45).

The mingling of private and public here is also insistent. In a recurrent series titled “Memoranda” that punctuates the collection, Briante addresses poems to public officials. In a poem titled “Dear Mr. Chairman of Ethics, Leadership and Personnel Policy in the U.S. Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel” Briante explains, “Yes, that was me kneeling down to take a birth control pill by baggage claim area three” (29), illustrating how our intimacies are themselves intimate with the not-so-external structures in which they occur—airports, shopping malls, highways—rendering the body itself a “quarry or construction site” (29), like emptying our pockets at the security gate. The “Sir” to whom these poems is addressed is informed of conditions on the ground: weather, in-process construction, desire: “Today, Sir, we have sun” (55).

Over everything hangs the specter of disaster, which is both intimate and administrative—an insurance policy, the “fragile braid of a spinal cord” (47). Disaster falls into stacks like paper, like sediment. Destruction here is daily, like rust or love or paperwork, but this doesn’t make it less urgent.

This is perhaps the striking thing about this collection. In the face of decay, we do not find cynicism or cleverness or the shrug of inevitability. Instead, we find urgency: “How does a tree move when it is angry? I want to be angry like that.” (18).

Something central about Briante’s intellectual, emotional, and poetic practice comes through in the poem “Nail Guns in the Morning.” She writes,

Storms this afternoon in Dallas
In the parking lot of the Target/Best Buy/Payless Shopping Center,
Big chalices of rain, contusioned sky over the east, big yellow bus moving north
Toward the dark end of—what?—

This weather, this fiscal year, the end of empire during which I am reading
The circulars stuck in my screen door, ice waiting
In the highest breath of atmosphere.
It will get to us.

…
Last night over dirty dishes, I told Farid
I would never write a poem that just said: Stop the War.

In this particular lyric landscape, where strip-mall stores in their indistinguishable/shared bodies (“Target/Best Buy/Payless”) sit under the bruised sky, Briante tracks the history of the emotions she documents, delivering us to this spot via earlier items from the archives of technological disturbance. A few lines earlier: “the study of trauma comes shortly after the steam engine, an affliction known as ‘railway spine,’ characterized by headaches, fatigue” (4). Together, these references form a search into the affect archives, into the emotions that attend trains, that attend shopping centers and empire, their etymologies, their ancestors and relations.

Briante’s refusal in the final line above (“I would never write a poem that just said: Stop the War.”) is in contrast to the poem’s ending, which arrestingly reads, “Stop the war, stop the war, stop the war, stop the war, stop the war” (15). But the difference here is clear. This is the difference between billboard and meditation, between lyric-as-univocal moment-monument and this interrupted, sutured, multivocal, diachronic documentary lyric.

Ultimately, it’s this rigorous sense of connection that drives the collection as it documents a multitudinous body of limbs (his and hers), desires, wet towels, rooftop air conditioning units, Texas roadside flowers, and the histories of roads and roadside flowers. She asks, “Laura Bush, what will you plant for us?” (75), insisting on the intimacy of infrastructure.

There’s something highly formal and very queer in Briante’s questions about bodies, their boundaries, histories, and connections. She writes, “When I write about my lover, I am writing about myself, the other/ part with hard cock” (45). At the same time, she asks, “We love each other/ and yet and yet and yet /Why should we want to confine ourselves in two’s or five’s or cities? (40). These are questions about the forms of bodies, of the self, of families, of connection, which become tied to the collection’s pervasive questions about the forms of landscape and memory and contemporary lyric. This is perhaps what Utopia Minus most documents: a sense not of abstract connection or continuity, exactly, but of everything actually touching everything else, a concerted contiguity: “every day/ another source of heat expires, bones from another/ century” (81).

*****

Laura Trantham Smith is a poet and teacher whose work has been produced by the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Painted Bride Art Center, and the Adrienne Theater in Philadelphia. She studied poetry at Naropa University and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. She has served as a Poet in the Schools in Philadelphia, PA and Austin, TX and has led gender and sexuality writing workshops at the International Drag King Extravaganza, the Queer Texas Conference, and OutYouth. Recent articles have appeared in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. and Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy. She teaches poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at Stevenson University in Maryland.

IN PARAN by LARISSA SHMAILO

2011-12-22T21:14:00.000-08:00

MOIRA RICHARDS Reviews

In Paran by Larissa Shmailo
(BlazeVOX [books], Kenmore, NY, 2009)

… The poppies pour

their juice in the red rain which will crack, in time, all o-
ther things. She drinks him with her hands. He follows
with her breast. She sees him with his chest, in this bo-

dy not her own, but which, in the night, is hers. Like the
heat that swells all things, she sings the night with him.
He follows her with his voice; she sees him with her skin

--“He follows her”

I marvel at the palpability of the passion on the first pages of In Paran; I turn to the back cover, discover that Larissa Shmailo has won awards for her spoken-word work, I remember the aside on the book’s copyright page – BlazeVOX, publisher of weird little books. Nothing weird, nothing little, in this larger-than-life poetry. I wonder what YouTube might yield, and bingo!

On the poet’s website I find OVERTURE For An EXORCiSM; A spoken word poetry with music trailer for Larissa Shmailo's latest CD "Exorcism", a 3-minute performance which includes snippets from some of these jazz-bluesy songs of heady all-consuming love.

And, as even the strongest love can be lost, so the love here is lost and the poetry becomes wanderer in the desert wilderness, Paran; the bereaved narrator desperate in the wasteland of having to continue living life as a human. But the poems display still, vitality, exuberance – these are poems that live up to the insouciance promised by titles such as:

How to Meet and Dance with Your Death (Como encuentrar y bailar con su muerte): A Cure for Suicide – part of this hypnotic, injunction-laden, prose poem appears in the Exorcism trailer I referenced above.

Such too, as: Sea Sic (Readers: please read the stanzas in any order you like).

And there’s the prose poem comprised solely of couple of hundred words, a List of Words Never To Be Used in Poems every one of which proves it sooo must have its place in the poem.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This second section of Shmailo’s collection (entitled, rather intriguingly, Lit Crit) begins with the poem, In Paran, in which the narrator imagines escape from that desert into a land of milk and honey. Following this, two poems that hint at the darker matter of section three, yet to come. Here, a bit from New Life 2…

Imagine that the epoch ends in an idyl. The words that came
In monologues are rain dialogues now. And the flame,
That consumed others better than you, greedily, like logs;
In you it saw little use or warmth, and, like the dogs,
That’s why you were spared, why shrapnel gave you only fear.

The clouds soon disappear, though, with poetry like the marvelously wacky three-page Bloom that riffs on tongue-twistering lines such as these:

All ways a feather: bed your bugs as they bud
Welling roses these sweltering days
Rose roaches blooming by books, near pillows
Blooming by Bloomsday, busting out by June
Busting on Broadway, busting the busts…

which seques later into

(Forests of feathers: naked birds shrieking
Bony birds swooping
Burning birds screaming
Descending like hell)

and finally, after heady verbal ride, to a tart riposte:

But I’m Molly Bloom, I’m a mammal,
I have mammaries, see: This is a bust!
I don’t touch dead birds.

The third and final section of this book bears title, In the World, and as hinted earlier, stares bleakly at the underbelly of what humankind wreaks on humankind. The poetry is commentary on the ways in which people become unhuman, see others as not human, render themselves able to commit unspeakable acts. The two long ballad-like poems that close the collection really enthralled me, had me reading them over and over:

Exorcism (Found Poem), a three-page piece, mourns, with chant-like refrain and repeats, the US massacre at My Lai in 1968:

I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
…….
The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred
Civilians on that day

The killings took a long time
…….
The killings took a long time
…….
The killings took a long time
…….
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground
I stand on holy ground.

Immediately after that, How my Family survived the camps, builds its affect with question-filled refrains inserted between the longer narrative stanzas:

How did my family survive the camps?
Were they smarter, stronger than the rest?
Were they lucky?
Did luck exist in Dora-Nordhausen,
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen?
…….
How did my family survive?
They offered no resistance
Did they collaborate?
Is complicity possible without choice?
…….
How did my family survive?
Survive is not the right word.
I’m alive, my father would say, alive
Alive because I did not die; others died.

Keep breathing, he encouraged me in difficult times,
Keep breathing.

Indeed. Keep breathing. This collection can, in places, take your breath away.

*****

Moira Richards lives in South Africa and hangs out online here and here.

THE FEELING IS ACTUAL by PAOLO JAVIER

2011-12-22T21:00:00.000-08:00

PHILIP TROY Reviews

The Feeling is Actual by Paolo Javier
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2011)

3D Glasses and Collage Tropes in Paolo Javier's The Feeling Is Actual

On a first look into the Filipino American poet Paolo Javier's The Feeling is Actual, the reader may be struck first by its ambiguous title, or by the title page's double-image logo. Farther along, the reader is threatened with a bit of sensory overload, as what had been supposed to be a simple book of poems veers off in ever-shifting voices and points of view, wordplay simultaneously playful and thought-provoking, and, perhaps, a sense that a poem just might not be a proper poem without its accompanying illustrations, slide projections, stage directions and/or video. While some may even be tempted to wonder if this can truly be called poetry, poets since (and probably before) Homer have had multimedia associated with their work. Although there are non-textual aspects to Javier's work, the text is still the spine and the muscle of these pieces. Zhou Xiaojing, comparing several Filipino American poets, concludes that they share a tendency to undermine English as “the institutionalized instrument of colonization and as the model of official language of the dominant culture to which Filipinos and Filipino Americans must conform in their process of assimilation” (157).

The Feeling is Actual begins with a bit of seemingly childish naughtiness, written in the voice of someone who may not have been speaking and writing in English since birth, but who has acquired fluency without taking for granted, or losing respect for, the power of the language of ad-copy, playfully combining the sexually suggestive with the commercial come-on:

This Pepperoni

is a one-
of-a-
kind

you'd love it too
if you
were
pepperoni-inclined
it's got big, big, flavor! (8)

Those born under colonial rule, or those with such a heritage, are surely familiar with having the imperial culture's language and commercial practices, including advertising, imposed upon their own culture, often to be completely and irrevocably assimilated. It is entirely natural to expect to see changes in how language is used when the colonial dynamic changes: statements that once might not have been safe to make are now possible, and situations that had been ironic might only now be seen as funny.

Text is essentially a linear form of communication. Letters or words in the wrong order may lose their intended sense, and some early writing appeared on papyrus strips before anyone thought to attach those strips together to form a truly two-dimensional, easily portable writing surface. Later, telegrams would echo this practice. Text is a vector aimed, by the writer, in a given direction at an often fairly specific intended reader, and proceeds to move and have an impact upon the recipient. Multiple messages from different directions or in different dimensions can impact upon the reader in unexpected ways, and the ability of a poet to use text coming from different directions to manipulate the thoughts or mood of the reader in new ways is a tool Javier fully exploits. One technique he employs involves hybrid, clichéd phrases that call to mind some familiar stock message, such as “the feeling is mutual” —often expressed in our society without much feeling at all—and introducing, either by changing a word or two, or by attaching an entirely different stock phrase, a different, often somewhat jarrring, concept. These colliding ideas can produce several results, including calling attention to themselves in a new voice (as when cinematographers directly acknowledge or address the viewer, also known as “breaking the fourth wall”), and taking the reader off in a third direction of thought without losing any sense of the new phrase's original component parts. Thus, “the feeling is actual” carries not one, but a minimum of three, possible associations, and perhaps more: the common, if somewhat half-heartedly formal, response to some statement such as, “I love you,” “the feeling is mutual,” is changed by one deceptively similar-sounding word to become, “the feeling is actual.” “Really?” one might ask. “Why?” It's an odd use of the word, certainly, and the reader can't help but notice. A simple response phrase moves in one direction, only to be halted by a word that reverses the dynamic logic of the phrase, effectively turning it into a question that the reader may feel challenged to consider. The word “trope” derives from a Greek term meaning “turn”, and that these are, quite literally, turns of phrase requiring our attention on at least two levels even before we invest a third line of thought reacting to them, effectively adding a third level, like a game of 3D chess. Marjorie Perloff writes on collage in the work of Ezra Pound: “In omitting the context, Pound both arouses the reader's curiosity and heightens the [ . . . ] contrast. Then, too—and this is how collage works—juxtaposition replaces exposition [ . . . ]” (7). Although this technique is not new, it does seem particularly appropriate as poets increasingly experiment with multimedia pieces, challenging the ability of the reading audience to interpret on multiple levels simultaneously.

The title of Javier's poem, “Wolfgang Amadeus Bigfoot,” for example, sounds vaguely plausible to the semi-attentive. It scans well, rolling off the tongue. It also evokes an image of mathematically-controlled passion—Mozart, tempered by his somewhat bestial-sounding given name, along with the “beloved of God” middle name—and all the images we might associate with Bigfoot, both in American folklore and popular media frenzy. The resulting combined image of Age-of-Enlightenment men in powdered wigs, velvet pantaloons and stockings rubbing elbows in a country bar with plaid-capped, conspiracy-theorist Bigfoot hunters in camouflage dress compels us to take an ironic look at our own culture—are we rational or redneck? —and it is hard to rule out the possibility that all of these references are entirely intentional. At a recent reading, Mr. Javier explained that he was not so much “into Bigfoot” —at least no more so than most people—as he is fascinated by people who are. Elsewhere in his collection (“Pinoy Signs,” part of the section entitled “FYEO”) Javier speaks of a great love of the Filipino people—presumably remembering their colonial past—for twisting common American-English phrases in unexpected ways, using the example, “Doris Day and Night,” the name of a 24-hour restaurant. Throughout his collection, Javier uses these mini-collage tropes as metonymy. In “LMFAO,” his speaker states:

It was a no-win-win situation
It was as brand as new
It was as clean as daylight
for me

“Hi, I'm Paolo,” I said, “What's yours?”

I couldn't help myself to it
you reap what you saw
the sky's the langit, &
I am only human nature (68)

Most of those references which will be fairly obvious to English-speakers—win-win versus no-win situations, etc. —langit, a Tagalog term translating as “Heaven” or “sky” is more obscure, but inserting a word that a conscientious reader might have to look up in a dictionary only emphasizes that the focus of the reference has been shifted. The effect is similar to that of James Joyce's twisted clichés in Finnegan's Wake, such as “Hearasay in paradox lust,” or “The flushpots of Euston and the hanging garments of Marylebone.” The framework of an expected phrase, carrying its own meaning, is combined with a word, words or phrase carrying their own implications which don't simply change the meaning of the phrase, but rather preserve the original reference while adding a new, different direction of reference and the question inherent in the distance between the two concepts, all while calling attention to the fact that this is being done. The reader can decide whether self-consciousness is an asset or a flaw, but it is amusing to think of a poet announcing his trickery, like a narrator in a 1950s B movie advising the audience, “Put on... your 3D glasses... now.”

“Wolfgang Amadeus Bigfoot,” using several characters to explore themes which include, among others, juxtaposed rationality and barbarism, machismo and sexual ambiguity, and mainstream American culture versus various manifestations of the alien Other, is also apparently intended to be staged as a play, with an introduction stating that performers may wish to choose images to project at key moments in the piece identified by capitalized text. Cynthia Wagner points out that this type of multimedia use in poetry is becoming more commonplace:

Experimentation is not new to poets. Even the constraints of the printed page permitted visual enhancements through the arrangement of words on a page and the additions of illustrations; adding music to words creates songs. The multimedia age permits and encourages new ways of approaching poetic communication, such as three-dimensional installations in virtual reality, which invite direct participation of the reader (16).

Wagner is referring to adding dimension to text by using visual aids and other outside sensory input, and Javier does sometimes do this, but it only seems to echo and reinforce his use of collage within the text itself to produce a similar effect of audience involvement, and Wagner's claim can be said to apply to it equally as well.

Multiple levels of collage, on both large and small scale, are used extensively in “Heart As Arena.” The title itself comes from a painting by 80s graffiti-themed artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (who also employed collage techniques), and parts of the poem appear to be spoken in the voice of a fictional Basquiat-as-character, while others seem to refer to him as a third party. The poem is filled with references to Basquiat's work, and the extent to which we are getting some sense of Basquiat's point of view, Javier's point of view in his disguise as Basquiat, Javier himself in his own voice, all or none of the above, is never entirely clear, but Javier does occasionally offer clues in what may emerge as something of a trademark form:

oy            Jean-Michel
           tangina, pre

who's laughing now
           raging
all the way to the
                       corner bodega

           in the clouds where
former champs gather

oy bodega (108)

Again, apart from Filipino terms such as tangina and (arguably) bodega (a term common in many Latino cultures for a small market, but also a place name in the Philippines), we see the cutting and pasting of various clichés to refer to concepts different from their probable original target: who's laughing now? / laughing all the way to the bank / raging all the way to the corner bodega / oy vey / oy bodega are all concepts which we must take in, individually and in sequence, before fully grasping what is not just a simple play on a couple of words. It seems quite possible what is being referred to in the above (and much of the rest of the poem) is the shifting dominance of multiple ethnic groups in a given area over time; certainly the combination of the phrases evokes images firmly rooted in mainstream American culture, but subtly introducing elements from Latino, Yiddish, and Tagalog tradition. Before Javier launches into a section on Basquiat's “Santo Versus Second Avenue,” he uses more of this type of deceptively transitional wordplay:

but I awoke groggy this morning
one of six philistines missing

I'd love to break the jawbones
of an ass
& serve it to him on a plate
stupid dumb dog motherfucker
- -----
(blank black) (109)

The “six philistines missing” could refer to any number of things, from the actual Philistines of the Biblical Book of Judges, Samson and his jawbone, etc., to punnish, sound-alike references to Palestinians, or to Filipinos; it may well just be some variation on something Javier read in the newspaper or heard on the radio on the day he wrote it, or perhaps it is one of the enigmatic text lines appearing in a Basquiat painting. We may never know, but it is still important that anyone attempting a serious critique at least acknowledge the question. The painting could be seen as a response to perceived assaults on the local supremacy of whichever ethnic group may have been, or may now be, dominating the Lower East Side of Manhattan, specifically the area around the Second Avenue IND Line subway station at Second Avenue and Houston Street—a neighborhood that had been a refuge for both Basquiat and Javier, but now considered part of New York City's Chinatown. Images within the frame include a combatively-posed, somewhat skeletal, figure—among other possible interpretations, Santo is the name of a long-popular Mexican masked wrestler who appeared in many films with titles like Santo Vs. The Vampire Women, before finally unmasking and retiring in 1982 (a date mentioned in the poem) —a group of vaguely Hasidic-seeming figures with what may be traditional headgear and a horse and wagon, a painted facsimile of part of a Chinese takeout menu, and at least one figure in a pointed hat which could be anything from a dunce cap to a bishop's mitre to the sunshade hat found all over southern Asia. All these motifs are separated by frames or portions of frames emphasizing differing points of view, and at strategic locations various angry or monstrous faces are placed on the periphery, reacting to it all. Javier ends his address of that painting and launches into another section on Basquiat's “Irony Of The Negro Policeman” with the simple words, “black tar and feathers” (112).

Javier pressures the reader into asking some very serious questions about what Western civilization has done, and continues to do, to many cultures deemed foreign to it. Zhou Xiaojing writes, of the Filipino American poet Catalina Cariaga,

Rather than retreat into what might seem to be a self-indulgent language game, Cariaga's poetry is resolutely situated in the social, historical, and political. Her interrogation of language and form shares with many Filipino American poets an investigation of colonized subjectivity in relation to cultural imperialism, particularly the imposition of Spanish and English on the Filipinos. Part of this investigation entails the poets' exploration of the possibilities of using the colonizers' language to tell “another tale” (Abad 3) (157).

This argument could surely be applied to Javier: the language of the conqueror being used to comment on and expose the injustices inherent in imperialism and colonialism, and the ironies and inconsistencies of post-colonial life is a tool probably as old as, if not older than, the Magna Carta. Still, while asking some seriously provocative questions, the author of “This Pepperoni” just might not be above multitasking with the odd self-indulgent language game.

+++
Works Cited:
Javier, Paolo. The Feeling Is Actual. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2011. Print.
Perloff, Marjorie. "Collage and Poetry." Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford U P, 1998. 384-87. Web. http://marjorieperloff.com/articles/collage-poetry/. Accessed 12/03/2011 Wagner, Cynthia G. "Poetry In The Digital Age." Futurist 42.1 (2008): 16. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.
Zhou, Xiaojing. "Language And A Poetics Of Collage: Catalina Cariaga's Cultural Evidence." Melus 29.1 (n.d.): 157. Gale: Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Nov. 2011.

*****

Phil Troy is a former chef who studied creative writing as a teenager with the late Frank McCourt at New York City's Stuyvesant High School. He is currently compiling three cookbooks, including one on Lunar New Year foodways, and authoring a semi-fictional history of his family told as a series of holiday dinner-table anecdotes and tall tales narrated by an assortment of relatives.

THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT PAINTERS SHOULDN'T TALK: A GUSTONBOOK by PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN

2011-12-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTONBOOK by Patrick James Dunagan
(The Post-Apollo Press, Sausalito, CA, 2011)

Yes, I've met plenty of those people who think that painters shouldn't talk. Usually quite irritating to Moi as it's as if a painting appears out of nowhere, or without at all reflecting the artist's concerns.

One can understand this attitude, I suppose, if a particular painter is tedious, boring, etc. in conversation. But that's something one can’t say about the brilliant artist Philip Guston. As Bill Berkson, notes on his blurb for Patrick James Dunagan's There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTON BOOK:

Aside from his prodigious genius as a painter, Philip Guston was an adept reader of modern poetry and prose, philosophy and art history; an ardent conversationalist and a sharp writer on his own and others' works. His multifarious Romance of Doubt was an ongoing and fructifying virtuoso performance of irony and dialectic conscience and devilish enjoyment, sublimity and near-sublime despair.

Thus, did Guston inspire Dunagan to create this (from the publisher's press release) "GUSTONBOOK...[,] a workman's notebook of sorts sketched out in response to years spent contemplating the work and life of painter Philip Guston in relation to the ongoing world, i.e. exhibitions, books on/about Guston, other books/art works amid daily walks, drinks, and talks. More explorations than explanations, the entries contained situate the eye of memory as witness to the immediate surrounds of now: day to day, hour by hour..."

I've always found Guston's writings worth reading. But what I relish about Dunagan's collection is how its poems transcend ekphrasis to become, if you will, Dunagan's voice. Sure, with the book's title, one can't help but think of Guston when one reads

A hand moves
eye starts the
words go

--and, by the way, the line-breaks are brilliant here in the 2nd and third lines to facilitate the push of energy (it would have been slacker had the lines broken as "eye starts / the words go").

But there also are lines like

Alphabets

Signs

Blinds

Waves

Piers

Charts

Thighs

whose sensuous ending locate the poem into direct engagement with the world/reader through the often-reliable means of eros. From "Alphabets" to "Thighs", this poem goes quite a distance for merely seven words.

Such engagement with environment—or this attention to one’s Now—also offers an appealing scaffolding to the poet's words:

Fact is you don't choose
between the door
and that first step out
into the street
there's harmony
welcoming every day
just like yesterday

The poet's personality—the author's existence—is not evaded, e.g. the poet's love for books:

Opening to a page
is like fucking

And it's all good—

Out of nothing
always something
rises along
paths nobody walks

'you get there
thinking it's
somewhere else'

utter bullshit
you are somewhere
to get there
is something else

Contemplation, contemplation, contemplation. With Guston. Through Guston. Beyond Guston. How commendable that it never rests inward—contemplation continues forward to what is outside of the poet:

Solitude in busy night
glancing lights a look
hands over thigh his
her rubs itself
driving around in search
of the next perhaps
occasion of knowing others

The book is deftly designed—kudos to designer Simone Fattal—with the words placed on pages surrounded by generous white spaces. Those spaces fit the poet's clear desire for engaged readings. It's a desired engagement based on the readers' openness to a multiplicity of possible evocations. This, too, means that this gift of a book will reward repeated readings of its poems: if one is open, one's reward can be infinite.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in Boston Area Poetry Scene; by Michael Leong in Big Other; by Alan Baker in Litter; and by rob mclennan. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews SILK EGG along with two other books, NOTA BENE EISWEIN and FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 at Asian American Lit Fans.

IN THE COMMON DREAM OF GEORGE OPPEN by JOSEPH BRADSHAW

2011-12-22T19:15:00.000-08:00

LOGAN FRY Reviews

In the Common Dream of George Oppen by Joseph Bradshaw
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2011)

The line between truth and fiction is deliberately blurred in Joseph Bradshaw’s In the Common Dream of George Oppen, resulting in a collection that finds its outlet as much in lyric essays and scholarly errata as it does in poetry to construct a hybrid monument to its subject. The entry point of examination is George Oppen’s politically-motivated 25 year hiatus from poetry, a period that, for Bradshaw if not for Oppen, is rife with poetic material.

It is within this imaginative space flanked by known facts of Oppen’s life that less prominent, altered, and wholly imagined events in the Objectivist poet’s life sprout like fungi and become the objects of examination. An interview with Oppen conducted by Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man) and interrupted by the disembodied voice of Jack Spicer sprouts in one corner. In a deeper nook is found Bradshaw’s homage to Coleridge’s phony background to the writing of “Kubla Kahn,” with Oppen composing his (nonexistent) poem “Idaho” “literally scrawled over his copy of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Kahn’” when a strange visitor appears at the door and “thrusts…a worn, familiar looking notebook” into Oppen’s hands. The multi-layered confusion of the previous sentence is intentional and the only way to accurately represent the many strata of varying authenticity that Bradshaw adds with each new section of the book.

This tendency to resist resolution of fact and fiction is at times maddening, given the degree to which Bradshaw employs the technique; however, through the near-constant dislocation that the reader feels from the truth—at times fully aware of the fabrications at play, at times suspicious of by-all-accounts factual information because of the pervasive blurring of “the facts”—one of the strengths of the book emerges. When Bradshaw himself enters into the book in the section “The Impossible Poem,” the trembling torque of the uncertain half-truths finds release in the appearance of a voice coming in from outside of the labyrinth to speak directly the reader caught up in and perhaps frustrated by its continual turns and dead ends. “The Impossible Poem” begins with the following paragraph, which, as early as its first three words, is clearly designed to burst and relieve tension, to soothe:

This is true: the work before you is still the work ahead of me. It is not George Oppen (does it even need to be said) but something other than what that figure stands for. It is an alchemy of memory, both actual and “false.” (I say “false” because it is not false—I have felt a stranger breathing down my neck, in a wind, a we, descending, as our gifts remain above us, ungrasped.)

Perhaps a better survival tactic is to distrust anyone who tells you “This is true” (especially following the speaker’s repeated manipulation of that same truth), but the need to latch oneself to an absolute at this point in the book is so strong that Bradshaw’s first-person voice comes in with the authority of an adult to a child. The gentle adult voice comes in to assure the reader that the authority is more complicated and less authoritative than he would like to let on. But is this another, still deeper strategy or manipulation, or is this the facade lifting for a moment to reveal its messy framework? It is more satisfying to assume the latter—that Bradshaw is being honest about his inability to control the project, which does not excuse the irreconcilability of certain choices in the text as much as it validates them. The alternative, which is that Bradshaw has inserted this straight-talk address as yet another layered maneuver, would paradoxically reveal that, on the whole, Bradshaw had less control over his project than in the “messy” explanation.

Following this concept of the controlled chaos, some of the best writing in the book comes in the form of a timeline in “A Chronology,” the book’s final section. Composed of certain odd facts and images that had glanced up through the body of the collection, the timeline compiles these fragmented ideas into a cohesive and propulsive countdown into the genesis of Bradshaw’s project. It begins:

circa 41,000 BCE—A woman holds a mollusk’s shell up to her ear, marking the beginning of the ocean. Rikle reconfigures this moment in the opening of Sonnets to Orpheus: “O hoher Baum im Ohr!” [A tree arises in the ear].

375 BCE—Startled at its own image, a centaur darts out of the cave and stumbles to its death over the cliff’s edge. The delayed thud, echoing through the canyon, is Plato’s laugther.

1170 CE—Metaphor makes its first literary appearance, through the string the two lovers tie between each other (via le rossignol), in Marie de France’s ‘Laüstic.’

The gaps in the timeline rapidly condense, moving through 1797, the 1950s, 1963, 1965, and 1984 to end with:

early 2000s—Startled, I awake: I’m in the old Weremart in Caldwell again, alone, sorting through the notebooks in the stationary aisle, when I begin to notice they’re all filled with the markings of a familiar hand.

The timeline is so effective for its energy and the way it makes use of repetition: we read the mythic factoids with a sense of the familiar made strange by the new, straightforward presentation, and this invokes a sensation like that which Bradshaw is trying to convey in his closing entry.

He borrows from the spooky campfire story cliché ending, looping the narrative around until it enact its own telling, but following all the genre-crossing experimentalism, to end with such a rigid form in order to end on a time-tested, chill-sending trope is refreshing. It harkens back to “The Impossible Poem,” the section where Bradshaw attempts to perform the ultimate illusion: to convince the audience that now, for this next trick, you have cast illusion aside. The “Weremart in Caldwell” is certainly a Wal-Mart (Google finds one in Caldwell, Idaho), commingled with another minor book trope, wolves. The brand new notebooks on the shelves “filled with the markings of a familiar hand” are more of a mystery: are the markings Oppen’s or Bradshaw’s? Whose markings, throughout the book, has the reader become accustomed to—have they been Bradshaw’s, or is it all the markings of the hand of Oppen being traced and traced until the paper shreds?

The ending timeline as a whole stretches back to the beginning of the book. Its elements are first introduced, in a somewhat altered but mostly whole form, in book’s first proper section, Incipit:

But in the beginning there was a man. He told us that, in the beginning, we have to choose the meaning of beginning—i.e., we must choose our own myths. Here are our choices:

a) In the beginning there was a child who, holding a mollusk’s shell up to her ear, first uttered the word “ocean,” which started the flood that still soaks us to this day.
…
e) In the beginning there was a startle. I woke in the Waremart in Caldwell, alone, finding myself sorting through the notebooks in the stationary aisle, which I began to notice were all filled with the markings of a familiar hand.

The markings of a familiar hand, indeed. Perhaps this is the way that Bradshaw puts us in George Oppen’s “common dream”: we cycle through the same motifs and images as they alter imperceptibly around us. Notice: the early “Waremart” (a mart of wares—a more straightforward pun on Wal-Mart) adjusts to “Weremart” later, shifting another notch away from its origins and into the symbol world of dreams.

It is this dream world that, paradoxically, we wake from in these scenes of Bradshaw wandering the aisles of an abandoned Supercenter. He wakes but only into another dream-state, one where Oppen becomes Coleridge and Sir Thomas Wyatt and Blake’s burning Tyger. At other points in the book, where the little groundwork there is to be found is shifting beneath the reader’s feet, such strings of references can be delightful individually, but become disorienting if one takes one’s eyes from the image at hand and trying to orient oneself in the spinning world.

It is for this reason that the anchoring finality of “A Chronology” ends the book on its highest note. In compiling in the rigid, authoritative structure of a timeline certain of the bizarre and mysteriously poignant elements that precede it, Bradshaw anchor’s the book into its reality at the most crucial point in providing the previous whirlpool with the suggestion of unruly order. Instead of preceding the text, the chronology follows because, like Oppen’s 25 year silence or his scrawling out lines that he did or did not realize would be his last, we sort events only posthumously. The chaos and confusion over veracity and actuality can only settle down conclusively in the afterword. The tidy perspective of history and the timeline is that the matter had been concluded, right or wrong. Because it fits the timeline, Oppen did sit down with the Elephant Man for that interview. Oppen did, “in those 25 blank years,…visit the green shores of Idaho.” Bradshaw did capture that long gap in the life—in a life—of George Oppen.

*****

Logan Fry lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas. His poetry has most recently appeared in elimae.

TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION by ANDREA REXILIUS

2011-12-22T18:50:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION by Andrea Rexilius
(Rescue + Press, Milwaukee, WI, 2011)

I tend not to have particular poetry collections I want to review. I just try to read as widely as I can and then engage with whatever surfaces or clamors from that reading as something I should (preferably, must) write about. Andrea Rexilius’ TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION—I plucked it from a huge Poetry-to-Read stack simply because of its great title—is the first book I’ve read that compelled me to review it as a result of the very last “note” in a “NOTES” to the poem section in the back of the book. Which is to say, something simmered during my reading of the actual poems, a simmering that was like a flirtation for my reviewing attention. But I didn’t get seduced until the book’s last page with this last note, to wit:

My apologies to my half-brother, Ben, for temporarily denying his existence on page 3 of this book.

I was seduced because I was repelled. I was repelled by the idea that this poetry project—which comes off as (partly) autobiographical—was free to edit biography in a way to deny someone else’s existence.

Of course this book is—and should be without apologies—also an imaginative act. And so, after being repelled, I became respectful. It takes courage to take such an action whose significance is such that the poet later even has to apologize about it. It takes admirable control that only would service the poems well.

And the poems themselves certainly are admirable, frequently gorgeous. About sisterhood (and more), the poems are meditative—they are both conversations and pauses in conversations:

Essay on Sisterhood

Human space is a cohabitation with fog. Our clothes are damp with it. Every sort of illuminated depth is astonishing. I have seen the burrow inside my own eye. Nature expanded into a premonition that the world is reincarnated. The essence of the brown and green color captures the process. Christopher Columbus did not voyage in the name of a country, but of an idea. The subject matter or this is obsession. You and I are in a relationship. We are glistening with what it evokes.

In her book, Rexilius also offers (some of) her answers to a question she poses: “What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?” Her text ruptures appropriately as much as a body will disintegrate or can be dissected. It’s all apt. But it’s Rexilius’ light (deft) touch that elicits reader empathy despite ruptures:

spoken as pasture
              sky broken to earth

              a groan in the growing

reflection,
how two lungs resemble

                            a roof

              possibility re-assembling
        interruption, an interrogation

hold yourself up to this light

Por eso, it becomes logical that some of the pages would contain nothing but a question situated atop the page, the rest of the page left blank as if for the reader upon which to inscribe response. I honor this project by answering one:

Page 12: Do you respond differently to the word depending on whether or not it is spoken or written by another person or by yourself?

Some words seem inherently Beautiful to me. A word like azure, for example. When I utter azure, I feel my tongue cleave onto and cling onto my mouth’s upper palate as if to extend the sound of the soft z.

A ZZZZZZZZZ OOOOR

I love this word, azure.

What if this word was uttered to me by someone I found abhorrent? What if Adolf Hitler was alive and we are standing inches apart having a conversation? What if, my repelled gaze on his mustache, he utters, Azure? I can see the individual hairs on his mustache move from the breeze of that Azure.

If that incident happened, I believe I no longer would find azure to be inherently beautiful. I hadn’t realized that until answering your question. Which is to say, a human is not only a conversation. A word is also a conversation, not an object to be fetishized …

… as I once did with azure.

This realization is not a loss but a revelation. It resulted from a conversation.

My gratitude to the poet’s humanity for enabling me to recommend TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION by Andrea Rexilius.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in Boston Area Poetry Scene; by Michael Leong in Big Other; by Alan Baker in Litter; and by rob mclennan. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews SILK EGG along with two other books, NOTA BENE EISWEIN and FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 at Asian American Lit Fans.

PARTS AND OTHER PIECES by TOM BECKETT

2011-12-22T18:30:00.000-08:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

Parts and Other Pieces by Tom Beckett
(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2011)

Parts and Other Pieces begins with “Questions at Ohio State,” which, as Beckett himself tells us in his acknowledgments page, “was composed for and performed at the 2010 Avant Writing Symposium at the Ohio State University.” This, in fact, is the poet’s second massive catalog of questions, the first being “One Hundred Questions,” originally published in 1997 and included in Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems (2007). The prior poem, as I have written in Jacket 34 (October 2007) in an essay called “The Poetry of Questions,” reflects Beckett’s preoccupation with the intersection of thought, language, and the social, and this is also true of “Questions at Ohio State,” but in the latter poem, he is especially probing the relations and constitutive features of self and other, and he keeps testing the Rimbaudian/Lacanian idea that self is constituted by otherness: “Whom among us isn’t an Other’s mirror?” (19) Beckett’s intentional grammar error calls attention to the possibility that an answer might be “no one”: the “who” (not the rock band!) is “whomed” by this being subjected to mirroring, to otherness.

Perhaps some who are invited to present a poem to an audience have no trouble considering the listeners passive “receptacles,” but Beckett is not among them. The fact that his poem poses nothing but questions indicates that thinking subjects aside from himself are designated to complete what is incomplete. The poet is granted the power of performance via a convention that only technically silences all others present in the time that s/he takes discursive space. Although the protocol rejects audience members’ interrupting to answer his questions and express their own subjectivity—“Who wants to stand up and tell us a secret?” (12)—Beckett knows that protocol can be broken and, more importantly, that a temporary monologue turns into a dialogue when the performance ends and especially when readers, gaining access to a book, can exert authority as interpreters and judges without having to strain their capacity for memory. Indeed, the performance is an occasion for the performer/poet’s insecurity to emerge: “If I stand before you, afraid, and speak…what the hell should I say?/ And why should anyone listen?// Confidence is lord and master of the dance, no?” (11). In light of the complexity of communication, “confidence” may seem like a false or arbitrary “master.”

Indeed, the performer must depend on the generosity of any audience, one whose composition is not known at the time of writing or perhaps ever: “Who’s there?” (17). An audience’s attention and the good will that attends the effort to comprehend are gifts: “Do you see what I am doing?// Do you see what I am saying?// Do you hear me?// Do you want to?// Or do you only want to be heard and/or seen?” (11); “Does anyone here want me to shut up?// Does anyone here want to shut me up?” (18). The anxiety is prolonged because the poet is not a mind-reader and the interpretation of facial expressions and body language is not an exact science, as some self-help books might assert: “Why are so many of you looking at me and so many of you looking away?” (20). Fear of negative judgment engenders claustrophobia— “Would you step back a little? Would you give me some space?” (16)—as well as defensiveness—“Do you have any idea how hard I’ve worked to achieve a few small things?//. . . . Do you think you know what makes me tick?”(22)—whereas, in other sentences, the desire to please, like the desire to seduce, comes across as pleading: “Does anyone here want me to do something in particular?” (16); “Does anyone here want me?” (17); “How do you like to be rubbed?// Can I rub you now?” (20); “I want you if not to want me to at least tolerate my need for being needed, OK?” (23). In the interpretation of these charged utterances, the struggle between the possibility that they are actual questions and rhetorical ones is important. On the one hand, the speaker would really not like to know it if no one at the reading “wants him”—at least as their intellectual/aesthetic entertainment for the hour or is willing to “tolerate [his] need,” but he would like to be aware of positive responses.

Aside from the wish to manage his anxiety, the performing poet manifests other desires. Perhaps at times, he wants to use audience clues to correct weaknesses, as though questions like “Why don’t I have rhythm?” and “Am I an asshole?” (16) can somehow elicit instructions about how rhythm could be acquired or how the behavior of an “asshole” can be eschewed. There may be, then, a desire for the other to hold a mirror to what the questioner has heretofore found unclear about himself, as though the analysand takes over the questioning and the psychoanalyst (audience) begins to interpret: “How is it that I feel everything is shaky and in question?// Why don’t I know right away what to say? // Why do I feel so thoroughly mediated by everything/everyone?// Why do I long to be pierced again?” (22). Even if these are rhetorical questions that allow the speaker to complain about his current fate, there is a chance that a respondent may offer a crucial insight.

Another possible goal for the purveyor of questions is to use his ambiguous power to seek alignment with others in reassuring community: “Do you ever think about your life as a series of newly/ constructed,// maybe often re-encountered crossroads// (or roadblocks)?” (9). “When I think about Utopia, I think about something approaching/ a sort of ongoing social orgasm, a kind of universal pleasuring./ How about you?” (22). If he can see the glimmer of assent and recognition in audience members’ faces (and later hear it directly from some of them or from readers of this book), he can be comforted by the sense that others have some of the same desires, fears, and fascinations as he does. Yet desire for alignment with others can also serve the search for social, philosophical, or psychological truth, beyond the need for comfort, in dialogue: “Are we defined by separations?” (9); “Is consciousness mappable?”(12); “How do you see yourself extending in time now?” (16); “Is there a collective reality which can be articulated and/ recognized?” (27). Finally, curiosity about others could be a motivating force: “How do you feel about fart jokes?” (20).

The catalog structure of “Questions” allows the varied desires and fears that I have identified to emerge one by one and re-emerge in an unpredictable fashion. But “Andswerving Fragmeants,” the catalog poem separated from “Questions” by “Between Asymmetries,” raises the question of whether Beckett is really asking anything of his live or book-bound audience or whether the “you” in his questions is actually himself! He answers, it seems, 92 of the (according to my count) 371 questions in “Questions,” but even though the opening sections indicate that the question has the same number as its answer, there is a good deal of slippage fairly soon afterward. In any case, if Beckett had wanted to make it possible—that is, reasonably manageable—for readers to align specific answers with their questions, he would have put the two poems together in some coherent way. Between the question and the answer lies deferral. And the latter is, chez Beckett’s Joycean coinage, an addition (“and”) intention (“meant”) to commit “fragment”ation and a “swerve” from the question, not precisely an answer. Therefore, I am going to assume pragmatically that all questions are directed to both the questioner and his audiences, and I will treat “Andswerving Fragmeants” as a separate poem.

Not surprisingly, Beckett’s third section in the book’s third poem, provides an answer and/or swerve that confounds the question/answer binary. It consists of two questions: “Am I capable of showing anyone anything? Who says one can’t/ answer a question with another question?” (51). Of course, the rhetorical question, if one can definitively situate it as such, does answer a question, so the response to the first poem’s question, “Is revelation on this morning’s programme?” (9), can be said to mean that revelation by the speaker will not happen. If “revelation” implies the achievement of certainty, disclosure of uncertainty and its implication is usually the strongest and most prevalent assertion in the poem, and this uncertainty begins (in part 4) with the speaker’s lack of confidence in himself as a communicator, the precise opposite of the romantic notion of the poet as sublimely adept transmitter of determinate feelings and thoughts through language: “I rarely know what to say, rarely know if I have said what I have had to say adequately, and have an extraordinarily hard time making my feelings plain within the constellations of utterances I move within” (51). Unlike the rhetorical emphasis of the adverb “rarely,” the deliberate awkwardness of the repeated preposition “within” emphasizes not only constraint but the strain of an effort to keep track of verbal and other social conventions—contexts within and also enclosing contexts—as well as seemingly uncontrollable ambiguities, while one tries to be “true” to the “content” of one’s thought and feeling.

The poet’s sentence, “I’m not aware of any certainties” (65), seems to be a neutral statement about his experience, but he can also suggest that uncertainty, connected with motion and fluidity, serves as a kind of creed: “I believe in intersections above everything” (53); “I aspire to live at the intersection of thought and feeling” (64). An “intersection” is a dynamic play of forces, whereas “certainty” is a “freezing” of those forces into static truth. Thus, for Beckett, to embrace some kind of certainty may be tantamount (or conducive) to moral failing. To the question in the first poem based on an unfairly generalizing, ad hominem premise, “Why is it that right wing ideologues are such mean-spirited bastards?” (15), he responds in the equally overgeneralizing (or perhaps just hyperbolic) penultimate “andswerve”: “Right wing ideologues are mean-spirited bastards because they have learned to delight in the unprincipled nature of so-called reality” (70). The implication of all right-wingers’ “delight” in (as opposed to relative indifference or individual charitable response) to others’ misfortune, coupled with the reiterated epithet of condemnation, is unfair. However, the statement is valuable because of its strong implied critique of “reality” defined as effects of enrichment and impoverishment produced by the workings of market capitalism with minimal regulation. Right-wing ideologues may think that submission to the “invisible hand” is an economic or political “principle” that jibes with “nature” and “truth,” but they exclude an awareness the implementation of the ideology produces the harsh effects and makes ethical regard for collective welfare extremely difficult and perhaps impossible to put into practice. In this way, since “reality” could reflect different causes producing other effects, the certainty implied in using the term, which Beckett questions with the modifier “so-called,” is, from Beckett’s perspective and my own, “unprincipled” in the user’s failure to entertain powerful counterevidence and, more importantly, an overall uncertainty about economic means and ends that reflects the complexity of globalization.

In general, for Beckett, uncertainty calls for incessant “testing,” as in an allusion to a great aphoristic precursor, Wittgenstein: “As for myself, the sentences I extrude are the ladders which take me to the edge of intelligibility./ All I can do for myself (and no other) is to try and test each rung” (55). What the poet keeps knocking up against—as implied or directly stated in many of the questions in the book’s first poem—is how a condition of mutual otherness among individuals in contact breeds uncertainty: “The we in “this” moment is severely attenuated/ Sadly, we’re apart” (68). Part of this lamentable separation is the possibility or even likelihood that each person attempting interaction differs in what motivates them: “What seems of singular importance to me, earth shattering in its personal significance, means little to anyone else. I am often uncertain as to whether I exist” (61). Remarkably, the alienation caused by others’ rejection or disregard for one’s most powerful preoccupations is so intense as to make the speaker doubt his own existence. Thus, a seemingly unattainable intersubjectivity and not uniqueness is seen as the foundation of individual existence. Given the contextual limitations of everyone’s perspective, Beckett does not assume that “consciousness could be mapped,” but if so, “no one would be able to read the Map,” as “one would be unsure of what one is looking at” (62).

Nevertheless, Beckett does not give up the goal of “engagement and a certain frisson” (67), something approaching successful communication. For one thing, within whatever can be said to structure a self is found much experience of what is external to it, and so even the outrageous declaration, “I think my penis is a girl” (53) makes sense. The poet accords major value to “becoming other” (66) through imagination, empathy, and what psychologists call “active listening” or at least enabling another to gain rapport with self through the medium of his otherness: “You’re an image. I’m a mirror.// You’re a voice. I’m an ear” (52); “What I might be able to do for you and not myself is to/ mirror you,/ establish your presence” (55). This gift to the other may or may not be “real,” but it provides a potentially satisfying counterforce to uncertainty’s incessant disruptions.

“Parts (30 Things for Geof Huth),” the final piece in Beckett’s book, partakes of an insistent, sometimes phenomenological probing reminiscent of and even more minimalist than Robert Creeley’s Pieces and later series: “Shadow/ of a gesture/ on a wall” (74). In each bite-sized part of “Parts,” Beckett challenges his readers’ desire to grasp a bit of substance by disrupting possible assertion: “Thread that/ doesn’t belong/ to it” (73); “Detached thread,/ car tread,/ frays, fades” (75). The referential fuzziness of “it” (not itself) blocks us from understanding how “thread” fails to do its job of “belonging” or making connections. The pronoun “it” itself is supposed to be a kind of “thread” between utterances sharing the same subject or object, but the function is disabled, as in the “detachment” of the second section which, like the “tread,” merely leaves out an “h,” lacks traction—apparently through repeated use over rough terrain.

If I may resort to personification, Beckett sketches notions of absence and presence disorienting each other: “Undeterminable/ emphases” (73); “Something/ (nothing)/ happens” (74); “Beginning between/ less than/ full stops” (77); “Voices,/ holes” (78). If an “emphasis” cannot be “determined,” then how can it have an effect, and how can a non-happening be recognizable as an event? Language may “begin between” periods or a motion occur temporally between two instances of relative stasis, but “less than” challenges our discernment of spatial or temporal order. A comma is less than a “full stop,” so does language start up between commas? And if so, what does that do to the grammar of a sentence and to the representation of “content”? While phonocentric philosophy privileges “voice,” Beckett as laconic deconstructionist identifies the gap between a voice and the full presence of a communicating self.

The poet discloses language in the act of producing effects, but such effects enact a dis-integration, destabilization, or (in keeping with previous sections of the book) questioning: “Pronoun/ envelope/ or knife?” (74); “Again and again/ (no gain)” (79); “Break/ (brake).// Faux patter” (80). In traditional usage, a pronoun is designed to protect the “mail” intended to communicate identity-differentiations, whereas at the same time, such differentiation can result in the kind of alienation from otherness that Beckett problematizes and thinks about trying to transcend in both “Questions at Ohio State” and “Andswerving Fragmeants.” Illusory or ineffective dialogue (“faux patter”) can stem from misleading “patterns” in an established sign system. Repetition involves the striving for “gain,” a lucky “break,” but may only result in elaboration, the extension of a chain of signifiers—or a disjunction (fracture). One applies a “brake” to gain control over motion, perception, and understanding when one is moving too quickly, but this can also evolve into a “break” with desired coherence) and an impasse. Yet “Parts” and Parts and Other Pieces ends with “Reattachmeant” (80), the will to resumption of communication, the sense that all questions do not have to be rhetorical but intensely exploratory, the hope that supplementary, swerving, fragmentary answers can provide, not only “frisson” but “engagement” in ongoing discoveries.

*****

Thomas Fink is the author of 2 books of criticism, including A Different Sense of Power: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry, and of 7 books of poetry, most recently Peace Conference, and co-editor of a critical anthology on David Shapiro. His paintings hang in various collections.

PUBLICATIONS by KAREN WEISER and MACGREGOR CARD

2011-12-22T18:15:00.000-08:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

To Light Out by Karen Weiser
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2010)

and

Duties of an English Foreign Secretary by MacGregor Card
(Fence Books, Albany, N.Y., 2009)

FAMILIALS

The poets tell us these two works were written as “companion” “volumes” or “books.” Card has it in his “notes/sources” that most of the “poems have several lines or phrases in common” and that they are “drawn from weekly collaborations, 2001-2008.” Weiser has it that they “share many lines” and are like their authors “familial, growing jointly out of weekly writing sessions,” according to her “acknowledgements.” Right there we have indications of their differences, though, as well. It is Karen who calls them “books,” while Mac refers to them as “volumes.” The tones of those two words may well set the tone of this important difference and the value of reading both.

That Karen Weiser says the works are “familial” is in line with the poetry she presents in To Light Out. The author blurb Ugly Duckling puts out for her says first that she is “a mother.” The book is dedicated by her to her mother and her daughter who carries names based on those of that grandmother. Her other grandmother is poet Alice Notley who wrote a familial work published by United Artists in 1979 called Songs for the Unborn Second Baby. It is a familial tangle that ties this book to the world, but not just in a family tree. Weiser says in her “Introduction” that the poems “diagram” an “act” of listening to something from her body’s pregnancy: “When I became pregnant my brain and body were suddenly filled with static” (13).

That static is described in what might seem like metaphorical terms: “less a sound than a sense that the flickering snow on a tv screen had been made into liquid and pumped into my veins.” I strongly suspect, however, that this description is somehow more literal. Its reference to the days of broadcasts interfered with on their way to us through the air presents a familiar image to me as a man who lived with rabbit ears and with Spicer books. One struggles to get the signal one wants, and one gets instead the signal that will come through. Weiser says that it became “difficult to think, hard to do anything at all.” We might see a sluggish woman there, but there’s another way to read this when you get it that Karen “couldn’t hear (her) own ways of thinking or feeling with this other person’s atoms multiplying inside of (her). It was the sound of the big bang,”—that background noise of the universe—“and my own radio brain was tuned in.” This might be a beautiful fiction, or it might be the real story of Sylvie Beulah’s beautiful beginnings. Either way it frames this work, these poems, in an on-going tradition. Weiser mentions Swedenborg, who brings in Blake; she has Notley standing by, who brings in the whole theory of the heiresses; and both of those bring in Ginsberg at Columbia, Spicer at home, and all the visionaries from Lamantia to Weiner and wider. But this framework also never leaves the realities of pregnancy. I could circle out to Robin Blaser’s theory of the “male womb” here, but what I want to focus on is the way these poems also are literal. That intro claims that Weiser “realized that it was her signal” (13). This means the fetus’s, the baby’s, the “other person’s.”

That intro moves from Swedenborg to loop through Spicer and come to a claim of being “interested in the messages from what usually lies beyond perception” (12). There are titles throughout the book, especially thoroughly in its first section, that can be seen as referring to the pregnancy. The theoretical aspects of the intro cross the literal line in poems like “IN THE PRESENCE OF ANOTHER” where every line can be read as “about” the state of carrying a baby and getting a sense of its being or as “about” writing poetry, especially in collaborative exercises involving seed lines.

The dispatches, possibly, picked up
a static I couldn’t register
multiplying in hypotheticals like cells
when lo! The tall belfries discontinued
for the hundredth time and in mid-sound snow
I picked up the crackling of another
(20)

The truth would seem to me to be that this is not actually beyond what I have heard from pregnant women that they perceive. The messaging is not from Martians but from an outside within, and I like it because that’s right where we all suspected Spicer was getting his messages all along.

One thinks of his complaints at the end of that poem:

You hear the dead are unregenerate
tuning out or in at the edges of your ears
I grieve to think of this murmur’s
frnge of vague moves static to center—

cross it and you yourself are leavened
hawking the sound of space
still pushing out the big bang
(20)

And the machinery of this poetics is apt enough for telling of what we living do in thinking of our dead or those yet to come and bear the links; in the next poem (“TO TOUCH INHABITED CREATURES”):

elements use every damn instrument
to play the turning over of absence
like the world has found a rare plum
in its invaded silence
something bitten through
this loose blue tableau
turnkey in relation to what it inhabits
(21)

The next (“SO IT GOES “) and the next (“DO YOU FANCY WE REMAIN INFERIOR MACHINES”) speak through and of this machinery as well:

In its minute bumping against the walls
the future’s at the center of every room
a message for eyes roaming in place
…

Forget the machine is only a device
as it shapes the exit from womb to physical
séance, …

So it goes, and a mollusk can not draw
the machine as we can not draw the heart
with its hot round push
the future is but another form of retort
between machines with eyes
that see but a part
(23)

The puns in those last lines keep Spicer close (“can not” is different than “cannot”; “retort” is a smart remark and an alchemical tool; “a part” is an oldie but goodie that holds together why we apart from each other and other beings can not see but a part of what is to be seen) and carry Weiser’s meaningful possibilities clearly and concisely. There’s fun here but it’s made of serious stuff.

MacGregor Card’s volume is full of laughs right from the get-go. It’s epigraph from an obscure poet named Sydney Dobell, who is credited as being of the school called Spasmodic. Card’s title comes from an 1852 essay by Dobell, according to the “notes/sources.” There is a tone of mockery and seriousness from title through contents to those notes here. As it says in the publisher’s jacket blurb: “These poems are inexhaustibly sophisticated” and they express “longing for that which is a putative past, a past no one lived through.” They are wry but show “sure footedness in the terrain of nostalgia.” They express feelings based right where Odysseus got into trouble, heading for a home that wasn’t the home one left behind. Even the titles here are wry; “OFFICE OF THE INTERIOR” seems to be written from the p-o-v of those who stay inside looking inside themselves. “CONTEMPT” uses the sudden turn of lines to express its attitude:

In what peace can a Christian
Home in the dark
Put out the light
Eating its young
(18)

We get a few jokes there about light and darkness and homes and the youth they purport to nurture, and I for one get the sense of contempt. In “THE LIBERTINE’S PUNISHMENT,” there’s a tone familiar to readers of Ron Padgett:

Something is moving beside me
Nothing’s supposed to be there
Either I have a heart of stone
or I haven’t got a heart
perhaps I have only a stone
and that stone is not my heart
and that stone is neither like my heart
for I have no heart, I only have a stone
following down to the sea
(59)

In “RULE OF HOSPITALITY,” there’s a plea that speaks to the sense of these poems:

I alone were fraught with confidence
Doubt offset by counter-
Doubt to fuckdom come
But I need you
To feel my pretense

I can’t help but feel that this plea in its mockery of such pleas actually reveals the stance of these poems, quite quite different from Weiser’s. It goes on:

I alone were fraught with confidence
                      The key in my hand
                                 Made me horny
Because I was telling the truth—
                      I was here on my own authority
And it’s none of my business
           Walking on air
With my friends to your door
(51)

Card comes to our door bearing prizes and poems that display the “dignified hilarity” that won them that publication nomination from Martin Corless-Smith in the Fence Modern Poets Series, but the poems embody less than one hoped for. They form a volume not a book.

What I’d say finally about these works centers around the word and concept “body,” and comes from this title poem of Weiser’s book:

TO LIGHT OUT

To light out is to burst into young legs
toward an opening in the newly made wild
toward the stain of gold machines we have set in motion
around the curtain of bad weather

In the opening of its glimpse the conversation flutters
like gardens that are the garden’s brother
I say pass me my book of gardens
to cultivate a generosity of opening

You say the gardens are heavy with saffron associations
and we are kneeling in its applied territory
a blistered web of circumstance
distributing the way we desire ourselves
having been built by these environments

Take your horn out of the night
garden of constellations
and vow me a club of body
an endlessly opening frontier of rapid sketches
pressed between the pages of knowing

(67)

CITIZEN CAIN by BEN FRIEDLANDER

2011-12-22T18:00:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Citizen Cain by Ben Friedlander
(Salt Publishing, London, 2011)

I hope Ben Friedlander needs no introduction. The mojo of his scholarship and poetry have been well-displayed for um so long. His scholarship is lively and useful—what more could one ask?—but here I speak of his latest book of poetry.

I should right off say that Ben is an exponent of Flarf. I want to speak on Flarf before I direct my attention specifically towards this one work of Ben’s. As a critical term, Flarf tends to overshadow the work it means to describe. I aim towards clarity here, wish me luck.

For the past 10 or so years, Flarf has been a lightning rod. Maybe I mean lodestar or bellwether, the point is, people have discussed Flarf in that public, Boolean way that sometimes lacks for satisfaction. To orient you, I offer my understanding of Flarf.

Flarf betakes itself of Google searches and the weird word groupings people find in them. Plenty of work has been attempted similarly, without the name Flarf attached. Flarf represents a social, and therefore attitudinal, connection of several nameable writers, all of whom use certain techniques to produce their work. Ben numbers among that ilk.

The social connection bears importance with Flarf, both in the friendship of the various Flarfists, and also in the social, or sociable, tool that the Google search engine manifestly (albeit weirdly) is. The Flarfists and friends created an email list, to share work and precipitate discussion. The list was (and perhaps remains) by invitation only. Tim Peterson invited me to join the list, and, without bearing evidence of Flarfian work or submitting to the Official Flarf Tattoo, I became witness, and modestly a contributor, to the adventures on the list. Thus my connection with Ben.

I mean, Ben sent me a copy of this book, some work of which saw light of day on the list, because of my membership on the Flarf list. My own Flarfian contributions were (and are) labored and sullen. Alas, because humour a-bursting defines a strong element of Flarf.

I guess that’s been one pissa preamble, but I just wanted to note that Flarf is fully objectified as a subgenre within the ranks of Poetry. And Ben works in the mode. Yet Ben’s work has its own escape velocity, about which I hope I can prepare Gentle Reader.

The first epitaph sets the pace: “Write a giggly ode about / motherfuckers”—Robert Creeley. Well, that’s part of it. One notes an insolence towards the native disasters by which we less than thrive. The air is full of satire and sardonica in these works, in tone and armament, but that’s only the front part. In back, one discovers a delectable search.

Look at some of the titles here: “Somebody Blew Up America”, “Gimme a Break!”, “What is an Internet Author?” Joe Lieberman”, and even “Yngwie Malmstein”. Something’s happening here, what it is aint exactly clear. It is enough for people to question whether this is poetry, one of the dumber debates going.

There’s no saying (nor should there be) whether Ben harvested all this from Google searches or if he made it up. Just from the titles you see a radiant stew of happening things, all weighted and limber and realized and forgettable. It is a harvest of culture, our wiggy, affluent child.

The poems radiate on:

“The ontological status of news that stays news
takes a long time to load
with a dial-up connection.”

That begins “The Pound IRA”. That sentence addresses Pound with twisting execution, amplifying our own “modern” conundrum of “news”, the reprobateable Fox. And more, beginning with the nifty pun of the title.

Disjunction and disruption shape the effort here. I am taken by the voices—desperate, vital, and crazy—pounding and propounding thru out these works. The whole weighting system of culture seems thwarted by the collisions. From “Jew”:

“Preaching Gospel to Megadeth fans, the Jew
is a new partner
who prevents infection.”

The Internet has allowed us to broadcast the creamiest dope. It may be the same thing as yattered in conversation, but broadcast into the wide variety, we see the sumptuous clutter of our effortless brains. Who do we think we are?

“Jew” mentions Sonia Sanchez, and I feel nervous because I do not know who that is. Culture, as aggregate of social concerns, impends. Is Sonia Sanchez that writer who wrote that thing or is she that singer who lip-synced on SNL? Onwardly, Ben writes (however the words came to him):

“Zucchini soup with tousled-
haired children seeking inroads
To a poisoned well of tears”

It is hard to explain the poetic displacement here. The train of thought draws cars of unconditioned response. To wit: Zucchini soup brings Martha Stewart to mind. Tousled-haired children asks a plodding sentiment, antipodal (let us say) to Ms Stewart. Poisoned well asserts crazy history, stupidhead at work. The junction where these exploits occur, the poem, sweats eagerly. The “special sin that arouses God’s anger is in reality an aborted baby.”

Gathering weirdness from the net provides little challenge. Every goofball, including you and me, has lent a nutty assertion to the Internet’s compiled overall. A poem from that roiling murk: that is a different story. It is hard in using this resource to meter the disruptions, and hitch disjunction properly to a fanning reverie of sense. That’s (my) experience talking. To combine the disparities into a thing to comprise demands a peculiar embrace. The poet must endeavour this job.

And that’s a crucial point. This writing may consist of randomly-hewn chucks of Internet chatter, but definite motivation and impetus moves behind the scenes. Poets who “make up” their poems thru “inspired” converse with the muse often offer the mere repetition of fine sounding poeticality. That inspiration seeks its lowest level, so to speak, as in the familiar or done thing.

The poems in Citizen Cain reflect an author’s viewpoint and care. Internet mining sets a limit to the control of sometimes bogus inspiration. The element of surprise, and the mocking of taste (taste as in the grand envelop in which Samuel Johnson made such orotund pronouncements), deflect author manipulations in favour of something radiant and obstreperous. The method aims towards an escape from the simplifying gravity of the studied product. Surprise, I say again, is key

In summing up lowest common denominator style, I find Citizen Cain fun, twisting, centered, tractable, and intractable. Those adjectives suggest the buoyantest of possibilities for poetry. We should all use our computers and our Internet searches as vitally.

*****

Allen Bramhall is the author of DAYS POEM (Meritage Press), among other things...

FORTY-NINE GUARANTEED WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH by SANDY MCINTOSH

2011-12-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2007)

List poems, poetry review poems, invented musical instrument poems--Sandy McIntosh’s Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death is playful and humorous. Even the title itself is unique in the poetry world--it sounds more like a gimmick than a poetry title, and what’s funny is that the actual poem dedicated to the forty-nine ways only contains 29 improbable ways with the last way listed as “Make a list like this, but don’t stop.” These poems contain often surreal elements, such as a description of an octuba, “a weird musical instrument / it requires eight strong men / and women to play it / Its music / is basso profundo in extremes,” yet alongside of these images/ideas, we get references to real people. Eileen Tabios shows up at least twice, and Burt Kimmelman and Thomas Fink also show up. Granted, they often show up in humorous contexts, such as a review of a fictional book of Eileen Tabios titled Intestines; still, this combination of the surreal and real create interesting juxtapositions and blur the line between reality and fiction.

Take, for example, “Insignificant Meetings with Remarkable Men.” This poem contains a list of seventeen meetings with famous men most of whom lived in the last 100 years. The question right away is are these real or spoof meetings. Because of McIntosh’s time, we must assume they are spoof meetings, and the last one seems to suggest that’s correct, for in that one, McIntosh meets another version of himself (a dangerous stud). So, are these commentary on the historical people? Are these commentary on meeting “remarkable” people? Are these commentary on our perceptions of the remarkable in others? With Eisenhower, the poet tells us:

My father knew General Eisenhower. I was three or four.
He took me to meet the ex-president during half time
at a Colgate vs Army football game. “How are you, my
boy?” Eisenhower asked, patting my head. “I have to
wee-wee,” I supposedly answered. He bent down and
supposedly confided, “I do, too.”

The poet tells us this with a straight face, but the content suggests that this meeting is a fiction. Still, we get a good amount of information, and such an actual event could have happened. What does it tell us about Eisenhower? Nothing really. It’s not remarkable, but it’s human. Is this McIntosh suggesting that the remarkable is based on situation. He could have had some remarkable encounter, but he has a fairly typical one. While the other men vary in their levels of renown, the meetings are similar. We want the poet to have at least one great meeting, but they all seem like minor let downs. Overall, the small stories presented as poetry also bring up interesting questions about what McIntosh thinks of poetic form. He provides some commentary on that topic in the section titled “Essential Inventories.”

In that section, both poems deal with the idea of poetic form. The first poems is “Partial Inventory of List Poems Not Included In This Volume.” The poem fits the description exactly, with the individual lines just being descriptions of poems.

8. Body Parts Sorted by Spiritual Merit

9. Machines that Reduce Objects to Their Actual Size

10. Four Hundred Fifty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death

11. Fossil Forms of Thought

12. The Twelve Secrets of Successful Polygamists

This list is the poem, but each item of the list seems to spin off new poems not written, except as the reader imagines what such a poem would be. The question here about what poetry is seems to rely heavily on the reader. For instance, does McIntosh consider this piece a poem or just a list? I’m assuming it’s a poem, but that’s mostly because it’s in a poetry book and I have a wide concept of what makes a poem a poem. Essentially, the works in this book seem to comment on what constitutes poetry by providing lists like these but also references to living writers and to dead writers. This book exist as poetry in a world that knows poetry intimately. Outside of that world, is it just a humorous list? The second piece, “Six Intriguing, Newly Discovered Verse Forms I’ve Decided to Share, After All,” brings up similar ideas because it is a list of new verse forms with descriptions but with no sample poems. McIntosh is commenting on the practice of poetry, i.e. he’s providing meta-commentary. This meta-commentary or even spoof commentary actual seems to open the door to new experiments. In other words, is this a case in which the spoof can turn real?

Whatever answers the reader comes up with to these questions, the book is fascinating and humorous. When I started it, I could not put it down until I finished. I wanted to see what other interesting experiments McIntosh would throw at us.

*****

William Allegrezza is the editor of Moria Poetry and author of numerous poetry collections, which can be seen on the left-hand column of his blog.

THERE'S THE HAND AND THERE'S THE ARID CHAIR by TOMAZ SALAMUN

2011-12-22T17:31:00.000-08:00

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews

There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair by Tomaz Salamun
(Counterpath Press, Denver, 2009)

There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair is a lovely collection by the Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun. Perhaps it may not be for everyone, as it is a dense read with images that run all over the place. Yet the agenda — both political and aesthetic — is sincere. Salamun’s plain yet ellusive language has its elliptical moments and heights. Freighted with a rich tapestry of cultural references (mostly European) that stretch from myths, folk tales, or autobiographical details to historical moments and political situations, the poems literally have a life of their own, a vivacity that can prove to be ageless.

I often read about Tomaz Salamun being a monster, and that the poet himself plays an active part in mythologizing himself. It thus did not come to me as a mystery when I arrived at this poem, “Monstrum (Lat.) from the Verb Monstrare,” one that certainly merits being quoted in its entirety:

I add to the story, because no doubt
there will be many theses on
who I am. My life is clear the way
my books are clear. I am
as alone as you, voyeur. Like you
I flinch if someone sees me.
I look into your eyes. We both know
the question. Who kills? Who stays?
Who watches? The one furiously
taking his clothes off to be innocent,
isn’t that a mask? Your heart beats
because your blood beats. You have
the same right as I do, I, who am
your guardian angel, your monster.

— p. 93

As revealed in another poem — with a straightforward poem, “Poem” — Salamun meditates on his relationship with poetry and art, in an effort to evaluate the role that his writing may play in a larger social context. He interrogates himself about his conditioned environment, and observes the changes in his work, detaching himself from his “self”:

Where am I?
Where do my gallows stand?
Why do I have granulated eyes?
The town will follow you.

(…)

My poetry is no longer credible,
not for a long time.

It rots from the sheer glowing.

— p. 96

So many poems in this book deserve an in-depth analysis, and these are merely some quick notes I have jotted down after my first read. I understand that this book project is a team effort. Other than the author himself, there are nine translators who had worked on the poems, each taking on different writings, and refining details to his/her sensibilities. Perhaps this explains why the style is so diverse in this work. Still, in the literary world where team efforts may be seen as seldom, a collective act is a statement in itself. It is a challenge and is always courageous.

*****

Fiona Sze-Lorrain's book of poetry, Water the Moon (Marick, 2010) is an Honorable Mention for the 2011 Eric Hoffer Book Award. Translations of Bai Hua, Yu Xiang and Hai Zi are forthcoming from Zephyr Press and Tupelo. An editor at Cerise Press, she is also a zheng concertist. (www.fionasze.com)

MY LIFE AS A DOLL by ELIZABETH KIRSCHNER

2011-12-22T17:30:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

My Life as a Doll by Elizabeth Kirschner
(Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2008)

Elizabeth Kirschner's My Life as Doll is one of the most searing poetry reads I've experienced in recent memory. How could it not be, when the first page presents

When I was four

years old, my mother pummeled
the back of my head with a baseball bat.

that continues on to

I remember the pain. I remember
hitting the floor like a scarecrow

that was a heap of broken straw.

This is why I love the winter garden so:

energy of enigma. Icy blossoms.

Yes, My Life as Doll reflects the effects of childhood abuse throughout the persona's life. But it's also that leap from a brutal battering to the significance of the winter garden that paradoxically shows how the persona doesn't ultimately get buried by the abusive experience. Despite the bludgeonings described on many -- oh so many! -- pages of the book, the lyrical -- often gorgeous -- lines offer the impression that the abused did not remain a victim.

It's a paradox that's either poetically masterful or not believable. Because the book doesn't contain redemption -- doesn't have a happy ending --

Damage is done when love is undone
and I'm a bouquet of burnt matches,

an ashen petal fallen from a loony-
tunes moon. Stomp, smudge, chalk

me into cinders and I will rise like
a genie out of a bottle of destitute dreams.

My scent is offal, seared grass
and dirt drenched with the blood of

the war dead. Why must there be
warring between heaven and earth,

dead Mother and me? The kiss of peace
has been smeared into blear

and white doves have bloodied their feathers
in hell's red bile of dew. I can be scraped

from the bottom of God's shoe, my scars
are pregnant with pain and I am a bloody stew.

Dressed in mole's clothes, I dig
past my open grave with raggedy paws

till I'm blinded with blinding light
that scorches the blackened wick

of my blackened soul, my masterpiece.

So the point of unease here is how the poet can so elegantly create such a wondrous poem without at all conceding any relief from the childhood battering. The book contains four parts, moving from childhood to adulthood, including the mother's death. Throughout, one isn't moved to consider the often beautiful lines in the poems as results that justify their sources.

Yet it's also this unrelentingness capped by a refusal for a Hollywood ending that makes this collection so powerful. The consistent difficulty and yet persistent lyricism combine for an impressive result for which the poet deserves, yes, no less than heaven -- even if it must be the type of non-paradise here:

While boys milked my breasts until
they were empty, I longed to be donned

in a habit. I wanted to float down cloistered
corridors like a black butterfly whose scales

were relics stolen from Mary. I wanted to marry
a martyr, I wanted to be a saint, but

my lips were rubbed raw by too many kisses
from boys who took and took -- suffering would be

my salvation, my one way ticket to a heaven
full of copulating angels -- they loved a good fuck

and I dreamed of dreaming in their lascivious arms.
There I would get pregnant with a baby angel

and I would mother her tenderly while my own mother
lay drunk on the sofa, smoking a cigarette

like a tiny flare that signaled her heartbeat.
Soon, soon I would be a centerfold saint

she would kneel before praying a prayer that sounded
like curses -- o glory be the day I condemned her

to the hell she belonged in -- it was a zoo,
it had a cage and I had the key.

P.S. This book also made me go in search of the poet's earlier books. That effect, by itself, is a testament to its power, uncomfortable though the experience of it was.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in Boston Area Poetry Scene; by Michael Leong in Big Other; by Alan Baker in Litter; and by rob mclennan. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews SILK EGG along with two other books, NOTA BENE EISWEIN and FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 at Asian American Lit Fans.

THE USE OF SPEECH by NATHALIE SARRAUTE, trans. by BARBARA WRIGHT

2011-12-22T17:15:00.000-08:00

GABRIEL LOVATT Reviews

The Use of Speech by Nathalie Sarraute, translated from the French by Barbara Wright
(Counterpath Press, Denver, Colorado, 2010)

In Counterpath’s 2010 re-release of The Use of Speech, first published in 1980, Nathalie Sarraute functions as a lexicographer of the nouveau roman order, compiling words and phrases only to complicate meaning and disorient the contexts in which they occur. Though the novel appeared decades after nouveau roman’s mid-century explosion, it’s difficult not to consider Sarraute’s work in the context of the literary innovation with which she, along with writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Phillipe Sollers, and Michel Butor, is so commonly associated. The Use of Speech engages many of the approaches that broadly characterize the movement, such as exacting description of sensations and initially coherent impressions that are undone by disunity of time and space. Sarraute categorically denies the kind of stable characterization that would situate speech-acts in lucid circumstances. A protean prose style, which adapts to the incremental shifts of each of The Use of Speech’s ten sections, erases the sense of a contiguous focalizer. The narrator weaves in and out of scenarios that serve to simultaneously illustrate and obscure the words and phrases that constitute the core of each section.

In documenting the ways in which we communicate, Sarraute explores how both words and the conditions of speech are loaded volatile import that creates a surfeit of discordant meaning and correspondingly mixed emotions. In fidelity to the denial of developed characterization that marks Sarraute’s earlier work, the individuals who populate the sections are depersonalized while the words and speech acts are humanized, transformed into mercurial figures rather than linguistic signs. Over the ten chapters, Sarraute surveys the extent to which speech shapes everything from political history to artist’s cliques.

For instance, “Ich sterbe” investigates the speech of the dying by deliberating on the language that precedes or ushers in threshold states. “See you very soon” foregrounds the sum of words constantly tallied in friendships, wherein the roles of speaker and listener that are rarely balanced, against a background of social exchange mediated by advertisements and entertainment. Here Sarraute tackles the interpersonal power dynamics that manifest in the language of friendship and how speech accretes its own weight and burden. The specter of gossip rears its head, too, as a social currency that is measured against its surfeit or scarcity. In “Your father. Your sister,” the emotional and psychological impact of “key- phrases”—the accumulations that surround oft-repeated expressions—also undergoes examination. Sarraute explains the “key” as language capable of shifting experience the moment that it is spoken: “Few phrases are more deserving than this to be called a key-phrase. A key in which the words ‘Your father’ ‘Your sister’ stand out like the web that enables the key to turn… ‘Your father’ ‘Your sister’… a section of the invisible dividing wall opens, and through the opening… what do we see?…” This section theorizes the “key” as language that has gathered richly textured meaning against the backdrop of family and life-long relationships. “The Word Love” has similarly potent capabilities. The word—not even the utterance, but the glyph—is a “powerfully armed, well-guarded, well-policed State” and kaleidoscopic by nature.

“Aesthetic” offers a manifesto against the reduction of art and beauty into a set of principles that are intimated by the mere utterance of a word that reduces and confines.

This word “aesthetic” erupted like the fateful pustule that discloses… it cropped up like a tattoo that reveals membership… But don’t think that, it isn’t the sign of what you imagined, not with me… I am not one of those, and I’m going to prove it, here’s something that will reassure you, here are the words I’m going to bracket with that word “aesthetic”… words in common usage, nice vulgar words I like to use…and you’ll see how at their contact “aesthetic” will lose that air you dislike…yes, I know…an aloof, haughty air, a bit supercilious, isn’t it?…but you’ll see how these good words infect it with their jauntiness, generosity, good-nature… “Well yes…the aesthetic sense… they don’t give a damn. All the care about is their own crap.”

Sarraute systematically destroys the denotative meaning of “Aesthetic” to reveal the connotations that associate a word with social and community motivations. This process of unraveling a phrase or a word so it is no longer neatly tied to a use value that can be employed in the linguistic economy is in line with the defamiliarization that occurs in the other sections. By looking closely at the use of speech under specific lenses, Sarraute reveals the extent to which concrete meaning dissolves and leaves behind the trace of gestures, intimations, and doubts. Relationships, whether with family or larger communities, become fraught by attempts to work through their intricacies using the inadequate perimeters of language. Within each of these scenarios, the position of speaker and listener are dynamic rather than static. They respond to the codes that surround speech, alternately upholding, breaking, and surreptitiously transgressing them.

As translated by the great Barbara Wright, the lines are filled with cadences, ellipses and interruptions that constantly evade and deny the completion or containment of one thought while adding yet another. As a result, ideas overlap and pile up, sounds layer upon other sounds. This level of sonic cacophony duplicates the uproar of ideas that resonate throughout the book. It’s a formidable reminder of the way in which nouveau roman dissonance and discontinuity responds to the political and social turbulence of the latter half of the twentieth-century. Despite the fact that nouveau roman has frequently been accused of being apolitical, Sarraute reminds me of the ways in which the breakdown of artistic representability can make a political claim by asking us to question other forms of representation and their veracity.

*****

Gabriel Lovatt writes, researches, and teaches in Athens at the University of Georgia, where she is finishing her dissertation.

PORTRAIT OF COLON DASH PARENTHESIS by JEFFREY JULLICH

2011-12-22T17:00:00.000-08:00

LOGAN FRY Reviews

Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis by Jeffrey Jullich
(Litmus Press, New York, 2010)

The poems in Jeffrey Jullich’s Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis have an ease to them, despite their use of disjunction and complex juxtapositions. There is a breezy quality that arises from a casually self-assured expression of difficult concepts and abstractions and the union of these elements through image. Jullich’s images are sharp and refreshing in that same casual way, arising from a linguistic inventiveness that is not showy or self-involved even in the unusual turns it takes. But Portrait is not an “easy” collection, nor is it accessible in the usual sense, though its handling of complex concepts makes them much more accessible than the concepts would be otherwise.

A good example of this is the poem “Buck Fever,” which suggests by its title an interaction with nature, as that phrase is used to describe the nervousness of a new hunter at sighting game for the first time, then undercuts this association by the banal, city setting of “walking / home from the office along the sidewalk….” Jullich then manages to bring in the title’s association, with the speaker being

petrified aghast—by a pure idea

cogitated upon until sick with fright,
the cement pavement rocking like a funhouse
after five o’clock on pay day, so jittery
I keep flinching all over at the thought,
pensive in dread at the abstract concept of

a theoretical oratorio,
of sorts, without costumes or scenery

Whatever the “pure idea” that is so frightening is, Jullich never makes absolutely clear, and the poem might threaten to unravel if it weren’t for the title’s firm link to an idea. Jullich has made a metaphor of the poem to the title’s tenor; the poem’s emphasis on the abstract—“pure idea // cogitated upon” and “the abstract concept // of theoretical oratorio”—can then be ascribed to the function of the mental experience of the phenomenon of buck fever.

The poem does not remain in the weightlessness of the abstract, however. Jullich deftly turns the poem back to the animal presence lingering in the

background, extrapolating on a glance
seen from the opposite side of the street
as from a distant shore, remotely—in which case

traces might retain no mammal body heat.
Typography could be no interconnection,
—absence outracing hope,
like a trope, like a turtle chasing an arrow.

It is a subtle move, the silent maneuver back into the context that, implied by the title, has been withheld from the reader for the sake of abstraction and theorizing; and the move is so precisely effective because of the relief the reader feels in being led through “abstract concept” to “mammal body heat.” But the feature of this poem that most distinguishes Jullich’s authority as a skilled and confident poet is that he mixes in the suggestion of ars poetica with this physical, animalistic embodiment of the poem—bringing in “trope” as the rhyme for hope, mentioning typography, which, as this is an early poem, should still be on the reader’s mind from the title. Instead of abandoning complexity and difficulty entirely for the sake of a clear, physical ending, Jullich is able to embed a new sort of complexity into the poem without distracting from the satisfying final image of the “turtle chasing an arrow.”

One of Jullich’s trademark devices is the italicization of words that, given their context of formal or theoretical written discourse, should not be italicized. Jullich uses this technique to impart the cadence of spoken voice, with all its dramatic emphases, into the poems. To use an example from “Buck Fever” so that Jullich’s purpose is most apparent, the italicization of “traces” completely transforms the phrase in which the word appears. The line without italics—“in which case // traces might retain no mammal body heat”—feels stuffy and obscure. Yet with the expressive emphasis that Jullich puts on “traces,” the phrase is invigorated, since now something is being distinguished, an alternate possibility is acknowledged through the emphasis on this term, drawing the reader’s attention to the term that is being used.

In some ways, this italicization can come off as off-putting or manipulative—I’ll admit that that was my initial response. Over the course of the collection, however, I came to see that Jullich was clearly aware of this manipulative element and was consciously highlighting it with his out-of-place italicizations. Poetry is manipulative—it tries to elicit a response from the reader, and it does this through its rhetorical constructs, its syntax, its diction, its tone, its voice, etc. By bringing the evidence of this eager manipulation of the poet to the surface, I found myself trusting Jullich more and more as the collection went on: trusting that the challenges of his work were purposeful and would led to satisfying conclusions (as they often did) and also trusting his voice itself, the image of the poet that I could infer from the more than seventy poems in this collection.

Emoticons can be a risky association to place front and center in your poetry collection’s title, saddled as they are with the stigma of puerile internet-speak. The association between the nuts and bolts of typographical symbols and mood, however, is a fruitful undertaking for a poet fixated on the way language creates his poems. It is because this language doesn’t stop at random bits of language alone—at, say, a portrait of apostrophe semicolon slash, which do not align into any meaningful image. Jullich chooses instead to assemble a human sensibility and emotional presence from the technical, formal elements of our language. The colon, dash, and parenthesis, in this arrangement, are known through a cultural consciousness to indicate a smile (or a frown, depending on whether the opening or closing parenthesis is used), but Jullich is pushing the semiotics here to new ground. By writing out the names of the typographical remarks, Jullich adds an additional layer of remove between the association we have with the words we read and understand and the end product of a smile or a frown. Just as his experiments with italicization led from manipulation to a knowing openness about the possibility and function of manipulation and thus ceased to be manipulative, the title of Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis moves through a disrespect for the complexities of language to shine a light on how these complexities actually function. Jeffrey Jullich has created a highly accomplished collection that encourages rereading not only for the ways that its components reveal themselves in doing so, but also for the moments of delight and humanness that mingle with theory and concept throughout the individual poems.

*****

Logan Fry lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas. His poetry has most recently appeared in elimae.

STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE by MATTHEW COOPERMAN

2011-12-21T23:55:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE by Matthew Cooperman
(Counterpath Press, Denver, 2011)

There are many interesting effects in Matthew Cooperman’s STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE. I emphasize “effects” because each page pulsates with textual energy to push you, the reader, forward. It’s apt that the colon is used frequently here, in titles and as section subtitles, to visually attest to cause and effect, and you want immediately to know the “next”—that effect.

As one of its interesting paradoxes, the book could easily be a page-turner, except that the text concurrently makes you want to linger in order to pay a deeper attention than what might be allowed from a faster read.

And, ultimately, when I’ve finished the book, I still feel the sense of energy—the anger, even—in the book and yet can’t help but consider the book more to be a snapshot, a still, indeed, rather than as, say, a movie. And I think this is because there’s no beginning-and-end, if you will, to the collection. Indeed, the first poem “STILL: WINTER” begins with the word “and” to bespeak things occurring before the poem (or book) even began.

The lack of a (seeming) “end”-ing, in particular is also significant to me so that the book ends up (to me) presenting a portrait of a moment(s) in time but there’s no attempt at resolution—the collection remains mostly a depiction.

Sure, it behooves me now to mention some of the many things being depicted—wars, business failures, greed, Empire with a capital “E”, dogs, literature and so on and so on: the stuff, I imagine, in the poet’s lived world which, as presented, is an admirably large canvas. But what makes it all poetry, I believe, is the poet’s craft in handling his material. I can’t say it better than one of the blurbers did, so I’ll quote Gillian Conoley for the effect that I am hailing here: “how [Cooperman] works a lyric out of its rage.” For example, the opening of “STILL: OTROS”

Tea Party: the United States already has enough people with college degrees, but who is going to cut our lettuce, our tobacco?

Hunger: “The piano travels within,/ travels with joyful leaps./ Then meditates in ferrate repose,/ nailed with ten horizons.” (Vallejo)

Mystery: all at once freak out, I is not X’er, I hate computers, I am buying a new house on the Mexican border, I know Philip K. Dick lived there, at dusk, in the 70s, the sky fills with Easter Island heads, or what is beyond anthropology, Paul Klee, I missed the important first years

Zeno: I can write my way into another as a function of time; it is X and approachable though I am always Y; this is the way in which space manifests my privacy and my language; she is cause and I am an island effect

transcends itself as just a formation of a list because of the energy-rhythm within the poem as well as the choices for what will be collaged into the poem. The poem ends with a quote from Willie Stark, and it is something that seems to say something deep….but, in my opinion, really isn’t:

“Time brings all things to light….”

And, yet, it’s a useful ending to the poem. It has the sense of being a conclusion, but doesn’t offer the type of content that distracts you from turning the page to satisfy your curiosity about, What else…

This assessment isn’t an insult. The effect is effective for being a mark of our times colored by quick attention spans as enhanced by the nature of internet-grazing. It’s like what’s often tweeted, you know what I mean. (Or often blogged too often if you read my blog.) And what’s often tweeted is relevant here, to the extent that such content may be part of the poet’s world from which he—working as, to quote Conoley, a “Geiger counter—lifts objects or elements not authorially pre-determined.

Finally, the collection ends with a page of four words:

Strum:

Strum:

Strum:

Strum:

It’s quite an effective ending. It’s like the book’s persona can keep going on … observing and depicting and depicting in a way that ultimately begs the question: WHAT ARE WE ALL DOING?

Strum: Strum: Strum: Strum: That’s more of a guitar sound than a violin sound, to me, but the yadda yadda yadda aspect does evoke a violinist. The one who kept on while Rome burned and burned. The ones who kept tweeting about the Kardashians while [and I reformat here a paragraph from “STILL: FIGHTING” into a list for a different emphasis] what's unfolding are

Actium, Massilla, Thermopylae;

Antietam, Appotomax, Vicksburg, Shiloh;

Ypres, Gallipoli, Somme, Passchendaele;

Khe Sanh, Ap Bac, Tet, My Lai;

Alamo, Medano, San Jacinto, Wounded Knee;

Kirkuk, Mosul, Karbala, Samawah

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in Boston Area Poetry Scene; by Michael Leong in Big Other; by Alan Baker in Litter; and by rob mclennan. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews SILK EGG along with two other books, NOTA BENE EISWEIN and FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 at Asian American Lit Fans.

THE URGE TO BELIEVE IS STRONGER THAN BELIEF ITSELF by ERIN M. BERTRAM

2011-12-21T23:50:00.000-08:00

BILL SCALIA Reviews

The Urge to Believe is Stronger than Belief Itself by Erin M. Bertram
(Cherry Pie Press Midwest Women Poets Series, Glen Carbon, Il., 2008)

Erin Bertram’s slim volume The Urge to Believe is Stronger than Belief Itself is a profound exploration of identity, loss, and recovery. Admittedly this is a generalization, but what makes Bertram’s work special to my reading is the intensity with which she displaces the normative definitions of body, a kind of reconsideration of the Cartesian split, and reinvests herself in her new, altered body -- but it this the same self, and is this the same body?

These are difficult questions to answer, and fall under the purview of metaphysics, epistemology, and perhaps ontology (not to mention physiology and psychology). The beauty of Bertram’s book is that she transcends all of these concerns while reducing none of them. That is, her poetry does what poetry can do best: considers how a thing -- a body, a state of being -- is defined in language, and then transcends both the language and the original condition to present the reader with a new experience. Can we ask more of a poet?

Bertram’s book is designed to maximize her thesis: a body is a reflection of itself, and also is a reflection of the self. The book is set with a definition of a term (from Merriam-Webster), or a description of a medical condition on one page, and a corresponding poem explicating, reimagining, or even translating / delineating / re-contextualizing the term on the facing page. Thus the text reflects the mirror image of the halves of the body. But, in Bertram’s “body” (that of the subject as well as the text), the body itself is redefined.

The opening poem describes, in the poet’s allusive way, the subject’s reaction to the cancer diagnosis and the impending mastectomy. But, it’s the first line of the next poem (none are titled) that is most affecting, and maybe the most affecting in the book: “It’s only a part of her body, but it’s a part of her body.” The sentence itself serves as a model for the book: it is a nearly perfect (except for only and but) reflection of itself (bisected by a comma), but it’s the shift in emphasis from body in the first clause to her in the second that accomplishes the real work. The poet doesn’t cue us to this shift. The beauty of her line is that she doesn’t have to.

Bertram writes in a kind of fractured prose style (in terms of syntax; the language and usage is poetic), intensifying the emotion of the fractured body / fractured text. She exhibits a fine descriptive eye:

Corn greys in its husk. The field before a field, the field after. Catfish darting through dirty current, blending & yet somehow not. Something always stands out when they flip the switch & the backdrop, even that, falls away. A table, maybe. A few stray sweaters slumped against the floorboard. Months pass, & one day the fallen colt, disappeared behind a neighbor’s barn, dissolves into soil & peat.

The verb “greys,” the catfish simultaneously blending and not blending with the dirty water, the disappeared and dissolving colt, all deflect this prose passage into poetry. Clearly we know what it is that’s graying, that is blending and not blending, that has disappeared and is dissolving back into the soil. The imagery and usage keeps the speaker’s experience from being maudlin, sentimental, or self-pitying. Rather, the poet sees the experience in terms of nature; she has displaced herself into the world in an attempt to reconcile the separation of the body from itself and from the self. There is no pretense to poetic imagery for art’s sake here; the poet describes it this way because this is the way in which she authenticates the experience. The imagery doesn’t describe the experience; it reveals the experience.

The surgery occurs, as one might expect, halfway through the text, and presents perhaps Bertram’s finest writing. The pain is described as physical and metaphysical at the level of selfhood. The surgery is described in precise physical terms; the question “Were you prepared to severe yourself from your body?” resonates through the book, and is reflected in the metaphysical: “I read poems, yes, with God grafted down their center, Christ bleeding in recto, in verso.”

After this point, the regular pattern of note/definition/gloss facing a corresponding poem is altered; Bertram’s choice of format is interesting; it demonstrates that, like the speaker, the text at this point is not “whole” (her qualification), but begins seeking reconnection to a form. This attempted reconciliation of all the tensions that have been sustained to this point is delivered in one marvelous statement:

An absence of visual aide does not render an image silent.

Does it.

That last expression falls like a hammer blow (or cuts like a surgeon’s knife), after it has happened it’s over, and the poet, in the last poem of the book, is reconciled: the cancer is gone, and, “in earnest” the speaker is reconciled with the natural world; in the world of this text, ‘reconciliation with nature’ is the speaker’s recovered the ability to express compassion and love, even from the depths of her terrifying experience.

Erin Bertram’s book demonstrates a poet at high power making use of language, form, and the material of the text to render experience in three registers -- physical, psychological, metaphysical -- in the manner of lived human experience. The framework, the aesthetics, are evident, but as is true with the best expressive writing in any genre, the aesthetics disappear behind the profound experience of the text.

*****

Bill Scalia holds a PhD in American Literature from Louisiana State University. His most recent essays include “Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film: Meaning-Making and Extra-Linguistic Signification” (in Literature / Film Quarterly) and “Bergman’s Trilogy of Faith and Persona: Faith and Visual Narrative” in the anthology Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). His book Conversing in Figures: Emerson, Poetry, Cinema is forthcoming in 2012. Bill teaches writing and literature at St Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, MD.

FAULKNER'S ROSARY by SARAH VAP

2011-12-21T23:45:00.000-08:00

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews

Faulkner’s Rosary by Sarah Vap
(Saturnalia Books, Ardmore, PA, 2010)

Feminist scholars and readers have long known that female writers who dwell in the world of the woman’s body risk alienating readers and being pigeonholed in any number of unpleasant ways. Happily, we now have a body of work from writers who have nonetheless fearlessly explored the question of what it means to live in a world with a woman’s body. Faulkner’s Rosary, by Sarah Vap, both falls into that tradition and transcends it.

The arc of the book explores a woman’s body as it brings a baby to term. These poems are full of inchoate mystery, as pregnancy poems so often are. Who amongst us has not marveled at the idea of conception, the way that several cells come together and sort themselves into a baby? Vap puts it more poetically: “Assembling / within me, our slightest idea / turned into roselight and chained / behind the sternum” (“Linea Nigra: cross of jubilee”).

If Vap had only offered poems that gave us unique insights into pregnancy, poems which made us see pregnancy in ways that we’d never seen it before, that would be enough. But Vap does so much more.

These poems also explore family histories while talking about the new life under creation. We learn: “. . . I was fathered by the angel who tells / the story of a Victorian house, buried / underground. It was built by aliens. It’s fully intact. / It’s discovered by his children” (“Fink, Punk, Nincompoop, Honky-tonk, Sunlight, Sunnysideup, Ding-a-Ling, Tiger”). In “Return, return, return (Jimenez); Contact! Contact! (Thoreau),” we learn that this child has a “great-granny who wore her thimble out / every couple of years. And great-grandmother who wore / the artificial lilacs in her hair. My women.”

Vap also taps into a larger cultural motif by weaving Mary, the mother of Christ, throughout these poems. Poets who explore pregnancy have a variety of archetypes and ready-made cultural artifacts to use. Vap acknowledges her variety of choices in the poem “To be breathed-in by a god,” where she lists an assortment of Marys, from the Virgin Mary to Mary Kay to Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. This brief poem wrestle with the question about who is lost when we use these cultural archetypes and answers “and we have lost the girl.”

Some of Vap’s most moving poems combine details of maternal history with religious themes. Her most stunning example of this accomplishment is “Call,” where the speaker tries to trace a lineage, only to realize how much information has been lost. The speaker realizes “. . . My women’s catechism / is the plain string of beads, is the pew, / is the pieta . . .” The poem makes the connections between mythical women and real women in a legacy of choosing love.

This collection of poems offers so much to such a wide variety of readers: theology, physiology, mythology, history, and anthropology. Vap manages to weave many strands into a fascinating tapestry, a textured treat.

*****

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. Her second chapbook, I Stand Here Shredding Documents, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2011. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale and serves as Chair of the General Education department. She blogs about books, creativity, poetry, and modern life at http://kristinberkey-abbott.blogspot.com and about theology at http://liberationtheologylutheran.blogspot.com. Her website is www.kristinberkey-abbott.com.

KYOTOLOGIC by ANNE GORRICK

2011-12-21T23:40:00.000-08:00

MICAH CAVALERI Reviews

KYOTOLOGIC by Anne Gorrick
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, UK, 2008)

[Editor's Note: Due to the various formattings within this review, it's presented as a series of five jpegs. You can click on each jpeg to make it larger.]

*****

Micah Cavaleri lives in Michigan, where he plays with his daughter and runs and sleeps and writes and cooks while his wife explores the mysteries of the natural world. His book the syllable that opened an eye is available from Dead Man Publishing. Poems, etc are scattered about the web, with his most recent work and forthcoming work in Moria, Jacket2, and the always beautiful elimae.

SEVEN PUBLICATIONS by j/j hastain

2011-12-21T23:25:00.000-08:00

TOM BECKETT Engages

autobiography of my gender by j/j hastain
(moria books, Chicago, 2011)

prurient omnibus anarchic by j/j hastain
(Spuyten Duyvil/Meeting Eyes Bindery, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2011)

restitutions for a newer bountiful verb by j/j hastain
(ypolita press, 2010)

cock-burn by j/j hastain
(Cy Gist Press, New York, 2010)

our bodies . . . are beauty inducers by j/j hastain
(Queermojo, Bar Harbor, MA, 2010)

the ulterior eden by j/j hastain
(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2011)

asymptotic lover//thermodynamic vents by j/j hastain
(BlazeVox, Buffalo, N.Y., 2008)

UNLIMITED ULTERIORS: j/j hastain’s “opus of awes”

There’s no way I can do justice to all of these books by this remarkable young poet. But, importantly, these various texts are not truly separate. Hastain has, I think, a rather singular project—a thoughtful, sensual rubric.

So, where to begin?

One starting point might be this couplet from autobiography of my gender:

“I have never felt like a woman

I have never felt like a man”
(unpaginated)

Another place to begin might be with this passage from Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (University of Chicago Press, 2009):

“The psychoanalytic rule of free association—‘that whatever comes into one’s head must be reported without criticizing it’—requires a suspension of judgment that permits different forms of thinking to emerge. Once you commit to following a train of thought irrespective of where it leads or how risky it seems, then you may find yourself thinking new thoughts and discovering spaces that you would not have come across otherwise. We might say that psychoanalysis, like cocksucking, involves taking risks with one’s mouth. Thus although psychoanalysis has an appalling history of pathologizing nonnormative sexual behavior and forms of desire, the clinical practice of analysis depends on not pathologizing any desire, in order to discover where its logic takes you. Rather than the conservative moralism of ‘Just say no,’ psychoanalysis involves the permissive ethic of ‘Never say no,’ because the unconscious never says no. This practical refusal to pathologize desire amplifies thought.” (28-29)

Another beginning might be found in this segment of an “after” note at the end of the ulterior eden:

“I’ve had it asked of me, if I fear that my work might be ‘misinterpreted’ as pornography. My response was that it is not of high importance to me what categories the work does or does not fit in. It matters not to me if there are taboos or apprehensions concerning it. I feel most interested in articulating publically, the things that are of pure relevance in moments, to me—and as such am interested in the myriad validities that exist in a similar sense, for others. That vulnerable, risk-driven sagacity.” (55)

Risk-driven sagacity!

To be open to experience, to be open to others, is to exist beyond what is obvious or admitted or intentionally hidden—in an Ulterior Eden. “Ulterior,” is—I believe—the most important recurring word in Hastain’s body of work (so far).

As a poet who has tried to write sex, tried to allow sex to write me, in various ways, I was particularly moved by this passage in our bodies … are beauty inducers:

“has there ever been a book            that exists as a direct
document of sex?

sex as space
           where it both       makes the logic

                      as well as sustains it?

this is that book
this is that puja”
(unpaginated)

I don’t think it’s a stretch to recognize the beauty, power and poetry of sex. I do think though that it is a very different matter to make sexuality one’s method. A very different matter to approach it in epistemological and even cosmological terms:

“this is why I am always constructing

ulterior gullets
ulterior virginities

ulterior wombs

this is why
we make our own

encircling

territories”
(prurient anarchic omnibus, unpaginated)

Text and sex coincide:

            “slowly

           my head
           a stanza
                      being brought by you to your cunt

this type of slaver
           then lathering it

                      as a force that goes deep enough into
                      that there is nothing else to ask for

                                            nothing else to need”
(restitutions for a newer bountiful verb, unpaginated)

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m doing anything more than hinting at what’s to be found in these works. These are engaging, multi-faceted volumes which sound in many registers. But there is a this to all of it, a rubric that recurs over and over again:

“this is a spiritual fusion that is so sure

that it turns our physiology
into an opus of awes”
(cock-burn, unpaginated)

The spiritual and the bodily are cognate and thoroughly conscious of one another. They interpenetrate. That is the wisdom that distills from these texts, that leaks out, expressed:

“this is the refusal to button over ruptures”
(asymptotic lover//thermodynamic vents, 19)

I hear rapture in that. This is work that matters, that makes love as well as sense.

*****

Tom Beckett's Parts and Other Pieces was published recently by Otoliths. He lives in Kent, Ohio.

A GOOD CUNTBOY IS HARD TO FIND by DOUG RICE

2011-12-21T23:20:00.000-08:00

j/j hastain Reviews

A GOOD CUNTBOY IS HARD TO FIND by Doug Rice
(Jasmine Sailing / CPAOD Books, Denver, Colorado, 1998)

Doug Rice’s A GOOD CUNTBOY IS HARD TO FIND is an invigorating, muddy descant turning itself into a stunning melody by way of bodies! These phrases and pictures that are “thrusting the future into the present” are truly requiring of us as readers—and of earth as holder of. I think that as readers we add weight to the gesture of Doug’s beautiful and raucous book, but I also cannot help but feel that this book is at least somewhat autonomous to us—that even in a post-apocalyptic zone where all mothers, fathers, sisters, cock-bearers, lovers and physical mugwumps have been obliterated—this book would continue doing what it was designed for. Taking up space anarchically—brutally.

This space that it takes up is one of subversions and transgressions—new sexualities and genders—but these expressed with such fierce clarity that it is as if they are being enacted for us. Sweet, true theater. The shame and aching juxtaposed against the pleasures of these sexualities and genders is apparent in the book, but they are shared (the complexities) with no shame. This is a strength of this book! We experience feelings with the writer—without dogmatic lenses or translations. This anarchic space of differentiations is one where social stigma and norms are far from us. This book does not prop itself against the status quo. It completely bypasses it. “Me getting hard and thinking maybe this is me getting wet”—or “we love cunt that is dangerously close to the impossible.”

What if this book were a next specie’s bible? What would the dos and don’ts of a culture that came from A GOOD CUNTBOY look like? “Words almost not words at all but my body acting, moving in unknown ways to God.” This God both a thing being traveled toward, as well as is the book itself. And in order to get there Doug is making xir cunt part of xir speech. Part of our speech. “Knowing this uncomfortable flesh of my impossible body.” This extraordinary, disturbing book is the impossible body becoming more and more possible because it is unfolding here as bounty for us. And we are altered as we intake—as we become the “small bands of nomads [who] read the book, eat the book, fuck the book” and in doing so are stricken, emancipated, gifted with the momentary loss of our own identities. “She took words carefully from my mouth. Replaced them with words from her own body.” “Never certain if there were no beginnings or endings or if there were just too many beginnings and endings generating corrupt middles.”—Doug is here regardless of us—and for us—and as we join with Doug in this striking and strange book, we co-enact an alert transmutation.

*****

j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with hir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous full-length, cross-genre works such as: asymptotic lover // thermodynamic vents (BlazeVox Books), our bodies as beauty inducers (Rebel Satori Press), we in my Trans (JMS Books LLC), autobiography of my gender (Moria), ulterior eden (Otoliths), prurient anarchic omnibus (Spuyten Duyvil) as well as many chapbooks and artist’s books. A new chapbook collaboration with poet-artist Marthe Reed, is forthcoming from Dusie 6. j/j’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including MiPoesias, Fact-Simile, Sextures, Trickhouse, Vlak, Unlikely Stories, The Offending Adam, Eccolinguistics, Poems-For-All and Kelsey. j/j is an elective affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv and a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j’s manuscript Let was a finalist in the 2010 Kelsey Street and Ahsahta book competitions. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award. In the near future j/j has full-length, cross-genre collections coming out with various exciting presses.

60 TEXTOS by SARAH RIGGS

2011-12-21T23:10:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

60 TEXTOS by Sarah Riggs
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2010)

Oh I quite appreciated this enchanting project! I didn’t expect to be so charmed by Sarah Rigg’s 6O TEXTOS. I’m sure it’s because the book is presented as poems based on (?)/written as (?) text messages (“texto” is French for “text message”). So my initial reaction was a slight yawn; the concept itself wasn’t that exciting to me after Google search poems, twitter poems, etc. and also how I once wrote a short story based on emails and once was enough so I’m thinking 60 poems? Wouldn’t, say, a Baker’s dozen be enough for manifesting the concept?

Silly me. I was wrong. 60 TEXTOS warrants every page. And it begins with the deft design, and not simply of the elegant rectangles (outlines to hand-helds) with one laid atop the other to intersect. The book begins, after its Title Page, with two facing pages, with the left saying “from Sarah Riggs” and the right presenting “to Omar Berrada.” This is more consistent with text-messaging than the historical book format that would simply present, say, “for Omar Berrada.” Then, cleverly, the book’s last page is decorated with the couplet

from a blue Nokia
to a silver Samsung

which also explains the dark blue cover with the rectangles, title and author name being inscribed in silver ink. Nicely done, indeed!

And as soon as I read the first poem, I felt my earlier concerns evaporate as I settled in to what I anticipated would be a very good read. Here’s the fabulous first ~~entry~~ poem:

Where will these
lines go if I
send them to you? I may send
them between
your ribs

Fabulous. Not only is the between...ribs a matter of getting through but ribs are “lines.” Some of the book’s most effective poems, at least for the project’s textos concept, are those where the texting infrastructure clearly plays a role and also poetically warrants its presence in the poems. Here’s another one:

Remember the year I
took trains in so many
directions? Now
I am become a train

I can easily imagine that text being writ within and sent from a train! Still, regardless of how the poems came to be made, there are some wonderful effects where its process becomes less relevant:

The lipstick of the
older women almost
separates from them.
One looked at me
through the window
of St. Tropez while
I was trying on shoes

As with “lipstick of the/ older women” becoming that which “separates” away, Riggs is adept at making the visual resonate with suprising, thus pleasing, takes. Here’s another one:

"Because we are weak,"
Ryoko said, and I
understood she meant
humanity. I watched
her snap the chopsticks
apart, and touch
each sushi

Or this wonderful one that I read to my own cats Artemis and Gabriela:

The weight of Inky's
purring may be what
holds me to the earth,
if it is not you
smiling into a room

“What’s the significance?” is a question I found myself asking through much of my read of the book. It’s not a question I normally bring to reading poetry but I did so for 60 TEXTOS because I knew from the start that these are text message poems. Fortunately, Riggs excels in answering this question a number of times.

I also feel that the implied searching-that-precludes-fixed-certainty is a moving source for the book—for example,

Sometimes to be sure
of the room I am in
I sit down to write
to you

—that is beautiful when it blossoms with ascribing a significance on older women’s lipsticks, etc. Because of this, the also present anxiety never grates, and one welcomes the poems’ presences in all of their complexity.

Here, as a once too-frequent conference attendee (not just for AWPs but also in my former financial analyst life) is arguably my favorite poem—which also situates itself into what texting could facilitate:

In Tangier I absent
myself from the conference
to watch the ferries
and the shoreline
soccer. Am I not
enough with the world
that I want to write
it, too?

These poems may be minimalist, but they offer a most robustly satisfying effect. Light but not lite.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in Boston Area Poetry Scene; by Michael Leong in Big Other; by Alan Baker in Litter; and by rob mclennan. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews SILK EGG along with two other books, NOTA BENE EISWEIN and FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 at Asian American Lit Fans.

BEAT THING by DAVID MELTZER

2011-12-21T22:27:00.000-08:00

BILL SCALIA Reviews

Beat Thing by David Meltzer
(La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2004)

David Meltzer’s book reads, on the whole, in epic scope, like the work of a poet simultaneously assessing a movement, his place within it, and the trajectory of the culture that spawned it (Meltzer is one of the original San Francisco beat poets). However, this is not to say that the book is simply a beat retrospective, career assessment, or pop culture collage; Meltzer employs these, and other, methods in order to do the work of an epic: to find out where we came from, how we got to be that way, where we are now, and where we might be heading as a result. The epic poet sits in the crow’s nest of the ship of a culture: he can see inside it, behind it, and ahead of culture, all at the same time.

Beat Thing is divided into three sections: “The Beat Thing Looms Up”; “Beat Thing: Commentary”; and “Primo Po-Mo.” The first section begins mid-sentence and immediately invokes a film reference that serves as a controlling image for the poem:

“like Campbell’s “Who Goes There” Jim Arness tall as Olson inside a rubberglove suit tears the door off an arctic station where Scientists confront alien life & fall apart in the impossibility (the impassability) of the Other, the Thing”

Meltzer sets up, formally and contextually, what is to come in this brief opening. Howard Hawks’ 1951 film The Thing (From Another World) concerns the events described by Meltzer (James Arness plays the “Thing’; the film was based on the story “Who Goes There?” by John Campbell, though it’s possible Meltzer is also referring obliquely to Joseph Campbell). The analogy is apt: one culture encountering a hostile, radically different Other that both resembles it and is capable of destroying it. The nature of this Other is considered in the first section of Meltzer’s book: where it came from, and what qualifies it (authentically, in terms of writing; cynically, in terms of style: the “Beat Gap line of chinos lumberjack flannel shirts Dr Dean beat shades Joe Camel unfiltered beat smokes . . .”).

If the poem were only a catalog of “beat” past and present, we might admire Meltzer’s collage of images. But Meltzer gets to the heart of the poem in section two, “Beat Thing: Commentary”:

“it was the Bomb
Shoah
it was void
spirit crisis disconnect
no subject but blank unrelenting
busted time
no future
suburban expand into past
present nuclear (get it) family. . .”

Like the unknown, atomic Other in Hawks’ film, the Thing at the door is Us. Beat Thing (both character and poem) is a response to the void created by that which Meltzer considers the watershed moment of the American 20th century: the explosion of the atomic bomb. Meltzer realizes the Faustian bargain of Hiroshima: the destruction of many thousands of innocent Japanese lives in an effort to end the destruction of war, a methodology mirrored in the film The Thing by the expedition’s lead scientist, Dr Carrington (played by Robert Cornthwaite), the embodiment of unreasonable reasoning. This paradox—unreasonable reasoning—underscores the entirety of Beat Thing.

The third section, “Primo Po-Mo,” asserts the result of this bargain—the death of Modernity—from its opening line:

“1945 marks Modernity’s death & the birth of the Postmodern—despite whatever theorists, critics, academics, clerks, klutzes, kleagles, grad students, rad relics, cocktail intellectuals, faux aboriginals, white midclass mall rats, hip-hoppers, flip-floppers, say or signify.”

Meltzer doesn’t miss many, if anyone, in this list of cultural commentators. The opening of this third part of the poem is the strongest example of Meltzer’s assertion; if the first two sections of the poem ramble through an assemblage of images from varying perspectives and cut up in various ways, the opening of “Primo Po-Mo” is a full-on blast of invective directed, with no dalliance for the sake of poetic nicety, at the heart of the condition of the postmodern. Meltzer speaks with the authority of one who was there, and has seen; the dominant perspective of the piece is one of informed observation.

In a way, the poem is conditioned by how we read the poet’s “authority.” Certainly Meltzer was there, an original of the SF Beat movement. His handling of style is a masterwork of Kerouacian spontaneous prose, and like much great writing, the style is deceptively simple. We might think of it as mapped spontaneity; the images recur with a web-like geometry. The force of this style is summed up in Meltzer’s closing line: “history is the story of writing.” This is a fine aesthetic statement, fully lived in the achievement of Beat Thing.

*****

Bill Scalia holds a PhD in American Literature from Louisiana State University. His most recent essays include “Toward a Semiotics of Poetry and Film: Meaning-Making and Extra-Linguistic Signification” (in Literature / Film Quarterly) and “Bergman’s Trilogy of Faith and Persona: Faith and Visual Narrative” in the anthology Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). His book Conversing in Figures: Emerson, Poetry, Cinema is forthcoming in 2012. Bill teaches writing and literature at St Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, MD.

HANK by ABRAHAM SMITH

2011-12-21T22:15:00.000-08:00

LOGAN FRY Reviews

Hank by Abraham Smith
(Action Books, Notre Dame, IN, 2010)

Abraham Smith’s second collection, Hank, is a rapid, careening rant. It is the poetic equivalent of an old west bar brawl—of an outlaw ascending the pile of overturned furniture to speak stark tales from his tender heart. Or, cast in a slightly different light, Hank is a corrupt preacher’s manic thoughts—not the preacher pounding out hellfire in his shack of a church, but his Sunday evening reflection on all that harsh oration. I know I’m mixing figures and metaphors here. It is difficult not to when attempting to distill Abraham Smith’s poetry into its driving components. See: there I just wrote “driving” when “central” would have normally sufficed. The components are “driving” because Hank is all about momentum, accumulated by its unpunctuated syntax and the energy of wordplay and vivid images of man in woe and fury and the creatures that contribute to that mood.

As the book is effectively one long poem broken into eleven sections, the collection builds its momentum in its structure as one long, continuous poem that is broken up occasionally by a bit of blank page followed on the next by “($(%^U&” or “!+#*”—yes, these are actual titles of the sections, though it is misleading to think of them as such. They don’t perform the function that titles normally do in a book of poems, which is to encapsulate the page or pages following it under its umbrella, distinguishing the poems as separate individual units (which hold true even if the poems have thematic or linguistic elements that resonate throughout a number of poems in a collection). For Hank, it is much closer to the mark to think of the breaks and cartoon-censored curses as the speaker clearing his throat, taking a swig from his flask, shifting gears into another fluid episode from the continual story he’s telling and, with a swear addressed to no one in particular, diving into it.

In reading Hank, I’m reminded of Frank Stanford’s epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Both poems are streams of unpunctuated, southern-inflected consciousnesses. The main point of division between the interests of each poet is that Hank resists the narrative qualities of Battlefield. Whereas Stanford anchored in the wild imaginings and musings of its young protagonist in the picaresque, Smith’s movements are largely tangential and based on the possibilities of voice and language. Wordplay, puns, and adaptations of clichés, colloquialisms, and even advertising slogans are the forces that steer Smith’s attention into a series of narrower tangents until the original impetus is all but abandoned, so far the poem has digressed from its seed idea in just a page of a handful of lines. The language play never turns solipsistic—it always is present to an idea outside of itself, and idea that follows from the preceding line in some observable way (as either its logical, temporal, or sonic progeny). Yet in following this path, honed in as it is to the individual stones, it becomes just as difficult to know where the path began as it is to see where it leads to, which places the reader in a state of dislocation. Marveling at the features of wordplay and voice as the lines stream past can become tedious if there is no route back into the larger context of the poem.

Perhaps Hank Williams Sr., could provide a route of contextualization of the smaller, moment-by-moment bits to the larger context of the poem. Hank is, after all, set up to be the larger context: his name, monosyllabic and direct, is the title, and his monochromatic blue face adorns the cover, shooting thin laser beams out of blank eyes to the sturdy, yellow block letters of HANK. The cover, designed by Andrew Shuta, is very well-suited to the collection: I saw the cover image online before ever reading a poem by Abraham Smith, and when I took my first peek into Hank, it was quickly apparent that the cover image was able to capture the mood of the poem. However, despite Hank’s prominent presence surrounding the book, he feels only vaguely present in it. I should note that my familiarity with Hank Williams’ biography is slim, so there are probably dozens of references to the man that a Hank Sr. follower would easily recognize. This may partially explain why my understanding of the work resists coherence into a unified whole—but I doubt that it is the only reason. For an example of why, take these lines from rather early in the book:

sea glass is sea glass cuz it’s always going in the sun freckled
hands of the sifters and darners
anybody always gone gets that salt fizzed feel to them
in the hands of the road you are a nameless thing
the invention of the hard road marks the end of the individual
we are sandman pounding energy drinks
and sandy with the house full of heart shape mirrors
teens are teens because they specialize in getting haunted

I wasn’t sure where to begin or where to end the quotation, for in this passage, like most passages throughout, each line feeds into the next while remaining disparate enough to make any spot a point of union or departure. On the note of Hank Williams’ presence in the poem, he certainly could be in these lines, but if this section appeared in a poem that was titled anything else, I don’t believe they would lose any of their potency, nor any of their mystery. In comparing two of the declarative statements— “sea glass is sea glass cuz it’s always going in the sun freckled” and “the invention of the hard road marks the end of the individual”—neither of the statements have a necessary connection to Hank Williams. The sea glass line is in keeping with the tone of the surrounding lines and has its meaning partially embedded in the context, though it indicates a move away from context and into independent statement that is fully realized a few lines later with the “invention of the hard road marks the end of the individual,” a claim that marks a distinct separation from the prominent discourse. It could just as well appear in an academic text as it could in this poem, a trait that is by no means rare for contemporary poetry but which is rare for Hank, with its unruly and energetic colloquialisms and cowboy-speak.

There are spots where Hank’s presence in the book rises above the tangle of associations into a clear and direct mention, as is the case at the beginning of the section entitled “!+#*”:

fred rose and hank williams in a writer’s room
and ain’t nobody ever
has known what
went on behind
that leaden handle door
the great wide door
that whipping walloper
this is already a great fat lie
for the door was a papery thing
it was one of those
after the war doors
the south after the war doors
it was a door that apologized
for itself when you shut it

This is perhaps the best example for demonstrating the interplay between the competing interests in the poem. On the one hand, there is Hank Williams, the muse of the work, its generative figure; on the other is the wild side of Smith that snatches an idea or a linguistic tic and gives it a nice, hard kick, then runs chasing after it to kick and chase again. There is that strain of childlike delight in process throughout Hank, and though in the above lines there are fewer gems than in most other fourteen line chunks of the poem, it demonstrates this emphasis on process and how it leads to the vivid personification of “it was a door that apologized / for itself when you shut it.” I think these terms—muse and process—are essential to Hank. Hank Williams is important in the work as its muse because, as a cursing and freewheeling mythologized figure, he initiates the process of creation like any good muse. Abraham Smith’s testament to Hank Williams is not not a testament to Hank—rather, it is a testament to poetry itself, rightfully honoring the muse that urged it into being, since “every song bone poem was / once a sung sun reading / how and where to howl / or hum along by the light / by the light by the light,” and Hank is sung in the light of Hank’s song even if it’s only playing on a jukebox in the bar that Abraham Smith overhears while hustling past.

*****

Logan Fry lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas. His poetry has most recently appeared in elimae.

BOOKS ON NAVAJO POETRY by ANTHONY K. WEBSTER and CHARLES OLSON edited by JOSHUA HOEYNCK

2011-12-21T22:00:00.000-08:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics by Anthony K. Webster
(University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2009)

and

The Principle of Measure in Composition by Field: Projective Verse II by Charles Olson, Ed. Joshua Hoeynck
(Chax Press, Tucson, AZ, 2010)

FEELINGFUL ICONICITY

The dully academic wording of their titles is not the only thing these
two books have in common; they are both exciting books of poetics based in feeling. Not feelings, simple emotionality or sentiment, what Olson theorized here and practiced elsewhere and what Webster here minutely details about Navajo poetics includes both brain science and social science. Olson’s source, what he works his ideas off of, is Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality; Webster is working in the dissertation mode of including a multitude of references to show his thorough familiarity with the field, but his most central and exciting concept is “feelingful iconicity.” This “turn of phrase,” as he calls it, goes all the way back to one of Olson’s other sources, Edward Sapir’s Language. It is also cited as developed by Webster from three other scholars who write about “the felt attachments that accrue to expressive forms” (9).

That’s the kind of academic language we’re subject to in Webster’s book, but it’s worth the weight. If you carry the heavy load of figuring out or even halfway sussing out what is being said in this lingo, a poet can make good use of this book. It is not just about the Diné world; it is about all poetry or at least as much as allows itself to see how feeling is a basic function of mind. He also “attends to language as action and not language as abstraction” (9). Though Webster uses both of these concepts mostly in relation to performances of poetry, he is also theorizing about a performativity in language itself—the place where audience meets something in language and makes something of it. One chapter deals with “ideophones,” bits of language that “create a sense of ‘sound symbolic involvement’,” borrowing that idea from Janis Nuckolls et al. These “affective-imagistic uses of language” are sometimes onomatopoetic and sometimes otherwise iconic sounds of the poet’s linguistic world like the naming of places in a local way that does not translate for others(52-53). “The ideophony found in contemporary Navajo poetry can certainly be considered both poetic and political,” Webster concludes after looking at how Navajo poets “actively select” this trope. “Since it can be linked back to a variety of verbal genres it gains feelingful iconicity as a sign of continuity” of Navajo-ness, and it is “also aesthetically pleasing and thus delights as well” (79). Ut moveat, ut doceat, ut delectet, was the way the Roman rhetorical theorist Rodolphus Agricola, and Ezra Pound borrowing from him, put it: poetry moves and teaches and delights.

Webster himself does all three things as he details the ways in which contemporary Navajo poets like Laura Tohe, Lucy Tapahonso, Rex Lee Jim, and others make their audiences think about language-ing in poetry. “Jim is quoted as saying, “most of my poems are written to stimulate thoughts and that involves thinking about semantics and etymology.” Webster tells us that “some of the Navajos that I have spoken to about Jim’s poetry have pointed to the semantic ambiguity that he evokes through his poetry as a positive aesthetic achievement” and he asserts that this “resonates with a general Navajo ethos that I have heard, t’áá bee bóholnííh or, in English, “it’s up to him/her to decide” (70). This kind of observation, based in statements by the people involved, is the concrete basis for Webster’s achievement in this book. We get to see that Navajo/Diné poetics is fully complex, not just some re-iteration of a simply recognizable identity. Webster’s study is a serious appreciation in gorgeous detail of that poetics at work in and from those who create it anew in each context they enter. There is an aesthetic of “felt connections that linger” (127) here but not as nostalgia or other sentimentalization. Webster establishes a scholarly but not intellectualized framework for a whole ideology of language that is “not about language alone” but about how language-acts “enact ties to identity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology.” He goes on quoting from fellow scholar Kathryn Woolard to point out how such linguistic ideologies “underpin” the poets’ “linguistic form and use” (82).

That’s where Mr. Olson and his master Whitehead come in. We have a new opportunity with Joshua Hoeynck’s edition of the follow-up work by Olson in the later Fifties on his idea of “projective verse.” Hoeynck’s introduction is a valuable guide to the thoughts here, their origins, and their relation what came before them in the famous letter to Elaine Feinstein and the first essay on this approach to a poetics. With this framework, the book is valuable to poets, literary scholars, Olson readers, and maybe even philosophers because of its generous work with Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality and several of its central ideas like “impetus” and “strain.” Olson picked up those terms from Whitehead’s book and transferred use of them into his poetics. It appears to me that Olson had discovered for himself, the way a writer does, his own impetus for writing as it came out of the masters of his age, like Pound and Williams, and found in Whitehead thinking that confirmed this poetic push. Hoeynck’s intro begins in a balanced discussion of Olson’s placement of his masters at the hinge point of entry into this new thought and practice of his. He then positions Whitehead where Olson found him and focuses through Olson’s use of a couple of key chapters in Process and Reality. “By drafting his essays from these two chapters, Olson transforms the vocabulary of Whitehead’s philosophy of science into a language for metrics and quantitative verse.” This can be seen, as I see it, as an act of finding a vocabulary to fit a practice rather than finding a concept first. Nevertheless, it seems to confirm Olson’s poetics as “engaging with things, environments, and the heterogeneity of the actual world, what Olson names ‘the variety of order in creation’ in the opening proposition of ‘Projective Verse II’” (10).

This engagement and the emphasis in it on feeling are what seems to me to connect with the Navajo poetics discussed in Webster’s book. If we read all of Hoeynck’s edition with its useful endnotes, bringing in the passages Olson used from Process and Reality and the notes he made in his copy of that book along with some of the thoughts on those notes that Hoeynck points out from Robin Blaser’s essay “The Violets,” we can get a deep look into both Olson’s practice of adopting and adapting scientific thought and his practice of writing poems. His voiced line as its own unit of measure makes a lot of sense when you see how he gets help from Whitehead at denying the validity of the kind of counted bits usually used in measuring the world that the philosopher calls “infinitesimals” (11 & 16 & 41-42). Hoeynck characterizes Olson rightly as “a poet who sensitively registers the relations between the evolving properties of the cosmos and the mind” and who evolves his own theory of projective verse “upon discovering Whitehead’s suggestion that ‘There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling; and it is felt’” (11-12 & 21). The trick then, with the help of scientific philosophy, is to make a poetics of feeling that is not a poesy of feelings. The Navajo/Diné do this with a great long tradition behind and around them of perception and concepts that go beyond the personal without leaving it out.

Olson’s way of building such a possibility for himself and others stretches a taut line across a kind of boundary of the personal, with Whitehead’s help. This is where he went beyond Pound and Williams’ efforts in this direction too. The poem itself is a kind of “line” in a larger field by which it is measured. “Projective Verse II” begins with a set of propositions numbered in the form of formal logic. After these, three “magnitudes” are proposed for the poem:

the ‘line’ of the poem (which would previously have been called its ‘ form’—what it is, from beginning to end);

its material of ‘field’, here called ‘impetus’; and

its condition as intrinsic to itself, that by which this poem differs from all other poems which have been or might be written, what can be called its own ‘obstructiveness’
(16)

This set-up is commented upon in Blaser’s essay now collected in his U.C. Press book The Fire (222). Hoeynck uses Blaser to help show how Olson took a thought from Whitehead and transformed it into one about “the poem”:

The inside of a poem, its volume, has a complete boundedness denied to the extensive potentiality external to it. The boundedness applies both to the spatial and temporal aspects of extension. Wherever there is ambiguity as to the contrast of boundedness between inside and outside, there is no proper poem.
(45)

What Olson did here was merely to rewrite in his marginal notes a passage from page 301 of his Process and Reality and replace the word “region” with the word “poem.” Hoeynck and Blaser show us clearly that this demonstrates the kind of awareness that Olson brought to his reading of Process and Reality. He was looking for concepts that applied to a sense of the poem as an extension of some perception that would impetuously pause to show itself. All us O-heads know it: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” from Creeley in the original “Projective Verse” essay of 1951. But here we have more.

The “Letter to Elaine Feinstein” that we have had at least since Auerhahn and then Grove published Human Universe and other Essays in the mid-Sixties was written in 1959, just after these things that Charles Alexander at his Chax Press in Tucson has now published for Hoeynck and us all. We see there that Olson is shooting for “the replacement of the Classical-representational by the primitive-abstract” and he wishes to “mean of course not at all primitive in that stupid use of it as opposed to civilized.” He asserts that he “means it now as ‘primary,’ as how one finds anything, pick it up as one does new—fresh/first.” We have all learned from the original “P.V.” essay that this means “kinetics” and that is “energy transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.” And that Olson’s masterly friend Edward Dahlberg taught him that “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (H.U. Grove 52). But there is more. In the 1959 letter, it is a discussion on the Image and its placement in a “basic trio: of “topos/typos/tropos” that centers the “obstructiveness” of the Whitehead notes of ’58 in a process of Image that Olson names with another Whitehead term as a “vector.” In his final succinct wording of it for Feinstein, we have: “Place…plus one’s own bent plus what one can know.” This is what carries Image beyond “the dead-spot of description” where “Nothing was happening as of the poem itself” because it was too simply “referential to reality” (H.U. Grove 96-98). By supplying the working thoughts of Charles Olson from the winter of 1957-58, Hoeynck and Alexander have provided the means to see the further push of a poetics that sought to have a physical basis, that is—one in physics and in the body. In the next couple of years, Olson would start to call it “proprioception.”

Here in this new old book, we can see the interplay of this science and poetics in passages like the following:

Why metric has had to change to do with quantity, the restoration of attention to the implicated character of the physical in everything--All things are vectors, among them systematic order thrives. This is private truth as well. Feelings are vector, the vector character of them is fundamental.

Olson then quotes the bit from Whitehead on feelings that I put in earlier, and he goes on to quote “All origination is private. But what has been thus originated publicly pervades the world” (21). Hoeynck’s notes show us that he might also have used another passage in which he did some underlining:

Thus the primitive experience is emotional feeling, felt in its relevance to a world beyond. … Also feeling, and reference to an exterior world, pass into appetition, which is the feeling of determinate relevance to a world about to be. In the phraseology of physics, this primitive experience is ‘vector feeling,’ that is to say, feeling from a beyond which is determinate and pointing to a beyond which is to be determined” (43).

This proprioceptive basis is now confirmed by brain science like that of Antonio Damasio. Olson put it directly in what Hoeynck presents as the “Notes on Poetics (toward Projective Verse II)”: Physical memory and causation spring from the same root: they are both physical perception.” And the next sentence, beginning the next paragraph asserts that a “poem has so many things to which it must do equal justice if it is to establish its own bounds (be inclusive)” (34).

I will leave the subsequent list of those elements, where the “intent here is to say it all,” for your reading of this slim but widely useful volume. It is provocative, instructive, deepening, and dang near if not wholly essential for us as we struggle our way between a here & now where we have something to say and we have to say something, and a beyond where the unbounded is both what informs this world and what serves it with potential content as it takes form coming into our time. That’s what this book does too, with “feelingful iconicity.”

*****

T.C. Marshall is busy occupying his life, seriously supporting movement actions on the Cabrillo College campus where he teaches and in the S.F. and Monterey Bay areas where he lives. He has been writing and publishing poetry since first grade, literary criticism since his college days in the U.S. and Canada, and nature writing here and there. His latest publications include online essays and reviews as well as poems online and on paper in magazines. His next project is a set of poems incorporating photos to be published on a blog, all of which were originally posted on FaceBook. They are called Post Language.

TEENY TINY #13, Ed. AMANDA LAUGHTLAND

2011-12-21T21:45:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

TEENY TINY #13 poetry zine, Edited by Amanda Laughtland
(Teeny Tiny Publications, Edmonds, WA, 2011)

I've looked carefully at visual art for umpteen years. One of the things I take away from that experience is the deceptive power of small scale works. At times, when I looked at a small painting and felt it to be a powerful one, I knew that it could be hung on a gigantic wall and it wouldn't be overpowered by said wall's expanse. It holds up the wall, as the saying goes.

On the other hand, of course, if a tiny painting wasn't effective, it would hang just like a smudge against such a gigantic backdrop.

I thought of the immensity of power possible from a small scale when I read through Teeny Tiny Issue #13, a zine made from a single piece of paper folded up to present six poems. Here's an image of it against my palm to give you an idea of its physical scale:

Yet the sum of these "small" poems -- by Laura-Marie Taylor, Eric Dickey, Heather Nagami, Amanda Laughtland, Mimi Allin and Sandra Simonds -- is a hugely enchanting presence. When you read each poem, they transport you to bigger worlds of the imagination such that you forget (and deem irrelevant) how they were presented first to you on a small fold of paper. For Taylor's and Dickey's contributions, their poems' impact is enhanced by ending lines that don't conclude so much as encourage the reader to continue the "story" on their own. Here are their endings:

The time I exposed
my left breast accidentally.
--from "stupid things I've done" by Laura-Marie Taylor

He was sleeping late and was easily agitated in the morning. Something had a hold on him.
--from "In the Clutch of the Octopus"

The endings aren't "open-ended" in the sense that the term is used for other poems that invite multiple interpretations/reactions. There actually are straight-forward narratives that led to these endings: in both, the narratives can be gleaned from their titles, and Taylor's is actually a list-poem. But they end beautifully by inviting other preoccupations for those readers so inclined to, ahem, occupy the poems.

I enjoyed all the poems but have to say I adored the last poem by Sandra Simonds which I replicate below:

The Sea

Everyone loves the sea
because the sea loves no one.
She pulls in everything: the nursery, the moon,
the glass of milk
the moonlight shines through on tge kitchen counter.

If I had to compare the sea to something
I'd compare her
to the sea.

It's such a fitting way to end a tiny but powerful zine. Succinct, a hint of a growl lurking within the tender references, and finally wisdom. What a huge punch from such a ... deceptively tiny thing holding up the world.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in Boston Area Poetry Scene; by Michael Leong in Big Other; by Alan Baker in Litter; and by rob mclennan. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews SILK EGG along with two other books, NOTA BENE EISWEIN and FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 at Asian American Lit Fans.

ANTIPHONIES: ESSAYS ON WOMEN'S EXPERIMENTAL POETRIES IN CANADA, Ed. NATE DORWARD

2011-12-21T21:30:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

ANTIPHONIES: ESSAYS ON WOMEN'S EXPERIMENTAL POETRIES IN CANADA, Ed. Nate Dorward
(The Gig, Ontario, 2008)

The subtitle of this book supplies a can of worms to open. Quickly shifting our metaphor, inside the can one finds a Venn diagram. One must first understand the diagram’s three circles ranged within a larger one called Poetry before inspecting where the circles intersect. In other words, what is women’s poetry? Experimental poetry? Canadian poetry? To answer those questions requires a serious look at the boundaries of each Venn circle. Can of worms, as I said.

But not without interest. Each of those circles stands—to the degree that circles stand—as subset of Poetry. Definitions of Poetry are fluid enough, but then to define these subsets as well: it’s a large, cramping job.

I guess there would be no can of worms except for the existence of an almost explicit fourth circle, Scholarly Critique. Scholarly Critique skews the diagram’s balance. It draws each circle into Academia’s private discussion gravity where clique becomes claque.

I do not want to refer to Academia as a class. Such a simplification offers no help. I mean here that Academic concerns prevail a little too much for us ordinary citizens. Gentle Reader simply may not be so focused. The three initial circles that I presented interest me (as a reader and writer), but less so as refracted thru the Academic prism. Perhaps citing some chapter and verse might help.

The first essay, by Edward Byrne, looks at the career of Susan Clark, and of the Kootenay School of Writing. Clark represents perhaps the central figure in this book, for her writing and for her editorship of Raddle Moon. I will admit my ignorance of her work, but that’s why a reader would come to a book like this.

Byrne’s essay teased my ignorance because it assumed that I know more than I do about the subject. Which makes the Canada of the subtitle more a boundary than some sort of cultural conviction (which is how I take the necessity of specifying Canada in the title). A word of caution here, Byrne uses terms like Pongean and Levinasian. Names becoming keywords like that suggest to me a lazy shorthand that harbours exclusion. Just saying that I’m wary of such usage.

Anyway, referring to a work by Susan Clark, Byrne performs this act of momentum:

[Clark’s] encyclopedia is at once a dream—on the cusp of modernity—of containment, of an interwoven, bound whole, a totality, which reaches its apex in Hegel, and an utter impossibility, the fulfillment of which would embrace infinity. This is what the “structure” of Clark’s work tells us. These are “apparatuses of impossibility”.

Makes you want to take a deep breath just to read that. No good reason exists for cramming so much into sentences, even if the sentences parse. The Hegel reference just dangles there, free of further explication. I’m ready to read Clark’s work, but I won’t be taking Byrne’s path to it.

A selection from Clark’s Bad Infinity follows, helpfully providing some grounding for ignorant me. Along with poetry, the book includes interviews, a talk, an exchange, and epistolary collaborations. To give you some idea of the area of survey. I’m fine with that.

Peter O’Leary’s essay on Lissa Wolsak dares a religious reading of her work. It is a close reading, and valuable therefore. Sentences like the following seem so lifeless, however, as to belie that valuable intent:

The iconic beyondsense [Lissa Wolsak’s] poetry emerges from is perhaps best thought of as made up of quantum particles, surrounded by the qualia of perceptions that makes a nimbus around the actual.

Oh, I don’t know. The word quantum nowadays lacks rigour, as does relying on neologism for weight-bearing import. I picture professors muttering in dusty classrooms. You are just not helping, Peter.

Briefly, some of the other offerings:

• Edward Byrne’s survey of Raddle Moon’s run of issues gives a useful and of course partial sense of the Canadian scene in the 80s and 90s.
• Collaborations between Erin Mouré and Caroline Bergvall and between Mouré and Chris Daniel both show an odd impedence of self-consciousness. I mean flowery, personal statements that seem to overwhelm the collaborative intent. Both pieces were almost smarmy.
• a rawlings offers a sort of diary of collaborative performances in which she participated. She calls it “tracking an obsession”, and it shows the resolved clarity of such focus.
• Tom Beckett interviews Lissa Wolsak and Stephen Cain interviews Karen Mac Cormack, both interviews showing clear thinking.
• Peter Larkin does a study of Lisa Robertson’s work, including the fabulously titled Debbie: An Epic.

And plenty other pieces worth reading. Editor Dorward sensibly admits that this or any anthology cannot be said to cover the ground adequately. He writes that he toyed with adding further qualifications in the subtitle but that that became unwieldy. You bet! As it is, the subtitle marks some points on the map, rather than boils down the mass to some sensible concentration.

I think the anthology makes good and valuable reading, but not for satisfying its subtitled aims. It is no survey, and does not really address the Venn circles with proper expanse. It shows enough landmarks to invite people to go explore. The academic bent is forbidding sometimes, however. Enthusiasm seems bound by MLA citation. Let’s let the bird out of its cage.

The provenance of these pieces remains unclear. Presumably some if not all were published in the journal version of The Gig. Dorward mentions rejecting one piece, so maybe he put out a call, as well.

I glean from this book—perhaps I err—two substantial poetry capitals in Canada, Toronto and Vancouver, tho I gather Dorward himself hails from Halifax. I infer tension between these capitals but that’s a guess. Such Canadian issues are left to allusion if noted at all. The book pretty much misses the question of how Canadian poetry distinguishes itself as Canadian, different from the poetry from other English-speaking lands. Similarly, the idea of women’s poetry really bows to the specifics of individual writers. Both questions could easily turn into muggins, especially if dealt with from the cloisters, but the intent bannered on the cover drives expectations of fulfillment.

I would recommend this book as a taste of what’s out there, but don’t file it under Women’s Poetry, Canadian Poetry, or Experimental Poetry. Antiphonies is not definitive, which is perhaps just as well.

*****

Allen Bramhall is the author of DAYS POEM (Meritage Press), among other things...

VACANT LOT by OLIVER ROHE

2011-12-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

GABRIEL LOVATT Reviews

Vacant Lot by Oliver Rohe, translated from the French by Laird Hunt
(Counterpath Press, Denver, Colorado, 2011)

In Oliver Rohe’s Vacant Lot the violence that accompanies the juncture between destruction and reconstruction is augmented by a central quotient of speed, wherein an ever-changing landscape is made ever more disorienting and vague by the rate at which change takes place. The city is a site that shifts rapidly in a fevered and “complete recasting,” but these transformations are neither exclusively technological nor architectonic. Instead, the city changes at the pace of rapidly duplicating cells that yield abnormal growths, a “permanent disaster of reconstruction,” where “[n]ew buildings multiply themselves on every street corner like furious metastases it’s hard to believe.” As the unnamed narrator witnesses the unidentified post-war city being rebuilt from an apartment overlooking the city, he is afflicted by partial memories that testify to an intensely chaotic experience of trauma and loss that accompanies not the war itself, but rather its end. His visions follow the city’s course of hideous biological transformation: “Graceful shadows move like ink stains before my eyes. Undulating they unfold themselves across the length of the wall and, little by little, infest the illuminated surface. In the center of the canvas I can see embryonic forms a horrible swarm of unfinished figures.”

The figure at the center of the book ruminates not on the loss that coincides with war, but the eradication of remnants, both physical and immaterial, entailed by the workings of reconstruction. He confesses that he “can’t help missing all those years when were kings. There were several of us who survived—who blossomed even—in a sick world.” Rohe, in an interview with Hunt included at the end of the book, remarks that after writing his first novel (Défaut d’origine, 2003), which dealt with the victims of war, he wanted to consider the “point of view of those who benefited from the war (the war lords)—those who had glory, power, money.” The interview clarifies the terms of the main character’s existence according to the author, but I would rather the work had been left to stand alone to menacingly rattle without this exact context. For it is the very ambiguity of the self at the center of Vacant Lot’s diffuse and savage monologue that allows the narrator to inhabit, rather than survey, the state of ruin. As he tracks the violence that pervades both the war and its aftermath through impressions, memories, and experiences, the individual becomes a political and cultural touchstone for not only the theoretical or linguistic implications that rise up out of destruction, but the embodied self that inhabits physical and social sites (cities, battlefields, houses; class systems, power structures, war).

Rohe figures the narrator’s losses as manifold, inclusive of the loss of memory, the eradication of a value system based on survival and prosperity in the midst of horror, the loss of comrades, and even the loss of the apartment as it becomes overtaken by vegetation and fetid decay. This sense of collapse is abetted by the chronological disorder that rules the book, as if the connection to workaday order has been abolished in a manner that affects the very material of memory and re-collection. Here ruin functions not just as a material site of rubble and dilapidation, but as an active verb that portends action and individual agency. These are unsympathetic and systematic processes. Throughout the text, drawings by Alexis Gallissaires provide illustrations that only heighten the depiction of an unstable world in which suffering is, perhaps, the only constant. Gallissaires figures have the boldly twisted, anxious lines of Egon Schiele’s most skittishly expressive work, but drained of any color or erotic import. The pull between visual excess and austerity echoes the extreme stakes of Rohe’s prose, which seems intent on maximizing the tension between erasure and impression, absence and presence.

Laird Hunt’s unsparing translation renders the omnipresent first person of the narrative as compulsive tic that constantly attempts to reassert (though futilely) the existence of a stable self in a world comprised of frenetic, violent revolutions. The assertion of one’s subjectivity within destructive terrain is, here, almost an irrational act, as if any attempt to avoid erasure through the constant declaration of “I” proves absurd: “My memory disperses itself and betrays me and I have the impression the fear of having lived only the pastiches of lives. But I hold on to them they are all I have left.”

The line of thinking that moves through Vacant Lot also works through mutation rather than accretion. The sentences appear to follow the syntactical constructions and grammatical signs that convey meaning, but deviation quickly takes over: the thought processes here are neither progressive nor sequential, and the form obliges this sense of being over-stuffed and suffused with sensation by vacating the language of conjunction and transition, preferring abruption. In a narrative catalogue that underpins the length of the short book, the narrator compiles the detritus of war that interferes with the city’s attempt to renovate—from wailing mothers to elderly people who no longer speak, the evidence of ever present suffering (and the inability to testify to it) is made manifest in forms of silence. Vacant Lot reconfigures the literature of witness and ruin as testimonial that devastation is a continual process in which even reconstruction begins with destruction.

*****

Gabriel Lovatt writes, researches, and teaches in Athens at the University of Georgia, where she is finishing her dissertation.

PUNISH HONEY by KAREN LEONA ANDERSON

2011-12-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

ERIC WAYNE DICKEY Reviews

Punish honey by Karen Leona Anderson
(Carolina Wren Press, Durham, NC, 2009)

I was worried. Worried after the first section of poems. Worried I was going to have to write a negative review. How could you do this to me, Carolina Press? How could you, Karen Leona Anderson?

An evil specter is haunting us. A terrible legacy has been handed down to contemporary American poetics. We have to fight from the start. Negative capability is the norm. Objective correlativism relegates us to an intellectual and spiritual poverty. Even inscape enslaves. Punish honey seems to be following the lead into negativism.

Good thing I was wrong. Punish honey takes a beautiful leap, starting from that all-too-familiar bank. Once over the abyss, it doesn’t look back. Anderson sticks a ten point landing better than Mary Lou Retton, delivering us to a new starting point rooted in optimism.

The book is divided into three sections: Tulips, Bees, The Animal Parliament. Each section contains about a dozen poems. A natural progression leads the reader into an exploration of the external environment in Tulips and of the internal self in Bees. The third section takes an expansive approach. Punish honey lures us with its refreshing language and takes us on a beautiful and thoughtful journey.

The first section begins with so much self-doubt, one cannot help but feel sorry for the subject and pity for the author. Does it really have to begin this way, I thought to myself. The poem "Gordon Cooper" contains lines: "and I, full of every grey the world could provide," and "I was a fathead full of pain," and "In a van the world departs." The book sets up the self as an obstacle and I couldn’t help but wonder if this path towards negativism is where Anderson wants us to go.

While the poet does establish a wonderful command of language, I question her economy with it. She uses language uniquely yet she throws around extra, un-needed words. For example, in the same poem, “Gordon Cooper,” she writes, "moved thing by thing to the radio station and sang or sing / all the songs like 'Yes I am the One Who is Sobbing’ / I could think of." The "thing by thing" and the "sang… sing… song" seem cute. The reader has to assume such execution is purposeful, so I give Anderson the benefit of the doubt. She confuses and teases with her word choices and style. I was reluctant, but somehow I knew the answer would be in the book. So I put my trust in Anderson. I read on and dove into the hive.

The second section, "Bees," had me questioning my misgivings: It has a cohesion, not just thematically, but in the language itself. The dine-and-dash language seems to stick around longer and even pay the bill. "Bees" focuses on specifics, beginning with the first poem which leaves wondering what life would be like with “nothing left with to sting.” The individual poem titles in this section are named after things that might be of concern for bees, such as "Requeen," "Scopa," and "Robber Bee." The section is a metaphor for how social structures might look from a bee’s perspective, as in the veracious meat-eating bees in her poem, “Horseflesh” leaving bones clean “in six days cold.”

The poem "Cuckoo" is a turning poem for me. It is an apology for one's shortcomings, whether bird, bee or human. It tells us we all may be a little cuckoo, whether for harboring self-doubt about appearance, or for going on a crazy date despite our own reluctance. We tap into our cuckoo-ness. She writes,

I dressed to kill
and killed so that the rest of us didn’t have to,
says the glitterfed and better date,
excellent in nest and empty-handed,
opening the sporty door of some convertible.
Come on, get in, it’s for the good of everyone.

Despite my doubts, I stepped into the car and shut the door, saying, “Let’s go!" before my ass even hit the seat.

Section three, “The Animal Parliament” really delivers. It begins with the triptych “Fur Coats,” the second of which, “Blue Fur Collar Coat,” has me feeling that getting out of the negative, instead of operating in it, is her impulse. While it contains words that invoke a void and a negative impulse, such as “cavity,” “we cannot say with truth,” and “old,” “clumped,” and “dumb,” it offers a chance to elude our own negative potential with the final few lines:

Or I’ve got it: I bet you slipped the noose, and
this is just your faux hair, the way my eyes are rimmed
with bone and therefore look only ahead:
I’m sorry. The cold tore down. I needed to get
in front of me, and I needed a way to go.

Here, Anderson shakes loose the shackles; whether it’s the shackles of mourning, loss of life, or even my own assumption of the preoccupation of negativism in American poetry.

The final section brings the collection into sharp focus. The poem, “Gas Pump,” is full of Anderson’s signature energetic language; it tips its hat to the purveyors of doubt, and offers us an entrance onto the promenade of growth. It starts with words such as, “slunk,” and “half-paid.” And from this poem, mired in oil and spills, we get this in the final couplet:

It is a value: down at the tomato stand:
hurt and ugly, but three for free.

Why so glum? Bounty and kindness abound.

Karen Leona Anderson weaves an internal story of loss and recovery that also serves as a framework for a larger discussion about modern poetics. Throughout Punish honey, Anderson forced me to crack open the shell of my own skepticism. I acquiesced to her style, feeling for the message.

As I said earlier, it was difficult for me to locate myself in the hullabaloo of language tossed around in this book. I was reading myself into her text, I thought, misreading the poems with my own baggage. Anderson taught me to trust the text. I did, and it paid off in sweet, delectable honey: the title itself forces us to question why we are punishing ourselves.

Punish honey makes us question the impact poetry has on the human psyche. It forces us to question how we use words. Are we going to use them to wound, talk about our shortcomings, and further subjugate ourselves to the machine, continuing the tradition of Eliot, Hopkins, Keats and the modernists? Or are we going to use our words to celebrate our full human (spiritual) potential, carrying forward the torch of Blake, Crane and Ashbery? Are we going to dwell in sorrow and absence or sing praise through the cornucopia of human experience? What are we going to do?

*****

Eric Wayne Dickey's poetry and translations have appeared in Rhino, International Poetry Review, and West Wind Review. Online, his poems can be found at www.talkingwriting.com, www.blazevox.org, www.4and20poetry.com, www.toegoodpoetry.com, and www.argotistonline.co.uk. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

INSIDE THE MONEY MACHINE by MINNIE BRUCE PRATT

2011-12-21T19:15:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Inside the Money Machine by Minnie Bruce Pratt
(Carolina Wren Press, Durham, NC, 2011)

It doesn't take the Great Recession to make Minnie Bruce Pratt's Inside the Money Machine a necessary read. But economic times do heighten the necessity of being reminded of the human lives behind unemployment and other economic statistics. Inside the Money Machine presents versified stories of, to cite the press release, "those who work for a living, out of the house or at home, from the laundromat to the classroom, from blue-collar construction sites to white-collar desk jobs...the people who survive and resist inside 'the money machine' of 21st-century capitalism." For example, from "Picketing the Bargain Store":

They say: We do not lack imagination. They watch
the boss try to harness them with word, threat, and trick.
They know he is out front getting photographed under
the red-white-and-blue Grand Opening banner, there
to remind shoppers of a national holiday, a victor's war.
They know we are inside fourteen hours a day, seven
days a week, once three days straight, no break,
one pizza a day to eat. Inside, they bend, grasp, lift
up onto the shelves the stuff for someone else's house,
bottles of bleach, welcome mats, thin pastel towels,
the green-and-gold peacock porcelain clocks,
each crowned head arched back to look at how well
it carries time in its belly. They make $2.74 an hour,
no benefits, no overtime. At night they sleep on the floor
of someone else's 99 Cent Dream Bargain Store.
They are here today to say: !Basta! Not us, not any more.

The book reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich's two books on the working class, Nickel and Dimed and Bait & Switched. One depressing effect I gleaned from this book was how expensive for many would be the cost of a typical poetry book. $15, $16...? These are real monies to many of the people whose stories/personas are offered. Anyway, it's appropriate to raise Ehrenreich's analyses because a comparison reveals the validity of Inside the Money Machine--that is, if one wanted to present a discourse on a topic, an actual study based on good journalism often would be a more effective form than poems. But it is Pratt's poetic mastery--specifically lyricism--that makes Inside the Money Machine warrant its pages. For example, here's one poem in its entirety:

Opening the Mail

She used to work down in the copy center, and,
don't get her wrong, she liked it, she did. The big
xerox engines purred, paper rolled out like money
and shot into slots like a casino payoff. But this job,
there's something new every day, the letters come in,
hundreds, thousands, from all over the place, and she
gets to open every one. The message in a bottle, the note
when she walked out the door, the handkerchief dropped
behind him during the game at recess. She slices each
open with her knife, logs it and routes it to the other girls.

But her dream is to get a camper and follow the NASCAR
races. Six days travel and on Sunday stand inside the final
circuit of sound, inside that belly. It's not the same as on TV
where it seems like they are just going round and round. Not
the same at all, she says. Every moment counts, and the air
smells like burning oil. Any minute it could burst into flames.

The leap between the first two stanzas' narratives bespeaking the persona's secret desire of following NASCAR races (a passion I happen to witness locally every year when trailers converge from all over the country onto an open field across a car racing stadium) as well as the energetic ending "Every moment counts, and the air / smells like burning oil. Any minute it could burst into flames." is a creation possible specifically through poetry. It's a transformation also made manifested in the following resonant poem:

A Temporary Job

Leaving again. If I didn't care, I wouldn't be
grieving. the particulars of place lodged in me,
like this room I lived in for eleven days,
how I learned the way the sun laid its palm
over the side window in the morning, heavy
light, how I'll never be held in that hand again.

The structure of the book also evoked a French movie I saw last century, entitled I think "The Secret Lives of Angels," which presented the doomed life of a factory worker who fell in love with a rich young man who'd come to toss her aside. She was friends with another girl who was a poor artist also working at the factory to make money. By "structure," I mean that Pratt occasionally inserted references to poem-making, reminding how the artistic practice might well be the most impoverished work path, from a purely financial standpoint. One difference between the betrayed lover in the movie who'd come to commit suicide and her friend was that her friend had her art--does this suffice in a world where rent and food requires a mad scramble? In a poem like the following, Pratt wisely avoids saying art is a guaranteed redemption and, instead, that Poetry just is--

Writing Poetry in a Rented Kitchen

Late at night silence settles down around me,
then comes the big tick of the electric clock,
then a whispered click like a syncopated
second hand, insistent phrase that stops,
starts, repeats again, finger tap I follow,
broken thread of sound, to the window.

A thumb-sized green lace-winged creature
staggers back and forth on the wire mesh,
marching with its flick and tiny flam of noise,
what I'll hear as I lie down in my strange bed,
a little bic pen in a nervous hand clicking
and writing down words I'll read in my sleep.

--even though the persona obviously feels some benefit from making poems.

While the frequent bleakness throughout many poems is logical, it's still sad that there aren't much occasions of redemption or burden-lightening, but maybe that just makes this a more accurate portrait, more authentic. In this sense, the book did not fail by the standards of its epigraph:

"The only danger is not going far enough"
--Muriel Rukeyser

Thus, the logic of the last poem:

If We Jump Up

Let new words leap out of our mouths.
Let our hands be astonished at what we have made, and glad.
Let us follow ourselves into a present not ruled by the past.
If we jump up now, our far will be near.

That's all that can be said. The possibly only alternative Happy Ending to the book that's based on capitalism is that one worked hard and became a multimillionaire. It can happen, sure, but the field is not -- has never been -- level: insider trading, anyone? legacy acceptances, anyone, for those applying to great schools? social, political, cultural, racial etc biases, anyone? But the poem does exhort, "jump up"! People should speak up, protest, act and not simply take abuse.

Ultimately, In the Money Machine is masterful for not delivering its politics through the elevated rant, logical though rants may surface. When Pratt says the following in "The Street of Broken Dreams", it comes off most effectively as a statement of fact:

We demand. Not rabble and rabid, not shadow, not terror,
the neighbors stand and say: The world is ours, ours, ours.

This insistence on dignity and respect is delivered almost matter-of-factly (even if, paradoxically, lyrically) and, in such non-hyped insistence, most powerfully. Pratt deserves kudos for the deftness with which she allows for nuances to communicate quite clearly.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in Boston Area Poetry Scene; by Michael Leong in Big Other; by Alan Baker in Litter; and by rob mclennan. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews SILK EGG along with two other books, NOTA BENE EISWEIN and FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 at Asian American Lit Fans.

SLY MONGOOSE by KEN BOLTON

2011-12-21T17:33:00.000-08:00

PAM BROWN Reviews

Sly Mongoose by Ken Bolton
(Puncher & Wattmann, Sydney, 2011)

In the autumn issue of Overland magazine Justin Clemens described what he called "that experimental line of Australian verse whose peak experience remains Ern Malley," as being "…continued today by poets such as Pam Brown and Ken Bolton, and which is almost inevitably much less popular due to its often-caustic undoings of sense." And here we are again. I would say 'yes, yes, I know my poetry is less popular!' but Ken would say 'I always make sense, don't I? Don't I !?'

Ken Bolton has written far too many books. It's an embarrassment of riches.

Ken can often be seen walking down a city street in Adelaide, frowning slightly, (possibly from the glare of a bright sunny day, possibly with the frightful weight of thought) whistling fragments of tunes to himself, heading from his job at the Experimental Art Foundation to a favourite, or rather, familiar, yet never cool nor trendy, café for lunch. There he might jot down some notes while waiting for his plate of mezes. Those notes, in spidery indecipherable-to-anyone-else handwriting, will end up as poems, often long, some quite long, discursive critical-cultural ramblings filled with diverse references, jokes, spacy moments and something like x-rayed or cat- scanned thinking—thoughts monitored as they bounce and shuffle in a poetry brain. In poems Ken's thoughts move and turn quite quickly.

The longer poems often extrapolate off into what he's reading, or has read, films he has seen, art he has looked at in real life and in books, music he knows, mostly jazz, blues and r & b., often mentioning poets that he admires or dislikes—not always as a signal to the reader to look them up but also as signifiers of the times and as possible influences. They're poems that critique or examine cultural puzzles, probably seek solutions and sometimes abandon the pursuit, to return to it in another poem maybe even a year or so later - questions that continually pester and are chipped at but probably never answered. That's a philosophical process, I suppose. There are poems for movie directors, poems written on visits to friends' flats that have John Forbes in the shadows. And there are lots of jokes.

Ken lets his poems follow their own direction, many roaming across the pages as a kind of streamed collage takes shape, making them into exceptional visual works amply surrounded by white space. Yet they are very closely attended, often, as I've said, over long periods of time. And here is where they eventually land—in print in a book like Sly Mongoose.

What is a Mongoose? It's a smallish, long-bodied, furry, carnivorous creature with sharp front fangs. Why is it Sly? I don't know. But the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker did because it's actually the title of one of the smooth yet peppy tunes he played.

Ken's poetry collections often seem conceptually coherent overall. And some of his books are very definitely coherent—like the long narrative poem The Circus published last year—a sequence of ingenious tales about a traditional circus, including a reflective elephant—and his writings on art in Adelaide called Art Writings.

But Sly Mongoose seems a little different—the poems are mixed in style and topic, and although they have a familiar Ken-Bolton-Tone they meander all over the oeuvre, scrambled oeuvre being a breakfast favourite, and scrambled oeuvre could well 'mirror', nay, 'resemble' Doctor Bolton's assemblage of poems in this case. (Yes, I say 'Doc' Bolton because he was once awarded a Doctorate for an incredibly erudite thesis written as a poem called The Duck at the Top of the Stairs, or How I Remember Writing Some of My Books – Why, Even*).

Some of the poems here were begun twenty or so years ago. Possibly not in the lunch café but at home, probably at a kitchen table—and maybe put away into a folder, or a drawer for a while, then later, lines will be shifted a little, added to or erased, re-punctuated (punctuation is one of Ken's specialties), to eventually emerge slightly rewritten, refreshed and ready—

Like the opening poem, '2.30'--it's dedicated to Alan Wearne and begins

Reading in the dust jacket I see James Schuyler
is 67

Alan Wearne's poetry is worlds away from James Schuyler's so any informed reader is immediately taken aback—what? no connection!?

Taken aback and alert—ready to read on …

It's two in the morning by the way, not two in the afternoon. Ken is drinking a retsina, writing a poem contemplating ageing, his mother, his father, death. He wonders what star sign his mother has and goes to find a women's magazine somewhere in the house to see what sign January is.

Just this small act in a poem, getting up from the table to find the horoscope page in an everyday popular magazine, told clearly and incorporated into the process of making a poem, is one of the elements that distinguishes Ken's poetry from most other Australian poetry. Another is a poem written from the viewpoint of a beaver swimming downstream articulating his odd encounters—birds, a student cyclist—thinking about how his mind races as he swims faster, like a poet's mind, the beaver thinks.

Ken often writes poems as letters, often long poems to friends like Akira Tamura, Mary & Millie Christie, Laurie Duggan, his partner Cath's son, Gabe.

In a note at the back of the book Ken tells us 'Akira Tamura is known in the Adelaide art world as Akira Akira, a sarcasm halving the number of repetitions he must make in giving his name.'

'Letter to Akira Back in Japan' examines and compares differences, looking at or through cultural stereotypes. It's an empathetic poem that uses a kind of 'cheer up' method to support a friend in doubt.

The poem begins by quoting an email from Akira who has returned from Australia to Japan—

The distance between
                                                      me & Japan
                                                      is like that between
                                                      a frog — & a cell
                                                      telephone”

In part Ken responds—

Your 'frog-&-
phone' image:

the 'disconnect'
between you & Japan.
                                                                      Funny.

I wonder where could I live—
apart from here?

Maybe Ireland (?)

                              —but the weather,
                                                      Jesus.

                                                                      Hey,

have you started swearing in Australian?

No, not 'Fuck', that’s universal —

You should try Jesus!

                              #

                                                          I remember a friend of mine

instructing an Englishman
on the best way to enter a railway carriage,
here,
travelling interstate:
you walk in,
glare about you
hurl your bag
in the corner of your
seat, shout Fucking
government!
                              sit down

                                                      glowering

And I'd bet that Akira laughed reading this. But the poem goes on to give advice, options to consider, and reminds Akira of aspects of Australia that he might not miss, as well as referring to the Experimental Art Foundation, a place he knew well.

#

If you went back permanently
would you be part of the debate there

  that everyone/no-one is having?

                                                      (No one is invited
                                                      to the debate here,

                              except
                              Greg Sheridan
                              Janet Albrechtson.)

                                                      the minions of Murdoch

                                                      Rupert’s minions

                              #

Speaking of News Ltd—
There is none:

no news:

I've mostly been doing
bookshop stuff & proofing EAF articles,

& began (finally,
on Saturday, a week after I thought I'd be on to it)
the small essay for Sarah's show
at the 'Eaf'.

                              Which, as you
                              know—
                              Rhymes with “leaf”—

I finish it tomorrow.

My main worry
(the 'news' continued),

was another essay —
written on the basis

of a studio visit
& J-pegs.

Anyway, I struggled with it for ten days —

after writing a bad,
lumpy beginning.

Then, when I'd left it as late as possible,
I got started —

& had a horrible four or five days on it …
And sent it to them lumpy

— but with an invoice!

'Letter to Akira' is a twenty page poem with sections broken up by hash symbols. Although Ken says that there's 'no news', there is, as he talks about artists and friends both he and Akira know, and their exhibitions and reactions to events at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas—Peter McKay, Scott Redford, Fiona Hall (Fifi), Melentie, Sarah CrowEst, Miss Mandy and so on.

I won't talk too much more about 'Letter to Akira' but this part, repeating the extract from Akira's email, is definitely a Ken-Bolton-moment—

The gap between you and most of
Japan
       resembles that between frog & mobile phone!

                                      I remember feeling the same
about me & Hornsby (!)

                  (& disapproving of myself as I did).

                         Adults wandering past, tubbily,

in shapeless, gelati-coloured
clothes, fit for children

                                      (I was twenty,
                         had read a lot of novels.

                         I didn't want to be a snob —
                         but 'Australian suburban life'

                  looked awful.)

Another twenty page poem is 'Art History'—beginning 'Art history you box on regardless'. It's a kind of refutation of looking at, thinking and reading about art and it is replete with art references.

Ah, Art History, you are
multifarious,

like overcoats
on a hall stand at a party

resembling each other, but different—

& a taxi calls—but which is
yours? the taxi is
but which art history, which art-historical coat?

The poem continues—choosing a coat—perhaps 'a raffish & worn & scoundrelly one' like Gully Jimpson's—Joyce Cary's fictional artist, or 'Max Jacob (as played by Roy Rene)' and we are taken on an enriching, winding trawl through Ken's particular kind of art criticism.

Art History, you are like a museum
in the mind,

And Art Criticism … (the subject
of another poem), you too I love!

The twenty-two page 'Brisbane Letter to Gabe', besides encompassing many other things, fills Gabe in on the scribbly abstract artist Cy Twombly—for Ken, 'a troubling anomalous figure'. And later, after talking about Matisse and Picasso, Ken tells Gabe about Sydney's Michael Fitzjames' aerial paintings of cities.

A few decades ago David Malouf wrote that Ken's poetry (then) "amply repays the debt to O'Hara and through him to Apollinaire" and now, in a poem called 'Apollinaire' Ken reflects on this early remark of David Malouf's, by meeting Guillaume Apollinaire. He invites Apollinaire for a drink to pay the debts owed to him by Ken's friends—John Forbes and myself. They go to some bars, the first one 'Zorba's', where they drink retsina. Ken asks Apollinaire if Alan Wearne has been to visit his tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery and Apollinaire tells him Alan

came to see the tomb of Van Morrison, "Jim," I correct him, quietly

and that Alan owes him nothing.

Ken himself has asked—"Is yesterday the subject of these poems? Not entirely. There’s a Guide to the bars of Europe! That looks handy."

This long poem is a guide to bars for a friend who's taking a trip to Europe called 'Kirkman's Guide to the Bars of Europe'. Ken imagines, among others, the reactions of Gig Ryan, Robert Gray, John Tranter, David Kennedy, John Jenkins, Peter Bakowski, the actor Richard Harris visiting one of them, Bar San Calisto. Lyn Tranter calls her husband away from the place. It's a dark and grubby dive off a cobbled laneway leading to the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome (where, incidentally, Federico Fellini shot a night scene for his film Roma) just past the grungy looking stud-collared street people and their big stud-collared dogs and begging tin. When I was in Rome Ken sent me an email telling me I should have a Strega there. Not have a witch—which Strega translates as—but the strong yellow liqueur, Strega. But, passing by, I had already seen that there were too many piercings and tattoos in there for me. It looked more like 'Bar Zozzo'—Italian for 'Dirty Slob Bar'. As Ken says in the Guide—

It would be good to sit
with Ava Gardner, outside, or Johnny Depp. But inside:
it would be terrible. It is always terrible to sit
inside—a hell interminable—& which every minute
calls for all your attention—
the sort of thing, probably, Sartre hated, though it
puts you on your mettle. Are you tough enough
for the San Calisto?

There's a probably-out-of-print 1950s farm manual called Outdoor Pig Farming that's written by a different Ken Bolton. When he came across the other Ken Bolton's book Ken wrote a poem with the title 'Outdoor Pig-keeping,1954 & My Other Books on Pigs'. It's written in the academic tone of a reminiscing pig specialist. It's very funny—

“Long pig” was somehow
special dark knowledge when I was
a schoolboy, I mean the term.
A human dish. (No one else ate it,
except the odd lion or tiger—
as a one-off: humans also
protect their own—better probably not
to eat them too often.) But, to return
to the term, “long pig” implies knowledge
of “pig plain” sure enough. It seemed
insulting, to me, back then—to the idea
of the human & humanity & I didn’t like
to utter it. . I remember once
someone telling me of an abandoned
hippy farm where they’d been producing
heroin. The pigs were fed
on scraps & excrement
& were squealing. Addicted.
Apparently the noise was horrible.

Later the poem makes an elegiac turn when the pig farm expert reflects that he is writing in the notebook of his deceased daughter. It’s a moving, sad section of the poem, yet avoids sentimentality.

There is an almost Oulipian group of poems drawn from a travel diary, in an imaginary Africa in the 1970s, each entry partly structured around a pun or approximate pun. It's called 'Exotic Things/(from a travel journal)'. Here are two short excerpts—

(TUNIS—IN THE GREEK RESTAURANT)

in the Greek restaurant we ordered dilemmas.
I had one with lemon.

(ENIGMA)

in Africa we shot enigma (which, in Africa,
only foreigners trouble to call "enigma",
everyone else, quite unselfconsciously, calls them
"enigmas").

There is such diversity. This book is veritably fecund with ideas and references—from Baroque art to Althusser to Jackie Gleason to Juliet Greco to Ron Padgett—inventive notations, appreciation of relationship—both friendship and family, and, as I've already said, plenty of terrific jokes. Ken Bolton writes like no-one else here. I could exhaust the lexicon of positive superlatives in praise of these poems because Sly Mongoose is a wonderfully compelling collection and I've mentioned less than a quarter of it.

+++
* thesis published online in ka mate ka ora on nzepc - the New Zealand electronic poetry centre.

*****

Pam Brown’s most recent title is ‘Authentic Local’ (soi3 modern poets, Papertiger Media 2010). She has published many books, chapbooks, and an e-book, over four decades. Pam is an associate editor of Jacket2, Polari and Rubric online journals. She lives in Alexandria in Sydney and blogs intermittently at http://thedeletions.blogspot.com

HOW LONG by RON PADGETT

2011-12-21T17:00:00.000-08:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

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

GRASSHOPPER

A Padgett book is always a delight. The humor and wry wisdom that shows up in Ron Padgett poems is forever quirky, often also full of feeling, and nearly always clearly to the point. What the point is is sometimes part of the humor and sometimes the “heart” of the matter; these days it is frequently in one way or another about the inexorable process of aging. From the title on through to poems here like the no-joke of “The Joke” and the sentiment of “The Best Thing I Did”, this focus is obvious. We see it in the elegiac uses of Joe Brainard’s own approaches to writing employed here to memorialize Brainard and Dante’s approaches used to remember another painter and poet, George Schneeman who loved his Italy. This book is written in the “how long” space of those years when wonders how long one will get to live on among others here and feels how long it is between the losses of others and one’s own passing.

Ron Padgett the poet has gone through the whacky fun and the great grief (“that other people die”) shared with his friend Ted Berrigan, and through the art of turning this thing right here whatever it is into its artfulness that he long shared with Joe Brainard, but here in this book there’s a fresh serious quality to each of the moves he practices; it comes from that coming cliff-edge moment. Death and love, all we’ve got according to one of those old-time guys, are here skipping hand in hand forward as if they’d just met in Miss Frechette’s class and are bouncing the cartoon bubble of imagination in the air between them with the light-hearted gravity of childhood affection.

Makey-up has always been one of Padgett’s best approaches, whether in long poems, collaborations, or a short lyric like “Flame Name” here where we are made to see an image shaped by the first few lines. It is Ron’s name surrounded by fake autumn leaves; the poems wording leads us to see it on a piece of paper with its edges burnt for effect, a very Fifties art class effect I seem to recall having seen with names on some push-pin board beside the blackboard in preparation for PTA night or something. We get sucked in to this image and then, this:

The effect was lovely.
It was not, by the way,
a dream. It was also not
something that really happened.
I made it up, so I could
set my name on fire
for a moment.
(80)

The really lovely effect, simply achieved, is the focus upon our own act of imagination spurred by the poem. Ron may have gotten to see his own name on fire, but so did we and that’s what matters.

The slip and slide of metaphor into metaphor in “The Coat Hanger” takes through a short history of key moments in American poetry and on into some fairly philosophical reflections all starting from the poet’s having noticed how bent he has become in his aged posture. It comes to a close with some imagery that begins by referring back to a railway station mentioned previously and insisting upon its metaphorical character:

Me I am at an angle,
but when I stand up straight as the lines in that station,
I see, before the fog rolls in, the tracks that
take us all across ourselves,
metaphorical fog thicker than real fog,
just barking is thicker than a dog,
though the dog is clearing up too, like a sky
whose translucence is arriving as the metaphors depart
and I start the day as a man for the first time again.
(83)

Talk about showing the f-ing real where real is at! And that “coat hanger”; there’s no hanger in the poem, nor coat neither. I suspect it’s the kind you bend out of shape until you can slip it in and catch the latch and unlock the door. Maybe it’s like the “sardines” in O’Hara’s poem for Mike Goldberg, something that was there in the process along the way, but I like to see it as the process itself.

There are also poems here that take the brilliance of the literal into their process and make us feel how much a person’s life hangs with them in the oddest literal ways. Sometime it hurts in the kind of way where hurt is maybe a relief too. “Snowman” is clearly an elegy of sorts for George Schneeman, but it is also a presentation of this literal presence of memory in things. How voices and words in that memory too, are a presence of the dead and a place still to love them. The series “From Dante” presents three poems based on the Italian’s lyrics creatively mistranslated. Somehow, retaining their originals’ elegance even as they fall into Padgett’s idiom, they come out as elegies for Schneeman, their dedicatee, too. Their similes and mistakes lean in the imaginative direction but use literalness for their ground. The first goofs off into an image of digging a ditch “just by singing” at its beginning but then brings that ditch back at the end thus:

For I have a reason to love you always,
Each one in his ditch contented,
As I think we all soon will be.

“Thinking about a Cloud” creates a moving cartoon that mixes an extended metaphor with the kind of literality that makes some jokes insightful. This is another forte of Padgett’s. It conjures up a cloud that chides the poet toward being more “grown-up” until he asks at the end:

“Are their grown-up clouds too? You sound like one.”
“I sound like one because I am almost gone.
And when I am gone, you will hear
only the sound of your own personality
as it rises in you and pushes me away.
Don’t you hear it now?”
(41)

This elegy for the image and imagination also has a “how long” in it. It is the strangely childish mature wisdom of Ron Padgett that you get there and in “Spots.” That poem imaginatively plays into a meditation verging on myth that begins with a morning on which the speaker notices new old-age spots, and it ends with this stanza:

But I remembered it was my birthday
and my mother is large with me
and her mind is full of ironing
like music you can’t stop hearing it in your head,
the music of ironing, and so
me, first a spot, then a boy
with a dog named Spot,
and now a man on whom more spots
are arriving in the night,
when Mother Nature makes her rounds
and Father Time keeps the watch.
(32)

The only poem that seems to have nothing to do with death is “Death,” the first line of which is “Let’s change the subject” (12). It goes on to tell an amusing imaginary shaggy bear story, so it probably is about death too in some way. There are other poems in the book that are less than fully successful to my mind, but heck dang it, what do I know? I know that Ron Padgett writing is all I have tried to show it to be and, as Robert Hass’s cover blurb says, “funnier, more graceful, light as air and as wiry and hard as, well, wire.” What that wire springs on us is our own from the start, kind of like the Wizard’s gifts. There is a poem in this book that starts with the observation that

It’s funny when the mind thinks about the psyche,
as if a grasshopper could ponder a helicopter.

And it ends with this set of lines that I want to set here like an arrow in neon, blinking and pointing at the poet of these poems:

He is a brave little grasshopper
and he never sleeps

for the poem he writes is the act
of always being awake, better than anything

you could ever write or do.
Then he springs away.

A HERON IN BUENOS AIRES by LUIS BENITEZ

2011-12-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews

A Heron in Buenos Aires by Luis Benítez
(Ravenna Press, Spokane, WA, 2011)

Well-established as a poet, essayist and novelist, the writer Luis Benítez needs little introduction. His books have been published in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, the United States and Venezuela.

He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Among other things, he is a member of the Latin-American Academy of Poetry, the International Society of Writers, and the Argentinian Foundation for Poetry. His work has brought him international recognition and he has been the recipient of many prestigious awards including the La Porte des Poétes International Award (Paris, 1991), the International Award of Fiction (Uruguay, 1996), the Primo Premio Tusculorum di Poesia (Italy, 1996) and the International Award for Published Work “Macedonio Palomino”, (Mexico, 2008).

Over the years, many of his poems have appeared in the small press magazines and journals in the USA and the UK but this is the first time that a substantial body of his work has been translated into English and presented as a full-length collection in its own right. The editorial team at Ravenna Press are to be congratulated on making a selection of his work available to the English-speaking world. This can only serve to enhance the poet’s reputation by bringing his work to a wider audience.

As with all great writers, his themes are universal. The way in which he chooses to convey these themes is masterful. Each poem has a conciseness about it, an ease which can be deceptive at first reading, because it belies the weight of the subject matter that lies beneath the surface. There is no florid language, no superficial excess; Benitez cuts to the chase and makes his statements with the minimum of fuss.

“This Morning I Wrote Two Poems” is a good example. The almost conversational title might bring to mind William Carlos Williams (I am thinking of his poem “This is Just to Say…”). The conversational tone continues throughout the poem because the words fall easily down the page. It is, of course, a work that concerns itself with the mysterious craft of writing—where does the Muse come from and why is it that the finished object is more than the sum of its component parts?

I wonder about the origin
of those two things that are now on the table,
not exactly made of paper and ink.

Always modest about his own achievements and wise enough to know that the perfect poem is in all probability an impossible thing (but worth pursuing), he goes on to wonder

About the men who have said it better
and are now dead

about the length of time, expressed in superlatives, that it can take for a work of art to come to its full maturity, and how, at the last, a poem can have a transformational effect which can be out of all proportion to its existence on the page:

I wonder why, a short while ago,
this world has changed twice.

Animals and birds feature in a number of his poems. In all of them, they are celebrated for what they are. His powers of observance are acute, the shape of the heron is concisely described as resembling the letter “S”; a leopard is a beast always under the rain (because of its spots) and an insect whose diaphanous wings are almost transparent is hardly distinct from the air in his elementary design.

There is a metaphysical feel to these poems. His consideration of the salmon, in “The Extravagant Upstream Traveller” is a beautifully honed metaphor for mankind “swimming against the tide” in a world threatened by pollution:

Then I saw him in the oily water,
a gift of industry and the hatred for what lives,
climbing upstream:
the impossible salmon…

unusual iridescence amid the garbage
of the condemned river…

In “Aurochs” Benitez succeeds in capturing a real sense of antiquity. He reaches back to ancient Greece and Rome and also, perhaps, to primitive forms of writing. The animal knows what he writes because before he existed it was already a name. Rightly or wrongly I detect here a reference to the second letter of the ancient runic alphabet, the “Fuþark,” in which the letter “u”—“ur” in the Anglo-Saxon Rune poem, is described as a fierce bull, literally an aurochs, with implications from the Old Norse word urdr of fate and destiny. It is also Caesar’s aurochs, as mentioned in his “Gallic Wars”— “that cannot be tamed or accustomed to human beings”. It is earthy and not without menace. To the poet, it is

sometimes something that leaves huge drops of blood
in the boughs and a footstep
going away, solid, invisible.

Poets, too, are celebrated in this volume. There are poems addressed to Vallejo, Pound and Rimbaud. The title of his poem “To Deprive Death of It’s Arrogance” carries an echo of Dylan Thomas’s poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” There are other echoes of Thomas in “Conversations” where Benitez proposes to battle the Great Night as did Dylan Thomas in his “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” The references are no accident. Dylan Thomas was, and continues to be, a great influence on Benítez. Benitez has said of him, “he was my master”.

In “Kustendjé, By The Black Sea” the whole poem, which is a meditation on change, revolves around the central figure of another writer from the past, this time Ovid, and his work “Metamorphoses.” The reference is to the time when the Roman Emperor Augustus banished Ovid from his native Rome to a period in exile in Constanza. Again, as with so many of the poems in this collection, there are several layers of meaning working their way into the reader’s conscience at the same time. In this case it is the skilful interplay between past and present: the ever-changing events of history.

“Naïve” reveals another facet to his art. In some ways, the title of the poem is ironic. It is far from naïve—it is in fact rather complex. The girl in the poem lives in her own universe, one that is, according to her, of her own making. It is full of everything that she loves: her clothes, her friends, her home. She believes that everything is a true reflection of herself and that nothing will change without her say-so. There is, however, one word in this poem that unhinges all of this and that is the word uncertain. She is living in an uncertain country. We are not masters of our own destiny. Benítez is aware of the fact that there are things which lie beyond our understanding. On one level this may be a spiritual force, on another, it may be the uncertainty of living under a political system where change could occur at any time.

In summary this book offers the reader meticulously observed, intelligent and moving poems by a writer whose reputation deservedly extends beyond his native country. Credit should be given to the translation and editing which has been done by Beatriz Olga Allocati, Veronica Miranda and Cooper Renner. Their team approach has been central to the production of this book. Collectively, they have made sure that the power and subtlety of Benítez’ work has not been lost in translation. The poems are accompanied by an extended essay by Carmen Vasco which serves as an informative introduction to his work.

*****

Neil Leadbeater is an editor, author and poet living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His poems and short stories have been published widely in anthologies and small press magazines and journals both at home and abroad. His first full-length collection of poems, Hoarding Conkers at Hailes Abbey was published by Littoral Press in 2010 and a selection of his Latin American poems, Librettos for the Black Madonna, was published by White Adder Press earlier this year.

THE WISDOM ANTHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHIST POETRY, Ed. ANDREW SCHELLING

2011-12-21T15:45:00.000-08:00

JEAN VENGUA Reviews

The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, Ed. Andrew Schelling
(Wisdom Publications, Somerville, MA, 2005)

Off the Program: Reading the Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry

Reading The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry, I’ve been having a little trouble with the “Buddhism-ness” of some (though by no means not all) of the poems. The title of the book (albeit the second word refers to the publisher) puts me off a little too. Like, oh, you’re dispensing “Wisdom” right off the bat. Just so we know. Imagine what stones would be thrown if you had used that adjective for a secular anthology: The Wisdom Anthology of Postmodern Poetry. Using that framework to present poems by Buddhists replicates a religious structure of authority that, lately, I have been finding less than useful. If I were to edit a book like that, I would go far out of my way to cut out that word. Because (and I think Basho might agree) being a Buddhist is often about being a fool.

It’s why I like the poems of Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Hoa Nguyen, Harryette Mullen, and Norman Fischer (all included in the anthology). The editor, Andrew Schelling, seems to have chosen a number of poems for their odd turns and curious juxtapositions. They surprise, they embrace contradiction; they come directly from lived experience, without spouting the jargon of carefully enforced calm or “wisdom,” as in Hoa Nguyen’s “Buddha’s Ears are Droopy Touch His Shoulders”:

Buddha’s ears are droopy touch his shoulders
As scarves fly out of windows and I shriek
At the lotus of enlightenment

Travel to Free Street past Waco
To the hole in the Earth
Wearing water

I’m aiming my mouth
For apple pie

I have to admit that some poems, like those of Gary Snyder and Jane Hirschfield, no longer feel vital to me (as they once did). I can’t deny that, like Kenneth Rexroth, their work had important roles in sparking and continuing a tradition of Buddhist writing in the U.S. But now their poems only remind me of the replication of nostalgic Asian tropes that continue to bedevil American Buddhism.

In my opinion, Siddartha Gautama—commonly known as “The Buddha” or “The Awakened One”—was a guy who discovered a route by which humans could gain insight into their condition and possibly reduce suffering, but he probably didn’t espouse all the hierarchical and baroque permutations on his teachings that many of his followers developed decades and centuries after his death. Glenn Wallis says something useful about this that questions the practices and assumptions of many contemporary Buddhists:

“Two aspects of employing a Buddhist framework are particularly disturbing to me. The first is that it usurps the practitioner’s actual, lived, experienced, process. That is, time and time again I have heard people use the same formulaic, doctrinal vocabulary to talk about meditative practice and the meditative life as a whole. Some see in such speech patterns evidence of “entering the stream” or maturing on “the path.” I see it, rather, as a disturbing symptom. I see the employment of borrowed language as a sign of evasion, of taking comfort in the warm embrace of community at the expense of the very purpose that that community is (ostensibly) meant to serve, namely, the combustion of delusion. I see it as a sign that someone is prescribing to a program, rather than engaging a potentially excoriating – and, to a great extent, lonely – practice of self-and-reality-knowing.

What is that practice? Perhaps a stance—to listen, to notice that which one often goes through life denying:

I’ve changed
Shrunk probably
Noticing the prominence of my skeleton
This word I wanted to fondle
That I threw out into the world
That never had a meaning or referent
Except to stand for all I do not know and fear
Now I can feel what it wanted to tell me
—Norman Fischer, “I’ve Changed”

The practice of Buddhist meditation, Buddhist study, is lonely, despite the comforts of sangha (community) that are available, nowadays, in the Western world: “I take refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha.” It’s lonely because the experience of meditation is never what others say it is or will be. It turns out to be your own path, after all—a dream sans the comfort of interpretation; it often comes out funny, crooked, or angry, and all the best meditation in the world won’t erase the mud:

People of color untie-dyed. Got nothing to lose but your CPT-
shirts. You’re all just a box of crayons. The whole ball of wax
would make a lovely decorator candle on a Day of the Dead San-
teria Petro Vodou altar. Or how about these yin-yang ear-rings to
balance your energy? This rainbow crystal necklace, so good for
unblocking your chi and opening the chakras? Hey, you broke it,
you bought it! No checks accepted. Unattended children will be
sold as slaves.
—Harryette Mullen, “Souvenir from Anywhere”

Erasure is not what’s needed. Replicating the nostalgic language or borrowed authority of a religious tradition only distances you from truth. Better to shine a light on the raw edge of the everyday life:

That is why I encourage people, as Thoreau put it, to keep language close to the bone. Let the language come out of the knowing – out of your bodily experience – and not the other way around. Because each of us has a particular perspective on “the knowing,” our language will be, at least to some degree, unique to each of us. It will be fresher, richer, more vibrant, and more honest than the borrowed language of Buddhism or any other pre-established framework allows.

Yet, still, I have to talk about these things. What language should I use? One possibility is the language of poetry.”—Glenn Wallis

(Read more of “Making Decisions” by Glenn Wallis HERE.)

Coming back to poetry. Why? Maybe the arts—poetry, the visual and plastic arts—take you back to the body, to corporeality, which, in all its pain (I write this as my migraine slowly winds down to blessed relief), beauty, messiness, and complexity, says so much that religion can’t. Sangha is good, community is good — it has important functions. Some point to the fact that communities can sometimes become insular, their traditions and habits inbred. Yet, Wallis notes that one of community’s functions is to “dispel delusion.” I do think that American culture and religion (indeed, all religion) embrace programmatic elements that generally go unacknowledged because we assume that our ethos of “individuality” and “independence” saves us from that. Well, it doesn’t; and when programmatic behavior goes under the radar, our best intent can be subverted.

+++++
[First posted in a different form at Okir, July 10, 2011]

*****

Jean Vengua's blogs include Okir and she is the author of the poetry collection Prau (Meritage Press).

WAIFS AND STRAYS by MICAH BALLARD

2011-12-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

WAIFS AND STRAYS by Micah Ballard
(City Lights, San Francisco, 2011)

If it doesn't give pleasure, what's the point? At times, critics (perhaps tired of the bombast in so-called criticism) fall back on such a statement: if not pleasurable, why bother? Yes, of course there are many points to art other than pleasure but I did recall this fall-back position as I read through Micah Ballard's WAIFS AND STRAYS. For the pleasure the poems engendered was simply intense and, at times, sublime. An instance:

We gather in the smoking
       & set our escape
              over a few restive shots
              tonal systems
                     that veil the architecture
       let me demonstrate
              the vacancy
                     "I once lived through all of them
                     & held their wings
       but now they hold me"
--from "DOUBLOONS"

There's a tone throughout that made me recall Jean Rhys' adept use of evocation. An instance, a poem in its entirety (that's also a wonderful opening poem to the book):

HAZY NOW

       these edens
                     dozing thru the day

strange
              they show up later
                                          old oblivions
                                                 left
from the blotter.
                                          hazy now
                                          these edens
                            the feeling
                                   lasts for days
                                          strange
              how we fail remember
                                      a determined will

                                                 to match the flame

So many luminous moments...touches of the mystic even. An instance, another poem in its entirety (and I'm reluctant to excerpt from short poems as Ballard does them so well):

WAYFARING

I see into them
as they see out of me
& dissolve the wattage
to avoid future legends
young pharaohs on Fillmore cracking dutches
it is a lonely frontier by contrast
forgotten game skulking around
big hearts, small temper
thine absence overflows
thine presence undoes
do not attempt to circle the inferno
a tremor in the throne
is a tremor in the throne

These poems bespeak a poet in touch with the world including its light. An instance:

rearrange paintings to feel less trapped
--from "COURT LIFE"

Not just aware--or present in many moments--with the world, this poet also has learned so that his experience comes off as a strong intelligence. An instance:

We go
where we're wanted rather flee
from to find out
       where we're not.
Walking up 16th
it's not us nor them
                     but something else
              more burdensome
              than love
                     or misunderstanding
--from "SLUMP GRIND II"

Or this, specifically worth nota bene-ing if the impression I receive of collaged, borrowed or found lines is correct (and if not correct, still smart):

              Once widowed
as a lull in conversation
I slipped quietly into the mist
& woke an assumed name
              invisible mastery
              (the easiest con to date)
--from "HALF A CANYON"

Then I read this one below, and thought it a "perfect poem" -- e.g., great twist with the second-to-last sentence and such such wonderfully inexplicable gap (fill-it-in-yourself-Dear-Reader) between text and title):

THESE VACANCIES FADE OVER TIME

I once awoke in a room in the asylum where the painter X had been confined. I remember reaching it in late afternoon and being admitted by a nun. I was led thru several cellar-like halls, painted yellow, with low cell doors along each side. There were other corridors and cellular rooms but those housed large unrelated groups. I believe paint was peeling everywhere and the floors were of stone. The view from my window allowed me to watch new arrivals and it opened directly onto the kitchen garden. Beyond it stretched open fields and rows of cypresses that stood at the left. It was a low, Netherlands-like country and only the shaven fields have retained their faded color, miles of marsh lit by a brilliant horizontal light. I suffered constantly from dizziness and was dressed in an unbecoming costume of gray cotton. They had my hair cut close but I tried to look different from the rest, leaving the top button of my shirt undone and keeping my sleeves rolled halfway between wrist and elbow--something a little casual and Byronic for the occasion. I hoped to perfect a mechanical neatness, my carriage and facial expression influenced by the same motive. When awake I thought of attracting to myself one intimate friend, whom I could influence deeply. He would be of great assistance in establishing myself an authority, recognized but unofficial.

Distilled hard to diamonds, these poems transcend what one may write as prose about them. To write about these poems is to miss their nature. All I can say is that you read the poems directly -- and I will do you the favor of not mediating your experience with them (beyond the hopefully light sleights-of-hands above). Go and read. Go forth and mate with their their radically-pleasurable shine.

P.S. On a personal note, upon finishing this collection, I wanted some Calvados -- this apple brandy drink is an old favorite of mine but I haven't had a sip for nearly two decades. Again, some strongly evocative power here...including an encouragement that makes you want to pay closer attention to what you've already experienced, what you already thought you knew ("I was told to lay down my song / & make use of my past"...?) That's what highly-effective poems achieve at times: make you look at the world afresh, including what you thought you knew as a revelation to discover.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in Boston Area Poetry Scene; by Michael Leong in Big Other; by Alan Baker in Litter; and by rob mclennan. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews SILK EGG along with two other books, NOTA BENE EISWEIN and FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 at Asian American Lit Fans.

THE NEW TOURISM by HARRY MATHEWS

2011-12-21T14:30:00.000-08:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

The New Tourism by Harry Mathews
(Sand Paper Press, Key West, FL., 2010)

CLEVER ABANDON

The publishers of Harry Mathews’ latest volume call him “a legend of the American avant-garde” as they laud this “first collection of poetry in twenty years.” Poetry, however, is not Mathews’ forte. The volume makes it seem more like his hobby. Stories, prose poetry, that’s more Harry’s bag. And yet…, and yet….

The best poems here are a haiku sequence, what the publishers term “a diary of discrete (if not so discreet) late-night improvisations on the familiar Japanese three-line form.” These poems are more anti-haiku of a Roman/Latin sort.

Wherever friends meet,
there is room for surprises,
such as listening.

My beloved friend
Who swears that he is happy
Is perhaps living.

Works done with pleasure?
Levers of melancholy
Skew my peopled streets.

The living and dead
constitute one memory:
scissored wall lettuce.

It is difficult
to know what children forget.
Rain: falling asleep.

There are 25 pages of these, 123 poems, not all sharp but none worse than Issa’s worst. Many of them are poignantly not rimmed in by Japanese traditions and are fully felt in American sentiments. That’s their value.

The other sections of this book are #I that consists solely of “Butter and Eggs: a didactic poem” about cookery and nicely imagistic, and #II that collects recent lyrics “devoted to the unpredictable deviations between intention and desire” according to the publishers’ flyer. I take the best of those lyrics to be about more than that. “In Pursuit of Henry Vaughn” does that writer and thinker honor by playing the concept of an “undoubting ignorance” as a kind of innocence against the acts that led through reading into writing without leaving any stage of that pilgrimistic progress behind. It begins:

Can we, can I remember happiness?
Do I know when I’m happy, except when it’s over?

Some lines then put forth the idea of a time of having “learned how to eat and not yet learned how to write” as a kind of innocence. A long second stanza looks at the teenage years when “all the things that meanwhile were going wrong” became the focus of life and mind, and then we move on to an adulthood when other’s attentions “helped me dilute this self-disgust.” It is an American boy’s tale. But Vaughn is there behind it, and the ending owes more than something to that writer who can hardly be a darling of “the American avant-garde.” I still have my Oxford Book of English Poetry that Allen Ginsberg required us to buy for his seminar at Naropa in 1975, and there in it is Vaughn’s “The Retreat.”

It is a poem of unregenerate nostalgia for a myth of our having all been angels before our birth. What Mathews has made of this is remarkably un-myth-bound. Vaughn writes of a first love that turns out to be God; Mathews focuses much more sharply on reflecting to us what always seems to be our free will until age shows it to have been the cockiness of every youth.

Perhaps later,
in my last moments, I can choose to relent
and, however briefly, recover that undoubting ignorance
(all its bad dreams effaced)
that I so cleverly abandoned.

It’s just before those lines that Mathews concocts an image of what happiness might have been:

From the branches of a red maple
into which I used to climb, the world spread vastly
in a summer that included me. From my perch,
the houses I saw were cool and welcoming—
they remain so today, but when I enter them
my thoughts have wandered elsewhere.
(23)

That wandering is not an innocent one, however much we all might do it; it is a kind of lack or laxity of attention. And that is what a poem is meant to render and remedy. This is poetry, and not that of any hobbyist. It joins Vaughn in pursuit of “bright shoots of everlastingness.”

The book has the feel of elder wisdom and reflection more than the playfulness of Mathews’ Oulipo works. Honest sentiment that is nobly unsentimental. That’s worth something, even to the young who think themselves quite clever.

*****

T.C. Marshall is busy occupying his life, seriously supporting movement actions on the Cabrillo College campus where he teaches and in the S.F. and Monterey Bay areas where he lives. He has been writing and publishing poetry since first grade, literary criticism since his college days in the U.S. and Canada, and nature writing here and there. His latest publications include online essays and reviews as well as poems online and on paper in magazines. His next project is a set of poems incorporating photos to be published on a blog, all of which were originally posted on FaceBook. They are called Post Language.

HOW'S THE COWS by JESS MYNES

2011-12-20T23:56:00.000-08:00

GUILLERMO PARRA Reviews

How’s the Cows by Jess Mynes
(Cannot Exist, Madison, WI, 2011)

The Just Rewards of Jess Mynes

The new book of poems by Jess Mynes has pulled me into its obscure orbit for months now, since I first came across it in rural Massachusetts last summer. I’ve had the luxury of reading Mynes’s work for seven years, the necessary time for a slow reader like me to wander around his language, and absorb the inner pleasures he draws with his poems. Mynes himself is a devoted reader, and this is evident from both his poems and from the growing catalogue of his magnificent project, Fewer & Further Press. This micro-press broadcasts work by poets as varied as Joseph Massey, Stacy Szymaszek, Arlo Quint, Aaron Tieger, Michael Carr and John Coletti (to name just a few personal favorites) in beautiful handmade editions, where the poem is given its proper space to fully breathe. Great work can always be expected from Fewer & Further, and we can likewise count on Mynes to surprise and move us with each new publication of his own.

How’s the Cows begins with a joke, a quip from Muhammad Ali, and we’re off. The first poem floors me each time I reread it. It’s called “Eastern copper” but the titles in this book are not meant to ground or guide the reader. Rather, like the odd epigraph that opens the book, they’re meant to throw us off-guard, lead us into the mangrove of words and phrases the poet sometimes collages, other times slices into each other, with full stops that evoke a manual typewriter’s jerks and rings, a laptop’s pleasant background tip taps, or the notebook’s scribble chants, scraping pen tip carving off a miniscule thread of paper as it moves. It’s the fingers leading the way, a physical act we are encouraged to imitate in our reading, that is, to let go of the linear pursuit of a form or concept that might cohere the poem. What we’re given instead is this type of musical endeavor, from the second half of the opening poem:

Brothers Live Poultry Hero Shop
big bird shadow merging chrome
to flowerbox stray range
leisure record, if showing happens
editions deep sing song scouts
operatives dawn advancing prime
remiss white winter sea legs
look up stand alone
maybe shotguns someone pointed
(“Eastern copper”)

His book is that “leisure record,” an itinerary of swerves and divagations sustained by Mynes’s seemingly inexhaustible ear. My preferred method for reading it has been in pieces, opening its pages at random and then going from there, sometimes straight through, at others meandering. The results are always different. One of my favorite of Allen Ginsberg’s “Mind Writing Slogans” makes so much more sense after you’ve read Jess Mynes: “Surprise Mind.” The intersection between vastly different words, images and rhythms that Mynes establishes leaves so much productive room for the reader. So that in my aleatory encounters with the book, I stumble onto this gorgeous fragment:

may larger scale attain reasonable ports
wasteful bless petal douses
clinging singers background hence
(“lies in hiding”)

I fall in love with that pair of words, “clinging singers,” every time I read this poem. Like a wall of flowers at dusk in the summer, or the sustained movement of forest branches when you stare at them all morning from your porch with a notebook and a coffee beside you, or the sound of the wind through a garden, this is the type of “background” that emerges for me when I read these poems. Subtle yet ecstatic delights.

This is a book made for the drift of vowels roundly spoken into a microphone night, but as quietly as the tapping of my fingers just now. When the aforementioned poem reaches its final line, the jolt is unexpected no matter how many times you’ve read it before (“just rewards of how to too far”), the sudden repetition that breaks the line off as it ends, and you’re left nearly stuttering, then released so ably in finite loops of pleasure. That’s the destination of these poems: “to too far.”

To read Mynes today, we might revisit his essential full-length collection Sky Brightly Picked (Skysill Press, 2009), which I have beside me on my desk as I type. The act of reading Mynes leads to writing, I go from him to my notebook, at once inspired by a sound or signal and by the reminder of pleasure’s centrality in the poem. These are fun poems, but also serious or shrouded verse drama. Piled on top of Sky Brightly Picked tonight I also have scattered issues of Asterisk, the magazine pamphlet Fewer & Further Press puts out sporadically, featuring one or two poets in beautiful fold-out pages. The selection of poets is eclectic and impeccable, just like Mynes’s own poems.

One title stands out as emblematic for the entire book: “oddball cataloging.” What these poems evoke is a careful yet loose stroll through the poet’s daydreams, maybe awake in bed scribbling stray thoughts, or at work stealing a few notebook minutes. The sense of timing in Mynes’s poems is ecstatic, yet measured and quiet. Referring to his sequence of poems loosely based on the paintings of Mark Rothko, Sky Brightly Picked, Clark Coolidge wrote: “Irrepressible, that urge to form the irreducible poem.” We can appreciate that urge in this new collection, as the shards of various days and minutes are sculpted together in such a way that the fractures between them add to their marvelous music. The marvels are in the way Mynes uses language static as a means of training his readers’ ears, so that by the end of the book we are attuned to his own version of seeing:

thin memorable fingers
edged in chorus
to outlast that we end up
leaves and twigs the same
with detachment lots of
empty on the first this wants
living filled with entrance
consumed to feel ways
not here and that you are is what often
tug song wrecking flutter
(“flimsy excuse”)

In his handling of the material sounds of his poems, Mynes at times evokes Coolidge’s devotion to soundscapes, as when in The Crystal Text he writes: “This book called the unread text might not be the one / the crystal reveals. The text of crystal might / reveal everything but itself.” That is, the everyday, the spoken can be employed for the sake of a poem of mystery, play, investigation and flawed perfections. In some way, Mynes is writing secretive poems that reveal those details of our daily routine that glow with a particular ambience. And like Coolidge’s “crystal text” Mynes’s book closes without having revealed much about itself or its author. But the reader has been given a new set of eyes, for the English language and for the immediate world we inhabit:

every iridescent blue butterfly
going through your progressions
reversal domain fractions
indifference heavy delays erase contamination
seasons in exigent mystery
(“buff orpington”)

I should note that this volume is officially a chapbook, according to the publisher. But the poems contradict this categorization, as they form a completely self-contained and vast universe. The reader leaves its pages changed and energized, with a sense of having encountered an event whose outlines will not fade. The stapled binding and beautiful artisan cover merely remind us of the limited amount of copies printed of this book, which means you should try to get one soon before they sell out, which they will. And once they sell out, hopefully someone will print a pirate edition, or maybe the author can e-mail you a PDF copy, or we will see it reprinted years from now in a collected poems edition. I received the book a few steps away from the amazing garden the poet keeps at his home, so when I read it I think of the particular landscape of rural Massachusetts where they were produced. But I suspect these poems have a portable brilliance that will reflect wherever you might be when you’re lucky enough to read them. Like a mysterious crystal, How’s the Cows acts as a type of organic machine that changes each time we read it, depending on what we might pick up in its miniscule vibrations.

My own tastes lead me to John Wieners when I read Mynes’s new book. The accumulation of sparkling details that are masterfully fractured by an oblique diction are thrilling to read, and they never lose their glamour. In his unclassifiable (poem, essay, memoir?) Conjugal Contraries & Quart, Wieners writes: “Did we ever get lost, traipsing through the golden-rod, the field thrushes, hedge thickets. Lose our short-tempered spirited blusteriness as our pink-organza shoulder strap slipped off deliberately the left arm to fondle his majestic afternoon brain-waves and blesst tits.” I think How’s the Cows accomplishes a similar intensity of psychic landscapes, with its agility and humor that always evoke generosity toward the reader. In “raring to go,” Mynes concludes with another emblematic line: “all day, I’m money.” And he is, this book is a bank and Jess Mynes is money.

*****

Guillermo Parra is a poet and translator who lives in Durham, NC. He has published two books of poetry: Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006) and Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books, 2009). He has written the blog Venepoetics since 2003. In 2012 University of New Orleans Press will publish his translation: José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Selected Works. An edition of translations of José Antonio Ramos Sucre is also forthcoming from Auguste Press in San Francisco.

THE WIDE ROAD by CARLA HARRYMAN and LYN HEJINIAN

2011-12-20T23:30:00.000-08:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

The Wide Road by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian
(Belladonna, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2010)

PASSIONATE WHY

Here we have a tome that asks a lot of key questions, has a lot of fun, prods us with voices that suggest embodied thoughts we can imagine as our own or those of our friends, and yet the book never quite gets truly satisfying—why? It seems to be made mostly of intellectualization that’s trying to be cool and at the same time hot, in the Levi-Straussian sense—of course.

Coupling in many senses is the main thematic in The Wide Road. I’m going to guess that the inverted reference to Basho’s travel journal The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the title is also part of this, and that the point might be that a man wrote a solo journey and this “we” is going to write something that is never solo, coupling to him and coupling as he didn’t. On page 122, the book declares “We can couple almost any one thing with another.” The particulars that get coupled, though, are what matters or (maybe I could say) “the matter.” The link to Basho, however negative or positive, is a kind of train car coupling to an engine. There are engines of form here too. The final section is written in two columns of separate but resonant voicings `a la Derrida’s Glas. It couples narrative and a poetic sense of auto-theorizing with commentary borrowed from film art, and it makes us feel as though we might be reading a critical plot summary from a catalog. Earlier sections read as an exchange of letters perhaps based in diaries. All sections before the last one imitate Basho in casting brief lyrics in a bed of poetic prose. There are also intermittent theoretical thrusts throughout the text:

One can see that from a certain point of view, a woman when it comes to sex is always on the outside.

But do you think that’s what it’s like to be a cup?

To what that are we referring, to what what, to what it?

There is a languid eros within a language eros.
(86)

These are sociological as well as literary, and therein lies the push. Whether we take these as just writing, writing that’s trying to be just, or truly sincere efforts to get a point across, they are so heavily self-reflective that they aren’t very much fun unless you start laughing at them. They are so seventies/eighties. What mostly gets coupled here are thoughts.

Even the sexy parts like

Spreading our legs we invited the stranger to enter and make himself comfortable.

           only my shadow
           will come to you
           tonight to beg
           for a little flesh
(4)

seem somehow weakened by theory, certainly weaker than the voluptuary poetry of India or Japan and less empowering of the womanly. In what seems like it might be a reference to the Kama Sutra, we have

Every poem is a posture we have tried:

           leafy froth of toe
                      we bite in circles
           topples time our flick
                      we wrestle wrists
(8)

This imagistic slide resonates with porn. Dream narrative is also used to present erotic energies. Many angles are used, but their failure seems too to be part of the book’s concept.

On page 49 in a “letter” beginning “Dear Lyn” implying that it might have been written by Harryman, we get

The difficult aspects of sex or sexuality may have to do with the way the fragmented form has evolved to this point. In addition to our eagerness to work in the most obvious genre that traveling used to suggest, the letter, a correspondence, might give us more thoughts about the fragmentation that thus far has constituted our excursion. Might I consider this insertion erotic?
(49)

The trouble with reading this is the “thoughts” and the desire for more of them. The intellectualization here is ponderous. Reading is certainly erotic, and so writing is too, but jeez when it’s all about dragging authors in by the hair it gets tedious. Despite all this thinking about things, the assertion is made that passion is central; one writer or the other asks “It is a passionate world, though—why?”

That is the question. It is worth a try at answering or even just standing with and mulling. When the passion swings as wide as the almost enchanting children’s stories and the Lorca-esque beauty of a longer poem with his green horse in it, or on to the challenges to Basho and Rousseau for how they treated their kids, this book shows passion.

When this book reflects on itself and strings together claims like

To live in a disenchanted world is to live at a dead-end. In The Wide Road “we” finds enchantments. The work may be an allegory about artists and the role of art-making. It is certainly a work about creative sexuality, and about sportive mindful animality.
(64)

and then doesn’t live up to them, it flops. A sentence like

Play is a medium in which the drive is encountered without significant threat to the subject.
(71)

is engaging if you want to step back and engage thoughts like “well, then sport is not play because it’s about threat barely contained by rules,” but the engagement is elsewhere. There are compensatory bits of self-reflection in this text of “we”:

The lonely woman of our profession has written her way into a romance, and she floats away in a wisp of thought leaving us holding our hands on the wide road.
(128)

I can’t help but take that image in a few directions: one, a little creepy, sees two women on a dirt road holding detached hands in their hands; another sees a romancer like our belovéd Jane Austen flying away while two women holding each other with both hands to both hands dance in the road; another sees the wide wide road as the central figure with two women on it and the thought of writing as its evaporative element. It was fun for me to read that sentence. All three of these parsimoniously principled readings say something about this project and what it was like to read it.

The penultimate taste I’ll leave you with is an address to “Dear Reader” near the end:

…if you’ve had too much languor, or language, if it bores you now, skip over this part or take a break.
(137)

There are, however, purely embodied moments in this thinking language project like this one from a letter that starts “Dear Carla”:

Sometimes in crowds I have an overwhelming impulse to stroke people’s skin or hair, in exactly the way I would like to touch a giraffe’s neck or an ostrich’s wing—out of sentient curiosity.
(63)

That shows the enchanting corporeal open thought that arises in this book’s best bits, cool as a myth and hot as political progress.

*****

T.C. Marshall is busy occupying his life, seriously supporting movement actions on the Cabrillo College campus where he teaches and in the S.F. and Monterey Bay areas where he lives. He has been writing and publishing poetry since first grade, literary criticism since his college days in the U.S. and Canada, and nature writing here and there. His latest publications include online essays and reviews as well as poems online and on paper in magazines. His next project is a set of poems incorporating photos to be published on a blog, all of which were originally posted on FaceBook. They are called Post Language.

THE COMMONS by SEAN BONNEY

2011-12-20T23:19:00.000-08:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

THE COMMONS by Sean Bonney
(Openned Press, London, 2011)

1.

“The work was originally subtitled “A Narrative / Diagram of the Class Struggle”, wherein voices from contemporary uprisings blend into the Paris Commune, into October 1917, into the execution of Charles 1, and on into superstitions, fantasies of crazed fairies and supernatural bandits //// all clambering up from their hidden places in history, getting ready to storm the Cities of the Rich //// to the bourgeois eye they may look like zombies, to us they are sparrows, cuckoos, pirates & sirens //// the cracked melodies of ancient folk songs, cracking the windows of Piccadilly //// or, as a contemporary Greek proverb has it, “smashing up the present because they come from the future”.”

“Hi, my name is John, I am 14 years old and hate the Tories, and this book exploded my political consciousness, now a brick through a window is never enough, I want to reawaken the dead.”

Both quotes are from the back cover of the book. My name is John, too, and I’ll be 61 by the time this is published, and I too hate what little John hates, and I too know that brick through a window feeling, and I too know it’s never enough, and I too want to reawaken the dead, at least in Walter Benjamin’s weak messianic sense. Whatever you do, don’t laugh. Or, go ahead, but first think twice.

2.

Even Wikipedia gets it: “The commons were traditionally defined as the elements of the environment—forests, atmosphere, rivers, fisheries or grazing land—that are shared, used and enjoyed by all.

Today, the commons are also understood within a cultural sphere. These commons include literature, music, arts, design, film, video, television, radio, information, software and sites of heritage. The commons can also include public goods such as public space, public education, health and the infrastructure that allows our society to function (such as electricity or water delivery systems). There also exists the ‘life commons’, e.g. the human genome.

Peter Barnes describes commons as a set of assets that have two characteristics: they’re all gifts, and they’re all shared. A shared gift is one we receive as members of [the human] community, as opposed to individually. Examples of such gifts include air, water, ecosystems, languages, music, holidays, money, law, mathematics, parks and the Internet.

[JBR: I’d add food and shelter to the list …]

There are a number of important aspects that can be used to describe true commons. The first is that the commons cannot be commodified—and if they are—they cease to be commons. The second aspect is that unlike private property, the commons is inclusive rather than exclusive — its nature is to share ownership as widely, rather than as narrowly, as possible. The third aspect is that the assets in commons are meant to be preserved regardless of their return of capital. Just as we receive them as shared gifts, so we have a duty to pass them on to future generations in at least the same condition as we received them. If we can add to their value, so much the better, but at a minimum we must not degrade them, and we certainly have no right to destroy them.”

3.

But the powers-that-be just say: Fuck that shit. So I can’t help but read THE COMMONS in light of the Occupy movement. Which, in a way, has a very simple message: Let’s Just Take It All Back.

4.

The poem begins with the first bit of an old song, “The cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies.” It’s got an interesting recent history, which kind of sums the whole thing in a nutshell. According to The Annotated Bob Dylan, “This is a line from a very old folk song that has many variations. It probably originated in the British Isles.” It was appropriated by Dylan for reuse in his “High Water (for Charlie Patton)” (Love and Theft, 2001), which is fine; old lines from old songs are there for re-use. But Dylan’s re-use of old material is controversial. He has a long-term habit of releasing versions of old songs and copping all the credit. Of enclosing the commons. Thus, when I read the first few lines of Bonney’s poem,

the cuckoo is a pretty bird,
she warbles as she flies
The cuckoo is a
- BANG -
he was a big freak:

I can’t help but hear the bang as—well, obviously as a gunshot that kills the poor old bird—and also as a bang that kills the commons (I can’t claim that anyone but me would hear “he was a big freak” as a reference to Dylan, and to his famous line, now redirected as in a mirror, “How does it feel to be such a freak?” … but I’ve always resented his taking credit for stuff he didn’t write, just as I resent Goldman-Sachs for taking money they didn’t earn).

(Bonney credits Clarence Ashley’s version, by the way).

5.

The mode is somewhere between junction and disjunction, and the content is the fragment (see p. 79 for some of the sources), and the mood is hard-leftwardly politicized.

this is me revolving
certainly, this is spit
like ‘all hell’ where birds
sorry, prowling dogs
wipe / negative decades
live in it like a rapist
this is my silence
big constitutional principle
bright magnetic decibel
nice gravity, nice racist
-yeh-
have your say David Cameron
music / movies / games
finance / cars / answers

6.

I think THE COMMONS is a sonnet sequence, though its somewhat disjunctive nature allows it to be read straight through as well. I’ll provide you two sonnets/stanzas in a row and let you decide.

My character was taken
was not yours, who
secretly my small thighs
& the british anarchist movement
stayed indoors:
halt, magnetic sea
& shun mad company.
halt, intelligence
I got my goose shoes on
& talk eclipse, the town is stupid
love fool love,
or we could brick their windows
the aged parents broken,
exposed to annoyance & danger

Back when I was still cruel—
OK, say that again
this time with malevolent roses,
some specks of lords, some
totally harmless character:
the town’s last cinema is broken,
& the rest were maimed & slain.
OK, say the word brain,
this time with malevolent roses
mumbled as in a ‘reverie’
like lingerie & a clean blade
OK, do that again
we got from London what we needed
slaughter the fascist BNP.

Either way one reads this, the anger is unrelenting.

7.

I don’t think we American read enough British and other Anglophone poetry. I think we’re pretty provincial that way. I think we see our traditions and possibilities too much through the lens of nationality. This can have consequences. I mentioned Occupy above. I was speaking with people from Occupy LA and Occupy Riverside and I described my thoughts when Occupy Wall Street marched onto the Brooklyn to the tune of 700 arrested. I asked, “Didn’t they know they were walking into a kettle?” Only one person knew what a kettle was. That really struck me.

8.

I was hoping I could review Bonney’s Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud alongside THE COMMONS, but my copy hasn’t arrived. But I do want to mention it, as the two books sit so nicely alongside one another. Plus, Bonney’s comments at his blog Abandoned Buildings, 27 Sept 011, re: the Happiness help illuminate where THE COMMONS is coming from:

It is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud. Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation.

Rimbaud hammered out his poetic programme in 1871, just as the Paris Commune was being blown off the map. He wanted to be there. It’s all he talked about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. It’s only in the English speaking world you have to point simple shit like that out. But then again, these poems have NOTHING TO DO WITH RIMBAUD. If you think they’re translations you’re an idiot. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie.

Even if truth is what a lie is.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards the middle of a project called Zeitgeist Spam. The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. The third section, In the House of the Hangman, is underway. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, a collaboration with Jerome Rothenberg. He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.

PERRIER FEVER by PETE SPENCE

2011-12-20T23:00:00.000-08:00

PAM BROWN Reviews

Perrier Fever by Pete Spence
(Grand Parade Poets, Wollongong, 2011)

nothing’s clear
until i’ve had
my neutrinos
then the first
light loses
its blurrrrrrrr

the first sentence
becomes clear
though clearly
i misunderstand it

the next coffee
is understandably
useful when
you’re looking
for an interim
to boast
about how clear
things have become!

though clearly
this interim
is elusive

etched into recesses
beyond clarity
(from ‘An Adventure in Parodies’)

I heard about Pete Spence a decade before I had any contact with him. In the late 1990s until the first couple of years of this century when I was poetry editor for Overland magazine I published some of Pete’s graphics and poems. Then he had a bit of a row with the magazine over the pesky goods and services tax and Australian business numbers and our emails died off for a time.

As a child Pete had ‘Pink’s disease’—an appropriately coloured disease for a future experimental poet. Happily, he survived and is now very much ‘in the pink’. Pete published some poems in the 1970s and then he began a decade long hiatus from poetry where he was busy with earning a living and following other ventures, like sapphire mining. He returned to publishing poems in the 1980s.

He began making mail art around 1983 and had a visual poetry magazine called ‘Ligne’. His mail art and visual poetry activities thrived. He participated this year in Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s Secret Exchange, exchanging secrets between Sydney and Seoul, Korea. Pete had started sending me collaged postcards and other forms of collage in decorated envelopes, and small poetry pamphlets published under the auspices of his own Ministry of Zaum. I was always surprised and delighted to find them in the letter box.

In 1999 Pete’s imprint ‘Mighty Thin Books’ generously published, as a pamphlet, a poem of mine called ‘Retarded Pretensions’.

Pete Spence is an irrepressible art and poetry maker—always working on something—collage, montage, drawings, free form and formal poems, making booklets wherever, whenever. Driven, I’d say, by a good dose of ‘Perrier Fever’.

Perrier Fever—what a wonderful title. It has to be the bubbles!

Actually, you might remember when, horror of horrors, or des horreurs, des horreurs, Perrier water became contaminated with benzene back in 1990.

Pete mentions Badoit a lot in his poetry and I would agree with him that it is an acqua frizzante superior to Perrier, but much harder to find and more expensive here in Australia.

The word ‘exuberant’ is used twice on the book’s back cover and these poems are. Pete’s poetry has been described variously as surrealist, naïve, outsider, but although these descriptions nudge elements of his poetry it is not really any of them. I think Pete is a well read, well informed absurdist who is fluent in modernist poetry and lightly sidles up to it in his own poems. These poems are direct because poets perceive language directly and they appear to have been written effortlessly, an effect that’s actually quite difficult to achieve. They can seem naïve or like deliberate art brut, but Pete’s references are literary, traditional even. His poems are actually very well-behaved. He has an obvious, compulsive interest in language and can turn what he hears and reads into profoundly clear and surprising poems. For instance from ‘Conversing in Geelong’—

“skin the broccoli merger”
“the rates are adjust”
“almost mean time
and robust in the cube:

and then it becomes a nature poem—

“a drawing of breath erased
faces the sun”
“shouts very loudly
into and through the dust”

“a nodule rouses
the fulcrum of a cloud”
“a big compression
holds up the rocks”

“a string of useless elegance
diminished out on the flats”

those ribbons of mould
clutter the exit”

Pete’s poems are brimful with numerous references to people like architect Adolf Loos, artists Vlaminck, Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, Clarice Beckett, Giotto, Magritte, Titian, Francis Bacon, Milton Avery, Frida Kahlo, J.M.W. Turner, Brancusi, Karel Appel and others and musician-composers Wagner, Pachelbel’s Canon, Beethoven, Hasse - King Crimson! And seventeenth century poet Anne Bradstreet and Mayakovsky, O’Hara, Whitman, Hart Crane, Koch, Bolton, Duggan, Adam Aitken, Jack Collom—great fast-brained poet of the everyday. Good friends—Cornelis Vleeskens, filmmaker Dirk de Bruyn, Lee Smith, Pete’s partner Norma and son Perren.

Enthusiastic language play and comical punning are major components of Pete’s poetic repertoire—

‘you did a mobius strip
rite in front of my elbow’

‘Pacemaker’—the footpath’s/a walkover’

‘I thought the shop/was called SLIDE/until I walked into the door’

‘always thought Penumbra was a month
in a template climate’

He is likely to riff on other poets lines and titles. Laurie Duggan’s ‘Adventures in Paradise’ becomes ‘An Adventure in Parodies’.

John Forbes, who was, and still is, the most engaging poet of his generation, is remembered in Perrier Fever. As you know, the title of one of John’s books was ‘The Stunned Mullet’—Pete has ‘ the stained millet/ in an equidistant foment/clawing at a place/in the sun’ in ‘In Memory … John Forbes’ and in an acrostic formed by John’s name the last two lines are ‘Energy everywhere/Stuns the pullets’.

Then there are confounding moments when a line like ‘the dark ankles of memory’ will have you pondering where memory might sit, or where bad or sad memory might sit—and whether held by the ankles, some distance below the mind and feeling.

There are also longer poems in this philosophising line—a meditation on falling over and an ode to dust.

In a poem taking its title from Robert Duncan—‘The Weather is Wide Enough for Pastimes’—Pete’s captivating philosophical temperament is beautifully light

a short interval
between weathers

the wind gone
into a burrow

not a cough
to be heard
from the flowers

memory vanishes
in this stillness

beyond light
and beyond
light’s partner

one small thought
might untie
the moment
might determine
the closeness
of this instant

and convince
some new stirring
to emerge
from under
the stasis

Last year, New South Press published a small, square hand-sewn book of Pete’s sonnets, handsomely printed on a letterpress in Germany by Karl-Friedrich Hacker. Those ten sonnets are the final set of poems in this book. His sonnets are definitely influenced by the late New York poet Ted Berrigan, especially ‘The Sonnets to Joe Brainard’, Pete tells us in the Perrier Fever notes, and adds Laurie Duggan’s ‘In Memory of Ted Berrigan’ and Peter Schjehldahl’s ‘The Paris Sonnets’.

Here, there is also a series called ‘Orange Sonnets’, each one beginning with a letter from the word; O - R - A - N - G- E . Here are some random lines—

syringe rhymes with orange
so does “ oh home on our range’

please arrange some oranges in that bowl

            a tepid swill
of Orange Pekoe   the arrangement bowls
me over!   an orange surprise   o
orange shadow   my dream a giant Jaffa

squares of orange light are thrown about

a sonnet is not an orange   nothing rhymes
with lozenge

why don’t you stop   look around   revenge
is nothing if nothing rhymes with orange

Pete’s a well known poetry and vispo figure in Melbourne and has been tripping around on the perimeter of that particular poetry world for ages. Now that Alan Wearne’s Grand Parade Poets has published this book flaunting his talents, his reputation has begun to spread and is poised to capture Sydney’s and other cities’ poets and readers.

*****

Pam Brown’s most recent title is ‘Authentic Local’ (soi3 modern poets, Papertiger Media 2010). She has published many books, chapbooks, and an e-book, over four decades. Pam is an associate editor of Jacket2, Polari and Rubric online journals. She lives in Alexandria in Sydney and blogs intermittently at http://thedeletions.blogspot.com

TWO PUBLICATIONS by MARYROSE LARKIN

2011-12-20T22:45:00.000-08:00

JIM MCRARY Engages

Marrowing by Maryrose Larkin
(airfoil chapbooks, Portland, OR, 2011)

and

The Name of This Intersection Is Frost by Maryrose Larkin
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, Great Britain, 2011)

Recommended

First off, I just read a New Yorker film critic who when referring to Werner Hertzog said something like: “Hertzog is a nut. A good kind of nut.” And so Maryrose too is all that. And yes, for me, no problem comparing Ms. Larkin and Mr. Hertzog. Indeed. Nutty is sure a way to describe both Maryrose as a person (ality) and poet . She has little self constraint. She is more engaged in living then most I know, if not all. She delights in most everything she engages. Example: When last my wife Sue and I visited Portland we stayed at a downtown hotel. Maryrose picked us up to drive us to the reading I was giving across town. At the time a tremendious thunderstorm was hovering over downtown Portland. Crashing and banging and pouring and strobe lighting slashing across a dark sky. Unusual enough to call the workers out onto the sidewalks looking up into the sky in awe. Was like a scene from a Batman movie. Maryrose arrived with windshield whipers whapping and dripping all over. Laughing she was, as always. And she didn’t seem to notice the storm. Not at all. Way she is. Thrilled absolutely to see us. Period. Her poetics is like that, or so it seems to me. So astioudly focused yet bouncing off in several directions that can only be found and or followed by close attention.

Consider this text from the chapbook Marrowing:

Vessel ladder notation

The river shifts
Image raise and arm

Joy sounded
In whole joy

A notation is
Vessel distracted

That’s all I can do is ask you to consider the text. All you ever want to know is here….how she does it and does it again through the remaining pages. Words are repeated and used again but wringing out tense and connection becomes mental boomerang for sure. Here….”joy sounded/in whole joy”. One could ponder on that, spin it around and around for a long time. Isn’t that THE “joy sounded”. Is Ms. Larkin giving us direction? Well not so sure. What she does do….and I think it is where her considerable abilities shine, is drop in and out of all her texts various connective(ness) which trip us into ‘seeing’(?) what it is she is trying to do. And does. Does with the greatest passion and thought. That is why reading through Marrowing is a pleasure all around. The time spent just getting use to the way it is presented, the sound in my head, the questioning of meaning implied or not, the way it is arranged and meant to be seen and heard and reacted to. Ms. Larkin I am suspect spends great amounts ot time with all this…doesn’t she….or does she just ‘toss em’. Could she even.

That title, Marrowing? Go figure. Chewing away the meat. Biting through the bone. Sucking out the best part inside? Huh! Call me mollycoddled just now. (So it was near marrow in the dictionary.)

I suppose it would be very, very tasteless of me to admit that I am over simplifying all of Ms. Larkins' poetics. So maybe that is the only way for me to enjoy them/it. Is that wrong. I can sure see things that resonate…words reused and repeated as if there might be, to someone who knows or who has asked, a method of repetition in her poetics. Well why not. Don’t we all. But without the particulars, I am okay. I do not need to know the basic thearoms (if that it what it is) which describe the technique. It is enough for me to have her put this in front of me. That I can spend time with it. And admit the pleasure that come s from that.

Ditto The Name of This Intersection Is Frost, a book length text in two parts….Inverse and Late Winter 30. This work is long enough and deep enough and wide enough to have a worked depth reflected in the recurring attention to worked landscape in Ms. Larkins' world. We join with her as she works with, works on, works in (deep) or barely notices some change out the corner of a window. And what is that but attention. If I may…and I may be stuffing a boot in my mouth here…say that Ms. Larkin stands with one other west coast poet Ms. J. Kyger who lives a bit south of Portland in Bolinas, Ca. These two. A like? Not at all. Well, do they both have an ability to drag a reader giggling and gasping for breath along with them in a voyage of discovery that may be textual, heartful, mindful or just real.

A bit from Late Winter 30:

“… sky eyed   facing east   to the visible and why   haze late

winter thirty   why cross section rhododendron   why whirl

why not other/not mother   sorrowside sun wings velum or

river violet   lifting   wild   anesthetic shiver   inner life……”

I think that reading Maryrose Larkin is one of the pure joys of reading today’s poetics.

*****

McCrary waits for his Social Security check in Lawrence, Kansas. His most recent publication, Es Verdad, a 'photo essay' of baby horses in the Yucatan combines stark pictures with poetic text guaranteed to wrench a tear from the reader. An online edition available by email. See below. He also lurks in the basement of the 8th Street Taproom, a local dive which holds regular poetry readings. He participates in the open mic and operates a book table. (Hint-send stuff to give away) email:

Editor's Note: To date, jim mccrary is the only reviewer allowed to post a reviewer photo of himself because he's so bloody charming. To wit, here he is with Iris:

THE NAME OF THIS INTERSECTION IS FROST by MARYROSE LARKIN

2011-12-20T22:30:00.000-08:00

TOM BECKETT Reviews

The Name of This Intersection Is Frost by Maryrose Larkin
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2010)

This is a book of two parts, of two poetic sequences: “Inverse” and “Late Winter 30.”

Each page of both sequences functions as a unit—autonomous—but also as a part of a broader improvisational scheme and an ongoing meditation.

The title of the book is taken from this page in “Inverse":

The name of this intersection is frost broken up

heavy spar reign   heavy phrase ravishment
            strands careening

let us unfurl instead: weather
            see also river

see also self and the less restricted sense   (17)

This is a book of inner and outer (and linguistic) weathers/formations:

see also   anagram the human oxide
see also   nomenclature grey textbloom

compare to articulate silicate compare to countersign
            to the tongue flowering   (36)

There’s so much beauty and intelligence and verve in this book—an intellectual and artistic vibrancy—I don’t know how to parse it. I don’t know that I want to. I’m always struggling with parts and pieces. I have the sense that this is true for Ms. Larkin too:

Look again: shadow chaos train chaos expecting never

I’m partly a mouthpiece partially an other partly indifferent
          winter winter

dodger cirrocumulus or every or suffer or mouth or late
thirty passed over doppler impossible she pushed into a
shadow and it pushed back

            don’t look

partly partially partly window partly fractured inland
and in body and system partly mixing up and
pinked out   (50)

How gorgeous is that? You probably don’t think, dear readers, that I expect you to answer. But I do, I do.

*****

Tom Beckett's Parts and Other Pieces was published recently by Otoliths. He lives in Kent, Ohio.