tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78120454821159652262024-03-12T17:28:28.772-07:00Galatea Resurrects #17 (A Poetry Engagement)Presenting engagements (including reviews) of poetry books & projects. Some issues also offer Featured Poets, a "The Critic Writes Poems" series, and/or Feature Articles.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger89125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-89026265582702356962011-12-22T22:25:00.000-08:002011-12-23T07:52:21.168-08:00Issue No. 17 TABLE OF CONTENTS<em>[N.B. You can scroll down on blog or click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to the referenced article.]</em><br /><br /><strong>EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION</strong><br /><a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/editors-introduction.html"><strong>Eileen Tabios</strong></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>NEW REVIEWS</strong><br />Nicholas Manning Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/irresponsibility-by-chris-vitiello.html"><strong>IRRESPONSIBILITY </strong></a>by Chris Vitiello<br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-phenomena-appear-to-unfold-by.html"><strong>HOW PHENOMENA APPEAR TO UNFOLD</strong></a> by Leslie Scalapino<br /><br />Allen Bramhall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/at-that-by-skip-fox.html"><strong>AT THAT</strong></a> by Skip Fox<br /><br />T.C. Marshall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/ethics-of-sleep-by-bernadette-mayer.html"><strong>ETHICS OF SLEEP</strong></a> by Bernadette Mayer<br /><br />Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/self-portrait-with-crayon-by-allison.html"><strong>SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CRAYON</strong></a> by Allison Benis White<br /><br />Laura Trantham Smith Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/utopia-minus-by-susan-briante.html"><strong>UTOPIA MINUS</strong></a> by Susan Briante <br /><br />Moira Richards Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-paran-by-larissa-shmailo.html"><strong>IN PARAN</strong></a> by Larissa Shmailo<br /><br />Philip Troy Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/feeling-is-actual-by-paolo-javier.html"><strong>THE FEELING IS ACTUAL</strong></a> by Paolo Javier<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/there-are-people-who-think-that.html"><strong>THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT PAINTERS SHOULDN’T TALK: A GUSTONBOOK</strong></a> by Patrick James Dunagan<br /><br />Logan Fry Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-common-dream-of-george-oppen-by.html"><strong>IN THE COMMON DREAM OF GEORGE OPPEN</strong></a> by Joseph Bradshaw<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/to-be-human-is-to-be-conversation-by.html"><strong>TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION </strong></a>by Andrea Rexilius<br /><br />Thomas Fink Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/parts-and-other-pieces-by-tom-beckett.html"><strong>PARTS AND OTHER PIECES</strong></a> by Tom Beckett<br /><br />T.C. Marshall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/publications-by-karen-weiser-and.html"><strong>TO LIGHT OUT by Karen Weiser and DUTIES OF AN ENGLISH FOREIGN SECRETARY by MacGregor Card</strong></a><br /><br />Allen Bramhall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/citizen-cain-by-ben-friedlander.html"><strong>CITIZEN CAIN</strong></a> by Ben Friedlander<br /> <br />William Allegrezza Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/forty-nine-guaranteed-ways-to-escape.html"><strong>FORTY-NINE GUARANTEED WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH </strong></a>by Sandy McIntosh<br /><br />Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/theres-hand-and-theres-arid-chair-by.html"><strong>THERE’S THE HAND AND THERE’S THE ARID CHAIR </strong></a>by Tomaz Salamun<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-life-as-doll-by-elizabeth-kirschner.html"><strong>MY LIFE AS A DOLL</strong></a> by Elizabeth Kirschner<br /><br />Gabriel Lovatt Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/use-of-speech-by-nathalie-sarraute.html"><strong>THE USE OF SPEECH </strong></a>by Nathalie Sarraute, translated from the French by Barbara Wright<br /><br />Logan Fry Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/portrait-of-colon-dash-parenthesis-by.html"><strong>PORTRAIT OF COLON DASH PARENTHESIS </strong></a>by Jeffrey Jullich<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/still-of-earth-as-ark-which-does-not.html"><strong>STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE </strong></a>by Matthew Cooperman<br /><br />Bill Scalia Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/urge-to-believe-is-stronger-than-belief.html"><strong>THE URGE TO BELIEVE IS STRONGER THAN BELIEF ITSELF </strong></a>by Erin M. Bertram<br /><br />Kristin Berkey-Abbot Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/faulkners-rosary-by-sarah-vap.html"><strong>FAULKNER’S ROSARY</strong></a> by Sarah Vap<br /><br />Micah Cavaleri Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/kyotologic-by-anne-gorrick.html"><strong>KYOTOLOGIC </strong></a>by Anne Gorrick<br /><br />Tom Beckett Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/seven-publications-by-jj-hastain.html"><strong>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</strong></a>, all by j/j hastain <br /><br />j/j hastain Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/good-cuntboy-is-hard-to-find-by-doug.html"><strong>A GOOD CUNTBOY IS HARD TO FIND</strong></a> by Doug Rice<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/60-textos-by-sarah-riggs.html"><strong>60 TEXTOS</strong></a> by Sarah Riggs<br /><br />Bill Scalia Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/beat-thing-by-david-meltzer.html"><strong>BEAT THING</strong></a> by David Meltzer<br /><br />Logan Fry Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/hank-by-abraham-smith.html"><strong>HANK </strong></a>by Abraham Smith<br /><br />T.C. Marshall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/books-on-navajo-poetry-by-anthony-k.html"><strong>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</strong></a>, Ed. Joshue Hoeynck<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/teeny-tiny-13-ed-amanda-laughtland.html"><strong>TEENY TINY #13</strong></a>, Edited by Amanda Laughtland<br /><br />Allen Bramhall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/antiphonies-essays-on-womens.html"><strong>ANTIPHONIES: ESSAYS ON WOMEN'S EXPERIMENTAL POETRIES IN CANADA</strong></a>, Ed. Nate Dorward<br /><br />Gabriel Lovatt Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/vacant-lot-by-oliver-rohe.html"><strong>VACANT LOT</strong></a> by Oliver Rohe, translated from the French by Laird Hunt<br /><br />Eric Wayne Dickey Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/punish-honey-by-karen-leona-anderson.html"><strong>PUNISH HONEY</strong></a> by Karen Leona Anderson<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/inside-money-machine-by-minnie-bruce.html"><strong>INSIDE THE MONEY MACHINE</strong></a> by Minnie Bruce Pratt<br /><br />Pam Brown Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/sly-mongoose-by-ken-bolton.html"><strong>SLY MONGOOSE</strong></a> by Ken Bolton<br /><br />T.C. Marshall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-long-by-ron-padgett.html"><strong>HOW LONG</strong></a> by Ron Padgett<br /><br />Neil Leadbeater Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/heron-in-buenos-aires-by-luis-benitez.html"><strong>A HERON IN BUENOS AIRES</strong></a> by Luis Benítez<br /><br />Jean Vengua Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/wisdom-anthology-of-north-american.html"><strong>THE WISDOM ANTHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICAN BUDDHIST POETRY</strong></a>, Editor Andrew Schelling <br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/waifs-and-strays-by-micah-ballard.html"><strong>WAIFS AND STRAYS</strong></a> by Micah Ballard<br /><br />T.C. Marshall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-tourism-by-harry-mathews.html"><strong>THE NEW TOURISM</strong></a> by Harry Mathews<br /><br />Guillermo Parra Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/hows-cows-by-jess-mynes.html"><strong>HOW’S THE COWS</strong></a> by Jess Mynes<br /><br />T.C. Marshall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/wide-road-by-carla-harryman-and-lyn.html"><strong>THE WIDE ROAD</strong></a> by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian<br /><br />John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/commons-by-sean-bonney.html"><strong>THE COMMONS</strong></a> by Sean Bonney<br /> <br />Pam Brown Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/perrier-fever-by-pete-spence.html"><strong>PERRIER FEVER</strong></a> by Pete Spence<br /><br />Jim McCrary Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/two-publications-by-maryrose-larkin.html"><strong>MARROWING and THE NAME OF THIS INTERSECTION IS FROST</strong></a>, both by Maryrose Larkin<br /><br />Tom Beckett Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/name-of-this-intersection-is-frost-by.html"><strong>THE NAME OF THIS INTERSECTION IS FROST</strong></a> by Maryrose Larkin<br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/two-publications-by-ammiel-alcalay-and.html"><strong>“NEITHER WIT NOR GOLD” by Ammiel Alcalay and STREET METE: VERTICAL ELEGIES 6 by Sam Truitt</strong></a><br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/radiator-by-nf-huth.html"><strong>RADIATOR </strong></a>by NF Huth<br /><br />Genevieve Kaplan Reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/chapbooks-by-james-cummins-christopher.html">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</a></strong><br /><br />L.S. Bassen Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/it-might-turn-out-we-are-real-by-susan.html"><strong>IT MIGHT TURN OUT WE ARE REAL </strong></a>by Susan Scarlata<br /><br />rob mclennan Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/three-novels-by-elizabeth-robinson.html"><strong>THREE NOVELS</strong></a> by Elizabeth Robinson<br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan & Ava Koohbor Review <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/teller-of-tales-stories-from-ferodwsis.html"><strong>THE TELLER OF TALES: STORIES FROM FERODWSI’S SHAHNAHMEN</strong></a>, Translated by Richard Jeffrey Newman<br /><br />Tom Hibbard Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/books-by-nick-demske-peter-oleary-garin.html"><strong>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</strong></a><br /><br />Jeff Harrison Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/dangerous-islands-by-seamas-cain.html"><strong>THE DANGEROUS ISLANDS (A NOVEL)</strong></a> by Séamas Cain<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/aliens-island-by-uljana-wolf.html"><strong>ALIENS: AN ISLAND </strong></a>by Uljana Wolf, Trans. from the German by Monika Zobel<br /><br />Kristin Berkey-Abbot Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/looking-up-harryette-mullen-interviews.html"><strong>LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN: INTERVIEWS ON SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY AND OTHER WORKS</strong></a> by Barbara Henning<br /><br />G. Justin Hulog Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/archipelago-dust-by-karen-llagas.html"><strong>ARCHIPELAGO DUST</strong></a> by Karen Llagas<br /><br />Allen Bramhall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/fragile-replacements-by-william.html"><strong>FRAGILE REPLACEMENTS</strong></a> by William Allegrezza<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/red-walls-by-james-tolan.html"><strong>RED WALLS</strong></a> by James Tolan<br /><br />Juliet Cook Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/compendium-by-kristina-marie-darling.html"><strong>COMPENDIUM </strong></a>by Kristina Marie Darling<br /><br />Bill Scalia Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-raven-said-by-robert-alexander.html"><strong>WHAT THE RAVEN SAID</strong></a> by Robert Alexander<br /> <br />Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/see-how-we-almost-fly-by-alison.html"><strong>SEE HOW WE ALMOST FLY</strong></a> by Alison Luterman<br /><br />Sunnylynn Thibodeaux Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/incompossible-by-carrie-hunter.html"><strong>THE INCOMPOSSIBLE</strong></a> by Carrie Hunter <br /><br />John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/two-publications-by-brandon-brown.html"><strong>908-1078 and THE PERSIANS BY AESCHYLUS</strong></a>, both by Brandon Brown<br /><br />Benjamin Winkler Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-in-my-trans-by-jj-hastain.html"><strong>WE IN MY TRANS</strong></a> by j/j hastain<br /><br />Mary Kasimor Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/t-lash-your-nipples-to-posthistory-is.html"><strong>T&U&/LASH YOUR NIPPLES TO A POST/HISTORY IS GORGEOUS </strong></a>by Jared Schickling<br /><br />Jeff Harrison Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/t-lash-your-nipples-to-post-history-is.html"><strong>T&U& LASH YOUR NIPPLES TO A POST HISTORY IS GORGEOUS </strong></a>by Jared Schickling<br /><br />rob mclennan Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/apollinaires-speech-to-war-medic-by.html"><strong>APOLLINAIRE’S SPEECH TO THE WAR MEDIC</strong></a> by Jake Kennedy<br /><br />Megan Burns Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/chaps-by-mairead-byrne-and-jimmy-lo.html"><strong>LUCKY by Mairéad Byrne and A REDUCTION by Jimmy Lo</strong></a><br /><br />Paul Lai Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/kerotakis-by-janice-lee.html"><strong>KĒROTAKIS :</strong></a> by Janice Lee<br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/poetry-memoirs-by-ted-greenwald-and.html"><strong>CLEARVIEW by Ted Greenwald and THE PUBLIC GARDENS: POEMS AND HISTORY by Linda Norton</strong></a> <br /><br />John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/kazoo-dreamboats-or-on-what-there-is-by.html"><strong>KAZOO DREAMBOATS OR, ON WHAT THERE IS </strong></a>by J.H. Prynne<br /><br />Gregory W. Randall Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/homelessness-of-self-by-susan-terris.html"><strong>THE HOMELESSNESS OF SELF</strong></a> by Susan Terris<br /><br />Jim McCrary Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-common-heart-by-anne-boyer-and-issue.html"><strong>MY COMMON HEART by Anne Boyer and ISSUE 8, Newsletter from James Yeary </strong></a><br /><br />Megan Burns Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/toast-in-house-of-friends-by-akilah.html"><strong>A TOAST IN THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS</strong></a> by Akilah Oliver<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/info-ration-by-stan-apps.html"><strong>INFO RATION</strong></a> by Stan Apps<br /><br />Bill Scalia Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/morning-news-is-exciting-by-don-mee.html"><strong>THE MORNING NEWS IS EXCITING</strong></a> by Don Mee Choi<br /><br />Micah Cavaleri Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/acoustic-experience-by-noah-eli-gordon.html"><strong>ACOUSTIC EXPERIENCE </strong></a>by Noah Eli Gordon<br /><br />Jim McCrary Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/publications-by-megan-kaminski-al.html"><strong>COLLECTION by Megan Kaminski, MANTIC SEMANTIC by A.L. Nielsen, LVNGinTONGUES by G. E. Schwartz, and PO DOOM by jim mccrary</strong></a><br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/blue-collar-poet-by-g-emil-reutter.html"><strong>BLUE COLLAR POET </strong></a>by G. Emil Reutter<br /><br />Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/if-not-metamorphic-by-brenda-iijima.html"><strong>IF NOT METAMORPHIC </strong></a>by Brenda Iljima<br /><br />Eileen Tabios Engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/ulterior-eden-by-jj-hastain.html"><strong>THE ULTERIOR EDEN: A SERIES OF GENUFLECTIONS, RUMINATIONS AND GYROSCOPES</strong></a> by j/j hastain<br /><br /><br /><strong>INTERVIEW</strong><br /><a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/interview-nf-huth.html"><strong>Tom Beckett Interviews NF Huth</strong></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>FEATURE ARTICLE</strong><br /><a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/feature-article.html"><strong>“Make a Wish…and Blow out the Candles: An Explication of Tennessee Williams’s <em>The Glass Menagerie</em>”</strong></a> by Nicholas T. Spatafora<br /><br /><br /><strong>THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS</strong><br /><a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/critic-writes-poems.html"><strong>Sunnylyn Thibodeaux</strong></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE</strong><br />Paul Lai Reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/automaton-biographies-by-larissa-lai.html"><strong>AUTOMATON BIOGRAPHIES</strong></a> by Larissa Lai<br /><br /><br /><strong>ADVERTISEMENTS</strong><br /><a href="http://poetsonrecession.blogspot.com/"><strong>Poets on the Great Recession</strong></a>: Poets reflect on the Great Recession, and its impact on their Poetry. Because<br /><blockquote><em>"To bring the poem into the world / is to bring the world into the poem."</em></blockquote> <br /><a href="http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com/2011/03/poets-on-adoption-inaugural-issue.html"><strong>Poets On Adoption:</strong></a> <br />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. <em>The same may be said about Adoption</em>."<br /><br /><br /><strong>BACK COVER</strong><br /><a href="http://galatearesurrection17.blogspot.com/2011/12/back-cover.html"><strong>A Thousand Words Plus...!</strong></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-60514566711988963512011-12-22T22:23:00.001-08:002012-03-05T12:39:34.000-08:00EDITOR'S INTRODUCTIONWow. 108 new poetry reviews! <br /><br />I also consider Poetry to be a creature. And I tease xir -- and vice versa -- many times. Earlier this year, I did an <a href="http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com">"angelic poker"</a> bet: that for <em>Galatea Resurrects' </em>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.<br /><br />Entonces: Thanks as ever to <em>GR</em>'s numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. In addition to some wonderful feature articles, we have, <strong>not </strong>a hundred but, <strong>108 NEW POETRY REVIEWS </strong>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 <em>GR</em>'s latest poetry-lovin' stats! <br /><br />Issue 1: 27 new reviews <br />Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)<br />Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)<br />Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)<br />Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice) <br />Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)<br />Issue 7: 51 new reviews <br />Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)<br />Issue 9: 65 new reviews<br />Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)<br />Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)<br />Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)<br />Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)<br />Issue 14: 64 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)<br />Issue 15: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 4 projects were reviewed twice)<br />Issue 16: 73 new reviews (2 projects were reviewed twice)<br />Issue 17: 108 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)<br /><br />Of reviewed publications, the following were generated from review copies sent to <em>GR</em>:<br /><br />Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews <br />Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews<br />Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews<br />Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews<br />Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews<br />Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews<br />Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews <br />Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews<br />Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews<br />Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews<br />Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews<br />Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews<br />Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews<br />Issue 14: 40 out of 64 new reviews<br />Issue 15: 43 out of 72 new reviews<br />Issue 16: 49 out of 73 new reviews<br />Issue 17: 73 out of 108 new reviews<br /><br />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 <a href="http://grarchives.blogspot.com"><strong>HERE</strong></a>. Future reviewers also should note that the next review submission deadline is April 15, 2012.<br /><br />As of Issue No. 17, we are pleased to report that <em>GR </em>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.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Such excitement around here! It's no wonder that we and <a href="http://galatearesurrects.blogspot.com"><strong><em>Galatea Resurrects</em></strong></a> also has now come to be the subject of a ... college student's paper! Please go <a href="http://goodchatty.blogspot.com/2011/10/drew-butler-reports-on-galatea.html"><strong>HERE </strong></a>to see excerpts from University of Colorado college student Drew Butler's paper on us! <br /><br />*****<br /><br />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).<br /><br />*****<br /><br />From our family to you: Happy Holidays!<br /><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oC_Q5c6t-lg/Tt6GeKLdTmI/AAAAAAAAB8Y/Q36NMsVfP4U/s1600/photo.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oC_Q5c6t-lg/Tt6GeKLdTmI/AAAAAAAAB8Y/Q36NMsVfP4U/s400/photo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683127632474754658" /></a><br /><br />With much love, poetry, vino and fur, <br /><br />Eileen Tabios<br />St. Helena, CA<br />December 22, 2011Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-68494148232630637512011-12-22T22:19:00.000-08:002011-12-23T07:58:22.504-08:00IRRESPONSIBILITY by CHRIS VITIELLONICHOLAS MANNING Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Irresponsibility </em>by Chris Vitiello</strong><br /><em>(Ahsahta, Boise, ID, 2008)</em><br /><br /><em>{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}</em><br /> <br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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 <em>Irresponsibility </em>had recently arrived. <br /><br /> I wanted to read it. To reread it. <br /><br /> But why… This is never so easy to say. I wanted to read <em>Irresponsibility </em>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. <br /><br /> A coming-to-terms. <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> I felt it did not shy away from this possibility: it does us no good.<br /><blockquote>Closing your eyes is <br />lying to yourself about fooling yourself <br />(24)</blockquote><br />I liked this. I wanted this. I remembered too <em>Irresponsibility’s </em>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: <br /> <blockquote>If the idea is optimally down <br />Or moved along and the sentences are dull<br />Or all the same length or awkward I’m<br />Not going to do anything about them <br />(27)</blockquote><br />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. <br /><br /> Writing is reflexive if flexible. <em>Irresponsibility </em>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, <em>Irresponsibility </em>is like a charming drunk who never stops introducing and reintroducing himself, only in ever more engaging ways. <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> This week, I had been reading <em>Robinson Crusoe </em>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”.<br /><br /> 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). <br /><br /> I remembered defending Vitiello against a friend who stumbled across <em>Irresponsibility’s </em>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 <em>moved me</em>. <br /><br /> 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”.<br /><blockquote><em>To be </em>is the verb behind all verbs <br />except <em>to be</em> <br />(27)</blockquote><br />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. <br /><br /> It is important, I think, that the listed time is “45 minutes” and not “1 hour”. <br /><br /> Think about this. <br /><br /> My friend asked why Vitiello punctuated his “great lines” (“Everything points to not writing things down” [36]) with other “less interesting random stuff”. <br /><br /> I said this was an apt summary of my life. <br /><br /> “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.<br /><br /> Often, I get tired of saying that books are “extroardinary” or “adjective”. <br /><br /> I wanted to read <em>Irresponsibility </em>when I didn’t want to read anything else. <br /><br /> There is nothing to add after this. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Nicholas Manning's new collection <em>Homo Sentimentalis: A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy </em>- which Kent Johnson has called "probably the greatest single-poet book of love poems in the field of avant American poetry since <em>For Love </em>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 <a href="http://www.thecontinentalreview.com"><em>The Continental Review </em></a>and maintains the weblog <a href="http://www.thenewermetaphysicals.blogspot.com"><em>The Newer Metaphysicals</em></a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-18960368371085871582011-12-22T22:17:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:49:24.806-08:00HOW PHENOMENA APPEAR TO UNFOLD by LESLIE SCALAPINOPATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>How Phenomena Appear to Unfold</em> by Leslie Scalapino</strong><br /><em>(Litmus press, Brooklyn, 2011)</em><br /><br />Although I’ve never much cared for Leslie Scalapino’s poems and often found her public appearances extremely trying <em>How Phenomena Appear to Unfold </em>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. <br /> <br />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. <br /><br />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 <em>there</em>.” <br /><br />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 <em>actually </em>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 <em>don’t </em>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.” <br /><br />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.<br /><blockquote>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. </blockquote><br />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 <em>The Grand Piano/ An experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-80 </em>then being published serially as authored by her Language peers. <br /><br />In a good, gruff extended squabble extrapolated from out her book <em>R-hu </em>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:<br /><blockquote>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. </blockquote><br />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. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in Gleeson library at University of San Francisco. His most recent book is <em>There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTONBOOK </em>(Post Apollo, 2011), other writing of his appears in <em>Amerarcana, Barzakh, The Critical Flame, Fulcrum, House Organ, New Pages, Poetry Project Newsletter, Rain Taxi, Sous les Paves, Switchback</em>, and <em>Wild Orchids</em>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-30529640920039837972011-12-22T22:15:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:48:28.213-08:00AT THAT by SKIP FOXALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>At That</em> by Skip Fox</strong><br /><em>(Ahadada Books, Buffalo, N.Y., 2005)</em><br /><br />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, <em>What If</em>. The present book lingers in the same delight as that one. Officially, I believe it stands as follow up to the earlier triumph.<br /><br /><em>At That </em>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><em>At That</em> consists of a bookful of sections. It looks like sections may reach one page in length, most are less. Pagination stops at 186.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Allen Bramhall is the author of <a href="http://meritagepress.com/dayspoem.htm"><em>DAYS POEM</em></a> (Meritage Press), among other things...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-12694864083088635152011-12-22T22:13:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:28:08.345-08:00ETHICS OF SLEEP by BERNADETTE MAYERT.C. MARSHALL Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Ethics of Sleep</em> by Bernadette Mayer</strong><br /><em>(Trembling Pillow, New Orleans, 2011)</em><br /><br /><strong>MIND BOOTY</strong><br /><br /> 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? <br /><br />My favorite, of course, is the last, which starts:<br /><blockquote>A dream called <u>Conversation with Ted Berrigan</u>. That’s it for the rest of<br />the glow, there’s the lace and the prolific by the ocean’s<br />rose hip blossom pressed to recall the ignorance of homilies<br />there’s a whole lot more the spider who swings down and around<br />the green gangrene of influence like your toes might fall off<br />if you don’t get to holding hands very soon,</blockquote><br />and ends: <blockquote> Chicken pot<br />pies and jazz with Ted while he’s the vice presidential<br />candidate.<br /> “What side are we on?” I say<br /> “I don’t know, the last cut on the first side I guess,”<br /> he says. <br /> (19)</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br /> After that comes an eight-page poem composed almost entirely of questions that asks:<br /> <blockquote>Have you read the sonnets of Rototeille?<br />Are you reading books in the middle or in the center?<br /> Have you found a number of genres?<br /> Did the snow park separate at the top & slide down on bellies?<br /> Try to describe everything. <br /> (22)</blockquote><br />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?”<br /><br /> 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:<br /><blockquote>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)</blockquote><br />He says this right after commenting on an “angry review” of her <em>Poetry State Forest </em>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 <em>Ethics of Sleep</em> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /> <blockquote>We finally understand how the brain works!<br /> --John Lilly, M.D.<br /><br /><br /><br />I’m leaving all my money to Bernadette Mayer because she’s the best writer, especially <em>Ethics of Sleep</em>.<br /> --John Ashbery</blockquote><br />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 <em>Scarlet Tanager</em> in 2005. This spacing makes a difference and again shows a level of attention to how a poem reads that is consciously writerly; in <em>Ethics of Sleep</em>, 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:<br /><blockquote>You could only feel the air like cold’s envelope surrounding the body<br /> like sleep</blockquote><br />OR<br /> <blockquote>Sleep is the stealing of beds inside and outside<br /> and the simple finding of them</blockquote><br />OR<br /><blockquote>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]</blockquote><br />OR<br /><blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />OR<br /><blockquote>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<br /> (57-59)</blockquote><br />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. <br /><blockquote>Bernadette is a treasure.<br /> --Johnny Depp</blockquote><br /><br />*****<br /><br />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 <em>Post Language</em>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-5327335653143124502011-12-22T22:12:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:27:52.952-08:00SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CRAYON by ALLISON BENIS WHITEFIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Self-Portrait with Crayon</em> by Allison Benis White</strong><br /><em>(Cleveland State University, OH, 2009)</em><br /><br /><strong>Beyond Grief and Melancholy</strong><br /><br /><em>Self-Portrait with Crayon</em> 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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />There are many lines I greatly admire, and here is just a short list:<br /> <blockquote>There is a hinge at the end of a lake boat, but I still don’t know how to draw the fear of separation. <br /> — “Waiting”<br /><br /> 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.<br /> — “Portrait of Mlle. Helene Rouart”<br /><br /> It was Santa Monica and waves rushed toward a collective sigh. Twice, under my breath, I said <em>no</em>. A necklace unclasps here, like touch. <em>Closer</em>. It is only love that requires a face.<br /> ¬— “At the Seaside”<br /><br /> But what good is her voice without her ear? <br /> — “The Song Rehearsal”<br /><br /> Sometimes it helps to think of this or nothing. <br /> — “Melancholy”</blockquote><br />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. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Fiona Sze-Lorrain's book of poetry, <em>Water the Moon </em>(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 <em>Cerise Press</em>, she is also a <em>zheng </em>concertist. (<a href="http://www.fionasze.com">www.fionasze.com</a>)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-49065473837309434972011-12-22T22:10:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:27:39.439-08:00UTOPIA MINUS by SUSAN BRIANTELAURA TRANTHAM SMITH Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Utopia Minus</em> by Susan Briante</strong><br /> <em>(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2011)</em><br /><br />Susan Briante’s second full-length collection, <em>Utopia Minus</em>, 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. <br /><br />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 <em>fall </em>into ruin <em>after </em>they are built but rather <em>rise </em>into ruin before they are built.”<br /><br />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). <br /><br />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).<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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). <br /><br /> Something central about Briante’s intellectual, emotional, and poetic practice comes through in the poem “Nail Guns in the Morning.” She writes,<br /><blockquote>Storms this afternoon in Dallas<br />In the parking lot of the Target/Best Buy/Payless Shopping Center,<br />Big chalices of rain, contusioned sky over the east, big yellow bus moving north<br />Toward the dark end of—what?—<br /><br />This weather, this fiscal year, the end of empire during which I am reading<br />The circulars stuck in my screen door, ice waiting<br />In the highest breath of atmosphere. <br />It will get to us.<br /><br />…<br />Last night over dirty dishes, I told Farid<br />I would never write a poem that just said: <em>Stop the War</em>.</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br />Briante’s refusal in the final line above (“I would never write a poem that just said: <em>Stop the War</em>.”) 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>Utopia Minus </em>most documents: a sense not of abstract connection or continuity, exactly, but of everything actually <em>touching </em>everything else, a concerted contiguity: “every day/ another source of heat expires, bones from another/ century” (81).<br /><br />*****<br /> <br />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 <em>Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.</em> and <em>Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy</em>. She teaches poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at Stevenson University in Maryland.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-56511508461241419042011-12-22T21:14:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:26:16.764-08:00IN PARAN by LARISSA SHMAILOMOIRA RICHARDS Reviews<br /><br /><strong><a href="http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/in-paran-by-larissa-shmailo-154/"><em>In Paran</em></a> by Larissa Shmailo</strong><br /><em>(BlazeVOX [books], Kenmore, NY, 2009)</em><br /><br /><blockquote> … The poppies pour<br /><br /> their juice in the red rain which will crack, in time, all o-<br /> ther things. She drinks him with her hands. He follows<br /> with her breast. She sees him with his chest, in this bo-<br /><br /> dy not her own, but which, in the night, is hers. Like the<br /> heat that swells all things, she sings the night with him.<br /> He follows her with his voice; she sees him with her skin<br /><br /> --“He follows her”</blockquote><br /><br />I marvel at the palpability of the passion on the first pages of <em>In Paran</em>; 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!<br /><br />On the poet’s website I find <a href="http://www.myspace.com/larissashmailoexorcism/videos/exorcism-by-larissa-shmailo/39985796"><em>OVERTURE For An EXORCiSM; A spoken word poetry with music trailer for Larissa Shmailo's latest CD "Exorcism"</em></a>, a 3-minute performance which includes snippets from some of these jazz-bluesy songs of heady all-consuming love. <br /><br />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: <br /><br /><em>How to Meet and Dance with Your Death (Como encuentrar y bailar con su muerte): A Cure for Suicide </em>– part of this hypnotic, injunction-laden, prose poem appears in the Exorcism trailer I referenced above. <br /><br />Such too, as: <em>Sea Sic (Readers: please read the stanzas in any order you like)</em>.<br /><br />And there’s the prose poem comprised solely of couple of hundred words, a <em>List of Words Never To Be Used in Poems </em>every one of which proves it sooo must have its place in the poem.<br /><br />But I’m getting ahead of myself. This second section of Shmailo’s collection (entitled, rather intriguingly, <em>Lit Crit</em>) begins with the poem, <em>In Paran</em>, 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 <em>New Life 2…</em><br /> <blockquote>Imagine that the epoch ends in an idyl. The words that came<br /> In monologues are rain dialogues now. And the flame,<br /> That consumed others better than you, greedily, like logs;<br /> In you it saw little use or warmth, and, like the dogs,<br /> That’s why you were spared, why shrapnel gave you only fear.</blockquote><br />The clouds soon disappear, though, with poetry like the marvelously wacky three-page <em>Bloom </em>that riffs on tongue-twistering lines such as these:<br /> <blockquote>All ways a feather: bed your bugs as they bud<br /> Welling roses these sweltering days<br /> Rose roaches blooming by books, near pillows<br /> Blooming by Bloomsday, busting out by June<br /> Busting on Broadway, busting the busts…</blockquote><br />which seques later into<br /> <blockquote>(Forests of feathers: naked birds shrieking<br /> Bony birds swooping<br /> Burning birds screaming<br /> Descending like hell)</blockquote><br />and finally, after heady verbal ride, to a tart riposte:<br /> <blockquote>But I’m Molly Bloom, I’m a mammal,<br /> I have mammaries, see: This is a bust!<br /> I don’t touch dead birds.</blockquote> <br />The third and final section of this book bears title, <em>In the World</em>, 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: <br /><br /><em>Exorcism (Found Poem), </em>a three-page piece, mourns, with chant-like refrain and repeats, the US massacre at My Lai in 1968:<br /> <blockquote>I stand on holy ground<br /> I stand on holy ground<br /> I stand on holy ground<br /> I stand on holy ground<br /> I stand on holy ground<br /> …….<br /> The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred<br /> The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred<br /> The troops of C Company killed five to six hundred<br /> Civilians on that day<br /><br /> The killings took a long time<br /> …….<br /> The killings took a long time<br /> …….<br />The killings took a long time<br /> …….<br />I stand on holy ground<br /> I stand on holy ground<br /> I stand on holy ground<br /> I stand on holy ground.</blockquote><br />Immediately after that, <em>How my Family survived the camps</em>, builds its affect with question-filled refrains inserted between the longer narrative stanzas:<br /> <blockquote>How did my family survive the camps?<br /> Were they smarter, stronger than the rest?<br /> Were they lucky?<br /> Did luck exist in Dora-Nordhausen,<br /> Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen?<br /> …….<br /> How did my family survive?<br /> They offered no resistance<br /> Did they collaborate?<br /> Is complicity possible without choice?<br /> …….<br /> How did my family survive?<br /> Survive is not the right word.<br /> I’m alive, my father would say, alive<br /> Alive because I did not die; others died.<br /><br /> Keep breathing, he encouraged me in difficult times,<br /> Keep breathing.</blockquote><br />Indeed. Keep breathing. This collection can, in places, take your breath away.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Moira Richards lives in South Africa and hangs out online <a href="http://www.darlingtonrichards.com"><strong>here </strong></a> and <a href="http://redroom.com/member/moira-richards"><strong>here</strong></a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-278392277442095442011-12-22T21:00:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:26:00.063-08:00THE FEELING IS ACTUAL by PAOLO JAVIERPHILIP TROY Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>The Feeling is Actual </em>by Paolo Javier</strong><br /><em>(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2011)</em><br /><br /><strong>3D Glasses and Collage Tropes in Paolo Javier's <em>The Feeling Is Actual</em></strong><br /><br /> On a first look into the Filipino American poet Paolo Javier's <em>The Feeling is Actual</em>, 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).<br /><br /> <em>The Feeling is Actual </em>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: <br /><blockquote><strong>This Pepperoni</strong><br /><br />is a one-<br />of-a-<br />kind<br /><br />you'd love it too<br />if you<br />were<br />pepperoni-inclined<br />it's got big, big, flavor! (8)</blockquote><br />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. <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> 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:<br /><blockquote>It was a no-win-win situation<br />It was as brand as new<br />It was as clean as daylight<br /> for me<br /><br />“Hi, I'm Paolo,” I said, “What's yours?”<br /><br />I couldn't help myself to it<br />you reap what you saw<br />the sky's the langit, &<br />I am only human nature (68)</blockquote><br />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 <em>Finnegan's Wake</em>, 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.”<br /><br /> “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:<br /><blockquote>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).</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br /> 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:<br /><blockquote>oy Jean-Michel<br /> tangina, pre<br /><br />who's laughing now<br /> raging<br />all the way to the<br /> corner bodega<br /><br /> in the clouds where<br />former champs gather<br /><br />oy bodega (108)</blockquote><br />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:<br /><blockquote>but I awoke groggy this morning<br />one of six philistines missing<br /><br />I'd love to break the jawbones<br /> of an ass<br />& serve it to him on a plate<br />stupid dumb dog motherfucker<br /> - -----<br /> (blank black) (109)</blockquote><br /> 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 <em>Santo Vs. The Vampire Women</em>, 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). <br /><br /> 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, <br /><blockquote>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).</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><small>+++<br />Works Cited:<br />Javier, Paolo. <em>The Feeling Is Actual</em>. East Rockaway, NY: Marsh Hawk Press, 2011. Print.<br />Perloff, Marjorie. "Collage and Poetry." <em>Encyclopedia of Aesthetics</em>. Ed. Michael Kelly. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford U P, 1998. 384-87. Web. <a href="http://marjorieperloff.com/articles/collage-poetry/">http://marjorieperloff.com/articles/collage-poetry/</a>. Accessed 12/03/2011 Wagner, Cynthia G. "Poetry In The Digital Age." <em>Futurist 42.1 </em>(2008): 16. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 Dec. 2011.<br />Zhou, Xiaojing. "Language And A Poetics Of Collage: Catalina Cariaga's <em>Cultural Evidence</em>." <em>Melus </em> 29.1 (n.d.): 157. Gale: Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Nov. 2011.</small><br /><br />*****<br /><br />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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-75460289571330375852011-12-22T19:31:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:25:47.891-08:00THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT PAINTERS SHOULDN'T TALK: A GUSTONBOOK by PATRICK JAMES DUNAGANEILEEN TABIOS Engages<br /> <br /><strong><em>There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTONBOOK</em> by Patrick James Dunagan</strong> <br /><em>(The Post-Apollo Press, Sausalito, CA, 2011)</em><br /> <br />Yes, I've met plenty of those people who think that <em>painters shouldn't talk</em>. 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.<br /><br />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 <em>There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk: A GUSTON BOOK</em>: <br /> <blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />Thus, did Guston inspire Dunagan to create this (from the publisher's press release) "<em>GUSTONBOOK</em>...[,] 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..."<br /><br />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<br /><blockquote>A hand moves<br />eye starts the<br />words go</blockquote><br /> --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").<br /> <br />But there also are lines like <br /><blockquote>Alphabets<br /> <br />Signs<br /> <br />Blinds<br /> <br />Waves<br /> <br />Piers<br /> <br />Charts<br /> <br />Thighs </blockquote><br />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. <br /> <br />Such engagement with environment—or this attention to one’s <em>Now</em>—also offers an appealing scaffolding to the poet's words:<br /><blockquote>Fact is you don't choose<br />between the door<br />and that first step out<br />into the street<br />there's harmony<br />welcoming every day<br />just like yesterday</blockquote><br />The poet's personality—the author's existence—is not evaded, e.g. the poet's love for books:<br /><blockquote>Opening to a page<br />is like fucking</blockquote><br />And it's all good—<br /><blockquote>Out of nothing<br />always something<br />rises along<br />paths nobody walks<br /> <br />'you get there<br />thinking it's<br />somewhere else'<br /> <br />utter bullshit<br />you are somewhere<br />to get there<br />is something else</blockquote><br />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:<br /><blockquote>Solitude in busy night<br />glancing lights a look<br />hands over thigh his<br />her rubs itself<br />driving around in search<br />of the next perhaps<br />occasion of knowing others</blockquote><br />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.<br /> <br />*****<br /><br />Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em> as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book <a href="http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/tabios.html"><strong><em>SILK EGG: Collected Novels </em></strong></a>is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in <a href="http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2011/03/silk-egg-by-eileen-r-tabios.html"><strong><em>Boston Area Poetry Scene</em>; </strong></a>by Michael Leong in <a href="http://bigother.com/2011/06/10/eileen-r-tabios-silk-egg-collected-novels-shearsman-2011/"><strong><em>Big Other</em></strong></a>; by Alan Baker in <a href="http://www.leafepress.com/litter3/litterbug02/litterbug02.html"><strong><em>Litter</em></strong></a>; and by <a href="http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2011/08/eileen-r-tabios-silk-eggs-collected.html"><strong><em>rob mclennan</em></strong></a>. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews <em>SILK EGG</em> along with two other books, <a href="http://notabeneeiswein.blogspot.com"><strong><em>NOTA BENE EISWEIN</em></strong></a> and <a href="http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/footnotes-to-algebra-uncollected-poems-1995-2009-by-eileen-tabios-169/"><strong><em>FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009</em></strong></a> at <a href="http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/99980.html"><strong><em>Asian American Lit Fans</em></strong></a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-44679595071944819412011-12-22T19:15:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:25:34.461-08:00IN THE COMMON DREAM OF GEORGE OPPEN by JOSEPH BRADSHAWLOGAN FRY Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>In the Common Dream of George Oppen </em>by Joseph Bradshaw</strong><br /><em>(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2011)</em><br /><br />The line between truth and fiction is deliberately blurred in Joseph Bradshaw’s <em>In the Common Dream of George Oppen</em>, 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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:<br /><blockquote>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.)</blockquote><br />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. <br /><br /> 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:<br /><blockquote> <strong>circa 41,000 BCE</strong>—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 <em>Sonnets to Orpheus</em>: “O hoher Baum im Ohr!” [A tree arises in the ear].<br /><br /><strong>375 BCE</strong>—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.<br /><br /><strong>1170 CE</strong>—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.’</blockquote><br />The gaps in the timeline rapidly condense, moving through 1797, the 1950s, 1963, 1965, and 1984 to end with:<br /><blockquote><strong>early 2000s</strong>—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.</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br /> 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?<br /><br /> 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, <em>Incipit</em>:<br /><blockquote>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:<br /><br />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.<br />…<br />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.</blockquote><br />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. <br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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 <em>did </em>sit down with the Elephant Man for that interview. Oppen <em>did</em>, “in those 25 blank years,…visit the green shores of Idaho.” Bradshaw <em>did </em>capture that long gap in the life—in a life—of George Oppen.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Logan Fry lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas. His poetry has most recently appeared in <em>elimae</em>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-89248654705596911352011-12-22T18:50:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:25:19.674-08:00TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION by ANDREA REXILIUSEILEEN TABIOS Engages<br /><br /><strong><em>TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION</em> by Andrea Rexilius</strong><br /><em>(Rescue + Press, Milwaukee, WI, 2011)</em><br /><br />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’ <em>TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION</em>—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:<br /><blockquote>My apologies to my half-brother, Ben, for temporarily denying his existence on page 3 of this book.</blockquote><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><blockquote><strong>Essay on Sisterhood</strong><br /><br />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.</blockquote><br />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:<br /><blockquote>spoken as pasture<br /> sky broken to earth<br /><br /><br /> a groan in the growing<br /><br /><br />reflection,<br />how two lungs resemble<br /><br /><br /> a roof<br /><br /><br /> possibility re-assembling<br /> interruption, an interrogation<br /><br /><br /><em>hold yourself up to this light</em> </blockquote><br />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:<br /><blockquote><strong>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?</strong><br /><br />Some words seem inherently Beautiful to me. A word like <em>azure</em>, 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 <em>z</em>.<br /><br /><em>A ZZZZZZZZZ OOOOR</em><br /><br />I love this word, <em>azure</em>.<br /><br />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, <em>Azure</em>? I can see the individual hairs on his mustache move from the breeze of that <em>Azure</em>.<br /><br />If that incident happened, I believe I no longer would find <em>azure </em>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 …<br /><br />… as I once did with <em>azure</em>.</blockquote><br />This realization is not a loss but a revelation. It resulted from a conversation.<br /><br />My gratitude to the poet’s humanity for enabling me to recommend <em>TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE A CONVERSATION </em>by Andrea Rexilius.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em> as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book <a href="http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/tabios.html"><strong><em>SILK EGG: Collected Novels </em></strong></a>is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in <a href="http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2011/03/silk-egg-by-eileen-r-tabios.html"><strong><em>Boston Area Poetry Scene</em>; </strong></a>by Michael Leong in <a href="http://bigother.com/2011/06/10/eileen-r-tabios-silk-egg-collected-novels-shearsman-2011/"><strong><em>Big Other</em></strong></a>; by Alan Baker in <a href="http://www.leafepress.com/litter3/litterbug02/litterbug02.html"><strong><em>Litter</em></strong></a>; and by <a href="http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2011/08/eileen-r-tabios-silk-eggs-collected.html"><strong><em>rob mclennan</em></strong></a>. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews <em>SILK EGG</em> along with two other books, <a href="http://notabeneeiswein.blogspot.com"><strong><em>NOTA BENE EISWEIN</em></strong></a> and <a href="http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/footnotes-to-algebra-uncollected-poems-1995-2009-by-eileen-tabios-169/"><strong><em>FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009</em></strong></a> at <a href="http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/99980.html"><strong><em>Asian American Lit Fans</em></strong></a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-44955350864729162512011-12-22T18:30:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:24:52.238-08:00PARTS AND OTHER PIECES by TOM BECKETTTHOMAS FINK Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Parts and Other Pieces </em>by Tom Beckett</strong><br /><em>(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2011)</em><br /><br /><em>Parts and Other Pieces</em> 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 <em>Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems </em>(2007). The prior poem, as I have written in <em>Jacket 34 </em>(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.<br /> <br />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.”<br /><br />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 <em>not </em>like to know it if <em>no one </em>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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, <em>ad hominem</em> 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 <em>produces </em>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. <br /><br />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).<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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 <em>Pieces </em>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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>Parts and Other Pieces </em>ends with “Reattach<em>meant</em>” (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 “<em>frisson</em>” but “engagement” in ongoing discoveries.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Thomas Fink is the author of 2 books of criticism, including <em>A Different Sense of Power: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry</em>, and of 7 books of poetry, most recently <em>Peace Conference</em>, and co-editor of a critical anthology on David Shapiro. His paintings hang in various collections.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-62873937528852368362011-12-22T18:15:00.000-08:002011-12-22T18:15:01.039-08:00PUBLICATIONS by KAREN WEISER and MACGREGOR CARDT.C. MARSHALL Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>To Light Out </em>by Karen Weiser</strong> <br /><em>(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2010)</em><br /><br />and<br /><br /><strong><em>Duties of an English Foreign Secretary </em>by MacGregor Card</strong><br /><em>(Fence Books, Albany, N.Y., 2009)</em><br /><br /><strong>FAMILIALS</strong><br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> That Karen Weiser says the works are “familial” is in line with the poetry she presents in <em>To Light Out</em>. 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 <em>Songs for the Unborn Second Baby</em>. 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).<br /><br /> 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.”<br /><br /> 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.<br /> <blockquote>The dispatches, possibly, picked up<br /> a static I couldn’t register<br /> multiplying in hypotheticals like cells<br />when lo! The tall belfries discontinued<br />for the hundredth time and in mid-sound snow<br />I picked up the crackling of another <br />(20)</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br /> One thinks of his complaints at the end of that poem:<br /> <blockquote>You hear the dead are unregenerate<br /> tuning out or in at the edges of your ears<br />I grieve to think of this murmur’s<br /> frnge of vague moves static to center—<br /><br /> cross it and you yourself are leavened<br />hawking the sound of space<br />still pushing out the big bang <br />(20)</blockquote><br />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”):<br /> <blockquote>elements use every damn instrument<br /> to play the turning over of absence<br />like the world has found a rare plum<br /> in its invaded silence<br />something bitten through<br /> this loose blue tableau<br />turnkey in relation to what it inhabits <br />(21)</blockquote><br />The next (“SO IT GOES “) and the next (“DO YOU FANCY WE REMAIN INFERIOR MACHINES”) speak through and of this machinery as well:<br /> <blockquote>In its minute bumping against the walls<br /> the future’s at the center of every room<br /> a message for eyes roaming in place<br /> …<br /><br /> Forget the machine is only a device<br /> as it shapes the exit from womb to physical<br /> séance, …<br /><br /> So it goes, and a mollusk can not draw<br /> the machine as we can not draw the heart<br /> with its hot round push<br /> the future is but another form of retort<br /> between machines with eyes<br /> that see but a part<br /> (23)</blockquote><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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:<br /> <blockquote>In what peace can a Christian<br />Home in the dark<br />Put out the light<br />Eating its young <br />(18)</blockquote><br />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:<br /> <blockquote>Something is moving beside me<br />Nothing’s supposed to be there<br />Either I have a heart of stone<br />or I haven’t got a heart<br />perhaps I have only a stone<br />and that stone is <em>not </em>my heart<br />and that stone is neither <em>like </em>my heart<br />for I have no heart, I only have a stone<br />following down to the sea <br />(59)</blockquote><br /> In “RULE OF HOSPITALITY,” there’s a plea that speaks to the sense of these poems:<br /><blockquote>I alone were fraught with confidence<br />Doubt offset by counter-<br />Doubt to fuckdom come<br />But I need you<br />To <em>feel </em>my pretense</blockquote><br />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:<br /> <blockquote>I alone were fraught with confidence<br /> The key in my hand<br /> Made me horny<br /> Because I was telling the truth—<br /> I was here on my own authority<br />And it’s none of my business<br /> Walking on air<br /> With my friends to your door <br />(51)</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br /> 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:<br /><blockquote><strong>TO LIGHT OUT</strong><br /><br /> To light out is to burst into young legs<br /> toward an opening in the newly made wild<br /> toward the stain of gold machines we have set in motion<br />around the curtain of bad weather<br /><br />In the opening of its glimpse the conversation flutters<br />like gardens that are the garden’s brother<br />I say pass me my book of gardens<br />to cultivate a generosity of opening<br /><br />You say the gardens are heavy with saffron associations<br />and we are kneeling in its applied territory<br />a blistered web of circumstance<br />distributing the way we desire ourselves<br />having been built by these environments<br /><br />Take your horn out of the night<br />garden of constellations<br />and vow me a club of body<br />an endlessly opening frontier of rapid sketches<br />pressed between the pages of knowing <br /><br />(67)</blockquote><br /><br />*****<br /><br />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 <em>Post Language</em>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-38173664893283080342011-12-22T18:00:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:24:34.705-08:00CITIZEN CAIN by BEN FRIEDLANDERALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Citizen Cain</em> by Ben Friedlander</strong><br /><em>(<a href="http://www.saltpublishing.com">Salt Publishing</a>, London, 2011)</em> <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>one </em>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />There’s no saying (nor should there be) whether Ben harvested all this from Google searches or if he <em>made it up</em>. 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.<br /><br />The poems radiate on:<br /><blockquote>“The ontological status of news that stays news <br />takes a long time to load<br />with a dial-up connection.”</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br />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”:<br /><blockquote>“Preaching Gospel to Megadeth fans, the Jew<br />is a new partner<br />who prevents infection.”</blockquote><br />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?<br /><br />“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):<br /><blockquote>“Zucchini soup with tousled-<br />haired children seeking inroads<br />To a poisoned well of tears”</blockquote><br />It is hard to explain the poetic displacement here. The train of thought draws cars of unconditioned response. To wit: <em>Zucchini soup </em>brings Martha Stewart to mind. <em>Tousled-haired children </em>asks a plodding sentiment, antipodal (let us say) to Ms Stewart. <em>Poisoned well </em>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.”<br /><br />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: <em>that </em>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 <em>thing </em>to comprise demands a peculiar embrace. The poet must endeavour this job.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The poems in <em>Citizen Cain</em> 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<br /><br />In summing up lowest common denominator style, I find <em>Citizen Cain </em>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.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Allen Bramhall is the author of <a href="http://meritagepress.com/dayspoem.htm"><em>DAYS POEM</em></a> (Meritage Press), among other things...Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-27210075628136088672011-12-22T17:45:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:24:19.448-08:00FORTY-NINE GUARANTEED WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH by SANDY MCINTOSHWILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death</em> by Sandy McIntosh</strong><br /><em>(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2007)</em><br /><br />List poems, poetry review poems, invented musical instrument poems--Sandy McIntosh’s <em>Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death</em> 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<em> basso profundo in extremes</em>,” 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 <em>Intestines</em>; still, this combination of the surreal and real create interesting juxtapositions and blur the line between reality and fiction. <br /><br />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:<br /> <blockquote>My father knew General Eisenhower. I was three or four. <br /> He took me to meet the ex-president during half time <br /> at a Colgate vs Army football game. “How are you, my<br /> boy?” Eisenhower asked, patting my head. “I have to<br /> wee-wee,” I supposedly answered. He bent down and<br /> supposedly confided, “I do, too.”</blockquote><br />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.”<br /><br />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. <br /><blockquote>8. Body Parts Sorted by Spiritual Merit<br /><br /> 9. Machines that Reduce Objects to Their Actual Size<br /><br /> 10. Four Hundred Fifty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death<br /><br /> 11. Fossil Forms of Thought<br /><br /> 12. The Twelve Secrets of Successful Polygamists</blockquote><br />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?<br /><br />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. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />William Allegrezza is the editor of <em>Moria Poetry</em> and author of numerous poetry collections, which can be seen on the left-hand column of his <a href="http://allegrezza.blogspot.com/">blog</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-36201090192566736272011-12-22T17:31:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:21:26.824-08:00THERE'S THE HAND AND THERE'S THE ARID CHAIR by TOMAZ SALAMUNFIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews<br /><br /><em><em>There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair </em>by Tomaz Salamun</em> <br /><em>(Counterpath Press, Denver, 2009)</em><br /><br /> <em>There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair </em>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. <br /><br /> 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, “<em>Monstrum </em>(Lat.) from the Verb <em>Monstrare</em>,” one that certainly merits being quoted in its entirety:<br /><blockquote>I add to the story, because no doubt<br /> there will be many theses on<br /> who I am. My life is clear the way<br /> my books are clear. I am<br /> as alone as you, voyeur. Like you<br /> I flinch if someone sees me.<br /> I look into your eyes. We both know<br /> the question. Who kills? Who stays?<br /> Who watches? The one furiously<br /> taking his clothes off to be innocent,<br /> isn’t that a mask? Your heart beats<br /> because your blood beats. You have<br /> the same right as I do, I, who am<br /> your guardian angel, your monster.<br /><br /> — p. 93</blockquote><br /> 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”:<br /><blockquote>Where am I?<br /> Where do my gallows stand?<br /> Why do I have granulated eyes?<br /> The town will follow you. <br /><br /> (…)<br /><br /> My poetry is no longer credible,<br /> not for a long time.<br /><br /> It rots from the sheer glowing.<br /><br /> — p. 96</blockquote><br /> 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. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Fiona Sze-Lorrain's book of poetry, <em>Water the Moon </em>(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 <em>Cerise Press</em>, she is also a <em>zheng </em>concertist. (<a href="http://www.fionasze.com">www.fionasze.com</a>)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-43331970030131022772011-12-22T17:30:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:20:03.214-08:00MY LIFE AS A DOLL by ELIZABETH KIRSCHNEREILEEN TABIOS Engages<br /> <br /><strong><em>My Life as a Doll</em> by Elizabeth Kirschner</strong><br /><em>(Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2008)</em><br /> <br />Elizabeth Kirschner's <em>My Life as Doll </em>is one of the most searing poetry reads I've experienced in recent memory. How could it not be, when the first page presents<br /><blockquote> When I was four<br /> <br />years old, my mother pummeled<br />the back of my head with a baseball bat.</blockquote><br />that continues on to<br /><blockquote>I remember the pain. I remember<br />hitting the floor like a scarecrow<br /> <br />that was a heap of broken straw.<br /> <br />This is why I love the winter garden so:<br /> <br />energy of enigma. Icy blossoms.</blockquote><br />Yes, <em>My Life as Doll </em>reflects the effects of childhood abuse throughout the persona's life. But it's also that <em>leap </em>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.<br /> <br />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 -- <br /><blockquote>Damage is done when love is undone<br />and I'm a bouquet of burnt matches,<br /> <br />an ashen petal fallen from a loony-<br />tunes moon. Stomp, smudge, chalk<br /> <br />me into cinders and I will rise like<br />a genie out of a bottle of destitute dreams.<br /> <br />My scent is offal, seared grass<br />and dirt drenched with the blood of<br /> <br />the war dead. Why must there be<br />warring between heaven and earth,<br /> <br />dead Mother and me? The kiss of peace<br />has been smeared into blear<br /> <br />and white doves have bloodied their feathers<br />in hell's red bile of dew. I can be scraped<br /> <br />from the bottom of God's shoe, my scars<br />are pregnant with pain and I am a bloody stew.<br /> <br />Dressed in mole's clothes, I dig<br />past my open grave with raggedy paws<br /> <br />till I'm blinded with blinding light<br />that scorches the blackened wick<br /> <br />of my blackened soul, my masterpiece.</blockquote><br />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. <br /> <br />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 <em>heaven </em>-- even if it must be the type of non-paradise here:<br /><blockquote>While boys milked my breasts until<br />they were empty, I longed to be donned<br /> <br />in a habit. I wanted to float down cloistered<br />corridors like a black butterfly whose scales<br /> <br />were relics stolen from Mary. I wanted to marry<br />a martyr, I wanted to be a saint, but<br /> <br />my lips were rubbed raw by too many kisses<br />from boys who took and took -- suffering would be<br /> <br />my salvation, my one way ticket to a heaven<br />full of copulating angels -- they loved a good fuck<br /> <br />and I dreamed of dreaming in their lascivious arms. <br />There I would get pregnant with a baby angel<br /><br />and I would mother her tenderly while my own mother<br />lay drunk on the sofa, smoking a cigarette<br /><br />like a tiny flare that signaled her heartbeat.<br />Soon, soon I would be a centerfold saint<br /><br />she would kneel before praying a prayer that sounded<br />like curses -- o glory be the day I condemned her<br /><br />to the hell she belonged in -- it was a zoo,<br />it had a cage and I had the key.</blockquote><br /><br />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.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em> as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book <a href="http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/tabios.html"><strong><em>SILK EGG: Collected Novels </em></strong></a>is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in <a href="http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2011/03/silk-egg-by-eileen-r-tabios.html"><strong><em>Boston Area Poetry Scene</em>; </strong></a>by Michael Leong in <a href="http://bigother.com/2011/06/10/eileen-r-tabios-silk-egg-collected-novels-shearsman-2011/"><strong><em>Big Other</em></strong></a>; by Alan Baker in <a href="http://www.leafepress.com/litter3/litterbug02/litterbug02.html"><strong><em>Litter</em></strong></a>; and by <a href="http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2011/08/eileen-r-tabios-silk-eggs-collected.html"><strong><em>rob mclennan</em></strong></a>. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews <em>SILK EGG</em> along with two other books, <a href="http://notabeneeiswein.blogspot.com"><strong><em>NOTA BENE EISWEIN</em></strong></a> and <a href="http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/footnotes-to-algebra-uncollected-poems-1995-2009-by-eileen-tabios-169/"><strong><em>FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009</em></strong></a> at <a href="http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/99980.html"><strong><em>Asian American Lit Fans</em></strong></a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-54990061885722809852011-12-22T17:15:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:19:43.514-08:00THE USE OF SPEECH by NATHALIE SARRAUTE, trans. by BARBARA WRIGHTGABRIEL LOVATT Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>The Use of Speech</em> by Nathalie Sarraute, translated from the French by Barbara Wright</strong><br /><em>(Counterpath Press, Denver, Colorado, 2010)</em><br /><br />In Counterpath’s 2010 re-release of <em>The Use of Speech</em>, first published in 1980, Nathalie Sarraute functions as a lexicographer of the <em>nouveau roman </em>order, compiling words and phrases only to complicate meaning and disorient the contexts in which they occur. Though the novel appeared decades after <em>nouveau roman’s </em>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. <em>The Use of Speech</em> 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 <em>The Use of Speech’s</em> 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />“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.<br /><blockquote>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.”</blockquote><br />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.<br /> <br />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 <em>nouveau roman</em> dissonance and discontinuity responds to the political and social turbulence of the latter half of the twentieth-century. Despite the fact that <em>nouveau roman</em> 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. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Gabriel Lovatt writes, researches, and teaches in Athens at the University of Georgia, where she is finishing her dissertation.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-38413725175068948952011-12-22T17:00:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:19:15.611-08:00PORTRAIT OF COLON DASH PARENTHESIS by JEFFREY JULLICHLOGAN FRY Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis</em> by Jeffrey Jullich</strong><br /><em>(Litmus Press, New York, 2010)</em><br /><br />The poems in Jeffrey Jullich’s <em>Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis </em>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 <em>Portrait </em>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.<br /><br /> 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 <br /><blockquote>petrified aghast—by a pure idea<br /><br />cogitated upon until sick with fright,<br />the cement pavement rocking like a funhouse<br />after five o’clock on pay day, so jittery<br />I keep flinching all over at the thought,<br />pensive in dread at the abstract concept of<br /><br />a theoretical <em>oratorio</em>,<br />of sorts, without costumes or scenery</blockquote><br />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 <em>oratorio</em>”—can then be ascribed to the function of the mental experience of the phenomenon of buck fever.<br /><br /> 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 <blockquote>background, extrapolating on a glance<br />seen from the opposite side of the street<br />as from a distant shore, remotely—in which case<br /><br />traces might retain no mammal body heat.<br />Typography could be no interconnection,<br />—absence outracing hope,<br />like a trope, like a turtle chasing an arrow.</blockquote><br />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 <em>ars poetica</em> 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 <em>new </em>sort of complexity into the poem without distracting from the satisfying final image of the “turtle chasing an arrow.”<br /><br /> 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 “<em>traces</em>” completely transforms the phrase in which the word appears. The line without italics—“in which case // <em>traces </em>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 <em>this </em>term, drawing the reader’s attention to the term that is being used.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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 <em>Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis</em> 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.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Logan Fry lives in Austin, Texas, where he is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas. His poetry has most recently appeared in <em>elimae</em>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-88164879077287767272011-12-21T23:55:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:18:59.727-08:00STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE by MATTHEW COOPERMANEILEEN TABIOS Engages<br /><br /><strong><em>STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE</em> by Matthew Cooperman</strong><br /><em>(Counterpath Press, Denver, 2011)</em><br /><br />There are many interesting effects in Matthew Cooperman’s <em>STILL: OF THE EARTH AS THE ARK WHICH DOES NOT MOVE</em>. 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”—<em>that </em>effect.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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 <em>still</em>, 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. <br /><br /> 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.<br /><br />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”<br /><blockquote>Tea Party: the United States already has enough people with college degrees, but who is going to cut our lettuce, our tobacco?<br /><br />Hunger: “The piano travels within,/ travels with joyful leaps./ Then meditates in ferrate repose,/ nailed with ten horizons.” (Vallejo)<br /><br />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<br /><br />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</blockquote><br />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:<br /><blockquote>“Time brings all things to light….”</blockquote><br />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, <em>What else…</em><br /><br />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. <br /><br />Finally, the collection ends with a page of four words:<br /><blockquote><strong>Strum:<br /><br /><br />Strum:<br /><br /><br />Strum:<br /><br /><br />Strum:</strong></blockquote><br />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?<br /><br /><em>Strum: Strum: Strum: Strum: </em>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<br /><blockquote>Actium, Massilla, Thermopylae;<br /><br />Antietam, Appotomax, Vicksburg, Shiloh;<br /><br />Ypres, Gallipoli, Somme, Passchendaele;<br /><br />Khe Sanh, Ap Bac, Tet, My Lai;<br /><br />Alamo, Medano, San Jacinto, Wounded Knee;<br /><br />Kirkuk, Mosul, Karbala, Samawah</blockquote><br /><br />*****<br /><br />Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em> as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book <a href="http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/tabios.html"><strong><em>SILK EGG: Collected Novels </em></strong></a>is reviewed by Zvi A. Sesling in <a href="http://dougholder.blogspot.com/2011/03/silk-egg-by-eileen-r-tabios.html"><strong><em>Boston Area Poetry Scene</em>; </strong></a>by Michael Leong in <a href="http://bigother.com/2011/06/10/eileen-r-tabios-silk-egg-collected-novels-shearsman-2011/"><strong><em>Big Other</em></strong></a>; by Alan Baker in <a href="http://www.leafepress.com/litter3/litterbug02/litterbug02.html"><strong><em>Litter</em></strong></a>; and by <a href="http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2011/08/eileen-r-tabios-silk-eggs-collected.html"><strong><em>rob mclennan</em></strong></a>. Stephen Hong Sohn also reviews <em>SILK EGG</em> along with two other books, <a href="http://notabeneeiswein.blogspot.com"><strong><em>NOTA BENE EISWEIN</em></strong></a> and <a href="http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/footnotes-to-algebra-uncollected-poems-1995-2009-by-eileen-tabios-169/"><strong><em>FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009</em></strong></a> at <a href="http://asianamlitfans.livejournal.com/99980.html"><strong><em>Asian American Lit Fans</em></strong></a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-69803325041091221632011-12-21T23:50:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:18:43.272-08:00THE URGE TO BELIEVE IS STRONGER THAN BELIEF ITSELF by ERIN M. BERTRAMBILL SCALIA Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>The Urge to Believe is Stronger than Belief Itself</em> by Erin M. Bertram</strong><br /><em>(Cherry Pie Press Midwest Women Poets Series, Glen Carbon, Il., 2008)</em><br /><br />Erin Bertram’s slim volume <em>The Urge to Believe is Stronger than Belief Itself </em>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? <br /><br />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?<br /><br />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 <em>Merriam-Webster</em>), 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. <br /><br />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 <em>only </em>and <em>but</em>) reflection of itself (bisected by a comma), but it’s the shift in emphasis from <em>body </em>in the first clause to <em>her </em>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.<br /><br />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:<br /> <blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />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 <em>reveals </em>the experience.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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:<br /> <blockquote>An absence of visual aide does not render an image silent.<br /><br /> Does it.</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />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 <em>Literature / Film Quarterly</em>) and “Bergman’s Trilogy of Faith and Persona: Faith and Visual Narrative” in the anthology <em>Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema </em>(Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). His book <em>Conversing in Figures: Emerson, Poetry, Cinema </em>is forthcoming in 2012. Bill teaches writing and literature at St Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, MD.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-30496254632545074152011-12-21T23:45:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:18:27.292-08:00FAULKNER'S ROSARY by SARAH VAPKRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Faulkner’s Rosary</em> by Sarah Vap</strong> <br /><em>(Saturnalia Books, Ardmore, PA, 2010)</em><br /><br />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. <em>Faulkner’s Rosary</em>, by Sarah Vap, both falls into that tradition and transcends it.<br /><br />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” (“<em>Linea Nigra</em>: cross of jubilee”).<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.” <br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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 <em>pieta </em>. . .” The poem makes the connections between mythical women and real women in a legacy of choosing love.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, <em>Whistling Past the Graveyard</em>, in 2004. Her second chapbook, <em>I Stand Here Shredding Documents</em>, 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 <a href="http://kristinberkey-abbott.blogspot.com ">http://kristinberkey-abbott.blogspot.com </a>and about theology at <a href="http://liberationtheologylutheran.blogspot.com">http://liberationtheologylutheran.blogspot.com</a>. Her website is <a href="http://www.kristinberkey-abbott.com">www.kristinberkey-abbott.com</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7812045482115965226.post-92040924855634341382011-12-21T23:40:00.000-08:002011-12-22T22:18:10.401-08:00KYOTOLOGIC by ANNE GORRICKMICAH CAVALERI Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>KYOTOLOGIC</em> by Anne Gorrick</strong><br /><em>(Shearsman Books, Exeter, UK, 2008)</em><br /><br /><small><em>[<u>Editor's Note</u>: 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.]</em></small><br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sG_YmIji_Uw/Tt8BOE7JDMI/AAAAAAAACAI/jbco7CkbMes/s1600/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-0.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sG_YmIji_Uw/Tt8BOE7JDMI/AAAAAAAACAI/jbco7CkbMes/s400/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-0.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683262596116450498" /></a><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-suPYsneX-64/Tt8BJN5mS6I/AAAAAAAAB_8/wHRmxp3iXYo/s1600/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-suPYsneX-64/Tt8BJN5mS6I/AAAAAAAAB_8/wHRmxp3iXYo/s400/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683262512626551714" /></a><br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tGoklbF7uwo/Tt8BDWojzuI/AAAAAAAAB_w/_jUWOOspPn8/s1600/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-tGoklbF7uwo/Tt8BDWojzuI/AAAAAAAAB_w/_jUWOOspPn8/s400/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683262411891789538" /></a><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HTU7VUqL1TA/Tt8ACU9q9PI/AAAAAAAAB_M/tFbrBZmnuTY/s1600/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HTU7VUqL1TA/Tt8ACU9q9PI/AAAAAAAAB_M/tFbrBZmnuTY/s400/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683261294751970546" /></a><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DfD5VX5TJ4Q/Tt7_8zkFQPI/AAAAAAAAB_A/GdyBhg6juiA/s1600/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DfD5VX5TJ4Q/Tt7_8zkFQPI/AAAAAAAAB_A/GdyBhg6juiA/s400/Kyotologic_review_by_cavaleri-4.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683261199886926066" /></a><br /><br />*****<br /><br />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 <em>the syllable that opened an eye</em> is available from Dead Man Publishing. Poems, etc are scattered about the web, with his most recent work and forthcoming work in <em>Moria, Jacket2</em>, and the always beautiful <em>elimae</em>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0