ISSUE NO. 8 TABLE OF CONTENTS

November 30, 2007

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


EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
By Eileen Tabios


NEW REVIEWS
Patrick James Dunagan reviews WRITING POETRY: FROM THE INSIDE OUT by Sanford Lyne

Sam Lohmann reviews “BURNING INTERIORS”: DAVID SHAPIRO’S POETRY AND POETICS, Edited by Thomas Fink and Joseph Lease

Patrick James Dunagan reviews RIPPLE EFFECT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Elaine Equi

Sam Lohmann engages RIPPLE EFFECT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Elaine Equi

Ernesto Priego reviews WORLD0 and NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING by John Bloomberg-Rissman; UNPROTECTED TEXTS and STEPS: A NOTEBOOK by Tom Beckett; and ESTE BIENESTAR, TIBIO/THIS WELL-BEING, WARM, POEMS IN TRANSLATION by Argel Corpus

Barry Schwabsky reviews GLOIRE DES FORMES PRECEDE DE LE DOUBLE CORPS DES IMAGES by Jean Fremon

Patrick Rosal reviews AMIGO WARFARE and ZERO GRAVITY, both by Eric Gamalinda

Eileen Tabios engages AMIGO WARFARE and LYRICS FROM A DEAD LANGUAGE, both by Eric Gamalinda

Thomas Fink reviews FRAGILE REPLACEMENTS by William Allegrezza

Pam Brown engages URBAN MYTHS: 210 POEMS by John Tranter

Rochelle Ratner engages HELEN IN EGYPT by H.D.; LOBA by Diane di Prima; SURVIVAL: A THEMATIC GUIDE TO CANADIAN LITERATURE by Margaret Atwood; and THE JOURNAL OF SUSANNA MOODIE by Margaret Atwood

Lars Palm reviews OPERA BUFA by Adam Fieled

Pam Brown engages BLUE GRASS by Peter Minter

Raymond John De Borja reviews ALL THE PAINTINGS OF THE GIORGIONE by Elizabeth Willis

Eileen Tabios engages WANTON TEXTILES by Reb Livingston and Ravi Shankar

Ryan Daley reviews THE ECSTASY OF CAPITULATION by Daniel Borzutzky

Joe LeClerc reviews CANA QUEMADA [BURNT SUGAR] - CONTEMPORARY CUBAN POETRY IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH, Edited by Lori Marie Carlson & Oscar Hijuelos

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS, CAPITAL and ERRATUM TO A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS (LEVIATHAN PRESS, 2001), all by Giles Goodland

Nicholas Manning reviews BLACK STONE by Dale Smith

Burt Kimmelman reviews PASSING OVER, POWERS: TRACKVOLUME 3, COLUMNS: TRACKVOLUME 2, TRACK and RESTLESS MESSENGERS, all by Norman Finkelstein

Patrick James Dunagan reviews COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS by Aram Saroyan

Lisa Bower reviews THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE by Quincy Troupe

Jeff Harrison reviews DAYS POEM, VOLS. I and II by Allen Bramhall

Burt Kimmelman reviews FORTY-NINE GUARANTEED WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH by Sandy McIntosh

Eileen Tabios engages HUMAN SCALE by Michael Kelleher

Pam Brown engages VOODOO REALITIES by Philip Hammial

Laurel Johnson reviews PASSING OVER by Norman Finkelstein

Pamela Hart reviews THREADS by Jill Magi

Lars Palm reviews DOCUMENT by Ana Bozicevic-Bowling

Nicholas Manning reviews OBSTRUCTS/CONSTITUTES by John Crouse

Eric Hoffman reviews N/O by Ron Silliman

William Allegrezza reviews GUESTS OF SPACE by Anselm Hollo

Larissa Shmailo reviews E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E V-A-L-U-E-S: THE FIRST XI INTERVIEWS, Curated by Tom Beckett

Eileen Tabios engages PUBLIC ACCESS #1, Edited by Nicholas Grider

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews PIONEERS IN THE STUDY OF MOTION by Susan Briante

Mark Young reviews EL TSUNAMI by Kevin Opstedal

Aileen Ibardaloza engages “LAKBAY-KAMAY”, a poem by Father Albert Alejo; "PSALM 120" in BOOK OF PSALMS, THE NELSON STUDY BIBLE; “OUT BEYOND IDEAS” by Jelludin Rumi in THE ESSENTIAL RUMI, Translated by Coleman Barks; and OUT BEYOND IDEAS, a CD by David Wilcox and Nance Pettit

Kristina Marie Darling reviews INBOX by Noah Eli Gordon

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews NOVEL PICTORIAL NOISE by Noah Eli Gordon

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews THE HAPPINESS EXPERIMENT by Lisa Fishman

Paul Klinger reviews LETTERS TO EARLY STREET by Albert Flynn DeSilver

Eileen Tabios engages FREE by Amanda Laughtland

Ivy Alvarez reviews MOONSHINE by MML Bliss

Beatriz Tabios engages THE BOOK OF THE ROTTEN DAUGHTER by Alice Friman

Eileen Tabios engages BELOVED INTEGER by Michelle Naka Pierce


THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
Two Poems by Patrick James Dunagan: "Dear Elaine," and "A Sloop in the Heart of Things"


FEATURE ARTICLE
“The Poetry of Put-On” (Addressing Bill Knott, Andrei Codrescu, Armand Schwerner, Jack Spicer, Among Others) by Rochelle Ratner


FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Murat Nemet-Nejat reviews SUDDEN ADDRESS, SELECTED LECTURES 1981-2006 by Bill Berkson

Scott Glassman reviews SIGHT PROGRESS by Zhang Er, Translated by Rachel Levitsky with the author

Judith Roitman reviews INVERSE and THE BOOK OF OCEAN, both by Maryrose Larkin


ADVERTISEMENT
Meritage Press Tiny Books Releases Fifth Title for Poetry to Keep Feeding the World!


BACK COVER
The Bad Bad Metaphor!

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

This Issue No. 8 rounds out the first two years of Galatea Resurrects (GR). Woot! And I am delighted to share that GR has presented 405 new reviews of various poetry projects. GR's reviews cover works put out by 207 publishers, in addition to the producers of one blog, one poetry CD, four poetry videos and a performance troupe. We've also introduced online 48 reviews previously only available in print journals (some of which are no longer in existence). The reviewed publishers certainly reflect the internet's reach, as publishers' headquarters reside in the United States, England, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, Colombia, Mexico, Philippines, Australia, Wales, South Africa, Germany, Japan, France, and, of course, the internet. You can see these statistics fleshed out in the new LIST OF PUBLISHERS COVERED BY GR.

This issue also inaugurates a new GR feature: THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS, inaugurated by Patrick James Dunagan with two poems (the first of which synchronistically is a poem sequence inspired by his reading Elaine Equi's Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems that he reviews in this issue). I thought this feature might be interesting in showing the poetic talent of those reviewing others' poetries/poems.

Since this is the last issue for 2007, we can also announce the recipient of the 2007 CALENDAR AWARD given by members of the secret organization, Oenophiles For Poetry (OFP). Basically, the OFP membership read all of the reviews/engagements published in 2007 and chose their favorite read. Note that I say "favorite read" versus "best review" -- after all, the judges were in their goblets when they made their choice, and even when they're totally sober their judgements are not necessarily reliable. Anyhoot, the recipient turned out to be[insert drumroll punctuated with clinking glasses]:

Guillermo Parra for his review in GR Issue No. 5 of Micah Ballard’s poems in 6x6 #5; BETTINA COFFIN; ABSINTHIAN JOURNAL; SCENES FROM THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT; UNFORESEEN; DEATH RACE V.S.O.P.; EVANGELINE DOWNS; and NEGATIVE CAPABILITY IN THE VERSE OF JOHN WIENERS.

Congratulations, Guillermo! Your Award comes with a cash prize as munificent as what I was able to scrounge from the pocket pants and purses of the OFP membership while they met to determine the award recipient (actually, they met to drink through my wine cellar but....). Sadly, I must bemoan the state of a credit card-dependent society. I was only able, this year, to scrounge up $10.25. Doesn't anyone walk around with cash anymore?!!! Anyway -- Guillermo, Congratulations but don't quit your day job.

To other matters beyond low finance, I continue to be amazed that GR has lasted this long and with such copious quantity of reviews/engagements. Here are more numbers:

Issue 1: 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)
Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)
Issue 7: 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)

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

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews

Thus, I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review. Any project as long as its author is a poet is eligible. For example, this issue inaugurates the first review of a book of art criticism by a poet: Barry Schwabsky reviews Gloire des formes précédé de Le double corps des images by Jean Fremon. Information for submissions and available review copies HERE.

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

Due to the various hijinks at Galatea, my beloved puppies Achilles and Gabriela hired a lawyer. I had told them that no one will sue me for printing negative reviews of poetry books but, given their genes, they wished to protect me just in case. So, for their latest entry into the Dogs' E-Photo Album Masquerading as a Poetry Review Journal, here they are with their brand spankin' new lawyer (and grumpy OFP member) pausing to relish a November stroll through the vineyards:



With much Love, Fur and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
November 30, 2007

WRITING POETRY: FROM THE INSIDE OUT by SANFORD LYNE

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Writing poetry: from the inside out by Sanford Lyne
(Sourcebooks, Naperville, IL, 2007)

FEELING GOOD AND WRITING POETRY

Sanford Lyne offers the following bit of guidance: “The earth is a good place to be” (193). This is not a book for anyone who considers herself not to belong: readers of Dostoyevsky, Kerouac, Woolf, Nietzsche; punk rockers; hipsters; public chess players; anybody who digs Dickinson and/or Whitman; skateboarders; or individuals otherwise possessing the slightest bit of wit and interest in resting matters into their own hands. This book may appeal to schoolchildren and roller-bladers. Approximately half of the voters who elected President Bush may also find something of use in it, as will approximately half of the voters who did not elect him. It’s unlikely that any European reader wouldn’t scoff at it.

There is no possibility of recommending this text to any reader under any circumstance for any purpose. Lyne wants poetry to be introduced to every person. He deems it a worthwhile—if somewhat imaginary—goal to get every person writing poems on a regular basis. He believes this will do the Spirit in them good. This book provides no balance to the view it offers, not only of Poetry, but of the World at large. Books so overly slanted towards making their readers “better” in whatever terms chosen are foolish and naive. This is the sort of work that encourages a self-glorying arrogant ignorance in people which ends up emotionally and imaginatively damaging them. Such material shapes the thinking which lies behind schoolteachers who scold and belittle the most promising among their students due to their own inadequacies which are reflected back by the eyes and tongue of the enlightened youth.

It’s not that it is at all difficult to find an agreeable passage. It’s the use which Lyne is putting his references to, the manner in which he directs his readers. His touchy-feely preconceptions of them ooze from off the page sending shivers down the spine.

What kinds of things grow our consciousness, our circles of awareness?
Living—life itself—will grow these circles. That’s in the design of life, for life is movement, change, and, therefore, response and hopefully reflection, new insights and understandings. Reading will grow these circles, especially if we talk with interesting people, people who are also awake and expanding their awareness. Emerson—like his student Henry David Thoreau—also believed that walks in nature expand our awareness. Emerson called nature “the great unread book,” and he thought our time in nature was essential—indeed, indispensable—to our growth. And again, writing grows these circles, for in writing we enter our own silence, our own stillness, and listen (172).

If people were to be trusted to attend to doing what is necessary and doing it well, this might be a passable bit of encouragement. Unfortunately, a significant portion of humanity looks to the easy way out of the majority of entanglements when thus confronted. Lyne conveniently leaves out the necessity of working hard. He gives a vague gist of Emerson in the above passage. A glimmer off the cream-puff top of an enormously engaging bore of wonder. If the reader doesn’t bother to go back to photocopied high school copies of Emerson’s essays—let alone become at least aware of, say, Carlyle’s influence upon them—he has not done her an ounce of favor, but more likely considerable harm. It’s similar to watching the Star Trek films which reference Moby-Dick and never reading the novel, especially the copious notes of the sub-sub-librarian which preface it. Granted, Lyne is perfectly adaptable reading for many graduate students in American Literature and the majority of their younger professors as well.

The hope would be that Lyne is not to be found of use to anybody who has spent the barest amount of time sitting with poetry, whether writing or reading it. Unfortunately, this is an unlikely assessment of the current situation. The problem is found in Lyne’s approach in general, it takes the norm into terrific consideration and does everything to be welcoming to it. Everybody is treated comfortably, any challenge must be gentle. No jarring of the individual’s world and temperament. None but the softest of demands are to be placed upon them; to be ever accommodating to their needs and perspective, utter passive acceptance.

Given that the norm is saturated with an ever increasing onslaught of digitalized distractions which make it increasingly difficult to focus on actual circumstances of interiorized personal growth and development, there’s little chance of his approach not growing in popularity. This is good for Lyne because he means to sell his book and continue teaching his poetry writing exercises in various workshops across the country. As is a well acknowledged fact, poets don’t make any money off writing poetry. Lyne has found his niche and now, in the vein of traditional American Capitalism, is successfully exploiting it. There’s a place in Dante’s Inferno for such abuses of the Imagination and a plethora of curses hurled by William Blake against those who support the Infernal Machines which Lyne appears to have no qualms of doing, may he find his own path to eternal peace.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in the library at USF. Poems and chapbooks have been published by Auguste Press, Blue Book, Chain, Pompom, and Red Ant Press among others.

"BURNING INTERIORS": DAVID SHAPIRO'S POETRY AND POETICS, Edited by THOMAS FINK & JOSEPH LEASE

SAM LOHMANN Reviews

"Burning Interiors": David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics, edited by Thomas Fink and Joseph Lease
(Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007)

This year, coinciding with David Shapiro’s sixtieth birthday and the publication of his New and Selected Poems, 1965-2006, Farleigh Dickinson University Press has published this collection of essays responding to Shapiro’s body of work (nine prior books of poetry, as well as numerous critical works––including the first book-length study of John Ashbery––and several collaborative work). Shapiro is a wonderful, complex, innovative poet who became involved while still in his teens with the New York School poetry scene of the mid sixties; while strongly influenced by the neo-surrealist, collage-oriented, richly visual frivoliste proclivities of older poets such as Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Joseph Ceravolo and Frank O’Hara, he managed to break through the veneer of irony and acoherence which typified his peers’ work, and to invent a poetry of emotional and political intensity and great thematic cohesiveness. Shapiro has become an influential elder in his own right, as a teacher as well as a writer (he has described himself as teaching “architecture to poets and poetry to architects” at the Cooper Union School), and this collection edited by two younger poets, Joseph Lease (who was a student of Shapiro’s) and Thomas Fink (who wrote the first book-length study of Shapiro’s work, The Poetry of David Shapiro, in 1993), is a fitting way for the U.S. poetry community to honor him. There are essays by twelve poets––Lease, Fink, Paul Hoover, Judith Halden-Sullivan, Joanna Fuhrman, Carole Stone, Stephen Paul Miller, Daniel Morris, Denise Duhamel, Noah Eli Gordon, Ron Silliman, and Tim Peterson––as well as one by the art critic and painter Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and a poem by Timothy Liu dedicated to Shapiro.

The book as a whole provides a useful overview of numerous themes and aspects of this complex poetry. There is a recognizable set of recurring motifs which appear gradually through the earlier books and are recycled, transformed, and interrogated, giving the work a particular consistency and familiar personality, while also exploiting the ironic or comically arbitrary aspects of self-reference and self-parody––like Ted Berrigan in The Sonnets, Shapiro acknowledges his own poetry as well as that of others as fair game for collage. Gordon cites David Shapiro’s description of his teacher Meyer Schapiro’s essay on Cézanne as restoring “our sense that an artist is deeply invested in his usual constellation of images,” and offers a list of elements of Shapiro’s “constellation”: “snow, knives, venetian blinds, clouds, violins, the page, photographs, golf balls and billiard balls, insects, airplanes, and, of course, the . . . copy, with all its ancillary lexicon: trace, parody, shadow, original, outline, rewrite, correction fluid, and so on”––to which must be added the house and other architectures, the sphinx, fire, hair, and––as a form of the copy––the translation or “strong mistranslation” which so dominates his 1994 book After a Lost Original. Gordon speaks of “images”, but I want to insist on the obvious point that it is words that recur, always in different context and always by their recurrence drawing attention to their character as words; snow in Shapiro’s poems is not precisely analogous to apples, say, in Cézanne’s painting, and it seems misleading to equate each noun with an “image” in a poetry that constantly clowns with and fusses over the arbitrariness and opacity of language, that consistently uses ambiguous grammar, incomprehensible similes and other verbal devices to obfuscate or refract any “direct presentation of the thing”.

Shapiro’s linguistic devices are many, but there are a few which recur constantly. The words like and as, for instance, take on an extraordinary life of their own in his work, abdicating the poetic simile’s customary concern with similitude in favor of wildly ramifying juxtapositions:

Sunken rocks are sunless
like a fence in iniquity
or a hedge in oblivion
or sunshine at supper
like the supreme being in surgery
restrained by oscillating powers
sweeping the dirty body
useless as if agreeable stuff
like saccharine might look upon
love’s clean teeth
(“Music Written to Order,” New and Selected Poems p. 94)

Peterson’s essay “Distorted Figures: Mannerist Similes and the Body in David Shapiro’s Poetry” examines this device, which Peterson sees as derived from Raymond Roussel via Ashbery, but which has become uniquely Shapiro’s own, one of the things that makes any discussion of “image” in his poetry so difficult: in the absence of logical relations, each thing is grammatically linked to each other thing in the poem.

This “mannerist” or “specious” simile is also discussed in passing by Fuhrman in “’Not a Bridge’: Dialogue and Disjunction as Didacticism in the Later Poetry of David Shapiro,” and she goes on to examine another device, the psalmic or liturgical list held together by a repeated phrase, as in:

What was there to do? It is said you cannot live life in quarter tones.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life in silence.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life playing scales.
What was there to do? It is said you cannot live your life listening to the Americans.
(“Falling Upwards,” New and Selected Poems p.124.)

or:

Blessed is the architect of the removed structures
Blessed is the structure that weathers in spring snow like lies
Blessed is the crystal that leaps out of the matrix like a fool
And blessed is the school
(“A Burning Interior,” New and Selected Poems p. 221)

Other specific aspects of Shapiro’s poetry discussed here are his collaborations with children (in Duhamel’s “Plays Well with Others: The Collaborative Poetry of David Shapiro”), the ways in which his family and his New Jersey childhood are invoked and distorted through his mainly non-autobiographical, anti-confessional practice (in Stone’s “David Shapiro: New Jersey as Trope”), and the influence of the painter Jasper Johns on Shapiro’s work (in Miller’s “David Shapiro and Jasper Johns: Ego in the Egoless Pie”). Shapiro wrote the text for a book of Johns’s drawings, and dedicated his new collection of poems to him; Miller describes their friendship, which began in the sixties, and draws intriguing but somewhat strained analogies between Johns’s anti-illusionistic investigations of sign and emblem––maps, flags, names of colors, numerals––and Shapiro’s nondescriptive, nonnarrative use of language, leading the critic to the (false) claim that the poet has “no subject matter except language.”

It is interesting to note that the most illuminating and ambitious of these essays, the clearest and the most charming, is also the only one not written by a poet: Gilbert-Rolfe’s “House Blown Apart.” He begins by explicitly emphasizing that his is a view of poetry “from outside,” but goes on to summarize beautifully the situation of poets at a time (the essay was presumably written in the mid eighties, after the publication of Shapiro’s House (Blown Apart)) when “Advertising and politics––more or less the same thing––provide a discourse so entirely detached from the world, while completely obscuring it, as to keep the general public’s imagination locked into a poesis of the banal, a poesis in which symbolic instructions lead unerringly into another entirely symbolic formulation, in which desire is paraded and resolved without ever coming down to earth.” He maintains that “It was always like this, but presumably not always so extremely linguified, so liquefied by the domination of language, of a world in which there are in the beginning so many names that one never gets to the thing––in the beginning were words, and as a consequence the world has been indefinitely deferred.” (One is used to hearing poets, talking about more or less the same situation, deplore the domination of image, and with no less truth, I think: the world is dominated by a linguistic economy whose primary tool is symbolic imagery.) To this condition poets have responded by “preserving, in flagrant contradiction to all that characterizes the twentieth century, the idea of the private”; they are “interstitial figures who attract our attention, when they do, by the strength of their irrelevance. . . . But they remain, as ever, the only people who know how the language actually works. And, like all people who are privy to special knowledge, they accordingly pretend that they are chiefly concerned with just keeping it alive. Like all custodians, they are instead, pace Foucault, changing it by the minute, and are themselves quite unable to keep up with the change.”

This generalization is acute with regard to Shapiro’s poetry, which imitates the marginal and self-inventing speech of children, transforms and hybridizes multiple traditions in an effort to memorialize and preserve them, and seems to dramatize the struggle of thought to keep up with an accelerating and snowballing event in language. The attempt to understand language and to preserve it involves Shapiro in a chain of considered and spontaneous actions which constantly threatens to escape his control; often his poems resort to sudden swerves away from sense, comic or awkward or pathetic readjustments of form and tone, contradictions and tautologies, the opacities and aporias any sincere verbal exploration runs into––“bumping into walls like a poet,” as Baudelaire wrote.

“Does he know what he’s doing?,” asks Gilbert-Rolfe in discussing Shapiro’s venture into “the workshop of Mallarmé and Verlaine, the place of the moment’s pretence to significance and the book’s to be at once organic, staining as a kind of writing, and architectonic––made of glass, pages as doors.” The influence of French symbolism is little discussed elsewhere in the book (it is a subject still largely taboo in U.S. poetry, eighty-odd years after Pound’s and Williams’s pronouncements against it), but Gilbert-Rolfe proposes it as one of “three and a half historicomythical worlds” on which Shapiro draws. The “half” is “American poetry since the Second World War,” especially the New York scene around Ashbery and O’Hara; the first whole “world” would seem to be that of American modernist poetry prior to the war. These the critic passes over quickly, noting that Shapiro offers “a more scholarly view of mainstream modernism––Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, in a word, them––than one finds, for the most part, in the New York poets of the preceding generation.” He then launches into a brilliant discussion of Shapiro’s “weirdly revisionist” use of French symbolist techniques.

His symbolism, Gilbert-Rolfe writes, is distinguished by “the extremism of its playfulness.” And: “This is probably what annoys people most about his poetry. It tends to engage in pathos without being earnest.” The “weirdness” he attributes to the “willed regressiveness”––the lateness––of Shapiro’s return to a Symbolism which “was the pre-Freudian moment, in which all that psychoanalysis would ever say, and, perhaps, far more than it would ever see, was spelled out by poets.” (Compare Shapiro’s use of Freud’s phrase “Ordinary Unhappiness” as the title for one of the sections of House (Blown Apart)). Shapiro then is attempting “a reconciliation, through a kind of (symbolic) regression, of two obviously quite irreconcilable conditions”––the “masterful and uninvolved” view of the Dandy, and the “mastery of innocence,” equally peripheral, which belongs to childhood––“the brilliant child playing in a world made out of anxiety.”

Gilbert-Rolfe goes on to offer a very interesting definition of poetry’s task: “He knows what he’s doing. . . . Poetry knows itself to be the guardian of language and, in that, language’s archivist: the ultimately adult language, and in that language at its most uninvolved, ‘useless.’ It also knows itself to be where language can play, quite without reference to the reality principle: the ultimately infantile language, once again, language at its most uninvolved.” He then comes to the last of the “three and a half worlds”: “the one that Shapiro has invented for himself. Geographically, its borders encompass both Passaic and Prague, linguistically it is prone to dialects, a result of its inhabitants being conversant with both Ovid and Percy Sledge” (a reference to Shapiro’s wonderful poem “A Song,” which improvises at length on the motif of Sledge’s 1966 hit “When a Man Loves a Woman”). He points to Shapiro’s tendency “to deploy the grandfathers [e.g. Kafka, Arendt, Forster, Scholem, Benjamin, Meyer Schapiro] to overcome father” (that is, the New York school poet, his most immediate peers) as one of the strengths that distinguishes his poetry, with “its complete lack of either knowingness or naïveté,” from theirs: “It is quite without the slickness which characterizes so much New York poetry, sure as it is of the common assumptions of its audience, the privileged role within it of certain themes––or perhaps only one: the psychology, as far as that can be articulated through poesis, of the very sensitive and at the same time either very weary or very self-absorbed.” This is spectacularly unfair, but the point is a good and necessary one. The earlier poets were concerned with brilliant inventions of tone and technique, and created a new way of poking fun at poetry’s pretense to present consciousness (e.g. The Tennis Court Oath) which quickly evolved into a genuine new way writing about consciousness (e.g. Mountains and Rivers), and then settled, sometimes with a disturbing complacency or facility, into the long business of exploring this new territory. Shapiro, appropriating all the gifts of his elders, has developed a poetry of much greater emotional and intellectual range, making parody’s voices resonate as lament and hymn, endowing collage with a new historical and psychological awareness of what it is to collage, “trying, and I should say succeeding,” as Gilbert-Rolfe puts it, “to make poetry topple one kind of reading into another as only it can do.”

Ron Silliman contributes a reprint of his blog post of March 22, 2003, an essay on Shapiro’s 1971 sequence “A Man Holding an Acoustic Panel.” It is the closest thing in Burning Interiors to an extended close reading, though it focuses on only three of the poem’s eighteen sections. Silliman’s theme is the political implications of the poem as a whole––not only the one clearly political section, “The Funeral of Jan Palach,” about the Czech student who set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet occupation, contemporaneous with the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and others in the U.S. protesting the Vietnam War. The limits of the blog format are evident in the brevity of the essay and in its failure to address the structure or themes of the piece as a whole, or specify about its politics, while asserting vaguely that “the ways in which these poems invoke history, as well as discourses such as science, make it instantly evident that the social realm is what is at stake––that for me is an almost perfect evocation of the political.” On the other hand, Silliman makes quite acute and interesting observations about the style and structure of the three sections he does look at. His piece also highlights one of the strengths of the blog as opposed to the academic essay, its tendency to put the act of reading into a very specific personal and historical context. Thus he notes that “it was possible, even plausible, in 1971, to read ‘A Man Holding and Acoustic Panel’ . . . without recognizing it for the political poem it is”; that “at the time, my own response was incomprehension––I simply did not have the critical framework in my head . . . to recognize the work for what it was, and is.” In a nice reversal of the critical commonplace that political works are doomed to become dated and irrelevant in a few years, this one has only ripened after three decades, and continues to bring up new associations: “So it is no accident, I suppose, that I have been thinking about this poem this week, not only in the context of the tragedy of Iraq, but also the homicide of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old Olympia, Washington native who was literally bulldozed to death by the Israeli army last weekend. Unlike Palach and his American and Vietnamese counterparts in the 1960s, Corrie did not plan her fate.”

Joseph Lease ends the book with an essay called “Afterword: The Night Sky and to David Shapiro,” which seeks “to place David Shapiro in a tradition of prayer, elegy, litany, and sincerity.” It is less a work of criticism than a personal tribute to a poet and teacher from whom Lease, himself very exciting poet, has learned so much. In making a plea for sincerity (while professing “I also love camp, goofy irony, breathless irony, unappeasable (ironic) anger, and so on”), he marshals quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alice Notley, Henry Thoreau, Donald Revell, Susan Sontag and Walter Benjamin, but the most illuminating quotations come from his own 1990 interview with Shapiro, who describes his search for a mode “less lenient with history”: “I had an anti-imperialistic theme, politically, that was very difficult to match with monochrome and I was less taken with camp than with Jewish earnestness and with prophetic qualities in Isaiah that were my first sense of poetry.” And: “I’ve been interested in achieving the kind of massive, depressing sense of melancholy that one gets again and again in Jasper Johns (in many ways my aesthetic standard) and the mania for prophetic structures in John Hejduk’s great imaginary cities. And I often dream of a poem that will be as labyrinthine as one of John’s analogous cities.”

There remain a few topics of interest which I think are not sufficiently examined by the essays in this book: Shapiro’s use of traditional forms (especially the villanelle and the rhymed quatrain); the ways in which he uses political and religious themes, and specifically the ways his poetry attempts to confront the physical and linguistic violence of the American empire, from the Vietnam War to the present atrocities; and, on the other hand––or perhaps not––the rich and complex humor that is almost ubiquitous in his work. Shapiro is one of the funniest poets alive, although his funniest poems are often terrifying, depressing, disturbing, and incomprehensible as well, veering between satirical deadpan and a manic clownishess on the verge of nonsense, and often making use of that all-too-familiar dialect of empire, hilarious and inscrutable foreign-language phrase-book English. As Gilbert-Rolfe points out, “some of Shapiro’s funniest stuff has to do with the arbitrariness of language, . . . the nonrelationship of words to things”; Shapiro is fascinated by the pathos of noncommunication and the bathos of miscommunication in political and erotic relationships, where language is often a kind of eraser fluid, a kind of blindness:

I have had an accident. I cannot see.
I have broken my glasses and I’ve missed my train.
I like you very much. Do you like me?

I need a guide. I need a secretary.
For when? For tomorrow. I will come again.
I have had an accident. I cannot see.

I need an interpreter. Here is my key.
Ouch! Stop! How long will it take? Please use novocaine.
I like you very much. Do you like me?

Remove your clothes. Open your mouth and lie
Like an interesting city under an airplane.
I have had an accident. I cannot see.

The battery is dead. Charge up the battery.
Can you draw me a map of the road I’m on?
I like you very much. Do you like me?

Can I see you today for the whole day? How long will that be?
Here is a present for you. A silver brain.
I have had an accident. I cannot see.
I like you very much. Do you like me?
(“The Carburetor at Venice,” New and Selected Poems p. 66)

Some of the essays in this collection suffer from a surplus of ill-defined abstract terms (“abstraction” itself being the most blatant one), sloppy semiotics (“Postmodern lyric finds its elegiac note exactly in the lost identity of word and thing, but in its yearning rescues the word as it drowns the referent”), and a recurrent false dichotomy which sets up the sin of “referentiality” against the virtue of “opacity” or “undecideability.” There is too great a tendency to generalize about Shapiro’s oeuvre as a whole, sometimes with an affectation of academic argument but without any real controversy, when it would be more to the point to offer close reading and thick description of the ways particular poems work. Innovative poetry in the U.S. is very exciting these days, but this book suggests our critical practices are not quite adequate to keep up with it. I say this not to quibble, but because I have a genuine desire for critical writing that might help me to read better Shapiro’s very complex and sometimes frankly overwhelming poetry, and did not always find such help in his book.

However, Burning Interiors does succeed as a testament to Shapiro’s growing importance, to the extraordinary originality and coherence of his work to date, and to his influence on a generation or two (how do you count generations, anyway?) of younger poets. It provides numerous opportunities to see pieces of his poetry anew by the simple fact of excerpted quotation and juxtaposition, and offers, as a whole, a comprehensive catalogue of Shapiro’s main themes, influences and techniques. Nearly every essay hits, at least once, an authentic note of gratitude and affection for the Shapiro. Fink and Lease have put together a timely collective love letter from the U.S. poetry community to one of its great poets.

*****

Sam Lohmann lives in Portland, Oregon. He edits a yearly poetry zine called "Peaches and Bats," and has published some chapbooks, most recently "Listen and Run."

RIPPLE EFFECT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by ELAINE EQUI

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems by Elaine Equi
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2007)

The Anti-Confession Confessional: Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems by Elaine Equi

INVOCATION

Come Inspiration,

sweet as two beautiful hookers
in a dream.

Don’t go girls—

even if you don’t know a thing
about poetry,

at least help me decide
what to wear.

-Elaine Equi

Elaine Equi doesn’t shirk away. Her poems are always of use, first and foremost to herself. Thankfully, in her case, this isn’t a negative criticism. How she accomplishes such personal exposure without over-doing any confessional aspects in the writing is the wonder at the heart of her poetry.

THE BANAL

Even with its shitload of artifacts, the everyday
is radiant, while the banal is opaque and often
obscure. I prefer the latter, with its murky
agate, mushroom, ochre background music—
its corridor of lurk. One hardly knows where
one stands with/in the banal. Walls come
together with hardly a seam. Wherever we are, we
feel we have always been. Poe, for all his special
effects, is rather banal in his approach to the
supernatural, i.e. overly familiar. Against the
inarticulate velvet of this mood, one grasps at
the everyday for relief. Thus any object can
bring us back with the fast-acting power of
aspirin. Any object shines.

When exposing the most personal of details, Equi places them (as she notes above of Poe) in such a context that familiarity is muddled and they are newly viewed. As with the most exciting of poets, Equi looks for new information in her poems. What it is she might discover in the act of writing that will place her in such a frame of mind that “any object shines.” Reading her poems is to enter into that “corridor of lurk,” finding new visions, such further possibilities of “the everyday,” that it is both a challenge and a pleasure to partake of them.

Her focus is on the distance of intimacy. Where might words lead that the world, once gazed at afterwards, is beheld anew.

A BOUQUET OF OBJECTS

Lovely to be
like a racehorse surrounded by flowers

but it is also lovely
to be surrounded by air and own pendants

and bracelets of soot.
Here is a factory made fresh by broken windows

and there is my muse
returning home with a pail of milk.

He brings me
down to earth where all poetry begins

with such beautiful hands
that I am forever doing nothing but thinking

of objects
and asking him to hold them.

Vachel Lindsay’s “factory-window song” brought into her own, without undue direct reference. The powerful patriarchal legacy of the benign female muse turned back on itself, under her own understanding and use of it. Assertion of her command over the gaze so often abused and misused by a patriarchal monopoly of the Arts which persists in the same old dumb observance. Equi doesn’t dwell long on such matters, instead giving the poem its own space to develop them or not, on its own terms.

It must be
like losing your
fear of death

to just stop
worrying about
what you look like—

no longer tied
to that lamppost

like a dog
in the rain.
(“BEAUTY SECRET”)

Equi sets her poems free to range where they may. The territory covered is ever diverse and fresh. The fearless ringing of new perspectives resounds throughout this collection.

Reading Equi may be likened to visiting a favorite relative. There’s always a story to be shared that titillates and charms. Another cup of coffee is a welcomed opportunity to stay around awhile longer. A solitary line offers a store of knowledge that sparkles, encouraging a closer, second look. Who wouldn’t want her for an aunt or second cousin?

I admit I used to like to smoke three packs a day wrap-
ping myself in an opalescent carapace of fog and being
always as in Victorian novels on the verge of swooning,
particularly when climbing stairs. Then for a brief spell,
during most of my teenage years, I was in love with
shoplifting. It was the sex glue in my adolescent girl-on-
girl world. One of those never-enough places where I
allowed myself excess—hungry open pockets and purse
gobbling perfume, candy, all the imagined gifts an imagi-
nary lover should give. Going out with boys, surprisingly,
proved to be an inexplicably simple solution.
(“ULTRA-CONFESSIONAL”)

There’s pure joy in the delight she takes in a conceived wrong, turning it around and finding a surprising rightness held within it, a shared rush of being naughty and nice—glimpse of a pleasant grimy bit of living. Rather than offering guidance or handing down lofty wisdom of a sage, Equi offers feelings and scenes from her own experiences that are focused on the immediacy of the moment: what feels good right now and has no harm other than offering a focus away from worrying over stresses and tensions of the day-to-day.

Just for today, I’d like to
step into someone else’s list.
Run their errands. Wish their wish.

Today is St. Ita’s day (the most famous
woman saint in Ireland after Brigid).
She is said to have reattached

the head to the body
of a man who’d been beheaded
and to live only on food from heaven.

Meanwhile the weather here is gray
but optimistic, aspiring to (I’m not sure to what).
The slant of something moving up and away.
(“A SENTIMENTAL SONG”)

There’s continual observance of detail, a zeroing in on the essential elements which play the major roles in creation. The poems are well constructed reflections of the living she’s busy getting on with. Her good times and her bad, her past and her present, the various loves and fascinations which have played round her through time.

TO HARRY CROSBY AT THE HOTEL DES ARTISTES

In 1979, on the 50th anniversary of your
double-suicide, I came like a bridesmaid
dressed in black to scatter rose petals
in the lobby. Then I went home and listened
to Joy Division, whose lead singer would
also kill himself. Death was everywhere
at the time, though mostly as a fashion
statement—kohl around the eyes and
safety pins through the cheek—with
the real devastation still to come. Now it
is 1993 and no one much likes to glamorize
their death wish, not since AIDS has made
absence so conspicuous. Today people prefer
to look healthy, and it’s mineral water I
toast you with in the Art Deco jungle of the
hotel bar. Not the sort of place I’d choose
if I were going to end it all, bit if I’ve
become anything, I hope it’s more tolerant—
even of the very rich. Outside on the ground
there is no snow yet, but old rice the color
of ivory, leftover from some other wedding,
and in the bare trees, white lights like a
handful of rice, transformed on this winter
afternoon into “the pleasure of neon in daylight.”
Perfect moments in an imperfect world, joined
together so that even death cannot separate them.

Ripple Effect covers Equi’s entire oeuvre up to the present. She begins the collection with a selection of New Work and then follows with poems from her first Coffee House Press publication, Surface Tension (1989). From there she continues forward with selections from her books: Decoy, Voice-Over, and The Cloud of Unknowable Things. In the back of the book, she gives a sampling of Early Work, “all but one of them written in Chicago” where she first began to write, read, and publish her poems in the late 1970s. It’s a splendid and generous sampling. The only two things to gripe about are: 1) a wish for more of the Early Work, including from which chapbooks individual poems are taken (the titles of the chapbooks are given but not in relation to individual poems), and 2) an index of titles and first lines is always nice to have with such a major collection. But these be minor quibbles. This collection is a wonderful delight and a terrific opportunity for new readers of Equi to become familiar with the unique qualities her work alone possesses.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in the library at USF. Poems and chapbooks have been published by Auguste Press, Blue Book, Chain, Pompom, and Red Ant Press among others.

RIPPLE EFFECT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by ELAINE EQUI

SAM LOHMANN Engages

Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems by Elaine Equi
(Coffee House Press, 2007)

This nice thick green paperback selects and collects poems from Elaine Equi’s four previous books from Coffee House Press (Surface Tension, 1989; Decoy, 1994; Voice-Over, 1998; and The Cloud of Knowable Things, 2003), bookended by a generous assortment of new poems at the beginning and a smaller section of “Early Work” at the drawn from her five books with other presses published between 1978 and 1989, before she had moved to New York from Chicago.

Offering a vast and diverse array of mostly short, consistently fun poems, this book is perhaps best suited to casual browsing; but it threatens to become addictive and, if read straight through, offers a better look than was previously possible at the persistent themes and approaches in Equi’s work as they recur and develop over nearly three decades of writing. Her characteristic style combines imagistic density and concision with a charming lightness of tone, an appearance of breezy casualness which is of course arrived at by years of devotion to craft. In her best poems, disparate observations and phrases are focused into delicate melodic structures where the silences between lines are as present as the sounds. Equi has no shyness about displaying her influences; there are a three-line poem, “At the End of Summer,” dedicated to Louis Zukofsky (“Go on / Mr. Tree Fugue / I’m listening”); poems dedicated to Robert Creeley, and Joe Brainard; mentions of Garcia Lorca, Barbara Guest and William Carlos Williams; a poem “After and in Keeping with H.D.” and this revealing “Prescription”:

Take Herrick
for melancholy

Niedecker
for clarity

O’Hara
for nerve

Some of the best poems in this book are centos collaged from the work of other poets. There are “Two Dozen Roses for Jackson Mac Low: a Cento,” “From Lorine” (which, says a note at the back, is “a collage of lines and phrases (slightly edited) from Lorine Niedecker’s letters”), and “Wang Wei’s Moon,” consisting of lines about moonlight from the great T’ang poet. (This last is dedicated to David Shapiro, presumably after his work on “mistranslations” of Wang Wei, and Shapiro returns the compliment with his poem “Elaine Equi’s Moon” in his 2002 book A Burning Interior.) These poems are gifts of tribute and acknowledgement, and theoretically interesting explorations of multi-authored, appropriative or ventriloquial writing practices, but they are always also well-made poems on their own, with a musical integrity that is clearly Equi’s own. They are also, of course, eloquently direct demonstrations of “the pleasures of influence” and of writing as a way of more actively reading––there are a lot of moons in Wang Wei’s poems, what happens if we put them all on a page together and introduce them to one another? Likewise the poem on H.D. emulates, in a manner that is more enjoyable for being slightly cheeky and put-on, that poet’s habit of building her poems by playing variations on repeated sounds, to an effect of vatic incantation, and sometimes being led by ear-associations to some wondrous strange metaphors:

When I am a current
           lifted up––
can you hear eclipses’ seasoning?

When you are a cure-all,
there is no signal,
           nor sorcery
trailing along.

When I am a curve-ball
           made of shelter,
O can you hear distance receding?

When you are a comment,
there is no sour cherry
trudging across sanctuary gravel.

Equi is refreshingly open about the ways in which her poetry is derived from other poetry; as she puts it in “Legacy”: “There’s no shame in being someone else. / You may even be better at it than they were.” This makes her a great poet of reading, a subject which numerous poems in this book address explicitly––“Found in Translation” (“Poetry is the sound one language makes when it escapes into another. . . . For years, I copied authors from around the world. Then one day it occurred to me, perhaps it’s the translator I imitate, not the poet. This idea pleases me and makes me want to write more. . . . It would be great to learn French in order to read William Carlos Williams.”), “The Sensuous Reader” (“In autumn / take all the red and blue / out of a book.”), “The Objects in Japanese Novels,” “The Return of the Sensuous Reader” (“Remove all the words from a poem; / keep only the punctuation. . . . Change the gender of all the pronouns in a poem / and see for yourself. . . . Memorizing a poem is a good way to destroy it.”), etc. The volume as a whole presents the life-rhythms of one person’s relaxed and unpretentious engagement as a consumer-producer of literature (this banal economic terminology is very much part of Equi’s world), a cumulative graph of pedestrian amusement and everyday imaginative existence, which is strangely comforting. Read in bulk the poetry may begin to seem slightly too comfortable, too relentlessly neat and charming, but it is certainly a good thing to have around and come back to whenever one likes.

The poet avoids emotional autobiography (except as in the spoof “Ultra-Confessional”) in favor of a playful fluidity of voice: “Nothing can stop this / endless, transformative / flow of selves / into other, opposite, / even objects and animals,” as she puts it in “Men in Camisoles.” There is a certain lack of ambition which limits the scope of the work, but it also frees Equi to concentrate on formal stylistic concerns––prosodic music and dazzling effects of color and texture. She generally uses a short line which emphasizes each syllable’s relation to those surrounding it, modulating stress and quantity expressively and using enjambment as a device for suspense and tension, sometimes building up to a punchline, a koan, or a breathtakingly bizarre image. Rae Armantrout is probably the poet closest to her in terms of sound and prosody, but Equi’s approach is lighter, brighter, less caustic. But it’s hard to write about this kind of thing without flailing among mushy adjectival abstractions; better to give examples. From “Destinations”:

In brine daylight
thought becomes brimmed.
Fraught with sudden,
steeped in listening.

From “Art About Fear”:

Some objects
are like a sieve
that language
passes through
while others
repel the alphabet
with a harsh
clanging skin.
Minor intelligences
perched on
the tip of.
Go ahead, say it
in your Bullwinkle French.

From “Decoy”:

think of ready-ing
as doing the prerequisite reading

clouds slide
smoothly over the skin

“He lives in his legend
and that’s about it”

a neatly folded labyrinth

going by:
blue blooms on the red field
of a dress in motion

if only we could get
that feeling back where
it’s the landscape that moves
and the viewer who stands still

“Yes, yes
we have to get together

and no, I don’t
know who you are.”

My favorite poems in this collection––there are many––emphasize this formal aspect of Equi’s work, offering a sonic and visual arrangement without ulterior “meaning” or “filling out” a traditional or newly invented “form” with the “content” it requires. On the other hand, the more anecdotal or narrative poems tend to be less enjoyable, and a few jokey ones are frankly annoying.

One of the most frequently occurring forms, utterly simple and endlessly delightful, is the list. There are all kinds of lists in this book: “Wittgenstein’s Colors” (“Blond / Tamarind / Bacon / Fog”), “The Seven Veils of Spring” (“1. ice water / 2. egg yolk / 3. pollen / 4. cotton candy / 5. fog / 6. chablis / 7. snot”); “Things to Do in the Bible,” “Table of Contents for an Imaginary Book,” “The Lost Poems” (“Victor Mature’s Kiss / The Snow Queen’s Summer House . . . Mister Preface / Charm-Quake / Postponing the Future”). There is a poem which describes each item of mail received on a certain day, a poem about dreaming in lists, and two different poems––separated by 223 pages and at least 20 years––which take the form of an elementary school vocabulary quiz, i.e. a list of words which are defined and then used “correctly” in sentences: “Quick, somebody throw the drowning man a siccative!” There are many other kinds of form-based poems in the collection: “Detail” piles up “not x but y” statements, where y < x: “Not the nest / but the egg. // Not Ophelia / but her bouquet. // Not the torso / but the arm”; “Out of the Cloud Chamber” moves repeatedly “out of the x into the y,” splicing an old saw and a famous poem: “Out of the frying pan and into the choir. // Out of mimesis endlessly mocking.” The beautiful “A Bend in the Light” does something similar with the formula “A y in the x,” while working in Dickinsonian off-rhymed quatrains, with allusions to Emily Dickinson’s poem beginning “There’s a certain slant of light.” “1+1=3” consists of stanzas (or perhaps a string of individual haiku-like poems) having the form 1 word / 1 word / 3 words, as in: “Saltlick / tit / of the infinite”; or: “River / runs / through a bullet.” Finally, in a more traditional form, there is a beautifully crafted, acutely tender and very moving pantoum, “Jerome Meditating” (concerning Equi’s husband, the poet Jerome Sala), in which the repeated and recontextualized lines knit each stanza to those adjacent in a strong, slow, unemphatic rhythm like that of a meditator’s breathing. The device of repetition, carefully handled, insists on the importance of everyday domestic details.

The “everyday” itself is very explicitly a theme of Equi’s, as is “The Banal,” and she elucidates the difference between the two in a poem of that name:

Even with its shitload of artifacts, the everyday
is radiant, while the banal is opaque and often
obscure. I prefer the latter, with its murky
agate, mushroom, ochre background music––
its corridor of lurk. One hardly knows where
one stands with/in the banal. Walls come
together with hardly a seam. Wherever we are, we
feel we have always been. Poe, for all his special
effects, is rather banal in his approach to the
supernatural, i.e. overly familiar. Against the
inarticulate velvet of this mood, one grasps at
the everyday for relief. Thus any object can
bring us back with the fast-acting power of
aspirin. Any object shines.

The poem’s very tone and typographic form play in the median between prose (and “the prosaic”) and verse (popularly associated with an aesthetic of the “radiant” everyday). Ripple Effect as a whole engages with both sides of this dichotomy, as well as with the somewhat queasy, politically and poetically ambiguous middle ground, the world of kitsch and advertising, in which “any object shines” with a borrowed light. The catchphrasey allusion to aspirin in “The Banal” strikes this note, as do several of the new poems in the volume, such as “Ciao Bella Chocolate Sorbet,” which is almost literally an advertisement for that dessert, and “Calcium Rush,” which evokes late-90’s milk ads (“My bones are growing stronger. / I feel them flexing their rippling marrow / high on the leafy milk of calcium”). “Unisex Colognes” is a triptych of imaginary slogans (“BLACK FOREST // Breezy. Bold. / Brooding. Bavarian. / /Makes anytime / feel like the middle of the night.”). “Ambien” is a dark parody of televised pharmaceutical-salvation monologues: “That’s Nutella on the light switch? / I should never answer e-mails after midnight. / Those are definitely raisins on the floor. / Never, never again. / I’ll just take my pill and go right to sleep. / I’ll wait until I’m already asleep to swallow it.” “Mountain to Mountain” reads a landscape delineated by logos: “Big Tit Mountain / Marlboro Country // Shangri-La-La / Mountain Dew / Iron Mountain / Sugarloaf.” These ad-like poems seem first slight and then disturbing, illustrating as they do the proximity of poetry to advertising, the degree to which any effort of poetic praise is almost doomed to repeat the rhetoric of commerce, which seems always one step ahead in “perfecting the science of discontent” (as Ezra Pound once said poetry should do).

On the “everyday” side of this miasmic middle, there are poems like “Fennel,” “A Lemon,” and “Almonds,” which offer meditations on or “thick descriptions” of their namesakes, an approach that recalls Ponge and Williams. The “banal” side is a major theme especially in the poems from the book Decoy, such as its title poem, the long sequence “Art About Fear,” “My Father Sees a UFO,” “Ninety Percent of All Serial Killers,” and its enigmatic opening poem, “Brand X”:

I know you think
this is about sex
but that’s only because
it’s really about advertising.

Someone talking
in an office.
Someone comparing two things.

I make decisions
or my body
makes them for me
and certain nights
everything is perfect.

Wedges of light flap
slow as Indian summer.
A red receding.

There is real violence
but it’s an after-dinner violence
mellow in the air
as sex is a kind of violence

like anything
that pulls us toward it
even though we’re unable
to ask for it by name.

One advantage that poetry still has over advertising is its ability to invent and evoke unnameable objects, and to include modes of consciousness which do not neatly add up spiritual lack resulting material desire. Poetry can distil an “enough,” and that “enough” can be an entirely new and unforeseen entity, more and other than the sum of its referents. Equi, with her keen sense of visual description and of paratactic conjunction, does something like this in her best poems, such as the long (for her) “Trenton Local,” or the compact lyric “’Your Purple Arrives’” (the title is a quotation from Zukofsky):

Purple flower.
           Purple heart.

Heap of sharp
and muddy edges.

Bruise or blossom?

Harp strings
trickle-down
realignment
of morning’s slow . . .

bright bug
with a crumb of window
on its back.

The way syntax and meaning hover in the line-breaks between “trickle-down” and “realignment,” between “slow” and “bright”––Ripple Effect is full of such crumbs of window.

* * *

Sometimes it happens that ones memory of a book is pervaded by the colors of its cover, regardless of the contents. In this case the cover is a garish spring green, and I noticed there was a lot of green inside as well. Inspired by Equi’s centos and other forms of readerly writing, I thought I might push this “engagement” with her work slightly beyond the usual bounds of a review by closing it with a paragraph “of my own,” made entirely from phrases found in Ripple Effect. I hope this is not too presumptuous or flippant an abuse of the reviewer’s office (in my case a picnic table in Laurelhurst Park, Portland, Oregon). I hearten myself with the thought that a review often functions anyway as a kind of cento or anthology of favorite lines, and that this is really the quickest way to get in a lot of good quotations at the end. So I offer

“ELAINE EQUI’S GREENS, A CENTO”

Knowledge back then was edible and served on the backs of broad green leaves. Quick and emerald green. Yellow meets and mingles with me, followed by an anonymous, clove-scented man. The screams of plants connect the turquoise dots. Under a green bough, history expires, the famous sea serpent. Is it jade or black––the river’s moodring? Tarn. Charred nettles. Snot. Cabbagefangs. Three empty beer bottles rest side by side in the nest of a cinderblock of tall wild grass. All they sell is the potential for candy: a twitchy, twangy, tangy green. “Crickets Crush Woman.” The leaves have finally found their niche: Willow seen by candlelight. Or the rarely seen pistachio green full moon that burns the pines. Cut into, its flesh unwinds like a roll of film––shot half in winter, half in spring. O to live on nothing but arugula and espresso! Sage. Marigolds. Salems. Rolling Rock. A pulse in the bark: Spring is a station too. . . . Its green apron and aquarium days . . . Even the light matches, pale and cold and slightly green, like the apple against his dark skin. Go on Mr. Tree Fugue I’m listening. Green is also the color of cash. Gears caught in the crab grass. Some uncharted green.

*****

Sam Lohmann lives in Portland, Oregon. He edits a yearly poetry zine called "Peaches and Bats," and has published some chapbooks, most recently "Listen and Run."

PUBLICATIONS by JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN, TOM BECKETT and ARGEL CORPUS

ERNESTO PRIEGO Reviews

World0, by John Bloomberg-Rissman
No Sounds of My Own Making by John Bloomberg-Rissman

Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems (1978-2006), by Tom Beckett
Steps: A Notebook, by Tom Beckett

Este bienestar, tibio/this Well-Being, warm, Poems in Translation, by Argel Corpus

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

World0, by John Bloomberg-Rissman
(Leafe Press, Nottingham; Bamboo Books, Culver City, 2007; limited edition of 100 copies)

No Sounds of My Own Making by John Bloomberg-Rissman
(Leafe Press, Nottingham, 2007)

John Bloomberg-Rissman doesn't need to invoke John Cage to become an experimental musician. He is a poet in the sense he used words and writes and organizes those words according to recognizable patterns, but his aesthetic enterprise seems to go beyond poetry to enter the realm of sound art. Both his chapbook, World0, and his book, No Sounds of My Own Making, are experimental artefacts in themselves, disguised as “traditional” poetry (even though the use of the hay(na)ku form is privileged, the latter not being, precisely, “traditional”, at least not in the canonical sense) but in fact working as exercises in sampling, looping, cutting and pasting. Bloomberg-Rissman uses the word processor and his blog as a deejay and remixer would use a pair of decks and a sound editing software: what counts here is poetry as organized words and the sounds and ideas they represent. These two are brilliant consequences of blogging as a poetic platform, and as such bear the mark of digital and online poetry: hypertextual, non-sequential, playful and free from the constraints of current mainstream or official tendencies in America or Europe. No Sounds of My Own Making is outstanding as an experimental long hay(na)ku, a piece that musically would traverse everything from John Coltrane to DJ Shadow to to Richard P. James, all seasoned with a bit of Sigur Ros's made-up lyrics. Bloomberg-Rissman's poetry is intellectually demanding because it forces to reader to map out his reading cartography, the literary landscape of his sources. Experimental yet experiential and therefore autobiographical, here's an attempt at reorganizing chaos and rediscovering the aura brought out by repetition. The author is dead but alive and well, thank you, because this poetry is foucauldian deleuzianism in all its splendour: it is not where words come from, but how they are arranged; where things are coming from is the least of our worries, what matters is where we will make all that go.


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

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

Steps: A Notebook, by Tom Beckett
(Meritage Press, St. Helena/San Francisco, 2007)

Tom Beckett has to be one of the most inspiring contemporary poets out there. His writing is as simple as it is complex: the reader is trapped in his fishing net (one pictures, also, Beckett dressed in fishnet stockings), because this is seductive poetry at its best. This is not, mind you, love or erotic poetry as Barnes & Noble or Borders know it. Unprotected Texts is a poetic photo album populated by snapshots of zombies, questions, ghosts, reflections, comic book aesthetics, critical theory, psychoanalysis and that humid, warm sensation of bodily fluids. Playing around with different stanzaic forms (hay(na)ku, tercets, couplets, lists, prose, aphorisms and other variations) Beckett has a voice that spectrally populates, under different masks, a poetic discourse that is as irreverent as authoritative. If Unprotected Texts has the melancholy tone of masturbation as an act of love, Steps, as a custom-made, handwritten “Tiny Book”, has all the playfulness of the unique event, a poetic journal that becomes public diary, extension of his now-defunct blog, yes, but also prosthesis of his body. Beckett's poetry, like Bloomberg-Rissman's, is the result of an aesthetics fully inserted in the 21st century, in the age of electronic global communications and the becoming-gadget of the human body. Unlike Bloomberg-Rissman's, Beckett's poetry is unavoidably possessed by a single voice, even if its manifestations are all multiple and variable. The fact that Unprotected Texts concludes with an interview with its author materializes the factual blurring of pre-existing categories that clearly differentiated bodily experience from literary act. Beckett's poetry is all corporal, and as such becomes to the bare eyes of the reader a naked performance: the Author's presence is that of a pole-dancer, tantalizing and perpetuating the reader's desire. Unprotected Texts and Steps are books for those who are willing to share his bed with a total stranger, beyond sexual orientations or distinctions of any other order.


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

Este bienestar, tibio/this Well-Being, warm, Poems in Translation, by Argel Corpus
(La Mano Izquierda, Victoria, BC, 2006)

Este bienestar, tibio/this Well-Being, warm finally reaches our hands via Mexico City. Argel Corpus (Mexico City, 1973) has written a touching, warm, vulnerable collection. A bilingual edition (translated by Maleea Acker, Susa Oñate and the author), this limited edition chapbook (75 copies only) offers a painful testimony of an experiential poetics that is nevertheless constructed around a careful, conscientious concern for form. Fully inserted in a Latin American tradition of contemporary poetry, Corpus carries his last name like a cross: his poetry is fragmented but aspires to wholesomeness; his words behave like bodies with dismorphic disorders and mirror themselves in the English versions next to them, giving back intimate reflections on the nature of time passing, the relationship of the self with the external world, proprioception as a phenomenological dilemma, the need to express the whole existence through the observation of what is small and apparently insignificant. Picture a crystal-clear lake and the sky mirrored on its surface: as readers our minds become naked feet not daring to test the waters on pain of disturbing the still peace of the whole landscape; such is the effect of Corpus's project. Mostly written in three stanzas of four lines each, with the occasional syncopation of one-liners in italics, the poems in Este bienestar, tibio/this Well-Being, warm have to be read in both English and Spanish to attempt a more or less just approach to what they may coyly suggest. There is a sadness here, a coldness of the heart that finds refuge in the obsessive contemplation of the physical world. Think of Sylvia Plath's “Tulips”: it is winter here.

*****

Ernesto Priego was born in Mexico City. He lives in London. He blogs at Never Neutral and is the author of the first single-author hay(na)ku poetry collection, Not Even Dogs. The "jainakú" is Mexico's version of the hay(na)ku poetic form.

GLOIRE DES FORMES PRECEDE DE LE DOUBLE CORPS DES IMAGES by JEAN FREMON

BARRY SCHWABSKY Reviews

Gloire des formes précédé de Le double corps des images by Jean Fremon
(Paris: P.O.L., 2005)

It is a great pleasure to have this compendious selection of Jean Frémon’s writings on art from 1978 to the present. Frémon is a distinguished poet and novelist—I particularly recommend L’Île des morts (1994, translated into English by Cole Swenson as Island of the Dead, 2002)—who also, as a director of the Galerie Lelong, enjoys an intimacy with contemporary art that is rare among his colleagues. Another way to put it, of course, is that he is a doubly dangerous character—not just one of those poet-art critics, a practitioner of that so-called “belletristic” criticism that is so out of favor in academic circles, but even worse, a gallerist-critic, in theory a conflict of interest come to life, a real scandal. (So much for Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.) Need I add, as well, that Frémon is an uncomfortable figure in another way? He is an unreconstructed modernist, one who is unashamed to invoke “glory” and even “form.” He feels no urge to demystify, knowing that “painting is a mysterious activity.”

So much the worse for those who may wrongly deny themselves a great pleasure. These writings are the product of a lucid intelligence and a great deal of knowledge, as well as of a freedom the rest of us art critics can only envy, for while they were mostly written for publication in exhibition catalogues, they were not (as Frémon points out in a foreword) written on commission, but rather by his own choice. And no editor to pass judgment on his choice, either of artists or of how to write about them! His choices are personal, which is perhaps another way to say that any given reader may find some of them questionable. All the essays are informed by something more than simply an acquaintance with the artists; working with them is something else altogether, something more: a way to mutually relate through the artwork in a very concrete manner. There are those who come to art primarily by looking; others approach it by way of its texts, and still others through conversation. Reading these essays one is aware of encountering someone who looks incessantly, reads everything, and has been able to discuss with the artists at length: many ways into art.

Most rewarding, perhaps, for Frémon and certainly for his readers is the opportunity to watch him come at certain of his subjects from different angles as he writes about them again and again over time. He returns regularly to certain key figures—Robert Ryman, Nicola de Maria, Jan Voss, Jannis Kounellis—but above all his great loyalty remains to Antoni Tàpies, here the subject of no less than eight texts ranging in date from 1978 to 2004—or rather nine texts, if one adds an essay whose subject is shared out between Tàpies and Arnulf Rainer, dated 2005. In that essay, the book’s last both by date and position, one finds the following surprising conclusion, a sort of lesson in French usage: “On appelle témoin le morceau de bois que les coureurs de relais se passent de main en main. L’histoire de la peinture est peut-être une course relais dans laquelle le témoin est un secret.” “Témoin is the name of that piece of wood that the runners in a relay race pass from hand to hand. The history of painting is perhaps a relay race in which the témoin is a secret.” Frémon is playing a game with us, of course. The primary meaning of the word is something else altogether—not baton, as that piece of wood is called in English, but witness, evidence. Certainly Frémon stands witness on behalf of Tàpies, able to cite not just sixty years of his artistic production but the artist’s reading and his collecting as well. Painting, the history of painting, has its witnesses, and it does pass them from hand to hand, as one painting leads to another. Not a critic, not a historian—“je suis marchand,” he declares right off the bat, as he prepares to give his evidence—Frémon may feel that he has been until now the secret witness of a lifetime of art, but in publishing this book, he’s tipped his hand: The secret’s been revealed.

+++++++++++++++
A Spanish translation of this review has previously been published in Exit Book 6, 2007.

*****

Barry Schwabsky is an American poet and art critic living in London. He writes regularly for Artforum and The Nation, among others. Opera: Poems 1981-2002 is published by Meritage Press, and his new book of poems will be published by Black Square Editions in 2008.

TWO BOOKS by ERIC GAMALINDA

PATRICK ROSAL Engages

Amigo Warfare by Eric Gamalinda
(Cherry Grove Editions, 2007)

and

Zero Gravity by Eric Gamalinda
(Alice James Books, 1999)

Amigo Warfare

I wish I didn't know Eric Gamalinda personally; then my appraisal of his two books of poems Zero Gravity and, very recently, Amigo Warfare as among the absolute best lyrics this country has seen in contemporary literature -- and likely longer -- could be taken more seriously. Among astounding collections of poetry written by beloved friends, acquaintances, and strange contemporaries in the poetry community, Gamalinda's books are singular.

After re-reading Rilke and Blake, I've been contemplating what it means to have some sort of vision -- in our time and our place. What does it mean to surrender oneself fully to language and its failures, only to capitalize on its contradictions? What does it mean to do that without renouncing the sensual pleasure that language is, that language describes? Gamalinda gives us some idea -- by example.

I find Gamalinda's poems unbearable at times, one of those books that I can hardly read one poem at a time. Sometimes a single line will stall me, and I have to, quite literally, put my head in my hands the way I've done when I've seen some terrible accident or been graced unexpectedly with strange music.

The poems are not oddities though there's the air of strangeness that the charge of the metaphysical takes on in, say, Neruda or Garcia Lorca or Rich or Zagajewski. The poems of both his American collections are squarely rooted in a physical context but make brilliant excursions into mathematics, philosophy, and myth.

Gamalinda has extraordinary patience, the way he allows the language to unfurl its surprises one by one. There is real awe here (not witless or overwhelmed awe, but one of high, shall I say 'awareness')-- and it, the awe, is almost whispered -- or it is bellowed; take your pick. The poems seem to have the quality of simultaneous energies -- kinetic and quiet.

I am sorry to say that we have many poems from the American Republic that try to sell us wisdom that is nothing more than mere knowledge -- much of it private. I include myself among those who have contributed on more than a occasion to that necessary slushpile. I don't think Eric would call what we draw form his books "wisdom", but they doubtlessly have the qualities of wisdom: precision, grace, astonishment. I mean to say, too, that the poems take their own astonishment for granted -- which seems to be the source of their power, a model of seeing (vision, perhaps) in which the extraordinary really is a daily fact.

The poems are nothing more than they exactly are. They know how unreliable language can be and then enthusiastically surrender themselves to the possibilities of being led by language and its delights. In the end, they do not deprive themselves of a timely melancholy nor an ageless bliss.

I keep pausing to make sure I am not overstating this. I don't believe I am. As I did (and continue to do) with Zero Gravity, I'm going to live with Amigo Warfare for quite some time.

Check Eric's page. He has excerpts from both Zero Gravity and Amigo Warfare. Better yet, buy the books.

Even as I wish I did not know Eric personally, I wish he and his poems were better known. They deserve, I believe, the widest audience.

*****

The following are samples poems chosen by GR's Editor. Here is a sample poem from Amigo Warfare:

No Fly Zone

Whatever form you imagine your worst fear,
if the zigzag of sunlight on the stoop profoundly
disturbs you, no matter how much bitterness
your earliest memory casts on your dinner plate,

Whether you come from a country of refugees
or xenophobes, whether you sleep
on the right side of the bed or the left, with a man
or a woman, in whatever language
you articulate your desire,

Even if tanks roll out of armories
looking for the dead center of mothers' hearts,
or in a city somewhere someone broods under a lamp
and pronounces a few words that could have saved a life,

Until the earth implodes with industry
and volcanoes sputter their last reproach,

No matter who you were two weeks ago,
no matter what voluntary evil lurked
in your heart when you woke this morning,
and you smoked a cigarette in the rain
and someone's name tasted like blood on your lips,

I am glad to share this lifetime with you,
there is no other planet where the cultivation of souls is possible,
not that we know of;
may the happiness of others protect you,
may you find the flashing exit signs at the turnpikes of suffering
and a coin to buy your way out of hell.

And here is a sample poem from Zero Gravity:

Subterranean

Let me be the first to say
that I know the name for everything
and if I don't I'll make them up:
dukkha, naufragio, talinhaga.
Just like the young
whose hearts give no shame,
I love the excesses of beauty,
there is never enough sunlight
in the world I will live in,
never enough room for love.

I fear none of us will last long enough
to prove what I've always suspected,
that the sky is a membrane
in an angel's skull,
trees talk to each other at night,
ice is water in a state of silence,
the embryo listens to everything we say.

I am afraid for the child skipping rope
on the corner of my street,
the girl on the train with flowers in her hair,
the man whose memory is entirely
in Spanish. I am more afraid of losing consciousness
when I go to sleep, or that in my sleep
I will grow old and forget how desire
once drove me mad with wakefulness.

Just like the perfect seasons
they will die
and I will die
and you will die also;
no one knows who will go first,
and this is the source
of all my grief.

*****

Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive and most recently, My American Kundiman. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including North American Review, Pindledyboz, Black Renaissance Noire, Brevity, Columbia, and the Beacon Best. His work has been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Arts and Letters Prize, Best of the Net among others. He taught creative writing for many years at Bloomfield College and twice served on the faculty of Kundiman’s Summer Retreat for Asian American Poets. He has served as visiting writer at Penn State Altoona, Centre College and, currently, the University of Texas, Austin. He is a native of New Jersey and the son of Filipino immigrants.

TWO BOOKS by ERIC GAMALINDA

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Amigo Warfare by Eric Gamalinda
(Cherry Grove Editions, Cincinnati, OH, 2007)

Lyrics From A Dead Language by Eric Gamalinda
(Anvil Publishing, Maynila, 1991)

Dear Eric,

I haven't seen you in years. Now, when I read your poems, I think of you as pure light. There is no skin between you and your poems. So though I haven't seen your face, your body, in years, I just saw you seconds ago when I opened Amigo Warfare and read from your poem “DMZ”:

At the end of my life I must stagger back to love,
my body a weight I am sick of carrying,
my pockets filled with intricate maps
and useless strategies.

I ask forgiveness of everyone who loved me
--you have been grievously misled.
I cash my name in, such a useful thing
--let's hope someone else has more luck with it.
I return the suit I borrowed,
promises I couldn't mend,
the happiness just one more quarter-inch
within my reach--loose change
still good for a pauper's meal.

Still, I haven't seen you in years. You've gone deeper into exile, haven't you? I wonder about that when I read certain of your poems, including my continuing read of “DMZ”:

I surrender my history
and all memory, its ammunition.
The nameless claim me. Exiles
offer me a home. Who else sees me
as I truly am, just another vehicle
transporting so much fuel?
I light my anger like a pile of twigs.
I do this in the desert: it scares away
anything that will devour me.
I do this in the city, where the jackhammer
cracks the cranium of the earth, and nothing
can save me. I lose myself
among the restless immigrants,
their bodies still warm
from the lust and gunfire of slums.

And yet, in exile, you're not separate from the world -- and still continuing to read “DMZ”:

Grief is a nation of everyone,
a country without borders.
I roam the avenues of it
out of habit. Summoned to testify
on everyone's behalf, I'm sticking
to my story. It's better not to talk
about the wounded, or the moist remains
of the disappeared. But there's always one
who can tell, in the packed
amplitude of crowds.

We are so many bodies, my friends.
We all move in the same direction.
As though someone had a plan.

I wonder, sometimes, how you feel about disappointment. Whether you are disappointed, not with the world though there's much to be disappointed with --

We know we’re heading somewhere, blizzard-bound
on an empty bus. The windows are opaque.
A curfew has been called. The driver speaks
in echoes, a language we have yet
to understand. It’s been like this for weeks,
dropping strangers in the same blind-alley town.
The streets are pocked with holes. A man crawls into
an empty vault in a burial wall. He’s stolen
votive candles, his twilit cave burns like gold.
The wax rips through the punctured hands
of Christ, another illusion, as sharp
as the dream I see us in.
(from “Sign Language”)

I wonder if you are disappointed to be always leaving, because you're always moving forward. This may be presumptuous of me. Worse, I then lapse to pap, e.g. "There's no need to be disappointed as long as you write poems like the ones you've been writing through these long years.” Like this:

Poem Not Written in Catalan

Out of everything that is not eternal
I deny the patience of water, the divinity of salt, and the persistence of the spider

I would like to write a suicide note in three and a half languages
and travel south on a Thursday towards
some form of life outside of earth

And although people will think I'm no longer there
I will live in geodesic domes
and count only in numbers less than zero

Sometimes when I walk past trees in the city I hear them denying me
Normally this doesn't bother me but today
I'm not going to take any conspiracies

I deny bodies of water smaller than the Great Lakes
I deny any planet larger than America

I deny the fact that when I kill time, time is actually killing me
I am air, light, sound, all of which I deny
I deny the Buddha, I do not deny the Buddha

An exact copy of my life is being lived a million light years away
If there's a way to prove it
If mathematics were the only religion

We are passing an era of turbulence
Make sure your souls are in the upright position

"I am afraid of the profound certitude of things"

Love like an arsonist
steals into my life and burns down all my tenements

(In a court of law, love will deny me
and the burden of proof rests entirely on me)

Or like this:

Melting City (1)

One of these days I’m going to melt all the gold of Paris
and turn it into money. I’ll spread it over the ghettos
of the Arabs, over the palm of the old woman begging
on the steps of Barbes-Rochechouart; she’ll wake up
with brilliant tattoos burning in her hands.
I’ll take all the hunger of the world
and use it as my ammunition. I’ll live in frontiers
where languages merge and confuse the tongue.
I’ll eat only chickpeas and pepper
and learn to crush olives for oil. I’ll use the oil
for bathing and nourishment and sex.
I’ll follow an angel in the fog of the baths
and sit next to him while three men take turns
sucking his cock. I’ll dream only on Tuesdays
and only at 4 A.M. I’ll be a prostitute for a night
and earn my living giving pleasure.
I’ve already told you how the earth spins backward
in the wrong direction and we’ll wind up
in the first moment of the world, a breath, an urge
to be, a calculated uncertainty.
I’ve told you that water decrees its own fate
and the deeper it is the less light you need,
that light moves in circles, what you are now
is already a reflection in a hundred years.
I’ve told you how I’ve seen the end of the world,
it will come slowly, like madness, like a boat
cruising the Seine. I feel every life that is shown to me
comes when it is most broken and most in need,
And I tell you what I’ve already said:
I will pave the gold of Paris all over your lives,
I will do it with words, if words mean anything to you.
This is the way I’ve always known it,
through all my life. I wanted not to believe.
I did everything I could not to believe.

Or like this, your book’s title poem:

Amigo Warfare

Because you seize our land
and call it hope,
because you manufacture desolation

and call it right-of-way. Because
your cavalries cut our children open
to expose their hearts of coal.

Because you send a shining fleet
of your youngest men,
lust still forming in their bones.

Because their bodies rape the bodies
of our neighbors. Because you sleep
soundly through it all.

Because you divide us from our history
and install a thousand checkpoints
in between.

Because you line the streets with bricks
torn down from temples,
because our sleepless gods

wander among the missing.
Because your prophets tell us there's a heaven
but there's no more room.

Because you feed your words
into our language, and now we speak
like strangers to one another.

Because you make our women wear
their nakedness like a gem.
Because you scorch the jungles

with the counterfeit daylight of cities.
Because you intoxicate our rivers.
Because you harpoon all our whales.

Because you teach us how to torture one another
with the simplest of elements,
fire and water.

Because you offer praise and weapons
to our dictators. Because you build blockades
around those who give us strength,

brother, sister, lover, friend.
Because you send your spies out
to investigate our dreams.

Because we dream the dangerous,
in which the world is fertile
with remembering, subversive

with desire. Because the old bury
the young. Because we use our sorrow
wisely, as armaments.

Because you brand our tongues
with silence. Because you watch us
in fear, even while we sing.

And you note that your book’s title comes from

“Amigo Warfare was what the Americans derisively called the Filipino style of resistance [from 1899 to 1904]. The Filipinos were friends during the day or when confronted, but at night or when no one was looking, they were guerrillas.” From “The Philippine-American War: Friendship and Forgetting” by Reynaldo C. Ileto in Vestiges of War (Shaw, Francia, eds., New York University Press, 2002)

which is to say, I am in awe at how you’ve alchemized so much beauty, albeit a dark beauty, from a political seed (this manner reminds me of William Blake’s similar achievement in Songs of Innocence and Experience).

But the poem has never asked the poet to sacrifice Joy. And you know that. It's just that when I read your 1991 book Lyrics From A Dead Language and compare what I sense to be a trajectory from that early work to your 2007 collection Amigo Warfare, I shrink a little from what I perceive that trajectory exacted from you. There is a personal cost to -- experience behind -- your poems that remind me of how true mysticism, contrary to its critics, is based on experience and not imagination. Here is one of your poems in Lyrics..., a poem written in 1979:

Jaro Sunrise

This hybrid of memory and progress,
your city, is my refuge.
In my dreams I call
and you come without a word.

I will learn your language,
your weather, your strange logic.
Let them know that we will be
the shadow of a lost people.
Give them your literature,
your blood, something
to live by:
A suite of beginnings.

Well, your poems instigated this "conversation" but I do realize it is a conversation with myself. It's just that I had determined relatively recently that I didn't want my poetry life to have as its last word this last word: Regret. And reading through your poems, I wanted to share that thought -- that hope -- with you.

And I wanted to meditate with you(r poems) over the difference between "diaspora" and "exile," only to wonder: Is that a foolish thought?

I haven't seen you in years, but your presence remains as fresh and strong as when we last shared the same room. Because you never stopped writing poems and I never stopped reading them.

And while I think that's a lovely sentence -- "Because you never stopped writing poems and I never stopped reading them" -- I just think there's still a better Conclusion ahead...and I share this, too, because I think you would agree. I'm raising a glass to Poetry as Forward Momentum, and recalling too a poem you love as much as I do -- Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso 33/ 85-105, (translation Anthony Esolen) -- that sings:

And so my mind, suspended utterly,
held its gaze still immobile and intent,
and ever kindled was my wish to see.

Before that Light one's will to turn is spent;
one is so changed, it is impossible
to shift the glance, for one would not consent,

Because all good--the object of the will--
is summed in it, for it alone is best:
beyond, defective; there, whole, perfect, still.

Stay well, my Friend. I still see you, albeit in profile, from the light cast forth by your poems.

Love,

Eileen


*****

Eileen Tabios doesn't allow her books to be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects -- but she is ecstatic to point you to recent reviews of her recent book The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007) by Nicholas Manning, by Jesse Glass, and by Burt Kimmelman. Oh, and a review by Laurel Johnson reprinted by Amazon.com, though it's also good to support SPD! Preening is as good as wine for good health!

FRAGILE REPLACEMENTS by WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA

THOMAS FINK Reviews

Fragile Replacements by William Allegrezza
(Meritage, 2007)

In William Allegrezza’s Fragile Replacements, two long poems in sections sandwich about forty pages of brief lyrics. The relevance of the book’s title is clear in the note on the first long poem: “The sections of Go-between were written in correspondence with the sections of Dante’s Vita Nuova. Each section reacts to or includes part of Dante’s text” (113).

In the Vita Nuova, as I understand it from the Dante Gabriel Rosetti translation, the amorous speaker not only idealizes Beatrice but focuses repeatedly on the anguish due to his distance from the beloved before arriving at a realization about the positive possibilities of a “new life.” In each of the sections, a reiterated form provides a sense of stability or at least a frame within which the anguish is contained: there is a prose narrative, a sonnet or sequence of sonnets, and then a brief explanation of the poetry, and the fluid syntax and traditional Christian imagery and abstraction also provides coherence. It stands to reason that Allegrezza’s collaging and responses to Dante’s work in “Go-between” will prove “fragile” in the sense that his sections of verse, not bolstered by the prose features, have a small fraction of the number of words and sentences that Dante’s do, and there is a fair amount of syntactical and thematic disjunction. Take section VII:

patience faltering            ideas
leaving
                       so clear            in water eyes

“i have been here only once before”

waiting after the storm            with
layers above            light refracting
                       crystals coming around my
body            limp            filled

the key was fumbled             “i was greatly
cast down”
                                   it is plain. (9)

The adverb “patiently” in Dante’s section VII becomes the noun “patience” in Allegrezza’s, but I fail to see any other repetition of actual language or imagery, and yet the tone of melancholy in the “original” is somehow preserved in various images and abstractions in the “replacement.” This tonal feature, along with hints of narrative in the “replacements,” mitigates the effect of the difference between the precursor’s stylistic fluidity and the twenty-first century ephebe’s disjunction. Allegrezza has spoken of the influence of Charles Olson on his work, and in “Go-between,” one can often imagine a twenty-first century distillation of Dante’s style and themes placed on the flexible spacing of “projective verse,” though not precisely Olson’s sprawling lines. (In sections XXVIII and XXIX, a destruction of boundaries among words and a destabilizing play with capitalization/lower case as well as spacing– “WOrDsJuMBLEASVoiCES/ COLlasPeFOrLacKOFPoWerTO/ APpRoacHTHETOpic” (30)—achieves an effect of fragmentation and temporary incomprehension far more intense than anything in Olson, not to mention Dante.)

In previous work by Allegrezza like the poems collected in In the Weaver’s Valley, as in many of the short poems in this book’s second section, we see the curious quoted sentences that pop up out of nowhere and seem to ask us to locate the substance of their relation to what comes before and after them. However, these forlorn traces of voice often complement whatever language surrounds them. If “the key was fumbled”—the key unlocking love or spiritual understanding—then it makes sense that the speaker “was disoriented (“greatly cast down”).

Although some aspects of Allegrezza’s long poem jibe with his sentence, “in parts i describe desolation” (23), a polyphony of tones enriches the text. Uncanny moments are especially noteworthy. In section XXVI, Dante speaks with delight and wonder about how she had gained the admiration of “all men” through her purity, humility, and grace and how, whenever she passes by, they crowd around to behold her. After the sonnet in this section, Dante states that its meaning is too simple to require the usual explication. However, Allegrezza’s XXVI is more challenging than the average section, and his speaker seems more neutral—and perhaps less than thrilled—about the attentions that throngs of men pay to his lady:

many men gathered round to look
and she not knowing where to turn
turned everywhere
                       those having seen could
                                   bear witness

so fair all sound stops                        no
“miracle . . . can create such marvels”

i searched for my own goodness in you and
found other faces staring back (28)

The fact that the woman does not know “where to turn” indicates an important difference from Dante’s perspective; rather than utterly poised in bestowing her grace to the multitude, she may be bewildered by the sheer mass of objectification that confronts her. This attention is not necessarily the ultimate honor, one which gives pleasure to the speaker, but a problem with which she deals by using common sense. When she returns the men’s gaze, Allegrezza counters impressions of the idealization of her beauty, etc. in at least two ways. First, there is a compelling ambiguity in the quoted sentence: not only is it unclear whether the “no” is to be read as enjambed with the quote or to be considered a negation of the prior assertion, but the superlatives (“miracles,” “marvels”) could refer either to the subjective valuation of her loveliness or to the dubious spectacle that the “many men” create.

But the most interesting event in the section comes last. Resorting to apostrophe, the speaker admits that he wishes to use the woman as a mirror for the validation of his own moral standing, as though either his profession of love for her or his loving acceptance of her inaccessibility to him (if this is the case), or her acceptance of him as her beloved might attest to his virtue, or else he asserts that her spiritual powers bring redemption. Unfortunately for him, the mirror brings him a crowd of others, who, ironically, may have similar aims in admiring the lady. From Rimbaud to Lacan, the notion of the self as another has been a significant insight, but this multiplication of similar others, a displacement of the unitary conception of self, may be even more disorienting. How far this seems from the pleasure that Dante takes (or at least considers it advisable, from a pietistic perspective, to take) in the effect that his beloved has on men.

“Gathering Forces,” the long poem that occupies the last twenty-one pages of Fragile Replacements, takes the visual experimentation in a few sections of “Go-between” several steps further. The opening page of the latter poem straightforwardly establishes the speaker’s program; he has come “into the valley”—perhaps a reference to the “weaver’s valley” of his earlier book—“to protect [himself] against coming storms” and to search “for clear air/. . . and for a voice/ with which to claim existence. . . “ (91). This visionary rhetoric might be assigned contemporary context, the misery of the two Iraq wars and the poet’s disgust with his nation’s foreign policy, in the section’s concluding lines: “a bathed body/ returning/ from years tuned/ through desert storms.” The “body” has been like a radio “tuned” to and “through” bad news.

On the next page, as many subsequent ones, traditional visionary stances are complicated or displaced by visual effects. A massive, black “V” dominates the page’s center, and though it is attached to the second, two-word “strophe,” which reads, “Voice returning,” announcing a positive outcome to the search mentioned on the prior page, the “V” is also superimposed on the three-line first “strophe,” rendering parts of it unreadable [Editor's Note: Depending on your server, the visual element may not be aptly manifested viz Blogger]:

i have car                       letters for                       a valley full of
buildings an                       ining st                       ats head out into
the nothing ne                       ando                       ed. (92)

Admittedly, Susan Howe sometimes effaces a good deal more than this. My approximation leaves out part of a letter after “st,” bisected by the right diagonal of the “V,” because I am unable to tell whether it is a “u,” “r,” or something else. The big “V” may be attached to “Voice,” but it also recalls the sign for “Victory” familiar in our culture at least since the Second World War. And so, I ask: whose victory? Is it the one claimed by the U.S. government in Iraq in Spring 2003, a claim subject to overwhelming counterevidence afterward? And if it is the victory of “Voice,” a transcendence of whatever forces have fragmented “existence” and “battered” the speaker’s “body,” is this a pseudo-triumph, since the gigantic gesture blots out parts of the speaker’s actual utterance? For example, in the passage above, I assume that the “car” is part of “carried,” but there is a missing adjective between “carried” and “letters” that may have held major consequence for a reader’s understanding of the sentence and passage. Similarly, the “an” in the second line is probably followed by a “d,” yet the next three words are obscured in ways that defy strong conjecture: “buildings and _____ _____ _____ head out into. . . .” And the third line poses a similar problem. “Victory” and “Voice” constitute defeat and silencing/effacement.

Ironically, while the same sort of partial effacement, often less blatant, is produced on pages 100, 104 (note the use of thick white letters for this purpose), 106, and 110, educated guesses seem quite easy in many cases. On page 94, obvious repetition of the language of the small print makes the big black and grey interruptions a moot point. On 96, 98, 102, 104, 106, and 110, Allegrezza uses bulky grey letters in darker and lighter tones that either appear to be beneath the smaller print or to allow the latter to show through; these effects permit a simultaneous apprehension of what the small letters and big letters say.

But isn’t this doubleness a splitting of “Voice” and the reception of it? Doesn’t this subvert the unitary intention of claiming a voice and of validating it through its unified presentation to others? When a voice becomes “voices,” a dialogue of selves (even if stemming from a single individual) supplants a singular authority. Perhaps this stance supports a democratic spirit: “and know/ that they/ are/ gathering/ forces/ by keeping/ fragments/ alive” (102). (When he was running for President in the eighties, Rainbow Coalition candidate Jesse Jackson exclaimed: “Keep hope alive!”) On the other hand, the poem’s visual innovations could be construed as a failure of voice, portending political balkanization that allows conservative authority to maintain itself. I believe that Allegrezza’s uncanny stagings of language on the page locate the tropes and topoi of Vision/Voice as an ongoing conflict between these interpretations. It keeps us thinking.

*****

Thomas Fink, Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, is the author of A DIFFERENT SENSE OF POWER (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001) and the co-editor of "BURNING INTERIORS": DAVID SHAPIRO'S POETRY AND POETICS (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2007.) Marsh Hawk Press will publish his fifth book of poems, CLARITY AND OTHER POEMS in Spring, 2008. His paintings hang in various collections.

URBAN MYTHS: 210 POEMS by JOHN TRANTER

PAM BROWN Engages

Urban Myths: 210 Poems by John Tranter
(Salt Publishing, 2006)

[First presented as an Introduction to ‘Urban Myths’ on the occasion of its launch at Gleebooks Bookshop, Glebe, Sydney, Australia, May 2006]

The first poem that I read by John Tranter was in Poetry Magazine in 1969. It was one of those inchoate but incredibly ambitious poems, you know aspiring towards epic, typical of a young man just beginning to publish. The gawky title "A Voyager Returns/Psychomimetic Paraboloid' was 'of its times' (and the poem has now shuffled off to posterity to yellow or mould in some cupboard in a garage). Poetry Magazine was published by a small institution called 'The Poetry Society of Australia'. It was a traditionally-styled society -- it had a President, a Vice President and various office bearers. Roland Robinson, Robert Adamson, Robert Gray, and Carl Harrison Ford too, were all presidents and for a brief time John was a Poetry Society 'councillor'. The whole concept seemed very official, very male and very square to me then. I was about to undergo total immersion in Sydney counter culture -- a group house, a terrace house, in Surry Hills, UBU scratch films in the living room, an underground offset printing press in the front room , pink inc., gay rights in Balmain, happenings, hippies, yippies and hashish. What fun.

Extract from ‘A Voyager Returns/Psychomimetic Paraboloid’
“…Nympharum Membra Disjecta…”
               Ezra Pound: “April”

1.
the harbour, through the gestures
of sail and motor, water, the shifts of light
through the artful dumb mechanics of the wind
was trying the sparkling edge of sand was
trying in brittle semaphore to say
we are the final harbour filled with light

2.
listen, sweet brother, he
said, it’s been a long and bloody journey
how could I wound you with the days
the nights the long the endless
avenues, the sandblown Russian highway
….

Today all of that (i.e. counter cultural life) can sound like an Urban Myth -- legendary but did it happen? In a parallel world in the same city, at the same time, John was finishing his arts degree at university. Then, in 1971, he got a job in Singapore where he and his wife Lyn lived until '73. Just after that he got one of the first Literature Board grants in 1974 and the following year, '75, they moved up to Brisbane where he worked for ABC radio and they got busy raising a couple of kids.

So, I didn't actually encounter John in person until around 1977 when he'd returned to live in Sydney. I remember first seeing him at one of those Glebe poets' parties in Toxteth Road. He seemed quiet -- hanging around in the crowded, smoke-filled living room in his mayonnaise-yellow skivvy. We didn't actually talk. I probably thought he was aloof and perhaps he thought I was -- or maybe he was bored or possibly very cool or on something. Everyone else was on something.

Anyway that's just to say that we've both, each in our own way, been around the Sydney poetry traps for a fair while. And remembering the '70s affords the realisation that these days everything we do as poets seems counter-cultural because the 'culture' is filled with so much expensive mediocrity and lifestyle spin that there's not much space left for poetry.

However, as this big collection demonstrates -- poetry as an art form is thriving in spite of commercial and lowest-common-denominator adversities.

John Tranter has been an active and influential figure in Australian poetry for approaching-forty years now. It's impossible to be an Australian poet and not know about John Tranter. He has anthologised Australian poets in several key collections including The New Australian Poetry in 1979 in which he used the term 'Generation of 68' to describe the fresh direction some poets had taken in a deliberate turning away from high British tradition (and he's had to live with his use of that fateful phrase for a l..o..n..g time now). He co-edited, with Philip Mead, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry which collected a broad range of 'modern' poetry beginning with Kenneth Slessor, and included hoax poems from the 1940s by Ern Malley, an urban myth in his own right. The anthology covered up until 1993. John also published, via his early 80s imprint Transit New Poetry, the first books of well-known poets Gig Ryan and Susan Hampton, and books by Alan Jefferies and the late great John Forbes. For a time in the late 80s John was poetry editor for the Bulletin magazine. In 1993 he edited a collection of the poetry and prose of his friend Martin Johnston -- another poet who died too soon. During his time at the ABC John invited innumerable poets to appear on radio broadcasts. In 1996 he started the international internet magazine Jacket which is flourishing -- getting better every day in every way. Currently John is also working on an ambitious project begun last year called the Australian Literature Resources Index -- a freely accessible index of Australian poetry that is set to become definitive. He's also doing his PhD.

So he has been a very busy poet and as well as all of that, he has written many books. The one we're celebrating tonight is his 21st collection -- Urban Myths.

What is an 'urban myth'?

It's a sensational but apocryphal story that through repetition in varying versions acquires the status of folklore. Urban myths reconstruct as the story unfolds. They usually, in the case of writing, contain the kinds of information that trick you into believing that the writer is a real person and that they know what they're talking about. If investigated you’ll inevitably find out that they either don't exist or they exist but never wrote the story.

I'm not sure why John has called this collection Urban Myths -- but I can speculate that he's signaling to his readers not to conflate him too closely with his poems and not to take the poems literally. He's letting us off the hook. As he traverses thirty six years of cleverly concocted experiments, we don't have to believe it. John Tranter is like a poetry scientist in his laboratory, peering through the microscope at the strange words grr=owing mysteriously in the Petri dishes -- into culture. And in everyday life, he also happens to love actual gadgets. He is interested in the technical -- how things work -- cameras, minidisc player/recorders, usb drives, pepper grinders, holograms, the angles of Furi knife blades, astrolabes -- you name it. He also loves typography and can tell you the story of the invention of many typefaces from memory.

This is background to the work in this compendium where John displays a panoptic proportion of formal skills with relish and the poetry becomes another technology. You’ll find a panoply of form; elegies, odes, haibuns, sestinas, sonnets, pantoums, acrostics and, even, in the case of 'Girl in Water', a poem about the movie Vertigo -- a double acrostic.

Style is also important to John, as to every poet, but here it's not mere sophistication.

‘Girl in Water’

Waiting to meet a pretty girl — any pretty girl —
hot summer day in 1958, beach crowd, emotional algebra,
also list and remember: makeup, perfume, lipstick, talc,
telephone passion — no, a soda fountain, a pizza.

Do they dream of mystery and adventure, women?
or do girls want to drown in literature? No, stupid. I
bet she’d like a fragrant pizza topped with mozzarella,
or is that just me? A movie: Item: Kim Novak. A drive-in —

yes, more subtle and powerful appetites litter the sand.
So become that detective, wounded, pitiful; so
learn to love and learn to fail in love, in the back row at the Bijou,
in parked cars, or snug among sandhills… your spyglass a nib,

keyhole secrets memorised and filed away, until
eternity comes calling at the foot of a staircase.
After that ending, another climb, another cliff
beyond which something awful awaits: love

or falling in love or into love or falling into death, a
uniform and dizzying and swift descent
that leaves you breathless, leaves you
very unsteady like a cork in the water,

effervescent and febrile and emotionally labile,
ready for almost anything.
That conscious pilot spoke: scripsi quod scripsi:
I have written what? I have written for

girl in water ‘girl in water’, girl
or woman in waves of water. I,
keen to find behind mirrors, wavering echoes, burn
in plots and complex narratives to draw

many clues out, threads of meaning. A
new insight into the convoluted plot
of good and evil I can look for, where good men whine,
villains struggle to prevail and bluster

against ordinary background noise and hubbub:
kaleidoscopes of criminality and subtle fiscal judo
scam and prosper, and some ordinary guy
will win and lose everything. I

owe more than money. The key will turn:
nervous ex-detectives afraid of causing harm
drop into floods of anxiety, plunge into semi-
enervating doubt; whirlpools of suspicion, and later

refuse help from well-meaning friends or
from glum old girl-friends, dawdling, doodling, who
understand too well their weaknesses, their
lack of manly self-respect, who know how hypnotic

those doubled mysteries within a mystery are. You reach
into a maelstrom of neurosis. Beyond bodily desire,
these complex chess-like fantasies are the true romantic
scenes in your life: the most ludic acrostic paradises: click!

[Vertigo, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, with Kim Novak and James Stewart.]

The range here, whilst being identifiably Tranteresque is very, very broad. There are uncollected poems and new poems as well. He has many influences and among them are the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who was a kind of proto-modernist and actually, as you know, quit writing poetry at a very young age. He was an early influence on John. Others include the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who is deft at bringing politics into poetry, and the North American, John Ashbery who, like John Tranter, is very fond of language play and masquerade -- however I'd say, to be utterly reductive, that John Tranter's writing is more accessible than Ashbery's.

These poems are loaded with imagery, often startling, often sensationally strange as if from dreams and they are often darkly comical. There is an exegetic quality to this work -- he explains what’s going on as at first he registers, and then brings into perception whatever it is, often a human quirk of behaviour, probably some foible. John often writes conceptually, in themes or series, so you get sequences or batches of poems. Poems on film, say, or famous figures at significant local venues -- Sartre at Surfers’ Paradise, Leavis at the London Hotel, Foucault at the Forest Lodge Hotel from Dazed in the Ladies Lounge or in At the Florida an entire suite of haibun and so on. (A haibun is twenty lines of blank verse for the first stanza and a short stanza of prose below it). Poetry on one level can seem incoherent but I'm certain tonight's gathering of poetry lovers doesn't have a problem with incoherence -- you know how a good dose of wild language play liberates the imagination. As a kind of anchor as you read you'll find a note on the foot of each page that tells you in which book you are and in what year.

Talking about imaginative language play leads me to The Alphabet Murders, from 1976, the title taken from a movie of an Agatha Christie novel. It's a set of, obviously, 26 poems that begin with the letters of the alphabet and then last, a 27th prose poem, returning to the letter 'A'. It's a wild trip through a personal theory of poetics where ‘lyric poets/wander through like crippled birds’. It's witty, and it's disturbing -- it's exhausting.

It's a kind of investigative trip through the past and future of poetry. He desires a resolution of modernism or even hopes to abandon poetry itself and make some other leap.

There are some good essays on The Alphabet Murders -- one by Kate Lilley but especially one by Kate Fagan and Peter Minter examining the poem's frequent muddy, scatalogical imagery, that you can find in Jacket issue 27. After reading the paroxysms of The Alphabet Murders you wonder how John got the mental energy or could have been so resolute as to ever write another poem . But thirty years later there are many more and mostly as intense, as this collection shows.

Extract from ‘The Alphabet Murders’

Before this complex thought begins attacking
what we have left behind — riddles, packaging —
itself must generate enough good luck for the whole voyage.
After trunks full of shit flung overboard
and the page aflame with noise and verb geometry
I’m ready and lunch jumps into sight and we are off
like a rocket, zooming through the lecture hall where
history becomes a kind of thick paralysis and breaks
down into spasms and morality and all we can remember
through the foggy explosion is how we thrilled
and brought back memories of Captain Marvel
wriggling on a pin....

John Tranter is also the poet of a kind of Australian suburban anxiety -- in The Floor of Heaven and Studio Moon especially. Desperation and the darker side of disappointment, i.e. melancholy, in some poems and a kind of ordinary or domestic ennui in others temper any excess of imaginative revelation. And from Under Berlin there's a mid-life poem with this opening stanza -- 'Although art is, in the end, anonymous,/turning into history once it's left the body,/surely some gadget in the poet's head/forces us to suffer/ as we stumble through the psychology of it:/the accent betraying a class conflict/seen upside-down through a prism,the bad luck/to be born in a lucky country'. These are part of John's exegetic pursuit of the humane, and the often comical fallibility of our feelings glimpsed beyond the feats of a twentieth-century fin-de-millennium stream-of-consciousness.

The poem in this book from The Floor of Heaven is a long poem of narrative melodrama, spoken monologues (mostly from some feisty, but not infallible, women) are over the top -- kind of spoofy and very entertaining -- in an unravelling kind of way. Is this the beginning of post-post-modernism ? I'm not sure. It's something I think best left to the scholars.

There are numerous interests in these poems but two that seem prominent are film and drinks. John likes the vividness of film, especially British film noir, Alfred Hitchcock, (I mentioned the Vertigo poem earlier) -- and the way film can leap from location to location, expression to shadow to something else just as unpredictably as lines in a poem can. There's a group of new poems called At the Movies.

There are many alcoholic drinks in these poems from the opening lines of the book, a poem about poetry -- the art of love, that is an emulation of the early 19th century German Lyric poet Friedrich Holderlin, setting the reader up nicely, it begins 'When I was a young man, a drink/often rescued me from the factory floor/or the office routine'. Quite understandable too.

More poems with drinks or the after effects, hungover and drinking crème de menthe in Trastevere, or campy cocktail-party wit reminiscent of 1960s New York School poetry -- that droll urbane sagacity. And, interestingly, for a poet who can deal with excess John abhors gush.

And then there's the computer. John is a skilled computer-user and he made an improvisational collection called Different Hands by using a program called 'brekdown' to generate prose pieces that John says 'started out strange and worked their way back to meaning'. More from the poetry laboratory but this time like an OULIPOian automaton e.g .'Neuromancing Miss Stein' combines texts from Gertrude Stein's 'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas' with William Gibson's 'Neuromancer'. And 'The Howling Twins' blends Ginsberg's 'Howl' and 'The Bobbsey Twins on a Bicycle Trip'. Did someone say 'semantic flux' ?

Extract from ‘The Howling Twins’

The twins Marilyn and Stanley and their friend Charlie Rugg had stopped at the top of the hill, propped against their red bikes. They’d come rocking along to the farm at Rockaway Junction to see if they could find their pet cat named Snowball. Snowball had been rescued from Uncle Daniel’s farm a dozen times, but no permanent good had ever come of it. They’d looked and looked, to no avail.

‘Well, I guess Snowball has given us the cold shoulder again,’ Marilyn said. ‘She hid in her own kitty heaven, a heaven in the underbrush. She would have heard a dog barking, should a dog have barked. Hey, don’t you two want me to pick some apples while I’m here? I’m hungry. Maybe she’ll turn up, while we’re waiting. Maybe somebody has already found the little tyke.’

‘Sure, and maybe a bunch of guys grabbed the critter, and took her as sacrifice to their dreadful god Moloch,’ Charlie replied scornfully, ‘guys who had seen Snowball but who said nothing, nothing at all!’ He burst into tears. Marilyn comforted the poor fellow, who was now dreaming of the breasts of the boys, sobbing after they had been crushed by the stone god.

In the quiet country morning there were sounds of many animals. Stanley’s acute hearing trapped the other sounds, and sorted out their pet’s bickering meow. ‘Cats hear more than we know. I hear one meowing now, up in the branches.’

‘Uh-uh. I don’t see a cat rescued from the branches,’ Marilyn said. ‘Not by us, at any rate.’

It was fun at Uncle Daniel’s farm, but that was a vacation, not employment, which is each day suffering money burning in wastebaskets. The one symbolic escape is amnesia, and the only escapees are those who watch from the place of forgetfulness.

Marilyn listened to the spiritual sounds on the old metaphysical telephone. Lots of static. Then Death spoke, and said he was coming to get the boys. What was their crime? It was looking upon Death himself. How to escape him? Look upon Life.

‘To look upon Life,’ Marilyn said, ‘we could visit dives in the city and from the anonymous dark watch the incomprehensible jazz criminals perform with their flow of semen, or so Charlie once proposed. If I felt like it I could accuse Charlie of something awful, something to do with his body.’

‘Marilyn, I’m sure you would accuse the stoops off a building if you could,’ snapped Charlie, who had overheard. ‘I don’t give a damn if you worry about my body. I don’t know what to do next with this body, which is more than I can say for you. I’ve been places, remember.’

Marilyn remembered Charlie had gone to find out what was happening on the West Coast, and Stanley had claimed to be the True Consciousness and said he didn’t need to go there to find out. But he did go, and he found there the three old shrews: the stunned governments of capital, insulin and electricity.

Stanley, who wept for the boys the starry-spangled shocks of harlequin speech had led astray, Stanley, climbing the stairways of sin in empty lots, Stanley who jumped into the void of insulin, Stanley who lounged hungry and speechless and said ‘Kiss the ass of war, the monster whose fingers inscribe the terror.’ Stanley, who is still cursing at the harpies of the poem of life, burning a light in his naked room as a shrine. Stanley thought of Cocks and their monstrous Bombs. In the evening sky, the two twins were visions.

In his dream Stanley finds Snowball and flings the last radio of hypnotism into the East River.

Perhaps my favourite poem here is The Beach -- well it's actually a poetic prose piece set in Sydney in summer. The poet takes a philosophical bus ride from the inner west to the eastern suburbs beaches -- Tamarama and Bondi, remembering and noting all manner of things along the way. He visits a Darlinghurst bar where a minor tiff with a topless cocktail waitress over the ingredients of a martini is followed immediately by one of those brief but chilling reminders of mortality. But all's well as, in the end, it's Sydney, it's summer, it's balmy and everyone's off to the beach.

The notes for these 210 poems can be found on the internet -- they're illustrated -- there's a great photo of Col Joye and the Joy Boys for instance. As John is an extensive indexer and a stickler for detail they're worth reading as a piece in themselves. The notes are over 50 A4 printed pages long.

Urban Myths is a tour de force collection.

I could go on.

You should read it.

And look out for what John once said about 'postmodernity' -- "I'm not sure that it's in the work of art -- hovering behind it, perhaps, or glowing like an electrical spark in the air, jumping the gap between the work of art and the consumer."

I think no one can better represent their poems than the poet so… John Tranter 'This Is Your Life' or is it a Fantasy? Over to you.

*****

Pam Brown has published many books including Text thing (Little Esther Books, 2002) and Dear Deliria (Salt Publishing, 2003) which was awarded the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2004. In September 2007, Tinfish Press published farout-library-software, a collection of collaborative poems written with the Seattle-based Egyptian poet Maged Zaher. Her next collection of poems, True thoughts, is forthcoming in 2008. Pam Brown is the associate editor of Jacket magazine and a contributing editor for Fulcrum and How2. She keeps a blog -- http://thedeletions.blogspot.com

BOOKS by H.D., DIANE DI PRIMA and MARGARET ATWOOD

ROCHELLE RATNER Engages

Helen in Egypt by H.D.
(Grove Press, New York, 1961)

Loba by Diane di Prima
(Wingbow Press, Berkeley, 1978)

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literatureby Margaret Atwood
(House of Anansi, Toronto, 1972)

The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Margaret Atwood
(Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1970)

Mythic & Heroic Women

[Editor's Note: This essay written in 1984 as part of a still unpublished book of criticism entitled Speaking In Tongues.]

When I began to write in the persona of a mermaid in the 1970s, I wanted to make her a bitch-goddess, at once personal and mythological. It was not until later that I realized how much ground had already been cleared by other women writers. The books I used for research and inspiration were frequently written by women: Esther Harding's classic, Woman's Mysteries, The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan, Mothers and Amazons by Helen Diner, and The Mermaid and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein. Since my reading also included books by the male predecessors of these women, such as Erich Neumann's The Great Mother, J.J. Bachofen's Myth, Religion, & Mother Right, and Robert Briffault's The Mothers, I was fully aware that, if I had only the books of male writers to work from, the results would have been much different.

An example, perhaps overstated, but even more important for that very reason, of the way traditional male folklorists viewed the woman's presence in myth, is given by Joseph Campbell:

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of ensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banaity and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world. (Hero With A Thousand Faces)

A writer such as H.D. did not have the advantage of a feministl iterature to guide her. Early in her career, however, she learned the value of writing in a persona. Discussing "Callypso Speaks", an early poem, Susan Stanford Friedman speculates that if H.D.:

had adopted the confessional mode of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton, her readers might have understood the raw fury in the poem for what it is. The use of mythic masks encodes the rebellion into 'safe' forms so that her readers can avoid confronting the blunt message of the poem: 'man is a brute and a fool.' Readers immersed in the androcentric cultural tradition can dismiss the contemporary anger of the poem by seeing it only as a poem about Odysseus and Callypso, two mythic characters utterly removed from the present day. (Psyche Reborn)

In Helen In Egypt, she enlarges this methodology and creates perhaps the first completely feminine persona. Diane di Prima's "Loba" and Margaret Atwood's "Circe" are the two personae which best extend H.D.'s concerns.


H.D.

From her earliest work, H.D. was concerned with the feminine and with creating a force to counter the heroic exploits of her male contemporaries. Near the end of her life she gave voice to her most heroic work, Helen In Egypt, an exploration of the soul-searching Helen of Troy and the men who lavish their attentions on her, each trying to persuade her that he was her only lover. H.D's choice of Helen (also the name of her mother), a persona all-too-familiar to her readers, exhibits clearly what she had learned from Freud: the relevance of myths to our daily lives, and their endless repetition in slightly varied forms throughout all history.

H.D. was deeply affected by WWII. In Helen In Egypt, written after the war, she was aiming for "visions perceived after the event of the Trojan War." (Horace Gregory, introduction to Helen In Egypt). Or, as she says in the opening narrative:

According to the PALLINODE, Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or translated from Greece into Egypt. Helen of Troy was a phantom, substituted for the real Helen, by jealous deities. The Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion.

Physical war thus becomes myth; if the mythic cycle is a repetitive and human one, then to understand one myth implies an understanding of similar myths. Through the words of Helen and those others implicated in her tale, H.D. found an appropriate vehicle to mythically express her sense of the useless destruction the past war had caused.

H.D. is dealing not with one myth, but with many; it would seem that half the gods and mortals of Greece enter; one god becomes another, or becomes his or her Egyptian counterpart. The entire structure of the book is the need for each speaker to give their point of view, and in so doing to better understand their own emotions. H.D. even makes the core of Helen's quest her search for identity. We do not appreciate the risk the poet was taking here until we realize that all persona poetry up to this point had been the assertion of a new identity, and each persona desperately defended his own self-image, even when it was highly mistaken.

It is by naming that we create anew, the Mysteries taught, and H.D. is deeply concerned with the Mysteries of Egypt and Greece, and their relevance for our own times. Throughout the poem, names act as symbols: "I called my sister, Astarte//or Nephtys, twin-sister of Isis" -- by simply calling her this, H.D./Helen tells us, it is so. Significantly, Helen was called Helen by the Trojans and as a child in Sparta; in Greece she was called Helena. Establishing this in the first pages, the later use of the name Helena immediately locates the speaker within her Greek self.

The poem is precisely crafted: a prose narrative begins each portion, setting the scene and hinting at the persona's thought process; this is followed by a lyric in the persona's voice, almost a meditation on the narrative. In the narrative, H.D. attempts to act as the listener or observer, responding to the plight of the speakers and being led by them. These sections also insure that the readers will not be confused by the introduction of gods and speakers not usually associated with Helen's story. But in stepping out of the personified voice with this commentary, H.D. sometimes undercuts the persona's vitality:

Helen compares Clytemnestra and Iphigenia to
"one swan and one cygnet." Their divinity is
stronger than all the material forces gathered
against them. They must forget the war and its
consequence -- but no, there is this yet,
unresolved -- without war, there would have
been no Achilles, no "Star in the night."

Have you ever seen a swan,
when you threaten its nest --
two swans, but she was alone,

who was never alone;
the wings of an angry swan
can compass the earth,

can drive the demons
back to Tartarus,
can measure heaven in their span;

one swan and one cygnet
were stronger than all the host,
assembled upon the slopes

and the hills of Aulis;
she was born of a swan,
and I and our brothers,

we are children of Zeus;
I must wait, I must wonder again
at the fate that has brought me here;

surely, she must forget,
she must forget the past,
and I must forget Achilles...

...but never the ember
born of his strange attack,
never his anger,

never the fire,
never the brazier,
never the Star in the night.

We are moved along and avoid confusion by being told in advance that Clytemnestra and Iphigenia are "one swan and one cygnet", but the second reference, to Achilles, spoils the later impact. The star image would have followed the embers, fire, and brazier nicely (one also thinks of the cygnet in terms of the constellations, surely well-known by H.D., whose father was an astronomer), but by telling us in advance that Achilles would be compared to a "Star in the night", she weakens the power of the persona's image.

It is difficult to see from this fragment how well H.D. has used repetitive and slightly varied imagery to unite the poem. The embers and the brazier have been used time and again, most strikingly in the warmth Theseus offers Helen. Or, to take another image, Helen's first meeting with Achilles is described in various sections as "few were the words we said"; Achilles' question, which Helen often repeats, is "which was the dream/which was the veil of Cytheraea?"; or Helen begs throughout: "Teach me to remember/Teach me not to remember", contrasted with Paris' constant question: "Who will forget Helen?"; finally there is the striking repetitive fragment, referring to the arrow which wounded Achilles: "I, Helena, know it was Love's arrow".

The poem divides into three sections, with each section subsequently divided into six or seven "books". All the poems are in tight, three-line stanzas, comparable to the Greek choral line and using form to root us in the persona's Greek identity. The first, Pallinode, is, H.D. tells us, "a defense, explanation or apology." This is Helen's section, and it is she who must defend, explain, or apologize for her actions. Even so, H.D. is careful not to let any one persona dominate the poem; our view of Helen must be prismatic, as seen by various speakers. After we have overheard Helen remembering Achilles' words, the fourth book is given over to Achilles' voice. In the final book Thetis, the mother of Achilles, steps forward, not to defend herself but to speak in defense of Helen and, by implication, all women.

The second section is entitled Leuke (L'isle blanche), the island where "Achilles is said to have married Helen." Finally Helen's more infamous lover, Paris, the core of Euripides' tale, is introduced. Paris speaks not in his own behalf, but to call to mind the Helen that he remembers, the Helen who loved him and not Achilles, as if his words can still prevent her marriage. It is in this section, also, that we hear from Theseus, the god who kidnapped the child Helen.

In the prose narrative to the first part of Book Five, we see the clearest insight into Helen, the point where she comes closest to H.D. herself: "Helen must be re-born, that is, her soul must return wholly to her body. Her emotional experience has been 'too great a suspense to endure'." Helen's question, near the end of the poem, "how reconcile Trojan and Greek" is to be understood, not as we might often misread it, how bring Paris and Achilles together, how prevent war (which it certainly means on one level), but on a deeper level: how unite her Trojan and Greek selves?

Love and Death become one in the third section, entitled "Eidolon" (the ghost or image of Thetis, extended to include all the speakers in an otherworldly aspect). Helen questions the reality of all around her, questions once again if it is memory or dream. Forced to confront reality, she realizes that it is in Death, not Love, that one recovers the youth or Self she has been searching for. At the end, the voice of "one greater than Helen", sums up the quest:

there is no before and no after,
there is one finite moment
that no infinite joy can disperse

or thought of past happiness
tempt from or dissipate;
now I know the best and the worst;

the seasons revolve around
a pause in the infinite rhythm
of the heart and of heaven.

Even though the reader senses that this is Helen's own voice speaking, the Eidolon of Helen, the recovered child with a woman's knowledge, must continue searching for what can never be recovered. Paris, she insists, knows nothing of the Sea: "only Achilles could break his heart/and the world for a token,/a memory forgotten."

But no, the memory is not "forgotten" -- not for H.D. at least, if it was for the persona. It had been lying dormant for awhile, "...ten years?/it was more than that, more than that", she tells us in the opening section of "Winter Love (Esperance)", written in the Winter and Spring of 1959. This sequence was included for the first time in Hermetic Definition, published in 1972, eleven years after her death. In his introduction to that volume, Norman Holmes Pearson says:

"Winter Love" was, as she often referred to it, a "Coda" to Helen In Egypt picking up once more all that her Helens have from the beginning expressed in terms of the quest. "Winter Love" is a poem "in contemporary time," her own older age. "Winter Love" as an actual coda. It would, it seemed to me, by bringing the legend on down in time, show how she herself had always figured in her own poems. If she was true to the Greeks, she was true to the Greek in herself. H.D. agreed that "Winter Love" could be included. Then, just before the manuscript finally went in, she changed her mind. Its appearance in the same book would, she felt, destroy the poem she hadoriginally conceived. For although her poems are personal they are never purely personal. They are part of something very much larger than herself. Her "Self-seeking quest" was for the compassing "self" of which she was only a part.

Helen is still with us in "Winter Love", but she is usually referred to in the second or third person. The narrator of the prose sections of Helen In Egypt is incorporated into the poem, and there is a sense of the poet speaking both to and through Helen. But it is a lonely Helen, one who has given her lovers back to the gods who own them, a Helen who has only her memory left. For the first time Menelaus, Helen's husband, is introduced: "There was a Helen before there was a War,/Menelaus remembered her." And in the poem which follows H.D. calls up her previous personages to bid them farewell:

Helios-Helen-Eros? Is that Menelaus?
is that the golden first love, innocence?
is that the Child before the Child was born,

imagined with the cap-crown of bright hair,
inheritance of the "golden Menelaus"?
not Menelaus, but myself gazed up at me,

in the veiled glance of Helen-Hermione;
they said there was a Child in Leuke,
they said it was the Child, Euphorion,

Achilles' Child, grandam,
or fantasy of Paris and a Child
or a wild moment that begot a Child,

when long ago, the Virgo breasts swelled
under the savage kiss of ravening Odysseus;
yes, yes, grandam, but actually and in reality,

small fists unclosed, small hands fondled me,
and in the inmost dark,
small feet searched foot-hold;

Hermione lived her life and lives in history;
Euphorion, Esperance, the infinite bliss,
lives in the hope of something that will be,

the past made perfect;
this is the tangible
this is reality

She tells us that "not Menelaus, but myself gazed up at me,/in the veiled glance of Helen-Hermione" -- it is all, in reality, the veil of persona, and the Self speaking through it. Hermione
is the main character of her early novel, Her; H.D. herself was a Virgo. Also, we sense that the Child is real, even if H.D. would once have had it otherwise. It is this Child who is “Esperance), the infinite bliss" and "the past made perfect."

Whereas other poets writing in persona could simply look back and recall their earlier symbols, H.D. (under Freud's tutelage) was compelled to explore the reasons that she had turned to them in the first place. As she tells us in the final poem: "cruel, cruel is Hope,/terrible the weight of honey and of milk,//cruel, cruel the thought of Love,/while Helen's breasts swell, painful/with the ambrosial sap, Amrita//that must be given". So even at the end, it is Helen's breasts which swell, or the thought of the pain drives H.D. to transfer it onto Helen. H.D. never completely releases the symbolic persona she has been using, she only draws it closer to herself.


Diane di Prima

With Loba, an ongoing sequence in the persona of the she-wolf, Diane di Prima is the first writer to continue H.D.'s exploration of feminine mythology. The Loba is the wolf-woman, woman as wolf, and ultimately Goddess. This is not, as was H.D.'s Helen In Egypt, the persona of the questing Goddess, but the quest to become the wolf-goddess. Di Prima enters the poem at the precise moment of interaction, and vividly records it. Like Pound, she makes no attempt to describe her references in watered-down fashion so that the reader will follow her. Thus, many poems become fragmented, mysterious moments, which catch the reader up in their not-quite-rational intensity.

Di Prima mixes the heightened goddess quest with mundane, contemporary images:

O lost moon sisters
crescent in hair, sea underfoot do you wander
in blue veil, in green leaf, in tattered shawl do you wander
with goldleaf skin, with flaming hair do you wander
on Avenue A, on Bleecker Street do you wander
on Rampart Street, on Fillmore Street do you wander
with flower wreath, with jeweled breath do you wander

In "Callypso Speaks" H. D. used persona to hide the "raw fury" of the poem, and surely this has been the main aspect of even the most violent personae. In Loba, di Prima not only gives us a decidedly feminine persona, but she was perhaps the first poet to use the persona to expose the anger rather than to cloak it. The Loba is Wolf, but her sense of herself is as Woman. Particularly in the poem's early pages we find her running after or hunting her mate, and near the end of the book:

THE LOBA, IN MAY

And yet, she knows, no one has loved her enough,
           nor can
no one has glimpsed her windswept
           chasm, the trees
           bent or broken in storm
howling
           of raw ghost on dusty
           horizon, or seen
grace of her hands, fondling amythest chips
           she knows
no one has guessed the affirmation
           w/ which
she now wears the marks of love, bruises
           like jewels on her aging
breasts, the secret fire
           white hot
           in virgin grottos whose waters
         no one has drunk.
           Blue liquid light
pours out of her brown eyes
           her great head
bends, to hide dreams that have not changed
under a hundred lovers. She waits
he-who-can-see-thru disguises, she oils
her supple, 16-yr-old limbs
           brushes
her thick hair...

It is the Loba's toughness which attracts the poet, her seeming invulnerability. This is the Loba who can say calmly to her mate: "Do you growl?/Know I cannot undertake/to meet you, tho it be only/a step."

Loba is not a persona which has been defeated by her quest. She is not a distorted madwoman with a melodramatic voice. Loba accepts her anger as part of who she is and this is what makes her a figure to respect. That anger is rational and justified by the experiences of the poems, not some mysterious power tormenting her. Loba is not ironic: di Prima intends for us to see the intense seriousness, even urgency, of her quest. She is speaking for all those women who make poems out of their anger, and what is more important, for those women who still hold their pain silently within them. Thus, in Part VI, "The Seven Joys of the Virgin", she turns "The Annunciation" into a scene of rape. "Nativity", like "Loba In Childbed," is a powerful poem of contemporary woman in her humiliating scene of hospital birth:

                              They fettered me
w/leather straps, on delivery table. I cd not
cry out. Forced gas mask over mouth,
slave. I cd not
turn head. Did they fetter me
w/ breath of a fish? These poison airs? I cd not
turn head, move hand, or leg
thus forced. They tore child from me. Whose?

Di Prima has spoken of the sense of the trapped woman, particularly noticeable on a workshop tour in Wyoming, which provided the impetus for the dream that triggered these poems:

I had a very long dream one night. I won't go into all the parts of it, it had to do with having to find shelter somewhere, being in an outcast or vagabond situation with two of my children, and living in the cellar of this building in which some very rich people lived upstairs. They were getting ready to have one of their entertainments: they were going to watch through a kind of skylight-thing in the floor, while we were hunted down by a wolf. I found this out by going upstairs and spying on them, listening to the conversation. I decided I wasn't going to wait to be hunted. I picked up my baby, and had another kid following behind me, and I was with a friend whose baby was really noisy, and I was worried about the noise because I was afraid it was going to give us away, and we started to walk through this incredible stone labyrinth. As we were getting it together to go, down the ladder that I'd used to spy came two men with a wolf between them, trussed as if she had been killed in a hunt -- you know, legs tied to a long piece of wood. When they got the wolf downstairs they untied it, and it's the wolf that's supposed to hunt us. We were already walking out. We weren't running -- we were walking out. And this wolf digs that this is what's happening, and falls in behind us and starts walking with us. Keeping pace. And at some point, I turned around and looked this creature in the eye, and I recognized, in my dream, I recognized or remembered this huge white wolf, beautiful white head, recognized this as a goddess that I'd known in Europe a long time ago. Never having read about any European wolf-goddesses, I just recognized this as a deity. (Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb, Talking Poetics From Naropa Institute).

Interestingly enough, the poem built directly from this dream is placed midway through the book. The book begins in the third person, the first section presenting external, physical portraits of the Loba, speculating on who or what she could symbolize, gradually becoming internalized in the sections which follow. A few scattered poems in the first person, the Loba's voice, require no transition other than their titles, since the portraits are so attuned to the Loba's quick, staccato
sensibility that the rhythms and voice are the same. The overall impression built up by these shifts is that the Loba sees herself as others see her, or that others see her as she sees herself, perhaps the first step toward the poet's merging with the persona.

By Part IV the portraits are more precise, including "Some Lies About The Loba" -- in knowing herself she knows also what she is not, and it is in this section that we find the key dream poem, "The Loba Reveals Herself". Here di Prima finally accepts the Loba as "kind watchdog I cd/leave the children with./Mother & Sister./Myself." The section concludes with "Loba As Eve", prefaced with a quote from the "Gospel of Eve":

               "I am Thou & Thou art I
                          and where Thou art I am
and in all things am I dispersed

and from wherever Thou willst
                          Thou gatherest Me

               but in gathering Me
Thou Gatherest Thyself

The poems which follow begin with quotes from this preface, exploring and extending its meanings. The use of first and third person no longer matters. As might be expected, this is one of the most successful sections of the book.

The placement of the dream poem is crucial to an understanding of the process at work. The first half of the book finds di Prima exploring who the Loba is and what the dream means, while in the second half she explores what to do with the knowledge and power now that she accepts the Loba and the dream as rightfully her own. We can extend this concept to speak of the persona form itself, and the freedom such a persona assumes in the second half of the book can be found in the work of other writers as well. Until di Prima embodies the Loba and permits herself to be embodied, she remains limited and pinned down by definitions. Once the persona is understood and accepted, naturalized, nything is possible.

Once the Loba is established, both as an entity in herself and as the poet's persona, the trickster Loba can assume other shapes and forms, mostly of powerful goddesses: Helen, Persephone, Iseult, Heloise, Mary, even a fascinating "Interlude" in which Lilith once again assumes her goddess nature.

By now we accept that this poem is exploration, not narrative. There is no story to be told, only this Self to come to know. This is not the saga of the whole quest, but isolated, peak moments. The quest is the poet's, not the persona's. In avoiding commentary and entering directly into the process of the poem, di Prima draws the reader toward identification with the Loba, not with the Loba's tale. If we insist on finding a story here, it is between the poems, in the poet's struggle to assume the persona which itself remains indifferent to such considerations.

The poems' transformations are not the result of writing in persona or the literary devices used to create the persona. They are possible because di Prima has spent years preparing and remains an initiate of esoteric teachings, and so was fully receptive to the voice of the Loba in the dream.

Several essays could be written about the various philosophies at work here; lesser poets than di Prima would have written essays instead of poems. Few poets have made so many personal statements vital to our times. The book is at once political and spiritual, qualities di Prima explored in her previous work: the political statement, art more often than rhetoric, was used well in Revolutionary Letters, while the meditative, quiet acceptance was most evident in Kerhonkson Journal. These poems move simply and naturally out of what has become her lifestyle, and perhaps this quality explains their graphic precision.

Unfortunately this quality is not sustained. The book is marred when the poet becomes overly conscious of her persona and steps outside it to comment on it, as in "The Critic Reviews Loba" or "Some of the People This Poem Is For". Such outside commentaries, placed within the poem itself, make us question the entire concept of her persona: is this really a creature di Prima is inhabiting (who is haunting her), or is it simply a device? As Armand Schwerner has pointed out, one would like to believe her preferatory statement that: "The work is, like they say, in 'progress'. The author reserves the right to juggle, re-arrange, cut, osterize, re-cycle parts of the poem in future editions. As the Loba wishes, as the Goddess dictates." But the momentary asides from the persona make us suspicious that it is more often di Prima and not the Goddess who dictates. It is also indicative
that these asides lose the rhythmic base which infuses the rest of the book.

We realize that, even in the second half of this book, this is still persona in the process of becoming, however tightly the mask may have fit for awhile. Persona can still be used as a simple poetic device, but as such they are not personae which embody the total quest in the way di Prima, like Pound and Olson, intends. Perhaps, in the middle of the twentieth century, with more and more poets writing in persona, this exploratory process, related to the process of the poem itself, is a form it must assume. The heroic is not so easily acquired and the quest is no longer an end in itself in the way that it was a hundred years ago. The poet/quester must begin again and again. Near the end of the volume, di Prima describes it in "Now born in uniqueness, join the Common Quest". The poem begins by asking what this Grail they are hunting for is, and ends with the Loba questioning who she is. And the book's final poem ends with the image of the Loba as "White Fox that Leaps over Tombstones", a reminder to the reader that this poem is not yet completed, but will continue in whatever manner "the Goddess dictates". The Goddess, of course, is also the persona, and in Loba the persona is the ongoing discovery of the poem.


Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's early search for a persona (brought to fruition in The Journals of Susannah Moodie) stemmed from her Canadian heritage and her need, as a writer, to shape a Canadian identity. In Survival, her history of Canadian literature, her discussion of animal stories shows her early fascination with the persona form:

They are almost invariably failure stories, ending with the death of the animal; but this death, far from being the accomplishment of a quest, to be greeted with rejoicing, is seen as tragic or pathetic, because the stories are told from the point of view of the animal. That's the key: English animal stories are about "social relations", American ones are about people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animals being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers.

Atwood similarly identifies with the victim (a theme which also runs throughout Survival, whether human or animal, and the poem often emerges from the point of view of that other). Whereas, in the work of most poets discussed here, we can first define a precise self and then trace that self as contained in persona, in Atwood we meet the persona first, and then only gradually discover traces of a personal voice. Sherrill Grace approaches this problem from the opposite direction when she says that:

The idea of the collective as opposed to individual hero is consistent with Atwood's view of the self, and her heros -- the chief protagonists in her fiction, Susanna Moodie, the voice in many of the poems -- should be approached in this light; while they are particularized, especially in the fiction, they are not highly individualized, three-dimensional characters, so much as representatives or symbols of social concerns, archetypes and myth. (Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality)

When Atwood does write about herself, it is as she resembles those around her, and not as she feels different or isolated. Where she is isolated or estranged from herself, as occurs frequently in her work, it should be seen as a collective, cultural isolation.

This idea of the "collective hero" is, as Atwood tells us in Survival, an element particular to the Canadian sensibility. In writing a work such as The Journals of Susanna Moodie, the need to create a symbol for the Canadian tradition most likely remained foremost in her mind; if Moodie became "highly individualized" at times, such was not Atwood's primary concern. It is therefore only natural that Atwood's first, and to date her most sustained work in persona, was based on the writings of this early Canadian settler. The themes of exploration and settling had been used in several short poems in two earlier books, The Circle Game and The Animals In That Country. Because they are usually written in persona, these poems become participatory, inviting the modern-day reader to share the experience.

Introducing the chapter on "Explorers and Settlers" in Survival, she says:

Part of where you are is where you've been. If you aren't too sure of where you are, or if you're sure but don't like it, there's a tendency, both in psychotherapy and in literature, to retrace your history to see how you got there.

The more one reads Atwood's work, the clearer it becomes that place is synonymous with identity. Once we understand this, it is easier to see The Journals of Susanna Moodie as the differing voices of the woman, which change as she moves from place to place. Atwood is concerned not with her movements, but with the effect that the shift in landscape has on her tone. At the same time, she is fascinated with Moodie's inner self. Roughing It In The Bush, Moodie's first journal was "written for the express purpose of telling others not to come, and that seems to have set a precedent.” In the "Afterward" Atwood says: "what struck me most about this (Mrs. Moodie's) personality was the way in which it reflects many of the obsessions still with us." And from Survival:

Needless to say, the patterns literature makes out of such experiences are not the same as the experiences themselves. For instance, we are looking not at explorers' journals but at the explorer figures that later writers have created. Still, what you think of the pattern -- apart from your aesthetic appreciation of it -- will depend partly on your evaluation of the original experience.

The Journals of Susanna Moodie presents such an evaluation.

Atwood found little use for the words that Moodie had actually written; she searched through the words to discover what the persona did not have nerve to say directly. The reincarnated figure must become all she almost was but ultimately was not in her past incarnation.

Sherrill Grace has said that "To create, Atwood chooses violent dualities, and her art re-works, probes, and dramatizes the ability to see double." In Survival, Atwood described this duality as part of the Canadian psyche. In the "Afterword" to Susanna Moodie she makes it specific to the persona:

If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia. Mrs. Moodie is divided down the middle: she praises the Canadian landscape but accuses it of destroying her; she dislikes the people already in Canada but finds in people her only refuge from the land itself; she preaches progress and the march of civilization while brooding elegaically upon the destruction of the wilderness; she delivers optimistic sermons while showing herself to be fascinated with deaths, murders, the criminals in Kingston Penitentiary and the incurably insane in the Toronto lunatic asylum. She claims to be an ardent Canadian patriot while all the time she is standing back from the country and criticizing it as though she were a detached observer, a stranger. Perhaps that is the way we still live.

Here, then, is the essence of this persona and its use for Atwood: she is wrestling with this conflict in her own life. She feels that perhaps in re-examining Mrs. Moodie's life and the way she dealt with its problems, she will come to an understanding of how she herself can deal with them. It remains to be examined how the poems have approached and fulfilled this need. Though the book is hampered by elements of the chronology which have been left out, Atwood at least partially solves the problem by using images which are simple and integral to both the poem and the persona.

The book is divided into three equal sections, nine poems each: Journal I, 1832-1840, deals with Moodie's life in the bush; Journal II, 1840-1871, places her in the comparatively refined city of Belleville; in Journal III, 1871-1969, "the poems take her through an estranged old age, into death and beyond." Atwood says in Survival that:

Although Moodie passed en route through several already established cities, her destination was a bush farm, and it is her encounters with the land, not her encounters with urban society, that form the subject of her book.

Atwood is true to her perception of the persona: the poems in the first section are the crucial experience, and the poems in the two later sections, while taking in the urban life they find around them, are still haunted by the experience of the bush the first section describes. The success of the entire book is, therefore, reliant on the poems in this first section.

Fortunately, these poems are highly successful. Not only do the images succeed within a given poem, but the use of repetitive and slightly varied imagery within the sequence makes the nine poems seem much fuller than their actual length, and establishes their imagery firmly in the reader's mind. It also establishes the images in the persona's mind, and here Atwood brilliantly puts into practice her theory of place fusing with identity. I quote the second poem:

FURTHER ARRIVALS

After we had crossed the long illness
that was the ocean, we sailed up-river

On the first island
the immigrants threw off their clothes
and danced like sandflies

We left behind one by one
the cities rotting with cholera,
one by one our civilized
distinctions

and entered a large darkness.

It was our own
ignorance we entered.

I have not come out yet

My brain gropes nervous
tentacles in the night, sends out
fears hairy as bears,
demands lamps; or waiting

for my shadowy husband, hears
malice in the trees' whispers.

I need wolf's eyes to see
the truth.

I refuse to look in a mirror.

Whether the wilderness is
real or not
depends on who lives there.

The cities, the only civilization Moodie passed through, are "rotting with cholera" and dismissed in four lines; they will not be thought of again in this section, where bush imagery cancels out all other thoughts. By picking up this imagery in later poems, the undercurrent of fear returns as well. "I need wolf's eyes to see/the truth" is echoed in "The Weremen" where she waits for her husband to return from the field: "I can't think/what he will see/when he opens the door."

In the final poem in this section, "Departure From The Bush", the image is even more fully developed. The animals have "arrived to inhabit me" before she was ready, and:

I was frightened
by their eyes (green or
amber) glowing out from inside me

I was not completed; at night
I could not see without lanterns.

The next line, set by itself, "I refuse to look in a mirror", symbolizes her way of dealing with the bush by avoiding it and pretending it does not exist. Later, the poem "Looking In A Mirror" represents her decision to return to civilization after seven years away.

The poems in the second section do not establish a separate, horror filled universe comparable to that in the first section. In three poems the persona dreams she is back in the bush and, while her images are precise, they lose some of their power by being one step removed from reality. Yet all this seems to be in accord with Atwood's sense of the persona: taken out of the wilderness which had become so vivid to her, Mrs. Moodie cannot hang onto it and at the same time finds nothing substantial with which to replace it. In "Charivari" an American woman tells of settlers killing a black man who married a white woman, then "adding she/thought it was a disgraceful piece/of business, finished her tea."

Moodie's old definition of what human civilization is has lost its meaning. She, too, would have once been happy to act in this manner, but it no longer suffices, she has seen too much. Ironically, it is on her return to civilization, and not in the bush, that Moodie's children die. A son dies by drowning in the poem which opens this section; we are not told how the others die, or even how many others there were. Even death is no longer a real experience. True, the children "catch at my heels with their fingers," but the image remains on the surface; we do not feel the intense action of the gripping fingers, nor the mother's emotional reaction.

Again, this is precisely the image that Atwood wishes to put across of the way in which Mrs. Moodie's feelings had petrified. There is an inherent problem here which the poet always faces when working in persona: the poems are extremely truthful to the character, and to that extent wholly successful. As poems in their own right, they fall short. But then, we must remember that Atwood has a reasonably low-key voice; she cannot compensate for the persona's complacentness with the energy of the poem itself. Perhaps the final test is that, while the third section is somewhat disappointing, the character and the narrative still retain our interest.

The poems in this final section recapture that physical sensibility which was missing from the previous section. Perhaps this is because these later poems also contain an awareness of the world surrounding the persona, avoided for the most part in the second section. Here is the poem which opens Journal III:

Once by a bitter candle
of oil and braided
rags, I wrote
verses about love and sleighbells

which I exchanged for potatoes;

in the summers I painted butterflies
on a species of white fungus
which were bought by the tourists, glass-
cased for English parlours

and my children (miraculous)
wore shoes.

Now every day
I sit on a stuffed sofa
in my own fringed parlour, have
uncracked plates (from which I eat
at intervals)
and a china teaset.

There is no use for art.

In this same parlour she visits with the grandchildren who do not really know her. She tours the lunatic asylum where, on the various floors, she seems in her own senility permits her to recover the various parts of herself. After death, she can look back over her life with a clarity and understanding that was impossible before. Atwood is on tenuous ground here: these final four poems could easily appear silly and extraneous; only Moodie's absorption in the physical landscape renders them credible. They also remain true to Moodie's persona: Belleville, at the end of one poem, is fast becoming a metropolis: "(though it is still no place for an english gentleman)". Or, as the book ends, the final stanzas of "A Bus Along St. Clair: December" read:

I am the old woman
sitting across from you on the bus,
her shoulders drawn up like a shawl;
out of her eyes come secret
hatpins, destroying
the walls, the ceiling
Turn, look down:
there is no city;
this is the centre of a forest

your place is empty

This is also the first time an unnamed "you" appears, a twentieth-century reality sitting and reading this book. Atwood has taken us full circle back to the collective self found in the prefatory poem, which describes Moodie's photograph with the face cut out. Now, truly, "where my eyes were/every-/thing appears" while at the same time it is the writer/reader whose "place is empty".

On the cover of the first edition of The Journals of Susanna Moodie there is a collage by Atwood, showing a stick figure landscape in the center of which is a photograph of Moodie in old age, set in an oval frame, then laid on its side. On the cover of Atwood's Selected Poems is a photograph of Atwood in a similar oval frame, set upright. The associations between the two are too close to have been accidental, and the photograph is fitting in both instances. The concern with mirrors and photographs, with a tangible identity as opposed to what the person really is, is a constant theme in all Atwood's work, and her emphasis on writing in persona is an extension of that theme.

...

Just as, in most poetry by women, there seems to be a greater ability to deal with the extremely personal aspects, so these women have transferred that same ability onto their personae. The raw fury of today's feminist woman, still concealed in H.D.'s Helen, is displayed to advantage by di Prima and Atwood.

The search for identity predominates in all these personae. These are not the already-formed heroes such as King Arthur that male writers have dealt with, but heroines in search of themselves, in desperate need of defining and defending their own heroics, and pleading that the world see them in a new light. H.D's description of the first book of Helen In Egypt as a "defense, explanation, or apology" can be applied to di Prima and Atwood as well. These writers explore the myths
without settling on any one final telling. Particularly in the work of H.D. and di Prima, it is necessary to emphasize once again that these are not casually begun personae, but quests the poets themselves have carefully prepared for, H.D. through her studies with Freud, di Prima through her esoteric readings and study of Buddhist teachings.

*****

In the late 1970s and mid 1980s, when Speaking in Tongues: A Study of Persona in American, Canadian and British Poetry was written, Rochelle Ratner's own poetry was immersed in the world of personification, most importantly the unicorn figure in Quarry (New Rivers Press, 1978) and the mermaid figure in Combing the Waves (Hanging Loose Press, 1979). Her most recent poetry books are Balancing Acts (Marsh Hawk Press, 2006), Beggars at the Wall (Ikon, 2006), Leads (Otoliths, 2007), and the e-book Toast Soldiers (Vida Loca Books, 2007). More information can be found on her website: www.rochelleratner.com.

OPERA BUFA by ADAM FIELED

LARS PALM Reviews

Opera Bufa by Adam Fieled
(Otoliths, Rockhampton Queensland, 2007)

What to say about Adam Fieled? What to say about someone writing the way he does? What to say about a book of 60 prose poems, or is it one prose poem in 60 parts? Does it really matter? Does it matter when the fourth poem (or is it part, or even chapter?) lights these fireworks?

The principle of sufficient reason has pinned
you to a mattress and is coming inside you.
You are a plantation officer after the lost war.
Your cache of black carnations marks out a no-
fly zone, bloody scalps of third wheels. You
see how richly layered you are, but frosting is
visible.

You might say he works in a fiel(e)d of his own. Somewhere between the opera & the carnival. Somewhere between the romantics & Jello Biafra, who are not very far apart by the way. Somewhere between you & your mind, usually very far apart indeed. Wedged between a gang of bodhisattvas & one of anarchists with round black bombs in their hands. In strictly literary terms he has mapped out an area between the traditionalists & the so called experimentalists. But. Isn't every poem an experiment? Don't we all ask upon beginning a poem if this will work?

& how.

The one above works, at least to this reader, splendidly, with the first sentence pulling me in to this shoddy room & this principled clinical, no love made here, intercourse (missionary, of course) so devoid of passion you go back to formally colonial times in the second sentence, out of boredom.

Or as Maria Callas says at the beginning of #50. You spent forty-seven poems looking for me. You were talking in expansive, fluorescent, Crayola circles.

To which the reaction is

                All I can say is, I remember
poundings and baseball cards and tons of
bricks. I remember daftness and deftness
disappearing. I remember gum, bruises,
abusing ice cubes. I know that I had to dream
an opera to really sing. I know I had to dream
singing to really write. As for fluorescence,
those crayons were always my favorites
anyway. If the color is off, it's because my set
collapsed, if not into nullity, then into
plurality. I remember a city and a story. I am
many stories up.

If Maria is happy with that we are not told. She changes the subject in the next poem/part/chapter.

& so will we.

There are several tons of bricks placed in these pages, the first one in #31. One wonders what they are doing there. Unless they are descriptive of the poem(s). Which wouldn't be entirely unreasonable. Because the musical tradition that lurk in my mind upon reading Opera Bufa isn't so much opera as an old thrash metal band like Metal Church who, by the way wrote a song called Ton of Bricks the end of which I will use to end this review, after recommending you seek this book out

do you have a clue
to what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna stop

*****

Lars Palm apparently sometimes writes reviews. his most recent poetry publications are some hay (Meritage Press Tiny Book no. 5, 2007), ten poems in the latest issue of Otoliths & (biotech), say (what?) a long poem in PFS Post. he has plans for the future, they involve translations &, hopefully, cats. just so you know.

BLUE GRASS by PETER MINTER

PAM BROWN Engages

blue grass by Peter Minter
(Salt Publishing, 2006)

I started reading blue grass and after the third poem 'Jou', a title that I could only imagine as short for 'jouissance', I closed it to take a little moment of reflection. I read the back cover blurb -- 'Playful and intellectually alert, Minter distils experimentation and contemplative thought into pure poetry'. 'Yes, that's right' I thought, 'pure poetry' and then I noticed that it was a quote from The Sydney Morning Herald and realized it was something I'd said in a review of Pete's last book Empty Texas. I was agreeing with myself.

That ‘pure’ poetry angle is still the case but, with the addition of the last few years of reading and writing, Pete's poems have both loosened up and deepened.

This collection reveals an unusual idea of poetry -- there are clues or keys to his method so that if you take them on and surrender to the unconventional you can come to your own notion of what Pete's doing.

He has an almost perverse interest in mingling archaic words with the contemporary as if that's a completely natural or unselfconscious use of language. I say 'natural' because it appears effortless.

He often breaks into a kind of lush Victorian lyricism reminding me of Algernon Swinburne or Charles Meredith -- 'Thunderheads/raise incarnadine, into dark blue waste' -- how vivid.

He can use unusual adjectives as titles -- words like ‘elenge’ (when he could say ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ or ‘miserable, remote, lonely’ -- whatever it is, it’s terrible) He leaves the reader to make a connection with the poem so-called. He also tends to make up words -- like 'odelic' -- which, for Pete, is a combination of an ode and an idyll. Pick the rare words here ‘Your eye makes a karyotype of dark seeds', ‘As ash/embers quincunx/over pines’ -- There’s a poem called (siryne)‘Serine’ -- which, as far as I can tell, is a scientific term for a particular enzyme, unless, that is, Pete can’t spell ‘serene’ ? and another title ‘Valentinea’ -- does he mean a Valentine -- a gift denoting affection, or is there an association with the ancient emperor of Rome’s western empire ? From the tone and content of the poem I’d say it’s the former -- but, then again, it might also suggest a problem with hygiene of the feet.

Trying to 'match' a title with a poem here can be an unsettling experience. For instance the poem titled with that adjective 'Elenge'

At night I lift crows
           from the dune's glow, a lake wherever it goes
with all unquiet things.
           Why does a man run towards distance
as if two carbon rings
           can make the soul ?
Included middle, new grass for the park's radiance
           under like-grey solar panels.

As if I could remember
           why this whole body curves
in heroic hope
           where this silver was becoming from,
flesh & bone
           in which the one tree slept?

The book is comprised of four sections -- 'History of the Present', 'Auto Heaven', 'Australiana' and 'Fresh Kills' and running throughout the collection is a series of precisely indented sonnets.

The first section 'History of the Present' does indeed have some very strong poems about present times -- like the utterly contemporary, long, and very moving, sorrowful poem which names names -- 'On the Moida of Roni Levi by Constable Rodney Podesta and Senior Constable Anthony Dilorenzo, the 'Awesome Twosome', at Bondi Beach early on the morning of Sunday, 28th June, 1997'. It reinforces one of poetry's important and enduring functions as a tool of social memory. From the Notes to Poems we find this poem was inspired by a similar title from Philip Levine's 'The Names of the Lost'.

This book has plenty of saltwater, freshwater, seascapes and swimming. We are taken to Lighthouse Beach, to a river, to a lake, to the coast many times. And the poet, musing on a 'half 'man' half 'fish' tells us 'In water we/ come back to real work, the what is to be done/ only partly revealed' . In one poem he goes fishing with the songs of US punkhippie folksinger songwriter Bonnie Prince Billy and elsewhere 'a stray breeze/on water slips bright crescent scales/between reeds & then literally away' ' a cube of water shivers blue' . There seems to be more water than grass in blue grass.

A long poem involving fire and vandalism is placed, as if to contain its fiery power, between two shorter, quieter sonnets of the ocean.

It's the amazing poem 'Super Georgic' which incorporates levels of meaning whilst describing a complex act of boys'-own vandalism setting fire to a petrol bowser in the outback. The poem begins on a 'good day' -- you feel a pastoral coming up, -- cruising along through the wheat belt, wedge-tailed eagles, white and brown butterflies in the air, a place called Lake Grace blurring/slipping into view to create an awe-filled state of being. With no hint, really, of the spontaneous destruction about to occur. The language in this poem is hyped up. The georgic is super -- a sort of sur-georgic. The petrol is super. The excessive feeling is super/lative. Setting fire to petrol bowsers is, obviously, a demented act and the poem's almost-desperate reclamation of a little marsupial, the dunnart, is quickly over as it 'springs burning from your fingers'. This is an unconscious tough guy scene and this fire is burning to a soundtrack, Pink Floyd's 'Chapter 24', on the car stereo. It's as if it happens simply because it can - out in the 'wilderness' -- and there's even a flash of lightning to cap this bright and weird moment. What a poem !

Loving and sexuality are a notable component of blue grass. Especially in two of the sonnets. 'Elope' -- which is almost adolescent in its intense romanticism. Its yearning, like most inchoate desire, remains unrealised. Later in the book there is a very sexy sonnet 'Black Star' that displays the Romantic equation of love and death and addresses a lover who has the 'satin eyes of Mallarmé'. Pete has no fear of excess -- listen to the heightened poetic intensity in this freely-associated stanza

The folding stem and labile edge
           of wind across lunate metacarpal phalanges
touches mouthlessness,
           meridians of lucid tessera
           we triangulate with fire, sense & speech,
then bifurcate all words

The rhythmic pantoum called 'Wallpaper Codicil' is another sexed-up poem and the repetition makes it very funny . Here's the middle of the poem --

The dildo in the cupboard is a force to be reckoned with
an independent scholar dressed to the nines
so honey, don't cry, the cheque's in the mail
I don't know…no-fat, lite, or full-cream entrees?

An independent scholar dressed to the nines
the exit wound smaller than a dime in the end
I don't know…no-fat, lite, or full-cream entrees?
brand loyalty is oedipal, your coterie few

I've detected a kind of unspoiled admiration for the concept of the bohemian intellectual who is to quote Pete quoting Bob Adamson 'Tho not calm in the head…' and Robert Duncan 'they cease to care' in the one poem. It's worth remembering that the bohemian posture is a construct, you don't have to believe in it even if you take it on.

But then again in another turn Peter Minter's poetry can bring to mind the 'raw' poets of the USA in the 1950s. (Charles Olson & Robert Creeley) There's also sometimes, not too often, but sometimes, lines that read like distilled essence-of-Forbes and some actual quotes from John Forbes -- 'the planets line up and nothing happens'. And in another instance of a kind of mutable diversity he has pop culture eliding the nineteenth century -- you'll find that wonderful punk chick from alternative comix Tank Girl, and quotes from Blade Runner, Pink Floyd -- to mention only a few.

And in yet another twist there's the long poem "Political Economy & Raphael's 'Madonna of the Pinks'". It's not romantic -- using real names -- it's a poem that's not distanced by coding. Basically it's an anti-hype anti-spin critique of commercialism in art and politics.

Many of Pete's lines of poetry sound like lines from songs. They have that element that the French poets, if you give them the time, go on and on and on about -- 'La sonorite' -- there's really no English language word for this. We use 'sonorous' to mean kind of grandiloquent sound or profound sound -- but Pete's poetry, although highly imagined, never engages with that kind of pretention.

For example lines like these could be sung -- 'dark as the well is the water there', 'Morning then was deep/& wide, sea water glittered in the round/ my hand cupped…', and even in a sombre war poem -- the irony is absorbed by rhythms

'On a fair and pleasant day
           as they waited, and they wept, children
           sold their stocks in tempests
while a mackerel sky & sunset let
           Hercules appear transcendent
           as they sank in rows towards the hangars
by the bay.

This poem, 'War in the Filigree of Peace' as it continues is reminiscent of poems by the Beats and the last couple of stanzas also bring to mind resonances of Baghdad imagery from our tv screens and even the earlier Desert Storm, in the exaggerated stylisation of recent films like 'Jarhead' --

Of course they knew that daily men
           were dying, that other men in pieces
           praised the power of green wind, green branches,
the bright red morning in split trees
           & arteries aglow with TNT, that crazy air,
           gold patina in the fire

awash along palladia of gilded stairs.
           So they waited then beneath that oily sky, old-growth
           oxidised in plumes the way
banners roll in wind like keels of ash
           as they appear through glowing clouds, a rumour
           swelling with a thousand seeds, a trace
of thousands of the coming dead.

To change tack now, my impression of the 'Australiana' poems are that they are that - recognizably local, with recognizably local people --

           'she was born in the early 70s
& absorbed something of that fuck you
           unfurling from her lips'
red tulip torsion equally intense…'

This urban poet, living in a big city, is concerned with the natural world and its imperilled status and with ecology. He makes a nice human joke of this -- fixed by the gaze of a fruit bat -- not man to man but 'mammal to mammal'. But further on, the first part of the sonnet 'Extinction' minces no words --

I was there when the dieback began.
           First I felt the dead drive
toward total florescence, company drying-out
           as the sun went down
on prime real estate, sandalwood, cedar
           feathers in the red sun, charred
plains of old geology
           bled maritime types into eternal light

spectral as money gluts.'

and in 'Besides Good & Evil'

'metropolitan furrows

growing resinous
as hydrocarbon fallout rouses
ex-nihilo flowers, spitfires

In the eucalypts' trim.such
coincidental similes forced gently
through cat shit

Thriving between
Newtown's permaculture terraces…'

Where in another instance the poet finds an old collection of feathers -- 'the lorikeet, the sulphur-crested/cockatoo, an eagle, a sooty owl' and wonders why he kept them and then he hears them outside in the city amidst the morning peak hour.

And another striking poem -- a city approached from a helicopter that undoes some of nature's tasks

           the chopper flies in low
over flowering apartments, rotor shadows
           unfurling long dark seed heads
into roof-top pools, empty & shivering

I can't finish this glowing panegyric without mentioning the clear, strong poem in which Pete remembers his friend and mentor Dorothy Hewett.

I haven't even mentioned 'The Knitcap Sutras' -- so you can discover them when you buy the book. But I'll just ask a question -- as a clue -- 'What is Beauty?' -- it is a promise. Beauty promises…

These poems are fully conscious, informed, but not cynical. In fact they can seem like dangerously optimistic leaps of faith . In short , they'll amaze you.

The book's final lines imagining Zukofsky mark a change of direction, possibly signalling poems to come

'guess I'll xerox the other
bits and pieces'

I have nothing but praise praise praise for Peter Minter's blue grass.

*****

Pam Brown has published many books including Text thing (Little Esther Books, 2002) and Dear Deliria (Salt Publishing, 2003) which was awarded the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2004. In September 2007, Tinfish Press published farout-library-software, a collection of collaborative poems written with the Seattle-based Egyptian poet Maged Zaher. Her next collection of poems, True thoughts, is forthcoming in 2008. Pam Brown is the associate editor of Jacket magazine and a contributing editor for Fulcrum and How2. She keeps a blog -- http://thedeletions.blogspot.com

ALL THE PAINTINGS OF THE GIORGIONE by ELIZABETH WILLLIS

RAYMOND JOHN DE BORJA Reviews

All the Paintings of Giorgione by Elizabeth Willis
(Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, 2006)

There is a sense of the excessive and the exhaustive in Elizabeth Willis’ All the Paintings of Giorgione; a sense that is at once triggered by the promise of inclusiveness by the word “All”. But informed of the circumstances surrounding Giorgione’s paintings, we are faced with an “All” that is dynamic and uncertain rather than presupposed:

The birth of Paris

The savior as a boy, playing with a ball, attributed to Andrea del Sarto, thought by Oscar Wilde to be Paris with the golden apple

Homage to a Poet, sold under the title Solomon and his Servants

Gypsy and Soldier, formerly known as Mercury and Isis

Under the soldier’s figure x-rays reveal an earlier outline of a bathing woman

The Madonna, reading

The Three Philosophers, later identified as Three Wise Men, in the possession of the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm

Portrait of a Lady, formerly the property of Prince Liehnowsky at Kuchelna and Later Lord Melchett at Romsey

The mosaic of the ground against the mosaic of her arm

The difficulty of attribution, the re-paintings, the focus on landscape, and the resistance to be representational that are characteristic of Giorgione’s paintings or supposed paintings are brought to the fore one by one through a list/chant that becomes the poem’s sense/sound structure; a list that, at least structurally, seems to try to frame the excessive, and the uncertain through each of its items; a list that echoes Willis’ classic concerns of referentiality through the problems of attribution in a Giorgione; a chanting that aurally mounts through individual and clustered re-utterances of “(lost)”:

Nude woman and shepherd with pipe (lost)

The doctoring of cats (lost)

Twelve pictures portraying the story of Psyche (lost)

Large head of Poliphemus wearing a hat (lost)

Episode of the Emperor Friedrich kissing the foot of Pope Alexander III (lost)

Further in the poem an interesting gesture happens when, after painting after painting, event after event, the speaker intercedes, this time much more consciously, to tell us that “At this point in our story, relief disappears” -- a story it is indeed, although one that is not constituted through plot, but by a coming together of fragments, events, uncertainties. This more conscious interceding of the speaker, which occurs more frequently at latter parts, also comes to acknowledge an almost absolute subjectivity, “And so one may speak of “my Giorgione” and not another’s”. But there are instances in the poem when this intercession are rather intrusive and redundant, for instance, the line that says “This is the moment a painting becomes a painting”, we may ask, what compelled the speaker to say something that we could very well deduce from the study of Giorgione’s paintings, from a recognition of his paintings’ resistance to represent known events/stories and hence become free from representation?

The descriptive and depictive manner of All the Paintings of Giorgione is musically and semantically unlike the torque, the more complex shifts and depictions found in some of the poems in Turneresque and Meteoric Flowers. I cannot say that All the Paintings of Giorgione ranks among my favorite Willis’ poems, but it is, for its ambition and its instances of exquisite language, “So matter is intended toward its perfect prose”, worthy of attention.

*****

Raymond John A. de Borja works as a technology consultant in an IT consulting company. He graduated with a BS in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the University of the Philippines Diliman. He was a Fellow for Poetry in the 6th UST and the 45TH UP National Writer’s Workshop, and has won in the poetry category of the Amelia Lapena Bonifacio Awards for Literature and the Manining Miclat Poetry Awards. He is a member of Pinoypoets.

WANTON TEXTILES by REB LIVINGSTON & RAVI SHANKAR

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Wanton Textiles by Reb Livingston & Ravi Shankar
(No Tell Books, 2006)



One must first start with the brilliant, attractive cover. The title "Wanton Textiles" is inscribed in purple -- but of course purple when you come to some of the (appropriately) purplish prose within the text. The purple (or purplish? there's some blue, too) title and poet-collaborators' names are set in front of a white background created by white bed linen and two pillows. Propped up against one pillow is a spool of purple thread, while against the other pillow awaits a needle with its eye just waiting to be threaded, which is to say, penetrated.

These poems, dear Reader, want to penetrate but also wish to be penetrated by You.

Moreover, not only does the cover image befit this chap's unfolding of textiles in service to eros but it winks at you with its transgenderness. The needle, propped up vertically obviously can be the metaphor for a penis. But the needle, with its rather large "eye", also contains the orifice awaiting the penetration of thread. Also, thread (as penetrator) can stand in for a penis but the thread, even as it has the ability to enter the needle's eye, will never get stiff (read: hard); it remains malleable (read: soft).

Thus, kudos to book designer Charles Orr.

To the text itself: wanton, yes. Also witty, energetic, imaginative with their uses of materials ranging over mohair (or was it angora) to Lycra to eyelet fabric. Eye lets! Reading through the poems, I couldn’t remember when merely reading the words for fabrics has been so effective in making me see the fabrics.

Here's one of the more amusing poems by Livingston:

Bunny-pie, this nickel slut can’t lose enough in Vegas. Charmed a great literary scholar at roulette, blew on chips, accepted his come-to-my-room invite for a critique of my latest manuscript, THIS HOSIERY RUNS DEEP. He knew much of silk worms. After forfeiting two $50 jackpots, followed the thread to a quivering “Stroke the wretched loom!” sprawled bare-assed on a wolfskin rug. For a moment, I considered straddling the entire western canon – all night long. Please understand, I only considered it so I could write I considered it and gaze upon your face learning of my consideration. Please send expressive reaction photograph for I forgot to rescue your image from my locket before pawnshop visit.

Spinning & Hungry, Reb

And here’s a poem by Shankar, also pleasingly lively:

So that I could be known throughout the land as Mister So-and-So, I meted out two tablets of extra-strength Tylenol, then ground cloves and ants into a powder fine enough to snort but too sickening to look at. The pastiche makes me gage, but nonetheless I wrangle garrulous ascots from the butler who came to work the wedding. No Jeeves in him, the sonofabitch, he kicked at his pick-up’s tires, then flew into a rage, out of sight of the happy couple. I ate canapés, made small talk. The troubadours, whent hey came, and they did not, sang madrigals of morning. Swum in syrup like visitation rites. Hear me? Waves crashed all around and DJ Dan laid on the disco thick as fleece. If marriage is a sham, I am in shambles. I hooked the angle out of the conservatory and bid adieu to the fleas. Somewhere a light blinked off, then on again. I cannot sleep, not now, not here.

Peeved and petered, quit possible pickled beyond brine—

Enormous R

Can you glean just how much energy thrums through these wanton pages? Metaphorical question. Eros is also energy and, notwithstanding Jeeves and canapés (references that ordinarily make me snore), the underlying energy is one of a carnaval with multicolored tassels swinging from many nipples and cocks: “These fabrics are slippy situations,/ putting us all on the whorepath of snakes/ stitching shut the fallen hero figure”.

Deepening the overall collection are other poems where an individual author is not discernible, as should be the case for collaborations. Here’s a lyrical example, even as it, too, displays pleasing twists in syntax:

Let’s rather stretch together, sky, breasts,
silhouettes, our own recognizable heads
unnumbered and damp upon the grass
asking for once, twice, thrice, why count
why wretch, why not bind our thighs around
our pathos and like CBs buzz:…

Wanton Textiles is a very satisfying collaboration to read, a salubrious interaction to experience. It's worth pursuing -- the poems will harden you as much as they will soften you and it won't matter which because these poems also want you to feel as many ways as possible of being unraveled towards ecstatic release. These poems honor its epigraph by D.H. Lawrence:

“Be still when you have nothing to say, when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”

*****

Eileen Tabios doesn't allow her books to be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects -- but she is ecstatic to point you to recent reviews of her recent book The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007) by Nicholas Manning, by Jesse Glass, and by Burt Kimmelman. Oh, and a review by Laurel Johnson reprinted by Amazon.com, though it's also good to support SPD! Preening is as good as wine for good health!

THE ECSTASY OF CAPITULATION by DANIEL BORZUTZKY

RYAN DALEY Reviews

The Ecstasy of Capitulation by Daniel Borzutzky
(BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, New York, 2007)

Capitulation and Speechmakers: Nixon, Love Letters, Handjob Guilt and THE ECSTASY OF CAPITULATION

You’re in a mammoth SUV hurtling down the Garden State Parkway, en route to the Monmouth County incinerator. Your names are Hannah and Gary. You have a Jewish woodcutter for a father. You have questions about his profession: What kind of cuttings does he produce? If he were to hire a staff, what would be their common practice? What woods work best? How would you feel as wood? How would you like new gel inserts, comforting you, between the gas pedal and your footpad while you keep the switchblade to your father’s throat and struggle to drive.

Given this family setup, would you realize you’re within the limits of Daniel Borzutzky’s Ecstasy of Capitulation? If you do, swell with playfulness and possibility. If not, welcome yourself to New Jersey.

Capitulation addresses the reader in the form of an inflatable gorilla-like oddity, seen in car dealership lots during sales events. Once we’re inside, Borzutzky is about-face and giving away his possessions to make way for the reified SUV. But this is hybrid region: longer lines, endless sentences; the puerile and sublime are mapped together in 79 pages. This is marathon: protagonists with dysentery, government jobs and penchants for rough, clandestine lovey-dovey.

"SHARP TEETH OF DEATH: AN ESSAY OF POETS AND THEIR POETICS" opens Capitulation in a decidedly prose direction, assuming books are read in page-order. Describing a view that Borzutzky will revisit in homage to the Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, poets in "TEETH" are treated like El Chupacabra. They are mythically evil. They are poisoned and hunted (for a reward of one pfenning). And within this comparison, Borzutzky excels at concept. In taking serious events and texts of history and parodying their plots and form, he creates a criticism of histories that do nothing but repeat. In cobbling together statements of the poet as Chupacabra or as an invasive species, Borzutzky effectively dismantles societal methods of suppression. He climbs into language through double negative, obscured/double meaning and repetition. It’s close to the migrating units of meaning in Clark Coolidge’s Polaroid, and the delight elicited is similar, though the commentary retains a relevance to our time. Namely, that each method of suppression uselessly exceeds the supposed threat, and the further hysteria as these threats are sensationalized. Lying in the documentary of sensation are really juicy language bits.

Capitulation embeds itself well within this literary hyperbole. Tonally, the narrator brags about hunting poets. But when are poets hunted by mercenaries and cornered with poison? "TEETH" shows the arts as a victim of government censorship and market prices. Why do Bestselling hardcovers price around $30? The reader laughs, seeing the poets threat level as serious as El Chupacabra, the reproductive habits of feral coneys, or viral Kudzu. Poets are hunted, and we find this implication amusing. Silly, privileged individuals, these poets who have nothing better to do than to cause trouble. "TEETH" is a critique of both the industry and the marginalization that makes the industry seem so necessary. Borzutzky tags the walls of the fortress, “Look, your walls are right here. You paid to watch them being built.”

And if this isn’t persuasion to listen, Borzutzky hatches the cryptic seals of political discourse, love notes, and subterfuge. In poems like "NOUN CLAUSE," "PRESENT PROGRESSIVE" and "SIMPLE PRESENT," he tunnels through language that fractures with reiterating explanation in attempts toward logic.

Writing in SIMPLE PRESENT:

I only think of you when I do not
think of you. Conversely, when I
think of you, I do not think of you.
Of course, when I think of you, I
think of you, but the you I think of when I
think of you is not the you I want to think of.
The you I want to think of is the
you I think of when I do not think of you.

Were this just a mere statement of desire ad nauseam, the concept might be lost. But still, we’re left with Yossarian, fighting to be free but only free to continue fighting, that the you I think of isn’t the you I am wanting to be thinking of when I’m thinking of the you I’m trying not to think of. We’re after freedom to buy different cars only to be killed by a new car. This type of Catch-22 that exposes the idiocy of jokes about dead soldiers during State of the Union addresses and press junkets to applause and nervous giggles. The you’s and I’s and our thoughts of one another compose a Fibonacci of our fickleness. Our presidency is indecisive.

I only think of you when I do not think of you. Conversely, you only vote for me when you’re not voting for me. I’m not a crook. The indeterminacy of our own thoughts; that in thinking of not thinking of you, I’m thinking of you. Bortzutzky has even written a poem about not thinking of you.

Are you thinking of me?

*****

A recent arrival in New York City, Ryan Daley is part of Homeland Security's plan to keep New York safe. He teaches English Composition at St. Peter's College in Jersey City. His work has appeared in JACKET, Combo and Shampoo. His study of superstructures, and first book, ARMORED ELEVATOR, was published by BlazeVOX Books this year.

CANA QUEMADA [BURNT SUGAR] - CONTEMPORARY CUBAN POETRY IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH, Edited by Lori Mark Carlson & Oscar Hijuelos

JOE LECLERC Reviews

Caña Quemada [Burnt Sugar] - Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish, Edited by Lori Marie Carlson & Oscar Hijuelos
(Free Press, New York, 2006)

Let’s get ready to RUUUUUM-BAAAAAH !

Kid Gavilan.

Kid Gavilan was the first Cuban I became aware of as a very un-Cuban child.

You see, the Kid fought Sugar Ray Robinson. That made him important to my old man -- and -- by filial extension -- importante to me.

Then Sandy Amoròs (the miracle catch in the 7th game of the 1955 World Series). Señor Amorós was a left-fielder for the BROOKLYN Dodgers. He broke my 9 year old Yankee (Yanqui) heart.

The Third Cuban was the guy who came down from the Sierra Maestra, and terminated Fulgencio Batista’s crapshoot in Habana.

Fidel.

A journalist who was there to see it happen came back to New York. He was a friend of my father. My father had been a writer for Black Mask. Then he became a writer for, and then the Editor-in-Chief of -- Billboard Magazine.

Anyway. Our man from Havana gave daddy a red and black arm-band. It said “26 Julio”.

Cuba Libre.

Somewhere in life, I lost that cloth. But it stayed in a drawer in little Joe’s bedroom for years (along with the Brigitte Bardot picture…, never mind).

It turned out that Fidel was a bit of a left-fielder himself.

He came to speak at the U.N. -- stayed in a Harlem hotel -- had chickens running around his suite, and, in fine, told Uncle Sam to shove it.

As I write, Fidel’s still El Hombre en Habana.

Pero (but) he’s gettin’ old. So are those rusting Chevrolets with the bad transmissions.

But he still might be in power when GWB is back in Crawford clearing brush for the duration… Hey -- you shoulda seen Jackie! But I digress…

Poetry is part of “everyday” life in Cuba. Along with Mambos, Rumbas, Beisbol, and some of the toughest boxers and some of the most beautiful women on the planet.

The great Celia Cruz lived in Jersey most of her amazing life -- but she was born in Havana. And she didn’t really WANT to be one of the greatest American singers -- she wanted to be a teacher (she was). She died in Fort Lee, New Jersey -- not all that long ago…

Perhaps the most famous of Cuban poets -- José Marti -- wrote a book (un libro) called “Versos sencillos/Simple verses“.

They are simple. Ordinary. But beautiful. As “everyday” life CAN be (the preceding capitalization is intended for my fellow gringos y gringas).

Marti is not included in a book about contemporary Cuban cantos. He’s been dead for 112 years. But he’s a great reference for a culture where folks say “Bailar!” -- which, en ingles, is the infinitive “to dance”. But -- when Cubans say it -- it means “Live it up! Live for Christ’s sake!” I hope any scholars having read this far don’t can’t ticked at my amateur translations -- But if they do -- well, errrrr…, BAILAR! Let’s get down with some burnt sugar, people.

From Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s La lluvia --

Por eso quiero que hasta el fin del mundo
para que nadie nunca deje mi casa.
Hijos, ánclense a mí,
hay tormenta para rato.

Or, as I say,

I hope it rains till time’s end --
so no one ever leaves my home.
Children, you anchor here --
whilst the tempest rages on and on
and on and on.

Translating is fun (Muchas Gracias to my teacher -- Señora Elba Villavivencio of Quito, Ecuador), but -- no matter how impressive the translated text may be -- it’s not the Thing Itself (Dang whatever -- read Kant to blow any poetry high you may engender).

So I’m going to omit Lori Marie Carlson’s and Oscar Hijuelos’ beautiful attempts at invoking La Cubanía.

Ms. Carlson and Mr. Hijuelos have put together a wonderful book that slips all embargoes.

It’s just that I want to try my hand at this translating game.

From Reinaldo Arenas’ El otoño me regala una hoja --

El otoño me regala una hoja
una hoja blanca de papel -,
patria infinita del desterrado
donde todas las furias se arremolinan.

El otoño me regala una hoja.

He wrote that in Ithaca, New York in 1985. He was one of those who Fidel called gusanos and put on the Mariel boat lift in 1980.

Autumn gives me a leaf
a page waiting to be written on
infinite country of outcasts
land of the whirling furies

Autumn gives me a leaf.

From Severo Sarduy’s Obatalá --

al dueño de las cabezas.
…,
Cascarilla, algodón, nata,
dale con grajes de plata
Y una torre de merengue.

Beautiful. Let me give it a shot --

You -- vassal to the Lord of Minds,
offer him your little shells, your cream,
your shards of silver,
offer him a tower of meringue.

Severo Sarduy was born 11 years after Kid Gavilan was born in their home-base, Camagüey. He died in Paris in 1993 (Kid Gavilan died in 2003 -- in Miami).

And from the negrista Emilio Ballagas’ Elegia de María Belén Chacón --

María Belén, María Belén, María Belén.
María Belén Chacón, María Belén Chacón, María Belén Chacón
Con tus nalgas en vaivén,
Camagüey a Santiago, de Santiago a Camagüey.

Nalgas is -- from the dictionary -- “buttocks“. Vaiven refers to “ to and fro motion”

It’s an elegy for María Belén.

She swayed. She swayed.

Burnt Sugar sways…

*****

Joe LeClerc is a writer, musician, and kick-boxer residing in the Hudson River Valley. He is also a Circulation Clerk at the public library in Goshen, New York.

THREE PUBLICATIONS by GILES GOODLAND

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

A Spy In The House Of Years by Giles Goodland
(Leviathan Press, 2001)

Capital by Giles Goodland
(Salt, 2006)

Erratum To A Spy In The House Of Years (Leviathan Press, 2001) by Giles Goodland
(Dusie Kollektiv, 2007) by Giles Goodland


1.

The ancient art of rhetoric tacitly envisioned language as an inertia from which words need to be nudged, jolted out of their accustomed signifying plummet, inducing a salutary perturbation. That the clinamen falls into the general category of tropes is also obvious.
-Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery, “Clinamen”, in their Imagining Language: An Anthology

Let’s not forget the spaces between letters, between words, between sentences, between texts, between languages …
-JBR (Unlike Giles Goodland, I subscribe to no self-denying ordinances)

If, as in this situation, a vast accumulation of ‘contradictions’ comes into play in the same court, some of which are radically heterogeneous – of different origins, different sense, different levels and points of application – but which nevertheless ‘merge’ into a ruptural unity, we can no longer talk of the sole, unique power of the general ‘contradiction’… This means that if the ‘differences’ that constitute each of the instances in play (manifested in the ‘accumulation’ discussed by Lenin) ‘merge’ into a real unity, they are not ‘dissipated’ as pure phenomena in the internal unity of simple contradiction. The unity they constitute in this ‘fusion’ into a revolutionary rupture is constituted by their own essence and effectivity, by what they are, and according to the specific modalities of their action. In constituting this unity, they reconstitute and complete their basic animating unity, but at the same time they also bring out its nature: the ‘contradiction’ is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be called over-determined in its principle.
-Louis Althusser, For Marx

I could have stopped here …


2.

I believe I read somewhere in Walter Benjamin that he hoped to compose a book that would include no words, no language, of his own. Leaving aside whether I read that or dreamt it, I’ve wondered for a while now what might be meant by words of “one’s own”.

I’ve done some thinking. I’ve done some research. I’ve looked into systems theory and philosophy and neurophilosophy and psychology and cognitive science. My research suggests, to me at least, that there are no words of one’s own.

But it seems insane to pretend there’s no such thing as plagiarism. The concept can be historicized, and has been, but … we live with it. The Pierre Menards and Kenneth Goldsmiths and Tom Phillipses and Ronald Johnsons and Jean Days and Jen Bervins and the other collage/appropriation artists of the world all (or almost all, that’s a matter for a separate essay) seem to recognize the concept.

So – no one can own language. But one can steal it. Curious.


3.

Why might Benjamin have been hoping to compose such a book? To get away from what Goodland calls “the core concept of authorship.” To hasten “The Death of the Author”, etc. etc. To let the human universe have its say. To acknowledge that that’s what’s happening anyway. Among other things. (Now if I could only find the quote …).

A text with no words of one’s own. This is not a particularly radical notion. As Giles Goodland puts it in his essay “Notes towards a History of The Cento” (http://www.malleablejangle.netfirms.com/gilesgoodland.htm):

Art recycles. All kinds of art, in whatever sphere, are recyclings of previous arts. Sometimes this is obvious, sometimes hidden. In the case of literature, and especially poetry, there are of course influences, and there is of course plagiarism, but there is also a long and often obscured tradition that openly recycles previous poetries. The relationship between poetry and copying or open appropriation has been pushed aside because it does not sit well with a belief in individual authorship. Collage was an invention of modernism in the early twentieth century that sought to achieve affects through shock-value. However, by proposing the quoted element as an ‘other’, collage in literature seldom broke away from the duality posited by the core conception of authorship: originality versus unoriginal writing. Several generations after modernism, practitioners of collage still claim that what they do is ‘new’. Literary historians have tacitly agreed with this by not looking for antecedents … [JBR: but antecedents exist, e.g. the cento.] … The cento as a form was first developed in ancient Greece when poets started stitching together their own poems entirely from lines or verses taken from Homer. This form of poetry later became known as the cento, from the Latin word for patchwork, or perhaps from kentron, a Greek word meaning to graft trees.

4.

Goodland places himself firmly in the cento/collage/appropriation/sampling tradition. From the same essay quoted above:

… the idea of appropriating sentences or fragments from other writers in a programmatic way … remains a powerful model for me. … it is possible to see it as a device available for making complicated points about appropriation, our relationship to texts in other discourses, including from canonical literature, and the daily trivial texts that surround us. In my own poetry I have been selecting large numbers of ephemeral texts from the print media and assembling them in order of date to make arguments, critiques, or just poems that can walk on their own.

I suggest that such assemblages also allow for polyvocality-in-univocity and vice-versa, blurring, or even erasure, of the distinction between self and other, or, better, perhaps, a reconsideration of what composes a self, and an other … What is a self, anyway? Is a self intersubjective? If so, what is an other? “Who is speaking, and to whom?”


5.

A Spy In The House Of Years is a collection of assembled/collaged sonnets, one for each year, 1900-1999 (the 20th century, according to one way of counting, not quite the 20th century, according to another). Each sonnet is titled with the name of a year (I assume 1903 is the name of that year …) and is composed of bits from 14 sources printed during that year.

In a 2006 interview, Goodland describes his working method:

For Spy, I had paper-based files, several boxes full. I would accumulate slips of paper with quotes from a certain year of the last century. At a certain point they reached a kind of critical mass and a 14-quotation poem became possible. Sometimes I had to have 100s of quotations for a theme to become apparent. Sometimes the theme was as obvious as a colour, so for instance I might have say 10 good quotations from the year 1920 with the word green, then I had to chase up and research to find another four good quotations from that year.

(Collage Capital: An Interview With Giles Goodland by Edmund Hardy, at “Intercapillary Space” http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/11/collage-capital-interview-with-giles.html)

In the same interview, he emphasizes that

My collage is not aleatory, these are not “found” poems but researched poems. The poetry is in the research. In these poems, collage is an attempt at social critique, using the tools of the dominant discourse: empirical, verifiable statements. I would like these poems to be taken as academic papers from which the literal layer of argument has been stripped, leaving the substrate of supporting quotation and apparatus.

He also notes that not one word of his own appears.


6.

In order to give you a taste, here’s “1903”:

If full use is made of the means by which the world of phenomena offers to theory

what looks like a retouch above the man’s left shoulder turns out on closer inspection to be

this delightful facility, with such a woman, of arriving at a new tone, he thought, as he lay on his back, of all the tones she might make possible

where the Harmony Society established

the combined use of a distinctly Swedish apparatus called the plinth, and a chest machine

the pinnacle of my happiness, from which I was in a little while dashed to earth

a “doped” cigar was given to her in a pool and billiard room, and

her thoughts presented themselves in visual forms attended by an hallucinatory

dove-shaped pyx of precious metal, suspended over an altar by a chain from the roof

served with half a dozen tablespoonfuls of comsommé, or petite marmite, or

a complex liquid heavily charged with dead organic matter, which, though perhaps more offensive than injurious when fresh, rapidly changes its nature

by presenting the history of England to them in a fresh and attractive way by means of typical lives of men and women, drawn from original sources

numerically, the words of Latin and Greek derivation preponderate, but this is somewhat deceptive, because a large proportion coming under this head have

radiants which give out N-rays communicating a similar variety of radio-activity.

7.

The source of the third bit jumped out at me (“Ah, Henry James”), but not the others. There is a section at the back of the book, entitled “Sources”, which consists of citations. “Sources” takes care of the plagiarism thing, but I don’t think that’s its main purpose. If “[t]he poetry is in the research”, if this project is “an attempt at social critique, using the tools of the dominant discourse: empirical, verifiable statements”, then the source notes are intrinsic, are the scaffolding from which at least these aspects of Spy’s significance are hung.


8.

Rod Mengham is quoted on the back cover of Spy as saying that “The immense web of reference … shows the frightening coherence of 20th century culture: the powers of reason and unreason all speak using the same voice.” Be that as it may, Goodland carefully avoids imposing coherence, adjudicating between “reason and unreason”, and deciding for the reader whether we are “hearing” one voice or many, 1400 “solos” or one great chorus. A great deal is left up in the air. Where it should be. Spy may be social critique, but if so it’s oblique, and shoves next to nothing down its reader’s throat.

I’m going to quote the last two lines of “1999”, for two reasons. First, words appear throughout the book that couldn’t have appeared much earlier or later (e.g. “newsbites” could not have been found in “1903”). Whatever else this book is, it’s also a history of 100 years of the English language (emphasis on a history). Second, these lines do a great job of recapitulating the entire project:

years in a fast-moving montage of memorable moments with music and scrolling newsbites

throughout the century’s poetry and all highlight the importance of thinking of literature as texts weaved by and weaving the historical discourse that surround.

9.

From the Hardy/Goodland interview:

Edmund Hardy: How did you get started on different kinds of Capital?

Giles Goodland: I finished Spy in the House of Years about 7 years ago and I was still intrigued and entranced by the possibilities of systematic collage. Spy was a sequence of 100 synchronic poems: each poem concerned a year of the twentieth century and was static within itself. I wanted to write a sequence in which the movement through time was more a part of each poem. I had inherited a database of late twentieth century material from my work on Spy and reading through this, certain themes were apparent. I wanted the poems to be about texts in some sense, specifically electronic texts, and I began to play with the idea of money as a text; like the text it has made a transition from paper to electronic existence, and like the text it depends on what people agree to believe it means. From another angle I was interested in this word ‘capital’, which has a long complex history, full of ambivalence and contradiction, and centrally the word is very productive of compounds: flight capital, intellectual capital, social capital, etc. Many of these compounds are of very modern origin, and many of them are entertainingly ambiguous. ‘Murder Capital’ can either mean a place in which many murders happen, or the capital necessary to commit murder, or if the phrase is inverted, it becomes a crime that makes one liable to the death penalty. ‘Flight capital’ is money that is withdrawn by capitalists from any social enterprise perceived as risky (hence exacerbating its demise), but can also be a flight to a geographical capital. From there I just had to trawl through masses of databases and select the most potent or interesting capital compounds.

10.

After reading Spy, and coming to terms with its methodology, it is not always obvious what makes a particular bit a candidate for a particular section of Capital. Until one realizes that Goodland not only “wanted to write a sequence in which the movement through time was more a part of each poem”, he also decided (?) to give linguistic play some room to work. Here’s the beginning of “Flower Capital”:

Bao-yu is gathering peach petals in the folds of his clothes and setting them on a stream

‘hey, this is like a ride!’ Navin exclaims as he’s deflowered

we can export fragrant flowers and rare plants. We can even export earthworms

recorded instances during pre-puberty of incongruities that come into full flower only after

adults received almost all of the plants and flowers and household items

rose quickly, making the company many millions of dollars before he went into business on …

In bits one, three and five, flowers just like the kind that grow in the ground appear. The only flowers in bits two and four are metaphorical. The only flower in bit six is a bad pun.

This is not to say it’s better, but Capital is a wilder ride than Spy, and in some ways more fun.


11.

What is the principle of connection between one line and the next (as if there can only be one …)? The back cover blurb suggests that “These are poems that join the dots, fill in the gaps, and suggest how poetry can once more be a tool for critique and engagement with the world as it is.” Re: the first claim (joining and filling): I don’t think so. Re: the second, I only object to the “once more”, as if no one else has used art as critique in a while, which is a ridiculous privileging of Goodland’s work (ironically appropriate, I guess, considering it’s a sales pitch for a book called Capital … ).

I don’t think Goodland connects the dots. I don’t think he wants them connected. In the quotes that start this review I allude to the clinamen. I think the white spaces between the quotes are swerves as often as they are direct routes.

This is how he puts it in the interview with Hardy:

E: What happens between two pieces of collaged material? (A connective, a gap, a cut, a defamiliarizing device?)

G: Hmmm, can I have all of these, depending on context. Parataxis is an irritating term because of what it conceals. If you think of a parataxis as a gap in syntax, it is richer to talk about ‘and parataxis’, ‘but parataxis’, ‘then parataxis’, etc. (supply your own conjunction …) My favourite conjunction is ‘but’, and I hope many of these poems have invisible ‘buts’ between them (if there's a pun there I'll lay claim to it). Contradictions are interesting, and in any work dealing with capital there are so many contradictions that can be exploited. I am not sure about defamiliarization. I think the media is already defamiliarized. A news programme habitually uses techniques of defamiliarisation in which the viewer is show[n] part of a ‘story’ and then brought back to the studio. I would like to refamililiarize people with what is behind texts.

E: Can you give an example of a contradiction you have exploited. My impression is that you bring out meta-contradictions by bringing so many arguments/argumentative pieces or examples together.

G: Yes, these contradictions are a little hard to quote from in isolation from the poems as a whole. I tried to ensure that I was quoting from a wide enough range of periodical sources that the contradictions would create themselves, by using for instance a variety of business-type magazines, both the one[s] that seem to have the function of apologising for capitalism such as The Economist, to the specialist insider magazines such as banking and finance journals, in which the people dealing with money were talking to each other; these are often contradicted by the articles from academic magazines which attempt to present an objective view of the workings of society. Also I got some pieces which were translations of Chinese, Soviet, or North Korean speeches, reproduced in English-language periodicals for the benefit of researchers and politicians. And also a lot of general periodicals, whatever I could get hold of really. Here are the first 5 ‘lines’ of ‘Fat Capital’:

               Cargo weighing as much as 2,200 lb can be air-dropped precisely through the rear door

               production of grain, fats and oil and pork has all surpassed their past best records

               the courts never quite made up their minds on the weight to be given to ‘offensive’, to ‘prurient’

               among Protestants obesity becomes progressively less prevalent as you go from Baptists to Methodists to Lutherans to

               a huge party for investors and friends. The bill for the food—including salmon pate, duck and roast suckling pig—came to

This is quoting from Aviation Week & Space Technology, from the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts which was running a translation of Ma Wenrui's speech on the Shaanxi economy, from the right-wing American Heritage Foundation Policy Review, then Business Week and then Time, for the years 1978-82. When I was assembling these pieces I was looking for quotes that embodied different sense of fatness or weightiness and sort of hooking them together in various ways, I wanted the syntax to usually click, I wasn't specifically looking for contradictions on a semantic level, but I was assuming that if the sources came from societies that are rubbing against each other, or from discourses on completely different levels, I would not have to look for them because they would already be there.

12.

The third title under review here is Erratum To A Spy In The House Of Years (Leviathan Press, 2001). Since Dusie chaps can easily fall into the hands of readers unfamiliar with Spy, what might such a reader make of this text? I quote in full:

Page 32 (poem 1931) line 15: insert double line space after the word ‘soup’; delete semi-colon

Eileen Tabios tackled this question in Galatea Resurrects #7. Without having familiarity with Spy, but a copy to hand, she reads the erratum back into “1931”, focuses on the distinction in effect between the em dash and the semi-colon, and prefers the reading proposed by the erratum. Beyond this, she concludes that the purpose of the Dusie chap is possibly to revive interest in his earlier book.

It’s also possible to read Erratum as a self-sufficient poem, which puts any text as given into question. If there’s this erratum, there might be others, right?

But. But. Read with knowledge of Spy and of Goodland’s method, Erratum more than anything is a fulfilling of Goodland’s vow of fidelity to his sources.


13.

Goodland’s work is in some ways akin to flarf. I quote Wikipedia’s article on flarf:

In 2007, Barrett Watten, a poet and cultural critic, long associated with the so-called Language poets observed that:

It is precisely, however, to the degree that Flarf does something new performatively and with its use of the detritus of popular cultural and the internet, treading the high/low distinction until it breaks under the weight, that it reinvents the avant-garde. In a larger aesthetic economy, it seems, ‘the truth will out.’ Flarf's recent productivity shows how the injunction against the sentence, paragraph, narrative, and even discourse from some sectors of the Language school intersects with actual conditions of language use. Any such thing as stylistic norms in the avant-garde must inevitably intersect with ‘life.’

Not that I’m quite sure what Watten means by “life” … unless “actual conditions of language use”. But the main point I want to make is that flarfists make (or made) frequent use of sources other than the author’s own imagination. As does Goodland. And both do it for the purpose of cultural critique. A recent work of his, not under review here (or maybe it is, suddenly; why not?), comes even closer than the texts under review, if one accepts (somewhat tongue-in-cheekily) Wikipedia’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek definition 2:

“Flarf” has, as just mentioned, also become a catch-all term for any poetic composition that makes use of Google or other search engines. This implies a retroactive application of the term to authors who were using such devices well before the Flarf Collective, such as Robert Fitterman, Alan Sondheim, and others. Some of these writers, naturally, may resist such connections, as their work deserves to be considered on its own terms without the imposition of anachronistic categories.

The Goodland text in question is A Bar (Beard of Bees, 2006). It was pieced together out of “all the hits from a search for the phrase “a man walks into a bar” on Nexis …”

It begins:

A man slips into my skin and orders a beer, which the bartender quickly sounds like the set up to a bar, looks around and says, so a blind man walks into a bar, says ouch knows? But the bar turns into a spaceship and the bartender gives him a haircut. Da Vinci must have been a really funny guy …

14.

I can’t stand it when I come to the moment I’m supposed to pronounce judgment on the work(s) under review. I always feel like an idiot. Or, better, a cross between an idiot and an asshole. As if I know what’s good and what’s not. And you don’t. So I’m just going to say that I’m keeping these books, and I plan to read them again. And to keep my eyes peeled for new work of his, if and when ...

*****


John Bloomberg-Rissman's most recent publications are World Zero and No Sounds Of My Own Making. He is one of four collaborators on the recent hay(na)ku sequence "Four Skin Confessions", which can be found at http://chainedhaynaku.wordpress.com/. His current project is called Autopoiesis, of which he has completed 60+ parts and expects it¹ll be time to move on to something else when he puts paid to no. 100.

BLACK STONE by DALE SMITH

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Black Stone by Dale Smith
(Effing Press, 2007)

I have a problem with Dale Smith’s new collection, and this problem will take some explaining.

First, let me state that Smith’s poetry is reminiscent for me of an increasingly prevalent type of writing. It is the poem imitating objective, or faux-objective, annotation: a diary-like progression of events, scenes, thoughts and images, as the poet perceives them, and as they subsequently pass through his or her mind. This heterogeneous sense-data is then presented to the reader under the aegis of a concentrated lyricism:

Rain falls with force this morning, water rushing up to our curb. Sidewalk chalk drawings “melt” under the weight of those mighty drops.

My argument, and my sensation, however, when reading a poetry such as this, is that such writing constitutes a strong imposition on its reader, and not in an entirely positive sense. This imposition is not that generated from the demand placed on a reader of a very active participation with the poetic text. Rather, it is an imposition of a very specific sort, which consists in the presumption that the reader is immediately interested by the mere annotation or presentation of such daily ephemera:

Two crows caw in sycamore branches. Twilight, a red sky fades, broken branches. The television flickers and John Kerry promises to defeat G.W. Bush in the November election.

All of which is attractive, perhaps: but is it anything else? The term I would use for this type of writing is that of a diluted impressionism: that is, the poet wanders with his or her notebook, the poet sees, the poet hears, the poet feels, the poet lives, and the poet writes. We are perhaps meant to take these largely unformed, largely unstructured impressions, as being a revealing ensemble of quotidian experience.

I would argue however that the only thing which separates this type of, what I would term, largely expositional writing, from the conservatism of Ted Kooser, Billy Collins or Galway Kinnell, is the degree of apparent closure given: that is, whether or not the poem forms a tidy loop of reflection at its end. Smith’s poems of course, such is his evident poetic intelligence, do not do this; but this is simply the reason why, despite the foundation of this poetry in a largely conservative confessional mode, it is far more palatable to readers who would normally turn away from Collins and Kooser with justified scorn.

Thus, Smith remarks to us that he is drinking coffee. That today he went to the park with his son. That he and his wife had sex last night. That it is raining outside:

Five p.m. Tin foil crumpled in green grass. Hoa boils water for nettle tea and now I hear the kitchen faucet running. K skipped his nap. His voice comes from another room. He has set up his tent now, camping by the window.

And so it goes on . . . This may seem an uninspired critical question, but it is an honest one: what is the interest of this? What justifies this writing’s ontology? Where is the analysis or reflection cast upon such details? Where is the process, the applied praxis? Where is the teleological direction into which such ephemera are being complexly and intricately channeled? What is, in brief, this recording for?

The precedent for this type of writing is, I believe, crucial to recognize, as for me it represents the current state of what happens when the two movements of late American Confessionalism (no less than Lowell and Plath) and a slightly tired current of the New York School, are made to fit more contemporary, and also more vital, aesthetic parameters.

Smith would surely insist -- and perhaps he is right, this is of course just one critic’s reaction -- that his recording of such details is for a very specific purpose, that it does indeed serve defined poetic ends. And it is true that the book initially establishes a very interesting object to justify such accumulation, namely, the fascinating initial idea of the Black Stone, “the dark heart”, the often cruel human core which lies beneath all such daily meanderings. This is the book’s nominal subject, and it is true that Smith constantly returns to this imagogical and conceptual orientation, whose power and poetic suggestiveness is evident:

Throw a black stone
deep in the night
for the old man to find

This black stone then becomes the new child in his wife’s womb, and also perhaps the tightly wound knot of primeval birth and death inside every being.

But to what extent does Smith dig into this heart? To what extent does he attempt to understand its origins, its constitution, and the many ramifications it may thus have on the many daily events he largely describes? This is, for me, the precise origin of my sense of vague dissatisfaction experienced with Dale Smith’s book: that, contenting himself with a simple, and largely unstructured, series of annotations, Smith proceeds to give us a Livre d’heures which, while recounting the weather, events and images, does not make these lists cohere into a unified, or unifying, vision.

For all of this, it’s also important to note however that Smith’s substantial lyrical gifts are undeniable. Take a passage such as:

Dreaming last night of cold sea air. The country was saturated with a coastal system, and the smell of the ocean spread far into the Rockies, beyond the Plains and south, here, to Texas. This morning the air is much colder, but it doesn’t carry with it the sea.

There are other beautiful examples, such as: “What painful acts of memory get carried against the house, the trees and each other.” My question is simply: why are such rich and poignant passages buried under a pile of mere event-lists? O’Hara knew how to turn such annotation to poetic effect. But too often here it seems to me a mere waste of Smith’s ample poetic acumen.

The following remark, then, will no doubt sound overly blunt, but it is necessary to state the matter directly, not to pander and not to dissimilate: the problem lies for me precisely in the fact that I have absolutely no inherent interest in Dale Smith drinking coffee, walking in the park with his son, or the bodily processes of his wife Hoa: “And now Hoa says she feels something, surges coming every ten minutes or so”. Well, the critic is pleased for both Hoa and her husband; but he is no more interested in these fragments than he would be if he overheard such conversation at a bus-stop. (This critical sensation on my part does not, I would insist, stem from any degree of prudishness: Alice Notley or Jennifer Moxley may very well recount any number of real or imagined intimate details of their lyrical personae, without us feeling such imposition). What is the goal then of such lines? Where is their deeper penetration?

Smith seems to make certain attempts, and it is sometimes effective. But it also often ends up being rather simply descriptive: “A strong cramping force brings out this earth-bound creature.” Is this all? Is this an appropriately rich and complex description of such an inconceivably rich and complex event? We glimpse the idea that the child is somehow abandoning the divinity of his or her prior, pre-incarnate state, to enter into the world. But does “earth-bound” appropriately convey this? Similarly: “K walked along, grew tired and demanded to be carried.” From years of reading Confessionalism and the British Movement, I really do not care about poets’ observations regarding the moods of their children.

Perhaps this should be seen as a type of poetic minimalism, where the pared-down exposition of events is left to do most of the work of evocation, as well as its own self-analysis. But, in spite of his occasional beautiful passages, I am often left almost entirely numb by Smith’s other formulations: “Drank a couple of beers. Washed dishes. Made tea. Tended Hoa and Hart.” Smith may perhaps suggest that this apparent rambling, annotative style is in fact very studied, modulated and aware, and sometimes, as in the very effective examples quoted above, this is evident. But more often than not, I feel, the result is that, whether what was aimed for was a simple, direct minimalism, or a charming confessional honesty, the reader is left wanting.

It is necessary to point out that this critique in no way constitutes a condemnation of Smith’s book. Many readers apparently do not feel the same reservations, the same dissatisfaction as I do for the type of impressionistic exposition I feel Smith often represents. Perhaps these other readers see, in such personal ephemera, an intimate reflection of their own lives. But I look to poetry for the development of ways of thinking, seeing and being, which go beyond that of the record. Smith no doubt feels this is also his poetry’s aim, and sometimes this is evident. I would simply liked to have seen Smith let loose his poetic gifts, giving them a more open and free range, and thus making such records obey a more total style and vision.

*****

Nicholas Manning teaches comparative literature at the University of Strasbourg, France. In 2004 he took his MA in twentieth-century poetics from the Sorbonne (Paris IV), and from 2003-2006 held a scholarship at the Ecole normale supérieure of the rue d'Ulm. His poems, articles, translations and reviews have appeared in Verse, The Argotist, Fascicle, Free Verse, Cross Connect, BlazeVox, MiPoesias, Parcel, Fiera Lingue, Cordite, Dusie, Eratio, Otoliths, Aught, Shampoo, among others. In 2006 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first chapbook of poems– Novaless I-XXVI –is out now from Achiote Press. He is the editor of The Continental Review, and maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals.

FIVE BOOKS by NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

BURT KIMMELMAN Reviews

Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, N.Y., 2007)

Powers: TrackVolume 3 by Norman Finkelstein(Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2005)

Columns: TrackVolume 2 by Norman Finkelstein(Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2002)

Track by Norman Finkelstein
(Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 1999)

Restless Messengers by Norman Finkelstein(University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA, 1992)

The Presence and Absence of the Text: Norman Finkelstein’s Recent and Early Poetry

Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein fills in not only a period of time in the author’s life between the publication of Restless Messengers and the more recent Track, but also the evolution of his thinking, his vision, especially having to do with the power of written text to transform human self-identity; inscription is also a key to Finkelstein’s identity as a Jew, a member of the people of the book. Yet, more fundamentally, writing ushers absence into the human existential equation, as Walter J. Ong and many others have shown (which helps to account for the Judaic wrestling with the deity, or potentially the cry of abandonment when God seems to have withdrawn); writing represents someone whose utterance is carried on after that person is gone. There are great implications here as regards one’s conception of time but also the ontology of physicality, of space. Finkelstein’s poem “Yes and No” begins,

               He is afraid to be in the presence.

He is afraid to be in the presence of absence.

               He is afraid, but his fear
               breaks the backs of the sentences,
                              suddenly understanding
                              the journeys to Hell
[…].

It is this dynamic that forms the basis for Finkelstein’s self-explanation as a human being and as a Jew.

Finkelstein’s moving meditation on Judaism and his life as a Jew living in America, which constitutes the greatest part of Passing Over, serves as a key counterpoint to Track—made up of three book-length poems in a sequence, which at its deepest level involves itself in considering, again, the phenomenon of the literate human being and the possibility for spiritual sustenance. Track incorporates Judaic scriptural motifs among allusions to and quotes from other textual religious and literary traditions. Written prior to Track, but only now being published, Passing Over establishes an intellectual grounding for the later work and fleshes out the importance of Judaism for Finkelstein the poet. It provides possibilities for reading Track, which are not on the surface of the poem. Restless Messengers also lyrically explored Jewish identity and life. Yet in the later Passing Over, one written by a mature poet, there is a calm moral clarity. Consider his poem “Allegory of the Song “ that begins with an allusion to Walter Benjamin’s thwarted escape from the Nazis, leading to his suicide, and contains echoes of Kafka:

At the disputed border the song is turned back.
Denied a visa, without proper ID,
the stateless one, begging and bluffin,
is last seen with what little it owns,
slumped on a bench outside a station
in an unidentified jurisdiction.
The stationmaster, the borderguard,
the clerk at district headquarters,
claim that they dealt with no such figure
               on that particular date.

The song is at once inscribed, alive and intoned, and ephemeral. Annihilation should not disturb anyone’s comfort except that the song perishes, and this death cannot ever be fully comprehended. The last stanza begins,

Think nothing of it: I was fighting off sleep
               when I came upon the scene.
               I never heard what became of it,
but it is allegory because it must be allegory,
               and the losses were tallied long ago.
Let’s climb up into the hills, away from the square
where the drivers beside their trucks blow on their hands
                              against an early frost.

In Passing Over Norman Finkelstein captures the dilemma of history and fading memory, and how, given these conditions, one might live genuinely.

*****

Burt Kimmelman has published five collections of poetry -- Musaics (1992), First Life (2000), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, Somehow (2005), and There Are Words (2007). For over a decade, he was Senior Editor of Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005).

COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS by ARAM SAROYAN

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Complete Minimal Poems by Aram Saroyan
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007)

Like the Eternal Present: Complete Minimal Poems by Aram Saroyan

In Aram Saroyan’s conception, “the one-word poem eliminates the reading process entirely—it makes the word both instantaneous and continuous, like the eternal Present.”* The writing of one-word poems marks the beginning of Saroyan’s venture into a prolific period throughout the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s, the results of which have now been brought together in the superb and necessary, Complete Minimal Poems.

During the late sixties American poetry saw a powerful boost of inventive and playful writing and publishing by young poets primarily focused in and around New York City. Saroyan is one of the poets who during the period participated in various circles of friends publishing each other and hanging out together. As Saroyan recalls, he and fellow poet, Clark Coolidge, were “living on the same raunchy street on the Upper West Side” discussing the idea of “a poem that would leave no impression on the mind after it had been read: a poem with absolutely no image-track.” Coolidge went one direction, in Saroyan’s words, “using all sorts of words and yet avoiding any kind of accumulation of these words into meaning or image” while Saroyan delved into “the one-word poem” seeking to achieve “the word stark naked” presented “into the middle of the white expanse of the page.”

Writing one-word poems, Saroyan developed a consistent application of intense examination of the word-as-object laid bare and enlarged upon that process as he began to utilize more than one word per poem. The majority of the poems collected here huddle up on the line of “what the hell are they?” Not falling conveniently into any strict category of poetic form, they are not-so-simply Minimal Poems by Aram Saroyan. Similar to Pollack’s drip paintings, Saroyan creates work in a manner that allows for the simplistic critical error of it being called easy, or child-like.

There’s no use bothering to defend the work against such criticism. All that need be said is that Saroyan strikes the imagination of the reader and holds it through giggles and impatient sighs. If the reader is not fascinated by a page such as

eyeye

whatever hope is there of convincing her different? The reader must continue on, either enjoying the benefits of existing in a world with Saroyan’s work, or not capable of acknowledging the pleasure of such company, not. There are times it is important to have the perspective which grants that opening up the imaginative minds of all readers is simply not possible. Saroyan’s work comes from just such a perspective, its fun without being dumb, thoughtfully engaging while not pushing an agenda, just the sort of enjoyable reading an active mind deserves.

Every reader of poetry needs to get a hold of this collection and spend time sitting with the work. Give it ample space to crawl around, get adjusted to its company. Feel a little excited and challenged, there’s depth to the poems that welcomes re-reading. And don’t fear, at the times when Saroyan gets beyond the parameters of the one-word poem the lingering presence of more traditional-seeming poetry peeks through.

In all the white the wall is

is so tiny a
black crawling roach—a

distance in and out of
vision.

Perhaps for certain readers the tendency of marijuana use to produce such focus of vision and contemplation comes immediately to mind, but remember that so often the effects of drugs are nothing more than reminders of an earlier innocence of perception. The return to such raw observance is the ultimate clarity to be found in this period of Saroyan’s work.

Against the tendency of abstraction, critical consideration about how letters go together to form a word, a world, is presented in such a manner to call our comfortable relations into question.

noom

What do you make of that?

++++++++++

* All comments by Saroyan are taken from “Clark Coolidge and I” Stations No. 5 A Symposium on Clark Coolidge Winter, 1978 ed. by Ron Silliman available on-line: http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/STATIONS/stations.html

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in the library at USF. Poems and chapbooks have been published by Auguste Press, Blue Book, Chain, Pompom, and Red Ant Press among others.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF LANGUAGE by QUINCY TROUPE

LISA BOWER Reviews

The Architecture of Language by Quincy Troupe
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2006)

Quincy Troupe’s The Architecture of Language is self-explanatory: it explores the way in which language is used, created, and perceived. Culture, particularly “otherness,” is a major theme in many of Troupe’s poems, but so too is the celebration of the music that is language. These poems are fierce: language becomes the baton with which to rally the reader into engagement.

With long lines packed full of rhyme, Troupe’s poems are passionate proclamations to the power of language. Pieces such as, “A Kite Above the Beach,” are full of action. Troupe writes of “pulsating voices of croaking frogs, buzzing crickets swell below / the gathering darkness, yeasts like bread, just before night falls, / raises a winking, full moon – a one-eyed cat’s view – / a cyclops looking at the world, just before lights click on.” Here, one can see how amazed and in love with the world, specifically the natural world, the poet is; these are poems that move fast and layer sound. It is common to see Troupe’s poems “switch from proper to colloquial” language.

Troupe’s trademark use of “eye” instead of “I” seems more than appropriate for this collection: many of the poems are about speaking up and explaining, like in the title poem, how “the american voice is not white or black” but “grows from a collective linguistic flow.” His gaze embraces the collective; these poems are vessels for change; afterall, isn’t that one of the points behind “political poetry” or work that extends past the self?

But as much as Troupe celebrates language, he doesn’t let it off the hook of analysis; as much as it is praised, it is also analyzed how words can be weapons or marks of the many “-isms” in the world. In the poem, “Vichyssoise,” he talks about how “you always like the word...the way it sounded,” and though the poem celebrates the connotations and syllables and sound, he also mentions how you can “drop it at high-end parties with people / who care about such things.”

Many of Troupe’s poems also celebrate figures of social change by focusing on public figures as diverse as Lucille Clifton, Richard Pryor and Tiger Woods. These are people who have broken down race barriers (among other kinds of barriers) and exist between worlds. And when Troupe writes of Woods at the 2005 Masters and how the ball “trembled at the edge like it was afraid of heights, / before dropping like a ball of sugar / into a cup of black coffee,” how could the reader not think of race; how could the reader not think about the old “bootstraps myth” of lifting one’s self “up” from their situation?

Troupe’s poems are fearless: they flirt and dance with rhyme; they shout about the many –isms affecting the world; and they are not afraid to say what they mean. Troupe’s politics are as present as his love of language. This collection comes out swinging, and like the figures it plays tribute to, it is willing to take risks.

*****

Lisa Bower is.

DAYS POEM, VOLUMES I and II, by ALLEN BRAMHALL

JEFF HARRISON Reviews

Days Poem, by Allen Bramhall
Two Volumes: Volume I, 494 pages; Volume II, 441 pages
(Meritage Press, 2007)

“-- simply finito --“ reads the coda of Allen Bramhall’s Days Poem (all quotation marks in this review will be mine). These two italicized words, with their second pair of dashes hinting at more to follow, are placed, centered and at a remove, below the concluding 412th canto ending with the word “forever” (“we are that river, loving that, forever.”), a word that contradicts, though not with any finality, the word “finito”. The first sentence of the opening canto of Days Poem reads: “dialogue resumes an emphatic tornado, leftover from emphatic excuse.” This poem begins in the middle of words, in the resumption of dialogue as undepicted now as when it began (as emphatic tornado, or ahead of metamorphosis), dialogue whose genesis is emphatically imaginary (an excuse is a cause, an explanation; “excuse” can likewise be defined, explained, as an exemption, a release granted). There are resumptions galore throughout Days Poem: “tornado rests its weary, imaginary bones. there will be violent discussion galore, as people talk.” (from canto 96); “the tornado holds on to what it can, voices being greedy. the landscape crams with ideas, all is well.” (from canto 408); the tornado frequents Days Poem, appearing in cantos before and between 96 and 408. There are resumptions thematic, resumptions of locales, resumptions of historical and previously literary characters

“such time as this, when discussion is what the animal is all about. Tarzan not good with language, says the Ape Man, studying a text called today. everyone is language, averred an expert, standing in for all. Tarzan love Jane, the intrepid Ape Man says, thinking loin clothes and swimming hair. you might one day be abandoned, theorized the expert. Tarzan looked toward the setting sun, thinking of days, for the first time. his civilized life leads on.” (from canto 102)

such as Tarzan, resumptions of unnamed hobos, raccoons, British regulars

“a British regular rests against a tree, possibly wounded, possibly just a picture. we fight for culture, says he, fired up about logical extremes (of which he’s probably one), just like anyone would be.” (from canto 82)

dogs, theorists, bears, and many others, including hippies and poets. There are resumptions of considerations of poetics, considerations which, like the inhabitants and diction of Days Poem, are apt and alluring, as in these selections from cantos 8, 37, 96, 105, 109, 207, 256, 318, 330, and 336:

“poetry grapples with its wants.”

“gesture lasts the day, and that’s how poets work. poets worry, because words get away. what does a poet do anyway? lay in wait.”

“a poem makes a vocal glance.”

“poetry is dead enough to be resisted.”

“poetry just lifts boundless documents, seemingly native and common, into the light. this light bends only as time will allow.”

“writing a poem is work, lifting words from nowhere and placing them somewhere: in context.”

“a poet is a gargantuan figment, a repose in conflict.”

“a poem is a catalogue of energies and how they may be cured. the cure is a closed door or inkling, either way.”

“poetry resumes its place in books, after a hiatus in the world.”

“why shouldn’t poets be funded by exactitude, where the real sentences grow? why can’t we include trails into forests, when we speak of important things? if our named is doubled, then doubled again, shouldn’t we have a right to assail Heliconian heights?”

With its myriad resumptions, in no service to novelistic plot, could Days Poem ever end? Surely the resumptions, the emphases, continue beyond the last page of volume two, just as they continued beyond the last page of volume one. As canto 412 was once unwritten and unread, so canto 814 awaits writing and reading. The prose poems that are the lines of Days Poem admit variation in cantos other than the 412th -- in canto 196 the word “cloud…” is centered amid a vale of space between two elevations of prose poem (they are a bisected stanza/paragraph, or “clouds…” is appended, possibly as a coda, to its preceding paragraph/stanza); sometimes a promontory is the altitude of a sentence or a phrase, and is found between, above, or below paragraphs/stanzas of varying yet comparatively more considerable size; sometimes these isolated sentences or phrases are found in a pair, or a trio, creating verse (in canto 87 there is enjambment from the first line to the second, from the second to the third; design, rather than coincidence, is apparent in this tercet); and sometimes an isolated sentence is justified at the right margin instead of the left margin (such as the truly final print words of Days Poem: “thursday, august 16, 2001, ahb”). The first and fourth of these variations complicate, via their precedence, the finito and the completion date appended to the concluding canto. That Days Poem ends is as imaginary as the resumption of dialogue that begins the poem. Days Poem is an imaginative instant slowed to literary time. The imaginary retains its shape in this poem. I summarize my findings on Days Poem by quoting words from Days Poem, which is what we’ve all been doing day after day because: “this is a sleek exquisite, because we want our words. our words have wanted us for so long.” (from canto 267)

*****

Jeff Harrison has publications from MAG Press, Writers Forum, Persistencia Press, and Furniture Press. He has two e-books at xPress(ed), and one at Blazevox. His poetry has appeared in Otoliths, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Moria, Xerography, MiPOesias, Big Bridge, and elsewhere. He has an interview blog with Allen Bramhall called Antic View.

FORTY-NINE GUARANTEED WAYS TO ESCAPE DEATH by SANDY MCINTOSH

Burt Kimmelman Reviews

Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death by Sandy McIntosh
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, NY, 2007)

“Show me things I’ve never seen,” Sandy McIntosh’s persona asks of his dream in “How the Work Gets Done,” one of the poems in Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death. Reality, like the “embroidered nature” the McIntosh figure hopes for in his dream, is hauntingly like the imaginary worlds McIntosh concocts. Yet what is really weird is these worlds are seemingly real, and so the reader is disconnected from any root or anchor in the safe but rather unsatisfyingly reliable everyday. Reading McIntosh, the everyday becomes a grand albeit demented adventure.

Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death continues in a mode of thought and writing McIntosh has established in previous books of poetry to painfully funny and disturbing effect. When I read his poems I feel I am dancing with characters in a wild abandon I would otherwise not permit myself, who have emerged out of my own psychic depths, who dance with me in an enclosed room of distorting mirrors. McIntosh’s work is extraordinarily inventive and unique (though reading it I am reminded of writing by Borges and alternatively Auster, to a lesser extent Billy Collins—no one else, however, has so amusingly plumbed our unconscious and the melding of dream and reality). McIntosh’s forays into his life—our lives—are hilariously bizarre, poignant and provocative, and unique in their formal qualities. His is a Möbius strip world in which we become aware of our primal fears and wishes through the oddnesses of an everyday consciousness tinged with ironic goofiness. Consider Number Four in “The Catalogue of Prohibited Musical Instruments”; the poem, titled “The Musical Scaffold,” begins thusly:

Before inventing
the electric chair
Thomas Edison

proposed
a moral cautionary
for mass executions:
the condemned
would be hanged
from ropes
braided of metal
instead of hemp.
Each would be tuned

to a different
note, and,
as bodies

dropped through
trapdoors
in sequence,
a solemn musical
composition
would sound.

[Etc.]

Even the darkest of human impulses can be contemplated as the sources of inventiveness that delights. Here, indeed, is McIntosh’s darkly tinged vision, and we are made to pause and wonder about, and fear, ourselves. His lists and catalogues in this book are revealed to be ways people devise to live with the tragedies of our collective past as well as with the fear of some future catastrophe. We might ultimately realize that there was a lost chapter of Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which Sandy McIntosh has unearthed.

*****

Burt Kimmelman has published five collections of poetry -- Musaics (1992), First Life (2000), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, Somehow (2005), and There Are Words (2007). For over a decade, he was Senior Editor of Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005).

HUMAN SCALE by MICHAEL KELLEHER

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

HUMAN SCALE by Michael Kelleher
(BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, N.Y., 2007)

I’m lucky to be surrounded by the works of visual artists. And as I read Michael Kelleher’s HUMAN SCALE, the works of Maureen McQuillan and Eve Aschheim come to mind.

McQuillan’s drawings -- the ones in the house -- were once-straight lines swirled about to create abstract images that evoke landscape, biological organisms, the Milky Way or a solar system, among others. To see these images, click HERE. To make the drawings, McQuillan made a series of parallel straight lines by stretching out lines of ink and placing them against wet resin. Then she disrupted them to make what I call the swirls. One of the ways in which she disrupts is to pick up the drawing while still wet, hold it against or in front of her torso, and move the drawing about with her body to eliminate the straightness of the ink lines.

As for Aschheim, the paintings I have are abstract works which are so powerful that, when seen in reproduction, one can assume that they are huge works. In fact, the works are relatively small, many being about 12 X 9”. An example of one of her paintings’ images is HERE (or, ahem, on the cover of one of my books HERE).

Which is to say, McQuillan and Aschheim are clearly concerned with intimacy viz the former’s involvement of the body even as she opens up her process to randomness (one can’t anticipate how the swirled lines will look) and the latter’s talking back at immense scale (I still recall the tendency to huge painting in the 1980s which used to frustrate me because of limited wall space in my then-New York City apartments) to generate the same force but from a significantly smaller field. Intimacy is a concern I see shared by HUMAN SCALE. And Kelleher’s new book is marvelous in part for presenting intimacy as a complex condition. Here’s an excerpt from his poem “CUBA”:

The phone rings.

It rings again.

It rings again.

It stops ringing.

Think about it. Hear this that we all know: the sound of an unanswered ringing phone. For anyone possessing a phone, this is an event so familiar that to read “the phone rings” is inevitably to hear the phone ring.

And yet, as is often the case, to be intimate is not the same as to possess knowledge or insight. The phone rings then stops ringing -- we don’t know whether someone answered the phone, or whether the caller gave up attempting to reach someone and hung up. We are intimate with this moment -- its sound -- and yet it remains stubbornly a mystery.

(The excerpt resonates in another way when we consider it in light of its title, “CUBA” -- when we consider it against what we know, and do not know, about Cuba. In this sense, for me, some sense of the ominous makes itself known even as it doesn’t explain its presence. I note this point parenthetically because it seems to turn Cuba, a country/history/culture into a mere marker; let me just say that “CUBA” is an 11-section poem with enough content not to have made the mistake of reductiveness.)

A similar stubborn wall preventing narrative clarity remains before the reader as one reads the next section in “CUBA”:

7.
There are stories about him. About who his father was. He is the child of the father of many. There is a family resemblance. We do not like to talk about it, but it is true. It is true and we do not like to talk about it.

We must continue to resist our hunger. For instance.

He went away for two years. He went away for fourteen years. And then he came back. He never came back. And then he came back. He didn’t find his fortune. From the room in his apartment the city looks like Paris.

It is Paris.

In this excerpt and elsewhere in the book, there’s all this activity -- and specifics -- and yet it all remains a mystery, even as it all holds together somehow. One is given a family’s history -- in that sense, the reader is considered an intimate; yet the tale remains secretive. So that, suddenly, the cover image makes sense: the cover photo and the book design is by Julian Montague who deserves fulsome kudos for his brilliant job.

Have I mentioned that the book is sized at 6 X 4”? You can hold the book cupped in one palm, recalling again how McQuillan held the drawing against her body and how Aschheim’s paintings tempt you to pick them up from the wall and peer nose to canvas at them. Yet the book’s small scale facilitates intimacy paradoxically with, or despite, the cover image of a human atop the stone ridge. The human figure, here, is almost a mere dark blot against the expanse of the terrain that stretches for miles and beneath a sky that also offers a seemingly infinite expanse.

Both text and book design manifest/embody a sense of grappling -- grappling with both the internal/psychological and external/world terrains. But it’s significant that the book opens with the poem “Firefly”. Indeed, despite the difficulties that come with existence, Kelleher brings optimism to the fore, through evoking a creature which, while tiny, brings light:

That light going out
…

Flashing in the dark.
Familia lampyridae.
…

The enzyme luciferase
Acts on the substrate
Luciferin, which glows

In the presence of air.
Luciferin comes from
Lucifer, meaning

“Light-bearer,”
“Morning-star”
“Bringer of the dawn.”

He was closest to God
Who cast him out for pride
Of bioluminescence.

The optimism is refreshing, and apt as there's a sense of activism here. The poem continues on to say, “My goal is to bring / Fireflies back to city”. The activism is fitting given some of the book’s themes. What’s brilliant is how those themes are not didactically revealed, but presented through a depiction of the difficulties of engagement:

The tower the sun the Sabbath the child

The sun the stage the setting the pier

The woman the eyes the goggles the sun

The crowd the gun the shot the fall

The instant the moment the aftermath the event

The sudden insight

The realization

The memory
(--from “LA JETEE”)

In any event, if the “goal is to bring / Fireflies back,” how to do such? Well, specifically by

Using an abdominal light --

Emitting organ,

I note “organ” and perhaps belatedly realize (so taken was I originally by the book’s physically intimate scale and how that affected my first perusal) that “scale” also refers then to a sonic facet. So do these poems sing? But of course! Sing along to “PIE IN THE SKY’ whose fourth section is

Time heals
No wounds
Least of all

My own, which
I have sat here
Licking, year

After year, until
All I could taste
Was your name.

Or “SEASONAL AFFECT” which begins

Cold spring
Cherry blossom
Petals falling
Summer bloom

Cold spring
Cherry blossom
Petals falling
Summer blue

Hold spring
Cherry blossom
Petals falling
Summer blue

Hold spring
Cherry blossom
Petals folding
Summer blue

and continues on for a total of 18 stanzas riffing of each other. You want to read these poems aloud: they sound good, yes, but they also feel good in the mouth, which is to say, they were crafted not to strain the vocal chord, which is to say, the pitch is perfect.

But despite their sonic mastery, these poems are too intelligent to discuss without addressing narrative (including visual) content. “PIE IN THE SKY”, for example, could be an obligatory 9-1-1 poem (and I say “obligatory” without intending any snark; it’s just that this collection is one of many I pick up nowadays which refers or seems to refer to the 9-1-1 tragedy, and why not if these collections are “contemporary?”). The poem begins

1.
That reckless
Silence
The falling

Fruit
Bears
Between

Snapped branch
And black earth
Singing.

2.
Mass being
Equal to
That place

In mind where
Thought thinks
Itself

Through
To some end
Lies ahead.

Yet the poem is more than just song…and more than just about 9-1-1 (or whatever it is about) -- the poem sings, but also states. In part, the poem says

Nihilism
Gives way
To elegy.

Ah, those fireflies. And such may summarize the deceptively-simple balance of HUMAN SCALE. Because the matter at hand is a poem, nihilism gives way to elegy. But it’s elegy as a thinking portal. A portal through which the reader, if the reader so wishes, may not just close the book but move forward with a clarified vision to engage in acts that, so to speak in an attempt at summation, help ease suffering.

HUMAN SCALE ends with a poem entitled “EPILOGUE.” It begins, it offers:

There once was a place called Guernica
Somewhere in a land called Spain.
They had a light bulb and a broken sword.
Everything was in pieces, everything
In black and white, like the past.
People could be seen clear through,
Like ghosts or windows, like ghosts of windows.
Guernica hung on the walls of the high school
Spanish classroom beside the a poster of a painting
Of a firing squad in which a man in yellow pants
And bright, white shirt stood, arms spread wide
Facing the solders at arms length, their arms
Aimed at his heart. The people of Guernica
Were shattered and the rest of the world
Shattered by Picasso, which goes to show
There may be some relation yet-to-be-explored.

That’s right: “relation.” In a suffering world, living is not easy and answers are difficult to find. And so Kelleher’s texts retain their mysteries. Because, as “ELEGY” continues, “Between art and life…depictions / Cause their objects to exist. / In such a world, Guernica causes Guernica.”

HUMAN SCALE gently suggests, Let’s not objectify each other. Let’s relate. McQuillan makes the artist's -- her -- body inherently part of the drawing. Aschheim’s paintings urge their being picked up off the wall to be held. HUMAN SCALE gently urges, Let’s relate. It can begin in intimacy despite the lack of certainty facilitated by knowledge -- intimacy that can be possible through something like art, something like Song.

*****

Eileen Tabios doesn't allow her books to be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects -- but she is ecstatic to point you to recent reviews of her recent book The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007) by Nicholas Manning, by Jesse Glass, and by Burt Kimmelman. Oh, and a review by Laurel Johnson reprinted by Amazon.com, though it's also good to support SPD! Preening is as good as wine for good health!

VOODOO REALITIES by PHILIP HAMMIAL

PAM BROWN Engages

Voodoo Realities by Philip Hammial
(Island Press C-Operative, Woodford, NSW, Australia, 2005)

Philip Hammial is one of the more interesting personalities of the last thirty years in Australian poetry. Apart from writing poetry Phil has been generous to other poets in operating his independent imprint Island Press and he has also made and exhibited sculptural art and has fostered the work of other visual artists, curating survey shows of Art Brut for some years now.

Most poets seem to jump at the chance to be institutionalised -- to be acclaimed by society’s committees, happy to forfeit poetry’s adversarial alienation (which is the source of its critical autonomy) to pitch themselves at winning the applause of posterity. Philip Hammial’s poetry, I think, resists this -- he seems not to want to leap and he certainly can’t be pushed. Phil’s social identity as a poet is not ingrained, although his commitment to making ‘ART’ probably is. And he can’t be pinned down -- his work is mutable.

Philip Hammial projects, in his poetry, a free, un-selfconscious imagination. The poems are vital, fast, celebratory. The reader feels she’s in the presence of originality.

His poems give you a delicious, if brief, feeling of being intensely alive. Allowing a kind of transcendence of conformity, it’s poetry that transforms alienation into freedom.

Phil’s poetry teems with images -- often seemingly freely associated, hallucinatory, and leaping from location to location. You can imagine watching the impossibly distant Cancri star system from the balcony of a hotel called the ‘Ucuncu’, you can end up in prison in Mexico or in court in Marshal, Michigan or be startled by an unidentifiable noise that’s ‘…Not/ the yes of Argentina overriding the no of Burundi/ at Egypt’s Easter Festival.’ You think you’re in Los Angeles, then -- ‘click’ -- you’re in France -- he covers the waterfront -- Africa, Nicaragua, the Middle East, Bedlam, Rome, the Bronx, China, even Sydney -- you get the idea -- ‘Enjoy your stay in Tokyo./Or is this Berlin’ -- it’s dizzying. Readers might wonder what drug he’s on as they reach for the atlas.

In their sweeping range of imagery these poems remind me, somewhat, of the two Johns, Ashbery and Tranter. Although, in comparison Phil’s poems are unrestrained. His poetry is intense. Innocence, naivety and spontaneity are seen as disadvantages in the adult world, where it is wiser to be cautious than spontaneous, clever than naïve and normal to feel guilty rather than innocent. In Voodoo Realities the reverse is the case. The sexual images can be grotty and sad -- ‘a jaundiced girl dancing in your lap’, or ironic and mocking as in ‘The Visit’ -- the poet follows a sex worker up some steps in lascivious anticipation and she turns and kicks him, jamming her foot in his mouth, so that he wonders if he has come for ‘the slightly rancid taste of her exquisite toes’. In one poem’s bondage scene, the poet resembles a warped Stelarc ‘…some of whom/if I ask politely, will suspend lead weights/from my testicles, adding more & more until/I’m forced to beg for mercy, having become/in the process a veritable Foucault’s pendulum ‘. And, whatever you do, don’t ask Phil to explain a ‘spunk cortege’.

Phil demonstrates a stylistic variousness here too. There’s the stark straightforward minimalism of a short poem like ‘A Gun’ --‘that is all gun, no/ aim, sets free/ its captive, a bullet/ that is all bullet, no/target, that enters its victim…’ and so on, and the contrast of dreamy optimism in another short poem -- ‘Unknown’

how these systems accumulate with
portholes in the mountain through which
the unfortunate who are trapped therein
can see & wonder at the beehive
from which the blessed will disembark
with the candles that they’ll carefully place
on the bonnets of majestic automobiles
that will move in slow procession to a better world
               (hmmm a ‘spunk cortege’ perhaps? ha ha)

‘Home Sweet Home’ is a longer funny, absurdist poem comprised of short stanzas ‘Duffers in line/ for a chemical spank’, ‘It’s such that/the same number/is the sane number.’ ‘Be advised/that the la la/& the ba ba/are one & the same’.

Another long poem in four-line stanzas works as a lynchpin or key to Phil Hammial’s modus operandi in this collection -- ‘Days In Jesus, A Chronicle’. It’s a hyperreal memoir -- of childhood escapism, teen rebellion, of hotheaded young adulthood on an experiential journey into a troubled world. It’s a kind of totally beat ballad -- ‘on the road to Damascus, or was it Lhasa…’

There’s not much point in my making further descriptions of these diverse and inimitable poems. Phil is an incredibly prolific poet and this collection is as energised as his previous work. Read it to discover more.

*****

Pam Brown has published many books including Text thing (Little Esther Books, 2002) and Dear Deliria (Salt Publishing, 2003) which was awarded the NSW Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2004. In September 2007, Tinfish Press published farout-library-software, a collection of collaborative poems written with the Seattle-based Egyptian poet Maged Zaher. Her next collection of poems, True thoughts, is forthcoming in 2008. Pam Brown is the associate editor of Jacket magazine and a contributing editor for Fulcrum and How2. She keeps a blog -- http://thedeletions.blogspot.com

PASSING OVER by NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

Passing Over By Norman Finkelstein
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway N.Y. 2007)

Norman Finkelstein is a poet, literary critic, and Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati OH. His body of work is impressive and includes critiques of modern and post modern poetry, scholarly studies on international relations, and several books of his own poetry. Critics have described his books as beautiful and beguiling, brilliant and audacious, lyrical and probing. In Passing Over he physically and metaphysically explores the Jewish-American identity within the history of the Passover.

In “Aliyah” he contemplates the Word and the Book, those constants that anchor Jewish people no matter where they live on Earth:

Even here in the promised place,
where the light sears every wound,
the figures are fruitful and multiply
as if it has been ordained.

Finkelstein dissects his creative process with clarity, exposing each serration honestly. Readers know exactly where his ancestors have been because he dissolves all boundaries. Consider this passage from “A Tomb for Gershom Scholem” for example:

The Blessing glimmers on the border of nihilism,
a no-man’s-land between Berlin and Jerusalem,
a haunted line between France and Spain.
The ghosts from Paris, from Prague, from Vienna,
circle warily around the merkabah.
You cannot fend them off; they are parts of you.
They are the sparks returning, completing a movement
which you thought could never come to rest.

“Mara: The Shape of an Absence” is a long poem, haunting and tender. I cannot adequately convey the impact of this poem in a review, but quote two small excerpts here because they describe Finkelstein’s poetry to perfection:

Syllables accumulated
in a psychic
reservoir

As if held in account
against the unspeakable
past?

And in a second excerpt from the same poem:

Mara, beyond my hatreds and desires
and the hatreds and desires of those I see
lies the void we have misnamed history,
as dark and capacious as the leafy Absolute,
alone in its gloomy park.
You fell into the one to fall out of the other,
if only for a few moments
on a summer day.

These poems carry fragments of death and miracles. Through his words, Norman Finkelstein eats the bread of affliction, mourns the losses of history, and drinks the wine of bitterness while holding watch in a night gone dark with ancient powers. His poetry, indeed, is beautiful and beguiling. Highly recommended.

*****

Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review and Review Editor for New Works Review. Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Kansas with her husband of forty-plus years.

THREADS by JILL MAGI

PAMELA HART Reviews

Threads by Jill Magi
(futurepoem books, New York 2007)

Jill Magi’s book Threads is a beautiful collaging of poetry, prose, visual art and found texts that blurs the boundaries between genres. In taking up the question of how we understand who we are, Threads explores the edges of family narrative, especially the silent places. The story of the author’s family in Estonia, a small Baltic country occupied by many countries during its history and mostly recently, by the Soviets, is one of disruption and fracture.

As the title suggests, the book also weaves connections -- societal, linguistic, cultural and familial as its narrative unfolds. This movement back and forth between what has unraveled (country, culture, family) and what is being pulled together (family, history, memory) is represented metaphorically through the title. Told in the first person as Magi travels throughout Estonia, her father’s and grandparents’ homeland, the book is excavation of both personal and societal memory and history. There is a new language to be mastered. There are maps to be deciphered, all in an effort to understand, as Magi so poignantly writes, “the position of the single body versus a whole family,” a horrific image literally describing the war-torn countryside, but also touching on the question of self identity in relation to this history.

Plaited elements of prose, poetry, found texts and visual images are interspersed with swaths of white space. And thus the placement of text and image on the page is yet another feature of the narrative. Along with language from guidebooks, Estonian poetry, as well as writings by her grandfather, there are instructions on book-repair and book-binding that serve as a kind of instruction manual for Threads. Indeed, the book does bind together a complicated story that has been torn and scattered by war and immigration. I love this particular series of manipulated instructions.

Reflect that there are three statements of force concerning the thread.
A pull or tension unchanged.
A relation between the tensions of the two sides.
A force to feel, of generative tensions.

These tensions are beautifully represented through images as well as language. Magi has manipulated and recast documents such as maps, letters, and postcards. For instance, a photocopied page has been torn and stitched together. A hand-drawn map of a neighborhood presumably in Estonia has been stained and blurred so that it’s new -- as much a visual work of art as directions to a family homestead. Poetic language appears on travel documents. Image and imagery are startling.

I’ve made artifacts with my hands like a trail of
breadcrumbs. To find a way back to a
home.

The shuttling between visual images and language is one of the compelling aspects of the Threads. I have to admit wanting to take the book apart so I might hang each lovely page on a wall just to look at and then read this moving book. But I realized the beautiful container -- the book -- would be destroyed. "The book comes into being," writes the Egyptian poet Emond Jabes, "by allowing itself to be read as it will be." The poet Susan Howe has worked beyond the boundaries of image and text. So too has Anne Carson blended genres to make another way of telling a story. Like those writers, Jill Magi demonstrates in this compelling book that the “breaking and vanishing” of borders is part of how we make meaning to arrive at self knowledge.

*****

Pamela Hart is a former journalist. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published last year by Toadlily Press. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in journals like Rattapallax, Lumina, Kalliope and BigCityLit. Check out her blog, A Walk around the Lake, at pamelahart.blogspot.com.

DOCUMENT by ANA BOZICEVIC-BOWLING

LARS PALM Reviews

Document by Ana Bozicevic-Bowling
(Octopus Books, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2007)

There are books you open & then there are books you open. Ana Bozicevic-Bowling's Document is a small booklet stapled to a bonzai-sized document folder. It's lovely. Apart from the esthetics of it, it makes me think about opening & reading. & about travel (& migration). The ones european authorities & media like to call illegals, or illegal imigrants, arrive without so called travel documents (passports & whatnot) simply because they know it's the only, if exceedingly slim, chance they have of not being immediately sent back. I am, however, not sure of the durability. I sense a future need to re-string the folder.

On now to what's inside.

I have a feeling others will compare her poems to other american poets. Sure, one or two may spring to mind. But. I see this belgian heathen showing up at various street corners. He goes by the name of Hugo Claus. Why? There's something in the atmosphere. In the elegant brutality of several phrases among these twelve poems, of which two by the way pose as epilogues. In the suspicion that nothing is impossible or even very difficult if she sets her mind to it. There's also a great deal of pitch-black humour at play, or is that just me being brutal?

                At earth's center a certain
someone discovers then forgets the function of arms

on a clock. You?
(from Light is the first animal of the visible)


How is their face different from a castle? Which
is constructed? Which legendary?
(from Legal Counsel)

If so, then so be it. There is also a sense that something is lost. It's never stated. Of course. Ana knows better than that. & her poems know better than to be simple elegies. Elegiac, yes, at times. As the end of "Rhode Island," the opening poem

And morningly
nebulae, red-throated
waterbirds,
typestrokes of
fish

visit the shrine

(to view the film
of a coat, departing.)

Ah, but there's so much to say about this Document. But I will jump aboard the coat & leave you, hopefully, curious at the quay.

*****

Lars Palm apparently sometimes writes reviews. his most recent poetry publications are some hay (Meritage Press Tiny Book no. 5, 2007), ten poems in the latest issue of Otoliths & (biotech), say (what?) a long poem in PFS Post. he has plans for the future, they involve translations &, hopefully, cats. just so you know.

OBSTRUCTS/CONSTITUTES by JOHN CROUSE

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Obstructs/Constitutes by John Crouse
(Effing Press, Texas, 2007)

Judging from the titles of the two reciprocal halves of John Crouse’s Obstructs/Constitutes, there may at first appear to be a strong underlining “argument” to this new collection. The basic proposition could perhaps be surmised as follows: there is, on the one hand, a “substantive” side to language, that is, its nouns which note and denote. This is the element of language most closely involved in the active construction (or “constitution”) of our world. On the other side of the divide we find language’s syntactic element, which, with all its possible myriad disruptions, is more focused on the “obstruction” of the coherent “constitution” carried out by naming and nomenclature. Syntax, we may thus think, mainly builds barriers to the eternal process of “building”, which is carried out by nouns and other “heavy” signifiers. According to this schema, the “obstruction” of syntax would be equal to - 1, and the constitution performed by nouns would be equal to 1. Language would thus be seen as a tension between the two poles of this competing binary: a division between substance on the one hand, and syntactic disconnect on the other. Between constructive nominal “constitution”, and destructive syntactical “obstruction”.

But in this, John Crouse’s marvelous little book, things are not -- we are relieved to discover -- nearly so simple or reductive as they seem. For naming is not, of course, in any way a “coherent” or purely constitutive act, and it is certainly not more naturally or intuitively coherent than syntax. Similarly, syntax is itself a construction, and is moreover as much a site of linkage as it is of disconnect. Neither pole of this apparently false, if conceptually rich, binary, proves then to be any more “constitutive” or “obstructive” than the other. In order to emphasize and explore this complex dynamic however, one would have to set about analyzing both syntax and nomenclature in very specific ways.

Which is, thankfully, precisely the project which John Crouse here undertakes for us. For the binary of this collection establishes a division, but also, of course, a co-dependency. This simultaneous connect/disconnect is manifest in the book itself which, in Effing Press’ inspired and beautiful design, is divided into two halves, each upside-down to the other, which begin at the back and front cover respectively, and “meet in their middle. The two texts do not, importantly, overlap: but they are united by the same binding. Their dependency is clear, though the reader must literally “flip” his or her mindset in order to consider language through a different lens.

We may thus choose to read the book in either direction: neither is necessarily the preferred. Let us begin, though, with the Constitutes side of the equation, to see the extent to which this half gives the lie to its title, and undermines the very act of constitution it pretends to set forth.

First, let’s note that Constitutes’ focus on nouns and naming is evident, for the simple fact that Constitutes contains only nouns. Many of these nouns are ambiguous, for some seem, at first glance, to be in fact adjectives or verbs, or at least to contain the possibility of being adjectives of verbs. We thus encounter fragments such as “Versus smelt?” in which, so tempted are we to make of this two-word structure a coherent semantic block, we feel obliged to read the second term as an infinitive or third-person conjugate: “to smelt” or “to smell”. We soon see, however, that this reading, given the rest of the surrounding structure, is unlikely: “Nymph smithereens oarlock, fluent smile.” If entirely surrounded by nouns, mustn’t “smelt” also be a noun? We then discover, with recourse to a dictionary, that “smelt” is a noun, if a rare one: it is at once “a style of fishing with dip nets”, and is also linked with the process of “smelting”. Whether these are the intended nominal references of the word is hardly important: “smelt” sounds like a noun, and unsurprisingly, it is.

And in case we feel this type of uncertainty occurs in Constitutes only between nouns and verbs, here is one of many an adjectival case: “Puce teaspoon.” We must imagine, initially, a teaspoon in the colour of greyish pink. But then we read what follows: “Tory teleprompter, duke flaccidity, buddha budge brownstone diarist.” We realise the word “puce” can also be not descriptive, but purely substantive. This is a very complex idea, and this complex effect is achieved, in Crouse, with a wry and evident poetic intelligence.

But what does this all mean? Perhaps simply that, in reducing the world of reference to the act of naming, we are confronted with precisely the same feeling of arbitrariness as syntax can often produce. We thus stop seeing nouns as “heavy” -- or purely denotative -- parts of speech, and begin seeing them as rather capricious, changing constructions in their own right. The full irony of Constitutes as a title thus begins to become more evident.

This impression is only enhanced, moreover, during our subsequent reading of Obstructs. Though of an entirely different construction to its “twin”, Obstructs similarly confounds our expectations, albeit this time in a rambling, syntactically dense “prose”:

Set its pace, a working to ward. Wholeness. Death. Sure, duping to be workable, got you.
A working toward wholeness, one best apprehend. Pithy. A perception of occupying a flow toward, ever always getting to.

And so it continues, in ever more ornate and perplexing constructions. We thus feel, once more, that this half of the book is wholly representative of its title: it incarnates a pure “obstruction”, and thus represents syntax in its most extreme form.

Or does it? As have we learned our lesson, taught so ably in Constitutes? Are we now more skeptical of this apparently “pure” obstruction?

Yes! For what will become clear, as we have already seen for Constitutes, is the falsity of this initial impression. To see how this occurs, let’s ask: How do such passages achieve their syntactic obstruction? Let’s analyze them a little.

Firstly, we note the important absence of apostrophized genitives: “these of our days best adventures”, or “All its lutes trying to unregret majesty”. It is thus more difficult, or even impossible, to tell if words such as “days” and “lutes” are third-person conjugated verbs, or simply substantive plurals. Also, we see verbs which have no apparent object, or whose object is, at the very least, highly displaced:

“Character of it matters emerging from scratch at the root of inverted trees.”

Now, what “emerges” here? “Matters” may indeed be a plural substantive, or it may be a verb whose direct object is the line’s first word: “character”. There are other possibilities. The word “scratch” implicitly contains both its substantive and adjectival incarnations. Indeed, the poem seems to want us to be able to very coherently read both: the conjunction “from” makes us think “Noun!” (“from scratch”), while the rest of the sentence makes us think “Verb!” (“scratch at the root of inverted trees”). Interestingly, this specific type of substantive/adjectival ambiguity is quite unique to English verbs, because of the highly reduced number of simple verb conjugations (usually only two) available in our language.

What seems, then, a too radical “obstruction” of language’s “constitution”, thus begins to seem, strangely, much more readable. As an example, let’s take, still from Obstructs, this apparent question:

“Methods untoward striving unrest particulars in order that wresting composure might be maintained?”

Is it indeed possible to see this formulation as a coherent semantic unit? There are, as is the case in all poetry, or indeed in any language use, many possible units here operating simultaneously. And one of the intense interests of Crouse’s poetry for me lies in the implicit presence of such meanings below the syntactically scrambled -- or at least extremely syntactically “tense” -- surface.

Let’s attempt then to syntactically “unscramble” this formulation, to see if this interpretative procedure is indeed worthwhile. One possible, “clear” version of the same line, would thus read as follows:

“Are inappropriate methods, which disturb particular elements, necessary so that the disruption of composure can continue?”

That is, by all accounts, at once a coherent idea, and a possible interpretation of Crouse’s initial syntactic disruption. It is, moreover, and fascinatingly so, a statement largely applicable to Crouse’s own aesthetic. That is, we may use techniques deemed “unsuitable” in order to continually disrupt the specific elements of different types of “composures” (be they social, political, linguistic, or all three).

There is, then, a joyouse “abuse” in this poetic of traditional readerly/authorial divisions. This is evidenced by an abuse of the common codes, such as naming, syntax and punctuation, which often define and separate these two veritable institutions:

Can I share yr sweet minute, goatbleated & crammed down spiraled grey afternoons throat, read as hid me motherfuckings mundanity slithered a lull in the dynamics enough to make me think its over?

The poet’s “voice” here, if there is one, is not that of Virgil’s honeyed coaxing of Amaryllis, but rather a different personage in the pastoral universe: the apparently ugly “bleating” of the lyrically discontent. Crouse’s book has this “crammed in your throat” quality, and this is meant literally. That is, attempt to read Crouse’s lines out loud, and the voice is reduced from the metronome to the near-inarticulate mimics of the metropole: “Indulge all said in a breaths good for what pangs saturdays rollicking pellets providence as evidenced doled smiles be reams.” In spite of the liberal assonance and sonorous play -- which serve generally, as they do here, to establish connecting moments of melodies -- the reader must overcome a level of sonic dissonance located between and within words. There is rarely, then, a “lull in the dynamics”; but when there is the reader is surprised to discover that, far form being “over”, Crouse’s aesthetic machine clicks on, turning out its various and variegated connections and disruptions.

According to Horation parameters, the poet should choose his or her disruptions carefully. Not Crouse. “Indulge all said” as Crouse puts it later, and indeed indulgence is a key word here: “Foxy. Indulgences. Mannequins lewd pose.” In its embrace of -- indeed its wallowing in -- such simultaneous lexical and sonic largesse, Crouse’s poetry has something in common with the prose-poems of John Olson, or Eric Baus. The value of this aesthetic is in its extremes.

All of which may seem, on the part of the critic, a touch overwrought; but it does importantly imply that such poems, in spite of their initial “unreadability”, in fact present a powerful vision of the way language operates. That is, language operates according to an infinitely expanding range of errors, ambiguities and competing tensions. It is not simply “poetic language” which operates like this: poetry is simply an occasional heightening of such effects, (and in any case, Crouse’s language is far from being traditionally “poetic”).

It would be a mistake then to view John Crouse’s poetry as a formal exercise, or as in any way autotelic in its nature, though it may initially appear such. For Crouse plays ingeniously with readerly knowledge and assumptions. He explores the entire reading process, the whole computation of language by the eyes, ear and brain, and such exploration often requires a deft projection, on the part of the poet, of what such complex process might entail.

*****

Nicholas Manning teaches comparative literature at the University of Strasbourg, France. In 2004 he took his MA in twentieth-century poetics from the Sorbonne (Paris IV), and from 2003-2006 held a scholarship at the Ecole normale supérieure of the rue d'Ulm. His poems, articles, translations and reviews have appeared in Verse, The Argotist, Fascicle, Free Verse, Cross Connect, BlazeVox, MiPoesias, Parcel, Fiera Lingue, Cordite, Dusie, Eratio, Otoliths, Aught, Shampoo, among others. In 2006 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first chapbook of poems– Novaless I-XXVI –is out now from Achiote Press. He is the editor of The Continental Review, and maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals. Come say Bonjour.

N/O by RON SILLIMAN

ERIC HOFFMAN Reviews

N/O by Ron Silliman
(Roof Books, New York, 1994)

“I am attracted and repelled”
begins the review

And so begins my review, which adequately summarizes my reaction to this, Silliman's nineteenth collection of poems, another addition to his long poem, The Alphabet, itself part of a longer, life's work, called Ketjak. N/O, obviously, includes the letters “N” and “O” -- the book is comprised of two parts: non and oz.

Long poems are a bit out of fashion as of late, given the short attention span of many readers of poetry, themselves a minority these days. Readers of long poems, therefore, are a minority of a minority, and part of this is due to the modernist tradition of which Silliman's poetry is extension -- I'm thinking not only of Ezra Pound's notoriously difficult Cantos but also of Olson's Maximus Poems or even Silliman's contemporary Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Drafts or Ronald Johnson's Ark. Like DuPlessis, Silliman's work is a pastiche of various poetic forms and themes, integrated into a somewhat loose thematic structure; like Johnson, Silliman is a devotee of poet Louis Zukofsky, particularly the Zukofsky of “A”. It is, in fact, the Zukofsky of “A”-12 that Silliman here most resembles, albeit in style more than substance.

I'm unfamiliar with Silliman's Alphabet as a whole and so some of my ignorance will no doubt show itself here; I'm not entirely certain what it is that he is attempting in a larger sense, and so much of the context of this poem is regrettably missing. His description of the work is broad enough: a poem that “seeks to include as much of the world as possible, especially those aspects that are least likely to be seen, heard, or recognized", which certainly gives Silliman enough room to maneuver.

My approach to The Alphabet must therefore be based on this collection of poetry as a self-contained poetic text; indeed, given his intense knowledge of poetry exhibited on his now famous blog, Silliman's arrangement and distribution of various “letters” of this “alphabet” into specific, discrete volumes must be quite intentional. Taking into account the fact that any modernist long poem (modernist because certainly Pound's Cantos while it meant to echo Dante's Commedia certainly was not and could not be as highly structured as the Italian poet's, Pound himself acknowledged this and arguably this was part of his intent, a commentary on the disorderly democratic society as opposed to the orderly societies of medieval Europe) necessarily evolves along with its author, often ending far from where it first intended to be, Silliman must have known before embarking on this undertaking that any specific volume must represent a conclusion of sorts, or signal a new beginning, otherwise, what is the purpose of its publication?

And here is the problem, because N/O, to this reader, is a hodge-podge of thoughts and images, seemingly stream-of-consciousness in its unfolding, with no apparent connective theme or overarching structure to be found. It may be the poet's intention, but this reader found himself cast adrift without a net, so to speak, unable to find any firmament to base not only an enjoyable, but even an informed and intelligent reading. And therein lies the rub of the long poem. It certainly begs, or at least appears to beg, knowledge of the larger work. Yet, given this obvious drawback, and certainly the magnitude of Silliman's project (The Alphabet is now finished and runs 1,200 or so pages in length), the poem requires a serious commitment on the part of the reader. Had one read the poem over the seventeen years or so that it was written, certainly this would have been leisure time enough to read, and in fact savor, the work, because based on this single volume there is much here that can be savored, and to give the poem the attention it both demands and deserves. Regrettably, I have not had the time or the leisure in writing this review to approach the volumes that both precede and follow this work. Therefore, I must approach it much like a play whose first and last act I have missed; the work begins and ends in media res and whatever themes or characters or props Silliman has established, if in fact they were ever there, have no doubt gone unnoticed.

Of course, the argument can be made that one can enjoy Pound's Pisan Cantos or Zukofsky's “A”-12 without the benefit of the sections that preceded or followed them, but those were relatively thematic, self-contained works and what we are dealing with here in Silliman's work is a concerted effort to undermine any thematic pretensions as being unavoidably passé, for as most readers of poetry know, and most certainly any readers reading this review, Silliman was part of what came to be known as the “Language” school of poetry, a “post-modernist” style of poetry that challenged both the idea of the natural presence of a speaker in the poetic text, emphasizing the reader's role in creating the meaning of the poem, utilizing such methods as metonymy and parataxis, which support the active involvement of the reader. Silliman edited a newsletter Tottels which published early “language” poetry and edited one of the collections that came to identify it as a school, In the American Tree. Many of these poets, including Silliman, wrote essays that described the method of language poetry, curiously without pausing to consider the necessity, and their dependence, on the type of discursive writing their poetry critiqued in order to be understood.

And so ends my discursive explanation in order to be understood. In this poem, discursiveness is abundant. Indeed, at times it often reads (frustratingly) like a run-of-the mill confessionalist poem from mid-century. I'm thinking of some passages in this work such as: “earlier / your left hand gripped lightly / the base of my cock / so only the tip / passed your lips / / sperm mixed with saliva / spilled onto my belly / you stirred it with your finger / inside my navel”. No question what is going on here! At times the metaphors strain credulity: “I eat a banana / the way some men make war / to exercise my faculties / fully”. Yet this is a poem of moments, and there are numerous moments here which are as good as anything: “Here we fathom connection / each word an accident of letters / ink bleeding into the page / / the cage is open / but the canary's dead”. The poem works best when Silliman steps out beyond the incidental and navel-affixed perspective of his speaker, or the deliberately obscure and deals with the world at large, a world recognizably our own, that gives N/O its immediacy, its import: “the topography of this beach / is not the familiar / gradual incline / smoothed over by high tides / sand fleas thick / over the rotting kelp / cormorant's path / low over the water / but pocked / anemone clenches / to the finger's probe”. These are exact measurements of an obviously radiant mind, but regrettably are displayed all too little in this volume. Perhaps this is why they stand out all the more.

By the time I reached oz I was a bit weary of the volume. Aside from its flashes of brilliance, much of it is frustrating and at times tiresome. I'm perfectly aware that seen within the tradition of which Silliman is working much of this work has some self-conscious architectonic role to play in the modernist tradition, but I see little reason for it beyond a practice as such. N/O has its moments, yes. But at 107 pages perhaps what it needs most are not moments, but the judicial hand with which to sift for the best.

*****

Eric Hoffman lives in Manchester, Connecticut. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals worldwide, most recently The Argotist Online. A recent essay, "A Poetry of Action: George Oppen and Communism", was published in American Communist History.

GUESTS OF SPACE by ANSELM HOLLO

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

Guests of Space by Anselm Hollo
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2007)

Any book by Anselm Hollo is exciting, mostly due to Hollo’s satirical humor, political commentary, formal playfulness, conversational voice—to my mind, his voice is one of the most distinct in contemporary poetry—and wide range of themes. Guests of Space is no exception. In it, Hollo brings up themes ranging from human contingency to the current U.S. political stupidity; plus, the book is based around the sonnet form, though since this is Hollo, the form is reconfigured, or perhaps I should say that it has been brought back to an earlier tradition where the sonnet could mean just a short poem. The sonnet’s main component that Hollo retains is the fourteen line limit—regular rhyme and meter have been discarded for a more organic form. For readers of his past work, this should be no surprise, for Hollo likes to draw attention to less traditional forms of poetry, getting away from, as Charles Bernstein has called it, “official verse culture;” to quote, Hollo pushes the reader “to defy / The dumbly trembling unities” (9) of official logic, of official verse.

In his poem dedicated to the late Hannes Hollo, Hollo tells us that the title, Guests of Space, comes from Alcuin’s response to Pippin, Charlemagne’s son:

“What is man?” asked the King.
Alcuin’s reply: “A guest of space.” And time yes time
The past lies before us, the future comes up from behind. (6)

The contingency of humans stressed in this section is apparent, and this theme is one that becomes a major one in the book, from poems on dead family members to late poets, yet Hollo adds a subtle twist on this classic poetic theme by the “and time.” By using this mention of time, he brings in the added layer of humans not only being contingent, but being culturally contingent. We are present, “presente,” in cultural space; Hollo brings that to life in this book by using a wide range of references, by stressing what he’s learned from past poets, and even by poems questioning whether his work or any of our works will matter to the future. The conversational tone of his poems helps stress this meaning, for in these poems the narrator sounds just like a person thinking, an educated person, but still a person thinking about anything, trying to be present to contemporary life as it comes at him. The lyric, one might think, but Hollo’s version of the lyric is open—anything can come up in a poem, even thoughts about writing a poem during the process of writing it:

I’ll write a poem about nothing
absolutely nothing
not about myself
or youth or love or any person
I’ll write it riding along
half asleep in the sun
and then I’ll send it to a friend
signed, William of Aquitane. (13)

The conversational tone suggest the expansiveness of poetry, that it is a “guest in space” itself but also that it includes many topics, or as Hollo puts it:

Poetry can be so many more things
Than what people mostly believe it is. (19)

Related to the contingency theme, Hollo presents his political views. Especially near the end of the book, he aims at contemporary Americans, stating we are the “overfeed co-inhabitants” (77) of a country whose citizens let ourselves “be ruled by a gang / Of vicious thieves” (77). He says of the president:

imperial president
cavorting on the deck of expensive killing vessel
paid for by you and me
president              no bonus

young humans dying
in a country occupied
to the tune of millions of dollars a day
paid for              by you and me. (81)

The simple act of voicing the political in poetry seems necessary. One can quibble about the efficacy of politics in poetry, but for one, I’d still like to see more poets actively following Hollo’s example.

Besides being interesting for its contemporary take on the sonnet, Guests of Space is a fascinating read due to the wisdom, fun, and sadness contained in its brief forms. Lisa Jarnot calls it an “elegy to the West,” a summation that seems appropriate, but in many ways the book is an elegy to being contemporary, an elegy to friends, and perhaps an elegy to the individual poet. Having read most of Hollo’s books, I find this one to be among my favorites, and coupled with Notes on the Attractions & Possibilities of Existence: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000, it would make a good introduction to one of the best living poets.

*****

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

E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E V-A-L-U-E-S curated by TOM BECKETT

LARISSA SHMAILO Reviews

E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews, Curated by Tom Beckett
(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2007)

Willing to Risk

Art (and sometimes the art reviewer) are usually transfixed on a butterfly pin, around which each static piece of art revolves in carefully controlled perspective). The joy of E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E V-A-L-U-E-S is the movement of innovation brought to the book by the unique energy of each extraordinary artist.

Most of the artists interviewed in E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E V-A-L-U-E-S are interviewed by Tom Beckett. The interviews offer a personal and intimate transcript of our finest avant artists (but no -- by the time I write this, the avant garde will morph mad mutate…). For the most part, these experimentalists are kinder than artists in the commercial world. They have helped each other: They have brainstormed, shared their skills, collaborated, critiqued, argued for just the right shade of umber, and supported each other on the daring artworks they undertook. I suppose, if you choose to set off to explore the uncharted regions of the Yukon, trail companions are a necessity.

Life at new frontiers, not always friendly ones, is the common lot of our interviewees. It takes courage to bring forth an art that is your deepest longing and few others want in the world. After building, After Taxes , his complex abstract masterwork, Thomas Fink warns, “I’m serious when I insist that how one conventionalizes one’s work is dependent in what one is willing and unwilling to risk.”

As for the individual artists, with each interview, the astute Tom Beckett and guest interviewers examine the work of each poet. One of the bonuses of this book is that it provides a selection of 8–10 poems by each interviewee. The poems are richer and more meaningful for the reader due to this intelligent arrangement. The interviews also provide a wealth of “shop talk” from experts in each of these poetic forms, so that the reader is schooled in the art which follows.

The interviews range from synoptic to the detail of a rhyme. Sheila Murphy’s discussion of feminism is born from the natural word play in the titles of her two collections, A Clove of Ginger and Falling in Love with You Falling with You Syntax (Selected and New Poems). Murphy examines her clove -- ginger? garlic? -- expanding it, using the poets rhyming prerogative, “why not love, glove”. She defends her expansions: “One way in which you joyce(ce)-full fully expand linguistics surprise is to develop new words -- for example, mooncoism, Harvard as adverb, musclshiritng….”

Beckett asks Jean Vengua which road she takes when she starts a poem. The road implies externality, and for the writer? There are roadblocks, obstacles, mediations. She writes, “I wish to shake it off, this meditation, through the direct experience of writing. And I think 'mediation' is one of those problems. . . of existing with various frameworks of knowledge, and assumptions that are sort of written on my skin. No -- not just shake off but to become aware of it, to see it for what it is, not direct experiences, because that isn’t possible, but to see,… “

As Crag Hills’s essential SCORE VISPO keeps Vispo alive, it now accepts audio submissions and lineated work. Like the valiant SPORE/SCORE, other magazines fight to keep homes for VISPO. Interviewed by Ron Silliman and Crag Hill, Geof Huth fields some of there technical and aesthetic queries. Asked how he would describe creating a visual poem, he provides the metaphor of a mixing board. “A visual poem requires evaluation from a number of perspectives at once.” The mixing board of his creation would include three input channels working in concert with and in opposition to each other. Huth continues to further describe how these valences may be use for images, the verbal content of the poem, photographs, photograph encases, embedded images and concrete images.

Nick Piombino, with passion for time and psychoanalysis (we hope his shrink has a generous session timer!) was central to the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E movements, with collaborators like Patti Smith, Bernadette Mayer, Charles Bernstein, Anne Waldman and Ed Friedman. Piombino’s interests ranges from visual poetry to his current involvement in the Electronic Poetry Center, and a childhood in.erest in aphorisms, The latter, he confesses, was born of his Catholicism, Despite turning away from the faith, the poetic interest in the form remains.

Here a poet’s warning From Contradicta:

To be an artist is to be forever hungry for things thing you have never tasted, to reliantly search for things you have never seen and can’t understand, to relently and warmly welcome back the most confused, lonely and unfair part of yourself and the world -- all for the singular joy of having something you can only experience by releasing it.

Describing his evolution as an artist, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen spoke of being happy and prepared for new directions. And the signal step toward that was “to give up using existing works by other poets.” Kervinen accepted the paradox of giving up poetry and poetic format to seek what was truly his own. Today Kervinen maintains many web logs and websites, leaving a unique legacy for the computer poets who have followed him.

An inflatable deer head on a magazine cover may seem too avant for us; it is the grist for the Google poetry mill for K. Silem Mohammad. The use of Internet and email are a form of “dyraphism,” a word Charles Bernstein coined from congenital diseases, to mean a prosodic device. Mohammad explores the Internet for language without out the usual characteristics -- euphony, sense, syntax. Still, Mohammad is intrigued by sequence, even if it does tamper with the stochastic processes with which he is creating his infinitely random Google verse.

Stephen Paul Miller. To introduce this interviewee, I’ve chosen a poem of Miller’s. I think this verse demonstrates the power of simple words. You can, of course, read the full interview and poetics discussion, as well as the collection of poem, in the books.

April 03
Notes on a song

There’s only one guy in Iraq
who wants George Bush
to take over their country
and become their boss, and
that guy’s an idiot, my six-year son
                Noah says at the Burger King’s
Glass wall facing planes taking off.
                And landing

                “Daddy”
                Noah says walking
To our gate. “Yes”
“George Bush is a murderer”
                “I know”

                At the security entrance an
airline worker makes a guard laugh and
I point to a sign
Discouraging “joke,”
The guard smiles.

On the plane Noah says Murderer
Has two E R’s in a row. It’s like singng.

We are glad that the gifted poets Barbara Jane Reyes and Pablo Javier, not only survived the brutalization of their MFA programs but, have lived to discuss their new work. The new books mark the dawn of a new educational and publishing opportunities for Filipino-Americans. Both authors are unveiling second books. Still, the difficulties at Bard and colleges known for experimental, open programs are distressing. Barbara Jane Reyes’ book is poeta en san francisco (TinFish) and Paolo Javier’s is 60 lv bo{e)mbs.

Woman of opposites, delicious blogger, award winning poet, socially concentrated citizen. And she is posed this question: Beckett asked Eileen Tabios: “What does poetry mean to you?” Tabios answered, “It depends on the color of the sky,” explaining, “I would like no seam between how I live and how I write my poems.” Some of Tabios’ poems deal with autism, and she is a champion among Filipino writers battling to shake the restrictions on their educations and advancement. Unabashedly political, she states: “My goal is that the reader ends up also becoming interested in the social-political-concerns that interest me.”

A neologism offered by Tabios has entered my vocabulary and I believe it will have wide parlance. At least, in our age, we hope that it will. It is a hybrid of the words poetry and ethic. Poethic. A word to be remembered in those journeys to the edge of art, where it may stand between the racy and cheap commercial choice and the heart’s true expressive need.

*****

Larissa Shmailo has been published in Fulcrum, Rattapallax, Drunken Boat, Big Bridge, Naropa’s We, and many other publications (please see www.myspace.com/thenonetworld for a complete listing). Her CD, The No-Net World, has been heard on radio stations and the Internet around the world. Larissa translated the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by A. Kruchenych; a DVD of the original English-language production is part of the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. She recently contributed translations to the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry to be published by Dalkey Archive Press. She is a director of TWiN Poetry, an informal collective of 7,000 audio poets and public coordinator for Fulcrum.

PUBLIC ACCESS #1 Edited by NICHOLAS GRIDER

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

PUBLIC ACCESS #1 Edited by Nicholas Grider
(San Francisco, 2007; available by emailing the editor at ngrider11@yahoo.com)

And of course I usually adore the varied ways of poets' DIY ("Do It Yourself") approaches to publishing poetry and moving those poems out to the public. For example, I enjoyed HOUSE ORGAN #58 Win/Spr ’07, edited by Kenneth Warren (Lakewood, Ohio, 2007), which was reviewed in GR#7): poems on 8 1/2" X 11" papers folded in half vertically and stapled. Another favorite journal is MIRAGE co-edited by Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy (San Francisco) which simply staples sheets of 8 1/2" X 11" papers together in a modest presentation belying the important poetry often featured on its pages.

PUBLIC ACCESS #1, the inaugural issue, is just a wee (very wee) tad more luxurious a presentation in that...the 8 1/2" X 11" papers are tinted light blue! Its self-described publishing vision -- "free, photocopied and irregularly-scheduled" -- attests to its home-grown, aptly intimate point of view.

What did make me grin, but then raise a questioning eyebrow, was this part of its "About" section: "the intent of which is to pair the work of a poet whose work you likely already know with a poet whose work you should know." The two poets in Issue #1 are Laura Elrick and Molly McPhee.

I first grinned because we are talking about a culture after all about which it's been said, "The most famous poet in America is unknown" (or words to that effect).

But then I paused to wonder/question as I thought about what this editorial statement suggests. For the record, I do "know" of Elrick and had not, until this journal, heard of McPhee. But Elrick is part of a particular community in the larger poetry community, isn't she? What is the likelihood that Elrick would be known by, ahem, more conservative (so to speak) poetry readers? So is editor Nicholas Grider targetting a specific contingent of poetry readers?

If so, what are the implications of targetting that particular readership?

So I thought of these questions....only to be happy to leave them behind in favor of reading the poems themselves. Elrick is represented by "Diagram -- III" and "But the Living Poets" while McPhee presents an excerpt from "Parishes and Wards." I enjoyed them all, appreciating their ambition and shape-shiftingnesses.

Elrick's "Diagram -- III" reminded me of Dan Waber's poem, "all alone again" published as a Meritage Press Tiny Book (see "Advertisement" in this issue) which offers variations on the phrase "all alone again". Similarly, Elrick's poem begins as

At a dinner party or forum I rip hair out of my leg with a special machine.

At a dinner party (or forum) I rip hair out of my leg with a special machine.

At a dinner party or forum I -- RIP -- IT -- OUT with a special machine.

As with Waber's poem, Elrick's reliance on occasional partial repetitions ramps up the energy of the poem. In addition, the mysteries that are Elrick's poems are satisfyingly lightened -- lit -- by such well-turned lines as:

Soft is unconscionably mean.

and

His slaying grown over analogy.

and

Men walking along an edge -- mottled impression.

McPhee's contribution depicts her current investigation on "Hurricane Katrina, disasters of language and love, language and environment, and coherence and social perception." The featured excerpt is effective, such as this portion which cites information compiled on Hurricane Katrina's victims by the Earth Institute at Columbia University:

Pivon J. Dupuy, Didn't want to leave; Thought the 17-foot levee by their home would protect them. A 35-foot tidal wave washed over the levee [...]

Rosalie Dupuy: Didn't want to leave. She said to her son, "Go, save yourselves." You're young yet. We've lived our lives. Whatever happens, we'll go together." A 35-foot tidal wave washed over the levee [...]

And then the text disintegrates as it questions, as it searches for significance, to:

given constant in the act of giving a passive body enacting a gift but purposefully given who receives also the gifted body given as a human also accepts the giftee given body ever be good in a way acceptable given what happens to the action what to the heart gifting can encompass two states one passive one of origination of the act gifted, equally
           a state of receipt of carrying, as its other meaning
               gift is poison, as gift closes the throat, lives
                              smolder, clarify too quickly

creating a moving juxtaposition and offering always another needed reminder of Katrina's tragedy mostly occurring and still occurring in the hurricane's aftermath.

As for the rest of it -- the questions I raised earlier -- maybe they're not so important in the scheme of things. All journals have an editorial vision which are associated with the named editors (that's why they're editors). Why shouldn't Grider possess the same opportunities ascribed to editors of perfect-bound and other journals whether or not the (aesthetic) limits to readership are acknowledged? Grider may be more honest, indeed, in gesturing more explicitly than other journals to the reality that readerships differ per journals and that their respective poetry communities rarely overlap. (Galatea Resurrects seeks to facilitate such overlaps, incidentally, but there's no obligation certainly on Grider to share this same goal.)

Ultimately, the poems themselves attest to how PUBLIC ACCESS is a new literary journal to be welcomed. So: welcome, PUBLIC ACCESS! And congratulations to Nicholas Grider for its debut.

*****

Eileen Tabios doesn't allow her books to be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects -- but she is ecstatic to point you to recent reviews of her recent book The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007) by Nicholas Manning, by Jesse Glass, and by Burt Kimmelman. Oh, and a review by Laurel Johnson reprinted by Amazon.com, though it's also good to support SPD! Preening is as good as wine for good health!

PIONEERS IN THE STUDY OF MOTION by SUSAN BRIANTE

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews

Pioneers in the Study of Motion by Susan Briante
(Ahsahta Press 2007)

Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned by the title of Susan Briante’s Pioneers in the Study of Motion. Even C. D. Wright, in one of the blurbs on the back of the book warns, “It’s a work of shuddering velocity.” After reading these poems, one feels a bit breathless, as if one has been on a whirlwind tour of many kinds of motion.

This book takes the reader to many parts of the world. There are poems with names of geographical places in the titles: Miami Beach, New Orleans, Roanoke, the many titles that evoke Mexico. Briante has written a series of Eventual Darling poems: “Eventual Darling (Galang Island),” “Eventual Darling (Kinshasa),” “Eventual Darling (Mexico City)”, “Eventual Darling (Brasilia),” and “Eventual Darling (Kanpur).” Each poem is rich in the details of the individual place, and each poem moves towards an insightful analysis of the effect of modern life, with its globalization and industrialization, on the place. Briante does this with devastating effect, often in a single stunning line or image. In “Eventual Darling (Kinshasa),” she writes: “Shepherds of reflex and deviation with preferences for ‘sticks / trowels, knives,’ with preferences for nipple clamps and half-light, / chase flocks of pandemics across withered earth” and in “Eventual Darling (Galang Island),” she says, “At a detention camp on Galang Island, Vietnamese refugees sculpt a Statue / of Liberty . . . .”

This book of poems moves through time as well as space. Four of the poems document a particular day of the rainy season (“5th Day of the Rainy Season,” for example), but not every day of the rainy season (just days 5, 7, 12, 14 and 15). Poems transport the reader to particular times of the year and often individual poems circle back to the end of summer. In “Roanoke,” “Summer came and you were the voice of the BBC.” But summer ends: “That’s not why I left you.” In “Song with Typewriter and Bleating Sheep,” the words “Summer ends” repeats at different places in the poem: “Summer ends in a kink at the back of your neck, burgundy wildflowers” and “Summer ends in a baseball through a window. You worry” and “Summer ends / in foreign policy, in a former lover, a factory.” The poem brims over with intriguing images of summer shifting towards autumn, of autumn taking over. Many of the poems in this book return to an autumnal state, whether a literal autumn or the mood of fall or the symbols of autumn.

The poems present various kinds of relationships, many of them in an autumnal phase. The poems in the second section of the book are titled in ways that show relationship, such as “The Cartographer’s Son,” “The Archaeologist’s Daughter,” and “The Pornographer’s Father.” Even poems that aren’t titled this way suggest relationship to others, such as “The Domestic.”

Not only do the poems document various relationships, they also move through stages in relationships. There are poems that talk about beginnings, like the companion poems, “The Groom Stripped Bare,” and “While the Bride, Miami Beach, 1999.” Several poems seem to be exploring the middle stage of relationship. But the bulk of the poems look at the end stages of relationships. Often, Briante mixes her exploration of physical place with the exploration of the stage of a relationship. “As a Series of Settlements” gives the reader seven sections, each set in different places. In the section titled “I-35 Between San Antonio and Austin,” the speaker delivers these devastating lines: “You say: Autumn descends inevitably. How much longer can we drive? / You say: Didn’t I show you Russian thistle, organ pipe, October flush with russet sky? / You say: “This is how cities are founded at the point where we refuse to go further.” And yet these lines of impending loss are undercut by the last line: “And grass wilts sweet under the weight of our footsteps.” This line speaks of people colonizing a place and staying put, rather than splitting apart.

Throughout much of this book, a foreboding feeling of impending loss is never far away. And yet, hope is never far away either. In “The Money Changers,” section iii begins, “Continents chafe. Traffic stirs a dusty breeze.” The poem ends with this image: “Some days even the sewage / smells of apples.” These poems, which explore issues of alienation and what it means to be a native, issues of industrialization and loss, nicely mix images of despair and images of sanctuary, and the overall effect is one of cautious hope.

*****

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals and was one of the top ten finalists in the National Looking Glass Poetry Chapbook Competition. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, where she has just been promoted to Assistant Chair of the General Education department.

EL TSUNAMI by KEVIN OPSTEDAL

MARK YOUNG Reviews

el tsunami by Kevin Opstedal
(Auguste Press, San Francisco, 2004)

The ocean is open to the beach. No left- or right-hand breaks, just regular waves rolling directly in with different backdrops. If there was threat of tsunami, has now passed. If still to come would be more tension -- but the content is in the main mellow, laid back, perhaps sharing a joint or sucking on one of the Buds choppered in as they could have been at Shelley's funeral, what Opstedal describes as "One of the earliest recorded / beach barbeques."

These are littoral poems, written at the sea's edges, subject to its moods, full of aqua/marine references & images. The poems are monotone in the pure sense of the word, picking up many of their nuances, much of their color, from the surroundings. It is obviously favored territory for Opstedal, & a great deal of the book's strength derives from this continuity, this commonality. It is a much-loved stretch of the coastline, sometimes a coastline refined by the mind, so much so that it competes with & often overcomes the human love who is subject / object of many of the poems. The sense is that the person could be replaced, the aspects taken on by the new love, the change almost not apparent.

The poem I like most in the book. "In Seeming Deep Waves Returning", contains the common elements, but it uses a jet ski instead of a surfboard to power through them. Lines scrolling instead of directed enjambment, letting the words set the direction rather than selecting them according to it.

"......Given your inherent
darkness its tumult & slant to be held in your hands
or whispered along the sand in a language only the
tide speaks--"

This is the poem where the ocean floor really does shift & the coastline is subjected to something a bit more powerful than the sea in its usual variety of moods.

*****

Mark Young is the editor of Otoliths, a journal where Kevin Opstedal's poems & drawings have appeared.

WORKS by FATHER ALBERT ALEJO, RUMI, DAVID WILCOX AND NANCE PETTIT

AILEEN IBARDALOZA Engages

“LAKBAY-KAMAY”, a poem by Father Albert Alejo (or “Paring Bert”)

"Psalm 120" in Book of Psalms, The Nelson Study Bible
(Nashville, Thomas Nelson Inc., Nashville, TN, 1997)

"Out Beyond Ideas" by Jelludin Rumi in The Essential Rumi, transl. Coleman Barks
(Harper Collins, New York, 2004)

Out Beyond Ideas, CD by David Wilcox and Nance Pettit
(What are Records?, Boulder, CO, 2005)

Voices, Spaces, Verses: The Encounter of an Anthropologist, a Psalmist, and a Mystic Poet on a Kitchen Table

In freely and loosely incorporating the famous Lautréamont phrase in my title, I hope to illustrate poetic polyphony, i.e., the possibility of hearing simultaneously the poetry in three or more distinct, harmonious voices where one is independent from but equal to the other, and where all three are wholly, indivisibly unified. [1]

On a kitchen table, 10 years ago and 5325 miles from where I am now, I have watched Paring Bert handwrite a poem:

LAKBAY-KAMAY

Ano't tila singlawak
ng lupaing pangarap
itong munti mong kamay
dito, mahal, sa aking palad?

Ang mga ulap sa iyong mga kuko
ang mga bangin sa mga daliri mo
ang manipis na batis ng iyong balahibo
at ang pagpapalit-palit ng panahon
ng init at lamig sa bigla mong pagpisil,
pagbitiw, at pagkapit ng ubod-higpit
sa bawat panaka-naka nating pagtatagpo
na kung bakit laging kailangang patago--
lahat ay tila kawalang hanggang
paano ba lalakbaying pilit
nitong nalulula, at nangingimi kong
mabilisang paghalik.

My translation doesn’t do it justice, but basically, it says:

Hand-Journey
(lines 1-4) How is it, my love, that your hand, though small, seems as wide as that longed-for land here in mine? / (lines 5-7) The clouds on your nails, the ravines on your fingers, their thin brooks of hair / (lines 8-10) and the changing of the seasons, of cold and heat as you quickly pressed, let go and held tightly / (lines 11-12) each time we met, but why did it have to be in secret -- / (line 13) everything seems neverending / (lines 14-16) how can this, my dizzy, shy, hasty kiss, take the trip.

The poem is a blazon to love, expansive in its imagery. If you go back to the original Tagalog, notice how the partial rhymes in the first stanza, … singlawak / … pangarap / … palad … set the tone; the 4th, 5th and 6th lines of the 2nd stanza are alliterative, e.g. pagpapalit-palit ng panahon / … pagpisil. / pagbitiw, at pagkapit … giving the poem a driven intensity. It is also interesting how the poet used the ‘hand’ metaphorically, the ‘hand’ being the doer of the ‘heart’ from which all good (and evil) things, figuratively, flow.

Paring Bert, or Fr. Albert Alejo, the anthropologist-philosopher-poet-Jesuit, carried his heart in his hand every day we (our tight-knit Pinoy-UK group) spent with him many years ago in London. One feels a world of compassion in his handshake, and one immediately knows it is a safe place to be. It is not surprising that one finds him now a peace advocate in war-torn Mindanao. [2]

Mindanao. An emotional terrain probably not much different from the hostile environment the Psalmist found himself in, when he wrote in despair:

PSALM 120

5 Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech,
That I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
6 My soul has dwelt too long
With one who hates peace.
7 I am for peace;
But when I speak, they are for war.

The Book of Psalms was written between the 15th C B.C. and 5th C B.C., employing such techniques as repetition and recapitulation. This particular chapter is part of the Songs of Ascent, used by pilgrims making their way to Jerusalem for the Feasts of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles.

The first and second lines demonstrate synonymous parallelism, where the second line serves to reinforce the first. The Psalmist, in deep anguish, speaks of hostile peoples, Meshech and Kedar, with whom he had to live. [3]

To live in a volatile environment is a terrible thing. Which is why concerned groups and individuals use various tactics to prevent a conflict from escalating, or if it has stalemated, to draw on commonalities, which may help lead to a resolution and to negotiated spaces for peace.

We bond with our hearts, to paraphrase Paring Bert. [4] Mystical poets allude to the four layers of the heart, which correspond to the four main approaches to peace, i.e., the outer layers corresponding to political, economic and military solutions, and the deeper layers, to addressing core human needs. “Once our core humanity and needs are addressed, we have hope of building and sustaining peace … The central function of poetry in all traditions is to waken the innermost layers of the heart and bond its readers.” [5] This was how a Rumi poem reached out to David Wilcox and Nance Pettit.

OUT BEYOND IDEAS

Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
each other, doesn't make any sense. [6]

Jelalludin Rumi was a 13th century Sufi mystic. His poem, in its simplicity, holds tremendous force, for it is one of vision and perception. It speaks of a common ground beyond judgments and divides, and offers a way out of conflict into peace. Wilcox and Pettit added music and sang it, their accompaniment, calming and buoyant. They recorded other songs, including those inspired by the works of Hafiz, Tukaram, HaLevi and St. John of the Cross. What resulted is a project that merges poetry, music and diplomacy; its message one of peace on a global scale. [7]

On a kitchen table, 7473 miles from a raging war, I have with me Paring Bert’s poem, a study bible, a CD and The Essential Rumi. To hear their voices simultaneously, we need to pluck out what unifies them. While each one is tonally, spatially, linguistically and rhythmically different from the other, all are bound by their humanity and their hope for humanity. This we hear only with our hearts. From the heart flows (figuratively) all the good (and ill) that the hand is capable of doing.

Write verses.
Wage wars.
Sign peace agreements.
Build peaceful spaces.
Rend.
Write verses.

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

Notes:

[1] from Wiki: Comte de Lautréamont was the pen name of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (April 4, 1846 – November 24, 1870), a French poet whose only works, Les Chants de Maldoror (The Lay of Maldoror) and Poésies, had a major influence on modern literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. Les Chants de Maldoror is often described as the first surrealist book … [In the 6th canto], Lautréamont describes a young boy as "comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie (beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!)". I borrowed the polyphonic idea from The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera.

[2] Albert E. Alejo, S.J. is Executive Director of the Mindanawon Initiatives for Cultural Dialogue, Team Leader of Ehem! Anti-Corruption Movement and is former rector of the Ateneo de Davao University. He finished his doctorate in anthropology at the University of London (SOAS). He is the author of Generating Energies in Mount Apo: Cultural Politics in a Contested Enviroment and Tao po! Tuloy!: Isang landas ng pag-unawa sa loob ng tao.

[3] The Nelson Study Bible (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1997), 873-876; 1008-1009.

[4] “Songs Our Mothers Sang,” Newsbreak, (accessed November 1, 2007).

[5] Valerie Yaeger, “Mysticism and Diplomacy – Common Ground, Uncommon Goals,” Social Work Today 6, no. 2 (2006), (accessed November 1, 2007). Referencing Davies, J. and Kaufman, E. Second Track/Citizens’ Diplomacy: Concepts and Applied Techniques for Conflict Transformation. Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2003.

[6] Jelalludin Rumi, “Out Beyond Ideas” in The Essential Rumi, transl. Coleman Barks (NY: Harpercollins, 2004).

[7] “Out Beyond Ideas,” http://outbeyondideas.org/ (accessed November 1, 2007).
*****

Aileen Ibardaloza is a research scientist, writer, and her 50-membered-family's caregiver/mentor. She lived in Asia and Europe, and is now based in North America where she is learning enology and writing techniques. She's on Facebook and OurOwnVoice.com.

INBOX by NOAH ELI GORDON

KRISTINA MARIE DARLING Reviews

Inbox by Noah Eli Gordon
(BlazeVOX Books, New York, 2006)

In his poetry collection Inbox, Noah Eli Gordon collects and juxtaposes the emails of friends, colleagues, and publishers, creating a shrewd, engaging commentary on the business of poetry. Often pairing the academic with the commercial, Inbox presents the requests for manuscripts, solicitations of readings, and friendly critiques sent to the author as an uninterrupted stream of thought that inevitably blurs. Touting this text as a “reverse autobiography,” Gordon raises fascinating questions about American culture, its relationship to academia, and the poet’s place in all of this noise, entertaining and constantly surprising the reader all the while.

In addition to the incisive commentary found in Gordon’s project, the use of stylistic devices to convey these points is impressive. While analyzing the changing face of academia and the poet’s shifting role within it, the author’s use of slang, acronyms, and an overtly casual tone suggest that poetry has become, as Dana Goia terms it in his well-known essay “Can Poetry Matter?”, a “subculture.” Gordon, however, questions the negativity inherent in this statement, and these stylistic aspects of the book emphasize the sense of community between academic poets. For example, Inbox reads: “I might abandon the idea of an MFA altogether. After all that AWP action here last weekend, I’m not so sure I want to sign up. Would be good to catch up on the phone or in person one of these days” (59). Filled with acronyms, contractions, and sentence fragments, Gordon’s text is delightfully informal, but accessible only to those involved enough in poetry to be familiar with these book titles and poets’ initials. His stylistic choices raise several interesting questions about audience, his book being a well-read and well-crafted affirmation of this very specific but devoted type of reader.

As he addresses these debates within the poetry community, Gordon also offers smart, funny commentary on the business of writing. Often satirizing the self-promotion of writers through hilarious juxtapositions and ingenious pairings, Inbox proves a humorous, erudite collection. For example, Gordon’s book reads: “Think of this as a real casual inquiry, because I know how crazy production schedules are. WE NEED MORE PRESSES! Hi to Sara. Hope you guys are well. How are your ‘career plans’ shaping up? Sorry if that’s a sensitive question” (9). Possibly blending two email texts in this passage, the blurring of voices becomes a source of fascinating incongruities and well-read humor throughout the book. Inbox is filled with passages like this, which parody and critique aspects of the poetry community while maintaining a balanced perspective on what it means to be a poet.

Overall, Noah Eli Gordon’s Inbox is an entertaining and intellectually engaging read. Anyone who is seriously committed to the reading and/or writing of poetry will be missing out if they don’t add this book to their library. Highly recommended.

*****

Kristina Marie Darling is an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of four chapbooks, which include Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2006, her work has appeared in many publications, which include The Mid-America Poetry Review, PIF Magazine, Janus Head, The Midwest Book Review, The Arabesques Review, and others. Recent awards include residencies at the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

NOVEL PICTORIAL NOISE by NOAH ELI GORDON

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Engages

Novel Pictorial Noise by Noah Eli Gordon
(Harper Perennial, New York, 2007)

I could have found any number of entry points into a discussion of Noah Eli Gordon’s Novel Pictorial Noise (NPN). You can see some of them in another review I wrote for Litter. Perhaps because I’m knee deep in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine I have chosen to discuss NPN here vis-à-vis Rae Armantrout’s back-cover allusion to “what we’ve come to circa 2007 … a moribund psychosocial system.” I love everything about Rae Armantrout, so I hope she won’t mind if I say I get what she’s working towards, and “moribund” works, but “psychosocial” seems just too small to describe what’s truly moribund here.

I take it as given that, to quote Huncke, we’re guilty of everything. I take it as given that, as Davison Budhoo wrote, “ … the blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me … ” I take it as given that, to quote Mr. Mayfield, if there’s a hell below, we’re all gonna go.

Since I’m a poet, and, to quote a character from the great “60s novel”, William J Craddock’s Be Not Content, “my karma’s doin’”, I come back and back and back to that question: “poetry after Auschwitz”. I’d rewrite the question: “poetry after Auschwitz, from which we’ve learned nothing of use.”

For example:

“The World Bank introduced Structural Adjustment Programs in 1980 to increase export production in debtor nations to provide cash for debt-service payment. Under “structural adjustment,” developing countries typically are required to devalue their currency; dramatically cut spending on social services, medical care and education; eliminate barriers to foreign multinationals and trade; privatize national assets; deregulate business; decrease wages; restrict credit and raise interest rates.

Due to the radical reorganization of national economies, people in "SAPed" countries often pay for their governments' loans with extreme poverty, hunger and disease. Using figures provided by UNICEF and UNDP, the editors of the IMF-World Bank Watchdog estimated that more than six million children under the age of five have died each year since 1982 in Africa, Asia and Latin America as a result of IMF / World Bank policies.”
(Susan Meeker-Lowry, “A people's alternative to Structural Adjustment”)

1982-2007. 25 years. Only counting kids under 5, that’s 25 Auschwitzes right there.

Poetry after how many more than 55 Auschwitzes? Poetry, like every human contrivance, that has to carry the weight of “guilty of everything” (even if only subliminally)? Poetry that can’t help but be caked in blood because there’s not enough soap, can never be enough soap, to wash off -- because everything we do is caked in blood?

Well … yeah. Yeah. Poetry. (My friend Alan writes: “… people in extremes need poetry. If they don't get it they turn to religion!”)

Poetry … But how?

I can’t claim that Novel Pictorial Noise has the answer to that (of course, I can’t claim anyone has). But I can say that the work found therein reads as if Gordon is aware of the need to grapple with what, for me, is a megaproblem. That’s something. Perhaps that’s the only answer there is. To grapple with it. To be response-able.

And grapple he does:

… centuries of labor congealing into the desk lamp that lets me mold my own two cents from this paper-clip panopticon …

Even the enabling light source is socialized/historicized/economized/politicized, as is the only possible material with which to construct his response to the only available subject matter, which too is a very special sort of prison … I wonder: does “paper-clip” in “paper-clip-panopticon” suggest that the prison is written as well as real? That the real is written? That written and real are inextricable? Hmmm …

Is everything always-already already written by the time we are thrown as it were into “here”? In caked blood? Including the “I”?

Power’s got a fulcrum that’s half self-portrait …

There’s no possibility of an innocent subject, object or process here:

The lever will pivot regardless of where it’s placed down.

Wherever it’s placed down. Even in a painting of a peaceful landscape, even in the language used to describe a painting, language, which in itself has nothing overt to do with power (unless figure/ground relations are power relations). Or, perhaps better, even in the reading of said language (question: is language caked in blood, or are the readers of language caked in blood?):

… is this a picture of the distance between yellow and blue, or is it merely a means to ground the figures, a maxim bled of its proverbial exigencies …

A maxim … I can’t help but hear an echo of the name of one of the first WMDs of modernity …

I don’t feel very articulate here. I feel overwhelmed. But how can I not be? Check this out. Gordon writes:

… in proposing the helicopter as the only subject retaining any seriousness, one is currently giving rise to the fundamental ineptness of abstraction.

It sounds good, but god knows what he’s getting at. But who cares? I want to tell you that, according to Arnaud de Borchgrave’s “Iraq exit logistics”, Washington Times, 6 October 2007, helicopters, before they can be returned to the US, must be shrink-wrapped. Shrink-wrapped. Knowing that for some ungodly reason helicopters must be shrink-wrapped before we can exit Iraq does fuck with my reading of Gordon’s “only subject retaining any seriousness” and “fundamental ineptness” to the point that my not feeling very articulate becomes the most understated understatement of which I am capable.

But:

Why should a thread understand a carpet? Unimportant that my arrows point anywhere …

But but but (and note the rhyme) …

One packs in what one can, as the real point of art is the subtle reiteration of the is, ain’t it? The way I see it, we’re all partially tainted.

NPN is a very suggestive read. Its “subtle reiteration of the is” has got me spinning. If that’s a comment on the is these poems reiterate, it’s also a comment on the poems. Not every work can do that.

*

I sent the above to Alan. Our conversation continued:

Alan: [This strikes] me as not so much a review of Gordon's book, as a brief essay, or meditation on the “poetry after Auschwitz” question, and maybe the title of the piece should reflect that? Just a thought.

I note that you praise Gordon when he makes explicit statements such as “we're all tainted” or “Power’s got a fulcrum that’s half self-portrait …”. But maybe someone like Naomi Klein is better at spelling out the facts, and poetry has a different purpose -- it allows people to “sing in their chains”. John Ashbery (who I'm a little obsessed with at the moment) seems a prime example of a poet who resists authority without making any explicit political statements -- but, for example, his appropriation of different registers of language or his refusal to preach or be didactic, is perhaps an expression of freedom or resistance. Jane Austen was favourite of soldiers in the trenches of WWI, and I found Ashbery the only poet I could read in my (what seemed at the time) serious illness of last year.

Here's another thought: poetry's not so much a statement as an act.

JBR: You’re right; this is a meditation with Gordon’s work as its occasion. I don’t really disagree w/anything you say, but I do think there’s room for explicit statement in poetry – for every kind of statement. If it’s con- or de-contextualized appropriately (whatever appropriately means). Gordon moves smoothly from the explicit to the ambiguous and back again, among other moves .... I singled out some explicit statements because they fit my meditation. I’d hate to leave you with the impression that his poetry is OVERTLY political. Though “awareness” does reverberate ...

Isn’t a statement an act?

Alan: Well, maybe... or at least *making* a statement is an act. Shelley's “Mask of Anarchy” or Adrian Mitchell's “Tell me lies about Vietnam” are wonderful of course. All I'm saying is that poetry doesn't have to be politically explicit to be politically active or effective. Re: the Adorno thing, poetry is like weeping or laughing, an expression of grief or joy, made all the more necessary by the horrors of human history.

JBR: Making a statement is certainly an act. But I wonder -- only wonder -- whether a statement remains an act after it’s made, at least in potentia, especially if it’s written, since it will continue to affect others, who will react to it. For example, the title “Tell me lies about Vietnam” instantly morphs into “Tell me lies about Iraq” and generates a serious stomachache.

But yes, poetry doesn’t have to be politically explicit. My thought, put it much more didactically than I perhaps should: The author must make certain demands upon her/himself in order to create a poetry equal to the times he/she lives in. If those demands are met, then the poetry can’t help but be politically “active or effective”.

I guess my question/despair is: given that, apparently, “Auschwitz” didn’t teach us *anything*, and that dozens of “Auschwitzes” have taken place since the original (and we know there was no original, that imagining so is just a polite fiction we’ve devised in order to keep our despair manageable): what are the appropriate demands, and can they possibly be lived up to?

Tho of course since that despair is tempered, as you note, by the existence of artists who have somehow figured this out, or have been born reasonably equal to the world ... I should probably rephrase the above as: what are the appropriate demands I can demand of MYSELF, and how can LITTLE OLD ME possibly live up to them? That’s my real ARGH in all this.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman¹s most recent publications are World Zero and No Sounds Of My Own Making. He is one of four collaborators on the recent hay(na)ku sequence ³Four Skin Confessions², which can be found at http://chainedhaynaku.wordpress.com/. His current project is called Autopoiesis, of which he has completed 60+ parts and expects it¹ll be time to move on to something else when he puts paid to no. 100.

THE HAPPINESS EXPERIMENT by LISA FISHMAN

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews

The Happiness Experiment by Lisa Fishman
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, 2007)

When I began studying for my PhD Comprehensive exams, I realized that I hadn’t really spent much time with T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Since one of my Comps would cover twentieth-century British Literature, it seemed imperative that I be able to write about it. I spent a summer reading the poem at least once a week, sometimes once a day. By the end of the summer, I felt that my best course of approach for my Comprehensive exams was to try not to discuss the poem except in passing. I could recognize its artistry (and with the help of my Norton Anthology’s extensive footnotes, I could understand the allusions), but I didn’t feel capable of explaining it to anyone.

My test taking strategy worked, but I still feel a bit sheepish about my inability to articulate what makes that modern masterpiece so powerful. Yet sometimes, I think some of the finest poetry resists easy explanation. The poems of Lisa Fishman provoke in me a similar reaction to the one I have when reading Eliot. I realize that I’m in the company of a fine artist, but I have trouble explaining what the poems in her book, The Happiness Experiment mean.

Often I have trouble because I am so struck by certain lines. In “Instructions/Confessions,” I find lines like “Then raid the larder of licorice” and “Then find the accounts of the body / in Anais Nin’s two volumes / One for pleasure, one for sorrow.” I turn individual lines over and over in my mouth, and seem incapable of enough perspective to figure out what the poem means.

The book works in a similar manner to some dreams I’ve had. I recognize the landscape and know that I should know where I am, but nothing quite makes sense to my logical brain. I notice that there are certain recurrences in the book. For example, I recognize certain forms, like two abecedarians (both titled “Alphabet”). One poem is titled “Eighth Month,” and one is titled “Ninth Month,” and so I return to the text, looking for themes of pregnancy, which occur regularly.

I also find lots of references to thrill my English major heart. I spent much of my graduate school years immersed in the British Romantics (and trying to avoid certain modernists, like Eliot), and I recognize a fellow traveler in Lisa Fishman. There are references to Keats and Shelley and Mont Blanc, and one poem is titled “Prelude.” But it is in the larger poem, “Creature,” where I find that the themes and images in the book come together in their most intriguing culmination.

When we studied Frankenstein in graduate school, my favorite Romantics professor insisted that we not call Frankenstein’s creation a monster. We had to refer to him as The Creature. In Fishman’s poem, “Creature,” I sense the ghost of Mary Shelley. But even people who have never read Shelley’s masterpiece can appreciate this poem.

There are interesting images of what might be pregnancy, like this one: “If night becalmed I point to you / and thou be tied to dreaming” and “closed but roving            follow / me, field me in flower / Be found.” The poem is also tied to women’s bodies: “Door behind the body / where my mother lives.” And there are references to other parts of a female life: “2 girls brushing their dolls’ hair.” There are interesting details about the landscape, with references to “sulphurous” winds and green seasons, as well as human-created structures: “The silo was falling a stone / at a time, debris at the bottom gathering.” The poem brims over with strong and memorable imagery. What does it mean? I don’t know.

In many ways, the poems in this book remind me of all the things I love best about both British Romantic poems and British Modernist poems. She gives us specific, luminous images and stitches them together in strange and haunting ways. I may not know what they mean when put together in this way, but I’m in awe of the effect. Long after I shut the book, these images percolated in my brain, and I saw the world in ways I didn’t expect, and wouldn’t have, except for her passages of poetry.

*****

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals and was one of the top ten finalists in the National Looking Glass Poetry Chapbook Competition. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, where she has just been promoted to Assistant Chair of the General Education department.

LETTERS TO EARLY STREET by ALBERT FLYNN DESILVER

PAUL KLINGER Reviews

Letters To Early Street by Albert Flynn DeSilver
(La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2007)

Forward Homage, or Fromage!

Say cheese. Sensation is alive and well on Early Street. So is imitation, which is just as often a callout as some stylistic resemblance or aping of _______________ (Pick one: O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, Notley, Berrigan).

This would be a good time to mention Kent Johnson’s poem “The New York School, or, I grew ever more intense.”

Also, see Brent Cunningham’s Diagram # 16 (“The Minutes of Frank O’ Hara”).

Various influences, various poses.

Whether it’s Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, or Philip Whalen, DeSilver has digested all these people pretty smoothly.

There’s hardly anything left of Berrigan’s jelly. It’s all been eaten.

At one point, I considered painting over the sign that said Early Street. I considered painting new words, like the Valley of the Berrigans. I would have emboldened “igans.” Early Street has the market cornered on these -igans.

The book does break out of its adopted poses every once in a while for a little commentary. These are good moments:

Moment # 1:
Letter 44: “voluptuous thoughts flushed through the continuous present”

Moment # 2:
Letter 45: “Begin by addressing general reader with respect via astute vacuity”

This could be taken as a little swipe at New York School antics. I like it, Albert. My pupils are dilating.

Moment # 3:
Letter 43: “I’m applying to be a resident of a place I already am”

That’s the whole problem stated right there isn’t it? At least for those of us still applying for membership.

The line between trivia and homage blurs. These moments I have singled out are the book’s statistics. Statistics are weird in that they vacate. In that, they are also helpful. They are a vacation from the rest of the writing, the imitative part. Not that imitation is bad. But this imitation does not feel instructional. It feels too studied, which sort of crashes the whole “I’m still crushing on Ted Berrigan” vibe that the book gives out. Most of the time, studying replaces crushing, right?

Objection: Trivia is homage.
Answer: Eh.

I mentioned Kent Johnson’s poem because it feels like a statistical simulator, projecting probabilities and scenarios for readers. Setting potentials, profiles. And of course, Brent Cunningham’s diagram profiles one of O’Hara’s more famous Characteristics. These two seem to be getting at something more necessary about the New York School, a criticism (or at least, consciousness) of tendencies, most of which have been overplayed for two or three centuries. Letters to Early Street seems reluctant to impose any curb on these tendencies, perhaps out of sheer appreciation. It’s hard to say why the Critic makes so few appearances on Early Street. There’s no question he’s there, swimming underneath Frank O’ Hara’s pelicans. The book’s celebration feels a little too regimented, a little too much of a march. For an interesting comparison, I recommend another book steeped in New York School antics, Matvei Yankelovich’s The Present Work.

Yankelovich’s book is much zanier, yet still manages a sustained examination of the New York School’s romance with Art Criticism.

This is not to say that DeSilver’s book isn’t well-crafted or a pleasant experience. But by the book’s middle, its business of in-jokes becomes grating. Letter 41 demonstrates this pretty clearly, as an imitation of Hart Crane fails to extend beyond repeating the word “borage” and other selections from Crane the Strange’s lexicon. Letter 51 rebounds from this low point, as DeSilver successfully translates Philip Whalen into this hall of mirrors. Here, DeSilver is for once engaging a poetics yet to be exhausted by writerly attentions. This is one fresh letter, and its distinction underlines the book’s main inadequacy: failure to acknowledge the breadth of readings already surrounding the New York School. To its credit, the book wears its heart on its sleeve, but after its fourth or fifth epistolary gush, you see this heart’s content to be a tributary.

*****

Paul Klinger's recent work can be read at String of Small Machines, Eyeshot Hindenburg, ab ovo, and Parcel. His book, FESCUE, will be released by Dusie Press in early 2008.

FREE by AMANDA LAUGHTLAND

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

FREE by Amanda Laughtland
(Teeny Tiny chapbook, Edmonds, WA, March 2007)

Occasionally, when I’m feeling (or being) pompous, I throw out a poetics statement (usually inflicting them on the hapless readers of my blathering personal blog). Statements like this one, which I like so much I’ve tossed it at the e-world more than once:

“You don’t need to fictionalize poems. Poetry is all around us; the poet just needs to be observant enough to see.”

And so I was pleased and gratified to read Amanda Laughtland’s “Teeny Tiny chapbook”, FREE. Because it made me more forgiving of my pompous tendencies. According to the Author’s Note, the poems in FREE “draw language and inspiration from ‘free stuff’ ads posted on craigslist’.” All of the poems’ titles thus begin with the word “Free.” Here’s an excerpt from “Free Pool Table”:

First person who shows up
for the pool table gets it. It does
have scratches in the wood

which should sand out easily.
Felt is like new. Balls and cues
not included. Don’t ask me—

I was charmed by the way "balls and cues" suddenly transcend their original context.

Then there's this poem in its entirety that would have made me grin even if it hadn’t been illustrated by a girl winking at the reader:

FREE MATTRESS

I have a queen-sized mattress,
foam insides, with matching box spring.

The fabric has rips you won’t notice
under a sheet. It’s not new or anything

but it’s clean, it’s a bed and it’s free.

There are six poems in total -- yes, just six since it is a tiny publication (a piece of 8 ½” X 11” paper folded and sliced into 8 pages including covers. But it’s a well-designed publication and conceptualized to ensure form matches content, which is to say, the publication is FREE!

E-mail the author/indie publisher at mandypoet@hotmail.com for your copy of this purr-fectly pitched gem. Go on: E!

*****

Eileen Tabios doesn't allow her books to be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects -- but she is ecstatic to point you to recent reviews of her recent book The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007) by Nicholas Manning, by Jesse Glass, and by Burt Kimmelman. Oh, and a review by Laurel Johnson reprinted by Amazon.com though it's good to support SPD! Preening is as good as wine for good health!

MOONSHINE by MML BLISS

IVY ALVAREZ Reviews

MOONSHINE by MML Bliss
(PressPress, 2002)

MML Bliss’s MOONSHINE contains twelve poems that span alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, Roman Polanski, Picasso and petty, neighbourhood disputes. Bliss’s harsh, colloquial and raucous language captures the jagged edges of a dog-eat-dog world, almost beyond the scope of laws and decency:

1. cooper
old rita tells the residents meeting i’m a murderer,
shout at my dog, wander drunk in the street
sound off at all hours. she says they call me
cooper because I’m the home-brewer.
she pokes iris, who’s new here
(he’s in those units where you are.)
like she ought to be scared.
that rita, she’s the one should be packing it.
& she goes on. poor old jean. him on one side
REM daniel on the other. she doesn’t feel safe.
she says their music going doof doof
makes her teeth feel like they’re
about to fall out. rita the man-eater
what have i done to her! nothing.
(from ‘moonshine’, p 11)

Yet at the most unexpected moments, the poems lay themselves bare, revealing a vulnerable underbelly or an open throat, trusting in the reader to understand what is and is not being said.

6.
the dog has led us up the mountain
& we have followed her like puppies
she is my pack. we speak the wordless
language of old friends.

look out & see the silence
sit close with us
forest valley river flats
high tide in the bay

see where we have carved our names
on the earth like lovers

in the dog country
where springs well & water is life

drink from the spring with us
spirit/ dog
walk
in the country
where my spirit sings
(from ‘spirit/ dog walk’, p. 4)

The dogs in these poems bark and growl and show their fangs, but scratch the right place and tails wag, eyes turn liquid and soft, leaving their prints throughout Bliss’s words, while on every poem, a glimpse of the moon.

moon’s spirit shuts the door behind me
fire on the horizon. no more ethanol kisses
full moon promises.
all that remains, a casket of ashes.
(from ‘full moon’, p 10)

The cover image by Jennifer Maguire shows a rickety rollercoaster rail angling towards a dark and bristly moon, echoing the poems’ longing to engage with the unattainable. MML Bliss’s poems are brave and unafraid, and together comprise a collection that leaves an indelible, muddied paw-print on one’s mind and soul.

*****

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Was