ISSUE NO. 2
May 17, 2006
[N.B. You can scroll down for all articles or click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to referenced article.]CONTENTS:
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTIONFrom
Eileen TabiosNEW REVIEWSChris Murray reviews
OBEDIENCE by kari edwards
Barry Schwabsky reviews
MERCURY by Simon Smith
Alan Baker reviews
UNDER THE MIRACLE BRIDGE FLOWS THE SAND by John Bloomberg-Rissman
Thomas Fink reviews
HOME ON THE RANGE (THE NIGHT SKY WITH STARS IN MY MOUTH) by Tenney Nathanson
PR Primeau reviews
THE ART OF COUNTRY GRAIN ELEVATORS by Jon Volkmer
William Allegrezza reviews
THE BEDSIDE GUIDE TO NO TELL MOTEL, Eds. Molly Arden & Reb Livingston
Mary Jo Malo reviews
"PHENOMENA OF INTERFERENCE" by Steve Dalachinsky & Matthew Shipp
Ernesto Priego reviews
[WAYS] by Barry Schwabsky & Hong Seung-Lye
Thomas Fink reviews
CITY ECLOGUE by Ed Roberson
William Allegrezza reviews
DRIVE: THE FIRST QUARTET by Lorna Dee Cervantes
Cati Porter reviews
LOCKET by Catherine Daly
John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews 2 books by Catherine Daly:
LOCKET and DADADA Julie R. Enszer reviews
LEARNING THE LANGUAGE by Kate Greenstreet
David Harrison Horton presents mini-reviews of four chaps:
THE BODY ACHES [POEMS AND HAY(NA)KU] by Ernesto Priego; ON EVERY EMPTY LOT by Edward Stresino; LOST AND CERTAIN OF IT by Bryce Milligan; and GAZOOLY by Olivia CronkLaurel Johnson reviews
from SERIES MAGRITTE by Mark Young
Richard Lopez reviews
TYPICAL GIRL by Donna Kuhn
Julie R. Enszer reviews
DESIRE PATH by Myrna Goodman, Maxine Silverman, Meredith Silverman & Jennifer Wallace (with a note on the book's publishing format by Sandy McIntosh)
Eileen Tabios reviews
MORAINE by Joanna Fuhrman
Jon Leon reviews
WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE by Kirby Olson
Barbara Jane Reyes reviews
PRECIPITATES by Debra Kang Dean
Laurel Johnson reviews
OPERA: POEMS 1981-2002 by Barry Schwabsky
Laurel Johnson reviews
ONE THOUSAND YEARS by Corinne Robins
Eileen Tabios reviews
RUSTLE OF BAMBOO LEAVES: SELECTED HAIKU AND OTHER POEMS by Victor P. Gendrano
Julie R. Enszer reviews
THE UNDERWATER HOSPITAL by Jan Steckel
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz reviews
PINOY POETICS, Ed. Nick Carbo
Tom Beckett reviews
THE VICIOUS BUNNY TRANSLATIONS by William Allegrezza
Julie R. Enszer reviews
POETIC VOICES WITHOUT BORDERS, Ed. Robert L. Giron
Barbara Jane Reyes reviews
MUSEUM OF ABSENCES by Luis H. Francia
Julie R. Enszer reviews
WAKE-UP CALLS: 66 MORNING POEMS by Wanda Phipps
Yvonne Hortillo reviews
OCHRE TONES by Marjorie Evasco
William Allegrezza reviews
SOMEHOW by Burt Kimmelman
Laurel Johnson reviews
HEADING HOME by Loreta M. Medina
Kyoko Asana reviews
SHOT WITH EROS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Glenna Luschei
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz reviews
POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO by Barbara Jane Reyes
Aileen Ibardaloza reviews
THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH (1950-1962), Ed. Karen Kukil
FEATURE ARTICLESandy's Mom reviews Sandy McIntosh's
THE AFTER-DEATH HISTORY OF MY MOTHERFEATURED POETSGuillermo Juan Parra presents
Elizabeth SchönAndrew Joron presents
Brian LucasFROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWSTimothy Yu reviews
ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY: THE NEXT GENERATION, Ed. Victoria Chang
Juliana Spahr reviews
BORN TO SLOW HORSES by Kamau Brathwaite
Joshua Corey reviews
DOWN SPOOKY by Shanna Compton
Anna Eyre reviews
PURR by Mary Ann Samyn
Barbara Jane Reyes reviews
OCTOBER LIGHT by Jeff Tagami
Yvonne Hortillo reviews
REAL KARAOKE PEOPLE: POEMS AND PROSE by Ed Bok Lee
Eileen Tabios reviews
FORBIDDEN ENTRIES by John Yau
FROM THE EDITOR
ENGAGEMENTSI've been/am active as an editor, but
Galatea Resurrects (GR) offers the first time that I'm editing a publication which includes -- let alone, focuses on -- poetry reviews. It's an interesting position, for me, because I’ve not had that much interest in reviews (despite
occasionally writing some), relative to other poetry matters. I am, however, interested in seeing how others engage with poems and/or poetry -- what moves them. And then sharing such with others in order to draw more attention to poetry's varied wonders.
I prefer that
engagement to the notion of
review (though I use the word), in part because "review" in some quarters comes with how-to-review paradigms which generally don't interest me. Some of the most effective reviews for me have been those which disrupt conventional review practices (for instance,
Bill Marsh's review of Heriberto Yepez's BABBELLEBAB in
GR's Inaugural Issue).
Also, I’ve noticed that a poem’s reader often responds (or responds mostly) to aspects of but not necessarily the entirety of the work. The fragment, however, may suffice for generating a meaningful engagement. And why not? In my first book
BLACK LIGHTNING,
Meena Alexander discusses in part the myth of how one needs to engage with the *totality* of a poem in order to respond significantly; on the contrary, there are many doors into a poem and not all need be opened by the same reader. This POV goes against some "how to review" rules, but it doesn't prevent a legitimate review or engagement, even as it may --
may -- emphasize one's appreciation for that review that attempts to address every single facet of a poem/poetry book.
With
GR, I mostly want to facilitate poetry discourse, for which I honor the most incremental addition to such. For more background about how I came to deploy
GR, you also can read my Introduction to
GR's inaugural issue
here. There, you'll see my primary intent as facilitating discourse on poetry, regardless, by the way, of whether it's negative or positive -- given subjectivity, I don't think being disliked is an insult to a poem; the real insult to a poem is indifference. In fact, since
GR is open to seeing more than one review of the same publication, over time
GR can start to show different engagements with the same work -- as already begins with this issue as some of the books reviewed were also addressed by
GR's first issue.
This all is also to say, as of this second issue, I am renaming the subtitle of this journal from “(A Poetry Review)” to “(A Poetry Engagement)”. Though the interactions occur through “reviews,’ my intent for GR is really to
engage. And I don’t -- as I said in my Introduction to the inaugural issue -- want to preordain (by evoking how-to-review rules) how others, including critics, should read poems. I also like the wordplay as regards “engagement”: some engagements are negative, positive or a mixture -- and not all lead to marriage. Of course, as
someone who married Mr/s Poetry, I hope that engagements lead to a fulsome love of a poet(s)’s work, though
GR doesn’t discriminate from preventing evidence of others’ aborted love affairs.
Relatedly, while recently cleaning out my files, I stumbled across what I think is the first poetry review I've written: a 1997 review of John Yau's 1996 collection,
FORBIDDEN ENTRIES (Black Sparrow). I've reprinted it as the last review presented in this issue -- unchanged from its first (so please hold the tomatoes!) attempt at a critical POV as regards poetry. And I present it today despite the outdatedness of some of its concerns because its existence still relates to the timeless joy of falling in love with poems. I'd never heard of John Yau when I stumbled across his "Conversation at Midnight" in the
American Poetry Review; I love(d) that poem so much it made me check out John's other books, which then came to inform much of my education as a newbie poet exploring the foreign language of poetry. I love(d)
FORBIDDEN ENTRIES so much that it even made me attempt something new: write a poetry review...! All this, of course, understates the pleasures of having engaged with John Yau's poems -- a joy that I wish for all who read poetry.
Ultimately, when it comes to engaging with a poem, I find the notion of “review” as one that can be too limiting. As Charles Bernstein once wrote (in one of my favorite lines by him such that
I once quoted it while writing a review of an art exhibit):
"you can't leave the theater humming the critique".HOUSEKEEPING DETAILS:The deadline for submitting reviews for the next issue is Aug. 5, 2006. You can review books you own or ask for review copies sent to us.
GR also is open to all styles of reviewing. I accept all forms, though would suggest generally that it's a good idea to provide excerpts of poems to exemplify reviewers' assessments. For more information, go to
Galatea's Purse here.
You can ask me for suggestions, of course, but as it turns out, I rarely assign reviews; 99% of the reviewed titles are chosen by the reviewers themselves. That's all fine as I don't wish to limit reviewed titles to only those which I like. I am here (I first typed "hear") to listen -- and learn about poetry projects new to me -- as much as to "edit." For this issue, I'm particularly grateful to Mrs. McIntosh for rising from the dead so as to grace us with a review of her ungrateful son's poetry book. Without all you reviewers coming to the mountain where I perch, brewing up ideas to cure insomnia,
GR would not exist.
Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
May 17, 2006
OBEDIENCE by KARI EDWARDS
CHRIS MURRAY reviews
obedience by kari edwards(Factory School, 2005) where i leave my wings and leave my limitations behind: kari edwards' obedienceGender activist kari edwards writes a poetry of kinetic energy in perpetual linguistic flux, a poetry of "bodies in motion" (12),
rising with the sun
caught in non-newtonian motion
from zero to infinity times ten
(7) The poetry of
obedience flows in acrobatically stunning, quick shifts of dialectics, transformative reversals, "forms forming" (20) in "continuousness reruns/ continuously replenishing" (21). This poetry is an act of carefully combing through ideas as one's fingers would comb through beach sand looking for that one special thing--a shell, a creature, a lost ring, an old spoon--that one knows intuitively
must be there, even if one is not yet sure what that found-thing will turn out to be, or, that it may never be found. The goal is not what matters--the quest is what matters. Here is a genuine poetic quest, a tracing that combs through the act of philosophizing life in a continuous present--of thinking aloud--via turns of compressed image and allusion, fluid person(s) (variety of voices and speaking positions), emotive action, artfully alliterative and consonant sound involved in "rejuvenating the naked, creating vast flames that leap to tomorrow's tomorrows in a word, on a body made of non-objects not objecting to themselves ... a figure that is flesh ... a dream surging on a plane ... rising against the ... walls of hate" (69). Reading this I am sadly reminded once again that hate is a purely human invention: in fact, implicated regularly when "a species disappears" because "we live in a spectrum of hatred" (13). Yes, then:
obedience raises a communal voice that is volatile and harsh toward hatred, yet also full of beautifully transformative energy, a lively chorus of compassionate song countering the panoply of human violence, poetic song holding forth against the painful, debilitating, deadly effects of myriad hatred.
* * *
This kinetic poetry is not merely a function of the verb to be, a factor of 'is'. The poetry is not
is; rather, it
feels. This poetry feels close to the body-as-loved, close to the vital fluidity, the blood that sustains and cares for the body. Indeed, there is something of "blood" on nearly every page--blood, both as let ("... a knife, a bullet, a blood clot/ stars and stripes) figuratively-politically, and as sustaining life ("blood donors") (20). Thus, as readers we are drawn in by this recognition of blood, a most common, shared element of physical humanity--rather than being distanced by the word as object on a page. We are continually embodied rather than othered by this poetry. Its kinesis, in effect, is a literal form of inspiration: while reading, especially if reading aloud, the poem-speakers are felt as beings, as if running a language-to-life gauntlet until nearly breathless; speakers are continually uttering thoughts in a rush toward that peak moment when the lungs are depleted and must be, then finally are,
filled. Replenished with fresh, life-giving oxygen, as in this passage:
call it blows against life
so powerful
so furious
so blood thirsty
call it whatever
call it
tears in a clairvoyant downpour
a gasoline rainbow
a sophist who mistakes
touch for a dream
a dream for an infection
curvature of space for an optical
illusion
I am talking about an antechamber
of words
petrified forest of images
faucets dripping from the underground
a ball of wax and second class citizens
a replica who counts
ad infinitum
till the bones are crushed to the last breath
33)* * *
This fluid interchange of energetic words, body, and things exists not so much in the subconscious arenas of mind and culture proposed and cultivated by surrealism and Dada, but more as a primordial chamber for sorting and reflecting, "an antechamber," or a twilight region of pre-consciousness, a Kristevan almost-place (akin to Kristeva's notion of the semiotic chora) of Dickinson-like proportion, of possibility. Yet a possibility evolved more out of an emphasis on the transformative, one that fruitfully never quite attains a fullness of having (nor knowing) its name. That is because it is a condition of possibility that recognizes it is always in semiotic metonymic motion.
* * *
The notion of transformative possibility is alluded to right from the start of
obedience. The book begins with two short epigrams, one a line about discovering knowledge, taken from the ancient Hindu mystic-spiritual guide, the
Upanishads. The other--a line about the universal import to everyday life of the notion of "possibility"--taken from gender theorist Judith Butler: "Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread" (
obedience, 5). The import of a Butlerian, poetic form of "possibility" to kari edwards and to this book cannot be over-emphasized. The quote comes from Butler's landmark 2004 text,
Undoing Gender (Oxford UK, Routledge, 29), a work that questions gendering from the perspective of transformative
physis,
ethos, and
logos via transsexuality understood not only as a figuratively performative phenomenon and state of being to be enacted or staged, but as a radical act of transforming gender in all aspects of self and being: body, mind, spirit: as the ultimate radicalizing and exercise of agency in one's episteme. Transsexuality as an act, then, that entirely unseats the cultural and socio-political centrality of heterosexuality. As a transsexual, kari edwards innovatively writes to, speaks from, having experienced this as struggle, as often painful yet a uniquely transformative state of being, a state of profound "possibility," where one is always "giving birth to an appropriation of the self into the other... dying in dying ... a death with a welcome or replayed on a final end, only to begin again" (51). The cycle is one of renewal, and as Butler notes, of "improvisation" (
Undoing Gender, 1). And as one speaker in
obedience puts it, the experience is akin to declaring "myself a border interloper... [I] adjust to delux adjectives" (18), and one might add, also a far more nuanced texture and complexity of pronouns.
* * *
As subtext, one particular "possibility" conceptualized in
obedience is that identity is permeable; "possibility" refuses to be fixed with, to be burdened by, a rigidly defined name, a narrowly defined identity. The "I" speaks to, continues a relationship with, a "you" transformatively, implying fluid interchangeability. The "possibility" that conditions this speaking "I" foregoes the predictable, the compartmentalization that would occur in the inescapable and stiffly maintained hierarchies of bureaucracy and socialization packed onto identity by designations of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, that inevitably occur in language and culture. This transformative possibility of "I" refuses to be named (defined) even if to ride the wave of resisting being named is costly for the individual in every possible human way. In that sense, then, this poetry is particularly political: an in-your-face, on-going response to the inadequacies and insufferable limitations of identity, the narrowness and rigidity of taxonomical language and the sense of community as merely systematic and singular, in terms of shared being.
* * *
The energy of this poetry is realized by the act of writing, which is an ongoing attempt to ride the wave of, yet never attain, complete or absolutist definitions. The act and energy of this poetry make productive, material use of that desirous, intangible paradox of thought, imagination, moment, and the experience of fluidly being-with/in-thingness. We hardly have words for that phenomenon, and that is the challenge this poetry takes on. Through the writing process, to make manifest that which (knowingly!) can never really be, except in passing. As Martin Buber might say, to make manifest the full presence of the
I-in-Thou in relation to the
I-in-It. For, the poetry of
obedience also speaks of a spiritual quest to know or to be part of that linguistic and material space Buber called
Thou, which designates the abstracted familiar being, the spiritual other, the unnamable entity that all being exists in relation to, in dialogue with. In other words, the same entity or
Thou to which the first, most ancient poetry was addressed. To speak in and out of that paradoxical relation is a large part of the project in
obedience, to reveal how "I am you," (7) and that, materially and linguistically, we all originate from being
conjoined in the erotic
in a cavity between
slight and never
and
evaporating human voices
(14)And "and": the simplest of conjunctions underscoring the fact of being conjoined. And: with which poetic allusion to life and art this passage puts Plato to shame for underestimating and then banning poets and poetry. Moreover, Freud and Lacan are allusively targeted for their patronizing pathetic fallacy of male-centeredness, while Luce Irigaray's groundbreaking work in talking back to the fathers (Plato, Freud, and Lacan) and asserting an unequivocal feminist presence in psycholanalytic and philosophical discourse is no less alluded to with an applauding, deft wit.
* * *
The poetic challenge here is also to grapple with the innerness of thought, its silence(s) and its self-silencing, in relation to the outer-ness of power where one is "powerless to say" (67), especially against "arrogant bigotry" (48). To talk back and to assert oneself in the face of bald violence(s) emanating from such outer forces as "helicopter gun-ships" and "an army of" (what amounts to near-compulsory) "heterosexuality in the name of god and country" (77), which evokes the continued need for gender activism in word and in deed. Such, yet again, marks one of the most damaging and narrowest limitations of having/accepting a name, of committing the act of naming, even of self-naming, even as self-empowerment--given that westernized languages, which ultimately form human consciousness of self and world, divide and classify human speakers by a deceptively (laughably) narrow, binaristic number of gender positions: one is supposed to fit oneself in as either "he," or "she," only, a conceptualization that forsakes all states of sweet in-betweeness and any possibility of interchangeability, or newly-created, as yet unnamed and transformative positions. Add to that the implication of a further travesty of language, insofar as language narrowly limits other beings by ascribing to them (of the plant and animal worlds) the ingloriously, sub-human, indefinite referent position: "it."
* * *
So, here is a poetry grappling with how to speak oneself out of that conundrum, how to speak thought so as to make it physically manifest as self-empowerment, a initiation into the predominant mainstay of change in discourse: "argument," with its hegemony of causality in western letters and culture, thus, courageously: venturing into argument as a poetic way to enable the disempowered,
...because in the very being, that brings being into play, brings an argument
to a position of because, being the force behind a wall no longer speaking, held captive with probing hands, attempting to make sense of senselessness in a senseless world, inhabiting the living in an object, concerned with the impossible aberration of too many hyphenated words, finding what will crevice on the surface, thinking surface, thinking forgetting -- forgetting thinking, passing completely through being in a wild rhapsody of utter faking, making sense of sense, making a square, faking a square, making the concrete blur, making the unheard unblind, everywhere in interstate cemeteries.
(68)Why courageous?--because language (in the broadest Derridean sense of the term), in all its inadequacy and narrowing, is all we have to be ourselves with, and with others. Think about it, the desolation of that recognition.
* * *
I want to conclude here by calling attention to how kari edward's
obedience opens. The first line is "let's begin" followed immediately by these lines:
there are mental facts
as potent as physical facts
...
let's start again
with a theory of law
bodies of resistance
a miraculous wonder striptease
(7)The book--really one long poem, a poetic journey--goes on to end, paradoxically with the echoing line, "let's begin again" (82), which is the eloquently sole occupant of the last page, but never the last word on this journey. For, if the word is limiting, it is also fluid, thus recycles, "again" and yet "again." In that humble construction is signified, aptly enough, both purpose for poetry and hope for its speaker(s). Few books of poetry have grappled so successfully with so much of philosophical and cultural significance. Given the profundity of this book, and the innovativeness of this author, I cannot wait to see what poetic challenges kari edwards will take on in hir next journey.
*****
Chris Murray's poetry and reviews can be found in Sentence 2/3/4, LIT 10, American Book Review
(forthcoming, July 06), Jacket 29, Black Spring 1, Score19, Fascicle 2,Yale Angler's Journal, Mem 3, Shampoo Poetry, Blaze Vox, Sidereality, Moria, can we have our ball back?, Eclectica,
and Znine.
With Hoa Nguyen & Susan Briante, Chris curates the print journal, Super Flux.
A 2004 chapbook, Meme Me Up, Scotty!
can be acquired via chris.murray.qwerty@gmail.com. Since March 2003 Chris has been blogging poetry & poetics at chris murray's Texfiles. Chris teaches rhetoric and literature, and directs the writing center at University of Texas at Arlington.
MERCURY by SIMON SMITH
BARRY SCHWABSKY reviews
Mercury by Simon Smith (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK, 2006) Before I moved to London from New York a few years ago I had little acquaintance with contemporary poetry in England. Yes, I knew Lee Harwood’s work pretty well, and Geoffrey Hill’s too; Tom Raworth’s rather less so. I’d read Christopher Logue’s “accounts” of Homer and, because I’d liked Christopher Middleton’s translations from the German, a bit of his own poetry as well. J.H. Prynne was more than just a rumor to me, certainly, but not a lot more. Of younger poets, I knew nothing.
Only after I’d arrived did my ignorance strike me as odd. I began trying to catch up with my new context but quickly saw it wouldn’t be easy. A lot of British poetry was and is hard for me to “hear” even when I can see that it is good. Reading it could be something like reading poetry in a foreign language one happens to know quite well.
So things stood when a mutual acquaintance suggested I check out a London-based poet named Simon Smith. Eventually I got around to googling him to get a sense of who he might be and what he was up to. Learning that he had a forthcoming book, his second, called
Reverdy Road--it was about to be published by Salt in 2003--I was immediately intrigued: Not only do I love Pierre Reverdy’s poetry, but having come across the street near where I live in south-east London, I too had written a poem called “On Reverdy Road.” So I got the book as soon as it came out: a revelation: Resembling nothing I was familiar with in American poetry despite name-checking Jack Spicer and clear affinities with the New York School’s love of speed, wit, and variousness of tone, it had a music I could tune right into, something very much its own though it has also helped me, I think, hear my way into the work of some of Smith’s British contemporaries. In
Reverdy Road I found a new English poetry I could hear every bit as clearly as I could that of the Americans who were opening my eyes and ears at the time, the likes of Eleni Sikelianos, Linh Dinh, K. Silem Mohammad, and so on.
Now Smith has published
Mercury, very much a continuation of the project begun in
Reverdy Road (not with his first book,
Fifteen Exits, published by Waterloo Press in 2001). The sheer quantity of his production--the two books together amounting to nearly 400 pages of poetry produced in the course of just four years (but then they are well-aerated pages)--is further evidence of a great creative ferment. I, who always urge more severe editing on anyone who will listen, would not wish to have a page less of this oeuvre. Perhaps that’s because Smith succeeds in elevating poetry above the poem. What I mean by this is that the book on the one hand and the line on the other--what one might call the macropoem and the micropoem--become more striking, in his work, than the intermediate unit of the poem, thereby alerting us to an idea of poetic activity as a matter of quite small and oblique momentary acts of articulation and perception, on the one hand, and of the steady, ongoing process of awareness and accumulation through which those moments can be cultivated, sustained, and amplified, on the other, more than of an effort toward self-enclosed, autotelic form. In this aesthetic, the end of the poem has nothing to do with closure, being little more than the necessary moment of rest, a systole. Smith nonetheless retains the division of the book into poems, it might almost seem for the convenience of it more than anything else. The individual poems’ brief, almost negligible titles--“Bet Wit,” “Tee Hee,” “Heaps,” “Of,” “Slips Light,” “Day One”, to cite one sequence almost at random from early in
Mercury’s first section--can seem arbitrarily assigned, like the ones some abstract painters give their canvases, yet by their very fragmentariness slyly crack a window open onto the world we’ll glimpse in the lines that follow.
Smith does not believe in rigorous consistency, so that anything one might notice as a rule of thumb about his practice will always be contradicted somewhere but, in general, each line is also a stanza--that is, a space separates it from the next, introducing a disjunction even where there might otherwise appear continuity--that begins with a capital letter (that is to say, each line represents a new beginning) and breaks off without punctuation (though there are beginnings, there are no endings). It’s not unusual for a poem to end in mid-phrase: “You or me sweep end on a”; “It seems we can six months in which brings me to”; “You saying when we are for this experience and drop off the edge there we”--or even in mid-word: “Take the ch.” At the same time, each line tends feel as if it could stand alone, in a musical sense though not in a grammatical one, as a “complete fragment,” if one can speak of such a thing. Again, one could give samples almost at random. Here is the beginning of a poem titled “Pfuff”:
Into the glass the sunset and its long arm
Raindrops dissolve low visibility equals grey light
Like my eyes like yours and other reference points
The playing card is the traffic islandAnd here, in its entirety, “In Reality,” which gives an example of one of Smith’s ways of making his fragmentary lines bear a syntactical overabundance rather than the syntactical deficiency one would normally expect (and which he also puts to good use):
An appointment book with a black cover machine-stamped
“2004” inscribed in gold
The dreams that die in small children’s eyes shining snow
Black and white “still” colour on the video “hiya” starts off
Where we left it at the stair’s foot
“Now” too quick to record whatever you do with your mouthSmith manages to sidestep the dichotomy--bizarrely significant to the discourse around contemporary poetry in the UK, for reasons I’ve yet to fathom--of accessibility vs. difficulty. Neither word applies here (the back cover is just wrong in claiming these as “poems that say difficult things simply”) maybe because this poetry is more concerned with its own doings than with an effect on some proposed reader. Other poetry can seem desperate and mannered by comparison. An immense energy passes through the field of this poetry but the poem does not want to concentrate that energy to produce a massive force. It is open, striving neither to impose a meaning nor to evade one. It’s neither personal nor impersonal. One might wonder casually, for instance, about the identity of the Michelle who recurs in many of the poems but it’s clear that whatever she means to the poet may not be what she means to the poem. Likewise, it does not gather itself around a topic. The subject is poetry itself as a form of awareness, an attitude toward contemporary urban life. If there is a formula, it might be the advice-to-self given in the poem “Rain”:
Squeeze Reality into as tight
A space as possible--but now in case you’re wondering about the grandiloquence embodied in that capital “R” Reality--isn’t that a tad sententious?--watch what happens next to it. Let’s start again:
Squeeze Reality into as tight
A space as possible the capital “R”
Crushed through a thin mouth to “r”Is that making too much of a letter? Doesn’t the poem have bigger things to attend to? Well, no, not when the letter is what reality gets squeezed through in order to make a poem. Or as “Chair,” one of a number of single-line poems in the book would have it,
As a letter acts the repository of the immediate*****
Barry Schwabsky is an American poet and art critic living in London. His most recent publication is the chapbook Tephra
, from Black Square Editions.
UNDER THE MIRACLE BRIDGE FLOWS THE SAND by JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN
ALAN BAKER reviews
Under The Miracle Bridge Flows the Sand by John Bloomberg-Rissman
(Bamboo Books, Culver City. CA., 2006)
The Californian poet John Bloomberg-Rissman has a substantial body of work behind him: several collections, a Selected Poems and a large-scale, unpublished work,
'Travels to Capitals' which draws on the poetry of Michael Palmer and the artwork of Donald Evans. Most of this work is self-published in limited editions and on his website (
www.johnbr.com). Bloomberg-Rissman's early work has the American virtues of plain speech and direct statement, with conventional first-person narration. A quiet, humane and humorous voice. More recently however, he has adopted techniques such as random word-generation, and has blended his more conventional voice with alternative forms of discourse. Incorporations from other writers, snatches of news reports, overheard conversations and other 'found' language all appear in a single poem. The result is a fascinating and at times powerful mix. The pamphlet under review is representative of his current output.
The opening poem is in memory of a close relative of the poet; a moving and dignified piece using few words, but hinting at larger vistas and associations (it reminds me of Bunyan and is in fact abstracted from American poet Ronald Johnson’s
RADIO OS -- itself an abstraction of Milton):
and
all is
and
and
and
the O
of
wonder passing through fire
breathing
from noon to
trumpet’s soundThe word “and”, repeated again at the poem’s close, leaves the poem open, expressing the life lamented as part of a larger process.
One of the things that appeals to me about this poetry is its philosophy of life, that it’s optimistic, yet realistic, aware of a spiritual dimension, but never pompous or dogmatic; and there's an anarchic side to these poems that manages to deflate authorial pretensions:
In the film jet fuel froze but
the hero could still light
a match. Is that science?
It's hard to say something
intelligent about a dishtowel, so
I hung one up instead.
Every moment a zen master
Slap. Thanks for the link
to the self-defense nightstand.but there's also an undertone of grief and sorrow, and some bitterness:
Out the window
Xmas lights,
Ho ho ho,
Torture prisons,
Unseasonable heat…
...When you call
I say ‘yes!’
And count the angels
dancing on a pin.
And the ghosts.
…Old fools
both of us
to feel things.Maybe it's an American thing, but Bloomberg-Rissman seems to be able to write first-person, anecdotal verse and make it significant and untrivial. Most contemporary British poetry in that vein fails to do that; I'm not sure why, but it may be to do with the American idiom being open and democratic, while the British vernacular always seems conscious of an inferiority which may have to do with social class (although there are notable exceptions: Lee Harwood for instance). In Bloomberg-Rissman quotidian details can have an almost stately quality:
4.
Some days last centuries.
5.
The tire is changed.
6.
The bird has gone
7.
That's part 1
8.
Part 2:
I shook all night
Till the 3rd ativan.And there's some skillful interweaving of idioms. In the poem 'For K' we have the plain-spoken lines:
You say, I
Wouldn't be young again
For anything. Age may ache,
Is also ease.and in the same, very personal, poem, we have:
By the
Moon, a vapor X. If
It's a riddle the
answer's obviously. Controlled burn.
cinema verité.which then moves seamlessly back into plain statement. This is skillful stuff, and a long way from the straightforward manner of his early work; an altogether richer mix.
This collection includes two translations, one by the Columbian poet Héctor Rojas Herazo, and three sonnets by the Belgian Miriam Van hee, both of which work well and fit in with the general tone.
To my mind, the finest poem in this pamphlet is 'After 3, 5 Weeks', a homage to the guitarist Derek Bailey. What does it for me is the musicality and the fluidity of movement, the feeling of improvisation that's just right for its subject:
If blue sky. If twenty
Tiny clouds, quietly, quietly. If
O, if o, if only.
Between fear and fear and
The other thing. 4:48 in
The morning. Stars swirl. Above
Dark trees. I can't
Use every word. May all
Beings find peace. Falling into.
Falling out of. This or
Any other inimitable.*****
Alan Baker lives in Nottingham, England. He publishes the Leafe Press pamphlet series, is editor of the webzine Litter and is assistant editor of Poetry Nottingham.
His most recent (and third) pamphlet of poetry is 'The Strange City' (Secretariat Books, UK).
HOME ON THE RANGE (THE NIGHT SKY WITH STARS IN MY MOUTH) by TENNEY NATHANSON
THOMAS FINK reviews
Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) by Tenney Nathanson(O Books, Oakland, CA, 2005)The author of a major tome on Walt Whitman, Tenney Nathanson in
Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) has produced a long collage-poem of Whitmanian energy and scope. The poem consists of 108
dizains (ten-line stanzas), and Nathanson has created diverse effects within this form in an unusual way: he has packed in so many overgrown “versets” in some sections that they take up much more space than others. Occasionally, two-and-a-half
dizains fit on one page, whereas one section sometimes occupies more than a page. While there is variety in the alternation among medium length, long, very long, and outrageously long lines within a single section, the overall impression given is that of a breathless onrush of poetic data.
Much of this data, a little more than half in each section, comes from “intertexts,” as Nathanson’s list—one book per section (except in
Dizain 70)—at the end of the book calls them. Many major British, American, and continental modernist (and nineteenth century) fiction writers serve as sources. Poetry by Whitman (of course) and Frost, literary criticism, critical theory, cultural studies, Zen texts, a scientific treatise, and a diet book are also included. The variety of intertexts allows for ample diversity in verbal texture.
Dizain 5, whose source texts are three different essays from Walter Benjamin’s
Illuminations, begins with the line: “messengers is law a gloomy way a firm place in a long existence impossible here.” Nathanson’s source is the essay, “Franz Kafka,” in which Benjamin writes: “What may be discerned . . . in the activities of those messengers is law in an oppressive and gloomy way for this whole group of beings. None has a firm place in the world. . . . There is not one that is not either rising or falling, . . . none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence. To speak of any order or hierarchy is impossible here” (117). Notice that Nathanson severs the copular link of discernment and “law” (and the secondary importance of “messengers”) in the original passage and gives us the grammatically strange equation making the servants of “law”—which might include language as well as human functionaries—identical to this authority. Indeed, in the “gloomy way” of Kafka’s work—and the feel of this comes through in
dizain 81, whose intertext is
The Castle—bureaucrats embody the full force of coercive regulations for hapless citizens. While Benjamin emphasizes individuals’ lack of security (“firm place”) and the “long existence” of their suffering, the poet ties “firm place” and “long existence” to the “law” before undercutting the notion of firmness with “impossible here,” which in the original passage was linked with a declaration about “order’s” absence. However different Nathanson’s deployment of the intertext’s words, effects of his collaging convey some of the darkness of Kafka’s work and Benjamin’s interpretation of it.
Obviously, the kind of intertextual labor I performed in the previous paragraph is not a practical overall reading strategy. But a general awareness of possible traces of the source text in harmony or conflict with Nathanson’s own words enhances the reading experience, as in
Dizain 44, where scientific discourse from Brian Greene’s
The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions , and the
Quest for the Ultimate Theory is juxtaposed with “natural” imagery of Nathanson’s own approximation of a Thoreau-like transcendentalism: “Focused on the electron, this discussion charged particles the same way that rocks on everyday sanctum increase in strength/ sitting and dwindling down into wind, rain, the flecked rocks hunkered and washed by the lake, your insight breathing/ short theories of 10 space-time dimensions.”
The poet’s mode of collagistic presentation does not deliver hard information like scientific findings to the reader; his “discussion” can “charge” heterogeneous “particles” of discourse to “increase” the “strength” of multi-contextual suggestiveness. “Rocks” could be stable enough to support an “everyday sanctum,” but the phrase’s potent strangeness exceeds its aptness in importance. Note how enjambments between the first and second and between the second and third lines are not arbitrary; for example, phenomenological “insight” about nature can inspire (“breathe”) much more abstract, theoretical formulations; the two are parallel ways of experiencing/measuring “reality.”
Depriving canonical fiction of its narrative motion through fragmentation, Nathanson retains some of the thematic charge and feeling tone of not-so “empty words.” Lines taken from Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter foreground the pun in a central after-effect’s name and convey the pleasure/agony of Hester’s union: “on the wooded hills of no scandal, shine, pearl/ passionately his burning walked among kindred, so pure in horror. He bids you” (
Dizain 33). The “range” (scope) that Nathanson is at “home” on is a wide array of scriptive cultural artifacts. Collage deployment of that scope engenders the “homelessness” of the between, of intertextuality: such poetry ranges in ways that a time-traveling Whitman would probably judge to “contain [new and old] multitudes”: “say I also return, translucent, beetles rolling balls of dung, winds surging, shaded, are the others down/ and sundered, no, they’re down where the tall grass twines under the oak tree having a Swabian picnic. swell” (
Dizain 92).
*****
Thomas Fink, Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, is the author of two books of criticism, including A DIFFERENT SENSE OF POWER
(2001), and three books of poetry, most recently AFTER TAXES
(Marsh Hawk, 2004). His work has appeared in JACKET, VERSE, TALISMAN, CHICAGO REVIEW, DENVER QUARTERLY, x-Stream, MORIA, MILK, AUGHT, OCTOPUS, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW,
and numerous other journals and ezines. Fink's paintings hang in various collections.
THE ART OF COUNTRY GRAIN ELEVATORS by JON VOLKMER
PR PRIMEAU reviews
The Art of Country Grain Elevators by Jon Volkmer(Bottom Dog Press, 2006) PRAIRIE SONGS--THE POEMS OF JON VOLKMER Jon Volkmer is the Thomas Hart Benton of contemporary poetry. That is, without the Benton's rampant misogyny, nasty anti-intellectualism, and general abrasiveness. It is in his dirt simple illumination of working folk’s trials and triumphs that he falls into close alignment with the self-described “enemy of Modernism.” Volkmer remains loyal to his American roots; in terms of both structure and content, his poetry stands in stunning contrast to current poetic trends.
In sixteen poems planted among black and white photos capturing classic Heartland imagery (courtesy of Bruce Selyem), Volkmer presents a world of sun-scorched backs, calloused palms, and gruff voices.
The Art of Country Grain Elevators takes the reader on a long ramble through the Nebraskan countryside. Despite being a professor of creative writing at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, the poet’s voice is that of an aged husker. His steady, genuine verse suggests a sort of wizened insight inherited through a family line whose blood, sweat, and prayers have long fertilized Nebraskan soil.
In “Rats”, Volkmer paints a gruesome scene: hired hands stomping on baby rodents, snuffing the life from them as they scramble into the open. An indirect but deeply stirring meditation on natural order, the poet writes: “they did a silly stomping jig/I clapped, until I saw the tiny bursts of fur/‘But Dad!’ I said, ‘they’re babies!’/‘But what?’ he said, ‘they’re rats.’” With those lines Volkmer grasps by the neck the dark poetry and crude justice of rural life.
“Epitaph on a Three-Block Main Street” is a melancholy reflection on lost towns and lost lives -- on lost
history. Volkmer conjures up places that “can’t be found, not on a map” and villages whose very foundations have been worn away by the stiff winds which blow forever across the plains. The specter of the ghost town arises on both a physical and spiritual level; the reader imagines the poet’s voice shrinking to a forlorn whisper as he concludes, “You have to visit the nursing homes/to find a handful who remember/where Table Rock was…”
In one of the collection’s finest pieces, Volkmer artfully sketches the perverse intimacy which exists between a farmer and his seed. “Dust” is divided into curt verses which argue from this perspective and that as to which crop “killed man first.” “Wheat can be funny/smelling almost of bread/And the shit you cough up/kind of looks like dough.” The poem is wreathed in black humor, though it concludes on a macabre note: “I knew milo was the worst of all/because Old Vaughn said so/and he had to spit out/the oxygen tube/to say so.”
Largely avoiding the bold typography, sharp line-breaks, and raucous subject matter which typify much of poetry these days, Volkmer has crafted rich and authentic poems which speak to the soul and come from the hearts, hands, and hard work of Midwesterners. His sensible diction and populist undertones are refreshing breaks from the transgressive experimentation of the avant-garde and the snooze cruise that is more mainstream poetry.
The Art of Country Grain Elevators is the hymnal of the everyman farmer, the tireless laborer, and the blue collar Joe whose lives blaze marvelous in their simplicity. Here we have Woody Guthrie with a dash of confused nostalgia, maybe Robert Frost stripped of Yankee trappings, perhaps even Richard Brautigan sans marijuana. Such beautiful Americana comes along all too infrequently in these busy, postmodern days. Quiet but powerful, Volkmer’s prairie songs can -- should! -- be savored by everyone from the schooled poet to the school janitor.
*****
PR PRIMEAU is manager-in-chief of
PERSISTENCIA*PRESS and the editor of
Dirt, a 'zine of minimalist poetry and poetics. His work has appeared in
Skald, Eratio, moria, minimum daily requirements, fhole, Yawp, and
Starfish.
THE BEDSIDE GUIDE TO NO TELL MOTEL Edited by REB LIVINGSTON & MOLLY ARDEN
WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA reviews
The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Edited by Reb Livingston & and Molly Arden (No Tell Press, 2006) Naughty, naughty, naughty—how often do we get to say those words about a poetry anthology? Not often, but they definitely apply to Reb Livingston’s and Molly Arden’s
The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel. Just listen to some of the section titles for this work: “Discretion and its Discontent,” “Techniques Guaranteed to Please,” “The Difference Between Seduction and Manipulation.” Our seductive editors tell us in their foreword, “These poems aren’t ‘desperate,’ they’re naughty, incorrigible, precocious, stimulating and exhilarating.” Even more, these sexy poems are written by some great poets (with buttons undone for our viewing pleasure!), such as Noah Eli Gordon, Catherine Daly, Amy King, Ravi Shankar, Shanna Compton, and Shin Yu Pai. Eighty-four poets focus on the sensual in this book, and that makes for anything but an ordinary anthology.
When I first picked up this book, the titles alone were titillating: “Überdesigned Happy Juice,” “After Ten Years Together, We Sneak Off to Make Out in Someone’s Closet,” “No Bra Required,” “The Vacuum.” After such titles, the poems have a steep task, but most of the poets are up to the work. Take this bit from Ravi Shankar’s “Simpatico”:
What exists but now, wet and pulmonary,
rinsed of context like two glasses used to mix a drink—
what’s not soluble in liquid exchange?
Personally, I’d trade my kingdom for your clavicle,
the chance to draw a bow across the viola of your hips.Come on! Doesn’t that at least make you loosen your collar? In this excerpt alone, we’ve a sense of carpe diem combined with the sensual “wet and pulmonary” thrown on top of a delicate touch of the hips. That’s good. Other poets in this collection are no less adept at depicting desire, the problems of declining desire, or the complications of love.
At this point if you are thinking, anyone can write about sex; what’s the big deal? These poets explore desire (and its surrounding friends) from a variety of angles. Take, for example, a selection from Shin Yu Pai’s “tie me up, tie me down”:
the Western tradition:
a punishment
reserved for
petty thieves
wife beaters
drunkards
fortune-tellers
unforetold perversions
in the land of the rising sun:
a feudal obsession with sexIn this excerpt Shin Yu Pai explores sex as a colonized thing or sex as a violent colonizing agent. It would be hard to say she’s writing about just sex. In her piece, as in many of this collection’s poems, sex is multilayered beyond the many layers it already has on a person-to-person level. That in itself is a reason to go out and buy this book. Just make sure you’re not alone when reading it!
*****
William Allegrezza teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poems, articles, and reviews have been published in several countries, including the U.S., Holland, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Australia, and are available in many online journals. Also, he is the editor of moria,
a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books. His books include The Vicious Bunny Translations, covering over, Temporal Nomads, Lingo,
and Ladders in July.
PHENOMENA OF INTERFERENCE by STEVE DALACHINSKY & MATTHEW SHIPP
MARY JO MALO reviews
“phenomena of interference” by Steve Dalachinsky & Matthew Shipp(Mastered & produced by Assif Tsahar, recorded at Tonic 7/23/2005. Released 2005) Ever since I discovered Steve Dalachinsky's work I've been curious to know if he really understands what he's talking about. His poetry seems to me more like a hypnogogic/hypnopompic dream language. You know the place, where color and sound and word interchange to make non-sense? But now I know differently. Dalachinsky is a poet, himself a medium where all these conspire to produce singular works of art. He spontaneously crafts a coherent and perceptible phenomenon from the chaos we too easily name as knowledge. His earth is a colorful cacophonous place where the music of the spheres and
blood and piss and shit combine to make something worth remembering, though we probably won't. Perhaps the feelings and images shot from his recordings will remain via the technology we so easily dismiss. Did you know that the iridescence of a CD is caused by the interference of light waves?
Matthew Shipp's piano and Dalachinsky's poetry have combined to produce their best album yet. Yuko Otomo's cover art is elegant and appropriate, stark black and red on white. Speaking of color, Dalachinsky always writes passionately about it, using it like someone who's suddenly rendered color-blind, someone shredded by their desire to see it again. The color of fruit, the blue of the sky, all of it unmasked from its grayscale disguise.
With this album he has found the physics of his poetry. He typically expresses a Zen comprehension of the something that emerges from nothing, and the music that arises from silence; but now he reveals a recognition of the principles of physics, the (un)predictability of a quantum universe. He serves up a delicious platter or palette of sound and shadow, a digestible meal with all senses commingling. One word suggests others and a sound suggests a word or a color or traffic sign.
Doors are always closing but
a window is sometimes a way out.
It's the raucous NYC microcosm baby, with schizoid shamans playing
blackjack, and where
Gal I Leo stargazes but plays us a no-frills evening, selling us the myth of meaning in
SUBWAY SYSTEMS:
chill reflect the myriad
of hopefuls & the din's aswirlin here
like the way reason flames this season . . .
put down that card and roll . . .
(blackjack)
wash the jordan (narc)few turns'round
the we are its center
motion moon planet (S)(T)(A)(R)
what the milky way is made
of what the stuff of dreams reads seam of traffiker
when those edges go how long the riff goes on how close the comer gets . . .
(Gal I Leo)______________________________
But my words don't do his words justice. You have to hear him interject
copyright, click, imprint, omit, emit, money, honest, repeatedly with agitation throughout a pome. I admire his juxtaposition of a night sky with consumerism!
How can I describe
3 orchids for niblock? Chthonic, erotic, primal? Uttering glossolalia, he speaks a ménage à trois straining to give birth to something, but what? The impossible, the inexpressible. And then there are the
trust fund babies of both kinds, and the
other-colors America.The directness of
embracement:
if I travel with You
further than this Spot
beyond my discontent
to embracement
to silence
& springtime
do you promise me a place on the charts
with a bullet______________________________
He observes and then tells us about
julie and a musician:
he played
just for you
tonite julie
he may not know
you may not know it
but every flower
on your
rich dark
dress
felt the moisture
from
his bell______________________________
Did you know that light waves interfere either destructively (by eliminating each other) or constructively (by combining into larger waves)? From the title pome in which he proclaims that he will not say, but he does, and incredulously sounds like he can't believe it.
tho nothing is without color as
nothingness itself in B&W is illuminated by its primaries
Bio-logic the politic of color elected
from the tip of the candle to its base ( nothing is in simple b & w
tho the DARK is so difficult to penetrate
for the dark contains all that it is not ) . . .
i cannot believe i said "rainbows" . . .
CORRESPONDANCES
secrets refract ures
where
white reflects & black
absorbs
the sound of color
the color of sound
where thought forms
& voice forms
& sand turns to glass . . .
( did i say color? did i say sound?)______________________________
You could read the entire lyrics booklet from this beautifully packaged CD and never come close to what you will taste and experience when you hear him bust a sound wave. Dalachinsky has never performed with more intensity. He finds it all by losing it. Nostalgia is a promise of what never remains. We'll have to do this again some day. Letters can form more than words . . .
do you
ever dot your eyes before you look?*****
Mary Jo Malo describes herself as a continuing undergrad in the School of Hard Knocks. Her C.V. is that she was born in 1949; in and out of foster homes for 18 years; newly separated from husband of nearly 40 years; proud mother of seven; extensive researcher of world religions and philosophy. She worked as a sales, marketing and advertising coordinator for a manufacturer of large electrical power apparatus. In 1993 she was disabled in an auto accident in the Rocky Mts. of Colorado. Never fully recovered and forced into early retirement, she’s had an abundance of time to pursue her favorites, poetry and philosophy, cosmology and evolution. These days as novice to modern and post-modern poetry, she’s been delighted to discover the Beat and post-Beat writers, among many others. While hoping she has miles to go in her adventure,and appreciating every poet and critic who takes time to talk with her as she seeks to better express her own voice, Mary Jo Malo finds now herself in good company. She is also the host and moderator of Company of Poets, a poetics mailing list/discussion group.
[WAYS] by BARRY SCHWABSKY & HONG SEUNG-HYE
ERNESTO PRIEGO reviews
[Ways] by Barry Schwabsky and Hong Seung-Hye(Artsonje Center and Meritage Press, Seoul and St. Helena, CA., 2004)A small pale-blue book with the word “Ways” inside square brackets on the cover. There is nothing else. No author’s name, nothing but a plural noun in small type. The first page is blank, featuring a single white square (its margins black), mirroring a bigger square made of three black squares, one white, on the inside pale-blue cover. The page, therefore, is not completely blank, but almost. The book begins like this.
[Ways], by Barry Schwabsky and Hong Seung-Hye, is not a “typical” poetry book. It is a typographic book, though, in spite of the fact that all the fifteen poems within are regularly aligned to the left margin. It is a graphic book, a collaborative effort between two proper names that have attempted to fill the book’s space with black ink, making a delimitation of space. Schwabsky offers a progression of words, an ascending-yet-descending flow of letters and lines that eventually end on the top of everything, a gradual, patient escalation into blankness. Seung-Hye multiplies empty boxes and mathematically expands equal dimensions to animate the page-passing. A poetry flip-book, if you will, that should be read carefully but swiftly, without stops, holding your breath. It is a book to read in any direction, but always sequentially, one numbered poem after/before the other.
[Ways] appears before me as a sophisticated piece of poetic machinery (poetry as sewing; the poem as a sewing machine) that proposes new ways of understanding poetry and graphics; a humble dissertation on the nature of reading lines, line-breaks and enjambments, subjects and objects, transitive and intransitive verbs left margins and “empty” spaces. As I write this I cannot but feel that I am betraying the beat-keeper that makes this book resonate with all its moving complexity. The main difficulty is speaking about it. A book that must be experienced, it can be read as a theoretical proposition on poetry as movement and of reading as motion. But it should also be considered a reflection on the nature of words and images in relation to space and what we consider “blank”, empty spaces, the whiteness of the wordless page.
“A page left intentionally blank”: such is the maxim of this book which is in itself one single poem fragmented into fifteen movements or, if you will, a series of fourteen poems and a coda or, possibly, a collection of fifteen individual poems that should be read in two opposite directions. This phrase, the first line of the poem numbered as “XIV”, will be fragmented, sampled and remixed throughout the book/poem, the last line of the poem numbered as “I”. Fifteen poems all composed with fourteen lines divided in seven couplets compose this flawless progression of signifiers that, through a regular pattern, proposes new ways of reading.
[Ways] flows upward and downward, spirals only in two’s, like final, conclusive couplets of old sonnets that suddenly find themselves flipped, animated and turned something else, becoming a discourse of alternative meanings to standard signifiers.
[Ways], indeed, grows towards the top of the page, until the blank page, left intentionally blank, stares fixedly at us. We breath, excited, still puzzled and in awe, but the page is, again, not completely blank, but gasping with that infinite fractal box of multiplied little squares that increase, in all their stillness, gradually before our eyes. The page pulsates with its apparent blankness, light that grows brighter with the shadow of the squares. The page is yet another square, always contained from the beginning, still there until the end. The text is, literally, a matrix that recreates something similar to “a sky remanded Thoughtfully”. The book glares with little units of meaning (like the stars dreamed by Roland Barthes) that pierce the chest like the photographic punctum of a dead loved one staring at us from beyond a faded dot matrix of printed paper (“second loves/ love best”, from II). After the “blank page”, another poem, seven couplets like all the others, the solution to this mathematical puzzle that flashes with the self-awareness of a melancholic patient drunk with oblivion and neglect; a clarity that only the Dawn seen by mad poets can blur: “speechless words, afflicted/ pleasures, if not without”.
[Ways] flips like infinite square doors and windows, a conditional interrogation on the nature of the poem as the perfect artifact of meaning; an exercise on mistaken beginnings; a reorientation of the couplet as the definitive not-closed stanza, in this case made up of possible false starts. After all,
[Ways] can indeed be read as a “sonata for a sewing machine” (from IV), since it creates the effect of mechanical, repetitive punctures that create embroideries on skin. But Schwabsky’s and Seung-Hye’s book is many other things as well: it’s not a map, nor the written directions to arrive to a destination. It is instead different manners of achieving what could be seen as the opposite of poetry: the blank page.
[Ways] gives the page, left intentionally blank, a signifying power that is almost blinding in its beauty. Ultimately,
[Ways] grows into its coda like a profoundly painful love letter, like the lyrics to a naked song.
*****
Born in Mexico City, Ernesto Priego is an essayist, teacher and translator. He is interested in everything having to do with poetry, graphic narratives and pop music. He recently released his first book, NOT EVEN DOGS(Meritage Press, 2006).
CITY ECLOGUE by ED ROBERSON
THOMAS FINK reviews:
City Eclogue by Ed Roberson (Atelos, 2006)At the end of
Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993), Nathaniel Mackey expresses the hope that “the quantity” and “quality of attention given to African-American art and cultural practices” (285) can be increased. Mackey, himself an important African-American experimental poet, wants “Ed Roberson’s
Lucid Interval as Integral Music,” among other texts, “to win the sort of acclaim accorded to Rita Dove’s
Thomas and Beulah,” thus confronting “neo-traditionalism . . . with a countertradition of marronage, divergence, flight, fugitive tilt.” Thirteen years later, Roberson may not be closer to the kind of widespread appreciation that Dove still enjoys, but the publication of
City Eclogue, his seventh book of poems, published by Lyn Hejinian’s and Travis Ortiz's Atelos, is an excellent occasion for pointing out, at very least, that those in U.S. experimental circles should take strong notice of his work.
Much of
City Eclogue has a political tinge. In “Sit in What City We’re in,” the Civil Rights movement’s lunch counter sit-ins evoke unusual questions about desire, individual and collective identification, and confrontation:
to know how those kept out
set foot inside, sat down, and how
the mirrors around the lunch counter
reflected the face
to face—the cross-mirrored depth reached
infinitely back into either—
the one pouring the bowl over the head of
the one sitting in
at that counter. (26-7)Whereas southern white segregationists desired the maintenance of African-American invisibility, the plethora of mirroring at the restaurants ironically insists upon a plethora of visibility for all. Subtle comfort can be taken in the fact that the actions of those insisting upon an end to their subordination are captured by early sixties mass media along with the racists’ violent responses. For the poet, such mirroring occasioned by the African-American students’ courageous protests undermines any pretence of “imperial selfhood” and makes isolation from the challenges of community impossible. However, his carefully spaced strips of syntax, sometimes fragmentary, prevents sloganeering and a simple parsing of the situation:
this regression this seen stepped
back into nothing both ways
From which all those versions of the once felt sovereign
self
locked together in the mirror’s
march from deep caves of long alike
march back
into the necessary
together
living
we are
reflected in the face to face we are
a nation facing ourselves our back turned
on ourselves
how
that reflection sat in demonstration
of
each face
mirror reflecting into mirror generates. (27) “Steps” (stages) of multiple mirroring are a “seen” (scene) “regression”—like a deconstructive mise-en-abyme—into such layering that one can focus on “nothing” individual. Racism, too, constitutes a psychological regression into a “nothing” of unbridled id. The many “versions” dangling from the “From which” (that lacks a determinate antecedent) and the spatial separation of “sovereign” from “self” sit “in demonstration/ of” this visual and social confrontation shattering individualism’s foundations. “Deep caves of long alike” might signify the single racial origins of homo sapiens and, thus, a “march” into racial divisions, or it might reflect how the lunch counter protests can be identified as one of various pivotal movements away from the “long” institution of segregation. Whites and blacks must “face” each other, facing also their mutual inclusion in “nation,” but also, the mirror supposed to supply one’s own identity presents the individual’s “back” and offers the face of an “other.” So the mirroring-effect may throw into question rejection of the “other” as a denial of otherness within the “self.”
In the course of the poem, several other intricate formulations of the selfhood/otherness dialectic are offered, including a quasi-utopian transcendence of polarization without the sacrifice of individual agency: “the self not lost, shared/ being in common in each other” (31). At times, Roberson seeks a way of simultaneously incorporating perspectives derived from different points in history: “A here and not-here division of things,/ where the future is in the same/ place as the past, is . . . like these facing mirrors/ in which time is making faces/ at you from the elemental/ moment, the faced and yet to be/ faced/ in one frame” (29). “The elemental” is what makes history useful for confronting the present’s urgencies.
“Beauty’s Standing,” the book’s second part, consisting of a ten-section, seventeen-page poem and a kind of coda, examines various trends in contemporary African-America. Since its title recalls the sixties slogan, “Black is beautiful,” one can read it as an affirmation that, despite continuing oppression, this “beauty” still “stands.” This is indicated in two examples from section 2: “The lovely women styled in as no other/ time are not the body of this space they make/ only the flow through it”; “a park/ of the highest form of pickup/ basketball in The Village a Harlem sound. . . “ (42). Yet this “beauty” is endangered. From the outset, Roberson calls attention to harsh environmental conditions, including images of urban clutter that, far from signifying abundance, indicate poverty and the effects of a community’s lack of political clout : “re: the water the heat/ is out of control the land toxic.// Building up more junk on more/ junk doesn’t pay the bills & get the light back on” (41). The couplets of 6, “(the first casualty is where you live”), one of the most compelling sections, depart interestingly from more direct treatments of racial profiling and police brutality found in Black Arts and other earlier African-American poetry:
The quiet of the house evacuates into the street
leaves all the rooms to follow the haunting
concern without yet subject the ghost with its cradle
floats across the walls red revolving patrol
lights a spun radiant weapon a night-
stick elucidation
a beating without a given reason
that just shows up at a door
in the neighborhood
just happen
to be
Who this time. (49)The strange personification of “quiet,” along with the mention of “haunting” and “ghost,” indicates how precarious encounters between an African-American community and the police undoes domestic serenity. The deliberately awkward phrase, “concern without yet subject,” underscores free-floating anxiety hovering in the neighborhood. Perhaps evoking Toni Morrison’s most famous ghost story,
Beloved, the apparition floating “with its cradle/. . . across the walls” not only suggests the squad cars’ “lights” rudely infiltrating the house of a family just trying to relax, but also memories of many similar intrusions and their consequences. Metonymically aligned with the menacing “night-/ stick,” “patrol// lights” impose a particular, disturbing visibility (“elucidation”) but provide “the neighborhood” with a lucid understanding of racially motivated, authoritarian violence and its lawless, un-reason-able disregard for due process, etc. This passage’s concluding phrase makes innovative use of grammar and pauses indicated by spacing to energize the truism that, for racist white policemen, all black men in such an area are rendered anonymous; they are “suspects.”
Countering the elucidation of sociopolitical hopelessness are demonstrations of the resourcefulness of poor urban African-Americans. Recognizing that black (and white) conservatives’ “bootstrap” ideology in reference to the elusive “American dream” is no match for the exploitative force of “bosses,” some of the folks represented in Section 9, whose “territory” is “on the other side of the idea/ of having anything/ to throw away to be collected” by the sanitation department, do what they can to narrow economic and opportunity gaps by acting as pragmatic ecologists: “After empties us/ out into the local dump/ to turn what we can find over// to make up/ into something we can use” (54). Their benefit is obviously extremely limited, and they are subject to what Roberson eloquently identifies in section 4 as “that powerful level of segregationists/ the civil rights movement never reached,” those who impose “the great weigh of wealth’s want/ that moves other men’s hands// and feet and leaves its own clean” (45).
In order to combat the very exploitation they suffer when they try to make an honest living in “this” allegedly “great countryland/ of opportunity,” others in the community feel justified in resorting to nonviolent theft: “The catch/ up in what/ we catch off the truck.// That we should catch up/ or make up any losses in the floor/ the union boss wants/ for his house” (54). And they are aware that the corrupt “union boss’s” subversions of democracy are not aimed exclusively at black workers: “him who’s/ gonna get paid/ and twice to put it in/ for the vote to/ stay ahead/ of the niggers/ of all colors other than” (54-55). It may be too simplistic to fill in the blank left implicitly at the end of the sentence with “white”; if, perhaps, the blank remains, it is a reminder that such bosses want to find ways to expand the pool of the exploited to maximize his own profit. In response, the workers maintain their own ironic version of Booker T. Washington’s “bootstrap” philosophy: “Get me/ a piece of that/ fall off the back of a truck first/ economy/ I can pick up like/ Y’know, with the bootstraps! (55)
One of the most troubling, challenging passages in this long poem of numerous troubling manifestations is the complex, ambiguous moral critique in the second half of section 2:
The kind of walk that’s always taking cover
instead of steps that gets to the corner
and can see what’s around it by the faced
direction targets cite the shooter’s placed,
by where people look for what’s against them,
we slouch that walk eye on our government
without thinking because we can’t think
without our common term yet
just a stink
of sense that something’s wrong here we always
used the word for
about our enemies:
dictatorship, takeovers, military
class rule, compromised legitimacies
These words hide as understood
our denial of such
with exclusive meaning
by definition never the us
or) By
our self-referent definition
none of these words
admits us and are (still in our habit
Colored Only. (43)In this passage of casual rhymes (“think” contaminated by “stink”) and off-rhymes (fervor against “enemies” compromising “legitimacies,” in which the use of the pronoun “we” makes the speaker (if not necessarily Roberson) implicate himself along with others, who is the target of disgust and/or pity? Who “walks” with such defensiveness, fear, and, as the pun on “steps” indicates, lack of positive social purpose? In 2000 and 2004, it can be said that the Bush campaign, capitalizing on the fact that many U.S. citizens had “a stink// of sense” of something awry in and with the U.S. yet lacked a coherent ideological critique of their nation’s ethicopolitical flaws, “sold” them vague abstractions that gave them something external to blame and made them overly comfortable about “America.” That many European-Americans, since the Civil Rights and Black Power era, have failed to identify the insufficiently corrected “habit” of institutional racism and thus perpetuate a form of segregation (“Colored Only”) may label them as the culprits at whom Roberson is pointing. The Charles Olson-like play with parentheses, however, might signify a useful uncertainty about boundaries: “we” “Americans” of various races and ethnicities, however divergent our economic status from one another, often uncritically utilize a “common term”—and “term” implies a temporal limit as well as a verbal expression—without perceiving how it limits “our” thinking and thus blunts possibilities of overall amelioration of national and international difficulties. Persistently, “Beauty’s Standing” solicits uncomfortable admissions and disrupts “exclusive meanings” and inadequate “self-referent definitions.”
No less than the late playwright August Wilson, another Pittsburgh native, Roberson in
City Eclogue exposes how the environments of the urban poor are undeveloped, diminished, ecologically and otherwise devastated. For example, the title of “The Open” signifies that a neighborhood is “opened,” not to opportunity but, “their buildings razed,” to the perception of emptiness (figured as the number “zero” [66]), a clearing away that teaches loss:
their blocks of bulldozed air opened to light
take your breath as much
by this kind of blinding choke as by the loss felt
in the openness
suddenly able to see
as if across a drained lake from below
a missing surface: the knowing everyone
by some common
immersion schooling you. (63)The trope of “bulldozed air” bespeaks the extremity of violence done, not to mere buildings, but to a cultural milieu and to literal “atmosphere conditions,” to allude to the title of Roberson’s 2000 collection. The poet seems to tell us that this “immersing” vision, elementally painful as the synesthetic “blinding choke” is, permits the benefit of a political insight. The wild impossibility of having the “privileged” vantage point “below” “a drained lake” underscores the sense of acute consciousness of a former presence through a current absence. Roberson laments the trials of “a people whose any beginning is disbursed/ by a vagrant progress,// whose any settlement/ is overturned for the better// of a highway through to someone else’s/ possibility” (64). That this “betterment”—this laying waste, “old houses moved down/ to vacant lots of garbage lawn”—is perpetrated by those whose economic good fortune contrasts mightily with those they are displacing receives the full weight of irony through modification of the noun “progress” by the adjective “vagrant.” And the play of “disbursed”/dispersed emphasizes the financial causes of disruption. From a sense of segregation (“distant separation”) by neighborhood comes knowledge of bitter interconnectedness.
Both “open” and dense areas can be equally problematic. “Eclogue,” the book’s final poem, juxtaposes an urban area, “flat and densely packed with people” and “the empty open of the plain,” where “the grown over dumpsite/ of the meadowlands wetlands or the shore/ is corps of engineered the bulldozer beetle’s/ ball of dung shines in it. . . “ (131). Roberson’s “city eclogues,” bearing a trace of the pastoral in evocative flashes of imagery, frequently account for socially induced devastation of what could otherwise flower. If, as he puts it in the last line of “Counsel of Birds, “the alarm is our alarms are not working” (116), the poet is working hard to revive the alarm.
*****
Thomas Fink, Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, is the author of two books of criticism, including A DIFFERENT SENSE OF POWER
(2001), and three books of poetry, most recently AFTER TAXES
(Marsh Hawk, 2004). His work has appeared in JACKET, VERSE, TALISMAN, CHICAGO REVIEW, DENVER QUARTERLY, x-Stream, MORIA, MILK, AUGHT, OCTOPUS, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW,
and numerous other journals and ezines. Fink's paintings hang in various collections.
DRIVE: THE FIRST QUARTET by LORNA DEE CERVANTES
WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA reviews
Drive: The First Quartet by Lorna Dee Cervantes(Wings Press, San Antonio, Texas, 2006)Sometimes literary works strike so deeply that it’s hard to say much about them except “Look!” Lorna Dee Cervantes’
Drive: The First Quartet is one of those works, but it is even more than that since it contains five smaller books in one, all full of energy, knowledge, excitement, growth, and anger—emotion itself. Just flip through, open this book randomly, and prepare to be awed by the beauty of the words. Take, for example, this excerpt from “Indigenous:”
Indigenous eyes, the hardness
of shale. Indigenous sky,
colorless. Wind wakes
the wanting of the weeds.
Fire frees the founding of the fence.
The sea slays the slicing
of the seasons. Rock
rocks the rocking of rage
into stone. Let it turn you
to salt. Let it lick you into
rapids. Make it see you
into stars. In this piece, there is no mistaking Cervantes’ mastery of language. She uses her skill with consonance and line breaks to present us with elements transformed, charged, so that they seem full of meaning or knowing, like the simple lines “Wind wakes / the wanting of the weeds.” The weeds and the wind have volition and react to each other, and the poem puts the reader, the you, into a larger charged community than we usually find ourselves. In this piece, as in many in the work, we find out something about ourselves that we already know but have not verbalized.
Moreover, this poet does not stray from conflict; in fact, she’s at the head of the line, like Neruda or Cardenal, rallying the wronged to action. Some of the poems from the beginning section, “‘How Far’s the War?’”, even have similarities with poems in Neruda’s
Canto general. For example, Cervantes explores the rape of the people and the land in her poem “Coffee.” Here’s a small bit of it:
In Guatemala the black buzzard
has replaced the quetzal
as the national bird. The shadow
of a man glides across the countryside,
over the deforested plantations; a death
cross burnishes history into myth
as it scours the medicinal land into coffee.These lines are beautiful, but they evoke action and memory as witness and battle call. One can almost hear Neruda whispering over Cervantes’ shoulder, “I have always preferred a poetry where the fingerprints show. A poetry of loam, where water can sing”
(Trans. Margaret Peden). In Cervantes’ work the fingerprints show full of the life that animates them. In the first section alone, she explores besides coffee and banana production, American imperialism, 9/11, and other equally important events. She shows herself to have an ear to the ground, but for her the ground is speaking.
Since Cervantes’ last book of poems, many years have passed, and this book, widely anticipated, was worth the wait. The themes, while ranging wide, strike accurately at the American pulse, and the language itself is symphonic, mesmerizing in its sheer elegance. Cervantes in the “Author’s Note” at the end mentions that she bound the books together in one so that it would be easy “for carrying with you.” That is exactly the type of work this is, one that you want to carry with you into nature, through the season, as a companion and guide.
*****
William Allegrezza teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poems, articles, and reviews have been published in several countries, including the U.S., Holland, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Australia, and are available in many online journals. Also, he is the editor of moria,
a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books. His books include The Vicious Bunny Translations, covering over, Temporal Nomads, Lingo,
and Ladders in July.
LOCKET by CATHERINE DALY
CATI PORTER reviews
Locket by Catherine Daly (Tupelo Press, Dorset, VT, 2005)Catherine Daly’s
Locket is sheathed in gold with black script, the flourish of an
L a swooshing swirling metaphor for one particularly troublesome four-letter word. Yes, these are love poems.
Lashed with lust, lush with longing, luscious as a labial-lingual kiss, Daly pulls us through a landscape rippling with heat, bristling with the riddle of that ‘same old song’. These are poems that are as straightforward and unapologetic as they are sweet and circumspect.
Love’s a huge subject. I can’t tell you that Daly has anything new to say about love or its effects of consequence. It’s how she goes about saying it that makes this worth your time, with language that is sharp and clean and smart and funny. Take these lines from the third section of the poem, “Osculate”:
Our two, worth their maximum and minimum,
perambulate, perform. Parabola, ellipsis, ellipses:
I would like to mention discontinuity at this juncture.
It slices our pair from the earth’s mantle.Out of context, this may seem like gobbledygook, but within these paper walls it makes perfect sense. This poem, in three sections, directly corresponds (in ascending order) to the Roman words for ‘kiss’:
Osculum, a greeting, an air kiss;
Basium, a direct lip-to-lip kiss between lovers; and
Savium, a ‘deep kiss’, known nowadays as ‘french’. Slipped in between these ‘kisses’ are references to mathematics, Jimi Hendrix, and WWII. Now consider that this poem, “Osculate”, uses the word ‘vacillate’ in the penultimate line, and is followed by a poem titled “Oscillate”.These poems are thick with images, references, word-play, making each a rich read. Daly uses language like a child uses blocks: she builds it up to knock it down.
Here is her poem, “Couple”:
“many a slip between cup and lip”
Two tipple tea, tupple, Tippacanoe,
sumptuously sip, sup, supple.
Two pull and tamp
their ample mutual appeal.
Two grasp two apples, oh,
to journey from Tampa to Tupelo.
Two peel their clothes.
They put and place, topple,
tumble, not duplicitous, pillowed, paired,
duplex, circumspect, slumber together.
Dual and singular, nuptial bells peal.Throughout I have found lines that seem particularly resonant. In the poem “Grain” the narrator states:
My love is a crop circle hoax,
has trampled all my grain. Such a terrific metaphor for love’s crush, that something thought to be so miraculous and out-of-this-world can be flipped, becoming so real it turns fake, false.
Here is a line that I absolutely love from “American Beauty: Night”:
Comport yourself within this machinery of want. ‘Want’ is just that: a machine propelling us toward--something--that will (hopefully, temporarily) satisfy. But it is a messy, undignified process.
In “Endnotes” there is so much language-play that it almost becomes nonsensical, but it is joyful nonsense.
She scatters her words with Arabic numerals,
Superscript or superior, a supertitled opera,
supernumerary, numinous, superfluous, fluent.Love may be her always implicit, sometimes explicit, subject, but it is the way she skips and dances around it that makes this book such an engaging read.
In “Footnotes,” on the facing page, there is a line which I think sums it up best:
If the ride’s pleasurable
it can be followedLocket is a lovesong. If I were to locate one flaw, I would say it is in the seeming predictability of the narrative arc. But that can also be considered an asset. On all levels,
Locket is pleasurably riddled and referenced; a reverberating read.
*****
Cati Porter is poet, artist, freelance writer, and editor of the online literary journal, Poemeleon.
Her poetry has been featured on kaleidowhirl, Poetry Southeast, Sunspinner, Banyan Review,
and Poetry Midwest.
She lives in Riverside, California, with her husband and two young sons.
TWO BOOKS by CATHERINE DALY: LOCKET and DADADA
JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN reviews:
Locket by Catherine Daly (Tupelo Press, Dorset, VT, 2005)and
DaDaDa by Catherine Daly(Salt, Cambridge, U.K. 2003)A confession: I decided to review these books because they struck me at first glance as real foreign country. And what little I knew of Daly intimidated: just read her bio. There were generational issues, too; the future (or is it merely the present, which I’ve fallen behind?), as well as the past, sometimes appears as a foreign country. Who are the Lyres, for instance? And there was something about the “poetics” statement I found on her web page, which begins, “Poets should not write their poems in a single (unitary, unified) style, voice, poetic, using a single technique, approach, form, or habit.” The utter didacticism of “should not”: that was scary. But I’m glad I reviewed her books. It turns out they are full of what I look for in poetry: that special combination of the irreplaceably individual and the commonly human.
From what I’ve been able to glean from Daly’s website, and from a 2002 article/interview by Brandon Backhaus, the work in
Locket seems to precede that in
DaDaDa. Seems to, I say. I can’t be entirely sure. In any case, I’ll deal with
Locket first, if for no other reason than
DaDaDa is a much bigger book, and, at first glance, at least, more challenging (damn, I intimidate easily, don’t I?).
The poems in
Locket look like lyrics, or little narratives: short, self-contained, left-margin justified. But what does lyric and/or narrative mean these days? Without rehashing 30 years of intense (if sometimes insane) discussion, suffice it to say we can no longer count on referentiality, a unified point of view, an intelligible story, an “I” that “is” “somebody”.
Locket intentionally avoids “a single (unitary, unified) style, voice, poetic.” The least one can say is these poems are more-or-less up-to-date. But it’s possible to say more than that. Is it ok to use words like
heart? Like
beauty?
The first poem in
Locket, “Breakfast for One: A Formality”, exemplifies many of this book’s qualities. It begins:
A show of butter
on toast, translucent bone
china laid upon a linen field,
and dove-like napkins:We could be in the New York of a Wharton or the Boston of an Eliot. But as the poem continues, we’re suddenly somewhere else:
this dawn of birds fashioned
from inorganic salt and volatile oil
would break an enameled egg,
spew sand and light.Let’s look a little more closely at the first two lines. Maybe I’m a bad reader, but I can’t tell whether it’s the dawn or the birds or the dawn-of-birds that’s
fashioned / from inorganic salt and volatile oil, not that that really bothers me; the point is, we’ve left “Wharton/Eliot” behind. Where are we? I’m no chemist; I don’t know what inorganic salt might be. So I did what any sensible person would do at this point of the 21st Century: I googled it: about 290K hits. I googled organic salt as well, to see if that taught me anything; that shows up about a third as frequently. If Daly (who is, after all, the author, if not the “I” of this poem) is making a point here, it’s one that’s more than ever so slightly beyond me. After googling inorganic (and organic) salt together with volatile oil, I began to see a possible something: cosmetics. OK. Maybe someone’s all dressed up, with her “face on”, as my mother used to say, for a lonely breakfast. Maybe. That’s story enough for me, to the extent I need a story. But on the plane of pure (?) pleasure it doesn’t matter. I concentrate on this poem because its moves are not atypical: as I read through
Locket, I know and don’t know, I know and don’t know, over and over, where I am, who or what is speaking. When I come to the “don’t know” parts, Daly’s
song carries me.
Locket includes a number of strategies, a number of musics. Take “Couple”, the title of which is itself a pun, a sign/form/song of exuberance, which begins:
“many a slip between cup and lip”
Two tipple tea, tupple, Tippecanoe,
sumptuously sip, sup, supple.
Two pull and tamp
their ample mutual appeal. Tippecanoe, I suspect, is there for a number of reasons, only some of which I get, and none of which have anything to do with the battlefield or with Tecumseh or William Henry Harrison (though I’m willing to eat these words; I put nothing past her): first, the pun, which suggests good rocking that ends with a drenching, and second, for sheer love. Of her love. And the music. And language.
Daly makes some other moves that sucker-punch (no, better, seduce) me. She’s got a way with what I still call aphorisms, for instance:
It’s no secret the heart’s an altar (“The Mugho Pine”, III). And she knows this world. From “Footnotes”:
Sun up, poppies bloom,
the sea of mud runs with rats, rots corn,
dead infantrymen decay
in their garments. There’s a lot going on in
Locket. I think it’s worth reading. I didn’t write this for the review copy. But I’m keeping it.
Now to
DaDaDa. It’s described as a trilogy (is that her name in the title, three times lurking?) It’s much less “merely” lyrical/narrative, much more “open field”, in parts much less “readable” than
Locket (I wouldn’t be surprised if it is later work, since, in retrospect, as
Locket moves along, it seems more and more like
DaDaDa). It’s not (overtly, at least; as I said, I put nothing past her) a collection of “poems [that] are also, in their way, love poems” (A comment of Daly’s relating to
Locket), at least not love poems as in love for one other human. It’s also much more obviously and mysteriously intertextual.
It also seems
religious. Is that another word it’s ok to use now that we’re all so post-whatever (don’t get me started ranting about all the fictions inherent in that!)? I think so, if you believe, like William Blake, that “everything that lives is holy.” Daly might in fact go beyond Blake and believe that everything that is, animate, inanimate, linguistic, whatever, is holy. “From the Baltimore Catechism” begins:
Q. 1399. What words should we bear always in mind? // A. We should bear always in mind these words: // a / according / and … and which focuses us on the littlest things and their relations, the
a, the
if, the
of, the
to, the
world.
Note: on rereading the above I realize I’ve assumed the reality of the world, and a relation between words and that reality. I understand that’s controversial. But I do assume that reality and that relation. With that said …
Daly’s religiosity is pretty encompassing, as one might expect of a poet who wants us to bear in mind everything from a on. It’s certainly not an either/or religiosity, like the one that’s taken over most of the planet. It gladly includes her PDA (which she uses to anchor a little anthology),
jars of unguents, undulating clothes, fuck me pumps, / mirror, comb, in fact the whole
show. It seems to encompass everything, These lines of hers,
jars … shows above, lead her almost directly, by the way, to
vast is the maybe, a line I wish I’d written and which I swear I’ll steal some day. Yes. Vast is the maybe. How religious is
that?
Note written a week after writing the above, while reading Robert Storr on Raymond Pettibon: it occurs to me that perhaps I’ve read Daly entirely backwards, and upside-down, that perhaps her constant return to the characters, symbols and language of religion isn’t religious at all. It may be post-religious. The more I read her the less I can tell. Here’s Storr on Pettibon, rewritten slightly by me, changing
he’s to
she’s, so it’s now me on Daly, using Storr’s words:
What her specific beliefs may be we have no need or right to know, but the repeated references to Christianity and the many topical, philosophical and emotional nuances she gives them makes it an issue in her work in all, rather than just a few, of its dimensions. Fundamentally the question is less one of a person’s opinions on that issue than of the place belief occupies in their life or might occupy or once occupied and has left vacant. So maybe my ‘how religious is
that?’ should read ‘how religious
is that?’
Take this line from “False Apparitions”:
Finally, I decided the visions were diabolical visitations. This is, presumably, “(St.) Catherine (de) Vigri (of Bologna)” speaking. But
only St. Catherine? When the author of
DaDaDa is a Catherine, too? And visions
are visions, diabolical visitations or not. I guess what it boils down to is I’m not sure her religion encompasses
belief anymore, or whether it ever did. I kinda think it very well may not. From the “Blinds” Section of “In Media Res”:
Who is the index, where is good. Nowhere if not in me, maximal.
…
Who is the index?
I am.Here is Marguerite Porete (also from “In Media Res”) (or is it Daly, speaking through Porete?):
Readers, think before speaking about this book. Daly’s strategies as a poet make thinking necessary but concluding impossible. I said about
Locket, “I know and don’t know, I know and don’t know, over and over, where I am”. Let me say it again, re:
DaDaDa.
What I interpret as her religiosity (or should I say her use of the characters, symbols and language of religion?) is only one of many ways I could have entered into discussion of this book. I chose it because it struck me as unusual. If this were a dissertation or an article I could have said lots about
DaDaDa. But would I ever have known (for sure) what I was talking about? This is a hell of a way to run a review. But I think (I
think) I can chalk my uncertainty up as just what Daly wants.
This is good, challenging, stuff. And she can
sing. Daly can make magic from Robert Plant’s moans, runs feminine/feminist riffs on that old student/reference librarian standby,
Masterplots in “Mistress Plots”, can reprocess/rework/reimagine the texts/words/voices of a variety of characters from medieval heretics to modernists (but as I write that I wonder how much is source and how much is Daly, and even whether these are
all Daly’s words, and not re-anythings of the texts/words/voices of others; I’d have to do a great deal of research to be sure … ).
Daly is a subtle complex thinker/singer. In fact, the deeper I plunge into her work, the fewer words I have to describe it. It is what it is, thick, rich, death (or is it life?) by chocolate. Maybe that’s why the blurbs on the back cover read as they do:
mistresses, matrices, vessels, vials, viols, vile induces, indices … that’s Adeena Karasick; Aldon L. Neilson resorts to constructions such as
verse’s universe and
about aboutness. These are homages to Daly’s dexterities and to some of her tunes, as well as admissions that attempts to explain, to tear apart into separate strands of meaning, are perhaps misdirected.
I’ve babbled on enough, though it could be I’m just getting started. But I’ll stop here with this:
DaDaDa is a book one can and maybe even should return to over and over. It’s not one of those things that just
unlocks.
Note written a day or two after the above: Eileen R. Tabios, our esteemed editor, published two hay(na)ku on 1 April on
one of her blogs:
How To Read A Poem
I
Is false
You start there.
How To Write A Poem
You
are real.
I start there.If false is opposed to real, then it should be impossible and illegitimate for me to say “Daly thinks” or “Daly believes”; given this, perhaps I should have been saying “Daly’s poems think” or something like that. But I don’t buy that false is opposed to real, or that the “fact” that “poets should not write their poems in a single (unitary, unified) style, voice, poetic, using a single technique, approach, form, or habit” means that a poem’s “construct I or I’s” have nothing to do with the poet. I think Daly would agree with me since she does write “Poets should not write
their poems …” (emphasis mine). A little suspicion ain’t a bad thing, agreed. But if the poem’s “construct I or I’s” are false, false meaning they have no reality to them,
nothing to do with the poet, or the world, or
anything, why would anyone bother reading or writing? Not that I believe this is quite what our editor meant, but it got me thinking. In any case, I’m going to let the above review stand as-is, and not go back and change every “Daly thinks” etc. to something like “the poem’s construct I or I’s think” (not that constructs “think”, good god this could get endless…). If I’m wrong, may the gods of poetry forgive me.
I said I’d stop and didn’t. My bad. Sorry. But these are good books and it’s hard to stop thinking about them and the problems they raise.
*****
John Bloomberg-Rissman is humanities bibliographer for the libraries of the the University of California, Riverside. That means he buys stuff with taxpayer money (better books than bombs, eh?). He has authored half a dozen chapbooks, most recently with Bamboo Books, Culver City, CA, has published recently in BIG BRIDGE, LITTER
and POETRY NOTTINGHAM,
and is eagerly awaiting the print appearance of his first long work, TRAVELS TO CAPITALS,
which has been accepted for publication. His current project is called ZHILI BYLI
, which, when complete, will consist of 100 parts; he's currently up to part 40. You can find JBR online at ZEITGEIST SPAM.
LEARNING THE LANGUAGE by KATE GREENSTREET
JULIE R. ENSZER reviews
Learning the Language by Kate Greenstreet(Etherdome, Boulder & San Francisco, 2005) Kate Greenstreet takes us on a well-crafted, topological journey in her chapbook,
Learning the Language. Her spare poems weave together found material and thematic elements across four “movements” within the chapbook. Each “movement” is separated by a page with a statement and photograph. I think of them as guides or keys to the topological map that we are reading in
Learning the Language. The four movements are:
“Learning a language is a form of travel”
“map of the world”
“translate exactly”
“How will we see where we are from where we are?
Each movement contains a poem titled “Yellow Book” and “Learning the Language” and each return of the poem while different provides thematic unity to the collection. Working thoughtfully with the issues of travel, family, love, and loss, Greenstreet creates intelligent and artful lyrics in each poem and wraps them together tightly in the whole that is the chapbook.
I think that Greenstreet is at her strongest when she writes finely observed lines like this in “Yellow House” in the third movement of the book,
“We’ll paint the bedroom yellow
Not like corn, you said, like wheat
I sleep outside and dream about my daughter.
The mountain wears a headdress
The wheat will be a mother”Or this opening to the final poem of the book, “The Interpreter,” where Greenstreet writes, “See how the child begins humming to herself when she’s left alone?/How, after she’s alone for a while, she starts to sing, quietly,/and open her eyes.” The poem concludes with these lines: “This road./It’s hard./It’s mud./Rises/as dust. We walk on it.” Greenstreet has a powerful sense of lyric intensity, creative leaps, and thematic unity which is well realized in this chapbook.
I adore the world of chapbooks, but they have some limitations.
Learning the Language suffers from a poor reproduction of the photographic images that I suspect are an important part of each of the book’s movements. They are rendered nearly unintelligible, however, by the reproduction of the book. I think it is a loss. Moreover, I wish that all chapbook publishers would follow some conventions of books, namely, provide a table of contents and page numbers. Too often I see chapbooks, like this one, without them. Certainly chapbooks are small and designed often to be read in one sitting. Still, I find these conventions of book publishing to be invaluable and miss them enormously when they are not present. In the case of
Learning the Language, I also missed having a biography of the poet and some sort of explanation about the photographs included throughout. The chapbook devotes a full page to citations of various found sources of the poem; the blank page behind it could have provided information about the author and the photographs.
Despite these quibbles,
Learning the Language is an excellent example of the chapbook form with a combination of visual and verbal art and craft wound tightly together. It is a strong debut for the poet Kate Greenstreet. Her full length book,
case sensitive, will be published by Ahsahta Press in September 2006. Readers will want to see this next work from Greenstreet.
*****
Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot,
the Web Del Sol Review,
and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual.
You can learn more about her work at www.JulieRenszer.com.
FOUR CHAPS by ERNESTO PRIEGO, EDWARD STRESINO, BRYCE MILLIGAN, and OLIVIA CRONK
David Harrison Horton offers mini-reviews of four chaps:
THE BODY ACHES [POEMS AND HAY(NA)KU] by Ernesto Priego;
LOST AND CERTAIN OF IT by Bryce Milligan;
GAZOOLY by Olivia Cronk; and
ON EVERY EMPTY LOT by Edward Stresino.
Chaps Received and Collected
Ernesto Priego, The Body Aches: [Poems and Hay(na)ku] (ExPressoDoble, Mexico City, 2005). 18 pages.There’s a certain danger with form, even
hay(na)ku’s one word, two word, three word stanzas. Oftentimes, form dictates the terms of a poem to its own demise. Priego seems to fully understand and escape all this. Familiar with Priego’s work mainly through his blog (
Never Neutral), I expected a hay(na)ku fest, but was pleasantly surprised to find the chapbook starting off with the title poem’s four couplets of varying syllables (16,11; 7, 12; 11, 10; and 9, 12 respectively):
How difficult it is, the body tells you, to keep a promise:
To say, painlessly, j’accepte, and keep your word.(ll. 1-2)
The hay(na)ku make their appearance as the bottom half of “An English House” on page 5:
Dreams
like water
keep me dry:
Yesterday
I lost
my floating board. (ll. 22-27)
As the poem begins with differently syllabled tercets, the seamless shift into a more structured form demonstrates Priego’s care and craft as the reading tapers down the first half’s already quite sparse use of image and words to a core minimum.
“Für Eileen” pays homage to Eileen Tabios, the originator and maven of the hay(na)ku form and also depicts the difficulty that this form—and writing poetry in general—can pose:
I
thought I
wanted to write
Something
in three
very simple lines.
…
I
thought I:
poetry is received:
It
is never
given away freely. (ll. 1-6; 33-39)
Priego seems to make a differentiation between poetry and hay(na)ku with the subtitle to the book, but the text makes clear that the form is a technique to make the words in these poems carry as much weight as possible.
+++++
Edward Stresino, On Every Empty Lot (Editorial ABC, Bogota, 1968). 10 pages.Super long out of print and out of Bogota at that. There were five copies of this at a Bedford Ave bookstore for $1.50 when I was recently out in the Williamsburg area visiting some friends. My library searches tentatively link the author to a collection of poems published in 1955 and a more recent bilingual phrasebook for child abuse case workers. Perhaps this should also be filed with
CA Conrad’s Neglectorino Project.
At any rate, the chap is a single poem. On its face it’s a beautiful–if sometimes shlocky-- eulogy to a departed friend/mentor/lover. What makes this stand out is the deft and calculated usage of marginalia that forces a rereading of the immediate lines and more generally and importantly the entire poem. For example, lines 1-4 read
Ohoh, when you’re famous
you’ll be bald, but allright
we’ll show them you had hair once
and not only where they think.The marginalia for lines 2-3 read
The beginning is meant
to repel the uninitiated.The poem begins and immediately the marginalia coopts and overrides what would otherwise be a more or less standard narrative love poem. This is a strong (somewhat flawed, but compelling) example of marginalia as form.
+++++
Bryce Milligan, Lost and Certain of It (Aark Arts, London, 2006). 37 pages.This is the type of chap designed with an eye towards the "book arts." It has a cut away cover that exposes a physical dimension to the psychological state of the full title. On the cover you see "LOST" in a little window. When you flip the cover, you get the full title against a forested backdrop, adding to the lost-in-the-woods anxiety, I suppose. It’s sewn-stitched bound, and printed on paper so good it detracts from the reading of the poems. But, in this case, that’s welcomed, as the poems in between the covers don’t seem to have too much to stand on in and of themselves:
I need a metaphor that will transform
This skeleton of passion into some
Thing that breathes fire rather than the still air
Of considered conundrums, into some
Thing that stands of its own accord against
Time and these chill unseasonable winds. (“Metaphor” ll. 1-6)
Milligan rounds out the chap with a few selections from his songbook. There are few songsters around capable of divorcing the lyrics from the actual musical context: Leadbelly, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen maybe in his better moments… it’s a short list. Milligan tries to evoke this tradition but his attempt falls flat, such as the book's ending “Dark Freight,” a song fashioned after the blues train tradition:
Here she comes rumbling out of the moonrise,
To catch her you’ve got to run fast:
Throw yourself through the doorway to paradise
And let the wheels of fate run freely at last. (ll.44-8)
+++++
Olivia Cronk, Gazooly (Beard of Bees, Chicago, 2006). 8 pages. Free online at http://www.beardofbees.com/pubs/Gazooly.pdf.In her preface, Cronk explains to the reader not only the process (semi-Oulipian) and source (a 19th century table book) for the poems that follow, but also explains that as these have been written to be performed by the readers out loud and in specific situations, that readers should embrace their own sense of agency for their part in the poems: “I have taken great liberty in arranging details to my fancy adding my own flourishes, like any future creator of the poems should do” (iii).
In places the poems resemble more an absurdist drama, as in “To be read in phone tree form, thirteen listening callers, one listener”:
Caller six: I cannot think.
Caller seven: You do not recollect.
Caller six: What makes my ankles grow so thick?
Caller seven: How great a calf they carry! (4)
This poem’s ultimate line is a stage direction that potentially extends the absurdity to infinity: “(fourteenth listener stays on the line, a good faith effort)” (5).
Several of the poems are for more than one voice; the dramatic verse form lends itself to a performance dynamic outside of the usual poetry reading aesthetic. The surprises that come from a processed text and Cronk’s openness for future adaptations makes these poems something that everyone should try the next time they get together with their friends.
*****
David Harrison Horton is author of the chapbook Pete Hoffman Days.
His poems have recently appeared in Backwards City Review, eye rhyme,
and Five Fingers Review
among others. He lives and writes in Oakland, California.
FROM SERIES MAGRITTE by MARK YOUNG
LAUREL JOHNSON reviews
from Series Magritte by Mark Young(Moria Poetry, Chicago, 200_)Mark Young is a New Zealander, now living in Australia, who has several poetry books to his credit. Young's strong connection to the international poetry scene is demonstrated -- at least in part -- by his two popular blogs:
Series Magritte and
Pelican Dreaming [which recently retired in favor of his current blog,
Gamma Ways]. His latest book of poetry is inspired by the work of artist Rene Magritte. Like the artist, Young's poetry is edgy and unconventional, its impact on readers often unexpected.
"The Hunters at the Edge of Night" is a prime example of the unexpected impact experienced when reading Young's poetry. I quote this poem in its entirety:
Usually he evaded the hunters
with little trouble. Only when
the dogs joined in
did he feel trepidation. They
spoke a different language. It seemed
more familiar to him
though at first he understood it
less. Finally he stopped running,
covered himself in mud &
became invisible. He learnt
the hierarchy of the dogs, the
patterns & cycles of their
behaviour. He killed the alpha male
just after the dominant female
came on heat then caught & coupled
with her. Now they hunt the hunters.Convoluted thoughts made visible are a hallmark of Young's work. I quote one excerpt from "Memory", memorable thoughts and words coupled with dramatic cadence:
Antiquities weep
blood. In the
Byzantine piazzas
of the labyrinth
pigeons pause
& whisper
Hebdomeros.In "The Song of Love" Young addresses Magritte's art and one person's unexpected response to thoughts made visible:
…this is the
siren song of
love that
fifty years before
made Yves Tanguy
jump from
a moving tram
that made
Magritte
say he saw
thought made visible
for the first
time. Making the
possible
improbable
but not
impossible. Pictures
within pictures.
Songs within
songs. Of
love & other
strangeness.Humans out of step with reality, feeling their way through the "yellow fog of melancholy" while contemplating the juxtaposition of things is key to Young's poetry, just as it was to Magritte's art. His poetry is invigorating and addictive.
*****
Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review;
Review Editor for New Works Review;
Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review
and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review
and Irish News and Entertainment.
Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.
TYPICAL GIRL by DONNA KUHN
RICHARD LOPEZ reviews
Typical Girl by Donna Kuhn (Fine Tooth Press, Waterbury, CT., 2005)Comedy is the first word I think of when I try to describe the poetry of Donna Kuhn. Not that the language Kuhn uses is sit-com type canned hilarity. Black comedy is more like it, an apter description perhaps, and I use the phrase not to limit the range and vitality of Kuhn's more abstract writings. Consider Kuhn's totems in her most recent collection
Typical Girl: bird, horse, moon, the color blue, water, and you have glimpsed a kind of writing that is based on images for their import. Better yet, consider these lines that conclude the poem "going round"
u cant deny
what u been to
with all that dark chaos going roundand you also have an idea of the type of comedy Kuhn employs. Yes, Kafka would recognize a kindred spirit, but so would Buster Keaton. The humor is not laugh-out-loud, but the sort that is derived from tragedy, risk and chance. Not defeatist in any sort of way, I'd hazard to guess that Kuhn keeps returning to her totems, especially birds (several poems use bird in their titles, for example "short bird taste", "shiver to birds", "can i put the bird back", "i was trying to be a bird", "bird chatter") to keep the world on point and prevent it from blurring into chaos. But also, that comedy for Kuhn is that famous window on the wall that ol' Buster slipped through in
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). Out of that dark chaos the wall of a house falls straight on Stoneface only to miss crushing him because there was a measure of a window to save him, and that measurement was absolutely precise, a portal against nonsense, and an exhilaration.
But is it surrealism, another brand of comedy made famous by the likes of Dali and Breton? Most of Kuhn's texts are abstract, therefore surrealism sticks out its craw as a label. The poems exult in difficulty, thereby these texts are resistant to specific meanings from their imagery. The poems in this book were written between 1979 to 2005, however, and there are texts that are, I think, early pieces of literal narratives of street life, and not at all abstract. These pieces are another facet to Kuhn's talent. Take the poem "bus stop" as an early example.
chickenheadfred's mother sits at the bus stop
by a brown paper bag full
of old clothes entitled FREE
she complains about the younger generation
how only five years earlier
kids did not drive around in circles
shouting fuck you out windows
but now we are all hooked
on awful smoking drinking habits
we all want to quit life
there is no way around quitting
life she says
out comes her shoemaker son
they quarrel in a foreign language
about shoes
he tells me he can get me a job
at jerome’s hot dogs
that working is a healthy routine
his mother tells me my shoes
are terrible for walking
i wasn't planning to go too farBam! the last line cinches the poem to a satisfying conclusion. The lines are taut, and the precision lies in the narrative motions of a linear logic. But contrast it to a later text where Kuhn uses her totems to full effect. The poem "pinch the lake" is a fair representative of Kuhn's vitality and difficulty, yet it is a mark of what I think of as her brand of black comedy. It is surrealistic, but not typically so, and I can't help but think that it references our post-911 world.
i am half of a fish door; the moon opens ice.
is a fish walking with a bird?
winston, the planes hit a bird.
i am open at the center for flat tires.
bird terrorism. bird i am bird i am open.
a bird wan't me in the heat.
father, shut the lake.
winston, the plane hit long ago.
bird i am bird i am i'm light with a bird.
now i see nonviolence. i'm her landscapes
profitable moon. light bird chatter.
a bird wasn't me.I've no idea who winston could be, perhaps Kuhn is invoking Winston Smith from Orwell's famous novel about negative utopia. The buzzwords of post-911 are present, such as "chatter" and "plane" and "terrorism". But that is as far as I want to take it, since my reading of the poem is like watching a silent film. The images have become more definite, cinematic even, while eschewing narrative logic, and the meanings of Kuhn's texts have become more opaque. But you let such imagery wash over you, and take pleasure out of their congruencies. I'm not one to argue that poems must be about something, but since poetry uses grammar and syntax it is impossible not to try to define it, however broadly. The images of bird and fish are portals of transformation. The line "bird i am bird i am i'm light with a bird" echoes Stein in its iterations whereby translating language into prismatic vantage point(s). Of what? Again, for me, Keaton's absurdities (having a house fall around you but survive by the precise placement of a window) reprises what one wishes the world to be, and sometimes becomes by the re-iterations of totemic language. So that we (reader/writer) become agents of that dark chaos all around us. In Kuhn's poems realities are changed utterly by the velocity of language.
Typical Girl is filled with many such beautiful abstractions. Even upon re-reading Kuhn's poems I still cannot locate precise definitions, but the meanings, line by line, accrue pleasure upon pleasure in the reader. I'll end by saying that, damn, wish I had written it! I can't of course, only Donna Kuhn can write this poetry. Her poems are an invigoration of the arts of writing, and reading.
*****
Richard Lopez is a poet in Sacramento. Poems have appeared or/are forthcoming in canwehaveourballback?, shampoo, watching the wheel:a blackbird, fhole, el pobre mouse, mipoesias etc. etc.
His interview with the poet Tom Beckett was published in Jacket 25.
He takes notes at his blog http://reallybadmovies.blogspot.com.
DESIRE PATH by MYRNA GOODMAN, MAXINE SILVERMAN, MEREDITH TREDE AND JENNIFER WALLACE
In addition to the following review, scroll down for a note on the publishing format of this project, offered by poet and publisher SANDY MCINTOSH. But first, JULIE R. ENSZER reviews
Desire Path, a collection of four chaps by Myrna Goodman, Maxine Silverman, Meredith Trede, and Jennifer Wallace(Toadlily Press, Chappaqua, N.Y., 2005)Friendship: The Desired Path The directive to the young writer is always: find a group. Find a collection of others like you, introverted, preferring to spend the days and nights alone in a room, plumbing your soul. Find a group. Share what you write. Be gentle. Encourage one another. Young writers are told this regularly. The four authors in
Desire Path did that and more. The fruit of their group extends beyond ripe berries from the bramble to the pantry with a freshly baked pie cooling on the shelf.
Desire Path appears to be a full book of poetry but contains within it four distinct chapbooks by four poets, three of whom have been meeting monthly as a writing group for ten years (the fourth joined the group in 2001). Each poet is allotted sixteen pages in the collection. The four chapbooks combined create
Desire Path, with a foreword by Thomas Lux.
Myrna Goodman submits the first sixteen pages with fourteen poems and the title
Some Assembly Required. Goodman’s poems are well crafted and capture particular moments with spare length. From a poem riffing on an advertising campaign of Apple computers to Rand McNally maps, these poems are rooted in the experiences of daily life. Goodman’s observations are quirky, as in the poem “My Two Cents,” where she notes, “When you’re 2 you’re never alone,/you always have a companion with personality—,” and inspired as in the poem, “Even If,” where she writes,
The gods could
still arrive at my door, . . . .
make my daughters lie down
with swans, leave my grandchild chainedShe concludes, “Better not tempt the gods today. Better/sit here in the spring sun worrying a word.” This first chapbook of Myrna Goodman begins
Desire Path on a strong note.
The second chapbook by Maxine Silverman, titled
Red Delicious, has poems that are more expansive in their size and spatial arrangement on the page, but take their inspiration from daily life—primarily the domesticated natural world—and Jewish spirituality. For me, one of the most wonderful lines is from the poem, “Days of Awe,” where Silverman writes about hearing Yehuda Amichai read and “sparks/flew out from the book/touch us touch us/ and the souls of the letters/hovered.” Perhaps the best poem in this chapbook is “The Black Dog,” opening with this line: “A black dog comes into your life and reorders it.” The poem meditates with its long lines over time about a beloved dog.
The third chapbook by Meredith Trede is titled,
Out of the Book. Trede devotes nine of her pages to a long poem in eleven parts of family history with the same title as the chapbook. Each poem in this series presents a well-crafted insight into a family narrative. While the narrative is full in the existing poem, the time frame that each poem in the series evokes indicates that there is still a fuller body of work for this poet to write on this topic, which is often one of the delights of chapbooks: early insight into the themes and issues that will consume and be realized in a poets later work.
The fourth chapbook by Jennifer Wallace is
Minor Heaven. The placement of Wallace’s chapbook at the end was wise. Her poems speak to the earlier poems of Goodman and Silverman. The interconnectedness of the poems between those three poets in particular seem to provide insight to what this writing group may be like: four poets (four friends?) carefully reading and commenting on one another work and shaping each other’s future work. Wallace, in her most ambitious poem of the chapbook, “Requiem,” writes,
Perhaps we are here to make of earth a minor heaven
where birds will glide higher
in an air made more full
by the deads’ barely audible sigh.The novelty of four bound chapbooks by four poets is delightful, and these four poets have executed it well. From their own selections of what to include in each chapbook to the ordering of the chapbooks as a whole,
Desire Path is a strong book with four new women’s voices in poetry. The novelty, however, is its weakness as well. Each chapbook because somewhat muddled with the sequential presentation. Each poet, with her distinctive voice, blends together within the whole. This may be a disservice to the poets.
Desire Path also may be a disservice to the form of the chapbook as well, debasing it into the form of any other trade paperback. Still, that criticism is too esoteric to be highly regarded. Think instead of
Desire Path as the consequence of the best of what the contemporary literary world has to offer: good groups, good poets, good books.
*****
Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review,
and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual.
You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.*****
A Note on the Publication Format of Desire Pathis offered by Sandy McIntosh, the managing editor for
Marsh Hawk Press (New York) which is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. Marsh Hawk Press was conceived partly because its collective members identified a need for a collective such as theirs, given the constraints of the existing poetry publishing infrastructure. In this sense, Desire Path was also of interest to Mr. McIntosh, who writes:
Desire Path
is a collection of four chapbooks, with an able introduction by Thomas Lux. Combining chapbooks with affinity into one volume is not only a good aesthetic idea, it's also a necessary one. After all, there is really no serious professional distribution for individual chapbooks. In practical commercial terms, chapbooks are a legacy from a remote time. In my earliest experience, during the '60s and '70s, chapbooks were sold at small book fairs--and, certainly, their authors sold them after poetry readings (the biggest selling events for most all poetry books, then and now). But at modern bookselling venues, such as AWP, almost all books on offer are products as professional as any issued by major book publishers. And they are almost always full-length. It seems to me that the survival of the chapbook as an artform will be accomplished by Internet-based magazines and by printed collections, such as this one.
MORAINE by JOANNA FUHRMAN
EILEEN TABIOS reviews
MORAINE by Joanna Fuhrman(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, 2006) A BOOK REVIEW IN THE FORM OF AN INTRODUCTION TO A POET’S READING[First written to introduce Joanna Fuhrman at her April 7, 2006 reading at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco. While not delivered due to last minute schedule conflicts, it's delivered here as a book review.]“Music is a reason for rooms”
--from “Post-Suburban Moraine”I.The moraine is “a mound, ridge or ground covering of unsorted debris, deposited by the melting away of a glacier” -- according to the Geology Dictionary. According to Joanna Fuhrman’s poetry collection
MORAINE, the word is as much about the melting as its aftermath. First, the poet must start with the architecture of the melt, and in her hands it is one of increasing revelations:
…she builds another house;…tears
for bricks, and cries as loud as she can…
Still he can’t hear her because the house’s
rectangular tears are too dazzlingly beautiful (13)I excerpt that from “Architecture Moraine,” the aptly titled and aptly-the-first-poem in Fuhrman’s book because the architecture of melting conceptually bespeaks vision: one witnesses, too, the
marvelous (as I think Philip Lamantia meant of said “marvelous”, albeit less "savage").
It’s a testament to Fuhrman’s wisdom that she doesn’t reduce the matter to the visual, but also encompasses the aural. Later in the same poem, she writes
…The ceiling is neither of their mouths,
but full of teeth. The sky above: a chicken,
fresh out of a fake swamp, opening its eyes
and flashing its resplendent wings. (13)But, first, she began the poem with this:
A woman builds a house out of birds’ cries and cries (13)This insistent noise -- and often marvelously a song --that articulates the poet’s observance of seemingly random juxtapositions fashions the poetry. But it is not enough to see. One must also speak of what one sees:
A man holds a stethoscope to a woman’s closed mouth.
A man holds a tongue out to another man’s car (15)II.Of course, sound can be insufficient -- from “Self-Portrait Moraine with Missing Tuba”:
Who bops along to these jammed resentments?
What’s behind that particular gaggle of hipster noise? (16)It would be tragic to keep speaking only to ultimately conclude:
…any real communication -- forever futile,
rain-ravaged, root-ruined, the skeletons of umbrellas (17)Do we lapse to humor? From “Approaching-Religious Moraine”:
A telephone is too anthropomorphic to be any use
as a religious icon. Likewise the ocean. Mama Mama. (21)An interesting, even funny twist of words. But still—how will it matter, if it does matter? The possible fate to such word-weaving is too discernible: more “skeletons of umbrellas.” No wonder the poet also cries out, sings out:
Song, I hate your demands! (21)Or, as in “Post-Suburban Moriaine,”
All along I knew the razzmatazz beauty was said to conjure
was just a weary catalogue, a thermometer designed to make us
sick (25)But the poet did—does—not give up. Nihilism is lazy. She kept excavating and so will come to be able to write (from “Before Thinking Moraine”):
All the water glasses line up
This means I am an art student and a classmate is telling me about a forgotten ancient language in which the words for colors are named for rocks.
There are an inifinite variety of rock types, so each shade of color has its own distinct name: indisputable, known, clear.
Misunderstanding can never occur because each color word meaning is exact. (23)III.Exact enough to articulate energy
I was all geeked out
in my “Poetry Rules!” T-shirt
and kneepads when the rain
washed away my attempt
at a rondeau (32)There is no exclamation point after “rondeau” but it just means the exclamatory energy is invisible, not non-existent.
The book continues to unfold with a geek’s passionate love affair with lingo -- surely displaying that the poet has come a long way for not being able to “tell a wise crack from a crack in an ass.” 56
It is fitting that when the book ends, we sense logic and no sense of arbitrary juxtapositions in this excerpt from “Self-Portrait as Infant Moraine”:
“I was born on the tracks during a railroad strike, and then again on a down pillow in the palace of Versailles. My father brushed my scars with vinegar to keep flies from my corpse. My mother shined my silver rattle so I could see reflections of my servants from my crib. (73)The poet kept her eyes unflinching to witness everything revealed—and recovered—as a glacier (a universe on its own) melted. In doing so, she made us believe in her version of a world ever in flux. About her, the “others” within her now rightly conclude:
In the painting of me, a violin imitates the squawk of a crow.
I am wearing a bonnet and sobbing, and then I am wearing
a potato sack and staring straight ahead.
In the recording of my voice, one can hear a lady mouse nibbling on an ear-shaped soap, she is singing labor ditties and swinging from the ropes of a velvet curtain.
I have heard the grown-ups murmuring that she had always been lousy at following orders,
that her name in Esperanto means “delicate thug.” (74)*****
Eileen Tabios just released a new poetry collection: THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I (xPress(ed), 2006). Available at SPD, Amazon.com and booksellers with excellent taste.
WAITING FOR THE RAPTURE by KIRBY OLSON
JON LEON reviews
Waiting for the Rapture by Kirby Olson(Persistencia Press, 2006)The Public Be DamnedState of the Union
Protestants once lived
a life of service,
but ever since the Sixties
the service has sucked.*
Like church sometimes poetry sucks. A lot of poetry sucks right now actually. And a lot of poetry readings are like church services in their absolute stillness.
Waiting for the Rapture is not like a lot of poetry. It’s brought out by PR Primeau’s Persistencia Press, a germ size publisher in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Along with chapbooks Persistencia also publishes an assembly of literary marginalia including a zine of minimalist poetry called
Dirt, a surrealist journal called
Starfish, another zine called
No Wave, and erotic broadsides under the Lipstick! imprint. Each publication is strict in its simplicity and devoted to the obscure, odd, or overlooked. Persistencia Press is truly an inspiring effort in a landscape populated by the ornate and moneyed publishers. It is a renegade even by small press standards.
Waiting for the Rapture is the 49 year old Lutheran Surrealist’s first collection of poetry. From this we gather he is not a slick prick peddling his poems like fly-swarmed swine to the market. 29 poems are stapled to a royal magenta cover emblazoned with an iconographic cross. The poems exhibit precision, compositional asceticism, and an uninhibited drive to convey
something. No one is writing like Kirby Olson because no one has the guts to write something like this:
The Marvelous
is always in
The Crucifix.No matter if one agrees with Kirby Olson that “The solution to Hegel is Kierkegaard.” To ignore his poetry for this is to miss the importance of his utterance. It is a book with a premise, unashamed and oppositional. No surprise that politics is fashionable material for concocting fake-poems for faker publishers.
Waiting for the Rapture is an example of true dissidence. It is also a triumph for the lo-. That is the diametric opposite of high bourgeois coming out of the too-cool-for-school school. Intentionally inaccessible poetry will never restore our form to the interest of the public.
Waiting for the Rapture exemplifies the necessity of creating an opening toward contemporary society.
In the book’s title poem Olson illustrates the individual plight.
While I walked through the parking lot
where there were many cars –
sick & bulbous, with sweet
frost metal –
a blackbird flew single
through the choleric blush
of overhead lamps.The “sick and bulbous” could refer to the bloated poetry industry in crisis. The blackbird, a voice concerned passes briefly through the light. There is the forever conflict: a poet outside rarely noticed for the shimmering flash (trash) around them. The blackbird unseen against the black of night and seen suddenly for an instant as it passes through the lamplight is also a referent to the unexpected moment when Christ returns. Carefully subtle the book is awake with elegiac observation and true human feeling. Longing persists through the work. In the poem “Blue Light” Olson could’ve attempted to describe the blue light but instead he illustrates an anxious awe, anticipating the moment that no human can put into words:
For thirty years I have wanted to describe
the blue light on the stones outside the church window
. . .
and I would still like to describe the dove flying in the blue lightKirby Olson tags himself a surrealist yet these poems resound with the consciousness and variety of hyperreality. In a poem called “Machines” the author submits a refresh of WC Williams:
No ideas but in machines.The democratization of poetry has served to populate literary culture with the calculated impersonality of carpets. The entire system itself functions like rote assemblage. Little value is placed upon spirituality or the personal. Reading these poems I am reminded of Spicer’s low ghost and his belief in the other.
Waiting for the Rapture is a humble and inimitable prize to be appreciated for its commitment to authorial vision and the perseverance to stay that vision at the risk complete obscurity. It isn’t fashionable and for that it is advanced.
But at last
into this rushing kick of world,
a noon transparency enters. Disguised
as a detective, He puts His finger on your shirt button,
marking you for heaven.Jack Spicer opens
A Textbook of Poetry:
Surrealism is the business of poets who cannot benefit by surrealism. It was the first appearance of the Logos that said, “The public be damned,” by which he did not mean that they did not matter or he wanted to be crucified by them, but that really he did not have a word to say to them. This was surrealism.
Spicer, a self confessed Calvinist, understood the possibilities of theology in poetry and the world. Immortality is perhaps the poet’s right. In
Waiting for the Rapture Olson’s “leap” allows for a double persistence toward the realization of a world. Inscribed on the first page is a line from Hebrews:
For we have no lasting city,
but we seek the city which is to come.
Hebrews 13:14It’s unclear why Kirby Olson relies on the surrealist epithet to define his work. Each poem attempts to deliver the very real and exhibit a touching world. “Christmas Eve” is a prototypical example wherein Olson simply recounts the events of a single night. It is moving in its belief and vulnerability.
We went to church tonight . . .
A frantic feeling; the Nativity Scene is illegal
because it’s too powerful, the priest said.
Richard really sang “Hark the Herald”
& I wept.
The kids played with trucks downstairs.The extraordinary faith which allows Olson this optimism apart from the secular lends a certainty to his poems—a major contribution lacking in contemporary poetry. Like their author we can only hope these poems find eternal life.
*****
Jon Leon is author of
Boxd Transistor. Some recent articles and poems appear in
Jacket, Magazine Cypress, Ghost Play, and
Dusie. He lives in San Francisco.
PRECIPITATES by DEBRA KANG DEAN
BARBARA JANE REYES reviews
Precipitates by Debra Kang Dean(BOA Editions, Rochester, N.Y., 2003) Debra Kang Dean opens
Precipitates with two epigraphs -- a haiku by Bashō and a couplet by Henry David Thoreau. For Dean, the seventeenth century Japanese poet and the nineteenth century American writer are not culturally dissimilar.
Precipitates is a quiet collection, a meditation upon the natural world, in which one must take the time to think of stillness and movement, of t'ai chi that does not disturb the birds. Precipitates is a dialogue between the body and the world outside the body; the self is interior and exterior, and this relates to her use of form - writing renga or renku with herself in the form of these alternating haiku and koan-like couplets, under the title of "Patchwork of Selvage." Find "selvage," in the dictionary, and you will find that Dean plays with “selves” and “salvage”:
sel•vage also sel•vedge n. 1) a. The edge of a fabric that is woven so that it will not fray or ravel. b. An ornamental fringe at either end of an Oriental rug. 2) The edge plate of a lock that has a slot for a bolt. [Middle English (influenced by Middle Low German selfegge): self, self; see self + egge, edge; see edge.]Dean is concerned with form and the alternating of form, particularly in the "Patchwork of Selvage" sections, though the entire book is concerned with cycles of life, with impermanence, and with the mutability of form: water - precipitation - snow - ocean - lake - hail. She begins
Precipitates with a “Weather Report,” telling us it is the end of winter. New growth sprouts where winter snow thaws, and amid images of falling away, of endings, a creative force is insistent -- insects teeming in stagnant water and rotted wood, handwritten words that fill the once-blank lines of a notebook. There is a creative force even in the steeping of tea, in the soup that she makes with her own hands, and in her son, who is clay to these same hands. These "Patchwork of Selvage" sections frame the "Heart Sutras" sections, in which Dean’s form appropriately mutates into formlessness, though her rhythms and refrains persist, telling us something about form and that which is void of form. There is little difference between the two.
And so this is why Dean weaves Bashō with Thoreau, Zen with Transcendentalism. Her insights come from her meditations on the cycles and processes of the natural world, and the presence of the divine here. Can we, in our mimicry of nature, come to understand that we are of the natural world, can our mimicry cease being mimicry, so that the natural world is undisturbed by our presence. The only permanence about which she writes is the departure from the physical body: death. The dissipation of physical form: cremation. This could also be enlightenment, a release from the trappings of the mundane, an understanding or appreciation for that which is intangible, for "the work itself," and not the "hunger for perfection and control." Does one really find the "Buddha in the throat" after the flesh has been burned away?
Consider also that "sutra" is "thread," and that "patchwork," or quilting is the sewing together of many different scraps to make a larger piece both functional and beautiful. Precipitates, then, is a "selvage," weavings not meant to be merely ornamental, but also so that the ends do not fray.
*****
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center
(Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco
(Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.
OPERA: POEMS 1981-2002 by BARRY SCHWABSKY
LAUREL JOHNSON reviews
Opera: Poems 1981 to 2002 by Barry Schwabsky(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2003)Readers will find uncommon revelations in Barry Schwabsky's poetry. In fact, music, water, moonlight, sunlight, and desire take on new powers once this poet writes about them. In
Opera, metaphorically, abstract art meets impressionism and the great composers of our past, gloriously transformed into words. For example, consider this excerpt from "Drafts (of water)":
A drowning breath, Luisa,
begins the poem
of our making
and unmaking -- night drifting
between two days. The sea
was calm, its music impossibly
translated. Flames
curl like waves, or was it
waves curl like flames?Schwabsky records life's rhythm and allows his thoughts to dance, words moving to a melody that only he can hear. This excerpt from "Somewhere" is a haunting example:
Bright moments constantly darken
leaving long shadows
pressed across floorboards that creak
loudest after midnight.He influences our emotional response in subtle ways through skillful blendings of words. "This Summer" transports us to one afternoon and places readers directly in the poet's shadow:
And here
of a late afternoon senses shrink, bend,
stumble, the latent swipe of appearance
splits like lightning…And again in "I Remember Lavender" the poet shares the surrealistic beauty of his morning:
That year morning light
expanded imperceptibly, transmuting every
thing into itself, you included, available
light coterminous with available space… These poems are visual art, words creating pictures in the reader's mind. We see what the poet experiences, share the sensual impressions of small moments:
…plump/light/plucked/from orchards of touch.
…faces pale/and precious…
…a shiver of clear water.
…bland unmentionables among/the inky crumpled sheets.
…art wedged/into pleats/of reflection.
…our smoky passage/through thickset air.Schwabsky's poetry is lyrical, infused with and influenced by his appreciation of art and music. For devotees of fine poetry,
Opera is highly recommended.
*****
Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review;
Review Editor for New Works Review;
Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review
and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review
and Irish News and Entertainment.
Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.
ONE THOUSAND YEARS by CORINNE ROBINS
LAUREL JOHNSON reviews
One Thousand Years by Corinne Robins, with art by Joyce Romano(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2004) As a respected art critic, Corrine Robins clearly sees the lines and shadows in her world and communicates those visions in poetry. Poetry lovers will find a rare symmetry within these free form poems. Enhancing and complementing Ms. Robins' poetry is artwork by Joyce Romano.
Robins' references to 9/11 are haunting, interwoven as they are with the atrocities of a thousand years in time. From the burning of St. Joan d'Arc to the Crusades, to those "flying buttresses" that murdered innocents on 9/11, the message varies little. This excerpt from "One Thousand Years" compacts her message into three brief lines:
while you build your fortresses high,
the saints dance and the devil
waits outside a thousand years.And again in "Bringing Down the Sky" we are mesmerized by beautiful words that tell a harrowing story:
The day's air has a different weight.
Released into the singeing wind,
the lure at liberty, bright-eyed
peregrine having no mercy,
flies to that sound,
that trust beyond touch
making the sky her reach."Love Games" exemplifies that rare poetic symmetry I mentioned at the beginning of this review. The Medieval resonance and rhythm of Ms. Robins' words here prompted me to read this poem aloud, more than once. I chose one excerpt to prove my point:
Sigh, sighing through the cold winds,
loving the flowering flowers,
we will have poetry
and be wary of priests who talk of God
and swear against the love of men,
swear their hatred of the pregnant spring
and hatred of old castles in Angevin."Galileo's Daughter" has the same impact. The poet's words bring life and reality to times we had perhaps forgotten:
Would birds lose their bearing
in midair? His thoughts fly upward.
His experiments are always perfect –
I see the rounding sky, the rough-faced moon,
and where the planets are stairs
proving if heaven is a house or a mighty city
it lies above my father's stars.One critic stated of Ms. Robins that "…the pageantry and personae she evokes are not locked in the past, but alive in the flux and imagination of our own present." I could not have said it better. Corinne Robins, assisted by the thought-provoking art of Joyce Romano, weaves ancient and modern into a fine blend. Her work is distinctive and highly recommended.
*****
Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review;
Review Editor for New Works Review;
Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review
and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review
and Irish News and Entertainment.
Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.
RUSTLE OF BAMBOO LEAVES by VICTOR P. GENDRANO
EILEEN TABIOS reviews
RUSTLE OF BAMBOO LEAVES: Selected Haiku and Other Poems by Victor P. Gendrano(Lulu Enterprises, 2005)Self-publishing is an honorable tradition within poetry. But it also can be tricky terrain to navigate when the author is placed in a position to edit one's self. Complicating this balancing act is how technology has improved to facilitate self-publishing through print-on-demand (POD) avenues.
Victor P. Gendrano’s
RUSTLE OF BAMBOO LEAVES: Selected Haiku and Other Poems is one of those projects that would find it difficult to find a (third-party) publisher, not just because its subject is poetry; the book's nature as a personal album probably would not interest readers unacquainted with Gendrano’s family and circle of acquaintances. Nonetheless, Gendrano need not apologize for utilizing POD technology to see his book published. This collection of haiku, senryu, haibun, haiga, tanka, Korean sijo, American cinquain, and free verse -- while uneven in quality -- offers many lovely poems which certainly deserve book publication (and, hopefully with a book, wider readership), such as this haiku
spring breeze
a spider swings
with the spider plantAnd this senryu:
young mother
she scolds her son
and joins him cryingAnd another haiku:
before surgery
her hand tightens on mine
mid-autumn chillThe book is dedicated to Gendrano’s wife Lucy Parcarey Gendrano who died in 2003 and who inspires many of the most moving poems, such as this tanka:
my daughter
invites me to brunch
this Mother’s Day
just for a tender moment
she is her late motherFor haiku, here’s
spring cleanup
I let my daughter donate
her mother’s wheelchairLess successful are Gendrano’s efforts with free verse (my assessment is of his English free verse since I’m not fluent enough to assess Tagalog poems). These poems often end up not transcending their sentimentality (fine though those sentiments may be). For instance, from the poem “Lenten Thoughts”:
Embrace each day with joy
Give thanks for gift of life;
Living in borrowed time
In simple joy delight.
Beauty is everywhere
If we but dare to look
Within ourselves, others
Or sound of nature’s brook.Multilingual poet Luis Cabalquinto who offers an Introduction to the Free Verse chapter echoes my conflictedness with Gendrano’s English free verse. I’ll cite Cabalquinto here, but also to raise the possibility that Gendrano’s Tagalog free verse may be more adept:
“The voice is specially compelling when it speaks in the author’s birth language [Tagalog]: ascending to pleasurable heights in the poems “Awit ng mga Dayuhan,” “Ang Sumpa Ko,” and “Ang Maskara.” In these poems, Gendrano shows a fluidity of thought and musicality of phrasing that are not matched in some of his English poems, which are partly weakened by a didactic and abstract diction.” (194)*
The poems are interspersed with autobiographical prose, other poets’ introductions of the various poetic forms and Gendrano’s practices of such forms, and various comments on individual poems which were first published on internet venues (e.g. World Haiku Club, Sijo Forum and Cinquain Forum) that made poems available for feedback. The prose can be educational, such as in Chapter II about “Tagalog and English Haiku” which deviated briefly to offer a useful explanation of tanaga:
If Japan has its short verses like haiku and tanka and Korea has its sijo, the Philippines has likewise a short poetic form called tanaga which dates back to the 1500s. // Tanaga has four lines of seven syllables each. Usually it has no titles. In its traditional form, all lines are rhymed at the end, although the modern form ranges from six to eight syllables per line and also tends to be written in free verse. It is in deep hiatus now but efforts to revive it is gathering momentum, thanks to [Philippine] government efforts, nationalistic Filipino poets, and the Internet. (66)Nonetheless, some of the prose elements are so specific to the author’s life that if one isn’t interested in an autobiography of this poet, they won’t hold the reader’s interest. For instance, Gendrano's American cinquain "SOLD HOUSE"
House sold
and empty now,
but if you listen hard,
the kid's laughter still echoes from
its wallswas presented with the author's note about how, following his wife's death, he sold the house in which the family lived for 20 years and, with its "too many memories," he has yet to venture back to visit it. The poem can stand on its own without Gendrano's (albeit moving) note. How much information is too much information?
In some cases, the comments detract from the poems themselves. Much of the feedback from internet forums fail to add significant insight regarding the poems, even as they might remind Gendrano of the pleasures of their engagements. For instance, this senryu
binge eater
she rips the model’s face
from the magazinewas burdened with the baggage of this comment from an’ya Petrovic, a reader in Oregon: “Speaking of sense of humor, this is terrifically funny.”
While Gendrano says in his Foreword that he wanted to acknowledge that he “writes for an audience,” the selected comments could have used some editing so that they don’t get in the way of a new reader’s--the book reader’s-- own path of interaction, hopefully enjoyment.
This is not to say that there aren't some poem/commentary combinations that work effectively. For instance, this pleasing haiku
black ants cover
a white rosebud
spring rainwas presented with the author’s note that it is a “common occurrence in nature especially after the first rain following a dry spell when insects climb to high dry places to avoid the water drenching them below.” I didn’t mind learning this fact which did not dilute my unmediated read of the poem.
On the other hand, if, ultimately, this book is intended to show not just a collection of poems but reveal a poet’s life, then one can see that Gendrano has been and is a blessed man with a loving family and many friends. That, surely, is more important than any critic’s review of his poems. Indeed, this book reminds me of this excerpt from Eric Gamalinda's fabulous poetics essay,
"+ H e . L ^ N G u A 9 E . o F . L / 9 h +" (from
PINOY POETICS, Ed. Nick Carbo):
The most difficult part about writing a poem is not the writing but the process that leads to it, the process that demands belief, compassion, a sense of hope -- all virtually impossible challenges. All of this takes a lifetime. And at the end of our lifetime, what matters is not what we have written, but what we have become.On this basis, based on the revelations from his poetry collection
and personal album, Gendrano deserves much respect as a poet.
*****
Eileen Tabios just released a new poetry collection: THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I (xPress(ed), 2006). Available at SPD, Amazon.com and booksellers with excellent taste.
THE UNDERWATER HOSPITAL by JAN STECKEL
JULIE R. ENSZER reviews
The Underwater Hospital by Jan Steckel(Zeitgeist Press, Berkeley, CA., 2006)Poetic and Moral Clarity, Even Underwater The twelve poems of
The Underwater Hospital form a fascinating statement on the experiences of the body and health care in our contemporary society. Jan Steckel is a Harvard- and Yale-trained pediatrician.
The Underwater Hospital exposes the limits of the contemporary health care system and the strengths of Jan Steckel as a poet.
Thematically, the poems about medicine and being a doctor hold
The Underwater Hospital together. From the first poem, “Dios le bendiga,” which is a dramatic monologue from a patient thanking her doctor for curing her child of syphilis and asking for the cure herself, to the concluding title poem of the book, “The Underwater Hospital,” these poems share the experience of a doctor treating people who are often not only sick, but in a distressed time of life as well. Especially potent to the American imagination at this time is “Charity after the Hurricane,” where Steckel writes,
We paddled these people across the street in a canoe,
one by one.
We carried them up eight flights of stairs
to the parking garage roof.
We’re waiting for helicopters they told us would be here.
ARDS-man just croaked.
My hands are sore for squeezing that bag.
I kept him alive for four days
and now he’s kicked the bucket. . . .Steckel shines when she is giving voice to her experiences as a physician. One other particularly notable poem in this vein is “Swallowing Flies” where she writes about a patient who dies with the counterpoint of the childhood rhyme, “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly/I don’t know why/she swallowed a fly.” Its horror as a poem is accomplished through the accumulation of medical knowledge with the familiar rhyme. It may be the best poem of the collection.
Steckel is not limited to her experience as a physician, however. She writes of current and former lovers, verse I’ll leave for you to read, and of “The Maiden Aunts” in Eastern Europe who dispense the good advice, “Don’t waste your life cooking, honey,/it’s all over in ten minutes” and “you’re one of the higher people.” She explains,
They own the lumber mills
that make the paper that makes books.
Though you live in poverty here,
you are part of a civilization.Those aunts also told Steckel to write always. We can all be thankful for that.
This book is an example of what I find to be the best in the chapbook world.
The Underwater Hospital begins with well-crafted poems from a poet early in her career. The poems have been selected to show some breadth of her talent, but they all work together tightly and thematically. Zeitgeist Press adds fine paper and printing and the design work that makes the book a unified whole. The outcome is a beautiful chapbook, to read repeatedly in one sitting and to return to in the future.
*****
Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review,
and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual.
You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
PINOY POETICS Edited by NICK CARBO
ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ reviews
Pinoy Poetics, A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino-American Poetics Edited by Nick Carbo(Meritage Press, 2004)Pinoy Poetics contains forty-one essays penned mostly by poets from the Filipino-American community. Edited by Nick Carbo to be the first international poetics anthology of Filipino English-language poets, the essays reveal a wealth of heritage, diversity of background and mastery of the language as well as the craft of poetry.
Pinoy Poetics is related to struggle, be it spiritual, political, historical or a struggle for identity. In many of these essays, we see poets addressing the question raised by Carbo, in his introductory essay, regarding what he calls the “plague of invisibility for Filipino poetry” in America.
That
Pinoy Poetics is grounded in its complex relationship with the language and with the long history between the Philippines and the United States emerges in the essays of poets like Ricardo M. de Ungria who speaks of how writing well in English becomes his revenge against English and Leny Strobel who writes about an urgent desire to connect with Eileen Tabios’s poetry as springing from a need to learn about what might come after one has decolonized.
It is revealed, too, in essays like those of Luisa M. Igloria whose poem “The Incredible Tale of the Ice Cream Cone Dog” is grounded in history, wherein the poet moves from distance to a point of identification with the native Filipinos who were put on display during the 1904 World’s Fair and Exposition in Missouri.
This same event is referenced in Barbara Jane Reyes’ essay on “The Building of Anthropologic”. Here she speaks of her adamant refusal to include translations or glossaries in her poetry as stemming from her refusal to compromise the artistry of her poetry, as well as her refusal to act as journalist or historian for her class.
Interesting is the diversity of form given to these essays: Oliver de la Paz writes about his process in the form of an outline for unwritten book, Vince Gotera supplies answers to an interview given by an absent Nick Carbo and Paolo Javier provides us with an abakada of his poetics.
Here are poets who come from different walks of life, and who are influenced by different disciplines, such as Patrick Rosal who comes to poetry from a hiphop culture, Mila D. Aguilar’s poetry which emerges from a political, personal and spiritual struggle, and Marlon Unas Esguerra who feels the responsibility to his art as intrinsically political, anti-empire, and anti-assimilationist.
Then, there is Eileen Tabios with “A Poetics of Everything, Everything, Everything”, which reveals how poetry becomes more than words on a page. Here we see how the artist embraces poetry so it becomes a means of confronting an audience with truths that may make them uncomfortable.
Observing how, for these poets, there are no delineations between poetry and life, I see how life and art flow seamlessly into each other.
Michelle Macaraeg Bautista relates the art of Kali to her poetics, and how she does not compartmentalize these from each other. She speaks of the poem as becoming “a space for both the writer and reader to explore”.
We further see how
Pinoy Poetics is grounded in the personal through Bino Realuyo’s, “Dear Warrior”, a touching tribute to a father who has been a source of inspiration to his son. We see it as well in Eugene Gloria’s questioning of this idea of “home” when we are neither American nor Filipino”, and in Cristina Querrer’s writing for her own theraphy and analysis, “even if it’s just something to live behind for my family”.
Gemino H. Abad’s statement regarding context comes back to haunt the reader throughout the collection. Here he says: “we are looking for a country and, simultaneously, looking for our language, which are both essentially poetic tasks – work of imagination.”
The struggle for identity, for mastery, for visibility, is one that is personal as well as cultural and political.
Pinoy Poetics is a revelation of how much of our poetry stems from our being a diasporic people, a people forced to migrate by circumstance, whose language has been wrested from us by events beyond our control.
Jean Vengua puts it so beautifully when she writes: “We are a people of a land or lands, and also a floating nation and culture. For such people, stories, myths, poems and histories are crucial; we take them with us, so that we will know always where we are and who we are in the world.”
In his essay "Binalaybay: Soul of the Island", Efren Noblefranca Padilla writes: “If we wish to know the soul of our people, we must read our poetry. It is through poetry that we hear the authentic voices of our people who spoke and sang years and years ago.”
There are so many poets in this anthology whose words continue to speak to me. Reading
Pinoy Poetics, moves the reader beyond an appreciation of wordsmithery, that beyond the words lies a connection that comes from being bound together by a shared history, a common struggle, and the complex nature of our relationship with words, language and all the baggage that is part of who we are.
*****
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is a Filipina writer living in the Netherlands where she writes speculative fiction and poetry. She writes a regular interview column for The Sword Review
and the Authors and Books column for Munting Nayon,
the Filipino-Dutch newspaper. Visit her at http://rcloenen-ruiz.blogspot.com
THE VICIOUS BUNNY TRANSLATIONS by WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA
TOM BECKETT reviews
The Vicious Bunny Translations by William Allegrezza(Moria, Chicago, 2005.
Available from lulu.com)
These bunny "translations" originated on William Allegrezza's blog,
p-ramblings. As the author writes of these texts in his prologue, "They are all attributed to individuals who do not exist. Over the past two years, I have been adding them to the blog as meditations on various subjects from war, to sex, to death, to divorce, to progress. The bunnies, though vicious, are products of their time."
Actually, they are timeless.
Mr. Allegrezza's bunnies are actually, in sum, taken collectively, the transcendental signifier, the Big Other, the furry emblem of limit and limitlessness. They first appear though as the building blocks of nature:
"Fire in the beginning was a bunny."
--Lalo Hernandez
"The essence of a bunny is a circle, as is the essence of the universe."
--Lao Chen
"Attraction is a bunny."
--Giovanni d'Ancona
"The sunshine is a bunny, as is the rain and wind."
--Mafouz al Fah'izTo know a bunny is to court danger and to pay a price:
"Those the bunnies love die young."
--Tracicodo Andros
"Now, we descend into the dark realm of demons and bunnies."
--Ante Salighieri
"the bunny is trading places with the bomb."
--Isok Harputi
"I watched the bunnies come over the mountaintop in search of revenge and I was afraid."
--Pablo Sanchez Ortiz
"The bunny is a chainsaw and I am its cheese waiting for fuel."
--Urusula di PiombaLove the bunny, but fear its wrath. Buy this book or the carrot eaters will come for you in the night.
*****
Tom Beckett publishes interviews with poets at e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s.
He is OK (for a tall person).
POETIC VOICES WITHOUT BORDERS Edited by ROBERT L. GIRON
JULIE R. ENSZER reviews
Poetic Voices Without Borders, Edited by Robert L. Giron(Gival Press, Arlington, VA., 2005) Poetic Voices in Strong and Memorable PoemsWhat makes a good anthology? On the most basic level, anthologies must delight readers by bringing together beautiful poems by known and newly discovered poets. At their best, anthologies are a treasure trove of poems stitched together in a beautiful and functional multi-colored, patchworked quilt. Beyond the needs of the individual reader, however, anthologies have a variety of functions in the literary world. Often they have a special appeal to teachers for classroom use. Often consciously or unconsciously anthologies define and move forward a significant literary trend. Some anthologies are transcendent because of the political and historical moment at which they are published. I think of
Lesbian Poetry edited by Elly Bulkin and
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga as two anthologies that transformed the literary world with the voices that they brought forth. Since then, an organizing principle that has been widely utilized in compiling anthologies is gathering writers by their identities.
Poetic Voices Without Borders doesn’t do this as a collection although many of the individual poems are written within that tradition. Rather, Robert Giron, as the editor of
Poetic Voices Without Borders, gathers poems, more than poets, around the principle of transcending borders “on a variety of metamorphical senses” to give them “an opportunity to voice what they have to say, be it personal, social, or political.”
There are three sections of the book in three languages: English, French, and Spanish. The editor notes, “I wanted the anthology to represent the three major languages of North America.” While in the European history of North America these are the three major languages, in an inclusive history, the native languages and the language of the Inuit would be major languages of North America as well. Despite this omission, a few native voices are included, notably Joy Harjo, whose poem, “Reality Show,” includes lines in Navajo. While I admire the project of bringing more multilingual poetry to our monolingual sensibility in the United States, the three language sections of
Poetic Voices Without Borders are not balanced. There are one hundred forty-one poems in English; eight poems in French; thirty-four poems in Spanish. The disparity among the number of poems included in French and Spanish left me wondering about the significance of the trilingual aspect of the project.
By far, the strength of the anthology is the individual poems that are included. I was delighted to see two poems by Jewelle Gomez, and poems by Jeff Mann, Jeff Walt, Shane Allison, and Louis E. Bourgeois in the anthology. These are contemporary poets that delight me; I enjoyed finding their work included here. I discovered new poets, too. Gabriella Belfiglio in “Instructions After Death” writes,
Save one part of the firewood of my body—
You choose:
hand, nipple, elbow, spleen, heart, clitoris.Her instructions continue for eight sections and conclude, “And with a seed of your favorite tree, bury me.” Cathleen Calbert’s contribution, “Companionate Marriage,” resonated with my experience in these lines,
Seriously, can one ever hope
for better than serial monogamy?
In any case, we’re able to conjure
lust occasionally as affectionate equals
although you rarely do the dishes
(or dust or vacuum), and, I confess,
you’re the one I’m rudest to. Kim Roberts’ poem, “The Back of My Hand,” takes us on a ride through eastern Europe and Russia and then returns us to the glove compartment where maps are resting “like the blue veins/that map/the back of my hand.” The poems selected for the anthology are delicious and each page seems to yield a new delight. On the strength of the poems and the poets included in the anthology alone,
Poetic Voices Without Borders achieves in the simplest goal of any anthology: to delight its reader.
Reading
Poetic Voices Without Borders as the issues of immigration were exploding in the United States and the political implications of borders are being scrutinized in a public way, I missed, in this anthology, a focused exploration of the premise of transcending borders which is outlined in the introduction. The poems just don’t hang together as a whole to make a comment on the title. Moreover,
Poetic Voices Without Borders doesn’t have a modern analysis of borders, which were explored so eloquently by Gloria Anzaldua in her book,
Borderlands/La Frontera. I missed that and wanted and expected it from the title and initial statement of the project. Despite that critique, where I laud
Poetic Voices Without Borders is in its struggle to define an anthology without the identity politics of the last century. That is a challenge and worthy of note.
Poetic Voices Without Borders is a solid collection of new and urgent voices. Read it to be delighted by the individual poems and remember the individual poets to seek out their new work. Regardless of borders, these poetic voices are ones you will remember.
*****
Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review,
and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual.
You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
MUSEUM OF ABSENCES by LUIS H. FRANCIA
BARBARA JANE REYES reviews
Museum of Absences by Luis H. Francia(Meritage Press and University of the Philippines Press, 2004)The structure of Luis H. Francia’s
Museum of Absences is a body divided into three sections: “Dis/Appearances,” premised upon urban American alienation and anger, “Zero Ground,” the historical trauma, and “Meditations,” in which the poet subsequently directs himself inward in an effort to find comfort, perhaps resolution in the body of poetry. Certainly, Francia concerns himself deeply with the body, not only a biological body, but also a nation, cleaved into many parts. From “A Dictionary of the Vanishing”:
There is the archipelago of your torso,
Islands of blood and sinew, red against the blue,
Declaring their Independence of You
You have no thoughts
Your thoughts have you
You are not out of your body
Your body is out of you
Seceding into smaller republics.And here is the crux of Francia’s work--individual and institutional acts of violence upon bodies, texts of dislocations and dissents. The strength of his work lies in this seemingly effortless metaphor making, and the apparent simplicity of the message and the poetic form he employs in the above poem excerpt--a body (human, nation) that is cleaved can neither be sustained nor sustain itself.
But let us first consider the bodies inhabiting this world which Francia presents in
Museum’s first section, “Dis/Appearances.” To begin with “The Manong Chronicles,” Francia presents a premise of “foreign” bodies’ displacements and subsequent anger arising within the American urban center. But why the Manong, the historically West Coast based Pilipino laborer, who is rarely, if ever, associated with New York, when the place and time to which he is directing us (in
Museum’s second section “Zero Ground”) is the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001? And it is difficult to overlook this historical and geographical inconsistency, when the poems themselves exhibit inconsistencies of diction and form, in which even line breaks refuse to abide by semantic unit, strategic enjambment, nor breath. Word play, combined with an oftentimes flippant tone, “that clever leveller,” “my dog, my dog, / why have you forsaken me,” “Dog All Mighty,” the litany and irregular refrain in “Blue in the Face,” detract from a compassionate stance on the plight of the Manongs, and by extension, all the marginalized laborers who inhabit the American urban center. Specifically, the heavy-handed and abstract, academic diction of “The Manong Chronicles” --“though I was / Brown, the overpowering sense / Of negritude,” “Millennial colonial contradictions / The humanity of the subjugated,” “blue bureaucratic blottings / relegating letters,”--indicate this is not the voice of the Manong, however reflective and however learned, but a mediation by the poet.
Francia eventually attempts to set New York City as the central locale of
Museum, and in this locale, the speaker appears undecided on his feelings for this American city, as his tone, while flippant, as above, is also both fed up and poetically distanced; it is not one of resignation, for we can detect an attempt at pointing out the absurdities and surreal qualities of urban living, as seen in the irreverent dog/god inversions in “dogless in manhattan,” and in the sadistic and grandiose vows and curses leveled against a landlord/slumlord in “A Request to My Landlord After a Suspicious Fire.”
Eroding the edges of the biting anger arising from displacement within the city, this anger which is premised in this “Dis/Appearances” section is “Ode to Jimi Hendrix,” comprised of generalized surface impressions, a glossing over of the African American rock and roll icon. This poem falls short of comprehending and communicating both the genre’s and the icon’s potent, proactively subversive American heart, opting instead for a classical, meandering Odysseus metaphor--a forlorn man in exile, at the mercy of the gods, their whimsy, their cruelty. A much more adept, apropos “use” of Hendrix and his importance to American dissent and rabid counter culture may be found in Jessica Hagedorn’s
Gangster of Love, where, in the wake of the recently deceased Hendrix, Hagedorn’s protagonist stumbles and shoves her way into this gritty space and concept of America.
There is the well-weighted and formalistically and emotionally well-contained “Cinderella at Fifty,” which we may choose to read as a larger, bourgeois dream too good to be true, not unlike the broken promise of America to the once starry-eyed, once naïve now awakened immigrant. Still, Francia opts to distance himself and his speaker from the city’s seething masses of workers. He concludes this first section with “What Picasso and Gaugin Would Have Seen on the Seven Train,” which appears an urban twist on the conventional artist viewing the world from behind the safety of a window (à la Billy Collins, “the toast is in the toaster / and the poets are at their windows”). Here, it is the window of the train, this clichéd vein running throughout the body of the city--“the / Seven winds its way, iron artery / bearing the city’s red blood cells, each bearer of oxygen for the ceaseless muscles of a metropolis,” its population “an empire.” Here, we may be reminded of the broken bodies of Picasso’s
Guernica: “bull’s head now a livid moon -- / dusk face, sun limb, flowers of // women’s bodies, reassembled, whole,” a foreshadowing for Museum’s second section, “Zero Ground.” We must question who of the workers riding the Seven would have access to the works of Picasso and Gaugin; we must also question whether Picasso would simply appropriate their art, and Gaugin sexualize and objectify them.
There is little engagement between the artist and his subject, for Francia presents a poetic itemizing of what he witnesses, and while he turns a critical eye to the reduction of the masses, the city’s laborers, to cells, his references to Moctezuma, Crazy Horse, and Lapu Lapu, further render these masses to an impersonal (gendered male) singular identity, which contradicts the speaker’s plaintive and tender, “each day memorizes and each night forgets their faces.” I think of a more involved, human and humanizing tribute to the city’s workers, positioned at “Zero Ground,” Ground Zero, in Martín Espada’s
“Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” in which Espada moves between “the chant of nations,” the specifics of the work and the workplaces, and the waitress who “sang to herself about a man gone.”
“Zero Ground,” we may read, not only as the cataclysmic event of September 11, 2001, but of events of historical significance--the encounter, for example, between Francia’s own grandparents, “Agatona of Aringay, Henry of Philadelphia,” resulting from the Philippine American War. Still, central to this section is September 11, in which Francia’s tone is formulaically journalistic, sweeping and generalized in its oratorical questioning. He begins “September 11, 2001”:
The blue that day held a promise.
Who would have thought the
Promise was death?
Who would have thought storied
Steel would tremble, then tumble, turn
Into torrents of fire, castles of grief?
[…]
At dawn of the day of the sun
No towers grew, no dead men or women,
No slain children arose,
For death is a permanent gift.But this is the language of network television September 11 memorial mediated news specials; we may recall from this poem that the speaker is a witness (“My infidel mind saw but could / not grasp…”), and as one of many New York bodies, the poet mediates the text as he simultaneously distances himself from the objects, this event at which he gazes. I wish for the humanity, the compassion of Espada’s “Alabanza,” instead of Francia’s reliance upon a requisite itemizing, “Muslim and Jew, Christian and Hindu, / Buddhist, agnostic, atheist,” and in “New York Mythologies,” “Mongol, Aztec, Berber, Cherokee, Zulu // Zuni, Semite, Aborigine, Malay, Han, Viking.” Sadly, these sprawling, impersonal lists do not provide proof of individuals’ lives affected, nor individuals’ bodies broken, nor evidence of long-term post-traumatic unity. Nick Carbó writes of Francia’s September 11 poems as a “uniquely New York poetic response,” and I am inclined to disagree. The speaker, and by extension, the poet, in his distancing, appears a spectator to the city and its people. He has not claimed New York as his city, though he has read its people and its tragedies as texts.
The strength of this “Zero Ground” section lies in the poem, “A Dictionary of the Vanishing,” in its located, well-wrought metaphor of broken human bodies and broken nations. The speaker addresses a “you,” directly and sincerely, and this “you” is any one of us, signifying our own state of brokenness, and disunity. Here, his habit of distancing is momentarily suspended. His tone is both immediate and compassionate, and however morbid this broken body falling through the air, here is a haven of sense and lucidity, humanity salvaged and sobered amid the confusion and ruin of September 11. Here is where he ought to have ended “Zero Ground.”
In an all too literal change of orientation, we turn the page from portrait to landscape, to Francia’s “Meditations,” in which the poet turns his attention inward, to his own poetics, just as the rest of America suddenly (abruptly) also develops an interest in poetry post-September 11. Here, within poetry, the poet attempts to convey to us, is a place of solace, where we may possibly restore to wholeness our broken bodies:
I bleed now, exult
I bleed days and nights into being
I bleed devils who sing and angels who sin
I bleed for lives we will never have
for lies we have had to believe,
for lovers, betrayed, dark in their cold rooms.
I bleed the islands and this continent,
their flags and their tribes But in the previous two sections of
Museum of Absences, the poetry does not emotionally engage. Rather, it sweepingly and impersonally gazes, and in this third section, Francia again employs wordplay and overused phrasing which erode the power of his meditations: “Poetics? / It starts with an itch, you see, so you scratch. Psoriasis? No. Metamorphosis. / There’s a river runs through it….” “May our wars be only of words, never of swords.” In the wake of September 11, in the depth of his meditations, the speaker’s glibness and use of cliché appear yet another mediation of the poet attempting to lighten the heaviness of these times.
This section continues with his musings, which contain lovely but fleeting poetic moments: “Take a pen and copy the poems / That appear on the horizon.” Here appears the poet’s project, to write his world, as it arrives to him, sure as a sunrise. But if the body of poetry, and the poet’s project is so simple, then we as readers must question why Francia undermines his own poetic project with his constant textual mediations, wresting the poetry to appear transcendent of this real world’s violence which is so deeply a part of our American psyches.
*****
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center
(Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco
(Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.
WAKE UP CALLS: 66 MORNING POEMS by WANDA PHIPPS
JULIE R. ENSZER reviews
Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems by Wanda Phipps(Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, 2004)Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight!Wake-Up Calls is subtitled
66 Morning Poems; a number of other writers have suggested this book to me as a model for a writing practice: wake up early every morning and write a poem. Another creativity guru calls these morning pages. I’m intrigued by the idea, but I can’t do it. I have two large dogs and a wife. The dogs want to be walked every morning. They are masters to their own destiny and not interested in me capturing my morning poems. For this reason, I didn’t read Wanda Phipps’
Wake-Up Calls as soon as I should have.
The characterization of the book as illuminating a process for creativity does not do justice to this fine collection of poetry. It is not a book about writing exercises; it is not a collection of poems that are transparently responsive to writing exercise; it is a collection of sixty-six very polished poems as Wanda Phipps first book. While the “morning poems” moniker may describe the time or the process from which they were written, much more significantly it exposes the particular state of mind from which each of the poems evolves: early morning reflection where the filter of the superego is shut down and the poet experiences herself and the world in the most honest and raw form.
The emotional breadth and depth of
Wake-Up Calls is impressive. These poems capture the fear and anxiety of young writers, as Phipps writes about the fear of working in an office in “Morning Poem #56,” “fear of office work/creeping into my psyche. . . .” Then later in the same poem, “running back and/forth with busywork/paperwork, redtape/procedure. . . “ In an earlier poem, “#47,” she writes, “forgot the poem/and the words/. . . .head filling with terrors/too many to mention.” Regret is another theme of the book, most fully explored in “Morning Poem #27,” with the listing of the poets “should haves” culminating in
I should have protested loudly
about some things and not at
all about others
I should have learned Spanish and German
I shouldn’t have been so easily discouraged
I should have listened to my mother
my life could have been so much better by nowPhipps’ range of emotions extends to the positive, hopeful and giddy, as well. In #52, she notes, “most famous poet/in the world/called me today” and in the following poem, she celebrates her birthday “full/of wine and tears/red poppies/coucous and broccoli.”
The marriage of form and emotion in this book is perhaps Phipps’ greatest accomplishment. She works with a very short line in each of the poems which makes them quite spare. Still they are packed with emotion. At their best, as in “Morning Poem #6” the form works with the rhythmic and poetic devices of poetry to create greater power and resonance:
groggy voice
hangover head
phone rings
work call
money writing
muddled thoughts
adrenaline rushThese short lines work together with her generally very short poems give the collection overall a unity which then is accented by the sequential numbering of the poems.
Wake-Up Calls is a text from which individual poems can be pulled, but it also works together as a unified whole, a significant accomplishment for a poet’s first book.
Wanda Phipps wakes up to writing each morning and through her writing wakes up to life. She shares this waking with us in
Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems. More than a manual to morning, this is a book for understanding the hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties, and, ultimately, aspirations of living.
*****
Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in
Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the
Web Del Sol Review, and the
Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at
www.JulieRenszer.com.
OCHRE TONES by MARJORIE EVASCO
YVONNE HORTILLO reviews
Ochre Tones by Marjorie Evasco (Salimbayan Books, South Africa, 1999)Stories Told in FullThere must be some way to bridge undeniable differences between persons. Friends. Cultures. Towns. Provinces. And, in Marjorie Evasco's case, languages.
Ochre Tones is a poetry collection written half in English and half in her native Cebuano.
Cebu is a long strip of land in central Philippines, in the island region of Visayas. Many island provinces in this region speak similar languages, with slight variations. Filipinos who are not Cebuano might find the Cebuano poems inaccessible because, as is the case with many regional languages, Cebuano is taught primarily in the region in which it is widely spoken, even as it is used in the mass media in adjacent regions.
In her Introduction to her book, Evasco says she first had the desire to write in her mother tongue while attending a writing residency in Scotland, four years after her first book,
Dreamweavers.
"Then a curious but inevitable thing happened. In the daily company of three British and two American writers, I made a new and distressing discovery: I wanted to write poetry not only in English but also in Binisaya, and I did not know where to begin... I sensed I was back to that strange place of portents," she wrote.
Often there are many subleties lost or misunderstood in translations between languages. I do not understand Cebuano, but I also think and write in two languages.
Take, for example, the title of her final poem in the Earth section: "Elemental." (
Ochre Tones contains four sections: Earth, Water, Fire and Air.) It is translated in Cebuano as "Yuta-Tubig-Kalayo-Hangin"; there does not seem to be one word in Cebuano to describe the basic components that make up nature:
In English: There is a season to this ripening,
the way sap of tree rises to fulfill
fruit of the topmost branch,
or the motion of jasmine
climbing trellises to show off
a single blossom at new moon tide. ...
Reason for this ripening.
You are goldened by my tongue. In Cebuano: Adunay panahon alang sa pagkahinog.
Sama sa pagtaob sa duga sa kahoy aron mopalumoy sa bunga
Sa kinatumyang sanga sa kahoy, o sama sa
Sampagita nga mosalingsing sa kinatas-an
Aron ipasundayag ang nag-inusara niyang bulak
Niining bag-ong bulan sa tingtaob. ...
Diya hinungdan kining pagkahinog.
Gibulawan ka sa akong dila. In this collection, Evasco has told us stories simmering during the time between her Scotland residency and her return to Cebu -- and English alone and Cebuano alone was not sufficient. In
Ochre Tones, Evasco nurtured stories fated to be told in two languages, stories fated for poetry. It was the only way to tell them in full.
*****
Yvonne Hortillo is an editorial assistant for The Associated Press.
She has never owned a business card in her life. She has crossed the Chicago River countless times, and is fated to cross it untold times more. She adores truth in all forms.
SOMEHOW by BURT KIMMELMAN
WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA reviews
Somehow by Burt Kimmelman(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2005) Burt Kimmelman’s
Somehow is a work concerned with cycles and seasons of growth. The section “Late in a Slow Time” moves through a calendar year, examining closely nature and light, in a language that is tentative and perceptive—reading this section is like looking at finely detailed art to explore the subtlety of its craft. The cycles also emerge in the section “First Life” in which Kimmelman writes poems about his daughter’s birth and growth. These pieces are touching in their earnestness. We see glimpses of her growth and of her father’s through interacting with her. As with all of the pieces in this collection, a pensive tone, sometimes laced with sadness, perhaps quietness, pervades. For example, in “For Jane, Age Three:”
Saying goodnight is saying goodbye—
leave-takings are forever. When
you were born, time began—yet for you
there’s no such thing as time. Or, take this poem, “Late February,” from later in the collection:
No denying
the sun, even
in the moment
of cold, crocus
pushing through soil
into the world. In both of these pieces, Kimmelman focuses on daily experiences in ways that makes us take another look at them. He steps back to ponder, and in so doing, makes us do the same. Moreover, his intense focus on an image makes it no surprise that he’s concerned with painting, as he shows through mentioning works by Gerhard Richter and Sol Lewitt. His work is painterly in its conciseness, and he is well-aware of how to place the right word at the right turn of the line, which makes this collection one worth exploring slowly over time.
*****
William Allegrezza teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poems, articles, and reviews have been published in several countries, including the U.S., Holland, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Australia, and are available in many online journals. Also, he is the editor of moria,
a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books. His books include The Vicious Bunny Translations, covering over, Temporal Nomads, Lingo,
and Ladders in July.
HEADING HOME by LORETA MEDINA
LAUREL JOHNSON reviews
Heading Home by Loreta M. Medina(Giraffe Books, Quezon City, Philippines, 1996)Loreta M. Medina is a gifted writer and poet whose work has been featured in journals internationally. Readers of
Heading Home will also experience her talent in photography and Chinese inkbrush painting. Clearly, poetry and art free Medina, and at the same time anchor her to Earth. Her visual artistry enhances her stunning poetry, and vice versa. In fact, her poetry is often written from the mind's eye of an artist. Consider, for example, these two excerpts from the beautiful "One Day at the Lagoon:"
Geese in tones of black and white
move about in perfect grace,
creating endless layers
of luminous whirlpools.
* * * *
As the afternoon wears on
the sun settles on the horizon
weaving orange wonders.The poet's humanitarian work has taken her to many foreign lands. She matures far from home. Unfamiliar sights and experiences transform her youthful perspectives. "Poem in Exile" clearly communicates this transformation. I quote two excerpts from this long poem:
As I watch the mountains
I realize I am on foreign soil once again,
hovering above things like hot, summer air.
Home is where consciousness loses its hold,
where you are one with the wind, heat, and dust,
family and loved ones, your taste buds,
the grass and sun,
sounds at night.
* * * *
You bathe in this presence,
you enter the tiny interstices
of your newly found truth
until you become truth yourself.
You have no need for a body that senses,
nor a mind that analyzes,
nor a hand that will hold for you,
or open to you the door to life's mystery.I had the distinct feeling while reading Medina's poetry that she does not create from the outside looking in. My sense is that the poet and the poem become one. I quote one brief excerpt from "Letter Addressed to a Poem" in example:
let me be an ally to you
if not a wellspring, a wall
to lean on. A rock at which you fling
your crystal nut
to test its fire.The range of subjects found within this book is exceptional. In addition to the excerpts I've quoted, readers will find words sensual and surreal, sorrowful and outraged by her visions of our modern world. Loreta M. Medina knows what it means to be female and skillfully shares herself with readers. I recommend that poetry lovers find this book and savor Medina's thoughts.
*****
Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review;
Review Editor for New Works Review;
Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review
and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review
and Irish News and Entertainment.
Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.
SHOT WITH EROS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by GLENNA LUSCHEI
KYOKO ASANA reviews
SHOT WITH EROS: New and Selected Poems by Glenna Luschei(John Daniel & Co., Santa Barbara, CA., 2002)Reading Glenna Luschei's collection
Shot With Eros is like being in a chamber of magic--the magic working but it may take a little while to notice the effect. Glenna's words, economically and masterfully scarce, do not come raw--they come well simmered and seasoned. Her words sub-lease an aura of silence, where the rich subtleness of her poetry resides. I imagine that she has been in touch with the ultimate nature of her own Being--which I gratefully caught in the second stanza of her “Petroleum”:
When I smelled the peony, I remembered
the millennia, lives I was meant
for, all laid out
You were there.
We were the same body, separated
by the big bang, jetting into the system,
doomed to reunite.Glenna's poems are presented to us as nonchalantly as Jackson Brown sang his vision from the crazed mind of the 'don't care' generation whose home was highways. What other singer had thought of dangling a harmonica from his neck? This individuality is captured in her poem, “Ticket”:
That sweet man between divorce and new
marriage: fire extinguisher salesman.
Tried to figure
what would ignite me.
He found tickets to Jackson Browne. Late.
Late.
I dreaded 5 a.m.
getting up to teach my freshman
comp class.
He said, “You fell
asleep during Father Sarducci.”Yet young and old alike can ingest the songs hungrily. The charm of Glenna's poetry comes from the essential light, in the image of immortality. The ultimate Oneness, runs quietly, steadily, through her bloodstream. It percolates in through the hearts and minds of the readers. I believe she is capable of making poems out of any scene, instantaneously--always with that divine lightness and charm. For such a mind, dog drops on the beach are but perfect.
*****
Kyoko Asano has been a practicing poet and artist for the past thirty years. She was an integral part of the poetry scene in San Luis Obispo and now resides in Southern California. She has learned through the discipline of visual art to create is life's most potent will; it will find its way into form like a river that naturally runs, carrying obstacles as well as gifts to the mother sea.
POETA EN SAN FRANCISCO by BARBARA JANE REYES
ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ reviews
Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes(Tinfish, Kaneohe, HI, 2005)To my mind, poetry that evokes a response or a reaction from its readers is evidence of its effectiveness.
Poeta en San Francisco is Barbara Jane Reyes’s second book and the winner of the James Laughlin award.
I was glad to read the opening words of the section called prologue because here the poeta says:
--what may be so edgy about this state of emergency
is my lack of apology for what I am bound to do.Reading these words, I nod and approve. Too many times, we apologize, and too many times, this apology results in the erasure of us. No, I think. No need to apologize, dear Poeta.
No need to apologize for the
“ghazal swimming inside her wanting to born”, no need to apologize for:
this is not a love poem, but a cove to escape the flux, however
momentary. This reader is thankful for the opportunity to speak and to enter into dialogue with Barbara’s book-length poem.
Poeta en San Francisco is sectioned into three parts before closing with an epilogue. As I read this book, I felt the significance of the three-sectioned structure:
1.
[orient] If I examine the word orient, it represents two things. Orient as being the place of origin--here representing the east; and orient as verb in how it involves adjusting to or acquainting with a particular situation.
Reading this section of
Poeta, I marvel at how the poet unfolds the streets of San Francisco so that this reader, who has never been to San Francisco, can almost see the homeless ‘nam vets, homeboys and hollow-eyed men (is what I see on TV shows reflective of what San Francisco Streets really are?) I see these images in my mind’s eye and hear the intonation of their voices, in the captured words of the poeta:
fuckinjapgobacktochina!
allthemfuckinggooknamessoundthesame!
and especially:
iwasstationedatsubicbay.I don’t need the poeta to explain to me how she feels upon writing these words. They are at once confrontational, orienting the reader to the reality of what exists under the skin of society.
Poignant when I recognize, too, my own inability to retaliate except inside my mind, when the poeta writes:
and if she believed in God,
and if her tongue had not been severed,
then she could issue this damnation:
wala kang pag-asa pag darating ang araw ng pahayagThe section, orient, ends with two poems back to back.
The first:
[why choose pilipinas?]
the answer is simple, dear ally. the pilipinas are the finest group of
islands in the world, its strategic position unexcelled by that of any
other global positioning.and the second:
[why choose pilipinas, remix]
the answer is simple, my friend. pilipinas are noteworthy for their
beauty, grace, charm. they are expecially noted for their loyalty. their
nature is sun sweetened. their smiles downcast, coy. pilipinas possess
intrinsic beauty men find delightful and irresistible.Painful to read as a nation is narrowed down to terms of use and gain, painful when we recognize on the other side how a people and a nation (in this case pilipinas) have been turned by this silent war, into commodities,
Both poems end with this observation:
in short, the pilipinas are
custom tailored to fit your diverse needs.2.
[dis.orient]Incredible to see this juxtaposition of images--the white man’s assumption of the brown man’s ignorance, and the written word and spoken text which give lie to the assumption. For are not written text and spoken words marks of civilization?
The use of Baybayin and the sounds of a language long forgotten by the islands of her birth, serve to heighten this conviction. When the white man came to the Philippine islands, he did not discover an uncivilized and ignorant race.
But there is always this desire, as the poeta writes: this belief exists that a conquered culture, an oppressed race, can be changed for the better:
for every daemonic place he erects stone
archangels and infernos, exacts penance
from those driven underground, spills his seed,
his battle cry, his body presses firm dispensation.
he invents himself by extracting others’ titles.dis.orient then goes on to speak of how culture is systematically erased and lost when one race seeks to oppress another. To me, the poeta speaks then, not only of the fate of her ancestral country, but of the fate of other countries and other peoples who have been subjected to this eradication and superimposition of what is conceived to be better, more civilized, advanced way of life.
This eradication and superimposition are carried on when migration occurs for there is a displacement, a disorientation. The landscape changes, culturally as well as geographically. In the midst of these upheavals, the poeta records the sentiments of a people fighting to survive, fighting against invisibility, waging a secret war against oppression.
Here we find the appearance of the disputed prayers, seemingly irreverent, seemingly blasphemous, but speaking the truth when it comes to what the masses mean when they pray. These prayers take on a deeper meaning when looked at in the context of a people struggling to survive while they endure humiliation and discrimination.
Lord. Have mercy. Christ. Have mercy.
Lord. Have mercy. Christ. Hear us.
Christ. Can you hear us?
Whoever the fuck is up there-–
Have mercy on us. Have mercy on us.
Have mercy on us. Have mercy on us.Perhaps it is the fact that it is so true of what is spoken in the secret corners of our minds that evokes a strong reaction or response in the reader.
But here is a struggle for justice, an outcry against judgemental eyes and ears that belong to this milieu the poeta finds herself in. This struggle finds its justification in the last lines of this section:
the morning paper
reported a suicide-–
filipina crack whore
nothing to live for.
3.
[Re.orient]Reading re.orient, one feels as if one has journeyed through turbulent waters with the poet, and returns to this point of reorientation to discover one’s self changed. There is a firm quietness in this section where the poeta says:
in this home that is not our home, we have mutually exiled each
other. i walk down your street in the rain, and i do not call you. i
walk in the opposite direction of where i know to find you, that we
do not speak is louder than bombs.Reading through this section, the reader gains a strong sense of the poeta returning to herself and embracing all this history and baggage that is part of her identity.
In Confession (al) the poeta writes:
Forive me father, for here have I faltered.
It has been thirty years and counting,
the process of my acculturation.
A pure product of America, my English
is more proficient than many native speakers;
usage conventions and colloquialisms do not elude
me.from "[panalanging sigaw]":
nguni’t laging alalahain namin: itong lunsod ng panaginip ay
pagkaligaw sa tunay. pag lumuluha ang lupa, dumadalisay na apoy
ang mga luha niya. pag may bagyo, sumisigaw ang lupa. ang sabi
niya: tama na.Here, the poeta lays claim to herself. While the tagalog is not perfect,
[panalanging sigaw] lays emphasis on the poeta’s determination to be who she is.
Following the third section, is the epilogue. Beautiful and lyrical, the English flows on smoothly into Filipino. It is a wedding of the poeta’s two languages. It is also a statement made with regards to the duality of experience, emotion, and connection. There are no explanations made, no solutions offered, only this epilogue that is a delight to read. It is true of life.
And as the poeta says:
dapat ganito ang pag-ibig:
tunay,
tunay.*****
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, lives in The Netherlands where she writes speculative fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in various publications both online and in print. She writes an interview column for The Sword Review,
is Authors and Books columnist for Munting Nayon
(a Philippine-Dutch publication), and is on the editorial board of an online and print publication, Haruah
(http://www.haruah.com). You can visit her blog at http://rcloenen-ruiz.blogspot.com
THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH, 1950-1962
AILEEN IBARDALOZA reviews
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, Edited by Karen V. Kukil (Anchor, New York, 2000)Unburnable Remains The Unabridged Journals
documents Plath's student years at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge, her marriage to Ted Hughes, and two years of teaching and writing in New England. It covers the years 1950-1962, and includes two journals previously sealed by Hughes. This collection is a faithful transcription from the original, duplicating even Plath's misspellings and grammatical errors. ***
I found the
Journals problematic the first time I read it. But my reasons were personal--I was projecting my own perceptions and fears, and I was uncomfortable with the word "unexpurgated", precisely because it revealed too much. Why didn't she destroy the parts that were sacrosanct or that could potentially demonize her? Had she considered at all if and how these journals should survive her, in the months preceding her suicide?
But for all her convoluted pain and tragic emotional state, Plath was creating spaces for love. I read the
Journals a second time, carefully weaving through her mental processes, balancing aesthetics and psychology. And so, I made her "rise (yet) again, out of the ash, with her red hair". In so doing, I had to re-calibrate my own mindset, to re-learn the diarist's pre-Lazarus psyche.
The 1950 Journal begins tenuously,
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. (1950)Plath, at points of near-happiness, would draw back and revert to introspection (edged by melancholia, and later, hysteria). She further writes,
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand ... hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die. (1950)This foreshadowing of death would take a more violent, more amplified form in later works. Thus, in a sense, Plath's adult journals are an autobiography of suicide. Consider the last entry, taking on an elliptical shape:
A bad day. A bad time. State of mind most important for work. A blithe, itchy eager state where the poem itself, the story itself is supreme. (1959)Plath's skill as a writer is highly evident in the way she described (sometimes, maliciously) seemingly quotidian details:
THE SILVER PIE SERVER: Mrs. Guinea and Sadie Peregrine: war of two old shuttledoors and battlecocks. Loneliness and meanness of two. Odd friendship. Frogs: cold, slimy pets. Thoughts, emotions of Mrs. Guinea. Gloomy, lugubrious. Rug-changing incident. Vengeance on young happy couple upstairs, always arguing, crying, but apparently happy. Broken leg. They search for pie-server, but do not find it. Symbol of propriety of gloom, Mrs. Doom. (1959) As love to her became increasingly unreal, she recounted her relationships in an almost drawn manner, said relationships aggravating what was already a highly polarized mental state:
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart. (1958) Plath's father died when she was eight, from complications of diabetes, and she despised her mother for it (for being the martyr who lived her life through her children):
So how do I express my hate for my mother? In my deepest emotions I think of her as an enemy: somebody who "killed" my father, my first male ally in the world. She is a murderess of maleness. I lay in my bed when I thought my mind was going blank forever and thought what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world. But I was too nice for murder. I tried to murder myself: to keep from being an embarrassment to the ones I loved and from living myself in a mindless hell. How thoughtful: Do unto yourself as you would do to others. I'd kill her, so I killed myself. (1958) Out of her colossal need to give and receive love, her husband became to her a demigod, and it was Hughes's supposed infidelity and abandonment which ultimately led to her self-destruction:
I identify him with my father at certain times, and these times take on great importance: eg that one fight at the end of the school year when I found him not-there on the special day and with another woman. I had a furious access of rage. He knew how I love him and felt, and yet wasn't there. Isn't this an image of what I feel my father did to me? I think it may be. The reason I haven't discussed it with Ted is that the situation hasn't come up again and it is not a characteristic of his: if it were, I would feel wronged in my trust on him. It was an incident only that drew forth echoes, not the complete withdrawal of my father who deserted me forever. Ask: why didn't I talk about it afterwards? Is this a plausible interpretation. If it had come up since, it would be recollected by the stir-up of similar incidents and fears. Ted, insofar as he is a male presence is a substitute for my father: but in no other way. Images of his faithlessness with women echo my fear of my father's relation with my mother and Lady Death. (1958) The publication of
The Unabridged Journals brings with it a shoving crowd, continually analyzing, re-assessing, and resurrecting Plath. And she rose out of the ash, glued together by compressed fibers. I wonder, would she consider me a peanut-eater, even as I reverently "unwrap her hand and foot"?
*****
Aileen Ibardaloza trained as a molecular biologist and is currently the Associate Editor of Our Own Voice.
HIS MOTHER RISES FROM THE DEAD TO OFFER THIS SPECIAL FEATURE
Sandy’s Mother Reviews The After-Death History of My Mother, by Sandy McIntosh (Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, New York. 2005) He was always a disappointment. He should have run a bank, but he barely passed math. He should have been a wealthy lawyer, but he leaves his fly open and stutters in public. Look how he misinterprets my good intentions when I find these nudie pictures in his room:
…
My mother had rummaged through my room, never saying a word, leaving the naked pictures there for me to know she knew I had them. I was never beyond her grasp. Private parts would never be private. She herself was a greater force of nature than even adulthood, and we both knew her name was Silence. (“Private”)Well, boo-hoo. I like things to be in order. How did I know how ungrateful he’d be each time he came home and discovered I’d rearranged and repainted his room? These were acts of love! Then he goes about copying down my senile remarks as if they were just the cutest things! For instance:
The hospital parking lot is empty.
My mother’s in her favorite chair refusing to speak.
“Such a character,” laughs her roommate.
“She touches you and tells you you are healed
and may go home.”
Her roommate hands me a pamphlet
with favorite quotations of my mother
assembled by the other patients:
a collection of libelous rumors concerning my wife and me.
One passage, supposedly from Jesus, reads: No one knows what will happen
when I leave my tomb in the night
to touch you.
(“The Hospital Chair”)He’s nothing but a plagiarist, a poseur.
In another poem he has me sleeping in the snow after I supposedly wander away from an Alzheimer’s institution. I was never in an Alzheimer’s institution. And I’ve never slept in the snow! Then he says he dumps me in the Public Library where they videotape me each week until:
… I was told that the library’s funds had run out
and my mother’s project would be terminated.
I would never see my mother again,
since over time she had become an image on a screen,
and the library would pull the plug.
(“The After-Death History of My Mother”)Well, in his favor, I have to say that he does get something right:
Cemetery Chess
We lower my brother’s coffin
beneath his monument.
Abruptly, mother hisses: “Look!”
Not twenty feet away,
another monument,
the grave of my brother’s nanny.
“She wanted him for her own,” mother whispers.
“Now she’s got him.”
A decade passes.
The game of Cemetery Chess progresses slowly.
Mother dies; her monument
erected midway between brother and nanny.
As we lower my mother down
I whisper to the nanny: “Check.”It’s justice that we keep the old bitch at bay. Still, I resent him using me, prying open my coffin, looking around inside, touching things, moving them. It’s a cheap way of making a buck. Even this book review I’m supposedly writing strains credulity.
Remember that film
Psycho? Well, that’s him, my son. He’s put on his mother’s dress now and stabs at you with that horrible knife!
*****
Mrs. McIntosh is still dead.
FEATURED POET: ELIZABETH SCHÖN
PRESENTED BY GUILLERMO JUAN PARRA who offers an introductory essay. After the introduction are 16 prose poems by Elizabeth Schön, an essay by Schön, and an article on Schön by Yolanda Pantin. All English translations are by Parra.
Guillermo Juan Parra was born in Cambridge, MA. He attended Boston University and now works as a teacher in that city. He is editing an anthology of XX century Venezuelan poetry in English translation. His poems and essays have appeared in Xcp, 6x6, CARVE
and The CLR James Journal.
The Poetry of Elizabeth SchönBy Guillermo Juan ParraThe poet and playwright Elizabeth Schön was born in 1921 in Caracas, where she continues to live and write. She studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and was married for many years to the writer and TV & radio broadcaster Alfredo Cortina, who died in 1988. She published her first collection in 1953 and has been an important (though often overlooked) presence in Venezuelan letters since then.
For this feature, I have translated a sequence of 16 untitled prose poems from her 1972 book
Casi un país. I have been unable to find a copy of that book, so my translations are based on the excerpt included in her selected poems,
Antología poética (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1998). These poems recount the musings of a young girl who has arrived in Caracas from the small town of Borburata. As she explores Caracas, accompanied by her friend Juan, the young Lucía maps out the immensity of a city that not only inspires her but becomes her adopted country. These poems reflect a city in its final stages of transformation, from semi-rural capital into a postmodern metropolis.
I have also translated an essay which Schön presented in Caracas during the summer of 2003, when she was the guest of honor at the tenth Semana de la Poesía, a yearly poetry conference (which, in these allegedly “revolutionary” times for Venezuela, was terminated last year). Finally, I have translated an appreciation of Schön’s poetics by her friend, the poet and editor Yolanda Pantin (Caracas, 1954), which first appeared in the
Papel Literario literary supplement of the newspaper
El Nacional.
Schön’s work remains largely unknown outside Venezuela. Even within her country, she is read by a select few, perhaps because her work resists simple classification, often blurring the line between poetry and philosophical discourse. In recent years, Schön has founded her own editorial venture, Editorial Diosa Blanca, through which she continues to publish her poems and essays.
At a time when Venezuela is drawing attention throughout the world for its farcical chapter in the long and ignominious history of Latin American dictatorships, the work of a poet such as Schön becomes ever more important. She reminds us that poetry is not to be found in the excessive and duplicitous use of language for the attainment of power and celebrity. Poetry is a way of living, a form of vision the writer and reader must dedicate their lives to, in hopes of learning how to discern what the universe tells us. The poetry of Elizabeth Schön serves as a point of departure, a place where language and being coincide in near silence, far from the dross of political and social pretensions.
--Boston, May 2006*******************
Almost a CountryBy Elizabeth SchönI was born in Borburata. There was a green plant holder in the hallway; the water would hurl itself down and would echo inside the clay jug with a sound like small coins falling. A fountain stood out in the patio; the ferns bunched up around it and formed a greenish, humid awning that smelled pleasant. The pillars were round, made of wood, and nails which sometimes injured, jutted out of the cracked sections.
The house had few rooms. The rooftops were made out of
cañabrava wood and mangrove beams; that’s where the spiders wove their hives, which packed the edges of the wooden framework. On the headpieces of the beds and in the water jugs, the moths and a fine, golden sand brought in by the wind from the distant sea would always accumulate. Two little stoves were always turned on; occasionally, a fly or a bee, who had been hunting the soup that was being cooked, would scorch itself within the embers.
Behind the yard, where an
apamate tree grew, ran a gorge. The cows would go there to drink, while the thrushes picked at their feathers and I thought of the day I would live in Caracas, Caracas which I imagined as if it were the most beautiful, immense palace inhabited by glorious men.
*
Juan is my friend and he has such black and such large eyes that it’s impossible for the sun to ever make them fade one day.
I met him one afternoon, he didn’t ask my name, he stood there observing me, quietly, calmly; he contemplated the mountains through the windowpanes, with the multitude of houses spread around them: hats the wind would have tossed. I told him my name was Lucía and with a soft, tender voice he began to repeat it, as though I’d told him the name of a continent, a lake, a forest he was anxious to observe.
*
He said we’d go see different places in Caracas today. I can’t figure out which ones. Whatever place we might visit, we will find something beautiful. I don’t think ugliness exists; if it does, it is surely the result of there not being enough clarity to appreciate the streets, the sharpness of the colors, the patience of the breeze that knocks on the large wooden doors until they open making a sound very close to the one that arises if you write on an old, worn chalkboard, with many cracks.
I approach the window. A yellow leaf falls on my shoulder. I like it, it has the same color as my dress. I will save it in one of my books, I feel as though everything that looks like me or my things belongs to me.
The sun announces that Juan is coming to pick me up. We will soon walk together. We will see streets, buildings, plazas, churches and in every corner, every bend, I will discover a detail, a blade of grass I have never seen before, and I will immediately recall the first day they gave me a hobby horse and I told myself I would ride him through all the cities in the world. The horse broke but now I have a friend and together we will get to know each one of this city’s houses, with names like the sound the waterfall makes when it pours from the highest point of the mountain.
*
Next to the stairs of El Calvario, I say to Juan: “Let's not descend the
steps too quickly.” “Lucía, if you want to know this city you have to
hurry. Caracas is too big, so much that I almost mistake her for a
country.”
We descend quickly. Since I'm happy, I remain quiet. Juan has told me not
to speak when I'm content; it's better to be quiet, and this way the
happiness doesn’t end. It actually remains intact, like certain gifts
that are stored so as to not be damaged or broken.
*
The clock in El Calvario is silent, like the shores of a lake are silent.
High above, with a vizier’s figure, with the color of a cloud forecasting a storm, they placed him next to the flight of steps so that someone continuously ascended or descended and in this way he would never be alone.
We’ve never heard his bell, we’ve never heard his tolling that clamors: one hour concludes and another one begins and to me this seems like a book you read until the last letter so as to immediately begin another one. And it also reminds me of the wave that folds, bursts, and another one immediately follows and does the same thing and thus successively, forever.
*
Finally, we’re in front of the San Francisco
ceiba tree! And it looks
so much like a friar who continuously listens to the rain, the breeze,
the wind, the birds, and who never ceases to be sheltered by the sky's
ceiling.
*
Look toward the cathedral and tell me if its tower doesn’t remind you of the figure of a shepherd who counts his sheep and contemplates the sky daily, hoping to enter one day.
Observe the clock; it sounds constantly and it sounds just like an anvil that never stops; it is round, like they say the world is round, and notice this: its needles look like thorns that injure, except instead of injuring these ones caress one of the numbers, maybe touching the window so it will open, and the inner din of a patio where the children of the earth play will bud.
*
The retreat has begun. The musicians amass themselves. Juan sits down to hear the melodies. I distract myself by counting the musicians and watching their uniforms made of a very dark blue; I distinguish shiny buttons on their jackets, as if they were full of seeds.
I contemplate the band, the lecterns and the notebooks where the scores are written and I say to myself quietly: what enormous instruments these are they blow with their lips! Some are made of gold, the gold the sun leaves on the sea’s horizon, the gold the trees have if the wind shakes up the leaves and the ray falls into them, what’s more, they have the gold of rivers when a star relaxes on their surfaces, the gold of the chasubles with which the priests recite the sermons, the gold of the carriages of kings, and that gold I alone discover if someone suddenly shouts: “Juan…!”
*
“Lucía, tomorrow will be another day and it’s as if we said to each other: tomorrow we will look at the leaf we were unable to contemplate today, the grain that remained hidden beneath the corn seedbed.
“Once the night has passed, the sun will shine again, and we will go out again and admire the city where beings march, sometimes silently, sometimes greeting each other, chatting, always without stopping.
“Do you remember that man who, with a flour sack hanging on his shoulder, picked through a pile of empty cans with his mangy cane? That man didn’t speak. In rags, he had a long, dark beard; his hair covered parts of his ears. His skin had the resistance of an excessively archaic wall. We spoke to him and he merely looked at us. I will never forget the shine of his pupils, it was a shine that reflected a very deep pain but supported itself calmly, in stillness, while he removed the cans and the smell of tar spread itself through the space.”
Night begins. Look at the cloud that envelops the peak of Monte Ávila! There, between the cloud and the peak, the first star has appeared. It is a small star, a luminous boat in the shape of a drop of water.
*
I have arrived at the Plaza de Capuchinos.
The church has something of a sleeping ox, its tower reminds me of the peace of lonely roads.
People walk in the plaza’s shaded paths. I wonder if they carry a fire lily, a utensil they hope to deposit in some spot on earth.
The dovecotes stand out within the branches, the clusters confuse themselves with the straw of the nests; the leaves mix in with the excrement of the pigeons that fly toward the spaces, they are cups the wind lifts up to give away, in the mountains, in the towns.
No one stops to look at the belfry. Most people walk, as if pushed by an unceasing blizzard.
Boys, girls, adults, all follow their paths across San Martín Avenue; I know each one carries feelings, desires, secrets within, and all of them recede, are diluted within the tumult, like the sound of a voice dissolves if a scream is tossed into the jungle.
Is it possible for so many beings to live, beings that walk, speak, greet and later on continue their paths without perhaps returning, without perhaps remembering?
*
I enter Urdaneta Avenue. The crowd traverses it avidly, promptly, as though wanting to find out where it ends. The blocks are wide. Very tall buildings jut out from both sides, blocks that look like the boxes used for displaying apples. Some of them possess the slenderness of a grain of corn, all of them have as many holes as fishing nets have.
I discern spacious plots, with no construction yet. The tower of the Santa Capilla church is sharp, fine, an immense splinter that doesn’t scratch, that doesn’t injure; a guard that never abandons his post. There‘s the Central Post Office building, not very tall, robust…a well-fed lamb sleeping peacefully. Everywhere I look I discover different dimensions, but where does my notion of immensity, of largeness, of narrowness, of lowness come from?
*
A bicycle is an immense sea-horse that descends through the tunnel. The air has the solidity of a feather. I want to touch that post, I run, I grope it. I continue. It makes me so happy to feel I’m headed towards the corner and towards the other one and even towards the one I don’t glimpse yet! I have no impediments. Impediments annoy, they impede me from enjoying the fresh, clean day full of sun and breeze.
I stumble into a brass cart selling sweets and
empanadas. Several laborers are busy working on a building. Others delineate the edge of the sidewalks and others set the lines indicating the curve or the open margin of the avenues.
I am in front of the Bellas Artes museum, white: cloud, seed of the whitest fruit.
I enter. Its hallways smell of meadows covered with pasture, the water of its pond tastes like an oasis. The wind slides, it is someone in search of a shelter that will protect it forever.
*
Could I be a descendant of Humboldt, that man who discovered rivers,
jungles, mountains, caves?
*
Maybe pushed by the wind, by the crowds, I have arrived at 23 de Enero.
23 de Enero is one of the most populated places in Caracas, as populated as the bottom of the sea, like the universe with all its stars, asteroids and galaxies.
Its buildings are immense transatlantic ships that, anchored at high sea, await the exit and boarding of its passengers.
*
In a doorway, a boy plays with a
perinola. Its string bends,
lengthens, curves nimbly, while the stilled boy doesn't laugh, doesn't
speak, remains alert to the string that stretches, retracts, forming a
circumference that is pierced by the clarity and that the wind does
not destroy.
*
Juan has arrived punctually. I like his suit, it is the color of medlar. He doesn’t say a word to me; but it doesn’t matter.
We stroll through Plaza Altamira. A green grass, with yellow tones, surrounds the plaza. There are bushes, round pines, benches. The obelisk is a mast, an immense needle. Beyond the avenues, many buildings lift themselves up, with balconies, doors and ferns the breeze moves.
We sit down on a bench. The pond, placed in the center of the plaza, is wide, long; the sun penetrates there and transforms itself, beneath the water, into a white shell. A small boat, with a yellow chimney, sails slowly, its dark anchors and the metallic rigging. It stumbles into the shore and stays still; around it: water, space, sky too high above, with the stars hidden amid the clouds.
Juan stands up. He runs to the corner. He chooses a fallen branch and begins to touch it.
Then he puts something warm into my hands, somewhat scratchy, it's a nest full of newborn pigeons! I imagine the sun must have been like this when it was born and they placed it above the earth.
(Translated from Antología poética,
Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1998) *******************
ApparitionsBy Elizabeth SchönRainer Maria Rilke says something very true in his deep and sublime poetic work, and which I choose in order to try and speak about a difficult and very valuable theme belonging to the invisible, occult reality which does not remain still like the tree in the clearing, but which we still feel as authentic and registered, when we hear it in the lightning bolt that flies and points out, and at other times reaches us through a premonitory vision of future vital action, our own.
I am not an expert in esoteric matters or in any theory. I approach what I feel as complete and it helps me discover, or gauge this being in the arduous; that is why I cite Rilke who proposes the following to us: “…Listen to the breath of the unceasing message made of silence…”
I choose this phrase which seems to bring us closer to the root of the cosmic fire, because there is no way it can be qualified as one does a cathedral, a landscape, a scaffold. I perceive it most in the creative spirit of poets, since they are the subtle listeners of the earth, of man, of the sky and of the infernos.
To “…Listen to the breath of the incessant message…” is to bring ourselves closer to something that is transmitted to us and which arrives to each one “made of silence.” That is, elaborated through that which tells us without speaking and which leaves us deep inside without words, the untranslatable quality of the grandiose, what is never able to be concretized. However, thought is very similar to a mouse looking to sink its teeth into something, which is why we ask ourselves: What remains in our souls if we hear the word “silence”? This is when, suddenly, an unfathomable emptiness that drowns us invades us until we are afraid, as we remain clinging to a more demanding alternative: to hear “…the unceasing message…”
We move within the time of the clock and we follow it until reaching a conclusion: in order to understand that message, it becomes necessary, as Rilke proposes, for us to “…sweetly disengage from appearances…” Only by disengaging from them do we get closer to that absolute silence that exists and which we cannot trap. We cannot perceive within its muteness a single palpitation of any extension, nor do we discover the exact point of the beginning and the end. It is a suspense; it leaves us without a verb, shrouding us within a fog diffused without limits or frontiers, much less oppositions. He is, is here and is never the apparent, even when being or complete and powerful. I remember Vicente Huidobro when he said: “…Give me a certainty of roots in a still horizon / and a discovery that doesn’t flee at each step…” And I remember that great Spanish poet, St. John of the Cross, who wrote: “…This knowing without knowing / is of such high power / that arguing sages / will never defeat him…”
Man lives the real, the surrounding and he assumes it so much that no other motivation superior to it seems to exist. We prefer the boat of changing swells and happy cataloguing to living in the night of the invisible. Novalis said the following for a reason: “…The non-temporal is the domain of night / the eternal the dimension of sleep…” Where do we find ourselves? In what poetic place do we dwell? Are we still paused between the hidden and the visible? Do we continue to think about the separation of what is seen or unseen?
Since we are conditioned to being in contact with the city and its thousand problems, we stop ourselves and, sustained by existence’s portable railing, we quickly return to watching amorous beauty, or we resort to better establishing our actions and obtaining what we have chosen for living.
In other words, we depend once again on our existential, living, pulsing realities, such as the arts, science and politics. Economy, poverty, health, abundance and all that belongs to human activity; completely forgetting that other silent, unapproachable reality is also ours, even if it does not reveal itself to us with the agility of the waves as they bathe the spaces and elevates itself to the distant breadth of the clouds.
There is a singular, beautiful fact. When we live the untouchable within us, it begins to bud, carried by the image, the metaphor, the symbol. If we read Rilke’s phrase chosen at the beginning, we feel something begin to shine, it is the image where three different elements join together, “breath,” “message” and “silence” making themselves so real it is impossible to doubt their authenticity and vigor. They were born of the poet, at the instant the uncontainable, the unnamable, even the invisible of the beyond, impelled him to place within the figuration of the breath, of the message, of the unceasing, the silence of silence itself, portentous, interminable.
The image surges within us silently, within an inner space that has no comparison at all with our own, that one of distance, height, depth, order. Its word enters in the clarity of men and it does so without breaking, without mistreating. It merely lifts itself up and communicates. We then think of the apparition that doesn’t wound, doesn’t break when it makes itself present, it merely enters to be contemplated, listened to, even understood. A faculty that subtly shows us the apparition encountered no opposition in order to get close to us and see us, since between the unknown, the invisible and the untouchable and our cognitive world, barriers and railings don not count. Only the step that goes through and enters exists.
To confirm what I have just laid out (one cannot speak about things one has not lived; it is easy to fall into fantasy, which has to be tied to what exists), I will recount an apparition that occurred within me, after the death of my mother. I tended to ask her insistently to come and find me so we could continue living together. I couldn’t stand her absence; wherever I looked things didn’t seem complete, she was missing. This made me lose contact with the earth, even with the skies.
We lived facing the church in Las Mercedes, a very wide, tall construction made of samán wood, whose color was not precisely green, it was an almost toasted yellow of a horizon falling towards night. One afternoon as I was descending from the terrace of the house, I saw the walls of the patio covered in an orange radiance surrounding the guava tree. I stopped. The sun was beginning to hide. All I could see was that radiance, its light was different, it made me feel I was somewhere I had never been before. It was a light opened especially for eyes and amazement. I touched the walls, I felt the coldness of the guardian who cannot be seen. I immediately asked myself: “What is happening?” I slowly descended to the center where the tree had been born, which is when I noticed that this encompassing radiance was not only orange, it had blue, green and crimson. I was staring at the inexplicability of that luminosity that formed an enormous oval with surprise, weaving in my glance a distant country, more secure and indelible. I discovered, without any disturbance, the place from which the light emanated. Encrusted in the fork of the branches was a small figure of a virgin. Her presence irradiated a tangible clarity, an extremely white center burst forth from her entire body, a whiteness not even the clouds can provide us.
I didn’t ask myself any questions, I didn’t think anything. I was immobile, I felt neither skin nor any hand, until I heard someone say, with a soft and slow voice: “…I can’t take you with me just yet…”
The luminous vanished without a trace. I remained standing, sustained by the floor and the wall.
I watched the tree, not a single leaf moved. Nothing had changed around it. I went to the hallway and sat down. What did the virgin want to tell me? I quickly answered myself: “…she can’t take me. I’m here to do something…” The night, the stars, the constellations grew close to me; I had understood the message. A very long extension grew in front of me with a precise conclusion.
In those days I found myself in the youthful disjunctive of wanting to be a nun, a trapeze artist or a ballerina. I secretly intuited that if I told anyone about the apparition of the virgin and told them she had spoken to me, they would laugh at me. It is better to keep what one has discovered secret, since others might erase it.
Time passed and I never told anyone, only I had seen this not anyone else, which is why I can speak without exaggeration about that real presence in the space of dusk’s penumbra.
It is apt to say an apparition is not valid since it is not real, apprehensible. It doesn’t contain the duration of a box, a crayon or a car. In this way, we free ourselves from the work of understanding the world of the invisible joined with the visible. It is not agreeable to shake up the known; in this way, the apparition is rejected as though it were merely the product of a child’s imagination. The child knows how to distinguish between what wounds or caresses and perhaps because of that innate safety we carry with us from a very young age, it is less difficult for us to apprehend when an apparition enters silently, like the breeze, offering us a close and precise silhouette like the prairies, the dust, the musical instrument.
What’s incredible about the apparition is that it arrives, and it arrives as it is. Shrouded in a light which isn’t precisely the light of the sun, of the stars. It is a light which is found in what never ends: the eternal, and which lives inside us precisely because of the silent arrival of the apparition.
Since then I knew I would become something on earth. I discovered it long after having studied music, philosophy and literature. All of this conspired to make me reach the poem, where I established myself forever.
Likewise, intuition is much stronger during childhood. It has more internal space in which to extend itself without having to adhere to any day, any hour.
The child believes, adults only perhaps. This is why a child has the possibility of feeling, of knowing what others cannot live. They are less tied to the time of the second, and even less to constructed space. The infant intuits, and it doesn’t ask if that intuition is real or not, since it discovers what has not yet become reality, and which sometimes happens in a few days or which requires years to realize itself.
From here we can add that certain children carry within themselves, and due to intuition, a type of special, internal vision, which few people understand, since it doesn’t depend on measurements or on the solar.
When I was four years old I intuited my mother’s death. For me, it constituted a truth as large as the one represented by my house, moss and food. I couldn’t get close to any child who was an orphan. If by chance this happened, I would break out into a weeping so large I felt it would never stop. The certitude of maternal death never abandoned me. One day, as soon as I turned eight, she died.
The apparition and the vision have a characteristic that joins them. They appear freely, and with the untouchable speed of the rotating earth. They take from the sun its whiteness and from the horizon the sails that approach us. Both are tangible, they can emerge within a dark space or in a space of rounded illumination. And their reality is formed by the silence which they themselves contain in the lapse of their duration.
An apparition is an enormous series of waves with no sea to sustain them and no hammer to smash them. A vision is the figuration of a reality that lives without knowing how to, and of which we are participants; actors in an infinite but real stage.
Years ago I met Petra Méndez. She was born in the prairies and due to reasons of destiny she came to Caracas and ended up working in my house. After many years she got sick and had to be hospitalized. As the days passed her face began to rejuvenate. I said to myself: “Her end is near.” One afternoon her face acquired the freshness of a 10-year-old girl. My hands clutched her left arm. In that instant, the room was transformed and suddenly we both found ourselves walking on a long, narrow dock. On all sides of us, dark green foliage was turning into a blackness like that of the night spoken of by Novalis. Silence enveloped us. Our steps could not be heard. We reached the end of the dock. The darkness was deeper than that of the cosmos. We both stopped. Suddenly she jumped, disappearing into that black wall with an absorbent presence. I remained alone on the dock. When I tried to look for her, I found myself once again in the hospital room. She remained immobile on the bed, she wasn’t breathing. She had died.
In the
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says: “…The visible stops the glance…” In his book
Memorial, Rafael Cadenas proposes: “…The eyes have only reality…” Both authors coincide in noting that the glance does not go beyond what surrounds us, that is, the glance does not go beyond the invisible, all that remains are the eyes full of immediate reality. Which leads me to think the problem of arriving at the absolute and unnamable somehow depends on vision. In this, not only does sight act but so does intuition. Perhaps, and I couldn’t explain this, a reflexive-intuitive feeling goes much further beyond the simple act of seeing. Sight is capable of assimilating what is impossible to see, to touch. This is why the poet is the one who can propose such problems and, in the same way, we find authors who complement each other with the introspection of the invisible-visible.
Poetry, like the apparition, does not force, it buds. It exists here, within each person, returning the world to us through the image.
Caracas, 9 June 2003(Translated from
Kalathos, October 2003)
*******************
A Thinking PoeticsBy Yolanda PantinMeanwhile, thought. Will it continue to be that slightly bluish light where the sands of the sea's concave circle are found? E.S.All poetry has its hour, which is why there is no need to ever force it to tell us. And it's just that when one is young one usually lets oneself be seduced by the flash of the images in the poem, and by the emotion that springs from the song. That is youth and that is the obligation of young poets: to have blind faith in words, to let oneself be dragged by the verbal torrent until we reach the "floor." Thus, it is not the same thing to be a reader at 20 than at 40. Youth is impatient, doesn't contain itself, it wants to be moved down to the bones, lose its head. But Elizabeth Schön's poetry is contained from its beginnings, a poetry that according to my understanding was written in full conscience and responsibility, a poetry that wants to communicate what it thinks, a reflective poetry to be read in a removed part of the house, with nothing to distract us.
We have seen that many poets value more what surges from the unconscious like a brute force than what results from intellectual effort. But Elizabeth Schön's poetry congregates both forces because it is impossible to separate the heart from the head, sensibility from reason, poetry being the balancing point: it is not thought, it is not emotion.
And it is because of the confluence of both forces that her poetry seems profoundly human to me, since it doesn't separate, it doesn't disintegrate and for which reason I perceive it as being close to the searches of some contemporary artists.
But now I want to highlight the importance that, in my view, the exercise of thought has in her work, which is made very evident in the book
La granja bella de la casa. There is a poem by María Clara Salas that speaks of how we depend on the "thread" of thought in order to not lose our sanity. The thread of thought is an image that also makes me remember an artist contemporary to Elizabeth and among those with whom I've been able to establish a relationship: it is Gego, that woman who sat down to thread space, to create infinite universes of relations from nothingness.
It is very stimulating to see these two great artists in front of their contemporaries, how they sustained their discourses from the isolated place that inevitably and fortunately conditions the fact of being a woman: Gego, without letting herself be tempted by the titanic endeavors of the "founders of modernity" (I'm thinking above all about Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto) and Elizabeth, as well, but with an interesting particularity, in my view. Although younger, she respectfully removes herself from the production of the women who were her contemporaries: from that of Ida Gramcko who was a very close friend of hers; from that of Antonia Palacios given over to the will of her ghosts; from that of Ana Enriqueta Terán seduced by the great agrarian captains that were her ancestors and from that of Luz Machado, prisoner of that house that denied her right to exist. While all that occurred, that is to say: while the history of Venezuelan literature and art happened, Gego and Elizabeth Schön remained concentrated in their quiet task. Time has ratified them in the choice they sustained against the tides brought by the wind. Because what I admire about both of them is the coherence and the faithfulness to their thought.
But in the same way Gego threaded those nets that gather us from the void, Elizabeth Schön's poetry gathers us from the passion and exalted emotion in the warp threaded by her "thought."
In an article about the book
El antiguo labrador (in:
Ensayos temporales, El Libro Menor, Academia de la Historia, Caracas, 1984) Ludovico Silva sees how "in this poetry a thought appears that is like a complicated warp." A "reticularean warp" adds Ludovico...
Moreover, she herself told me in a recent conversation that hers was "a thinking poetics." But "what does it mean to think?" the poet asks herself in a fragment of the book and she herself answers Heidegger's question: "it seems to be to think Being."
When I went to say hello to her for the first time in Los Rosales, I saw how she had filled that place that is her home with meaning: a place populated by her being. But now she tells us, following Heidegger's thought (language is the house of being) that the word is the house of being. And we have spoken about this many times because Elizabeth has confided in me how over the years it has become more and more evident what poetry means to her profoundly. Poetry receives all of us since it is the power of metaphor to annul contrary signs, the opposites and contradictions among parts.
La granja bella de la casa is an essay but also a very beautiful poem interwoven with emotion and intellect, without any source prevailing over the other. Thus, starting from the phrase of the German philosopher that opens
Letter on Humanism, the poet begins to open the many relations that have unchained the image of the house, to touch that theme I speak, and which now can be seen as the one that gives meaning to all of her work.
Now I realize that it is because of this that Luisana Itriago highlights in Elizabeth's poetry her desire for linking, the same one that in my view runs through Gego's work.
But the link can only be given without traumas, without violence, the link is only made real through metaphor and it is because of this that only poetry can congregate us in this hour of fractures and divisions. She says it herself: "metaphor, live and unbreakable hoop, is the property of a people who do not admit separations; this, as much as the images carry within themselves an indivisible watchword."
When I mentioned the relationship of Elizabeth's poetry with the work of her contemporaries, I thought of the goddesses of Greek mythology and in the one she chose out of all of them to accompany her, a goddess considered "minor" as the tone of her poetry can be "minor," since it is not bombastic or grandiloquent, since it does not seek to be more than what it can reach.
She chose the one that cared for the fire at home so it remained lit, and the one who in her modesty hid her face behind a veil. It was not in Hestia to show herself but rather to allow for heat, light, while she removed herself. Hestia was not a protagonist but a facilitator, although Elizabeth gives the covered face of the goddess a novel interpretation: Liberty is announced from the invisible stillness of Hestia's face. That is where the desire to know her factions begins, and it is the void that embraces us with its unlimited darkness.
Hestia represents the "unnamable" where the possibility of the poem that can or cannot be written exists: It is when the word opens to the patio of the house where the pillars and the rooftops are and someone announces: beautiful to not be named, beautiful a face completely unknown to daily contingency, walking.
Elizabeth Schön has been faithful to her thought, but it has required an entire life, a life given over to words, so as to have gathered it in a pristine poetics:
La granja bella de la casa where she argues sustained by a "poetic thinking" that being is within the word: "What is the job of Being?--she asks--He lodges in the word and she is who expresses, because it is thinking that allows the rose to grow within itself..." And later on she adds: "By existing, the word adopts a reality as potent as that of a hill or a red, acquiring in this way the dignity of a linguistic entity." It is a matter of an indivisible all because "Being and the word touch the sky." Both in univocal silence, with no division, with no demands, just like Elizabeth's link with poetry. In this way, how can one not feel admiration for her? Because I also admire how poetry lives in her, how she expresses herself not only through means of writing, but also through sensible and intelligent conversation, as it is shown in the spaces she inhabits, in that generous patio, full of green and flowers beneath the Caracas sky.
Listening to and reading Elizabeth Schön, I realize the value she gives to words in an ethical sense—since there is also no separation between her poetry and her being, between what she thinks and what she is—, corresponds with the harmony between the things of heaven and earth. A harmony she somehow manages to communicate and which therefore moves her poetry and her presence so much. "And what is the universe?—the poet asks herself in a moment from this essay that can also be read as a prose poem—Perhaps the star that protects amid its shine the round and sonorous house of Being?"
Because of her, I have been able to understand that everything has meaning because nothing is contrary or opposed: everything is part of a mystery, the one represented by the covered face of Hestia and from where the poem calls us. It remains up to us, through the intelligence we were given, through the gift of discernment, to make an effort to move beyond the limits that are also our jails: In the place where the poem's possibility exists, liberty also exists, as does the annulment of the forces that separate us from the indivisible Being within the word.
Elizabeth has certainly provided us a lesson by offering her life to the talent that was given to her. She knew how to value it, appreciate it; she knew how to share it with us, her friends and her readers. She did not disdain it, she gave it a place at the center of her house, like the bread upon the table, since her relationship to poetry is not only literary. Let us listen, then, to what this major poet has to tell us.
(Translated from Papel Literario, El Nacional,
3 December 2005)
FEATURED POET: BRIAN LUCAS
PRESENTED BY Andrew Joron who says:
BRIAN LUCAS is an American poet and painter living in Bangkok, Thailand. His work, both visual and verbal, draws upon the pure transformative energy of the Imagination in ways that link him to the Romantics, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists.
In response to his visual art (available for viewing at
http://notabove-notbelow.blogspot.com/), I once wrote:
"What a mysterious and compelling world you have created here! Like the surrealist painter Yves Tanguy, you transcend the boundary between figurative and abstract: your work inhabits both realms simultaneously!" Lucas's later paintings are lustrous and metamorphic as ever, yet now show (to my eye) a growing influence of Thai design and architecture. Drinking in the influence of his adopted milieu, he is developing a potent hybrid of local/traditional and universal/visionary artistic vocabularies."As for Lucas's poetic work, I have written the following lines on his forthcoming collection
LIGHT HOUSE (Meeting Eyes Bindery, Spuyten Duyvil), New York: 2006):
"Warning: the words strobing from this Light House
may hypnotize the reader, compelling her to draw closer to the perilous shore of poetry. Once wrecked on these rocks, she will discover that "The head is a great sea of apparition" and that "broken textures are the seed of thought." She will learn that the voice that haunts this headscape is that of Brian Lucas, whose lyricism relates to the runes & ruins of Gothic and surreal writers. Yet Lucas's first book is also the document of an exilic voice, original in its wandering, a book composed of spectral coils, knots, and spirals, a book of arabesque (that perfect synthesis of irony and enthusiasm), whose language is limitlessly defined as "an intentional science of ecstasy beyond decay." Peruse, then, these leaves of Hypnos at the risk of understanding!"Lucas is an adventurer in the liberated zones of the mind. And the tendrils and exfoliations of this American poet-painter's mental paradise are flourishing in the hothouse environment of Bangkok.
++++++++++++++++++++
[THREE POEMS by BRIAN LUCAS]Sketch of the EclipseResolve liberty
caterwaul from
below
his hand and mouth
engaged with limits
withheld time
waking up to time
other than what’s
owned
by the eye
crosses summit
another language
of arrivals
***
Pain in the evening. Discomfort. To live without a thought or sinister dictations. A longing for certainty in a world of the indefinite, the unpredictable... There is all together too much meaning here…
***
Rest in movement…. in which part?
for the sake of flux he begins
***
The body
seeks equilibrium
its sicknesses,
legendary
***
In waves gathering up sail, swimming across sea
waters the cold length of sea
vegetable salt oil delirium
Brown cold sea waves a’ roiling swim
towards beacon across sea,
drowse eyes the jetty
The flag of marina star ahead, full mast
***
What remains after
an exhalation
a few threads
chalk particles ideal-flecks
Tone and sentiment
both aspects of
the same destitution
***
Identity revealed
where space interludes
with possibility
disappears into
the screen itself
woven between image and sound
***
What’s on this disc?
―Images
Images of what?
―This disc contains images of cities and ghosts, of all prismatic sighs coloring the coast that rose into the air by wind in its sand; of lanterns and giant nests where mandates for actual futures are hatched, not the ones we were forced to bear. There were images of great walls and aqueducts, stone markers on valley floor.
Time wasn’t an image until given a number, and now as an image it seems less containable. Tepid water-flow over plateau, a woman distracted mid-step, the selected writings of an oceanographer. All images.
What other images are stored on this disc?
―The images of not-above and not-below; of gold-plated glands, organs, and tissue. There were several thin images of language reduced to pops and sputters but were only omitted when the words began to fail
***
Monsoon traced from dense cloud to flood
humid months
now cold
where he sits he can
see reflections on
doors
songs played out
drowning flourishes
***
Sketch of an eclipse retina is summoned to detect. Hurried marks and scratches as if fear of losing sight was the sole impetus to its rendering in charcoal and lead. Sun ways are respected here. Vertigo at sundown.
***
Contrapunctus greeting the seasons
determined fugue of what is
will be
this whorl or that crescent
***
Ever-dreamt so
focus
on the pattern
a design without
pause
From earth
to threshold
unbroken lines
from star
to star bellow
beyond morass
seeing
the inevitable dim
***
Amalgam of mirror
and the way brought up
in this illusion
of world and effort
this response and nerve
with fits of hearing
sight touch a wider connect
comet of one
with a tail of millions
leading into mountain scape
that is this and no other
***
Blowing from the inside
translucent gust
ears in maverick style
detect in spectral signature
chromatic bursts engendered
by unheard timbres
worn thin where sound
meets its match in the bright
flash between two ears
***
He had already collapsed before coming here. The new environment filled the gap a temporary state of disequilibrium left behind. Movement into theater. The actor’s costume willed to him. He tells a story and other characters appear; these he is unsure of, as if they could vanish at any moment. Curtain call. He steps out as a stranger to all who see him—void, yet permitted. Heads in the sand everywhere he looks.
***
The cipher without meaning
pacified by dominant modes
of thought
impermanent agreement
with the real sensed in its design
Traveling through sunrise domain
at peace with various strands
of dying rays and substandard light
claimed to be
the highest peak deepest gully
like an arctic song extinguished by flame
―this conceals sense
allows the rupture to show its promise
Trellises of ice
fragrant snow on a plain made fertile
by the rough seed words marry to land
open-mesh phosphorous
dendrite startled out of ordinary mind
***
Some say, “across the waves lie a bed of nails, blue skies at night, and a wayward inch of rain.”
Others intone, “further beyond the furthest beacon there are mollusks made of lunar pearl that bask in moon sheen and moor reflections.”
***
Still wave
breathing x and o
from one end of the continent
basking in surrender
a figment of tree
leaves
New Mechanics for results
statistics legend toward extinction
of the New Language abbreviated
spent geyser utilitarian sterile
with a fugitive appearance
***
Artifact, quiet for now
terror in its constant upheaval
another hot earth formed
from marginal resources
I decided to stay for
the show
Two-headed men appear
who speak and piss in the wind
Begonias tulips
the fruit growing
from rot to ripe
that is
without rule or reason
***
Each part from the whole
Each part has a separate system of sense
Each part as it is taken from its whole seems to have its own weight, its own concern, dream, and interests
Each part is an illusion
Each idea of self is an amusement
Each part becomes a rose but let’s stop,
this flower talk will get you nowhere***
Chiseled between cloud and ground:
What is being hidden
kept away from these senses,
trading the ability to observe
for an empty task… or something
that never occurs?
The practice of preparation is a sequence
of movements (ideally economical in execution)
that interlock, meld, or vaguely associate
with an end in mind
However, the end is naturally elusive and
a desired state is never reached
So what is the preparation for? To tide one
over, to serve the purpose of removing time
from the body?
Yes and yes and who can say?
***
He kept repeating that he could remember nothing of the previous day’s events.
She told him of the dream where the ocean’s shadow started to grow and of the mummified woman who accosted her while she sat on the bus.
He no longer had dreams, only loose bowels meting out gold coins and random souvenirs of a seaside town.
He looks out over the ruins, takes cold air into his lungs and vomits a cloud into the missing palm of his hand. Tragedy is born from such moments, yet he only experiences an uncommon joy.
***
She waited until he arrived home before telling him the house was no longer there. As he stood where the downstairs room used to be he saw the sky, the bright hot sun, and a few noisome blackbirds twittering to and fro through the branches of an almond tree. The walls were replaced by piles of splintered wood and rusted debris he had been collecting on the walkway which ran along the side of the house. He tried to think of where the upstairs had disappeared to; was it now on the island that used to appear before him?
***
There were people hidden in pockets of air. Deeper entities present long before the first explorers.
***
Before eyes set upon this fold of untilled earth they resembled quicksand, enveloping space then letting loose to form nests, hollows, and nerve. There were musclemen the size of cracks in thinking, sounds burned into the eye resting in mandorla and laughing.
***
The sun extends its branches. Every object commands attention, signing themselves out to symmetry’s decay.
***
Gentle, gentle goes the scrawl of fragmented fear that lovers never lose unless their heads are intact. Let these actors have their way! Extend the floodlights to reveal the orchestra pit of dramatists penning the closure of each disembodied word. Incidental music provided by hands slapping one’s own face until wakefulness.
***
Someone following me
in a yellow cab
is it the lord
or baron
the unseen
king
who blames me
for a cat-eye sun
***
Hagioscope shows
only savory qualities
in retrospect
***
24 hours isn’t enough to gain all the information so he elected to explode time’s particulars. Is he a spy for this other life? Spinning white and outward the old ways buried in mounds and seen in the twitch of a stick re-sound. No instructions attached to trees or devices realized to be only a game.
***
Is there someone here who can explain how the mysteries began? The ones with rivers that shift matter, permit skies to open, allow planets to bide their time with whale watching?
***
Twirl of leaf in midair sent sub-decibels out to engender havoc in the ears of birds and man so alike now that humans shit on windshields and holiday umbrellas.
***
Filament pulled through the mouth. River of flowers drying up as he speaks.
***
In order to dissolve all structure play nursery rhymes in reverse while wearing a crown of antler and chrome.
***
He traveled into seminal eye to regenerate the scattered dim light that forms concentric ribbons and banners reminding him of his frontier and where its waterholes are located.
***
Scattered sand onto the floor raw mark through the grains
limned pictogram as spectrum
of the silent approach to chaos-tensions
Monitor results through micro telescope.
***
He consists of water, blemishes, and an unused bardo ticket pasted to his face.
++++++++++++++++++++
SirenIn waves, clustered lull, buoyant claims there is no ground. Set adrift, resurfacing as certain compass points drift closer to the edge in prismatic sighs and plundering O’s, shapes calling to what remains over half-light, half an eye to rescue this spectrum from the siren who attacks and decays by finite blossom.
++++++++++++++++++++
Low AnthemA low anthem
weightless
necessity of innards
bones without
rhythm
translate
wordless periphery
Take the center
gently enticed
script holding
orb in place
its heat unfolds
a map to stun
Take this road
it narrows until
a stream is reached
our pockets full
of tongues
tongueless larks
and their lice
Yet this is rare
instead
we borrow
grails
become nouns
outside
possessed by
new landscapes
particles
vulgar dialect reaching
solar shores
Behind the scenes
with a molecule
reveals
tentative structures
“the Word never
was an Absolute
disproven”
in a cave of
silent gestures
wanting to be
the sea
Its course
trammeled
by doubt
translated into
tints and tones
their voices
to be seen
as a film
through holes
in the hand
++++++++++++++++++++
Brian Lucas lives in Bangkok, Thailand. His book, Light House,
will be published by Meeting Eyes Bindery (Spuyten Duyvil) in the near future.Andrew Joron is the author of several collections of poetry, including THE REMOVES
Hard Press, 1999) and FATHOM
(Black Square Editions, 2003). A collection of his essays is forthcoming from Counterpath Press in 2007.
ASIAN AMERICAN POETRY: THE NEXT GENERATION Ed. by VICTORIA CHANG
TIMOTHY YU reviews
Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Edited by Victoria Chang(University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2004)[A slightly different version of this review appeared in
Chicago Review 51.4-52.1 (Spring 2006). Edited by Joshua Kotin.]
If lyric poetry is the most introspective of all literary forms, the most remote from public and political concerns, how should we read lyric poems that come to us under the label of Asian American writing? Should we read a minority writer’s embrace of the lyric as a sign of literary maturity, a transcending of narrowly ethnic concerns and political propaganda? Should we see it as a strategic withdrawal from society, following Adorno’s dictum to read social pressures as “imprinted in reverse” on the lyric? Should we join those who would criticize lyric poetry as an abdication of the poet’s political responsibilities to his or her community? Or are such demands themselves a form of racism, denying the writer of color the same freedom we grant to white American authors of lyric?
These are just some of the questions raised by the publication of
Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, a new anthology of young Asian American poets. They are the same questions addressed a decade ago by the first two major anthologies of Asian American
poetry: The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (Anchor Books, 1993), edited by Garrett Hongo, and
Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (Kaya Press, 1995), edited by Walter K. Lew. These groundbreaking anthologies were conceived and published at a moment when Asian American literature, once seen as a vehicle for political goals, seemed to be embracing a wider range of aesthetic commitments. Both anthologies, in their very different ways, acknowledged and responded to this shifting landscape, placing their selections in dialogue with the history of Asian American writing. While Asian American Poetry cites these earlier collections, it lacks their historical awareness, yielding to aesthetic concerns so completely that its readers may question whether “Asian American poetry” has any continuing relevance as a category. Yet a few writers within its pages do offer a new kind of public lyric—one that never loses sight of the ways in which the individual consciousness is shaped by the discourses of race.
Despite its sweeping title, Asian American Poetry is a slim volume with relatively modest ambitions, surveying the work of about two dozen writers under 45, whom its subtitle calls “the next generation” of Asian American poets. As editor Victoria Chang in part acknowledges, it has less in common with
The Open Boat or
Premonitions than it does with collections like
American Poetry: The Next Generation, with the goal of promoting rising young stars. It speaks less for the Asian American community than for that familiar demographic known as Generation X.
Chang is more frank than is usual about editing with an eye to the market.
Asian American Poetry, she writes, is part of “the growth of anthologies that cater to specific subgroups of readers, a development that indicates readers’ strong desire for editorial expertise.” This volume’s publication by an academic press would seem to confirm that editorial authority. Yet the historical and aesthetic narrowness of this collection stands in sharp contrast to the scope suggested by its title. The editor of a specialized anthology should not be faulted for selecting work according to her own tastes. But readers have a right to expect more from a collection titled
Asian American Poetry and published by a university press. The volume’s publisher, it seems, wishes to capture the growing market for Asian American literature without committing to the necessary scholarship.
The work of the “next generation” of Asian American poets, Chang writes in her introduction, represents a departure from the work of “first generation” writers like Cathy Song, Li-Young Lee, and Marilyn Chin--writers who form the core of Hongo’s Open Boat. First-generation Asian American poetry, Chang argues, “tended to focus on issues of culture, identity, family, politics, ethnicity, and place. These poets generally wrote ‘protest literature,’ exposing their inferior treatment by the mainstream culture.” Younger Asian American poets, in contrast, “write less about ethnic or political issues” and more about “mainstream American” ones, employing a wider range of “innovative styles” and “new voices.”
Cathy Song and Li-Young Lee would, I imagine, be rather surprised to hear themselves described as writing “protest literature.” In a foreword to Chang’s anthology, Marilyn Chin, one of the most skilled and self-aware of the first-generation writers, wryly alludes to the “mega-Chinese-food-tropes” of her poems’ “old-fashioned minority discourse.” But, in fact, Hongo’s
Open Boat is an open rebuke to the activist writing of the 1970s, with what Hongo views as its “culturally biased” image of the Asian American writer as a politicized propagandist obsessed with his “community roots.” The
Open Boat concerns itself less with claiming a dissident position for Asian American poets than with celebrating the success those poets had achieved within the literary mainstream by the early 1990s. In his introduction, Hongo lists the numerous awards won by Asian American poets during the 1980s, from Song’s selection as a Yale Younger Poet in 1982 to Guggenheim awards and National Poetry Series publications. The marginalized position of the Asian American writer, Hongo notes, has “dramatically changed,” as “some of us even serve on foundation and NEA panels, sit on national awards juries, teach in and direct creative writing programs, and edit literary magazines…We are included in the textbook and annual anthologies published by Norton, Heath, McGraw-Hill, Little Brown, Morrow, Godine, St. Martin’s, Pushcart, and Scribner’s.”
For Hongo, this mainstream success is correlated with a new aesthetic for Asian American poetry, one whose values we might very well call lyric. Music and purity of voice--“We lift our bodies, voices from the sand, and call”--are valued above forceful statements of Asian American identity. The collection focuses on younger writers like Song and Lee, who replace explicitly political statements with explorations of individual experience. Such poets are primarily interested, Hongo writes, in “a personal subjectivity and poetics within the American experience, minority or mainstream.”
Hongo thus turns away from the aesthetic of those writers who, in Chang’s generational scheme, we would have to call the “zero generation” of Asian American writers, the first consciously to write under that label: poets such as Lawson Fusao Inada and Janice Mirikitani, who achieved wide readerships in the 1970s with their fusion of political, populist content and jazz and haiku styles. While Hongo does pay homage to the “brave” and “innovative” efforts of these earlier writers, providing an account of their pioneering role in the creation of a distinctively Asian American literature, he is also harshly critical of some elements of their legacy. The typical Asian American writer of the 1970s, Hongo suggests, was preoccupied with a “polemicized critique” of American culture; he was “macho,” “crusading,” proud of his “political and ethnic consciousness” grounded in “community roots and allegiances,” “stable and secure” in his identity. (It is not hard to recognize here a caricature of that best-known of Asian American anthologists and provocateurs, Frank Chin.) Hongo argues that this attitude, carried forward into the early 1990s, has hardened into a kind of “intellectual bigotry” and “ethnic fundamentalism” on the part of those writers and critics who continue to judge Asian American writing by purely ideological criteria.
For writers of Hongo’s generation, then, the goal of Asian American poetry seemed to be not to establish and defend a distinctively Asian American identity, but to resist orthodox, “sociological,” and “essentialist” notions of that identity that had become oppressive. Against any “litmus test of ethnic authenticity,” Hongo’s anthology offers a wide range of subject matters, privileging the introspective lyric and eschewing the public rhetoric of racial politics. Yet this lyric turn inevitably raises the question of what remains distinctively Asian American about poetry that turns away from ethnic markers in its celebration of an American self. Thus
The Open Boat, while well-received by mainstream readers, has been criticized by some Asian American scholars for offering a narrow, depoliticized view of Asian American writing. Critic Juliana Chang, among others, has warned that Hongo’s anthology, in its privileging of mainstream American experience, risks the “appropriation of Asian American poetry into hegemonic narratives of immigration and assimilation.”
It might be hoped that the next generation of Asian American poets would respond to these dialectics--ideology/poetry, social/individual, politics/subjectivity--with a new synthesis. But Chang’s
Asian American Poetry offers what is largely a replay of Hongo’s generational logic, while redefining the players. Hongo and his peers, once seen as rebels against the vulgar politics of an older generation, now become purveyors of that politics. Their work’s concerns with “culture, identity, family, politics, ethnicity, and place,” however muted, are viewed as constraining by Chang’s younger poets, who are even less interested in “ethnic or political issues” than their immediate predecessors. The more explicit political engagements of the zero generation, acknowledged by Hongo, are for Chang a historical footnote, relegated to a single paragraph that summarizes Asian American writing since the 1890s. Chang gives us an account of Asian American writing in which ethnic and political concerns--and perhaps even the category of the Asian American itself--may soon disappear altogether. Her anthology, she writes, “reflects a shift away from [the] ideal of a ‘recognizable Asian voice’ and toward a poetry that transcends racial, gender, and cultural boundaries.” While Marilyn Chin’s foreword holds out the hope that younger Asian American poets will continue to “march onward, bear witness, and work with a conscious effort to build a magnificent, dynamic canon,” Chang’s introduction shows little interest in such rhetoric.
If Asian American poetry is moving even further away from identity politics, it is in part, Chang suggests, because it is becoming more “experimental.” As in most discussions of contemporary poetry, the term is used in the broadest sense to describe even the slightest play with “stanza, white space, and syntax”--anything, in short, that does not sound like the transparent voice of the workshop lyric. In Chang’s analysis, experimentation is opposed to politics and to the use of “traditional” Asian American themes or subjects. It is through experimental style that younger writers mark a “physical separation” from first-generation writers.
Despite Chang’s claims for a generational break, a glance at her selections shows less difference between first and next generations than one might have imagined. The opening of Monica Ferrell’s “Persephone”--
Mother, I love you. But with the dead
we drink differently, holding the cup
in the left hand, pouring the wine this way
into our mouths. Please understand.
What we do not say, I still mean;
the sound of purple drowns those other words out.--could be an alternate version of Sharon Hashimoto’s “The Mirror of Matsuyama” in
The Open Boat:
Mother, what trick of light
brings you back--your face rising to the surface?
Is it my need that imprisons you behind
the cold glass? When you lay still,
the flowered quilt no longer warm with your body,
I didn’t believe your promise.Familiar motifs appear, perhaps most noticeably in poems featuring Asian cooking and cuisine. In
The Open Boat, David Mura uses food as a mark of authenticity:
As Sam crumbles lumps of tofu on her tray,
I sizzle onions in oil, shoyu, rice wine,
add noodles, ginger, sugar, shiitake;
shoots of bamboo and chrysanthemum leaves.
Before the beef, veined with fat, thin as gauze,
I stir what for years I could not love.Asian American Poetry offers a round of variations on this theme, including Tina Chang’s “Fish Story”:
It is the hour of news. The television cracks
its voice over the radiator and the blue carpet. Always
that same cooked silver of you, oil spilling
from the mouth, ginger and scallions burning
through the scales. My father thinks you are delicate
as he steals the eggs from the purse
of your belly, white interior exposed and steaming.The few differences between these first- and second-generation writers can be attributed less to changes in the demographics and experience of Asian Americans over the past two decades than to shifts in what mainstream American poetry is doing. The sense of the line is somewhat less slack; there’s a self-conscious frame placed around autobiographical content; there is less earnestness and more humor. Chang claims that her authors are “bolder about sexual topics.” But there is little here to match Mura’s uncomfortable linking of racism and desire in his attraction to white pornography in
The Open Boat, or the “hard-ons and mermaids” of R. Zamora Linmark’s hustler’s Hawaii in
Premonitions.
There is plenty of evidence, though, of the desire to transcend race that Chang describes in her introduction. The polished lyrics of Rick Barot are studies in natural and erotic beauty, classical in their referents and reaching toward the universal in their insights. Jennifer Chang’s mother-daughter drama is figured not in racial or historical terms, but in religious ones, as a form of “unction.” It could be argued that this is a natural outgrowth of the aesthetic of first-generation writers. Mura’s work moves toward domestic joys, “the island of light we make with our bodies,” while Li-Young Lee develops a sort of erotic philosophy in poems that have “something to do / with death…something / to do with love.” But Mura and Lee continue to place these projects in the context of Asian American experience. If the work of younger poets lacks that context, Asian American poetry would appear to have a dim future.
There are poets in Chang’s anthology who do suggest new directions for Asian American writing, often in work that reactivates the dialectics of politics and form. It’s a surprise to realize that the writing of Mông-Lan, a rising star in the field, echoes the work of one of the best-known of the zero generation, Janice Mirikitani, in its jagged arrangement of words on the page and its archetypal power. Then there’s the antic brilliance of Linh Dinh, whose juxtapositions of humor and horror refresh the idea of political, historical writing. Dinh’s “The Most Beautiful Word” takes literally Adorno’s sense that writing lyric poetry in our time is barbaric:
I think “vesicle” is the most beautiful word in the English language. He was lying face down, his shirt burnt off, back steaming. I myself was bleeding. There was a harvest of vesicles on his back. His body wept. “Yaw” may be the ugliest. Don’t say, “The bullet yawed inside the body.” Say, “The bullet danced inside the body.”Dinh’s “Earth Cafeteria,” with its deceptively simple style and its parodic recitation of ethnic-food stereotypes (“Rice people vs. bread people…Kosher sub-gum vs. knuckle kabob”) is reminiscent of the early work of zero-generation writer Lawson Fusao Inada and of the recent poetry of John Yau.
The best work in
Asian American Poetry moves outward into public space, but never loses sight of the way such spaces are marked by politics and race. Nick Carbó’s engaging poems feature as their protagonist Ang Tunay na Lalalaki (Tagalog for “The Real Man”), a muscular star of ‘70s and ‘80s Filipino liquor commercials; his American counterpart, as Carbó notes elsewhere, would be the Marlboro Man. Carbó imagines Ang Tunay na Lalalaki as he “stalks the streets of New York,” seeking a role for himself in American culture:
He looks at his reflection
on a book store window, notices
that his hair has grown shoulder-length—
like Tonto in the Lone Ranger
he would watch on TV. He turns to the right,
his profile now looks like the young Bruce Lee,
as Kato in the Green Hornet. Yes,
he realizes it will always be the face
of a supporting character.Like many younger American poets, Carbó displays a hip facility with popular culture, but his poems show a wry awareness of the vexed role of the Asian in that media landscape. These poems, which take seriously the inner life of a pop-culture creation, offer an alternative to the fadeout of Asian American identity foreseen in Chang’s introduction. They offer the pleasures of lyric introspection, but place such insights at a critical distance--one that allows us to see the way race and culture continue to structure the individual Asian American experience. Through such work, Asian American poetry may have a future after all.
Still, it would be hard to argue that this anthology gives an adequate sampling of experimental Asian American work. The focus on emerging writers seems to have excluded more established experimental poets such as Myung Mi Kim, Tan Lin, and Catalina Cariaga (although Timothy Liu, the well-known author of four books, is included), and the work of promising younger writers such as Hung Q. Tu, Pamela Lu, Truong Tran, Sianne Ngai, and Brian Kim Stefans is not included. That’s a shame, because these writers provide a sense of how experiments with form can remain profoundly political, deepening new work’s connections to earlier Asian American writing rather than severing them. Indeed, the complex writing of the zero generation itself, far from being mere propaganda, testifies to the ongoing search for the appropriate forms in which to articulate an Asian American sensibility. Chang’s lack of interest in these bodies of writing impoverishes her anthology’s sense of possibility.
For what is still the most comprehensive statement on the role of formal experiment in Asian American poetry, readers would be well advised to return to another anthology of the 1990s, Walter K. Lew’s
Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. Published in 1995 by a small Asian American press, Premonitions has never received the same popular and critical attention as The Open Boat, despite containing twice as many poets and pages. Chang mentions
Premonitions but, like many readers, gives it short shrift, claiming that it “focuses on experimental poetry and features only previously unpublished work.” Neither of these statements is accurate. While Lew does feature less well-known poems by the major authors in his collection, many selections had already seen book or journal publication. And far from focusing myopically on the “experimental,” Lew offers a range of poets that is massively comprehensive. He includes generous selections from many of the major lyric poets featured in
The Open Boat, including Marilyn Chin, David Mura, and Agha Shahid Ali, while also including more stringently avant-garde writers who fall outside Hongo’s aesthetic, such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, and Tan Lin. Lew even makes room for the achievements of important Asian Canadian writers such as Fred Wah and Roy Miki.
The image of
Premonitions as a parochially avant-garde collection may have been encouraged by Lew’s afterword, which did not mention
The Open Boat by name but did critique those “previous anthologies” that have been “either too small or conservative to convey the astonishing diversity and eloquence of new poetries” being written by Asian Americans. “The work in this anthology,” Lew writes, “is not confined to conventional models of verse.” Despite its bulk,
Premonitions thus takes up a position of aesthetic dissidence not unlike that of Donald Allen’s 1960 collection
The New American Poetry. Like Allen, Lew even insists that “A poetry anthology should be organized poetically,” grouping Premonitions into 19 “zones” that represent different aesthetic, geographic, or political concerns.
Is it the case, as Chang asserts, that the experimental is the enemy of the political? Perhaps
Premonitions’ most impressive achievement is its argument that recent experimental trends in Asian American poetry are, in fact, profoundly consonant with the work of the writers of the zero generation, whose political commitments were matched with a willingness to explore different genres, forms, and modes in order to create a distinctively Asian American writing. Lew recovers the work of writers like Al Robles, Luis Malay Syquia, and Ronald Phillip Tanaka, widely published in the activist journals of the 1970s but neglected since. Their poems, like those of the lyric poets of the 1980s, give voice to Asian American experiences, but in a manner that is as much collective as individual, drawing on myth, slang, and Asian languages to create jagged, multivocal works that turn outward rather than inward. To read such writing against the contemporary multiethnic portraits of Sesshu Foster or the sonic collages of Tan Lin, as we do in
Premonitions, is a revelation, one that breaks down our boundaries between formal experiment and social engagement.
If
Premonitions has not been embraced as the authoritative anthology of Asian American poetry, that may be because the demands on such an anthology have shifted over the past decade. The rapid growth of college-level courses in Asian American literature means that any successful anthology of Asian American poetry will have to do double duty, as a trade book and as a textbook. Chang’s
Asian American Poetry acknowledges this reality, both in its broad title and its academic imprimatur, but its narrow aesthetic and chronological focus, along with its lack of attention to historical or scholarly context, makes it of little use for the classroom.
Premonitions, for all its strengths, is at its best as a vision of Asian American poetry for the 1990s. It is not a historical anthology that collects the most significant and widely read Asian American poems (there are no selections, for example, from perhaps the most widely taught Asian American poet, Li-Young Lee); nor does it offer a scholarly apparatus, such as headnotes or a critical introduction, that would serve teachers and students new to the topic.
The new, truly comprehensive anthology of Asian American poetry that is needed now would draw generously from both the 1980s lyric represented in Hongo’s
Open Boat and the avant-garde work of the 1970s and 1990s featured in
Premonitions, offering notes and introductions that place both aesthetics in historical and literary context. But it would also offer a much longer historical perspective on Asian American poetry, building on the work of scholars such as Juliana Chang, whose
Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry recovers Asian American poems from as early as the 1890s. It would place this work alongside poems by younger writers who represent some of the newest Asian American immigrant groups, while using three decades of experience by teachers of Asian American writing to help measure what poems have been most useful in the classroom. Such an anthology--ideally a collaboration between critics and poets--would provide an invaluable introduction to Asian American poetry for general readers, while providing the depth students, scholars, and writers need. But since there is no widely available anthology of this sort even for Asian American literature more generally, it’s a safe bet that readers seeking this big anthology of Asian American poetry have a long wait ahead of them.
*****
Timothy Yu's poems and prose have appeared in SHAMPOO, Meanjin, The Poetry Project Newsletter,
and the anthology Pinoy Poetics,
as well as at his blog, tympan He teaches at the University of Toronto.
BORN TO SLOW HORSES by KAMAU BRATHWAITE
JULIANA SPAHR reviews
Born to Slow Horses by Kamau Brathwaite(Wesleyan University Press, 2005)[Review first appeared in
The Poetry Project Newsletter, April/May 2006. Editor Brendan Lorber]
At the end of
Born to Slow Horses, in a note that somewhat resembles a biographical note, Kamau Brathwaite calls this book part of his “postSalt poetry” phase. The “Time of Salt,” as he puts it, were the years 1986-1990, years in which his wife died, his home and archives were destroyed in a hurricane, and he was attacked in Kingston, Jamaica. The “Time of Salt” produced recent books such as
The Zea Mexican Diary and
Trench Town Rock. PostSalt are
Born to Slow Horses and other recent collections such as
Words Need Love Too. And as he writes in the third person, these postSalt books survey or make “natural reference to the entire tidalectics, but at the same time marking, even with the most remarkable of his ‘Caribbean’ poems here, a significant transboundary development.”
It is this attention to the “transboundary” that I find so distinctive about Brathwaite’s work. Brathwaite’s work is distinctive for how it charts the connections between the global and the local. His stunning
Middle Passages zig zags back and forth across the Atlantic in a series of poems about political resistance and political art. Even his highly personal works, such as
Trench Town Rock which is about his attack in Jamaica, often manage to get in a colonial history lesson. I always want to resort to some oxymoronic term or jargon, perhaps a term like transboundaric localism, to describe his work because the words currently in circulation around poetry never feel adequate. His work is always rooted in the Caribbean yet it is never naively isolated, never nostalgic, always interestingly attentive to the difficulties of its colonial histories and migrations. Part of the intense pleasure of reading his work is how it swoops back and forth between detail and big picture.
Because so much of Brathwaite’s book is about the difficulties of colonial histories and migrations, he is the master of the lament. He uses the form frequently and he uses it persuasively. And it is just one more example of how Brathwaite is always challenging genre expectations that he turns so often to a form that is usually gendered female and is also often about an inability to speak for so much of his historical, political poetry.
Born to Slow Horses, Brathwaite’s most recent book and among his strongest, has at least two laments in it although it could probably be argued that most of the book is lament. One of the obvious laments, “Kumina,” is about Brathwaite’s wife’s son who is hit by a car while riding a bike. The poem opens with the telling of the death and then in a mother’s voice tells the story of mourning day by day. This poem has all the marks of the classic Brathwaite lament. It begins by telling about the death of someone, then turns to an intimate chronicling of the pain of someone close to the dead who is still alive using classical tropes (the breaking of bread, the tears, the disorientation and inarticulateness), and then there is a moment when the poem turns individual grief into the larger collective pain of a culture dealing with an impossible history.
The other obvious lament is called “9/11 Hawk” and it has some of the classic Brathwaite lament moments but moves out of them, perhaps even more into this “transboundary” space. “9/11 Hawk” opens with the narrator listening to music and begins with a memory of hearing Coleman Hawkins play “Body and Soul” and a discussion of how music matters. It moves then to an uncle who died in the Twin Towers when they collapsed and a telling of this event. The voice of lament in this poem is not so much the narrator and his uncle but Beth Petrone, the pregnant wife of a firefighter who died in the buildings who is quoted throughout the end of the poem. The images in this poem are productively less sure, more complicated than in “Kumina.” There is “the broken quaver of the water leaking in our one canoe” and “death in the fission of indebtedness” and “the unknown animal that is now yr sibyl sister at the door.”
While Brathwaite has been living in New York City for some time, it has never held the attention of his work the way the Caribbean has. For this reason, it is interesting to see him writing about 9/11. So much of his work laments those dead because of the world’s powers colonial histories it is fascinating to see him writing from within the center of the empire and to have him mourning with it. The poem ends with the narrator wanting to reconnect with his/her beloved. “O let me love you love you love love you” is one among many lines where it is left ambiguous if the beloved is a human or New York City, whether this love is something that is difficult or easy.
The last poem in
Born to Slow Horses uses short, mainly three line stanzas, Robert Creeley-style. It is not really lament but could easily be read as comment on lament. Here Brathwaite abandons his classic trope of expansive listing and swooping historical views and turns to tell a story of a dead robin strangled by a string around its neck and is caught on a power line. Most of the poem describes another bird that comes to mourn the dead bird. The poem ends with the a boy cutting the dead robin down and burying it. The still living bird in this poem is clearly lamenting (this bird is gendered male): “the mourn-/ing male bird circle/& sing//at the hope-/less/song-//less/tighten-/ing string.” But it seems telling that the boy comes from outside this relationship between the dead and the mourning and respectfully ends the song through his actions. This ending suggests that there might yet be another, new phase of Brathwaite’s work after this postSalt one.
*****
Juliana Spahr is the author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs
and some other books.
DOWN SPOOKY by SHANNA COMPTON
JOSHUA COREY reviews
Down Spooky by Shanna Compton(Winnow Press, Austin, TX, 2005)[Review first printed in
Cutbank #65. Editor Brandon Shimoda, 2006]
If melancholy is the index of authenticity in American poetry, then Shanna Compton’s
Down Spooky is a very inauthentic book indeed—or as Compton writes in “My Huge Napoleon,” “Violators of these depth prescriptions / may be unsubscribed. But does it matter? / He’ll mature into silliness.” She is that rare creature, an exuberant minimalist: though few of her poems are longer than a page, they are compressed and crammed with wordplay and wit. The first line of her bio says it all, really: “Born and raised in Texas, Shanna Compton has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1995.” She combines West and East, bringing an acute sense of place (places, rather: the Duane Reade and the BQE; St. John Parish in Louisiana and a high school band parade in Texas) reminiscent of C.D. Wright. But like Wright (or Caroline Knox, who contributes a blurb to the back cover), Compton’s truest allegiance is to words and their uncanny ability to manufacture a community of meanings out of the barest possible contexts. The speed of her associations produces a kind of delirious whiplash in the reader, as in the case of “Post-Texas Expressive Heat,” quoted here in full:
Your mother put a
fan in the oven,
he said, to cool
it down. That’s right
the door is open
and on it sits
a little fan, blowing.
I am a little
fan, she says, an
ardent fan, a big
fan of yours. Whew.
That clever, cartoony “
Whew” conceals itself behind many of Compton’s poems like the quick sly grin of the cat who got the cream. It often seems apt to compare these poems to cartoons and comics: three- or four-panel affairs offering the immediate pleasures of strong lines and good jokes, but rewarding closer examination with the fine detail of their crosshatching and the exquisite syntax ordering the panels. The latter quality is on display in “The Woman from the Public,” which alternates a seemingly straightforward confessional narrative in lines of Roman type with incantatory italicized lines, the whole adding up into a decisive sketch of the risks run by a woman claiming her right to compose “the public.” Nervy and syncopated,
Down Spooky proves that you don’t have to prove your seriousness to create authentic experience in language. Or as “My Huge Napoleon” concludes, asking of its titular character, “Why can’t he just admit / pleasure is inevitable?”
*****
Joshua Corey is the author of two collections of poetry, Selah
and Fourier Series,
and keeps a blog at http://joshcorey.blogspot.com.
PURR by MARY ANN SAMYN
ANNA EYRE reviews
Purr, by Mary Ann Samyn(New Issues, 2004)[Review first printed in
TRAFFIC, Editor Elizabeth Treadwell, 2006]
It has been said that before we are conscious of something we must have a word for it. Mary Ann Samyn's third book
Purr elucidates a consciousness that is built on language. The poem "Beneath Speech" welcomes the reader into a collection that is aware of the weight of words, the importance of questioning their definitions and the way in which we use them. In the poem a woman is "looking up at the undersides of words." and the words physicaly take on the characteristics of that which they describe.
In the air, the smell of snow like bits of speech--may I
have a little word?,
she wondered, because or so to cover me--Mary Ann Samyn's little words reach into the big world of ideas by tracking thought in a perception made of nothing but signs and symbols. Her language is vernacular and yet,because of the juxtopositions she creates by following a thought-fractal, becomes a different sort of communication. A communication/expression through familiar language that bursts into the unfamiliar questioning of its accuracy. The poem "A Thought, For Example, Is a Form" adresses what happens when we think of a word. Riffing off the definition of words such as "mine," the poem simultaneously takes place in the concrete world of what language stands for as well as in the abstract world of language itself independent of things. "The point being that you can't see it. The point."
Perhaps it is in this seemingly familiar language that we can best see the absurdity of certain predicaments and their description. What seems simple at first glance is often what is most complex. "As for complexity, I've come to prefer it-". Mary Ann Samyn forces us to confront the larger questions of our existence by rubbing them up against the minutea. The Big Bang for example enters a poem alongside a postcard or consider the title "Origin of the Universe or Cheerleading for Novices." Her sense of humor is evident throughout and instead of making fun of or mocking an intent, it serves to accentuate the difficulty of trying to express/communicate/illuminate anything through language. By highlighting the pointing/referential aspects of words she is simultaneously able to rely on their fixed content as well as unglue it. This is not a simple task, "there is so far to go" and there is no dispute that when Samyn says, "I go as far as I can." she has.
*****
Anna Eyre is a professor of English at UNM-Taos. She is also a reading tutor for middle school students at Taos Pueblo Day School and served as the assistant editor for the 2005 edition of Traffic.
Her chap book Metaplasmic
was published by effing press in 2004.
OCTOBER LIGHT by JEFF TAGAMI
BARBARA JANE REYES reviews
OCTOBER LIGHT by Jeff Tagami(Kearny Street Workshop, San Francisco, 2002)[Review first appeared in
Pacific Reader, Volume 15, No. 1, Summer/Fall 2005. Editor Alan Chong Lau]
At the risk of appearing cliché, the word I keep coming back to is “home.”
Jeff Tagami offers us poems in the voices of those who have experienced loss in his book of poems
October Light. To begin with a violence, a loss of life, as in “October 23rd,” we immediately understand the significance of October, and of Autumn -- this is the ending of the cycle of life. Loss happens in industrial accidents, in mental unsoundness, as in “The Horn Blow,” and “Now it is Broccoli.” The rural life to which Tagami has introduced us is far from idyllic; real people lose real pieces of themselves as they work to make this place their home.
Set along the Pajaro River of Central California, Tagami’s poems explore the intimate relationship between the land and those who work it. The Pajaro is the life vein of this community, a ubiquitous and ever-changing force; it is more than mere river. In “Song of Pajaro”:
Pajaro the men thigh deep in mud…
Pajaro the children who clean…
Now Pajaro is tired…
This Pajaro of my mother…Its waters bring life to fields of cauliflower, broccoli, potatoes; its waters also carry the dead, as in “I Remember Fermin,” where excess potatoes the boss says to dump into the river, are expendable as Filipino workers. Tagami presents in metaphor a scathing critique of American Excess; food and human lives are so easily disposable.
But far from lamentation or dirge, these poems are lovely and tender, hope-insistent, and here is where Tagami’s talent is more than apparent. In these poems so strongly imbued with sentiments of outrage and anger, Autumn’s darkness and its proximity to endings, there is still promise of renewal, for life is cyclical, and in death, one transcends.
In “Tobera,” written in the voice of Fermin Tobera, the Filipino laborer killed in the Watsonville Race Riots of 1930, Tagami asserts what American History omits. Without being forgiving, Tobera, through Tagami, asserts, “I am not bitter, believe me,” for in his death, peace from the brutality of white mobs. Tobera continues to live, in his brothers’ whispers, “Tobera, Tobera, Tobera.”
Home is Here; this rallying cry, deafening in its quiet.
*****
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center
(Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco
(Tinfish, 2005), for which she received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.
REAL KARAOKE PEOPLE: POEMS AND PROSE by ED BOK LEE
YVONNE HORTILLO reviews
Real Karaoke People: Poems and Prose by Ed Bok Lee (New Rivers Press, 2005) [Review first printed in
Hyphen, Issue 9, 2006. Contributing Books Editor: Lisa Ko.]
United Church of Karaoke In the prairies of North Dakota, single-roomed churches rise out of the wheat. Some are the only buildings along stretches of road. Some rise out of the intersections of two dirt roads. Some are squat with stained glass, stone walls and brown facades. Some are wooden painted white with one steeple. They tower over plains that roll gently from the main roads. They are the lone attestors that a community lives in this part of the prairie.
The churches were built by European immigrants in the late 1800s up to the 1950s. There are about 2,000 of them scattered throughout North Dakota, the centers of towns of about 2,000 residents each, and about 50 of them fall into disrepair and neglect every year -- earning them a spot in the National Historic Trust's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in 2001.
This is the setting of Ed Bok Lee's "Year of the Dog," a poem in his collection,
Real Karaoke People. Lee tells the story of young soldiers escaping wars in Vietnam and Los Angeles only to end up in towns whose center used to be the decrepit church down the street, hard to miss, crumbling in its obvious not-belonging.
... refugees from Bosnia and Saigon, come to till the abandoned prairies, ghost towns of a century-and-a-half ago, where Swedish songs of sugar beet farmers mist the one-room church houses
if you concentrate, you can still hear their walls in the wind; journey the spine of abandoned railroads on the Dakota Plains to the end of civilization, past vagrant, shot-through Indian reservations, and you know how they came, but where did they go?
(Year of the Dog) Most churches ring with silence, heavy with memory. Lee mixes the memories of new immigrants washing dishes in their new towns, how the same Guangdong hands that used to separate fish from fine nets now separate plates from glassware and forks and spoons at the only Mexican restaurant in town.
Fishermen may not have imparted their memories in the same careful and gentle language that Lee translates them for us, and Lee clearly takes pains to do justice to their experiences. He manages to tell the story of a mail order bride enduring the differences of man and Asian wife and saving enough money so she can send for her friend from Saigon and be with her. He remembers the words a would-be older brother who showed him scars from life on the streets and said,
"Go off and write... Poetry. ...
And when you do,
do me this one favor. ...
Lie.
And make our father and me
the heroes
you always needed us to be."
(The Secret to Life in America) Just when Lee convinces his reader about the unhappy lives of his subjects, he rises and sings a song:
when you're singing karaoke,
really singing from the center of your being,
in whatever town you're in, whatever bar, club or smoky poolroom...
the only thing that really matters is...
Destiny
(Real Karaoke People) And you can't help but smile, because even if poetry were invented to make you despair -- after all, all lives lead to the grave, indeed, Death is everyone's destiny -- or invented to jolt you awake -- after all, some of us Asians were born here, or brought here at the highest comfort our enterprising lawyer-doctor-business parents could afford -- then poetry is life, and all our despairing, expiring lives are poetry.
*****
Yvonne Hortillo is an editorial assistant for The Associated Press.
She has never owned a business card in her life. She has crossed the Chicago River countless times, and is fated to cross it untold times more. She adores truth in all forms.
FORBIDDEN ENTRIES by JOHN YAU
EILEEN TABIOS reviews
FORBIDDEN ENTRIES by John Yau(Black Sparrow, Santa Rosa, CA., 1996) [Review first appeared in
TEN, The Literary Magazine of The Asian American Writers Workshop. Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 1998. Editor Nina Chaudry]
On contemporary American poetry, Donald Hall once said that too many poems "are afflicted by modesty of ambition. They do not extend themselves, they make no great reach." John Yau's poetry collection,
FORBIDDEN ENTRIES (Black Sparrow, 1996), is a rare exception to Hall's trenchant observation. Though Yau often uses arbitrary rules of composition to begin a poem, the results are more affecting than many confessional poems because of how he experiments with syntax and diction outside the realm of narrative.
Yau's poetry is influenced by his interaction with postwar art as a critic, curator, teacher and collaborator with visual artists. Just as the visual arts of his time has addressed such tensions as realism (poetic narrative) versus abstraction (pure language) and the shifting lines between the image of art versus the concept of art, the poetic debate of Yau's generation has focused on a poetry rooted in the fixed "I" or ego (realism) versus language as the pure material of poetry (abstraction). Yau, however, believes in subjectivity. When his subjectivity is combined with his belief that identity is not fixed but constantly in flux, the result is a poem much like a drip painting by Jackson Pollock whose surface presents a harmonious balance despite being made from flung and ruptured trails of paint. What results is an evocative poem with strong personas despite unexpected shifts and turns from and within the poetic voices of the narrators. Yet the rupture of the poetic voice (e.g. the interchangeability of pronouns) does not prevent the reader from empathizing with that voice -- evidence of Yau's master craftsmanship as he convinces the reader to identify with someone unidentifiable because the poem's lines are that compelling.
My favorite poem, "Conversation At Midnight," projects the ebb-and-flow of a conversation between lovers and yet it was written primarily because Yau wished to concoct a poem that would utilize 30 words he had not yet used in his poetry. The result transcends his intellectual goal, proof that the poem evolved to become its own entity (just as, he has said about the works of such artists as Jasper Johns and Pat Steir, "the painting takes over"). The self-fulfillment of the poem can be illustrated by this excerpt:
The window was always glued down. You knew that.
I am sorry about the lump I left in your throat.
It was the latest joke someone sent me from another state.
. . . Perhaps you would like to shift your flippers a bit,
make yourself more pungent than a fist clinging
to the grains of its last silver collar.
. . . How would I know what kind of rust coats the inside of my dome?
You were always the expert on the proper insect retrieval systems,
the necessary buzz tones to pendulum through the hair.
. . .Don't talk to me like I am some style of perishable food
and you are the only minimum page burner around here.
I have all rinds of dirt. You want to tree some up or what.
Sonar finally brought them through the last truculent gates.
Why do they bang like that if they are not yours to keep.
If you want to lease me, go ahead and cry. You little parking lot. In Yau's hands, "parking lot" has become an endearment, much like the private pet names lovers often have for each other.
Other poems by Yau may be like abstract paintings where the images offer spaces that the viewer personalizes with an emotional response, such as these words from the poem "Peter Lorre Dreams He Is the Third Reincarnation of a Geisha":
I want my neck to be licked by a cloud, my eyes to snow. The incense of winter's lengthening shadows leaves its spoon of ashes by my pillow. The tea grows cold. The temple bell is silent, a pile of shoes and limbs growing beside the door. Mount the onyx crutches on the brocade wall, O hill of foolish straw, O devastated dreamer. Yau's writing methodologies and their significances are intriguing as well as intriguingly holistic. For instance, he is influenced by surrealism, and it is synchronistic that Yau -- who, as an essayist, also writes on socio-political issues -- is conscious and appreciative that, among modernist movements, surrealists were the ones who openly accepted people of color. Also, Yau's wish to get away from the "I" reflects his dissatisfaction with how both modern and postmodern poets have addressed issues of identity (he once posed the question, "Why is the author dead at a point when demographics have changed such that all these people who were once marginalized and silenced (e.g. minorities) can now talk"?). Yet the poetics would not be as interesting if Yau's poetry did not touch the reader. Yau does not write poetry as a conceptualist -- like a visual artist might relegate a philosophical treatise to a blank canvas or an empty frame backed up against the wall (at least, not after such have been done the first time). Yau's poems still sing, still soar like the music of Miles Davis whom he admires, as this excerpt shows from "Angel Atrapado XXII":
I want to penetrate
the planes of smoke between you and your mouth,
I want to steal the earthen jar,
where you store your bones,
the ones you use to beat
sunlight into metal,
moonlight into stone. FORBIDDEN ENTRIES is a pleasure for its poetry of pure emotion and range, from sweetness to despair to wryness and even to coolness (the latter as seen in this fragment from "Genghis Chan: Private Eye XXVIII":
Droll moll
Cool doll
Shark stamp
Park bunch. But Yau's collection is also important in that his poems musters personality even as Yau attempts to delete his "I." Yau once said (in his book,
The United States of Jasper Johns which I also recommend; it is one of my favorite meditations on visual art), "Language is not consensual; we have not completely agreed upon what words mean or how they are to be used." But even as Yau challenges the notion of a common narrative, Yau has not lost sight of what I believe the point of a poem (a work of Art) may be: the enabling of a relationship between the work and its audience/reader.
Finally, because Yau's poems affect the reader without limiting the space of interaction to a specific narrative, Yau's poems may further engage the reader in questioning the wider implications posited by his work. Included among the issues raised by Yau are the (political) implications of his diction subverting the dictionary; how to live with uncertainty posed by an ever-shifting identity; the difficulties of communication; the questioning of what is "familiar"; the distancing of the cultural "Other"; the trickiness of memory; and the relationship of Art to one's life.
FORBIDDEN ENTRIES is an important book because it has "great reach" for both the mind and the heart.
*****
Eileen Tabios just released a new poetry collection: THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I (xPress(ed), 2006). Available at SPD, Amazon.com and booksellers with excellent taste.
