Verse

NEW! Poem by Evelyn Reilly

2012-01-26T02:22:00.000-05:00

Evelyn Reilly

CHILDE ROLANDA, or THE WHATEVER EPIC

Here endeth, then,
Progress this way

--Robert Browning,
Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came

1.

Names in my ears

all the lost

the Spring My Heart Made

sudden river trickle

and charged rain

epistolary pistils

along a Path Darkening

2.

Rain ampules

liquid word phials

came to arrest my thoughts

Questions that CrackDevastate

the extreme corner of the page

no scale order or end

to this series

3.

Wheel which gets the wormiest

sticker panels Nightingale

Panels Small Still Voice

and total inversion splash ruin

in the strictest sense

of the personal desire party

but saddle ached

saddle ached and ached

4.

This was the place Crayola

the Loretto Laredo

where even those

Who Could Find in Their List

trembling outcomes

old man of which

engine trouble

and the interface touch

a little bit dated

5.

Although the View the Same

migrating into the deepest pocket

of Next Phase Phrases

a switch of the Thin New

once upper

now "in it" low

and Subject to the Same Error

6.

In Middle Ground

Tall Scalped Mountain

and lame figure in the cleft

sunset where Noise was Named Ears

re-spoken in the muffle

of horror ardor and blond worry

The Arm That Will Reach Out

when dry blades prick the mud

7.

For flowers fill cruel rents

with Environmental Trial Run

natural regrowth material

mostly alien mostly waste

but coherent with alarms

that Bruise the Creature Program

alert the disappearing progress memo

laid down millennia and millennia

8.

And She Whose She-Horn is also

a camera also a navigational device

photographs as a Breathing Rock

what was picked up as a speaking sea

of avant jewelry: rock paper scissor

and Uber Fern Leaking Through

so many pre-set talking points

disambiguated among the creeping forces

of multiple password panic

9.

in which dauntless Childe Rolanda

whistle blower forest format

maven trolling the underside

of the Universal Mistake Blanket

presses to lipless lips

the endzone slugfest

run out of fuel last lines

(locust marrow sepal

sorrow) of the Whatever Epic

Review of Barbara Claire Freeman, Endi Bogue Hartigan & Jennifer Martenson

2012-01-11T11:55:00.005-05:00

Incivilities by Barbara Claire Freeman. Counterpath Press, $14.95.

One Sun Storm by Endi Bogue Hartigan. The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, $16.95.

Unsound by Jennifer Martenson. Burning Deck, $14.

Reviewed by Andy Frazee

Each of the poems of Barbara Claire Freeman’s first book might be called an incivility, as if the term referred to a new poetic subgenre alongside the elegy and pastoral. Even as the title may connote civics, civil society, and the Civil War—all of which play roles here, directly or indirectly—it is the way that Freeman’s poems act discourteously, uncivilly, that make her poetry exhilarating. “Imagine not having to apologize for the United States,” she writes in “When the Moon Comes Up.” “Let history decide which matters most, the weeds or the earth.”

This incivility, while not confined to it, finds its stride in tackling the current financial collapse, “the decade’s debacle.” “My purpose / here is to decline into the realities of the economy,” she writes in one of the book’s title poems. “Greed’s gone viral in someone’s sentence but a stock / that clings to its fifty-two week high begs to be sold.” More generally throughout the book, Freeman investigates the ways that underlying truths are mystified through encoding, whether it be the whitewashing of history by ideology, the occult initiation rites of religion, or the pseudo-mystical language of the stock market. “Better to live like an options trader awake before the market / begins its metronymic stream and the first scattered symbols undo / the possibility of hope,” she writes in another of the title poems. And here we find the tension at the heart of Freeman’s poetry, between poetry’s truth-telling function and its own type of encoding: poetic, especially lyrical, language itself. This tension is of special consequence for political poetry, torn between the need to witness and critique and the need to do so in a way that doesn’t push the poem into the realm of propaganda.

Freeman’s solution to this dilemma is to reconceptualize the lyric as public speech, in a way not out of line with the intentions of British poets of the 1930s—particularly the early Auden, whose modernist experiments in lyric and oratory are too often eclipsed by the reputation of his later works. Freeman engages a form of what the college-age Auden, piecing together texts lifted from myriad sources into anxious narratives, called “the Waste Land game”—as can be seen in Incivilities’s first poem “The Second Inaugural,” which melds textual appropriation (from George Washington’s inaugural speeches), dramatic monologue, and political speech:

Dear Necessity, the magnitude
          and difficulty of the trust to which the voice
                    of my country has called arises from the recent
tempest, adopted by the Spanish to name
          the storms they encountered in New Times
                    Roman.

Here the inability to tell which words are Washington’s, which Freeman’s, makes for a shifting, hybrid speaker that partakes of the past and the present, of public eminence and personal effacement, of borrowed and newly-written language. A kind of melting pot, one might say, though one that serves, in the ostensible moment of national unity, to turn its eye on disunion: “In the night there is a coming / and going of people, but where are the former / ties?” These former ties lie at the heart of Freeman’s vision here, and the poems return to the image of an unraveling social fabric: “a territory made up // of objects connected unhappily,” “parcels tied together by chance bonds, folded structures, fracture / systems.”

In her emphasis on rhetoric, politics, and public language, Freeman does seem to be an acolyte of Auden, by way of the fractured, appropriative poetics of postmodernity. Incivilities shares similarities with Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which explores ideology and social ties through a speaker seemingly infected with the culture of global capital, even as she rails against it. Like Spahr’s book, Freeman conveys a world caught in the general economy of capital, which frames each relationship, each connection, even as ideology conceals this framing. Equal parts experiment and jeremiad, Incivilities is an intense examination of the nation’s soul whose lyricism strives to overcome the lament at its center. Like Spahr’s book, Incivilities reminds us that jeremiad demands experiment, if only to free ourselves from complicity in what we would defy. “If you fax, attach, / or photograph this text / without permission from / the unbegotten one who hides / in silence,” Freeman writes in “Apocryphon,” “you will be / its replica.”

*

While Freeman’s poems take on current events directly, the poems of Endi Bogue Hartigan’s Colorado Prize-winning One Sun Storm portray these events as humming just beneath the surface, a kind of background radiation ready to intrude into the poet’s meditations. Juliana Spahr has called for a nature poetry that does not fail to image the bulldozer as well as the bird whose habitat the bulldozer threatens. Hartigan’s is a nature poetry, but one that takes the bulldozer (or in this case “the war”) into account, and in a way that is perhaps more startling for the naturalness with which the threat appears, as if it is an essential aspect of the scene:

You are instances of lichen falling, instances of white fingered lichen
sprinkling from the bridge You are two sisters talking there,

it is reported that the sun has fallen on your hair

or that your hair reflects the war above the bridge, or that your hair
reflects the water that is bridged, or that the water is not there

The cofounder of Spectaculum, a journal devoted to long poems and series, Hartigan alternates more expansive sequences with shorter lyrics; many of the pieces, like “Icestorm,” marry long lines with the intricate repetition of minimalist music. “[A]nd in the fusion of ice drifts we were two of / three, then three of three, then one,” the poet writes. “[A]nd were repeated, as a dance / to which the lost are drawn / in the midst of disperson—.” Others, like the opener “Owl,” compress the poet’s perceptions into lines of lyrical precision: “Here the animals / we've plucked / from books or fields, placed // into our hearts / like lanterns / imagining keener sense.”

One Sun Storm anoints Hartigan an heir to Gary Snyder’s consideration of nature through the lens of Buddhism, even as other influences—Jorie Graham, Brigit Pegeen Kelly—make more direct formal claims on the work. Though the poet does not speak of it in Buddhist terms, the Buddhist conception of multiplicity-in-oneness (or oneness-in-multiplicity) is at center stage here. Importantly, this oneness is experienced as a kind of ecology the poems’ speakers are within and a part of, rather than acting as poles of a subject-object dichotomy:

     The people in the horizon, one people and no horizon, one horizon, one person
and
three billion horizons, two people, three billion people in no horizon
          To not equate horizons with horizons

Here is the center, no, here is the center from which one field is drawn
          Here is my statement, no, here is the field in which statement is drawn

                    Let us be clear.

It is this weaving and unweaving of details perceived in nature that grants Hartigan’s poetry a visionary status, in that the poems’ acute observations, like the nitty-gritty of quantum physics, reveal a complex and wondrous reality, even its ostensibly mundane manifestations:

There is a French men’s store on the corner in which the tourists try on hats.

There is design, and envy of design,
and cars designed for envy, and actual chartreuse birds.

This visionary cast finds its revelation—as nature poetry often does—within the already-revealed. Or, more precisely—and this is what makes One Sun Storm more than just nature poetry—it finds revelation at the moment of becoming, which occurs and then, just as suddenly, is gone, replaced by another becoming. Hartigan’s poems, particularly the sequences, are recombinant organisms, becoming and becoming again, like double helixes evolving into eyes and ears and skin. “The day the puma licked her face,” goes the Lorcaesque “The day the puma,” “the pace of the past / raced unwed, she said, no fear, no fear, no fear.” “The said world slid, tumbled, rained,” it continues, “the world began again, again.”

Like Snyder’s poetry, Hartigan’s political critique arises from an awareness of events that are ignorant of or threaten this ongoing revelation of unity in multiplicity. Hartigan goes so far as to take Whitman to task:

The third thing is the grass,
not the multitude of grasses.
A completion that was singular in nature as a nation is singular
and torn for it.

Unity is implicit in reality, Hartigan seems to say; to claim it as a function of the state is to reduce oneness to ideology, to claim (unilaterally, one could say) that the centerless has a center. Lovely without losing its edge, critical without losing its heart, One Sun Storm achieves that rarest of poetic feats: it makes wisdom new.

*

Like Hartigan’s work, the poems of Jennifer Martenson’s Unsound are texts to move around in; like Freeman’s, they pack a sharp political edge. Most of all, they remind us that words are things too. This is not concrete poetry, though the words do interact with weight, and their texture matters as much as the more traditional syntax of the sentence. Taking her cues from the spatial, appropriative poetics of Susan Howe and Jena Osman, Martenson performs an autopsy on the page only to prove the language is still alive, its heart beating all the faster.

In poems like “A Priori,” it is the way that words touch that is paramount over what order they come in. And in this Martenson reminds us that poetry is an art of alternatives—particularly of alternative syntaxes, whether they be between two words, two pages, or two lines:

The trouble seems to have stemmed not from the synapses but from the word “sexuality,” about which much was said but little known. Her perception (taken over and assigned a different value) of her impulses was forced into alignment with THAT IS, THROUGH a lexicon gleaned from those old standard fantasies (retained in spelling due to conservatism) which had by default passed into public domain to disguise themselves as private longings while THE MEANINGFUL AND OBJECTIVE misogyny and homophobia REACTIONS OF THE OTHER raked in the residuals.

Martenson experiments with the way language touches in order to examine how this shifting linguistic surface may enact the perceivable world—but only to lay claim to an unseen world of meaning that resists scientific discourse’s appeal to an authoritative truth. Yet this is less an appeal for the soul than a recognition of what is elusive, and how the very difficulty of defining the elusive lends too easily to conceptual distortions. Martenson frames this most clearly in the series “Xq281,” which at once takes a cue from Jenny Boully’s “The Body” and which differentiates itself though its playful rhizome of reference. Comprised of 12 footnotes (the main part of the page is blank), the poem behaves like the bio-linguistic mutations of the first footnote, which seem to lead to nothing less than the “ideological mutation” of human selfhood:

While numerous experiments have demonstrated the ability to bind tightly with strands of DNA,9 thereby producing ideological mutations, the exact mechanisms by which these paradigms exert their effects on the economic ramifications of sexual preferences are, at present, unclear.

We’re then lead to the ninth footnote, and from the ninth, the tenth:

9 (While the spines are relatively durable, the information stored within can be banned10 at any time.)

10 This process is known as indoctrination: traditions normally stored in the form of two vines wrapped around the status quo separate in order to guarantee the reproduction and survival of laboriously alienating complacency.

To say that Martenson’s writing “slips” easily from the linguistic to the material, the conceptual to the physical, or the biological to the political is to mislabel the work, for the slip is no mistake and the poet calls our attention to it: this is what language does, and what poetry in particular makes evident. “Is there something / buried in the hybrid / testimonies of medium, / skin, and prediction?” Martenson asks in “Centerpiece.”

Appropriately, the more traditionally-versified poems of the last section take on their own sequential state, their own duration as an object of inquiry, using line and stanza breaks to make visible the in-betweenness, the aporias that lurk within one’s seemingly coherent worldview:

Let flute equal raw sensation
and let medium et al
stand in for language
with its veils and chisels.
I thought to find a block of marble
where instead I found an echo
splashing back and forth
between resemblances.

This “echo / splashing back and forth” is for Martenson the kind of fact that science fails to measure, and because of this, holds the possibility of escaping its confining, defining discourse. In her emphasis on the physicality of the page and in the way her language constantly breaks its conceptual frame, the poet suggests that this echo, this fact, is poetry itself, uniquely equipped to handle the interface of the physical and the ideological, the biological and the cultural. “I get stuck where the tree provides merely // shade, not philosophical positions,” she writes in “Preface,” “I had either to seek out a different gender or to climb across the blind-spot and resume my identity // on the other side.” Unsound is finally a book both defiantly experimental and, in a way, defiantly traditional: it seeks to approach the unspeakable, and speak it.

NEW! Poem by Micah Bateman

2011-10-17T00:24:00.001-04:00

Micah Bateman

ONE

One starves, one
Activates a cigarette.
Outside the bush
Of limbs billowing: a
Mime’s glove.
One leaves, one
Selects a glossy
From a selection
Of glossies, hand
Deliberate, printless.
One’s eye dissects
The room like
Cut fruit, one
Swells like a pear
In the serpent’s
Unhinged entry, one
Streaks a blind flash,
One cringes, one’s
Mouth ejects
A deluge of grain,
Cascading brown
Gestalt of particles
Only discernible
By the lightning’s
Quick crack, rescission
Of verbs bonded
To nouns, plucked right
Out of the loop, one
Blowing a bubble, entering
It, only to wave
Goodbye, only to
Meet the wall’s
Ballistic exactitude.
A crop circle is stitched
Radian by radian
Into the mown rows
Of pasture, cows
Given over to the
Chore of sleep
And dream, of what?,
One wonders, flicking
Her toe too relentlessly
To answer one.

NEW! Poem by Stephanie Ann Whited

2011-10-10T00:06:00.000-04:00

Stephanie Ann Whited

IT STARTS IN THE BELLY

I am losing prayers to these eardrums. In a whale
stomach that needs a scrubbing. A good detox. No
more shellfish for this fiend who just opens his mouth
taking in any old thing that comes along. I
dream the ark teeters on the precipice

of embargo. How about
some Palmolive to shiny

the hull? I hear
the figs have eyes

to rest on laurels
made of patent pig
skin and red #
40.

I spy something black and white and radioactive

All over.

NEW! 3 poems by Douglas Piccinnini

2011-09-22T00:53:00.000-04:00

Douglas Piccinnini

WILDLIFE

my green is my green”
and trending
and huge

woodlings porch
the ordinary forces

and caked w fur
and seasoned

the water beads
around my leathery beak.

Let’s not think about
breaking let’s not break
anymore of my things.

SERVING THE HEAD

Only smooth channeling.
Only soothing annuals
to ear the way.
Which that I see

tingling fury
so possessive following
doubling becoming.

All the states
throat up.

All the coin towers
tooth down.

PLAY

Por love of noon
cracks the grape
feeds the sky
pours its plain young
explaining on everything.

In the thistle I hear
wind coming too

maudlin wind
so full and filling.

NEW! Poem by Kyle Booten

2011-07-28T00:40:00.001-04:00

Kyle Booten

POOLSCAPE

 You've heard about the order of the waves,

  established many years ago by boys  

and girls disguised as boys. Wholly artless,  

they plied the crests barehanded.  

You've heard about their hands, but have not touched

  or been touched, else you too would be clean  

and constant, governed by the distant sun  

or its viceroy umbrellas. In their shade  

you saw many people alive with sugar.  

Every person is made of water; so  

every person is, or could be, a radio,

  a rudimentary song harvester  

with no search-dial, bleating random tunes  

or static. I trust you've heard of static,  

that place where songs surge and overlap.  

Half-graveyard, half-battleground,  

it grows more crowded every summer.

  Songs have to go somewhere, after all.  

They can't seek asylum in the future.  

You've heard about the future, or even

  leaned against it once, unawares,  

mistaking it for a chain-link fence.

NEW! 2 poems by Sara Femenella

2011-07-25T03:36:00.001-04:00

Sara Femenella

MARY SHELLEY

The second moon inflated like a lung,
naïve, organic, a quickstep’s heathered
horizon, peals of astral-ardor sung
above the noir, numinous she weathered

that storm, thank you. So arresting and how
it hurt when it hurt. The gathering gale
of father, redshift Tuesday on the prowl.
An off-key, minor diatonic scale,

a daughter’s parlor trick, she lay muttered
bone-cold in a watery tableau, bloom
affliction mulled and wooly, kill shuttered
away in two blue chambers, fears flood and flume

the ruins. The gamine’s keen and boozy urge
limns motherless aesthete, autumnal dirge.

THE STORY OF THE EGG

Born an arctic circle of cautious
physics, it’s a closed system of calcified
brides and orphans, chitinous and whistling
northern lights. It is Oedipal, sanctified,
a black wing slick with membrane.
If a palacial city, handsomely baroque,
dressed in snow, twinkling with carriages
and holiday parties, then it is the waltz,
the stroke of midnight, the glittering
champagne. Love doesn’t have
to be real. It’s the actual abstraction
of call and response, the soloist’s standing ovation,
the flowers at the door. If every biography’s
unsung accolade and greatest mythology
glows amber in a coal dark,
wreathed in ideology, then it is the proverb,
a disciple to Petrarch’s descent, the Laura,
kneeling in a curved prayer.
What gratitude that every confession,
every hunger, every mistake
from this one small thing, and that you can hold it,
organic, opaque, cool and weighty in the palm
of your hand.

reading period closes next week

2011-07-06T10:00:00.001-04:00

VERSE remains open to submissions until next Friday, July 15.

NEW! another David Bartone

2011-06-21T01:58:00.000-04:00

David Bartone

The Prince’s Downfall Involved Li Po in a Second Exile

The trouble with being good at courting patrons.

The prince’s downfall involved Li Po in a second exile, though they spoke of it an excursion.

…

The fall has now entered fog fall as a way to help Li Po understand himself, which he accepts.

He’ll be back by Indian summer.

…

Exile: drink, write nothing until Indian summer.

The energy of his thighs enough to carry him.

…

Attention wolf fans:

Indian summer has already garnered tons of praise and will arrive just in time for Halloween.

…

It has been thus far a four-colored fall.

Kitchen window light. Stove light. Sink light. Lamp.

…

Spry sprung into a full force of passion, lovers obey this time of year approaching with their ears to the leaf crinkle.

Old lovers leave-taking in old friends.

…

To see through the thick now, sense of a band playing down low over the hill.

This, the prince’s downfall: always sensing down low over the hill.

NEW! 2 poems by Jesse Nissim

2011-06-15T00:14:00.000-04:00

Jesse Nissim

Your city with love on the benches

Where the harbor shrinks back
from its edge

Thousands of dead fish
take a nap
in the library.

Smell the harbor’s ordinary
objects, trusting us, with
all that stuff in here.

If you string them
together, will these fragments form
a recognizable mirror?

If you trust in
the frictionless
narrative.

We’re all the same
down to the lawn ornaments
Christmas & Hanukkah
black and white and even
down to the lesbians.

We coordinate mailboxes in taupe
our names curled in gold.
All the same font.

Yellow stakes flag the yard’s perimeter
indicating our pests

Yes, every neighborhood has pests
even here

Where we can benefit from
the foul smell
that deadens the wonderful.

Someday

The light presses down
imitating summer
and need presses down
imitating a fire-escape
and want falls empty
unloved and alone
and bushes flop like
need imitating belief and
the church is a true
empty head alone imitating
an oven dying.

They need never escape.
Some of them like stones
sleeping under firelight.

The spying dawn
alone is light
pressing in
upon the fire escape.

I was alone and unloved light.
I was as hot as a church.
I was the dying swan. For a long time
I could not escape the fire of that swan
and little girls’ who believed in it’s existence.
The girls pressed down instead of falling
while I was imitating a stone.
When I escaped from falling. I escaped from my heart.
In my head, I was need, belief, and truth.
My head was a peculiar bush.
It flopped in an empty oven.

This poem is constructed almost entirely of lines- randomly taken and freely scrambled- from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Ed. Donald Allen.

i want someday / to have a fire-escape (471)
this would mean, i think, that summer need never come (471)
and snow falls down upon / the streets of our peculiar hearts
the Seine believed it to be true / that i was unloved and alone (473)
the light presses down / in an empty head the trees / and bushes flop like / a little girl imitating / The Dying Swan the stone / is hot the church is a / Russian oven... (475)

NEW! David Bartone

2011-06-10T02:51:00.000-04:00

David Bartone

Beekeeping and Hearth-cooking

Consider what Thoreau proposes:

“There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance, is a very slight interference. It is like directing the sunbeams. All nations, from the remotest antiquity, have thus fingered nature. There are Hymettus and Hybla, and how many bee-renowned spots beside! There is nothing gross in the idea of these little herds—their hum like the faintest low of kine in the meads. A pleasant reviewer has lately reminded us that in some places they are led out to pasture where the flowers are most abundant. ‘Columella tells us,’ says he, ‘that the inhabitants of Arabia sent their hives into Attica to benefit by the later-blowing flowers.’ Annually are the hives, in immense pyramids, carried up the Nile in boats, and suffered to float slowly down the stream by night, resting by day, as the flowers put forth along the banks; and they determine the richness of any locality, and so the profitableness of delay, by the sinking of the boat in the water. We are told, by the same reviewer, of a man in Germany, whose bees yielded more honey than those of his neighbors, with no apparent advantage; but at length he informed them, that he had turned his hives one degree more to the east, and so his bees, having two hours the start in the morning, got the first sip of honey. True, there is treachery and selfishness behind all this, but these things suggest to the poetic mind what might be done.”

…

Consider a recipe from The American Frugal Housewife.

A task to divest oneself then from worldly gods.

On election day, eat election bread.

…

During the Q&A portion with experts on Lydia Maria Child, an audience member tries to sell one of the speakers a $125 library licensed video on Lydia Maria Child, and as though I could be a community college professor for the rest of my life, long long past retirement age, a minor tangle begins up in me, that I must understand as a certain dying of youthful ambition—the sentiment I could write anything, not gone but going.

…

The Child’s didn’t have any children, were abolitionists.

They were poor, sugar beet farmers for a time.

He took up the last dollars on a ship ticket to France to learn how to raise sugar beets in central Massachusetts. She remained to raise the sugar beets in central Massachusetts.

The abolitionist movement had come this far: beets not cane then in the North.

…

Later in a barroom the kingship is abandoned.

…

Today now all this time passes.

…

Today now as ever.

…

The sum of exiles, greater than Christ and the meek—the mind making Emily Dickinson of the Old Testament.

…

Not wanting to leave myself behind on any worried walk inward, I decide to step outside of myself for a few days.

I read six poems in the New York Times, six poems to mark the end of day-light savings.

What the Pulitzer Prize winners have to say.

The couch in the basement.

NEW! Poem by Stephanie E. Schlaifer

2011-05-18T14:43:00.004-04:00

Stephanie E. Schlaifer

The simulation is an understatement--

the tract not wide enough
too brief. Still, those cautioned
and those cautioning cannot believe
that it is not an unlikely cinema,
indemnity against
grievances and grief.

VERSE is now open to submissions

2011-04-01T09:56:00.002-04:00

VERSE is now open to submissions. See below, or follow the link on the right, for guidelines.

Submissions

2011-03-11T00:35:00.001-05:00

Verse will re-open to submissions in spring 2011. In keeping with the magazine’s relatively new format, the submissions policy has changed.

All submissions for the print magazine should be chapbook-length (20-40 pages), in any genre or combination of genres--poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, criticism, interviews, journals/notebooks, images, etc. Everything in the submission must be unpublished.

Submission period: April 1 to July 15 (postmark).

Submissions received outside the submission period will be recycled or returned unread, as will submissions that do not adhere to the submission guidelines.

We will respond to submissions on a rolling basis, beginning in May. We plan to notify everyone within 8 weeks. (Acceptances might take slightly longer.)

Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, but you must withdraw your entire submission if something in your submission is accepted elsewhere. If work is withdrawn from consideration, no substitutions will be allowed.

Please include a SASE for response. If you want your work returned, include sufficient postage on the SASE.

Reading fee: $10 (cash or check/money order to VERSE).

All contributors to the print magazine will receive $10/page, $250 minimum, plus free copies (up to 1 box, or approximately 18 copies).

VERSE is not considering submissions for the web site at this time.

Mail all submissions to:

VERSE
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond VA 23173

NEW! 2 poems by Stephanie Burns

2011-02-09T02:23:00.000-05:00

Stephanie Burns

TWO POEMS

Spring in the Winter Garden

I’ve known you to be cross-eyed for a while now.
Like the flared fat pigeon on its crumbling
headstone, you mix your lefts
and rights until the whole world is less
stable than before. In the shops,
in the malls, they are folding
clothes into shapes that can never
be emulated in real life.
I guess we are all facing south when we die.

There is, ever so slightly, something
to be heard on this balcony.
I’ve watched others writing it down
in complicated twirls and all too ordinary
snapshots. I know that the backs
of their heads want to breathe.
Then again, I am all that strives to be,
but is not, more than too-tight pants
and curled hair.
We are taking notes on each other.

Dear Good Sir—
I am not dangerous. Kindly stop thinking it.
Sincerely yours, etc. etc.

This year we will not smoke in the hallways
or clack in high heels. I am meeting
only people too bored for me.
You have been one of them.

You are letting it be too obvious.
You are staring too much.
You cannot let it be known
that things have gone radio electric
in front of you. Keep a distance
and healthy swagger.

Otherwise, you will glint into the scene
and everything you’ve collected
in a dusty shoebox under a bed
will slip away into trash.
We are only the poses we can commit to being.

Secret doors and miniskirts meet
under your eyes. They rile against
your skin. Toys turn to roses
and sad hands are held.

I know you are hasty and that
you can’t stop actively being pretty.
This is how it all portraits—protests
and steamy hot mornings.

If I become cold or undernourished,
I will know it is because we have built
ourselves this winter garden,
but shattered its glass with our first breaths.

Poem on Talking to You

Out of a cut
in my arm I pull a dove,
a tightrope, a bright red sunset.
My arms are useless in this way.
Their gestures are worthless and awkward—
awkwardness the tragedy hovering over me,
resilient as fruit flies.
I’ve killed the impulse for natural reactions.

Pronunciation slips in and out—
I hardly know what I am saying.
Now in the back of the scene,
I don’t talk. I paint
my face to mean, “Stardust,
appleseed, march hare, revolution.”

The paint chips away
and blankets the area, nearly
as inconsequential as it could have been
in my head.

NEW! Laura Larson & Brian Teare

2011-02-03T02:13:00.000-05:00

Haze, 2003

There is neither God nor nature in photography. Like faith
a discrete series of disappearances; like God the abrading of
arrested motion—landscape is active absence, part of the
design. That’s why photography’s trees can never be the trees
of painting or of nature : we expect them to correspond to
themselves and then they slip, asymbolic, outside of religion,
outside of ritual until the upper limit of our nostalgia seems a
high green canopy and its lower a mat of rust-colored needles
so thick and acidic it permits no undergrowth, a perspective
intended for reverie. Nature is essential to photography’s
invention, but it’s the picturesque—a way of picturing nature—
that aids photography’s development. It becomes more difficult
to position the frame : does photography simply wipe out one
space in order to invent another? Good-bye, perhaps. The first
art in which God never existed, its trees arranged by men.

Discursive Glance

A Picture That Includes by Means of Its Structure the Excluded Space

I’ve held this
smallest forest

sticky with sap
haptic branches swaying

in nonce wind—
a syntax

outside the frame
of the visible—

and longed to be struck
as I should
to say I’ve loved

It’s no small thing

Let each eye
be believed

the way cicadas leave
clinging skins

split to drone
umbra’s grass

Let matter rest
in belief

it has lent itself
to all our purposes

liminal and image
the way veronica is

a flower
a girl watching
a matador

wave his cape
over charging eyes—

each only once
given one

of matter’s many
possible nouns

Let each pass by

picture
difference
or surprise

In that still space
we won’t stop

finding and losing
what we love

all day
we’ll keep on

thinking
because it once existed

it still exists

very arbor very body
very smoke

NEW! 3 poems by Stephanie Burns

2011-01-31T02:21:00.000-05:00

Stephanie Burns

THREE POEMS

The Park

This is the day for a newfound gorgeous melody.
I guess I don’t mean that.
I guess I mean it’s a day that should be captured—
This park, its strollers and one-handed bikers.
Everything is just fractionally above disaster
and that is, of course, why it works.
Babies are creaking into their shoulders
and dogs squat in painful contemplation.
It’s the traffic that blesses this spot—
the red-bottomed sailboats and two-
tiered zephyrs. Airplanes and helicopters
and truant little islands straining to sea.
Here, the hair before its first cut,
she’s allowed cappuccino.
There, two boys with sweaters tied
around their necks.

Some buildings will slide off each other,
but some will cling and pull us all down.
We are all thinking about each other—
caught in wonder—and the horizon
conceals all the more obvious paint jobs.

Route 66 in Decent Light

Sweet-toothed drumbeat in the desert―billboard
of dinosaurs and the cut-glass sky.

The mesas in their ignorance upend
the road out of town. Soldiers and nuns―

our scented headache. We are unscathed
in the hungry nunnery of the soul. The food

is good. Tumbleweeds loop themselves into repeat
behind the only two cacti available.

My snaps pop and drop―no revelation
in this swimming pool of sand. The chalk

of possible endings unfolds without glamor.
The charge is only so high. Earlier flights

and histories are available upon request,
as well as bathrobed blue skulls.

They are subject to change.
No touching, no pictures, no faces.

The salt-soaked sky taps
these questions, and is sullen.

Desks, insults, movie sets--the things stripped
and shouldered forth. We are the fish.

The ink and paste we’ve produced mix
into my coffee with subtle soft curls.

At the gas stations,
we sew ourselves into each eye.

Several

This is not unlike what I wanted you to know.

I am saucy (drunk), fatigued,
Talkative in the times we grasp for silence--
the clumsy piano player
in the red-lit bar at the back of your mind--
all you never knew you
always wanted.

I know all the neat lines
in your gardens--the way you order
memories (playground--hot dog--pretzel).
I negotiate these sandboxes
but these are not the secrets
as I want them.

You flinch at me. I buy you presents
but they dissolve at your harsh touch--
so much burning paper. I keep
to the middle of your thoughts,
listening for the right instructions.
is there something you want known?

You shrug at us, the world, yourself.
You come to the part where you must
walk a tightrope above yourself
and I just want you to know
I wasn’t going anywhere with that question.

NEW! 3 poems by Robert Fernandez

2011-01-26T14:08:00.002-05:00

Robert Fernandez

THREE POEMS

Flowerheads

I

Red today, and like a wave-field fanned along the length of Overtown, a hummingbird-red universe or saturnalia, St. Keith. Avail us of your administrations. Certain dead president mythotypes perched on the topmost peak of Watts. Delayed. Abetted resolutions. I enter the studio and of these sour, convalescent faces: a logopoeia of flayed reds.

II

What moves along the course of a line must learn the single line, single statuary’s flanked revision of scan, and learn reluctance. Is hateful. Pools wrath in porcelain. A mandrill clutching the throat in the billiard hall of Pele. Hasten to work? Wither goest, Ruth in strange corn: the concise fft of levitation. The backs of the knees sloped like rock elm. The tonal steps of the eyes pushed vaguely on.

III

Boom. Gainsay death metal is a window, ram’s-horn ripple. RZA shaved the track, niggaz caught razor bumps. Ascyltus: “To sell ‘em piece by piece, brick by brick, a catch!” Encolpius: “Twice the street value…” Homage gainsays a death-work of preterit lexicons. Tramlines etched adept, colossal rounded patterns.

IV

Printed “adagio, et in Arcadia ego.” The caryatids of Miami, our golden bough. Because we endeavor to end in a fuck-all of resolution: blooms of the crotch and raining credit. THE WORLD IS YOURS. Laundered ax of draconian abilities. A fast, red-eyed vireo hollows the duodenum.

V

Of all your lauds, thinking like a course in statistics but not yet raw of wheat uninhibitedly pounded not yet sun, wild in your ears. Then, anxious for news of Mike Tyson. Then I seemed (Thanatos) to Wifredo Lam (sought) a concise logic revealed, of my situation: forearms like reddened glass lovely, able to move freely.

Victuals

Then violence and practice and make it happen. On the map with the delicatessen that falls through your mind, that shudders in its hide of brick and awning. This is not how we would have wanted it. Village and music box with a little pentacle on its back, and not what we would have wanted for anyone involved. I escape arrhythmias into the heart’s normal operation. The valves run smoothly. The hide’s parched and pleated but runs smoothly: a bucket of ice and a rhinoceros, a Syrian flag and a recliner. Falling through the rug in the grip of a stomach that sees, we slip past the odds; we feel fortunate. From the bedroom, from closed booths, we plot our victuals. What illuminates the morning better than the souls of the dead?

Coast

Lethal as ever. We link up. We stay exact. We are the clean cut through the middle quadrant—with box cutters, through pin-stripe, though cardboard—we have not yet decided. We are the letters spilling out onto the bare table today. These rash communications. A virus, like carousels of glass; like flame poured on the table, cut cleanly—into quadrants—whether in lattice-work or arabesques we cannot decide. Whether a young man walking up from the asphalt or through shadow, we have not yet determined. Look at the waves, they are like blood packets rising, falling. Look at the gulls. Look at the clean shore and the bodies, the parables (I glide a muzzle over the sun’s oscillating bands of purple and white).

Review of Sawako Nakayasu

2010-12-08T00:42:00.001-05:00

Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu. Letter Machine Editions, $14.

Reviewed by Amani Morrison

Sawako Nakayasu’s collection of prose poems, Texture Notes, is “too buoyant to lay low” (“9.12.2003”), as her narrator optimistically traverses through and pontificates about a dismal existence filled with endless lists of objects (especially eyeballs) and concepts, where one suffers from “a breath of fresh air that arrives too late” (“5.26.2003”) or can “end up on the ground as a result of someone else’s good or bad intentions” (“8.12.2003”). Throughout the work, the narrator explains her experiences through references to thickness, layers, and texture, ranging from the “texture of a field of fried umbrellas” to the “thickness of the anti-tropism,” from “[l]ayers of loss” to “danger as a texture.” Drenching reality with waves of whimsy, Nakayasu constructs a world with scientific precision, in which it seems only natural for the narrator “[t]o provide a physical, chemical, psychoanalytical, or textural analysis of it. To assign it values of beauty” (“8.22.2003”).

A portion of Chris Martin’s abstract Glitter Painting appears on the front cover of Texture Notes, serving as a gatekeeper that provides as much information about the internal content as the title does. The reader cannot fully appreciate the unlikely masterpiece of “acrylic medium, spray paint, and glitter on wood” and “assign it values of beauty” before reading Nakayasu’s first entry, entitled “6.2.2003”:

Bicycle texture.

Take five radically different groups of people. The groups may radically differ in the usual categories (such as size, shape, color) or others (such as surface area, scent, hair texture, politics, emotional predicament). Lead them by the hand, and then let go and give them a choice: field of flowers, field of gold, field of dreams, field of vision, field of applicants, field of corn, field of bicycles, field of bicycles.

Martin’s painting along with the “five radically different groups of people” provide a precursor to the conglomerate pieces in the collection: they “may radically differ in the usual categories. . . or others. . . .”

Using numerically-formatted dates as titles, Nakayasu draws attention exclusively to her poetic conflagrations, persuasively inviting the reader to “relax and get fuzzy” in a seamless existence of “Needing Yellow,” “girls, women, all ages and sizes, who have. . . diarrhea like a motherfucker,” and “a four-year-old tree attaining twice its current height thanks to the tears of a widow.” Despite the informal tone and disturbing hilarity of the content, Nakayasu organizes her notes in a fashion resembling a formal paper—the first isolated line of each poem serves as a thesis statement, and the lines/paragraphs following justify the initial claim with examples and further explication, convoluted though they might be.

The self-conscious narrator (there seems to be only one) exists in a state of oxymoronic harmony—she is amused and horrified, judgmental and meek, sober and fantastical. Consider the speaker’s recount of a “nightmare about hamburgers” in this excerpt of “9.2.2003”:

I think I see a light in the distance.

Though it might very easily be a lump of fat.

But worse yet, clearer yet, I begin to smell smoke, a gas-fired barbecue. I call out, distressed and damselled to the hilt:

“Hamburger!”
“Hamburger!”
“Hamburger!”

For lack of a better way to describe the situation—and I am quoting some long-lost love poem, and so I am.

Immediately following this poem is the equally revealing “6.3.2003”:

What do you miss about America?

A woman, a very very fat woman, I trace her and to what extent she gives, and what of her takes as I dive into her rolls, loll around and find a press, a fold, fresh laundry out of the dryer and keep tracing her, linger on the inside of her elbow, insider of her armpit, fall into her heated neck I keep tracing her with my finger her tracing her and she bites me and I go back.

As the narrator explores the textures of the world around her, she resorts to science, math, and inference to make meaning of what she finds. At times, the speaker is child-like, reverting to elementary practices and thought practices (although not necessarily language) to deduce her findings—such is the case in “6.3.2003” as the inquisitive narrator relates, “. . .I keep tracing her with my finger her tracing her and she bites me and I go back.” She guiltily confesses her unconventional behavior later in the collection, stating, “Whenever I meet new people I want to touch them first and find out their texture” (“9.19.2004”). At other instances, however, the speaker grapples with seemingly more complex subject matters, for which she employs equally complex, even impossible theories and equations, as in “10.6.2003”:

Combined sum of the texture of one word at each moment everywhere, thicker than it is true. The true number, when taking into account the combined sum, which amounts to how many false answers.

The narrator’s hyper-awareness of the eccentric and the mundane paired with her curious, exploratory nature push the reader beyond the bounds of the ordinary, stimulating contemplation of “ant-sized objects,” “Tokyo advantages,” and “the pressure of a speeding vehicle or even that of an angry nation.” However, Nakayasu does not present the reader with a narrator who is simply exploring to make mischief. On the contrary, Nakayasu’s narrator arduously seeks “layers of clarity,” to find answers to her questions and offer solutions to problems she encounters in a world where it is possible for something to be “true and false.” Consider the following excerpt from “5.28.2003,” which is also printed on the back cover of the book:

When the compression finally comes forth, allow for the bodies to settle, before measuring the resulting thickness. Measure the authenticity. Measure the artifice. Remove the artifice.

The giant shall not be held responsible for the removal of the artifice.

In Texture Notes, Sawako Nakayasu becomes a master artist as she creates a congruous cacophony of images, perceptions, problems, and word play. Nakayasu deftly ensures that “a distance, a thickness, a slightly twitching texture is created between the first and last layers, a measurable distance that surfaces out of nowhere but an internal and external longing for a presence or good word” (“11.16.2003”).

Review of Franz Wright

2010-11-16T00:54:00.000-05:00

Wheeling Motel by Franz Wright. Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95.

Reviewed by Adam Palumbo

To dismiss Franz Wright’s latest collection as melancholic or cheap (as some have done in the past) would be a tremendous disservice to American poetry. In his tenth solo collection, Wheeling Motel, Wright’s visionary aphorisms and short-lined lyrics show a weighty confidence. He has distilled issues of personal anguish, spiritual longing, and regret, which prove to be impressively robust when presented through his sparse style. But Wright does not allow these themes to constitute the heart of his work; beneath the dark wit is an astute and humble voice. He clings to faith in times of trouble and has no misgivings discoursing in a tone both self-deprecating and eerily comforting.

Wright has always been noted as a frank poet, and this characteristic does not cease in Wheeling Motel. His brutally honest appraisal of the condition of the human soul begins in quite a foreseeable place—with the poet himself. In “Out of Delusion,” he starts by considering his oeuvre spanning nearly thirty years, but confesses, “a book one wrote decades ago seems stranger than somebody else’s.” This unfamiliarity extends into the rest of the poem when he leads the reader into a quandary of perspective, admitting, “I speak in the mask of the first person not as myself.” But Wright’s poetry does not isolate itself by focusing on the constant “I”. The poet has crafted this lyric, but he doesn’t have to be the main character. The speaker spies himself walking alone, riding the subway, and, lastly, appearing at the gates of heaven, until Wright ends the poem with the most anticlimactic line of the book: “And that is a beginning.”

Wright’s preoccupation with despair and evil is not a new development for the poet. He has confronted psychological terrors in many of his earlier volumes. He has also been chased by despair for much of his lifetime, a sentiment he categorizes as universal when he bids the reader to “Call no man unhappy until he has passed, / beyond pain, / the boundary of this life.” In “Baudelaire,” the poet decrees, “Evil isn’t hard to comprehend, it is nothing / but unhappiness / in its most successful disguise.” The logic behind these statements is not revolutionary, but Wright can express these universal fears in such a heartfelt and succinct manner, and it is this kind of assertion that makes Wright so authentic and accessible. Wright would not assert that his suffering is unique, but common to all men. His honesty about drug use is striking, too. In “Kyrie” (a transliteration of the Greek Κύριε, an exclamation meaning ‘O Lord’), he begins by popping an oxycodone and ends with a prayer—quite a progression in just six couplets, but typical of the power in this collection.

Wright’s style may seem spartan, but that only serves to make his poetry more powerful. In “Will,” he shows a defiance that becomes commonplace by the end of the collection:

I would be ready,
accompanied
by a rage to prove them wrong,
prove they picked the wrong child to torment

and that I too was worthy of love.

But not all of Wright’s poems dwell on dysfunction. The most outstanding moments in Wheeling Motel come when he oscillates from experiencing deep anguish to basking in the most ordinary occurrence. After bumming a cigarette from a young woman in “Günther Eich Apocrypha,” the poet forces himself into reverie, with interesting results:

Think about it.
I do. And am
for a moment
the happiest man
that I have ever known—

Wright’s language transforms the quotidian into the sublime, blatantly proclaiming the beauty in the most everyday of occurrences. His meager rhetoric is not used out of carelessness, but a desire to make each word more exposed, more influential. His short, aphoristic stanzas may employ nontraditional rhythmic modes, but they burst with experience, wisdom, and unexpected optimism.

Wheeling Motel also exudes a powerful feeling of nostalgia for family connections. In this collection he addresses nearly his whole family. Wright’s childhood was turbulent, particularly after his parents’ divorce. In “Abuse: To My Brother” he describes his childhood in terms both terrifying and magnificent:

(No one is born sad.)

There’s a gladness in everything
When it’s first breathing, a
bright naïveté
and a will to be well—
They’ll kill it and then go have breakfast.

The collection finds Wright struggling with a yearning for connection and a realization of the impossibility of being all things to all people. As longing as his voice may be, Wright does not often suggest solutions for the problems he elucidates. Thus, the absence of major figures in his life draws out of the poet an unapologetic impudence. Wright addresses “The Call” to his mother, acknowledging his failings as a son but without shying away from explaining that the mere sound of her voice irks him. Wright continues, lost in the complicated array of feelings that exist in the void between him and his mother. Ultimately, though, the void remains unexplored because the poet lets “The Call” end unanswered.

The book’s representation of the author’s late father, fellow Pulitzer-Prize winning poet James Wright, is even more complicated. In “Wheeling Motel,” the book’s title poem, the ghost of the elder Wright becomes a corporeal presence. Franz speaks directly to his father, saying, “There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours. / The river is like that, / a blind familiar.” Wright is no doubt mournful of his father’s absence, but also continually haunted by his legacy. The disenfranchisement of the elder Wright’s poetry is reticent in his son’s, but manifests itself physically in the troubled childhood Franz experienced. Despite their problematic relationship, in the end, the poet seems appreciative of his father’s posthumous presence in the book.

Wright’s genius in Wheeling Motel lies in his ability to turn moments of fear and dread into unexpected optimisms. Throughout the collection, he yearns for happiness amidst the evil all around him. It is this satisfaction with the dichotomies of the human soul that makes Wright’s book so enrapturing. As the poet himself asserted, “We are free, in some strange way, because of our hopelessness.”

Review of Philip Fried

2010-11-01T00:53:00.000-04:00

Cohort by Philip Fried. Salmon/Dufour, $21.95

Reviewed by Adam Palumbo

Philip Fried’s latest collection, Cohort, consists of three poems arranged as a short introduction, and then launches into a longer sequence consisting of 33 sonnets. The book operates on the understanding that the modern and the archaic converge every day on a sublime, often unconscious, level. Melding the classic form of the sonnet with rich illustrations of modern-day America’s technologic quotidian, his poetry seeks out this sublime and brings it unapologetically to the reader’s attention. His poems exude a sonic energy; he does not abuse the old form, but cracks it open to examine its past—and in doing so, signals its bright future.

Fried is both engrossed in and at odds with the modern world he observes around him. His poems cannot help but be extremely referential, aimed at a techno-savvy, specifically modern audience. But by employing both poetic language and cyber-speak, Fried creates a hybrid that speaks in emphatic, fourteen-line bursts against, as D. Nurske puts it, “the toxic side of the Information Age as it veers out of control.”

But not all of Fried’s experiences with technology and modern appliance put him on his guard. In “Reversible Swirl,” the last and title poem of the introduction, the speaker fondly reminisces on his childhood while listening to the radio, an old Zenith Tombstone. He finds himself amongst family, “grandpa, grandma, mom, dad, arrayed / behind me, the ceramic family / whose chatter cooled to the overglaze.” He fixates on the device itself, remembering the swirl pattern of the cloth covering the speaker that pulsed with noise while he pulsed with boyish excitement. This attachment to the apparatus resonates into the final lines of the poem, where the speaker realizes, “At night, the bedsprings picked up transmissions / that were bending around the edge of the future.” This end line vaults the reader from the past into the present and fuels all of Fried’s reflection on the technology-driven colloquialisms of the modern age.

Despite his nostalgic opening, the speaker subverts the reader’s expectations in his more robust sonnet sequence, aptly named “The Oral Tradition.” The book’s title poem, “Cohort,” begins this section. The speaker says:

first i was only an ignorant dot
iota in the countless cohort
unique and yet only a part
…
oh how many eyes devoured ignored
me but i returned the gaze

The speaker identifies himself as a piece of the collective but is oddly unsatisfied with it. Throughout these poems, the reader begins to discern the speaker’s discontent with the way the world has changed, little by little, until the speaker admits:

Our least wish is a whole other

life—who can make a meal of the incremental?
So, brother, sister, give your hands over to bric-
a-brac repairs of the possible…

Despite the multitudinous opportunities open in this new century, the speaker still feels insecure in this reality and longs for something different or more imaginative. His tone is world-weary, and he passes this attitude along to “brother, sister” who have no other options than a repair of what could be. This dissatisfaction with the modern world is presented elsewhere, too. In “Advice to the Gods,” the speaker laments the way technology has shrunk the world into a sphere that is becoming too small and too smelly. He speaks of modern transportation in a palpably negative tone, emphasizing its potential for “reducing / all that it passes to less of a place, too close / more and more local.” He also reflects on his own ineffectiveness in changing this wave of progress when he says, “I am consigliere to the gods / of travel, but they rarely consult me.” His battle with technology is one-sided, and the speaker has resigned himself, along with the rest of his cohort, to relying upon it.

However pessimistic Fried may be about the preeminence that techno-dependence has assumed in the Digital Age, his poetry is well equipped to deconstruct it. Using ancient inspiration and structuring it within the classic Western form of the sonnet, Fried infuses resonances of criticism in his “By Babylon’s flow-charts.” Coupling ambitious internal rhyming and wordplay, Fried creates his own version of Psalm 137 and echoes the Biblical poetry’s tone of condemnation, unsatisfied with “appeasing / data-gods with the ragtime of input, clicks / and bits.” Furthermore, Fried’s poetry is full of a keen sense of historical retrospective, and several of his poems reflect upon the last World War. In “Sealed Warrant,” he memorializes those that endured the Holocaust. Beginning with Kristallnacht, he summarizes the pogroms enacted against the Jews in Nazi Germany while still showing a proper respect for their experiences. As a sort of posthumous vindication, the speaker capitulates with an oxymoronic envoi: “I hereby name you, who shall go nameless, / and detain you in a limbo of secrecy.” Elsewhere, the speaker muses on memory’s morphous tendencies, proclaiming, “history is a fitful foam that bursts at your heels.”

Fried’s Cohort exercises a rich cacophony of themes and a deft use of language. But sometimes his syllabic construction falls apart into a sea of caesura and tends towards a Dickinson-esque discourse. In “Illumined Century” he includes the turn-of-phrase, “Edwina’s chaise: ‘[Lightning, blackout, eloquence] / Don’t let father die in the dark!’ The rest / is silence.” This is an example of Fried’s inclination to produce jam-packed lines; luckily this does not occur often enough to sidetrack the reader. The originality of Fried’s sonnet sequence undercuts the disconnect that the speaker feels toward his subject, but he is not trying to condemn the modern. Instead, he has reimagined the sonnet for a new century so that we as readers might “sort out our too many selves.”

NEW! Review of James Belflower

2010-10-01T00:57:00.000-04:00

Commuter by James Belflower. Instance Press, $15.

Reviewed by Jordan Windholz

James Belflower’s debut collection, Commuter, is a difficult book. As a reader, I have a hard time making sense of the various fragments, fractures and silences that run through its sections. But this is as it should be, for Commuter does not seek to make sense of the world with which it interacts. Rather it seeks to bring the senselessness of the world—in particular, the senselessness of violence—to bear upon our quotidian routines. That is, Commuter is difficult in that it brings into focus the difficulty of reconciling a text with a self, a self with a place, and a place with other communities. Nothing in this book is stable—not even the pronoun “it”—and the power of the book is its ability to demonstrate how language “commutes” the very real violence occurring all around us into banal and less threatening systems of representation, be they metaphoric, graphic, or both.

The word “commuter,” of course, contains multiple valences. Its verbal root, commute, derives from the Latin, commuta, which is itself a merging of “com”—altogether—and “mutare”—to change. It is a word that intimates the permanence of mutability, and commuter, its particularized noun form, grafts selfhood onto, indeed positions it upon, unstable and unpredictable actions. These etymologies roil beneath the word’s most mundane denotation: a person who travels from one community to another, often for work, on a daily schedule. Ours is a world full of commuters, constantly moving, exiting and entering the communities and lives of other people, and Belflower’s Commuter recognizes this fact. It also decides not to ignore that in such a world explosions and conflict are also no longer localized, if they ever were, but that they too commute—through the news, through subways, through airplanes, and, inevitably, through language—to where any of us might be.

Commuter’s first page foregrounds the reality of violence’s proximity and possibility. The “prologue” of the book features a network of variously colored intersecting and diverging lines. This map of a generic public transportation system rests unsteadily above a news report, generalized and divorced from context:

“People combed a city’s major hospitals in search of family members who they thought were aboard the trains. “Oh please God! This can’t be happening,” said C—, 47, sobbing as she studied a patient list in vain at G— M— Hospital, seven hours after a terrorist attack. “How could a human being do this?”

Before a reader even turns the page to a matter-of-fact explanation which begins “Like / this,” the map above this quote already indicates “how” anyone could “do” anything to almost anybody; it’s simply a matter of getting on a subway line or a bus and pushing a button.

Belflower, of course, is only calling attention to something we all already know, and if Commuter stopped there, it wouldn’t be much of an achievement. The achievement of this book is its ability to resist easy associations. That is, Commuter does not attempt to synthesize conflict into digestible metaphors or narratives, and instead asks “may one […] chant metaphor into compassion”? Belflower suggests the answer is no, though this does not mean there is no room for compassion in Commuter. Belflower finds alternatives for relation, relying on the gaps between experience and events, between one person and another, to exist as sites themselves.

Rather than attempt to bridge the divide between one experience and another, Belflower calls attention to difference. Throughout Commuter, white space is a definite and locatable place, and the silence it signifies often carries as equal a weight as the words that surround it. Sometimes Belflower emphasizes white space in entirely directed ways. At one point early in Part I, the “performer” (i.e. reader) is commanded to “Wait 5 seconds on this page, then turn to the next and continue reading.” There is nothing on the page, and this first command serves as a wake-up call for the rest of the book, for on the page following this command, the “reading” that we do includes and accounts for the large strip of white space (cordoned off from text by black horizontal lines) that divides images and accounts. For instance, the simple action of “rice, rice, rice from white / mesh satchets… / / …arcs…” cannot be related to or occupy the same intellectual space as the violence that surrounds such simple, even beautiful, movement. After this simple image and across the white gulf of silence, we then read:

“So we decided to go up a side street, Ha-Rav Kook. On our way up the street, a car bomb exploded from a parking space off the side. I was struck in the leg—not by shrapnel, but some other flying object—and in my left eye. My hair was also quite singed, though I only noticed this later. Everything was hot, hot.”

How do we reconcile the two accounts? Can we? Commuter begs these questions again and again, and often pressures a reader to consider that synthesis can efface, that comparison does not necessarily mediate so much as it obstructs.

Yet Commuter does occlude violence in particular ways, or, rather, it calls attention to the way our words distance us from the violence purport to talk about. Belflower emphasizes the word “it” throughout Commuter, which can seem odd. “It” is, after all, a small word, a one syllable neuter pronoun. One section, however, maps the constantly shifting use of the word as “it” comes to signify the representation of a violent act—suggested, but never detailed—and the violent act itself. After a brief quote of an image, or video, from a digital camera, a speaker states,

truthfully
it
doesn’t terrify me

it’s grainy, B&W, and the figures don’t scatter
as fast as I would in that schema

so it
is easier to think
they are stupid and deserve

it

The lines are over-wrought, even over-aestheticized, but not in a manner that indicates contrivance. Rather, the constant breaks on the small pronoun call attention to that words shifting signification, and the careful, unconscious ways anyone makes acts of violence less of a human loss. From the use of the word “figures” for “bodies” or “people,” to the grainy photograph or video that contains these “figures,” this small snippet of speech demonstrates the way even our most benign acts of representation obscure the reality of our world, and Belflower puts the simple word “it” at the center of this cover-up. Once the passage opens to these revelations about how language itself can efface lives lost or violence done, one has a hard time not reading the passage as a meta-commentary. In lines like these, Belflower shows a reader how “it’s grainy,” even as “it” poses as a “B&W” pronoun.

How can one write poetry in this environment, when even language ignores harm? Belflower never answers this question, at least not entirely. He is aware, however, of his predicament, acknowledging “this book // may be incompletely / confused // by reposing // pornography.” Like pornography, Commuter does contain explicit depictions, albeit these depictions do not eroticize violence or portray violent eroticism. Unlike pornography, however, Belflower’s documentations of violence seem to defy easy objectification. Almost in defiance of an age that saturates voyeurs with images, videos, and newsclips, Belflower gives us voices. We do not so much see as we do hear humanity in these pages.

Yet Commuter is not just about violence, and the humanity we hear in it is not just the humanity of voices recounting violence done. Throughout Commuter, we encounter what are ostensibly confessional accounts of a honeymoon; we see bodies in landscapes, “scaffolds / near the hairline // her white scarf cinched androgynously.” We hear the forthright confession, “J. and I / will probably not birth // someone,” even as we see and hear about domestic scenes:

Seems
our plates
never clean

scrub in shifts. Air
them and soak the silver-
ware in warm
soap.

Of course, running beneath these quite pictures (often literally, at the bottom of the page) are newsreel accounts of violence, near pure documentation of individual voices recounting stories of blasts and balls of fire. And this is the wonder of Commuter; it is a book about war, but it avoids the cliché or the easy politicization of war poetry. It provides the tragedy (and the comedy) of the world without burdening it with sentimentality, and it demonstrates that the comedic—the marital—and the tragic—the fatal—coincide though never in an analogous fashion.

Rarely do the intimacies of the book forthrightly interact with the violence that constitutes the landscapes of travel and quotidian experience. At one point, however, Belflower does forthrightly insists that the possibility of great violence can easily enter our domestic worlds, our honeymoons, our vacations. After a first hand account of what seems to be a terrorist attack, a litany of names runs down the page. Here, the reader is asked to “strikeout and write in names of immediate family, relatives and close friends,” and Belflower states that he reads the names of audience members when he reads this text in a public setting. It is a simple technique; but it reminds the reader that the exploded bodies seen in newspapers, on cable news, in this very book, had names, families, and relationships of their own.

It is difficult not to feel from these formal moves, to not recognize that feeling can be aroused and that sympathy can be gained for another without necessarily diverting to a metaphor, to let events and people be closer to their names. Even as Belflower’s Commuter demonstrates that words never mean what we want them to mean, it also exhibits a profound faith in language’s ability to help us navigate our world to hear and see those who inhabit it with us. It is perhaps wrong to call it a beautiful book, though it is beautiful: in its hard looks, in its sympathies, and in the pressures it places on the reader to look, and to look again. It is beautiful in that it attempts to see the humanity in another without reconstituting that other in terms that negate their difference. And in doing this, Belflower forces us to wrestle with all the ways we are the same.

Review of Sueyeun Juliette Lee

2010-07-30T00:04:00.000-04:00

Underground National by Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Factory School, $15.

Reviewed by Thomas Fink

Underground National, Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s second book, consists of six sizeable poems, the two shortest of which each span six pages. The book’s dedication casts what follows in a political frame: “For all who’ve suffered the multi-generational consequences of nation-building. May the shapes of the future arise from a renewed imagination.” Specifically referring to the two postcolonial Koreas, their diaspora, and the dream of reunification, the poet probes facets of this suffering and its complex causes, harbingers of renewal, and questions about how “shapes of” a better “future” are thwarted or cultivated.

The opening poem, “Korea, What Is,” spans 34 pages, each one featuring a unit or two of prose blocks, verse, or computer photo. Lee’s “Notes to the Text” speaks of a “density of materials” that found their way into this poem and documents source texts ranging from the CIA’s World Factbook, news articles in The New York Times and Time, global affairs experts’ editorial texts, blogs and other websites, and postcolonial scholarship. Frequently, “texts” have been “altered. . . through erasure, lineation, or rewrites of short phrases.” Lee’s collage method sometimes presents various attempts in the source texts to say “What” “Korea” “Is,” and sometimes pulverizes them beyond ready contextualization. Further, the juxtaposition of disparate points of view undermines the ability of premature, rigid, narrow, or ahistorical definitions of a people or a political structure to gain authority.

Regarding the movement toward a desired collapse of the current North Korean regime and possible reunification, the poet cites a prediction involving seven phases, with three of them missing:

Phase one: resource depletion.
Phase two: infrastructural failure.
Phase three:
Phase four:
Phase five: active resistance.
Phase six:
Phase seven: the formation of a new national leadership.

These omissions suggest the poet’s resistance to any U.S. pundits’ smug graphing of precisely how the fate of both Koreas and possibilities of reunification will “play out.” While an end to the military dictatorship of Kim Jong-Il and his family is surely a desirable outcome, there is no guarantee that “a new national leadership” would be a distinct improvement.

South Korea’s vulnerability, of course, is not confined to the North, but also involves its position on the world stage. At various points in the poem, there are allusions to South Koreans’ mistrust of U.S. military presence in their nation: “’whose armored vehicle crushed two schoolgirls to death.” One passage actually comes from a New York Times article about incidents early in the Korean War: “who won a warm spot in the hearts of the populace when he entered this capital as a liberator nearly three months ago, now is regarded with suspicion by many.” For 60 years, doubts about U.S. intervention in Korean affairs have surfaced, and this must be particularly unsettling for a poet of Korean descent who was born and has always lived in the U.S. A noted Korean farmer-activist and martyr, Lee Kyung Hae, is quoted as declaring that “human beings are in an endangered situation” because “a small number of big WTO members are leading an undesirable globalization. . .”

It is arguable, perhaps, that Lee presents multinational corporate platforms enabling Korean youths to fashion a semblance of identity and a tacit sharing of national pride on the basis of culture: “Kim Tae Yeon is “Single” Again Girls’/ Generation leader and I got konglish lyrics. . ./ about to take a drastic change as a viable option/ for Kangin Come Party with Se7en in Atlanta/ featuring Lil Kim/ through a fancam at the Gimpo Airport. . . ./ Kim Yoo Jin Joins After School + Diva Teaser.” However, such collages can also underscore the triviality and ephemeral quality of pop cultural topoi fostered by Web 2.0’s blinding speed, as well as the implication of a widening generation gap—hardly conducive to national unity.

Various references to the suicides of pop stars, a former South Korean President, and “’the suicide capital of Asia’” indicate that social and economic pressures—and perhaps the very problems of national identity and nation-building—are troubling the mental health of the more prosperous Korea’s citizens: “Lee Seo Hyun left a note saying sorry to his parents as well as to his fellow church-mates. The reason for his suicide: failed stock investments, a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of borrowed money”; “’But Teacher! What if you have so many money in debt and not good job? Then maybe making suicide is best choice’.” The false plural “many” in the borrowed language of world commerce underscores a threatening destabilization of currency’s unitary flow.

One might be buoyed by “a ‘united Korean anthem’ created by blending the melodies of the nations’ anthems seamlessly. . . to promote Korean re-unification.” However, any idealism risks corruption, as Lee indicates on a page near the end of the poem by interspersing snippets of Kim Jong-Il’s Juche (self-reliance) philosophy about “man’s” “position and role as dominator and transformer of the world,” the narrative of a young woman’s abduction by an older man, and a theorization of “the spread of a political order,” colonialism, as inscribing “in the social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the real.” Though homegrown, Kim Jong Il’s “manufacture” of “the experience of the real” for his citizens might be as masculinist and coercive as that of the colonial powers that preceded him, and indeed, he probably learned strategies of control from the occupiers.

Perhaps to signal aspirations, there are images floating through different parts of the poem (and returning twice in a later poem) of kites, which were used by the Korean hero Admiral Yi to relay information that helped turn back a Japanese naval assault in the late 16th century. Lee makes the kite a trope for the longing for a liminal experience:

A cross-kite. My link to the sky, pinned up into wafting blueness there. Grafted together, folded like a paper coat, a hidden oath like a never worn golden ring. Wait—I thought this was the beginning of my skin. ‘[T]hat may be an indication of what lies ahead.”

Kites: between two impossible states. A tug and pull enforced by sky’s restless dreaming, contrary wakefulness of earth, nerve-like. Flicker feeling in the flesh, cast free but held.

In these passages, among the most lyrical in a poem incorporating disparate kinds of discourse, the “link to the sky” seems a desire for access to a space that affords the imaginative reconstruction of a homeland for diasporic subjects. This includes finding an opportunity to pledge fealty to a nation, to wear a precious token of fidelity, but this is difficult if the terms of the “oath” or “vow” are unknown. These subjects exist in the “impossible state” of disjunction between their own lived experience and that of their ancestors’ existence in a nation-“state” that is “impossible” to re-enter, as postcolonial history has changed it so extensively. To relinquish tense “wakefulness” on earth and to surrender to the kite’s “dream” of travel to origins may seem available in the “flicker feeling in the flesh,” captured by alliterative frissons. However, the phrase, “cast free but held,” reminds us that the kite will not transport the body; the individual will either limit the kite’s trajectory or will let it go and see what happens. “Korea, What Is” does not anchor “Korea” to any definition. Various scraps of definition and processes of de-definition are held aloft to catch divergent “winds.”

Another potent poem of nation-probing is “(the underground national didn’t blow up) for want of love.” In this text, short and medium-sized paragraphs tend to be the norm, with lines of verse used more infrequently. The title foregrounds ambiguity. If parentheses are seen to separate the title’s two units, it suggests two divergent themes of a near-explosion and something occurring due to lack of love. And perhaps the reversal of where parentheses usually go—around a second phrase or clause—emphasizes this doubleness. However, if we read a continuity into the two parts of the title, then we may assume that a blow-up has occurred despite the existence of love. Further, “underground national,” the book’s title, seems to signify Kim Jong Il’s “nation-building” gesture of staging “an underground nuclear explosion near P’unggye on October 9, 2006,” as the Korean Central News Agency reported, and yet “underground” also suggests a covert resistance to Kim’s regime.

The poem supports this ambiguity by interspersing images that might relate to the problems of love relationships with fragments hinting at numerous aspects of the explosion and contexts surrounding it:

A plenary approach between two foreign bodies, what the sky dreamed as we all fell still. Confluence of isolations, most certain. I am confused, dumbstruck ((deadly pale))—it tickles when I touch you there, there. “I am not quite comfortable.”

“was born into this system and is in a sense a prisoner of it himself”

A tectonic pulse, another way to imagine a breach, or what else stands against the DMZ.

Intimately placed “bodies” and nations are “foreign” to and perhaps “’not quite comfortable’” with one another. Love is “explosive,” not only in an orgasmic sense, but in the vulnerability it creates. The pulsing “underground” of each lover’s unconscious encourages one “to imagine a breach” with consciousness and a “DMZ” thwarting mutual recognition of the unconscious impulses of the two. Subterranean communication disrupts the best intentioned efforts of conscious dialogue. Perhaps lovers are “born into [a] system” of signification that may imprison them in a paradoxical “confluence of isolations.”

The most obvious subject of the quoted fragment in the middle of the passage above is Kim Jong-Il, who inherited power from his father and might not have insight about how to transform his “system” into something that would diminish the culture of fear and improve the country’s dire economic situation. Further, he may not know how to communicate with the international community (or with the South) in a less reactive, more nuanced way than flexing nuclear muscles.

By placing in relation numerous sub-contexts within the situation of the underground explosion, Lee suggests that provisional understanding of the historical dynamic comprises a resistance to any conceptual reduction. She gives us indications of the violence of the explosion, its impact on local citizens who “had no idea anything was wrong” and on the environment, the sense in the North of “a slow starvation on a mass scale” yet “no sign of a verging popular revolt,” the North Korean government’s assertion that the explosion constitutes “’a great leap forward in the building of a great prosperous powerful socialist nation’” and “an ‘historic event that brought happiness to our military and people’,” and international responses and forecasts of reprisals: “’and the international community will respond’”; “risking even further isolation.” Attention to all these particulars is neither partisan nor disinterested; Lee evinces a distinct love for future realizations of the “national” through “underground” and gradually unearthed speculation and action. To return to the dedication with which I began, brutal power relations involved in colonial and neocolonial “nation-building” is precisely what the movement toward critical articulation of the national intends to overcome.

Review of Ana Bozicevic

2010-07-26T12:19:00.004-04:00

Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Bozicevic. Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009.

Reviewed by Mary Austin Speaker

Ana Bozicevic was born in Croatia and emigrated to New York City when she was 19. Although it is dangerous to make presumptions about the way one’s biography inflects their poetry, I think it’s helpful to consider the conditions of Ana Bozicevic’s native country when she left it. Croatia’s is a history of conflict in which voices speak over each other. Stars of the Night Commute, the author’s first collection of poems, suggests that since her emigration she has been learning how to write her own history while rejecting the very idea of writing history. Bozicevic’s poems offer a record of a mind continually working against an understandable past. They are non-narrative yet intimate. They are, at times, scenic, although the rooms she creates are not the actual rooms of the poem, but they may in fact be the rooms that you yourself have waited in. Say the room has a table with a white table cloth. This could be any room, but the way Ana Bozicevic directs our attention to the tablecloth suggests that this room exists for everyone. We are constantly going back to it and yet we never know exactly what we are waiting for. Everyone has one of these rooms. Ana writes, sometimes, from this room.

Fanny Howe has written of bewilderment as both poetics and ethics—a bewilderment born of “an irreconcilable set of imperatives. . . a double bind established in childhood” that results, inevitably, in uncertainty. If Fanny Howe has carved out a space for a poetics that is ultimately unquantifiable, and which offers a practice of living and writing as a way of revering the unexplainable, Ana Bozicevic’s poems certainly participate in this tradition. She achieves bewilderment through abrupt shifts in syntax and tone (this reader’s favorite being the excited address of a nostril, that humblest of body parts), as well as a stubborn refusal of the power of accepted beauty. Light, birds, each of these are teased, off-handedly rejected, just as they are reclaimed—but it is the poet’s attention—not the inherent characteristic of the thing itself— which defines the beautiful— how the thing itself is seen, and Ana Bozicevic’s book understands the fickleness of a bewildered attention.

Bewilderment is not lamented— it is celebrated in all its raw, staccato energy. The poems in Stars of the Night Commute disrupt, they bother, they tease, they nudge and cajole and apostrophe. We are not to be hypnotized (although some poems are inarguably gorgeous). We are not to fall lamely under a sonorous spell (although some poems use sound masterfully to prick our ears). We are supposed to pay attention, and if we don’t recognize what’s been placed in front of us, she’s betting on the fact that we have, regardless, understood a mood, a tone, a something, and that, without the architecture of more linear poetry, is exactly what makes her work an experience unto itself. Her poems laugh at themselves, and they laugh at you. They also weep at themselves and weep at you. And complain and instruct and adore and puzzle.

The poems of Stars of the Night Commute play with our notions of the utterable. How does one convey beauty without commodifying it, betraying it? How does one write about violence, even war, without betraying them? Perhaps one has to obliterate in order to build something new. Or perhaps one simply has to provide enough disruption along the way so as to offer meaning in discrete packages— like chapbooks.

M.L. Rosenthal’s Genius of the Poetic Sequence posited in 1986 that the sequence was ultimately poetry’s most lasting and vital form, and the steady growth in critical attention to the chapbook in recent years might very well confirm Rosenthal’s supposition. Ana Bozicevic’s work seems to grasp this notion implicitly—most of her book was presented first as a series of chapbooks, each with a discrete tone, endeavor, subject, and the poems themselves often operate this way as well. Why not try a poetics that allows for the outcome to be at turns musical, spastic, unpredictable, thrilling? The drama of how a tone offers its subject can be, it would appear, a shield against a subject’s perceived (tired) meaning. Ana Bozicevic’s poems are punctuated by exclamation points in unexpected places, wrinkled with asides from the poem’s recesses, and even deliberately broken up by words that have lost meaning due to overuse and overkill. This dance between the things of the obviously poetic— birds, light, small animals— and the things of the pedestrian life— VHS tapes, has-beens, commuters— serves the poet well to provide enough static for the reader to understand Stars of the Night Commute as a thing very much of the world in which we live. It acts out claim at the book’s outset, that the poem “can no longer be remote.”

So how is intimacy expressed amid this cacophony of things? It springs from the same place we find intimacy in our daily lives. Often over the course of this collection, the poems resemble scraps culled from a conversation between two people, each of whom expects something of the other and in this way the book itself is sort of like an eclogue— one voice perpetually interrogating the other— but the voices switch roles, obliterating a graspable sense of a speaker, yet never evading a sense of expectation— indeed, intimacy does not exist apart from expectation. Reading Stars of the Night Commute offers a paradoxical reading experience—a tone that suggests an uneasy, cajoling vulnerability is coupled with a syntax which at turns holds the reader at bay (like one who has only just approached an ongoing conversation) and invites her in with the sudden slowing of attention that provides the opportunity for a peculiar, personal music that is at once apart from and very much surrounded by the world:

(O traveler. Grey star.

From your hat, when you upend it,
your small family upturn their faces.)

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

What is expectation in a book of poems? Ana Bozicevic might deny that she sets up any expectation at all. Or she might view expectation as an opportunity for subversion, a kind of poetic bait-and-switch that diverts the reader’s attention with the spectacle of humor, ridiculousness, jokes, while sneaking in the things that are most difficult to say, or even opening up opportunities for us to discover them ourselves. This sidling up, this inadvertent conveyance of meaning allows us to participate in the author’s bewilderment, to experience the world the way we do when we have just grasped a joke— the moment of recognition, the psychological sense of inclusion, the bubble of laughter making its way to the surface.

Review of Michelle Taransky

2010-07-23T05:06:00.001-04:00

Barn Burned, Then by Michelle Taransky. Omnidawn Publishing, $14.95.

Review by Lindsay Kathleen Turner

Selected by Marjorie Welish as the winner of the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Contest, Michelle Taransky’s first collection of poems, Barn Burned, Then, takes its title from a haiku by Masahide: “Barn’s burnt down / now / I can see the moon.” Structured into two sections, “Barn Book” and “Bank Book,” Taransky’s work places us immediately and fully into the space created by loss and its aftermath: lines are spare and usually quite short, images are as bare and fragile as the half-burnt rafters of the half-present barn, and throughout the book a certain repertory of words—drawn from both financial and agricultural registers—repeats and recurs, as if the repository of language itself had, along with its storehouse, gone up in smoke.

Indeed, the operating principles behind Taransky’s poems seem themselves to be informed by an economy of loss, by the tension of scarcity. Meanings are questioned and revised as line follows line, and in the absence of an abundance of words, many of Taransky’s are called upon to operate in several possible positions at once. Take, for example, the opening of the poem “Barn Burner, If”:

What lies down here
Does not call for
The plan

Its facts of carve
and split something […]

Here—as with the book as a whole—the meaning of the lines shifts dramatically depending on whether or not we read continuously from the title into the poem, as grammatical structure invites us to do, or whether we discard this structure in favor of a standard separation between title and poem—and, thus, a stable statement of “its facts” rather than a situation of if/then contingency. But even the “facts” seem undermined by the sort of anthimeria characteristic of Taransky’s work: the evocative “facts of carve” becomes the destructive action “carve and split,” and we are left with no “fact” at all to fall back on.

But it’s not only the meanings of words that Taransky works to destabilize; on both semantic and grammatical levels, the experience of reading Barn Burned, Then is not unlike the attempt to keep one’s balance on a galloping horse described—or, more accurately, replicated—in another poem in the collection (titled, joltingly as well as perhaps jokingly, “How To Keep / Your Balance / On A”). Returning to “Barn Burner, If”: the poem ends with the conclusion of the conditional construction begun in its title:

If ovate
Then

… Blaze the
Bricks will

I don’t stop for

Then the yearling
Loses touch

Here the conditional is strangely doubled, however: the blaze, already figured by the book’s title as occasioning force, is now what follows an empty space and is contingent upon the “if ovate” as well as the previous “barn burner.” By the end of this spare poem, it is impossible to determine where the if/then construction begins or ends, which “if” follows which “then,” which force affects which entity; the space of the poem is one in which grammatical structures serve to question the ideas of causality and contingency they evoke. In other words, the emptiness opened by the loss of the barn becomes the site of an intense and unresolved investigation of language.

The examination of the space of loss at the core of Barn Burned, Then, however, is not solely a problem of language. If the poems’ structural and linguistic ambiguities function to further their creation, their semantic ones point to something gone awry both inside and outside the book. The fact that certain words are called upon to sustain multiple meanings is not only an act of semantic disturbance; it is also a chilling way to evoke a certain cultural moment: the literal destruction of farms, barns, homes, and lives in the wake of contemporary economic failure.

In the “Great Foundation I Dug Out,” Taransky writes of

a once

dead barn swallow—

now full of change

and falling

it is an anvil

stuffed with wild

weeds I saved to open up

an account

In these eight short but impossibly knotty lines, it seems that both language and economics have collapsed into each other, and collapsed in general: the destroyed barn names its now-dead denizen, the natural “change” from life to death bears both the echo and the weight of the nickels and dimes that could have saved but have in a certain sense destroyed both swallow and barn, the bird itself becomes a kind of repository, a fragile “safe,” and the speaker’s “account” is in the end both a financial and representational problem. Indeed, a partial list of the words that echo, doubled and redoubled in meaning, throughout the book points to the extent to which writing and language are implicated with a destructive economic system: change / exchange, prints / imprints, counts / count / account, tell / teller, bank, safe, note / notes. Elsewhere in the book, in the same way that the verb “to tell” (a story) becomes (bank) “teller,” the verb “to add” (as one would one’s life savings) becomes, terrifyingly, “adders”: the close association of registers is clearly no benign condensation.

Barn Burned, Then is, then, ultimately both a politicized examination of language and a linguistic—and remarkably lyrical—examination of the political. This double action is not ultimately surprising, given that Taransky locates herself clearly and deliberately as drawing on the work of both Language poetry and of Objectivism; the first section of the book begins with epigrams from George Oppen and Charles Bernstein. What is perhaps more surprising is the quietness with which Taransky mounts her critique—remarkable given the scope of her project and especially refreshing in a first book from a younger poet. Even as it multiplies meanings and referents and further pulls apart a world already almost destroyed, the book rarely fails to evoke a certain closeness and smallness of scale that remain accessible through and to the poems: take, for example, the end of “Barn Burner, If” (“Then the yearling / loses touch”) or the delicacy with which the barn swallow cited earlier appears and falls.

It might be possible to trace this intimacy of the concrete back to Williams, or back again to the haiku tradition already mentioned. Barn Burned, Then also brings to mind the work of Lorine Niedecker, a poet deeply and personally impacted by economic depression and loss of home and property; what Rachel Blau DuPlessis wrote in The Kenyon Review (spring 1992) of Niedecker’s work—that in it “the haiku-lyric… may even offer its own barbed commentary on monstrous, overweening cultural ambitions”—seems equally appropriate to Taransky’s. But in any case, Taransky’s book is less an illustration or evocation of other schools or other writers, or even of its moment of political and linguistic crisis, than it is—in the wake of destruction—the construction of a solid and satisfying “statement // to take the barn’s place.”

NEW! Poems by G.C. Waldrep

2010-07-21T05:02:00.000-04:00

G.C. Waldrep

NATIONAL GALLERY

Why does everything
have to be
a Native American
burial ground.

I have not set fire
to any visiting poets.

You look through
the kaleidoscope, and
Russia looks back.

Ants the size of
people. Little church
biographies.

Swine flu on campus
means nothing
much. Wood ducks
fly through it.

The bank clerk
pretends to examine
the watermark.

Flagstone, crisp
as a cathedral apron.

An idea of residence:
we live here.
Lichens drift past us
in the swan boats.

There are no rules
for theater. Toppling
into the eulogy:

Interferon, various
prostheses made of wax.

Darfur is not
a medical experiment.

Visible spectrum.
Your left hand opens
in real time.

Sand dunes, sand
storm. Faint crescent,
puma, cloudy sky.

EPITHELIUM

Try thinking of Jamaica
as a search-&-rescue mission.

The third thing is
the noumenal, by which
we mean advertising
when we aren’t around.

A tentative dislodging.
Man-in-boat, man-in-
cave formation.

Marsh grass. Shallow.

The president announces
new household gods.
I burned myself
trying to light the fire.

There was this weird
noise. And we got there,

the little prayer flags
beating time with capitalism.

No, the book report
is not a lyric form, unless
it’s a book about
constellations, or sand.

The largest unbranched
inflorescence is the titan arum.

Nothing new is hiding
in the trees, you said.

A living dog being better
than a dead lion,
we left the child in peace.

Verse is closed to submissions

2010-07-20T13:07:00.001-04:00

Verse is still closed to submissions. Submissions received outside our reading period will be recycled.

NEW! Poem by William Pettit

2010-06-02T02:29:00.000-04:00

William Pettit

The Opposite of a Dog

The scars of boredom
On this constant heap

Add some white wisdom to her suffrage
If turned around and sent aloft
From dug cube under marked stone to omnipotence
As the white roses on that soil bloom and pass

She stays with me and my songs
What a godly companion
What a furry beating

NEW! Poem by Tomaz Salamun

2010-05-31T02:27:00.000-04:00

Tomaz Salamun

SUTRA

What is the sea? The sea is the forehead.
What is the forehead? The forehead is the night.
What is the sand? The sand is the dawn.
What is the dawn? The dawn is the king.
The king is the donned man.
The donned man carries the burden.

What is the sack? The sack is garbage.
What is garbage? Garbage is the wheel?
What is the color? The color is gas.
What is the gas? The gas is the child.
The child hugs the Bible.
Smash his Bible.

What is carrying? Carrying is delight.
What is delight? Delight is Bach.
What is the wisdom? The wisdom is silence.
The silence is number four.
Four, crossed and encircled.

Translated from the Slovenian by Michael Thomas Taren and the author

Recent & Recommended

2010-04-27T13:30:00.003-04:00

Andrew Joron, Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights)
Srecko Kosovel, Look Back, Look Ahead: Selected Poems (Ugly Duckling)
Ben Lerner, Mean Free Path (Copper Canyon)
Raul Zurita, Inri (Marick)

Rae Armantrout reading

2010-04-12T15:55:00.001-04:00

University of Richmond
Wednesday, April 14
7pm
Weinstein Hall, Brown-Alley Room
Free and open to the public

Armantrout's Versed just won the Pulitzer Prize, and it also won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book still would be great without those prizes, of course, but still...

Coudriet, Faizullah, Poteat reading tonight

2010-04-03T12:34:00.001-04:00

Daniel Coudriet, Tarfia Faizullah, and Joshua Poteat
1708 Gallery
Richmond VA
6pm

Gillian Conoley reading

2010-03-30T00:37:00.000-04:00

Wednesday, March 31
7pm
University of Richmond
Brown-Alley Room, Weinstein Hall

free and open to the public

James Schuyler's Other Flowers

2010-03-29T07:33:00.000-04:00

Recent & Recommended

2010-03-21T10:59:00.002-04:00

Daniel Coudriet, Say Sand (Carnegie Mellon)
Bin Ramke, Theory of Mind (Omnidawn)
Susan Tichy, Gallowglass (Ahsahta)

Recent & Recommended

2010-03-17T00:06:00.003-04:00

Julie Carr, 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta)
Heather Christle,The Difficult Farm (Octopus)
Bob Hicok, Words for Empty and Words for Full (Pittsburgh)
Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton (Fence)
Stan Mir, Song & Glass (Subito)
Ben Mirov, I Is to Vorticism (New Michigan)
Sawako Nakayasu, Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions)
Chris Nealon, Plummet (Edge)
Travis Nichols, Iowa (Letter Machine Editions)
Stephen Ratcliffe, Reading the Unseen (Counterpath)
Lisa Robertson, R's Boat (California)
Christopher Salerno, Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review)
Kevin Varrone, g-point almanac: passyunk lost (Ugly Duckling)
Karen Weiser, To Light Out (Ugly Duckling)

NEW! Poems by Ali Lanzetta

2010-02-15T10:12:00.001-05:00

Ali Lanzetta

the invention of water

. . . our last page waits with cold wings furled, can't stand a cold angel, shut up like cherry-buds. we relate by smelling cut grass, grass on one side of the path dappled, dappled grass on one side where the morning hasn't turned the water out, we are waterwheels turning with dreams left running, wasting, turning our weeks over like soil, like eroded fields of sweet found red places we hold in memory of ripeness, we hold in our palms like baby birds, write the numbers in our palms with the juice of. afraid with the shame of children, stitching twigs and stems to hold the gaps and gullies together. palming the wet ground to make sure we're not growing dreams we can't pronounce, dream composers who say play soft, play loud, play one, two, three, four again, again. the pained grace painted on our collarbones, stone lips mysteried by ellipses, the infertile seedlings lined up, sprouts lifted up out of the garden to feed birds who hang on reaching branches, old moments reaching the reach of thieves, creeping under closed doors, seeping into wine vats, fluttering in by dusted sunbeams are found floating belly-up in our glasses, sunken in the pulses of peppermint, ginger, thyme, fire-blue flowers that fall. the partial story pressed between pages of us collected, our handwriting fades, our bent letters still laced across the doorways like poppy-pods, the theater of our averted eyes revolving around the past like strung stars, both burning and restrained, filling the distance. rotting plums, stitched to our paper crowns, crown me with your pasteboard pomegranates and turn me under, harvest me, tell me i am here and you are there. let our bones fall back to the ground.

bird-colored glass: an installation

red side of september mom's belly ripening up like the last apple, october scarecrow decorate dead grass pumpkin gut scooped out with a wooden spoon for smoothing, spanking, stirring. splinter-palm grains of pine drying in the sun. wrapped in yarn in blankets november, papery crimson stir of memory november, bare branch witch-finger in needle-rain november, heavy yellow moon harvest the last of the leaves and the wind and a flat glass bird-girl is born. first hard lemon winter light to look through, suspend a winter bird against the storm windows, twist of black sky tilted with the weight of first things, suspending time. birch bark. sharp-tipped. chancy. skinny arms held full to empty. black sky fills with clean stars like april rain in a slatted barrel.

hurricane lamp and emergency candles waiting in the antique icebox with the punchbowl. elaborate raw wooden walls waiting for bird. pictures drawn in knotty pine, ghost-branches lopped off, old wounds make knots to inherit, good topsoil-colored eyes and big brother has nightmares about, red fox chase a boy though the garden, hit over the head with a frying pan, flung over the moon and gone. down the short wooden hallway glass bird sleeps like a puppy, little folded wings limp in dreams of running the yard to flying. unable to sustain taller breaths between dreamgrass and brown belly, pesky inability to maintain little ribcage horizontal to sky, birds float down the edges, undone shoestring walls of, the dream keeps coming but doesn't get there. here, where bird learns almost. learns early. is not afraid of falling.

biography of bird is written in the path through the orchard in apple seeds. biography of bird is spelled wrong, word-combining, letters dyslexic, scratched in the mud with bare toes, hourglass-textured, circus-colored. biography of bird is buried in faded photos of the family couch for nobody to find. ask and mom won't tell. mom whose belly swelled up for autumn, for sunshot maple leaves raked up, for the dying of things, for the branches poking cold nimbly fingers at the skyline like reaching at in sleep, as in a dream, as in a muddle, as moth-eaten map, premonition of tumbling, of things pulling apart, just slightly. biography of bird a swallowed flower, or a muffle for the garden asleep under snow

NEW! Review of Maile Meloy

2010-01-27T00:36:00.000-05:00

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy. Riverhead Books, $25.95.

Reviewed by Katy Einerson

Maile Meloy’s second short story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It seems to hover quietly above the threshold of some immanent yet unnamed private disaster as her characters repeatedly gasp for balance in their tangled lives. The individuals in each of her eleven stories struggle with impossibility—wanting while having, remembering while forgetting, constancy amid change. They are caught on both sides of a widening chasm, knowing that a flutter of movement, any decision, offers only uncertain gain and the irrecoverable loss of possibility.

Meloy takes the title of her collection from a poem by A.R. Ammons, which she also offers as an epigraph:

One can’t
have it

both ways
and both

ways is
the only

way I
want it.

Ammons’ poem seems to insist on collapsing Hamlet’s classic skeptical dilemma, however futilely, and Meloy in turn places it in the sphere of modern American realism. The compact intensity of Ammons’ poetic voice is traceable in Meloy’s own narrative style: she writes with a certain assured concision as she exposes her characters’ inner psyches with illuminating selectivity. Her realism is an emotional one; as an observer she is poised and precise, her narration omniscient and deeply honest. Her stories unfold as though unhindered by artifice—as if they had already existed when she found them.

Meloy’s versatility emerges in this collection as her narrative voice takes on the perspective of a dejected factory worker coping with the death of his best friend, an affluent doctor on a family ski trip, a lonely ranch hand in love with an out-of-town lawyer, a wealthy and aging Argentinean aristocrat, a nine-year-old girl entangled in her mother’s unstable relationship, and the grieving father of a murder victim, among others. The backdrop is largely American and nearly half the stories are set in Montana, Meloy’s home state. Meloy’s Montana has an intensely private quality to it, as if it is hiding from some larger American stage. Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is marked by a fierce, almost reclusive interiority. Her characters appear most frequently in the midst of their domestic lives. We find them at home, in their kitchens, like Alice in “Two Step,” crumbling at the thought of her cheating husband, not once suspecting that the woman who has come to comfort her is her rival. Or they are small families traveling together, like Sam and her father on a summer canoeing trip in “Red from Green,” or Everett and Pam cutting down a Christmas tree with their little daughter in “O Tannenbaum.” Or we simply find them alone, like Chet Moran feeding cows in winter in “Travis, B.” and Steven Kelley in “Lovely Rita,” orphaned and glumly employed at the local power plant.

The collection is consistently more isolating than it is intimate. In “The Girlfriend,” Meloy’s most outwardly troubling story, a man, Leo, confronts a young woman behind the closed curtains of a Montana hotel room. She is the girlfriend of his daughter’s killer, and despite an already guilty verdict, he has pulled her into this dark, enclosed space, still searching for an explanation for his daughter’s death. Leo’s grief boils into imaginary violence as he fantasizes about attacking the murderer in court, hearing “the satisfying pop of the trachea, the sudden flow of blood.” The eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Sasha, is an obstacle he cannot negotiate. She offers him sex, which he first refuses, repulsed. But as the senselessness of his daughter’s death seizes him, he becomes manic, manipulative: “He had the wild thought that if he did fuck her, he could control her. And if he could control one small part of the situation, he might come out the other side a man who could live with himself, a man who could sleep. Or he might destroy what life he had left.” He no longer seeks justice, even revenge, so much as selfish peace of mind, and he is willing to take it at any cost. He hunts it with a leonine energy that at times overshadows his paternal sorrow, thrilled with “the excitement of the chase, of discovery.” The discovery he finally unearths is more crippling than he’d imagined and pins him even more acutely in his grief, leaving him nothing but empty time, “decades . . . for him not to forgive himself.”

Loneliness and abandonment find their echoes in every story. In “Red from Green,” Sam, a young teenage girl, embarks on a canoe trip with her father, uncle, and a witness in one of her uncle’s court cases. The witness, Layton, takes an interest in Sam and develops the beginning of a friendship. One night as Layton, Sam, and her father sit around the campfire, her father abruptly rises and goes to his tent. Alone with Sam, Layton’s attention becomes physical and, to her, frightening. She escapes to her tent and the incident passes without remark. When the trip is over Sam continues to be troubled by her father’s leaving. Had he meant to desert her? Did he know what would happen? In this story Meloy captures the uncertainty of adolescence—the notion that somehow, somewhere, something has been gained and something lost. Sam finds herself sliding along a continuum, between the green of innocence and the red of experience. Her newfound experience is perhaps made more disquieting with the consciousness that it was not one she forged for herself, but one she was abandoned to.

Even Meloy’s most domestic settings lack familial warmth. The precarious subtexts of marital and sexual relationships figure prominently in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, and it is in the face of adultery that her characters seem to most fully want it both ways. She exposes simultaneously who her characters are and who they’d rather be. In “Two Step,” Alice and Naomi talk over tea in Alice’s kitchen on a wintry Montana evening. Alice is distraught and suspects that her husband is being unfaithful. The dance becomes verbal as Meloy seamlessly establishes dramatic irony: Naomi is her husband’s lover and she is there under the guise of a comforting shoulder, with a slightly perverse desire to discover how much Alice knows. When the husband comes home the kitchen floor seems to fall out and each character is left to grapple for footing in the now unfamiliar space. Alliances are uncertain and disaster seems to be edging in when the husband takes Alice in his arms and twirls her around the kitchen, leaving Naomi to slink out the back door and into his car. Stability is pitted against fulfillment; the desire of one can never fully extinguish the other, and each character is left to wait and hope.

Dialogue plays a provisional role in Meloy’s stories, and the relationships she constructs seem to question the plausibility of honest human communication. Well-founded trust is hard to come by. “The Children” is another story of a husband torn between the comfort of familiarity, the pleasure of fidelity, and the satisfaction of his private desires. The opening epigraph surfaces once again in the context of this story, as the husband lies next to his wife while thinking of his lover. He repeats the poem to himself, which his daughter had brought home from college:

“Both ways is the only way I want it.” The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way? . . . He held his wife and felt himself anchored to everything that was safe and sure, and kept for himself the knowledge of how quickly he could let go and drift free.

In an odd way, Meloy seems to link the pursuit and fulfillment of desire with shame. Her characters hide what they want, and are frequently embarrassed by it. Fielding, the husband in “The Children,” cannot bring himself to disrupt his family with his affair and expose himself to his wife’s and children’s judgment. Similarly, Augustín, a wealthy Argentinean aristocrat, is in love with a maid in his eponymous short story, and goes to propose to her upon finding her after many years. When he was younger he had been “too afraid of his teenage daughters to offer her marriage.” But this time it is she who is unwilling to expose herself to the hatred and ridicule of family and society, preferring the honest work of providing for her son. It is not so much a tone of judgment that Meloy adopts in these stories, but rather an exposure of the sincere difficulty of pursuing personal happiness in the face of public disapproval. This fear of disrupting the status quo seems to be what drives her characters so deeply inward.

This profound inwardness can at times create an almost claustrophobic atmosphere. Meloy writes of Fielding, who is thinking of his lover, “All he wanted was to preserve that feeling, of the two of them alone together, and make all obstacles to it go away.” This continued desire to retreat and hide from society becomes oddly stifling, especially in the context of the wide-open Montana horizons. But opening up and self-exposure are dangerous games in Meloy’s fiction. Strangers and outsiders are frequently presented as threats to whatever fragile stability her characters hold on to. Layton in “Red from Green” is one such dangerous outsider. “O Tannenbaum” also clearly identifies outsiders as ominous and menacing. The family stops along the side of the road for two hitchhikers, another couple, who went out cross-country skiing and lost their car. Pam, the wife, wants to drive away and preserve her family’s self-contained security. Everett, her husband, reasons you “can’t leave people in the snow” on Christmas and they take them in to help look for their car. The tension mounts as the two strangers reveal their names as Bonnie and Clyde. But even as the passengers prove themselves to be physically peaceful, another threat arises as Pam notices sexual tension between Bonnie and her husband. Memories of her husband’s previous infidelity come back, and we are again in the milieu of uncertain marital relationships and the ubiquitous threat of instability.

“The Girlfriend” is of course another example of the dangers of outsiders, as Leo’s daughter is killed by a man who breaks into her home and attacks her. But the collection’s subtle agoraphobia goes deeper than a simple fear of strangers. In “The Girlfriend” especially, it is Montana itself that seems dangerous. As Leo thinks back on what he could possibly have done to prevent his daughter’s death, he considers the possibility of having kept her on the East Coast for college and not letting her move to the University of Montana to study forestry:

If they hadn’t sent her at fifteen to the outdoor course in Wyoming that convinced her to want bigness, ruralness, westernness. Leo designed sky-blocking office buildings for a living, and wondered if forestry was a direct challenge to him. . . . He had argued with Emily about her choices, to test her resolve, but her gray eyes would only get solemn and sure, and her chin would lift stubbornly. . . . Even as a child she wanted vast forests, not gardens.

Montana’s bigness and openness translate into vulnerability—its wide open spaces offer no protection and nowhere to hide.

The threat of personal and familial invasion, interplay between fragility and stability, and the precariousness of decisions in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It propel Meloy’s stories forward with fixating energy. Meloy has a gift for vivid, natural storytelling; her creation of suspense is effective and subtle. At about twenty pages each, her stories neither rush nor drag and always manage to mesmerize as they unfold. Meloy’s intense study of her characters remains perhaps the most fascinating aspect of her stories—she seems to pin them like butterflies on a bulletin board for momentary scrutiny before pulling away, leaving them to whatever secluded existence they have carved for themselves, and leaving us with riveting and absorbing fiction.

NEW! Poem by Dawn Marie Knopf

2010-01-25T00:50:00.000-05:00

Dawn Marie Knopf

HIGH TEA

Sits the city centre known as
Poor's House of Cactus the beacon

both the ladies & the queens said so

they met among the saguaros out
back in their purple robes against

the light from the amber & dead

hills beyond Manteca beyond
their season they declared we

are the purveyours of grande culture

we are the narwhals of grande culture
we are the turquoise on the Stetson

hatband of grande culture who

by our headlong battle to save
the sculptures from the Comstock

the flood shining with spun discs

of Pyrite but also the rarest & most
genuine in the California lode

no we would not hold out our hands

January/February APR

2010-01-14T02:15:00.000-05:00

A lot of great work in the latest issue of APR, including some of Hayden Carruth's last poems, some of James Schuyler's uncollected poems, and poems by Mary Ruefle, Kazim Ali, Claudia Keelan, Gillian Conoley, etc.

NEW! Poem by Stuart Friebert

2010-01-11T02:58:00.000-05:00

Stuart Friebert

SHOES

The donkey-skinned pair God ordered
Moses to remove before treading holy soil.

Did he sit down to do so, or perhaps
lean on his staff, bend over unsteadily

to pull them off, the sun’s rays already
reaching him from below the horizon,

his eyes closing like fists, his hair caked
with mud? Was he dying to know how long

he’d been dying, but afraid to ask? If he’d
laughed to lighten the moment, he’d have

been alone with his laughter, heading toward
a grave full of slush and snow – I read it could

have been snowing! At this time in my own
little life, busy getting older, I’m willing to

accept anything too, and so on and so forth.

NEW! Poem by Günter Eich

2010-01-08T02:59:00.000-05:00

Günter Eich

APPLICATION

Some knowledge
of damming wild creeks,
familiar with
health insurance measures
for apprentice weavers,
unafraid
of electric current,
also able to handle animals,
adept at business correspondence,
especially, praise God, Manchurian,
Tocharian and in
the stenography of filthy
eagle-owl calls, an
all-around talent,
appropriate
to a position of leadership
in the submarine business.

Translated from the German by Stuart Friebert

NEW! Poem by Elliot Figman

2010-01-06T02:57:00.000-05:00

Elliot Figman

PLEASE EAT PLANS

A statement is no match for it. Not when calls again
pleased a little better than Harry knows this much true.
Truth will rear it. Justice will suffice. Slide please slide
the little waiter calls. Caftans submarines adjudicated matters
none this ripe must do. Names may readjust norms.
Skin butchers lie in ruins. Please draw closer closet
turn that corner an unhurried attitude what’s
it for won’t sell. Froth with pleats when all streets have
is clothes. Calves encounter lambs. Just now shook its lawn.

NEW! Poem by Kelli Anne Noftle

2010-01-04T02:54:00.000-05:00

Kelli Anne Noftle

MATING RITUALS

You feel listless as underthings
unravel. At the bottom
of an ocean, near her neck
where the collar dips—some of the habits
you acquire are ancient.
On the one hand, you’ve been
cannibal, pausing only
to swallow light and motion. (It happens
so quickly, it’s already over.) In the other hand—
her jaw. Her eyelashes, rhinophores, and that other
sensory sublimation by which you grasp only
through tangled weeds, against the under-
belly of waking, your insides, out.
Your heart, a slipknot of mucus.

And this question: if all the corresponding regions
make her sigh, then how did specializing
in your own desire become
so stereotypical, homo sapien?

Adult sea slugs are all hermaphroditic, though they still require partners to copulate. Some will engage in long elaborate courtships, joined together in intercourse for extended periods of time.

2 poems by Laura Wetherington

2009-12-31T00:11:00.000-05:00

Laura Wetherington

In the day I dream in future tense: past sedative plus perfect

the present is a pasture:
a funny joke about pointers. it points to itself.
my vagina is a closed circuit television.
but how can one question with a period.

there is no narrator, no barrier.
I know how to see with my cells.
oscillate does not mean vacillate. both could mean masturbate:
my vagina is an electrical engineer.

Quiet people are crazy in bed

All orgasm is just me clapping for myself on the inside.
We are sound waves reverberating in the chambers of our skin.
We are sound whales crooning the universe in.

NEW! Poem by David O’Connell

2009-12-29T00:52:00.000-05:00

David O’Connell

SGT. BRADLEY TALKS EMERGENCY PROCEDURE

We come to when he says raise
all shades, when he says snipers
will take high ground, will be
our eyes, and when it starts,
he says, stay down, says
all hands on heads and single
file when you exit; it’s
standard op, he says, too many
backpacks and experience has taught us
they’re innocent until the bullet’s
in your chest. Here’s the word
that means lock down. Here’s the room
where you’ll huddle. Here’s the only knock
that means it’s safe. Anticipate.
Drill. You think you won’t,
but every study shows
you’ll lose your head. I don’t mean
to alarm, he says, but
three hours plus a day right now
those kids are playing games
that train a boy to squeeze off rounds
like this, this, this. And this is how
it happened in Moses Lake, and this
is what they did in Jonesboro, and this
is all you didn’t want to know
of Littleton—the homemade fractals,
the detailed schematics. And you,
he says, are our best defense.
Paunch and bald patch, sag
and bad dye, we’re cataloging long
coats and sullen stares, running
the percentages, calculating second-story
drops and the density of fire doors.
Our minds are buzzing television.
We can almost hear the story
spinning off the perpetual machine.

NEW! Poem by Ben Mazer

2009-12-28T00:20:00.000-05:00

Ben Mazer

He saw the birdwatcher in the distance
raised the gun to his head, the woman yelled
"oh lord" the animals scattered and he fired.
A sameness of birds flew off in his direction.
A smart sheep learned to see a human dying.

Then he was headlines, a bullet's report.
Quotes of friends who'd seen his rise to fame.
A few appearances and a private library,
only the chief librarian never answered.

His poems stirred the old feeling underground
where love still made its signal word for love
and silent with their truth they passed around
declaratives like cheaper currency,

the coiling of the wind in groves of autumn,
an old vagrant fogging wiping and looking in.

RIP, Vic Chesnutt (1964-2009)

2009-12-26T21:32:00.002-05:00

The world lost a rare light when Vic Chesnutt passed away yesterday. He has left behind some of the most incisive, poignant, and mordant songs of our time. It's no wonder why so many people who love language and the possibilities of language were drawn to his songs. He was also an incredibly sweet and gentle person, but could be fiery as well, especially when talking about politics, which he followed closely. He gave innumerable outstanding performances, including one singular event with Forrest Gander in The Chapel at UGA.

Unfortunately, he also left behind $70,000 in medical bills, despite having health insurance. Please consider following the above link to help his family. Hospitals and debt collectors don't simply walk away from unpaid bills; they'll go after his estate, his house, etc. until they get their money.

NEW! Poem by Ben Mazer

2009-12-26T00:44:00.000-05:00

Ben Mazer

Cookies and Lamictal

The undershirt of my imagination stinks
with always persuading sheerly by tone
the remembered dipsticks of our latter winter
when to atone for me you went alone
to veering vetters of the current cutter.
I want to see, want to see Tyrone
Power play Philip Marlowe.
Cut straight to the bone
I am not write. Won't be this winter.

Two poems by Don Share

2009-12-24T00:23:00.000-05:00

Don Share

DED (Dutch Elm Disease)

The town came round and said
Our tree must come down--
Like a bell without a clapper,
This yard without its elm.

Nesting

Good luck, to find a feather,
Less so, the whole bird.
So why read about "nesting"
When you don't love me anymore?

2009 Recap of Recommended Books, S-W

2009-12-23T18:55:00.000-05:00

Tomaz Salamun, There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair (Counterpath)

Zachary Schomburg, Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean)

Laura Sims, Stranger (Fence)

Lytton Smith, The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat)

Mathias Svalina, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State)

Chad Sweeney, Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga)

Brian Teare, Sight Map (California)

Novica Tadic, Dark Things, translated by Charles Simic (BOA)

Allison Titus, Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State)

Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (FSG)

Catherine Wagner, My New Job (Fence)

G.C. Waldrep, Archicembalo (Tupelo)

Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies (California)

Robert Walser, The Tanners, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

Jason Whitmarsh, Tomorrow's Living Room (Utah State)

Dara Wier, Selected Poems (Wave)

Joshua Marie Wilkinson, The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo)

Rebecca Wolff, The King (W.W. Norton)

2009 Recap of Recommended Books, H-R

2009-12-23T11:54:00.000-05:00

Joshua Harmon, Scape (Black Ocean)

K.A. Hays, Dear Apocalypse (Carnegie Mellon)

Brenda Hillman, Practical Water (Wesleyan)

Joanna Howard, On the Winding Stair (BOA)

Fanny Howe, The Winter Sun (Graywolf)

Christine Hume, Shot (Counterpath)

Devin Johnston, Creaturely (Turtle Point)

Garrett Kalleberg, Malilenas (Ugly Duckling)

L.S. Klatt, Interloper (Massachusetts)

Timothy Liu, Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse (Talisman)

Natalie Lyalin, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut)

Sabrina Orah Mark, Tsim Tsum (Saturnalia)

Joseph Massey, Areas of Fog (Shearsman)

Bernadette Mayer, Poetry State Forest (New Directions)

Jennifer Militello, Flinch of Song (Tupelo)

Jennifer Moxley, Clampdown (Flood)

Christian Peet, Big American Trip (Shearsman)

William Pettit, Ghost Songs (Casagrande)

Joshua Poteat, Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World (Georgia)

Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood (Ecco)

Donald Revell, The Bitter Withy (Alice James)

Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House)

Kit Robinson, The Messianic Trees (Adventures in Poetry)

2009 Recap of Recommended Books, A-G

2009-12-23T00:51:00.001-05:00

Kazim Ali, Bright Felon (Wesleyan)

Karen Leona Anderson, Punish Honey (Carolina Wren)

Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)

John Ashbery, Planisphere (Ecco)

Ferenc Barnas, The Ninth, translated by Paul Olchvary (Northwestern)

Eric Baus, Tuned Droves (Octopus)

Bill Berkson, Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House)

Mark Bibbins, The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon)

Roberto Bolano, The Skating Rink, translated by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

Ana Bozicevic, Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky)

Rene Char, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland, translated by Gustaf Sobin (Counterpath)

Norma Cole, Natural Light (Libellum)

Gillian Conoley, The Plot Genie (Omnidawn)

Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (FSG)

Joseph Donahue, Terra Lucida (Talisman House)

Brandon Downing, Lake Antiquity (Fence)

Dominique Fourcade, It, translated by Peter Consenstein (La Presse)

Graham Foust, A Mouth in California (Flood)

Barbara Claire Freeman, Incivilities (Counterpath)

Sarah Gambito, Delivered (Persea)

Michael Gizzi, New Depths of Deadpan (Burning Deck)

Kate Greenstreet, The Last 4 Things (Ahsahta)

NEW! 3 poems by David Dodd Lee

2009-12-21T00:25:00.000-05:00

David Dodd Lee

SIX MINUTES

The day eats itself then expires

Moths, dirty people

The animals match their blood to the earth and sky in that place

His face was the size of a pin cushion

Old lambs die young in this country

A JUMPING FLEA?

maybe

'cause I've got this ukulele in a bucket

star light, star bright

I've got a ukulele in a bucket

and this very small songbook

he's a police officer

riding a horse down old Seville Parkway in the dead of summer

the crab grass blossoms in her hair

the smell of heavy sedation

then I think to myself, self

the wagon sits in its own tropical shadow

does the ground see the wood, the wood look down at the ground?

there are many quarters falling out of the moon

and into the galvanized moat-of-the-lute

that cemetery seems like a dream to me now

but only on the real object

do the spokes fly backwards

MANUAL GRAVITY

Scrape of shovel

Sediments of meaning multiplying in the woods

It's noisy down around our ankles

The land groans and shudders with broken bottles

Every time I look around I sink into this deepening of reclamation

Milk of Magnesia

An animal with its eyes sealed off

Dr. Pepper bottle embossed with an image of a clock

the fluids that drip on one’s skin

A twig dragged along the naked back to where the ass flares and begins to reverberate

Complete irrelevance

Recent & Recommended

2009-12-20T00:39:00.002-05:00

John Ashbery, Planisphere (Ecco)
Ferenc Barnas, The Ninth, translated by Paul Olchvary (Northwestern)
Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories (FSG)
Brandon Downing, Lake Antiquity (Fence)
Graham Foust, A Mouth in California (Flood)
Sabrina Orah Mark, Tsim Tsum (Saturnalia)
Joshua Marie Wilkinson, The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo)

3 pieces by Susan Lewis

2009-12-18T00:30:00.000-05:00

Susan Lewis

PROGRESS REPORT

First I’m wading through daisies, nosing your breath, then we’re like this, not one way but its opposite, in ever-more confusing rondo form. That we fail doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to align ourselves, give or take reality’s allowance. Do you hear the crickets yelling at those hungry birds? Do you smell the storm crackling in the hollows? I’ve tossed petals at the lot of them, they are not impressed. You would call me desperate, & I would answer. I would call you Babyface, or Salamander, or Mr. Critical, depending on the stuck market & the relative humility. Now there’s sorrow raining down from the agitated clouds. They, too are underappreciated, they might yearn for a more congenial atmosphere. Who blames the cook for a flip of the wrist? Who, indeed. Meanwhile you’ve aced more mean feats, making me jealous of my former self. Call it sweet-and-sour grapes, call it no-strings-attached, either way she’ll be sorry, & sometimes I am. Other times I tremble for more of the same.

INTRODUCTION TO APPRECIATION

Most knowing goes unlicensed. Most nonsense brings tears to your blinding eyes. Take A is for Effort. Take Practice What You Preach. There are layers here which mediate the difference. Start with the last thing you should ask, or the first. A matter of simple splicing. A matter of profiling, gene pools, & other murky depths. Miss Emily might love this lack. Miss Gertrude, not so much. Don’t scoff at this gaping vacancy. To avoid the bends, sit straight, adopt the branded lifestyle. Lead with your silver spoon. The first kiss & the last should lie beguilingly. Under the arch, posing archly. Snap. Bounce any kind of ball. Have you heard what passes for thought? Does your sympathy resemble contemptuous relief, embellished with identification? Have you thanked the Great Tubercular for his tutor sparrow? Will you open your mind’s cage & let it fly?

YOUR FRIEND THE PHOTOGRAPH

always pays attention. It reveals faces which look like mountains which look like faces. Also steel & glass, tits & ass. Its colors remind you of chocolate & loss. You feel wistful for the future you imagined you would enter, like a room. Instead, you have the room inside this wavering frame, to examine with someone you thought you knew, or afterward. It’s no use trying to be literal. It’s no use trying to force what happens next, which is up to the auteur, who wants you much as you want him, dead or alive.

NEW! Poem by A.K. Scipioni

2009-12-16T00:15:00.000-05:00

A.K. Scipioni

WILL

For the curious horseman, it was a separate counterpart
concerned with weightless, small things, under-
Junes. The bulwark of recognizable, mortal
suspension is a few stones, a place
in the middle of an element making itself
an element. Petrous gravel. In the stables
the horses arrange themselves to the east, all
refusing water. For a long time now, the eschatological
artifact had remained hidden. An eighty-year-old
Peloponnesian is decapitated on a trellis.
The whole of Crete, flattened by a long rock.
A Korean martyr is asked to spit on the forehead
of Christ, and a scholar cannot read the Aramaic
on a poorly glued bowl. Like the thief in the night,
it was the glue we should have concerned ourselves with.
Because the last horse buckles under the weight
of its broken legs, likewise, the continents unwind
with the first children raveling the legs of spiders into
mobiles above their beds. After all this time, it will
not be the thief in the night, it will be that there was
nothing left that had not already been stolen.

Recent & Recommended

2009-12-15T07:01:00.004-05:00

Mark Bibbins, The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon)

Roberto Bolano, The Skating Rink, trans. by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

Barbara Claire Freeman, Incivilities (Counterpath)

Garrett Kalleberg, Malilenas (Ugly Duckling)

Allison Titus, Sum of Every Lost Ship (Cleveland State)

Catherine Wagner, My New Job (Fence)

NEW! 2 poems by Michael Rutherglen

2009-12-14T00:37:00.000-05:00

Michael Rutherglen

APPALACHIAN SALMACIS

A smalt-clotted, sedgeless depth.
Slap through the surface to surface

tinted by something other
than steady, adusting daylight:

bedrock-solace,
calm beyond storms:

a cold prehensile
as a nymph’s blue limbs.

Flail in to wade out
as you would out of dream,

silted with, grafted to a shade at strata
you had not known you had,

head cloudless, body
tremoring with balm.

TO A DOGSTAR

A fistful of tinder,
a shot glass of sugar
light-sic’d at the center
of a shorn plain.

Or my hands come to flicker
like raw birds before me
in an all-anulling noon,

the day blazed to one
void, the constellation come
down to weld the hours.

NEW! Review of Johannes Göransson

2009-12-13T00:01:00.000-05:00

Dear Ra: A Story in Flinches by Johannes Göransson. Starcherone Books, $16.

Reviewed by Katie Toussaint

Johannes Göransson’s Dear Ra: A Story in Flinches tears open the epistolary crypt of conscious outpouring belonging to a man who holds modern society in utter contempt. His willing descent into a disordered existence apart from the organized world is carved out in three chapters throughout which he asserts that “[t]his language doesn’t mean anything” to him. With the touch of an ultra-modern Romantic, he warps the conventional presentation of language, spinning the reader into the fast-paced confusion that becomes the cognitive whirlpool.

The initial chapter sparks into focus with “Seattle,” contemplations addressed to Ra in prose form. Göransson dabbles in varying planes of existence, as Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun, presides over the underworld, the earth, and the heavens. Through the narrator’s letters, the three levels are synthesized; the reader follows his appeal as that to a divinity, only to find that what is being unfolded is “a bitter letter to [his] ex-girlfriend, an Egyptian girl named Ra who’s got the head of a hawk.” The narrator sinks to another depth, writing that he “fed hell.” Göransson overturns the traditional view of spirituality as a separation of human and divinity, of human and devil. To Ra he says, “[y]ou plucked me out of a mayhem,” hinting at the idea that an individual has the power to liberate another from chaos, as well as to stir it into being.

Göransson’s connection with the disarray of the human interior is pricked with the Romantic perception that sacrifice is necessary to the discovery of truth by the self. The narrator rips the societal filter from his musings, “revealing things about . . . private life and genitals, . . . making life seem tacky as a ghost in a parking lot.” With his frequent vulgarities, the narrator exposes the raw essences of the human presence, and so lays bare the unhindered mind. Surrounding society opposes his ways, thinks he is “blind like love, but [he is] actually blind as a highway.” The narrator, who has “always belonged to another congregation,” epitomizes the unabashed assertion of individuality, boundless despite the necessity of “hanging with hysteria and . . . not wearing any band-aids.”

Through Göransson’s narrator, the poet figure graced with both humor and insight in the midst of typicality is embodied. The narrator’s “poem” celebrates self-ridicule in a world that works too hard to conform; he admits that “[i]f forced to decipher my handwriting, you might think this was a scientific tract on the migrant patterns of birds. I’m an expert on beaks, not escape routes.” His thread of thought is thus a tangle of impulse and wondering, of questions unanswered yet glorified by the very fact that they were printed onto a page. The poet is the individual transformed into basics, into unfamiliarity, “learning how to bleach . . . hair . . . [h]ow to rain . . . [h]ow to sneak into a thrust . . . [h]ow to blare.” The everyday becomes an experiment in the unknown.

Within the second and third chapters of the book, “Found Poem” and “Spanish Harlem,” the narrator’s self-established sense of purpose streaks into awareness. He manifests the ability to create the self and, in doing so, to redefine the external world through perception. He declares, “I’ve invented a new brand of surgery—I don’t try to keep things together that should fall apart; I pluck them, I shuck them, I ship them to opposite sides of the house. I’m trying to cut the connection between ladies who crouch in my garage, knitting their lives together using nails as needles and a blue thread that looks like a vein.” Göransson reveres disharmony as the nature of things, as that which need not fall prey to the structured interference of society. His stylistic effusion of conscious thought reveals that a life is not meant to be cohesive and fully understood, but simply to be considered and lived. He defines “beauty” as a “brilliant nonsense” founded upon subjectivity. In doing so, the narrator’s torrent of perception becomes a personal triumph, a “self-inflicted mosaic” of past and present, lucidity and confusion; in this way, the internal complexities of the individual existence are conveyed in their purest sense.

The world is “searching for a concept that will rupture.” As the pages of his book flutter past, Göransson unveils the life quivering behind all things. Every letter is a burst, a flinch, an overturning of the senses and of common understanding that progresses towards a quickening state of disorder to ultimately shift and curl into a poetic sequence of introspection. Dear Ra turns madness into clarity, and back again, in a limitless riddle of what has happened, or perhaps what never did. With every flicker of thought, “[l]aughter will sound like books burning in junior high parking lots, but the bang won’t whisper and the world won’t end. It never does.”

NEW! Review of Mark Nowak

2009-12-11T00:56:00.000-05:00

Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak. Coffee House Press, $20.

Reviewed by Brittany Taylor

The 2005 explosion at China’s Sunjiawan colliery killed 203 miners and injured nearly two dozen others. But it isn’t with the image of those trapped in the fatal shafts that poet and labor activist Mark Nowak opens his latest book. A woman, widowed at 40, is the first character sketched in Coal Mountain Elementary. She waits calmly in a room just 50 meters away from the mouth of the mine that swallowed her husband. She knew this day would come.

Though snapshots of the men—and, rarely, the women—who disappear in the mines are present and eventually overtake the story, Nowak’s opening focuses on the coal patch communities of families and friends that anxiously await the return of their men at shifts’ end, soot-covered but alive. Reflected and refracted continually, the image of the grieving widow, whether standing silent or ceremonially burning her missing husband’s possessions in fury, inserts the reader into a somber reality. As the pages turn and more lives are discovered lost, we, like the widow, know what is coming when news of yet another explosion is relayed. And we, like the widow, can only wish that there had been more time.

Coal Mountain Elementary isn’t the story of Pennsylvania or Wyoming. The focus is global, with news reports spanning the recent accident-ridden history of China’s coal industry and eyewitness accounts from the survivors of the Sago, WV, mine explosion—perhaps the most poignant tales to be found. The split focus on the two political giants of the modern world, the United States and China, highlights the enormity of the global problem of coal mining, making the reader wonder how, in the most developed country and the most quickly developing country in the world, we can allow such travesties to happen again and again to families that cannot otherwise support themselves.

Nowak emphasizes the absolute financial dependence of communities upon coal mines, many operated illegally in China. “They know the danger,” a newspaper article reports, “but still want to be coal miners because they cannot make a living on the land.” Many of the Chinese miners are illiterate peasants who receive little training, we are told. Often, they are taken into the mine the day they are recruited. While reading the excerpts from newspapers, we suddenly comprehend the push for the next generation of Chinese children to achieve higher education in order to escape the lifestyles of their forefathers. A 17-year-old girl who lost her father in a 2001 mine tragedy now fervently studies for her college entrance examinations. “My dad didn’t live a single day of a happy life,” she says, “but I will try hard to earn a happy life for my mother.” Another family has fallen to the same pressures. The father made 400 yuan a month as a security guard—not enough to send his daughter to secondary school, his wife said. As a miner, he could earn 1,000 yuan a month. “Otherwise, who would take such a job?” the woman’s sister said. “It is a job for living people working in hell.” Since undergoing this occupation change, he has been sacrificed to the pits of Sunjiawan.

Treading through woeful and desperate subject matter, Coal Mountain Elementary flows with the suspense of a narrative, each section of prose offering different pieces of information and points of view. We delve through alternating Chinese news reports and American eyewitness accounts, which make up the meat of the text. The framework of the book, however, is lessons derived from the title, a poetically divided series of activities taken from the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren. By using the curriculum as a framework for the book’s three sections, Nowak transforms us into students, allowing us to learn and grow, to follow along with the students’ texts and come to our own conclusions, as children do, rather than to take on the more apathetic response shared by many adults.

The lesson plan framework also establishes rhythmic repetition, the omnipresent echo of Nowak’s exposé-like intent, notably in the second section, which urges us to consider the “costs associated with coal mining” as we take in the lifeless body of a Mr. Helm at Sago, found feet-first. As a poetic device, the lesson plans underline the images and messages Nowak expresses through the arrangement of articles and accounts. But as poetry, they are not as effective, primarily because of the dull, often technical language in which they were originally composed. The line breaks offer little additional meaning, and while emphasis can and is instilled frequently through enjambment, such emphasis is evident in the context of the news reports and eyewitness accounts.

The juxtaposition of the curriculum activities with these reports and accounts creates a dual sense of an overarching course of action and a profound sense of the unknown. Curriculum discussion questions—“What do you know about crystals? Where have you seen them?”—are bookended by an account of the loss of all communication to the mines at Sago and an article reporting that no one knows whether the 51 men trapped by the underground blast at a Chenge coal mine are alive or not. A continuation of the coal flower experiment’s procedure tempers a harried, confused account from Sago on the facing page:

Well, I do remember the dispatcher saying we had an explosion. He repeated that out loud to himself and his face—his facial expression, he was real nervous and he was trying to figure out what was going on, what we needed to do and who we needed to call and—.

The longest excerpt in Coal Mountain Elementary is an account of a man’s frantic attempts to follow procedure and alert the authorities. He calls number after number, enlisting the assistance of his wife to find outdated contacts. No one answers. Phones are disconnected, answering machines are turned off. The man waits as ring after ring falls upon absent ears. Incompetence becomes Nowak’s buzzword, trotted out when quoted excerpts recount the numerous incidents in which help arrived too late. Paired with this is the assessment section of the first lesson, urging documentation: “Either photograph / the crystals / or have the students / draw them and explain / in their own words / how they made / the flowers. / They should describe / the process / as well as the changes / they noticed over time.” The contrast between the chaotic reality of the timeline of events at Sago and that of the experiment, so measured and neatly ordered, is stark and astounding.

Nowak’s triumph here in creating the affecting and distinct Coal Mountain Elementary is almost exclusively that of the designer. The photography is the only original work present in the book, and Nowak’s own photographs seem lackluster when compared to the vividness of photojournalist Ian Teh’s stills captured in Chinese collieries. The articles quoted are from China Daily, South China Morning Post, and other national papers, and the Sago accounts are verbatim excerpts taken from the over 6,300 pages of transcripts. The material does become repetitive, particularly where the news reports are concerned, as they become more of a tally of accidents and deaths, pulling back from the more individualized focus of the earlier excerpts. But this occurs in tandem with the increase of narrative in the Sago accounts, which hone in on the rescue of one man, Mr. McCloy, told from the perspectives of numerous fellow miners. This trade-off is understandable and well-planned, though the Chinese reports become tiresome as suspense builds at Sago. One of the book’s few flaws is this excess of information and emphasis.

As a labor activist, Nowak’s intentions are clear. He seeks to educate, as the title and framework suggests, but beyond that, he seeks change for these communities for which mining is the only way of life. By weaving a book that focuses not on one individual—the miner, or the widow, alone—but rather on the community—the lost miner, his grieving family, his church, and his comrades—Nowak shouts that this is not an individual’s problem. By using material from the East and the West, he points to the fact that this is an international tragedy that occurs with horrific frequency. It is not isolated and it is not a phenomenon. Though one widow says she has no language for her feelings, that “there’s no way anybody else can understand it,” to the outsider, Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary is a lesson that imparts the somber, shocking reality of coal country.

NEW! Review of Joanna Howard

2009-12-09T00:08:00.000-05:00

On The Winding Stair by Joanna Howard. BOA Editions, $14.

Reviewed by Maria Ribas

Joanna Howard’s short stories flit about like phantoms--just as her characters are ethereal and haunting, her stories are framed by an aura of mystery and romance, with fleeting peaks of action. The 14 stories in On the Winding Stair range from a vignette of an encounter to a “novel in shorts” that encompasses several generations. Howard imbues all her tales with dream-like action and sidelong description, which creates a haze around the narrative that, rather than disorient, lulls the reader into her sometimes euphoric, sometimes tragic world. Her careful and practiced dismissal of the concrete allows the reader release from conventional concerns of plot and conflict, and ultimately celebrates the unknowable. Few of her stories have happy endings and none need them; they offer glimpses into reveries, into intrigue, into rediscovered pasts and unreadable futures that dispel our world and offer another. Unwinding it all is futile, and Howard poses the question in one of her stories: “Is there still the pale hope to unknot the bind? Again, I count out the factors, moving across the horizon, now, with bright allure. Forever vulnerable to the seduction of cool fingers and warning hands which announce, as though inked: Fictitious! This way does not go through to action.”

The fictions Howard inks often focus on the silvery shadows of the world rather than on the searing realities of existence. The collection opens with “Light Carried on Air Moves Less,” a tale of an unnamed pale beauty, alone in the cross section of a ramshackle farmhouse in the middle of a deserted plain, and her desperate affair with the powerful prairie wind. Watching her is a specter, who pumps a handcart along a dead-end strip of train track and wonders if it is possible “for a ghost to combust to light and ash from sheer will, just for the sake of finally being seen.” There is a scarcity of wind and, desperate to regain her lover, she strips to a chemise made of rainbow scarves and strikes seductive poses in the farmhouse turned stage. Tortured and desirous, the specter pumps his handcart ever harder until he is finally able to create an “elaborate fantastical cyclonic whirl” for the pale beauty.

The romantic, idyllic past in which many of the stories are situated is saved from garishness by a thread of the macabre that winds through the collection. Nieces dig graves for their recently murdered uncles; the body of a man swells in a canal; a Hungarian sailor poisons a gentleman and steals his daughter; the dead are ever abandoning the living, and yet their specters abound. In “Seascape,” a woman settles into the home of a dead sea captain and, even after the love between the woman and the ghost fades, still has the home: “I married the place. This was the more lasting of the two liaisons. Loving so solitary a horizon, when one has been abandoned, proves some compensation for absence.” The relations between the departed and the remaining, the sought and the searching, and the past and the present spur the charm and mystery behind these stories, which explore the intertwining of our world and a parallel mystical world.

Yet not all the stories are overtly cryptic. “In Guffy’s Plum Cricket” reveals the spiraling delirium of the narrator through a stream of consciousness, as he attacks his fellow diner, Marty, for not truly understanding the difference between the movies Guns of Navarone and Spellbound. It becomes an inner battle between Spellbound, “which marks well-reasoned, even-keeledness, understated good taste,” and Guns of Navarone, which is “hysteria and backwardness.” The narrator unwinds into insanity, ending his rant, “I know now I must be quiet if I want to move into Spellbound, a space where the bar is quite white and the floor below me is pitched and I am either scaling or slipping.” Iterations of a clash between normalcy and absurdity overflow in Howard’s prose, as it veers first to realism and simplism, then to florid fantasy.

Howard’s linguistic maneuvers are what primarily account for the vertiginous, sensory deluge of her prose. The words tumble forth, trumpeting their full sound and heralding attention: “Even Loba came down from the porch in sisal-soled slippers each spring to shake the tall branches of the mulberry tree so the dark berries would collect in the yard, so we could scoop them up in handfuls into stone bowls, our bare feet spotted bruise black with ripe mulberries.” Then each successive sentence adds to the onslaught, creating a surge of meaning, with few pauses: “Eyes like a name, her eyelids flicker. The iris capsizes. A murderer is rarely moved. Behind him, the trail of his reflection in shards. The pursuing inventors. Forward, the ruined beach.” Howard’s prose alternately whirls and unwinds, contributing to the overall aura of emotional catharsis and unrestraint.

While her words and sentences thatch together perfectly, her characters often fall to pieces, uncertain and broken. The femme fatale of “She Came From the East” views her own death in mirror shards, as a bullet rips through her body and into a funhouse mirror; the young girl of “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horsemen” wanders endlessly through a threatening wartime landscape, and the gourd farmer’s orphan ward in “The Scent of Apples” is just barely resuscitated by the neighborhood dandy. The girls, women, and phantom women of Howard’s work perpetually mourn a loss, whether it is of a lover, a family, a past, or a future. They are haunted and they haunt, flitting through the sometimes ethereal and sometimes all too real worlds of Howard’s creation. There is no end and no beginning for Howard’s stories, only a perpetual suspension in a gloaming.

NEW! Review of Zachary Schomburg

2009-12-07T00:48:00.000-05:00

Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg. Black Ocean, $12.95

Reviewed by Timothy Henry

There is an index at the back of Zachary Schomburg's second book of poetry, Scary, No Scary. Many books of poetry contain an index, usually an alphabetical list of the poems' titles. Schomburg's index, however, lists 84 themes that appear throughout the poems; for instance, “Birthday, or the idea of apologizing for missing one's party” can be found on pages 24 and 62, poems about “Leaving (and never returning)” can be found on 10 different pages, while “Sawing in half, or the idea of division” can be found on 6 pages, though you might want to also look at the poems listed under “Part-species, or hybrid species (see also Sawing in half).” Schomburg's poems, gracefully arranged across 79 pages, are just as strange and unorthodox as the index of themes, but the book's uncanny beauty isn't limited to these numerical games: this is a cohesive and (successfully) daring collection of poems, often reading like the diary of a delusional child-prodigy, with an absurd yet compelling narrative strung throughout.

As the title suggests, Scary, No Scary attempts to find the thin line (if it even exists) between terror and pleasure. What better way to do this than by relying on an adolescent's perspective, albeit a highly intelligent, highly promiscuous youth, living in a seemingly post-apocalyptic universe. The landscape of Scary, No Scary is unchartered literary territory: chandeliers made from broken dishes, nameless men and women transforming into trees, boys becoming hummingbirds, and twins named “Invisible” and “Not Invisible.” As frightening as all this might sound, Schomburg’s tone remains hilarious throughout: “Either way, let’s not just stand here/with our fingers up our butts.”

If Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is this generation’s great somber novel about the post-apocalyptic world, Scary, No Scary makes the end of modern civilization look a bit more fun, and much more psychedelic. Like The Road, Schomburg’s future universe is devoid of personal identity: “Neither of us have names / especially you.” Life is rather abundant as well, especially trees. We can all rest assured that the youth of the post-world will still be afraid of entering the woods late at night, not fearful of wild animals or witches, but fearful of finding what is “half-buried” beneath dead leaves, be it a bodiless woman or one’s own beating heart. Becoming part of the woods, too, is of great concern:

Soon you’ll be
more tree
than person.

You’ll go camping in the woods
and never come back.

Animal life is also abundant, especially insects and hummingbirds, both of which humans can randomly turn into:

How do you tell someone
their family is
tiny insects?

How do you tell someone
their boy is
a hummingbird?

Jaguars, too: “You were becoming more and more jaguar.”

But even with all this anthropomorphic action, the post-apocalyptic teenager still retains teenage desires. Unlike today’s youths, who are really only concerned with accidental pregnancy and unwelcomed transmitted diseases (if they are concerned about anything), the sexually adventurous kids of Schomburg’s future have bigger concerns, such as choosing “between floating eternally in a buoyant cage of hummingbird bones down a river of lava or a river of blood.” Break-ups, too, will take on a different form, as seen in the prose poem “Goodbye Lessons”: “I have to say goodbye . . . I will know that goodbyes are when you eat yourself to death.” In The Road, we had to be concerned with cannibalistic wanderers eating our children; in Scary, No Scary, we need to be concerned about our kids eating themselves. All concerns aside, these kids are still looking for a good place to make out:

I know a place where we can escape the dead hummingbird
problem, a pond no one knows about, cold and clean. It is fed
by a mountain stream. We can take off all our clothes there and
maybe have sex.

Scary, No Scary is organized into four sections. The first is mainly comprised of short, wonderfully sonic lyrics, reminiscent of Robert Creeley (in the midst of a bad LSD trip) or, more recently, Graham Foust (if Foust was an evil clown). These poems introduce the narrator and his views on the scarce world in which he lives. The second section consists mainly of prose poems, surreal yet darkly beautiful, like a horror-core band (comprised of musicians who really know how to play their instruments) interpreting James Tate. The final two sections are sequences, the first being “The Histories” and the second “The Pond.” “The Histories” tells a story of the narrator in his dining room (which doesn’t actually exist) setting a table with dishes beneath a chandelier (none of which exist, either) in a dark, floorless and ceiling-less house. All that exists, it seems, is the narrator, who simply describes this non-existent scene. “The Pond” may be referring to the pond where the narrator takes his lover earlier in the book, but we will never know for sure, since the narrator is unsure of everything:

At the edge of the pond
someone who looks like me
is holding hands
with someone who looks like you.
I begin to wonder who I am
because I don’t look like me.

So what are we to make of Zachary Schomburg’s universe in Scary, No Scary? Should we be fearful of what is to come after the apocalypse? Of course, but instead of being afraid of cannibals and violence, we should be afraid of morphing into hummingbirds and having to apologize for missing a friend’s birthday party. Will the end of the world bring just the “scary” or the “no scary” as well? As far as we can tell, there will be a combination of both. One of the only moments where the narrator actually tells us he is fearful of something comes from “The Black Hole”: “I’m afraid of myself.” Considering this could be said about most people today, things might not be too different. Hopefully, each day that comes after the apocalypse will flow into the next as perfectly as the movements of these poems.

NEW! Poem by Tomaž Šalamun

2009-12-04T00:09:00.000-05:00

Tomaž Šalamun

The Birth of the Poet

The warm calf’s belly is on his
forehead. Flies buzz and crawl
into his mouth. He closes
the powerplant. He intercepts

the raft with the oar. He hits
the cherries, prepares the sling. An ox
falls like a bronze, father doesn’t. Rice is
stuck on his neck, behind his forehead.

There are rings in the cement. Their soft
wood drowns into his flame. Muscle
destroys his face. It’s scribbled. It tortures

itself and stares. His entrails are spread
as if he knew where the birds would go.
The warm calf’s belly is ripe for command.

Translated from the Slovenian by the author and Michael Thomas Taren

Collaborative poems by Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert

2009-12-02T00:55:00.000-05:00

Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert

THE ONE ABOUT NOSTALGIA

A psychic who's right 100% of the time walks into a bar. Rhetorical use of the present tense aside, I should mention this takes place in the past. All the women in the bar start talking at once. For some reason they have British accents. The places looks built to withstand a million earthquakes. "Fear of a million earthquakes" was a common affliction at the turn of the century. "Sweet are the uses of adversity" was a common saying.

THE ONE ABOUT THE UNHEIMLICH

My doppelganger walks into a bar. He has a nasty disposition, whereas I am merely having a bad day. Does he enjoy watching forest fires? Do the patrons think we're twins? Only a certain kind of man would identify the color as "cyan." Or announce that "Rippling abs don't just appear on your midsection; you have to sculpt them." A sudden sunshower. Now he is reenacting a classic tourist photo cliché. And now I am surprised to find myself weeping.

THE ONE ABOUT GENRE

Two drunks, evidently drunk, walk into a bar. Fact or fiction? We haven't progressed past Romanticism. The drunks read only professional literature & psychiatric case studies. You have to finesse the jargon. True or false? Would it be weird to say, there's no romance in this. Do you know the end of the story--they died.

NEW! Poem by Daniel Luévano

2009-11-30T00:24:00.000-05:00

Daniel Luévano

The Arts, Part 3

Hope a day you break even.
Hope a day you break open.
For what cathedral do you weld
these spikes. For what praise
do you mangle these beams. What
ecstasy of origin. What crater
raised to a valley. The quick answer
is zero. Wrists at goodbye.
But to refuse as you do
the null set the straw fire
of real estate realism
don’t tremble
get under the blanket. Textile
subtexts I can’t afford
should make me a better person.
Hanging from a ceiling fan
what about you.

~

Guaranteed you won’t
go gracefully. As grace is impersonal
in dimension & valence
as far as the authorities are concerned
as art demands lightness & telescopic
density. Our interconnectedness
for granted, go light the task
is heavy. Don’t accept
the conditions again. Answer
before the question muddles.
These are his handwritten notes.

~

Articulated as Lucifer’s tail.
The empty thought the televised brain.
Sorry didn’t see you standing there.
But here I am may we have a word.
We need more day at both ends of night.
We need a pretty girl. A musical. A bitter
martini. Chunky salsa. A strapless dress.
So what’s your (dirty) answer.
More night both ends of day.
Can you sing. Then sing.

NEW! Review of Christian Peet

2009-11-26T00:49:00.001-05:00

Big American Trip by Christian Peet. Shearsman Books, $15.

Reviewed by Brittany Taylor

Imagine a lone wanderer in the doeskin of his ancestors. As a poet, he borrows the rifle they toted and transforms it into a pen. Their combative stance becomes his criticism. In an anonymous narrative, a native made unnatural in his homeland scribbles a series of postcards commenting on a journey across a country that continues to bear the mark of his people, no matter how American arrogance insinuates itself into every ravine in an effort to become a New, a Better World. The postcards are at once addressed to no one and everyone; it does not matter who reads them, but everyone will. Buckle up for Christian Peet’s worthwhile Big American Trip.

As we follow the lone wanderer from Blaine, WA, to Brooklyn, we are given an increasingly intimate view of his private frustration with a society that wipes out all that has come before and simultaneously acknowledges its ravaged past with cheerful sound bites. The captions that crown many of the postcards are not-quite-prosaic bits of encyclopedic arcana that offer insight into the matter-of-fact manner in which Americans have treated their predecessors. With these tidbits, Big American Trip seeks to recall America’s erased history, deridable and otherwise:

Blaine, WA, home of the US-Canada Peace Arch was named by Cain Bros., townsite proprietors, in 1884, only twenty-five years after it was first settled as Semiahmoo, the name of the tribe of Salish Indians who inhabited Semiahmoo Bay until being relocated to the 390 (presently 320) acre reservation.

Language, particularly the notion of naming and possession, is an essential influence on Peet’s narrator. The postcards show a progressive thumbing-through of Strunk and White, relating the grammarians’ lessons on the English language to the manner and mindset of those who speak it. As the narrator writes, “It is not simply a matter of language . . . / it is possible to translate with fair accuracy from one language to another / without losing too much of the original / meaning. But there are not methods / by which we can translate a mentality / and its alien ideas.” By analyzing the ways in which syntax, diction, and grammar change from language to language—with an emphasis on the rift between Native American tongues, colloquial Spanish, and English—the wanderer is able to make nuanced criticisms of society as a whole, as when he writes:

The emphasis in English
is religiously in the possessions
but the adoration of the Salish is in a tender place . . .

. . . According to Dorothy Lee, “The hunter
who has lost his luck does not say
‘I cannot kill deer anymore,’
but ‘Deer do not want anymore to die for me.’”

The contrast between English or American and not-American is prominent. Three of the wanderer’s acquaintances, all with proper given names, are described as aliens. Another is vaguely specified as “hermano sin sleeves.” This notion of otherness is key, but there exists a tension throughout the series of postcards between it and a sense of commonality. On the one hand, the narrator writes, “The ‘other’ refuses to disappear; it subsists, it persists, it is the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth.” On the other, the series is bookended by “In Texaco it is said ‘they’ / are forcing the coast to a single state / from Tijuana to Vancouver. / It is the common feeling, / the agreement of the convenience store” and “It is the positive vibration: The Nation of Brooklyn. It is apparently a common feeling, the agreement of the bodega.”

By writing lines in a variety of western European languages and offering verbatim translations that are at times poignant and appropriate and, at others, stilted, Peet shows the variety of otherness that came together to create one America, at once highlighting and erasing the tension. We see proper English and slang, Spanish, German, and French. There are references to partially remembered Native American languages, and a poem dedicated to those no longer living in modern memory.

As a book, Big American Trip is light on plot, heavy on narration, and nontraditional in form. Pieces like the postcard written from Downtown Big Timber, MT, are stunning in their simplicity and socio-political acuity. The caption of the card reads “Enjoy small town pleasures such as a 1930s soda fountain, antique shops, or just a shady bench to watch the world go by,” and in response, the poet-wanderer writes:

Yo no deseo que el mundo se iria
Yo no deseo mirar el mundo salen

I do not wish that the world would go by
I do not wish to watch the world leave

Reluctant though he is to see it exit, the wanderer is a blunt critic of the world. Big American Trip exposes the realities of racial profiling for the non-Arab. It ridicules the high price of oil and the “wars” that we fight to achieve it. It censures the state of the laboring poor worldwide. “Jesus, King of Beijing, Television should not oversee / the counter sales,” the wanderer writes. “Witness subliminal procedures / of the manufactured goods, the broken worker—odds and ends, bits and pieces, rags and bones . . .”

Surpassing all this is the acute reality of this fictional narrator. The paper is his flesh, the ink his blood. He writes of romantic aggravation, of sitting in traffic, of rejection from a publisher. He muddles the words of Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded.” But most importantly, Peet gives his wanderer a nation of friends, notably fellow poets, proving that this narrator can mean something to readers because he has value to others, even though these others are fictional. As the wanderer crosses the United States, he seems to be searching for a piece of it to call his own, a community that will accept him rather than hunt him. Despite the scorn and despondency we can detect in his voice throughout the book, when he reaches the Nation of Brooklyn, he is hopeful. He buys the t-shirt.

Recent & Recommended

2009-11-25T08:29:00.001-05:00

Christine Hume, Shot (Counterpath)
Joshua Poteat, Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World (Georgia)
Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood (Ecco)
Mathias Svalina, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State)

NEW! Poem by Daneen Bergland

2009-11-23T01:05:00.000-05:00

Daneen Bergland

Fugue for Insects, Animals, and Vegetables

Animals live among us; they shit in our kitchens.
I find spiders asleep or dead in the mailbox.
They look like crossed out words.
In water, whales sink and arc beneath us,
their teeth could comb your hair and it’s rumored
a handful of their flesh feels just like a breast.
In the mirror when I touch one breast it is not the one
I try to touch. What is real is what I can imagine. I’m not sure
I deserve what I want. Better to expect the deficit
As if every disappointment buoys a delight.
Their heads in dirt sacks, the potatoes periscope.
The tomatoes slip glistening beads from wet purses.
And these gifts, what must I do to pay for these?
Have I suffered enough, roughed up by the cucurbits’ leaves?
Nothing I buy stops the cats from sleeping their lives away.
I spend so much time digging at the bottom of bags
and resent the squirrels plugging the dirt every year.
I keep a garden against chaos, each bush pruned back to its bones.
Still summer comes in one lump sum. Shiny things
work themselves out through the dirt like slivers.
Maybe it’s the crows. And each day I ask myself
will you be the pen or the scissors? And resolve:
to my cats on my hands to bring home the smell of other cats.
If I can have only one color of butterfly: yellow.
This isn’t a competition; who made me think so?
So, surrender, trust the windfall and marry the house.
But the animals are not enough. I want the freedom
to reach out and touch you with my blunt instrument.
While the slugs bullet hole the ranunculus buds,
the nightcricket plays his tiny violin and feels sorry.

Poteat, Svalina, Titus reading in Richmond

2009-11-21T09:07:00.000-05:00

Joshua Poteat, Mathias Svalina, and Allison Titus will read in Richmond on Monday, November 23 at 7pm, at the Visual Arts Center, 1812 W Main Street.

Three poems by Milan Dobričić

2009-11-19T00:03:00.000-05:00

Milan Dobričić

Amphisbaena

Icarus too up
Orpheus too down
Summer too hot
winter too cold
Day too bright
Night too dark
Hill too huge
Sea too wet
Yours I can when you can't
mine I can't when I can

Meteorgy

From sunrise to sunset
rain clear wind clouds rain wind hurricane
little then a lot of ice snow roar squeak whistle
sizzle tramp ripple
let’s not even mention the night

Belgrade

Linden scent
water tremble
sparrow jump
pigeon limp
boat train truck whistle
Contagious market chrism
Drunkenness
Tram midnight
Unsung

Translated from the Serbian by the author, originally published in Blessed Losers (Blagosloveni gubitnici)

Keith Waldrop

2009-11-18T23:53:00.002-05:00

won the National Book Award for Transcendental Studies.

Excellent list of finalists, too.

NEW! Review of Novica Tadić

2009-11-16T00:23:00.000-05:00

Dark Things by Novica Tadić, translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic. BOA Editions, $16.

Reviewed by Timothy Henry

In his introduction to Novica Tadić's Dark Things, Charles Simic suggests that the reader of this haunted collection is led by “a nameless recluse, mistrustful and fearful . . . surrounded on all sides by monsters and apparitions generated by his vivid, guilt-ridden imagination.” With the guidance of this recluse, we are taken on a full-frontal tour of the narrator’s neighborhood, where this brilliant, delicate elder has lived long enough to lose any hope for his land's salvation. A lifetime spent on these dreary streets takes its toll on the speaker’s own hope for salvation, which remains at stake throughout the book's 48 poems, and, like all of the troubles presented by Tadić, is left unresolved. Yet with a terrifying beauty, our guide still manages to fulfill his vocation: to endure this dark and dreadful world as both witness and poet, or, in Tadić's own words, as “God's messenger.”

The scene is Belgrade, Serbia's capital, where Tadić has lived for virtually all of his life. Born in 1949, he draws from nearly 60 years of violence and decay that ransacked Communist and post-Communist Yugoslavia as well as from the emergence of the nation now known as Serbia, complete with the subsequent terror that has plagued the young country. But Tadić's poems don't seem to describe a typical city or nation, establishments usually designed to unite and define a group of people dwelling in a geographical region. Rather, these poems seem to portray an isolated universe, often void of logic, always void of hope, where man, beast, and the supernatural live, suffer, and, most noticeably, die side-by-side. No one wants to claim ownership of this forsaken land, yet everyone seems to be responsible for its constant decay: “Poor us, we are all kings / when we gaze upon the starry sky,” Tadić states in the opening lines of “Night Passes.” Only when an inhabitant gazes into the unreachable outside, Tadić suggests, does he realize his own role in the darkness that consumes the stale, cold city.

The scent of death is apparent throughout all of these poems, sometimes from corpses left to rot or rabid animals dying in the vicinity, but most often this scent emerges from the terror lurking around every dark corner, in every abandoned hall, and in the unfamiliar faces of those who call this unfortunate neighborhood home, as in “About The Dead, Briefly”:

We sniffled and sniffled,
but nobody shed a tear.

May the earth be easy on him;
since it was only today that we noticed
he had been alive.

An immense amount of power lies in both the poems and their settings, but a stranger, stronger power seems to exist in the zombie-like surroundings of the town: “Amidst the noise, the moving crowd, the live maelstrom, / I know your powers, street.” This uncontrollable, unseen power has an enormous effect on our recluse-guide, whose poems show him crippled with paranoia (“My blood wouldn’t let me rest”) and utter fear (“Let's turn and lie on our backs forever”). Tadić’s strength lies not in his ability to depict the external evil that haunts this neighborhood, but rather in his ability to show how this external evil can infect itself inside the already hopeless human soul: “Evil spirits will rise out of the palm of your hand,” perhaps, even, through osmosis--“An ocean of hatred splashes over me everyday.”

The speaker is constantly concerned over his role in the deterioration of the land, and his inability to bring an end to the horrors creates a poignant guilt that radiates from these poems. A spiritual presence, too, is peppered throughout, though often in a futile tone: “Now, what will I cover myself with? Only with prayers,” and “I wandered everywhere / like a God's fool.” God is far from absent in these poems, as Tadić addresses God more than anyone or anything. However, the only thing worse for Tadić than an absent God, it seems, is an inactive God; the sheepish, poetic prayers of the recluse remain unanswered, the darkness and decay never cease.

Tadić's poems recall A.R. Ammons' statement that, “The end of the poem is to reconstruct silence . . .” Tadić has the ability to shatter silence each time he begins one of his beautifully haunted poems, yet his endings do what Ammons suggests: they bring the reader back to silence. These uncomfortable silences gradually become more familiar to the reader, as each poem concludes with a feeling more terrifying than what came before. Perhaps Tadić's most dreadful ending comes from the four-stanza “A Bird Started To Sing,” which concludes:

Wind lifted the ashes
and spread them
over other ashes.

Since most of these poems barely reach a page in length, Tadić works with diligence and speed, as if the scenery he is describing is so vile that he can only muster a few stanzas before the horror again breaks him. One may wonder why our recluse guide doesn't flee his current state for the hope of finding a brighter land, but, as Tadić shows, fleeing is an impossible task when one doesn't have his bearings: “I don't know where I've come from / nor where I'm going.” Again, credit must be given to the work of Simic, a master of diligence and stealth himself. A weaker translation would not have been capable of depicting the sudden silences of Tadić's nightmarish world to an English-speaking audience so effectively. Simic's own Serbia-influenced poems are drawn from childhood memory, often contorted, filtered, or presented with an admirable naïvete, sometimes even making light of atrocity. There is no lightness to be found in Novica Tadić's collection, only darkness. A crippling, ubiquitous darkness.

Recent & Recommended

2009-11-15T00:53:00.003-05:00

Ana Bozicevic, Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky)
Gillian Conoley, The Plot Genie (Omnidawn)
Kate Greenstreet, The Last 4 Things (Ahsahta)
Kit Robinson, The Messianic Trees (Adventures in Poetry)
Chad Sweeney, Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga)

submissions deadline today

2009-11-14T00:01:00.002-05:00

Today is the last day of Verse's submission period. Verse will be closed to submissions until August 2010 or later.

For guidelines, follow the link on the right.

Verse is paying $10/page ($200 minimum) for portfolios published in the print issue.

NEW! Review of Stephen Rodefer

2009-11-12T00:11:00.000-05:00

Call It Thought: Selected Poems by Stephen Rodefer. Carcanet, £18.95.

Reviewed by Lindsay Kathleen Turner

Despite its handsome black-and-white cover, Stephen Rodefer’s new selected poems, Call It Thought reminds me of a beat-up old suitcase my boyfriend used to carry, which I hated: it was sloppy, fraying at the edges, overstuffed, unreliable, exotically stickered and tagged, ostentatiously unlike anything else, yet still suspiciously bland. Call It Thought is, luckily, not a suitcase and is thus relieved of such functional obligations: it is supposed to stand out and be provocative. Whether such provocation is appealing is a matter of taste; but whether or not one finds the poems sturdy enough to carry their content of inventions and jibes, Rodefer works thoroughly, intelligently, and—sometimes—intelligibly at a snarl of artistic and aesthetic queries.

Call It Thought begins with excerpts from Rodefer’s Four Lectures (1982), which according to Rod Mengham’s introduction “so exceeds conventional lineation and bibliographical form that only a few extracts could be included in this book.” This textual difficulty raises a first problem posed generally by Call It Thought: one wonders what, and where, the rest of the lectures might be. Given the sprawl of Rodefer’s work, its shifts in style and register, in the case of Four Lectures, and similarly for the book as a whole, the act of selecting does nothing to delineate the boundaries of Rodefer’s corpus or to sketch for us a general outline of his work—what’s included simply raises questions about what’s left out.

In any case, starting with Four Lectures—for the book does not follow the chronological order of Rodefer’s work—prepares us for the lexical inundation occasioned by the collection. Rodefer is well-schooled in the history of literature and poetry, as inclusive of the esoteric fact as he is of the poetic cliché, and everything in between: “As should a book be as deep as a museum and as wide as the world,” he concludes his preface to the lectures.

Indeed, the collections assembled in Call It Thought seem to represent not the continuity or arc of a poetic career but a gamut of voices, a virtuosic act of ventriloquism. Rodefer is, of course, often associated with Language poetry, but the intimacy and imagery of the Black Mountain poets is strongly present in some of the earlier work, such as One or Two Poems from the White World (1976). The voiced observation and introspection of the New York School marks later poems, especially those from Emergency Measures (1987), whose title points us immediately toward O’Hara, a frequent Rodefer evocation, and those from Left Under a Cloud (2000), which includes a literal translation of “The Day Lady Died” in French. In and among all this, Rodefer also calls to mind Lucretius, Sappho, Dante, Villon, the English Romantics, the Italian Futurists, and the entire tradition of the French poète maudit (Rodefer’s collaborations with Benjamin Friedlander and Chip Sullivan recall Apollinaire’s Calliagrams; Fleurs de Val translates, after a fashion, Baudelaire). Given this list—by no means exhaustive—it is hardly surprising, that, along with Charles Olson, who appears in a non-blurb on the back jacket of Call It Thought betting “anybody a lobster” that the poet could answer his question about Milton, we are left asking where, among the voices and evocations, is Rodefer, anyway?

*

As prolific and as innovative as he is provocative, Rodefer is more or less unknown in most American poetry circles. Indeed, most commentary seems directly focused on the problem of Rodefer’s ambiguous location; in the introduction to the 2008 issue of the Chicago Review dedicated to the poet, editors Joshua Kotin and Michael Kindellan note that “Rodefer’s affiliations are as much a sign of his poetic identity as of his perpetual homelessness.” Critical approaches to his work are, more often than not, the projects of British scholars, and it is in this context, paradoxically, that we find Rodefer referred to most decisively as an American poet; Mengham states that “of all the most intensely American of poets, Stephen Rodefer turns out to be the most European,” while Rodefer’s website bears a quotation from Simon Jarvis calling him “quite simply the most important living American poet.”

Stephen Rodefer lives in Paris. Even if he grew up as a person and poet in a solidly American milieu, and even if he alludes to New York and California as often as he does to the poets who populate these places, his work seems to describe a slow unmooring, a drift from the partisanships of American poetry schools into a world far more cosmopolitan, and also more amorphous: the last poems in the volume, from the unpublished collection How to Fall Off the Pony in New York, are as sprawling and varied in language as they are in form, peppered with names and phrases from, truly, all over the globe. (Take, for example, “Drinking Amongst the Wafering Drinkers”—yes, “wafering”—which bears the subtitles “after Mozart and before Nietzsche” and “On y va à le repaire du Bacchus / cher Ramses Tutankhamen,” and then begins, “Detroit too long des trop.”)

And yet Rodefer’s poems are often occasional, bearing the stamps of places and dates, dedicated to real people: it is ultimately clear that Rodefer does have a “here,” a genuine locus from around which his voices, concerns, and general overflow of words assemble. The poet Fanny Howe describes him as having the “aura of a pariah,” and his exclusion from American scholarship seems more or less standard—yet this general homelessness, finally, is the result of neither biographical nor textual confusion. Rather, it seems deliberately produced by the poems themselves; Rodefer rejects the confines of academia and of “home,” preferring instead, it seems, the freedom and energy he claims within this space of rejection.

*

Asking, “where is Rodefer,” then, may not be the most productive way of approaching Call It Thought. His is a poetics of rejection, a sort of authorly uncertainty principle by which, somewhat baffled and provoked, the inquiring reader finds only the continual assertion of where the poet is not. A favorite trope of Rodefer’s is the bastardization of a well-known line: “tenured is the night,” for example, or “[a]bout suffering we are always wrong.” These allusions are not particularly funny; they do not build on the poems from which they come nor even recall Keats or Yeats in a particularly interesting fashion. But even if the language discomfits, these garbled lines exemplify what, for Rodefer, is at the heart of his art: the act of creation is here constituted by the deliberate garbling of the standard signals of traditional form, voice, and allusion. It is fundamentally an act of resistance, of defiance of the norms of academia and the expectations created for readers of poetry by poetry itself; in Four Lectures, Rodefer writes:

But bent out of shape is also bent into shape. New replacements are expected, and they always come. We start to be fed things forcibly. We can throw up, not eat, or fold the spoon in half.

The metaphors are slippery, but the tone of obstinacy, at least, is unmistakable: Rodefer’s project is to bend tradition and form to his will, and his will is none other than the rejection, or at least the bending, of tradition and form.

Given this deliberate perversity, it seems obvious that reading Rodefer’s work is not a reliably pleasant experience. One has the impression, in the lines cited above and elsewhere, that the rejection of tradition entails a sort of deadening of the words, a weakening, a reversion; once evoked, Keats’ nightingale cannot but be missed. Perhaps this sense of loss motivates the concurrence of Rodefer criticism around the adjective “dreamy”; Friedlander characterizes Rodefer’s tone as one of “consistent dreamy innuendo,” while in her Rodefer: A Study, also from Chicago Review, Fanny Howe writes that Rodefer’s words “seek a new language that floats far above the borders of nation or sex or speech. His poetry is, in a word, dreamy.”

To me, “dreamy” seems at odds with Rodefer’s stream of puns and claims and exclamations, which range in tone from sly to trenchant to careless to absolutely overshrill. (“All talkative writers will prattle,” Rodefer writes in an interview with the editors of Chicago Review. Rodefer is a very talkative writer.) Regardless of whether one finds his logorrhea dreamy and evocative or grating and (to cite Friedlander again) manneristic, Call It Thought—in spite of Rodefer’s muddled reception, and his further attempts to muddle things in general—is a work with a definite, pointed, and meta-poetic bent. Reading Rodefer is an experience of provocation and of destabilization; again and again, the poems cue us toward history, toward elsewhere, only to jerk us rudely back:

[…] Paper
Is the surface, but there is nothing else. Improvisation is a tool
of refinement. The sentence is up for parole. I’m from there
but now I’m here. It happens to everyone. We are born two and we part one.
Your plane is here. Happy crowd. Some things are too loud to hear.

submissions deadline in 3 days

2009-11-11T00:24:00.001-05:00

postmark deadline: Saturday, November 14

Verse then will be closed to submissions until August 2010, possibly longer.

from Kazim Ali's Theory Whore (an essay a novel a spore)

2009-11-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

Kazim Ali

The Perfect Painting

He thinks the sky is a living creature turning on its back.

Rain is the caress.

He is warned not to personify so much.

So bored by music.

Why always the same progressions, the same formulas, why only twelve tones?

Why not the shamelessness of Satie: but only those periods of silences in which there are no notes, only the piano strings reverberating.

Revertebrate.

Why not thick layers of static, with the slightest modulations at the level of microsound, shifting the way a person shifts in his chair, or in bed.

Why not tone changes so subtle a listener might not even know that a change has occurred.

Why music that depends so deeply on being consumed.

He looks up at the gray, cloudy sky and thinks:

“That’s the perfect painting”

Why, he wonders, does he love art like this?

Is it because he is emotionally dead.

Or scared.

Or unable to communicate.

OK, what do I love about it, he thinks, looking carefully at the sky two specks—birds flying across his field of vision a mile up.

It’s the gradations in color, so subtle.

The vast space, supposed formlessness.

But actually not.

Actually burgeoning.

Actual possibility.

The open space

Because suddenly there is not time at all.

“You really like this?” a disbelieving friend asks at the Agnes Martin exhibit.

He’s not paying attention.

He’s thinking of your hands leaving his back.

Thinking it felt like being brushed by birds’ wings.

The talks in the night after sex—when you realized you loved each other but weren’t fulfilling each other’s desire.

How does he work his way back from that?

Remember the scene in Four-Chambered Heart where Djuna burns all the books—because she realizes they can’t save her.

That’s what he thinks as he writes his novel into the notebook: “how will this save me?”

And what should we say to him?

No one will save you.

Don’t go back?

Be unsaved?

All those novels about eros or extremity end in either

silence
abandonment
or death.

Ether.

So how have you been helped.

As he’s driving, a huge—and it seems to him golden—bird flies low across the road.

Likely it’s a hawk but today he needs to believe in phoenixes.

Even this could be about anything.

The disbelieving friend.

The emotional distance.

Monochromatic.

Abandonment.
Silence.
Death.

Duras. Nin. Maso. He wants to lie down with them, flesh against flesh.

Where he’s gone.

Where he’s going.

“History Happened Here,” reads the cast iron sign at the thruway exit.

He always reads the signs.

Though, he thinks, history happens everywhere.

How do you go back and fix something?

It’s too late.

Nothing gets fixed.

Even this.

Could be about anything, about disbelief, could be the river surface, could be about what hasn’t been said yet,

could be just about the wind.

“Partially cloudy with a chance of showers.”

He thinks of leaving this morning.

“Fish fly through the ocean, men crawl along the bottom of the sky.”

If the sky is a living thing, filled with gas and vapor and water all undergoing perennial transformation, then raining is actually the sky falling down.

What open ended

“We picked mates out for you one from the other”

He always thought he would stay with the phoenix forever.

Separation from the phoenix—five empty years after that—then the raven.

What’s the use—he’s explained all this before

Tried to make you understand.

Even thought to himself, “he doesn’t make me burn like phoenix did—phoenix is fire; the raven is water.”

Like rain.

How do we travel our way out of this.

How about not having the answers.

Scattered thunder showers, possible storm warning.

He remembers going to see Ono’s film “Apotheosis.”

You know he loved the first part: the balloon getting higher and higher over the snowy fields.

Sounds from the English countryside below.

Gun shots, dogs barking, sounds getting fainter and fainter…

Landscape fading and fading into snowy gray and white.

Finally vanishes into the clouds.

Seven minutes of blank screen and the sound of the gentle gas flame holding the balloon aloft, sound of the wind against silk.

How many people viewing simply got up and walked out because there was “nothing” to “see.”

Look for the last one, in the back row, a young man in his thirties, bad haircut, a little horsey looking, but beautiful because his eyes are on the screen of snow, transfixed.

Then the balloon bursts through the top of the cloud cover into brilliant sunshine and blue blue sky.

Coming from winter.

What if this is what it’s like he prays.

Remembering the clarity of the outlines of objects the day after the storm.

But what if it isn’t like that.

What if we go through clouds and there isn’t anything after.

submissions: one week left

2009-11-07T00:28:00.001-05:00

Submission deadline: November 14 (postmark)

NEW! Poem by Michael Farrell

2009-11-05T00:52:00.000-05:00

Michael Farrell

large glass

sky in the sky; bluebirds in my

eyes. the pantyhose sales-

man in a cage.

out‘foxed’.

whats behind the charge? (all the buckled wet books.) convents

have no modern equivalent.

let it affront, let it drink
THEY DONT HAVE TO TELL YOU WHAT THEY THINK
on the street, let it have

black

teeth. i dont rem-
STEAL THE SUNSHINE SET UP A CONCEPTUAL SCHEME
ember the emotion. [heaven knows.] [is the

theme.]

we already are

what we do: we dont need a

theory of recovery.

a sailboat sinks: your ‘italian’ dream
HELL HAS ICECREAM

"New Moon" by John Olson

2009-11-02T00:15:00.000-05:00

John Olson

NEW MOON

On the morning of July 20th, 1969, I emerged from a house near Burien, Washington shortly after sunrise, and tilted my head back to look at the sky. My neck creaked. I had attended a party that had gone late into the night. It was a warm, bright morning and I could see the moon, phantasmal and splotchy against a China blue sky. It’s rare to see the moon during the day, and whenever I do, it seems oddly displaced, a prop from the theatre of the night someone forgot to bring in. On this occasion it smacked of significance. There were men walking on it. Or about to walk on it. I gazed at it as if I might actually see them hobbling about in the dust, the way you can sometimes see from a distance people scaling the side of a mountain.

My adolescence in the 60s had been witness to a long pageantry of lunar landing modules. My father worked at Boeing as an illustrator and engineer. I grew up in a house full of lunar landing modules, many of them constructed out of toothpicks and ping-pong balls. NASA’s coveted contract went to Grumman, rather than Boeing, so my father’s many illustrations and modules remained stillborn, although a few went on exhibit at the Smithsonian in the 1980s.

My parents were out of town that summer in ‘69. Home from California for a visit, I had the house to myself and watched the moon landing on TV. I saw Eagle land and Armstrong clamber down the ladder in his bulky space suit and put his foot on the surface of the moon and utter his famous words, “That is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Years later, circa the early 90s, Buzz Aldrin and my father had been invited to a dinner at someone’s house on Bainbridge Island and gotten lost. My father drove and Buzz navigated. Bainbridge Island is heavily wooded, which outer space is not, which provides at least one mitigating factor to this otherwise curious misadventure. If I remember my father’s story correctly, it had been a clear night, and Buzz had been able to use the stars to pinpoint their position using a declination formula based on spherical trigonometry. That, and a map spread out on the hood of my father’s Taurus, which they studied by flashlight.

Today the moon is a thin crescent that looks like a fingernail clipping hovering over the western horizon. There are no people flying around with jetpacks on their backs and living in homes that look like the Space Needle. The world is in crisis. Billions live in dire poverty. The poles and glaciers are melting. Millions in the U.S. believe that humans lived with dinosaurs and that evolution is a hoax. But Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins continue on tour, noticeably aged, but still smiling, still optimistic. I like to think that they know something that I don’t know.

NEW! Poem by Anne Shaw

2009-10-30T00:53:00.000-04:00

Anne Shaw

Absence of Assignable

Listen: you are elsewhere
trined in a nest of names. Some
are yours, some perish

to begin. There is luck
and luck’s remission, freckled
hands on locks, vestiges

of kindness, wrists bent back.
There are rabbit’s feet and staples,
fava beans and phones. When

you turn, you are cinched and gathered.
When you turn, you are clocked
and spooled. Everything is audible

but not. Everything is politic
but not. And you, ramshackle penitent,
apply a weedy poultice

to your wound. How can I speak
when I cannot speak? you are thinking.
Mutable you. Or else, please buy

please bundle. Please do not
refute. Refuel. Refuse.

NEW! Poem by Noah Eli Gordon, Eric Baus & Sara Veglahn

2009-10-28T01:46:00.000-04:00

Noah Eli Gordon, Eric Baus & Sara Veglahn

THIS IS THE UNIVERSAL SIGN FOR PART TWO

Among those studying the brook in the woods from a trail near the road is a woman. There is a tree with a long steel rod through its trunk. The situation is serious according to various bystanders. This is a real brook, she thinks, tossing a pebble into shallow water to test the thought, which destroys our photographic image. The photographer would like for you to do the opposite of reading. The bystanders think about their claims of having been elsewhere. Somewhere, someone plays the same two notes over and over and tries to equate them with language. This is artifice, thinks the woman, unaware of being watched. A door closes slowly. Is it right to say I hear a pause? Among those studying the rod in the tree just off the trail near the woman is a boy. I wish these were chandeliers, he thinks. The bystanders move in unison, mumbling. They feel a house inside their hands. In Part One, there is no applause. The curtain falls when the bystanders arrive later than expected. Later arrives.

NEW! Poem by Alexandria Peary

2009-10-26T00:43:00.001-04:00

Alexandria Peary

SMALL BLUE HOUSE

This mighty bird house

is an A-frame, a letter

A hanging off a branch

from the previous poem

a move some readers don’t care for.

It’s insulated, with trinkets

that rattle when shaken

a king cake jesus, a rhine

stone mummy, a man

who spends more time at a desk

than a table with a candelabra of buds

and the house hangs off a birch

which is cold, zen, zebra-striped,

and papery.

NEW! Poem by Michael Farrell

2009-10-23T06:50:00.000-04:00

Michael Farrell

confessional poem

“there was blood on the bumper officer,

i (had) just meant to go

on mowing; & then someone – wearing a clown

nose – came up & presented me

with a handful

of larkspur (that unfunny flower). did i ev-

er tell you

of that hovel i made out of the ironiest sand:

it was quasi-black
IT WAS LIKE A BARRACKS & PRODUCED ITS OWN FLAK
i thought id never get it in to austral-

ia? (they sell tiger shells in the

opshop – a fact that

gives me no satisfaction . . . i built my

own establishment by

this ‘sea’.)”

NEW! Poem by Joseph P. Wood

2009-10-21T01:29:00.000-04:00

Joseph P. Wood

The Broken Body as Spectacle

Arch the back, the Romans do, then pierce the criminal with large rusty hooks, cruel fisherman angling out the condemned’s will like a bass in a raging, white stream. Finally, give or take twenty soldiers, hot & soiled, the monstrous gold helmets slipping over their eyes, each commissioned to shatter a segment of back so when the criminal is raised to the cross, they can slump him over a wooden arm, hang him upside down, & cinch the dangling hands & feet into a folded 180. Time will do the rest: each orifice to be picked so clean by crow or maggot or microbe that a year later, one could find the skull & firmly plant a votive candle in a socket. And say, at night, a holy man lit it? Would his audience, in their own idiosyncratic methods, strive toward a life as pure as a wind-swept cypress? If so, then why do the children spend their days in stealth & stuttering, as if some random madman would force a crown of decapitated rabbits? And why are the cathedral floors black & less black, as if they sucked the sun & spit back rotten teeth? It’s enough to throw oneself at the ocean, but the ocean just will bloat us: a walrus in place of a mother, coral in place of a God, sand in place of a law—this is how the Romans conquer.

NEW! Poem by Anne Shaw

2009-10-19T00:56:00.000-04:00

Anne Shaw

unruly clock.

How strangely things unmoor themselves.
For instance, overhead: shadow of a bird
without a bird. As paint peels back
from the porch front, cloud-thread
raveled out against the blue. How my body
craves extinction. Yours, a tenderness.
On top of or below. As the preposition
wanders from its noun. The lip
and its restriction. You, the fricative angel
in my bed. How a bulb turns on
in the farmhouse: a private
radiance. And the body’s rapt attention,
apparent slips of tongue. Some truths
I kidnap back into the dark. My realm
of unbecoming, kingdom of shatter and thrust. Fields
in the side view plated now with water over loam.
The little clatter the mind makes, and each
peculiar crevice of a heart. Such beds of flood
and thistle: their many endings, turnings,
passings-through. Then all my slick retractions
flattering a passage through the skull. There is luck
and luck’s remission, there are freckled hands
on locks, tallow-meshes hanging in the trees. And the bees
relentless, hungry now, summer or its semblance
bent in sad arrival, creeping charlie tiny in the lawn--

NEW! Poem by Alexandria Peary

2009-10-16T00:38:00.001-04:00

Alexandria Peary

TITLE WITH SHADOW

“ ” are put around a tree which is plaid but smells fruity

and then the white field slides to the right of the poem

in the awkward jump my Royal typewriter makes for a huge tab

to jut from the side as they walk to find the manager

while the whole 1/2 mile is reeled back in

though the walk back is pleasant, like chewing gum

or chewing on color. In Ugg boots, they traipse around

stepping over white shapes in the white, looking up from watching their feet

to discuss the title up at top which doesn’t help,

a group of charcoal letters with a steel shadow

ineffectual as a billboard in the middle of nowhere

(perhaps nowhere grew around it). Some people

may be discomforted by walking in a forest inside white

and not knowing which season it is, so an icon of a yellow leaf

falls. They walk by the trees they passed up—

the blaze orange one, “Garage Band,” smelling of Johnny Walker,

the one covered in American flags, others smelling like “grandma’s kitchen,”

“clean air,” and the tree that’s an open window which they almost took,

that row moving jerkily as though on a conveyor belt.

They reach the manager who grumbles about people ripping trees off

in middle of the night, he wants to install a surveillance camera

so sensitive it will respond to the wedge of moon and the most poetic moves of leaves

and, indeed, they had seen on their way down how instead

of stumps, there were little gashes in the cardboard

where the staples had been. Everyone needs a title,

for finished books and ones written only for the shelf in oneself.

A title is good for any car. It will make the ride smell better.

Quotation marks around a leaf make it ring like a bell

like this one outside the manager’s lean-to. Tired by now, they look back

in the middle of the lane, not having a thought,

The title with shadow— coneless original—

In the white lane, A figure made of sea glass,

Kelp moving in the shadow.

submissions update

2009-10-14T00:22:00.003-04:00

We've accepted a few more portfolios for the next print edition of Verse, but still have room for another half dozen or so. We'll be open to submissions for another month.

We're especially interested in receiving more fiction and essays and interviews.

Newly accepted work has been appearing on the Verse site and will continue to appear over the next few months. Some of these pieces were selected from submitted portfolios. Submissions to the site are also open for another month.

NEW! Poem by Adam Strauss

2009-10-12T00:02:00.000-04:00

Adam Strauss

Labor

The shore
Ablution
Breaks at--
Where poor
Women sort
Shells as
The yen goes
Lower--
What's full store
When this is
The case?
Gulls
Dip and
Pivot; deer
Graze a steep
Hillside--
Across
The "sea"
In a cement
Shed green
Coffee beans sit:
A green
Snake sheds;
Its skin's unfit
For fashion: too
Narrow,
Brittle, not even
A watch.

Recent & Recommended

2009-10-11T06:32:00.000-04:00

Donald Revell, The Bitter Withy (Alice James)

Robert Walser, The Tanners, translated by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)

NEW! Poem by Anne Shaw

2009-10-09T00:50:00.000-04:00

Anne Shaw

Another Art House Movie

(homophonic translation of Verlaine)

A rule of sun falls inward across the table:
What craft in the ivory grapes, what ugly crap.
You are always already moving, whatever pants you wear:
Corduroy trousers, my poor pale friend, or simple water pooling in its glass.

Drink it. Close the door after. Aprons, pens, your voice,
And all the rest. It’s a malleable hour
In the middle of the day. An edgy lottery writhes your sleep,
A cicada creeps like an infant to its birth.

Meanwhile, your shadow elongates and slips through the summer grass.
The door of the boat house opens, the footsteps of a boy
Resonate at certain frequencies. Your room is a room
In shambles: a table set with stones, a steaming pan, a nail, a crust of bread;

His hand with tiny cuts; a boat, recurrent flower blooming in its thimble--

NEW! Poem by Leonard Gontarek

2009-10-07T00:47:00.000-04:00

Leonard Gontarek

From Grace

I may force the soul into nakedness.

I may lead the soul around on a leash.

I may dress the soul in women’s underwear.

Which part don’t you understand?

I did not win the Hemingway look-alike contest again this year.

I could pass for the Polish President & Prime Minister, I think.

I’ve painted myself into a corner here, away from the cobalt galaxies.

For another, I’ve cut a door in the wrong wall to get away.

NEW! Poem by Alexandra Mattraw

2009-10-05T00:38:00.000-04:00

Alexandra Mattraw

Summary Between Bodies

When we reach the summit, you tell of repetition. The way an orange unpeels itself in such heat. : All bruised skin wants to give way in the manner of water. We stop field center, but the green world sweats, thickens like hair. Each pasture clots a day’s naming. We share corner store bread : Fingers break the body in two. Darkness trembles light waning bees. My styrofoam anxiety a cup misplaced I bite into moons. Then print-crescents : Your foot on soil as proof of where sadness went. Why I didn’t have reason to change my mind, pick each wild iris apart : I see you not. Your foot shores my other. This pattern to sea pebbles larger notions of stability. Sodden bread spreads where we left it. Your arm confused with mine. The envy of sands, rocks war up waves to tell them.

NEW! Poem by Joseph P. Wood

2009-10-02T01:26:00.001-04:00

Joseph P. Wood

Before Rublev Paints the Cathedral

A jester’s head is
knocked against

an oak, soldier
takes a peeling

knife, like a dead
mollusk, tongue

comes off clean.
Rublev stops

speaking mostly,
churches so torched

snow drifts down
on the altars. What

is a horse doing
thrashing the asp?

Who is that kid
building a bell

from mud, not
to be sodomized.

It tolls. Doves
flutter from belfry

to monk’s shoulder,
& the Steppe blank

canvas elsewhere.

Recent & Recommended

2009-10-01T13:50:00.000-04:00

Zachary Schomburg, Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean)

NEW! Poem by Doug Ramspeck

2009-09-30T01:23:00.000-04:00

Doug Ramspeck

Clairvoyant

The city fell asleep in my arms.

What is important here is the concept
of a pillow of streets.

It doesn’t matter what the dead believe,
their ontology of stillness.

It is enough that someone,
somewhere, cuts out his eyes and holds
them in his palms.

The work is never completed. We imagine
our lives as blood on the brain, as walking
through a warren of streets beneath
a naked eyeball of moon.

Skull moon, salt moon, prophecy moon.

It was Horace who described tossing aside
his shield and fleeing the Battle of Philippi,
which is one way to describe a life:

to imagine sitting tomorrow on a park bench
with a sack lunch perched in the lap.

The earth rotating more rapidly at the equator
than farther north or south,

and yet the sunlight strangely
incorporeal, as though it is dreaming us.

And the pigeons, too fat
for flight, pecking their way into tomorrow,
which is all we know to hope for or ask.

NEW! Poem by Nina Corwin

2009-09-28T01:19:00.001-04:00

Nina Corwin

Interior With Artificial Leaves

What I meant to say, but the crop of false fruit kept intruding, is that
doorbells are not destiny. They have no teeth. Split infinities while
waiting for a ring.

When you come, you come without warning labels or guarantees
(black box from a bastion of caveat emptor). All I ask is the insider’s
peek.

___________________

The leaves have a theme song. It’s inspired by all those lullabies
with falling babies and broken branches. I’ll sing you a snatch before
the future explodes our foregone conclusion:

The heart is a minefield awaiting its moment. It bruises when served
open-faced. Parentheticals wipe their feet on every act of faith. Above
the sink, a cylinder of light winks like it’s in on the deal.

___________________

I got a call last month from a woman who uncorked a bottle of noxious
recollections. She asked if I could put them back.

I tried to tell her there’s always a stain that can’t be scrubbed, but my
tongue became a fountain spouting wishful thoughts. After that,
I planted my spleen beneath the bed to see if anything would grow.

Now, my duct work chokes with vines. Against the concrete tree,
woodpeckers beating their heads. Rakes are no match for the mess
that's spread between us.

___________________

I have a dangling proposition: part apostle in the garden, part storm
in your escape route. A dim bulb’s hope for harvesting sunrise from
shrapnel and sawdust –

Let’s say we blow up the second act and spatter gold paint on what’s
left. Send hope to the front lines to mop up the spills while we sleep.

Brian Teare & Kathleen Graber reading

2009-09-22T13:00:00.001-04:00

Saturday, September 26
1pm
Chop Suey Books
2913 W. Cary Street
Richmond, VA

O Mission Repo available free

2009-09-14T01:14:00.000-04:00

at Fact-Simile's web site.