Graeme Bezanson
AMERICAN FOLKTALE
All my closest compadres were named for Idaho
which was named for nothing. Eleven set out west
to the mountains planted on the horizon
like a row of cattle's teeth. Ten gathered their clothes
above their heads and swam to the east
and the school bus shaped island. I wandered
from village to village with one boy to carry always
alongside me two liters of Coca-Cola, one boy
to follow me everywhere with a short-handled spade
to bury me with, wherever I fell.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
NEW! Review of Robert Lopez
Part of the World by Robert Lopez. Calamari Press, $17.
Reviewed by Leigh Murphy
In his first novel, Robert Lopez leads the reader into a peculiar “part of the world” on his own terms. The novel itself deals with the everyday actions of the narrator, from renting an apartment to buying a used car. However, these tasks become yard sticks by which one must measure the narrator himself and his sense of reality. By the end of the novel, the reader is forced to question the validity of everything the narrator has said, as a new, obfuscated yet elucidated reality begins to appear.
The narrator reveals himself in a piece-meal fashion, immediately declaring that, “Sometimes I know the particulars when asked, but I just as often forget.” In this way, Lopez brings the reader into an unnamed, vaguely described place in America. (One can only assume it is America, as the narrator, who is himself unnamed, differentiates himself from a proclaimed female foreigner because of her use of typically British colloquialisms.) The narrator depicts his own part of the world in a series of oppositions throughout the novel. He observes other characters, and remarks on their part of the world in contrast to his own. Certain “parts of the world” are described with simple statements such as, “Where she is from the women admonish the men for being perverts.” Rather than describing his surroundings to the reader, the narrator seems preoccupied with diction, and the story becomes intertwined with, and eventually inseparable from, these anxieties: “Imposing is not the correct word in this instance, the proper usage. This is the second time imposing has been misused. But I like the sound of it, accentuating the soft vowel sounds.”
As a reader, one is at first concerned for the narrator and wonders how he survives, as he is plagued by strange daydreams and an inability to pay attention to anything other than himself. In this way, he resembles Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger. The narrator’s mantra--“Almost nothing has anything to do with me”--becomes superfluous as the novel progresses. The reader sees that the narrator is unable to relate to the outside world in much the same way as Meursault, through his fumbling interactions. His familiar apathy is also illustrated in his statement that, “Whenever someone tries to explain something to me I get lightheaded and fall down.” What distinguishes him from Meursault, though, is that this apathy does not seem to be intentional. While at one point he states that sequence is of no importance, he later expresses his belief that “Certainly someone was responsible for it, for all of us.” Similar contradictions can only mean that this character is not determined in his beliefs, as was Meursault. Instead, it appears that the narrator is simply unable to comprehend others’ feelings and attitudes. Moreover, he acts disgusted by what he cannot understand. Especially troubling is his concern with the so-called Teardrops: middle-class, overweight individuals who seem to make up most of the population. While this indifference bordering on contempt appears symptomatic of some mental defect (e.g., “Choosing something from a take-out menu can induce anxiety, even paralysis. I have gone without more than once, have gone to bed without my supper”), the narrator remains self-aware, assuaging to some extent most of the reader’s concerns. Also comforting are his relatively functional relationships with a neighbor and sister, though they are functional only from his viewpoint.
The structure of the novel is patterned around repetitions. The narrator repeats himself, nearly word for word, on several occasions. Each time he does so, however, the passage takes on a new significance both within the narrative and to the reader. As the work progresses, the reader begins to question the veracity of the narrator’s account. There are holes in his stories, and each time he repeats them the details change. While he admits this occasionally, and states that he does not intend to deceive the reader, this does not provide any sense of confidence. Instead, it increases the reader’s concern for the narrator’s functionality.
At the same time, the narrator begins to refer to his health problems more frequently. What begin as allergy pills eventually morph into some type of medication that results in sluggishness, drowsiness, and confusion. What at first appear to be idiosyncrasies begin to suggest a more dangerous, innate problem with the narrator. He can no longer distinguish his own present from fiction and memory. The narrator’s repetitions begin to take on new meanings. “When the phone does not ring is never a problem,” a seemingly innocuous statement insinuating that the narrator does not like to answer the telephone, ultimately leads the reader to see that the narrator is paranoid and anti-social, or worse. The repetitions of certain passages, word for word, acquire new meaning when the narrator changes the subject of the descriptions. He describes his neighbor, with whom he has a sexual relationship, in the same words as his sister. He describes the neighbor’s car in the same way he previously described his own. The reader begins to question everything he or she has just read, and wonders whether the other characters were ever real at all.
Part of the World is simultaneously accessible and complex. Lopez chooses each word carefully, giving the novel a two-tone sense of superficiality and depth. The repetitive structure gives the reader a distorted perception of reality, parallel to that of the narrator. The banalities of everyday life are reconceptualized as fascinating, important, and complex through the eyes of this equally mesmerizing narrator. The reader must come to a conclusion at the end of this novel and decide for him/herself whether or not to believe the narrator: a refreshing literary technique since the author provides balanced evidence for numerous conceivable endings. Ultimately, Lopez gives the reader the unique opportunity to determine reality in Part of the World.
Reviewed by Leigh Murphy
In his first novel, Robert Lopez leads the reader into a peculiar “part of the world” on his own terms. The novel itself deals with the everyday actions of the narrator, from renting an apartment to buying a used car. However, these tasks become yard sticks by which one must measure the narrator himself and his sense of reality. By the end of the novel, the reader is forced to question the validity of everything the narrator has said, as a new, obfuscated yet elucidated reality begins to appear.
The narrator reveals himself in a piece-meal fashion, immediately declaring that, “Sometimes I know the particulars when asked, but I just as often forget.” In this way, Lopez brings the reader into an unnamed, vaguely described place in America. (One can only assume it is America, as the narrator, who is himself unnamed, differentiates himself from a proclaimed female foreigner because of her use of typically British colloquialisms.) The narrator depicts his own part of the world in a series of oppositions throughout the novel. He observes other characters, and remarks on their part of the world in contrast to his own. Certain “parts of the world” are described with simple statements such as, “Where she is from the women admonish the men for being perverts.” Rather than describing his surroundings to the reader, the narrator seems preoccupied with diction, and the story becomes intertwined with, and eventually inseparable from, these anxieties: “Imposing is not the correct word in this instance, the proper usage. This is the second time imposing has been misused. But I like the sound of it, accentuating the soft vowel sounds.”
As a reader, one is at first concerned for the narrator and wonders how he survives, as he is plagued by strange daydreams and an inability to pay attention to anything other than himself. In this way, he resembles Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger. The narrator’s mantra--“Almost nothing has anything to do with me”--becomes superfluous as the novel progresses. The reader sees that the narrator is unable to relate to the outside world in much the same way as Meursault, through his fumbling interactions. His familiar apathy is also illustrated in his statement that, “Whenever someone tries to explain something to me I get lightheaded and fall down.” What distinguishes him from Meursault, though, is that this apathy does not seem to be intentional. While at one point he states that sequence is of no importance, he later expresses his belief that “Certainly someone was responsible for it, for all of us.” Similar contradictions can only mean that this character is not determined in his beliefs, as was Meursault. Instead, it appears that the narrator is simply unable to comprehend others’ feelings and attitudes. Moreover, he acts disgusted by what he cannot understand. Especially troubling is his concern with the so-called Teardrops: middle-class, overweight individuals who seem to make up most of the population. While this indifference bordering on contempt appears symptomatic of some mental defect (e.g., “Choosing something from a take-out menu can induce anxiety, even paralysis. I have gone without more than once, have gone to bed without my supper”), the narrator remains self-aware, assuaging to some extent most of the reader’s concerns. Also comforting are his relatively functional relationships with a neighbor and sister, though they are functional only from his viewpoint.
The structure of the novel is patterned around repetitions. The narrator repeats himself, nearly word for word, on several occasions. Each time he does so, however, the passage takes on a new significance both within the narrative and to the reader. As the work progresses, the reader begins to question the veracity of the narrator’s account. There are holes in his stories, and each time he repeats them the details change. While he admits this occasionally, and states that he does not intend to deceive the reader, this does not provide any sense of confidence. Instead, it increases the reader’s concern for the narrator’s functionality.
At the same time, the narrator begins to refer to his health problems more frequently. What begin as allergy pills eventually morph into some type of medication that results in sluggishness, drowsiness, and confusion. What at first appear to be idiosyncrasies begin to suggest a more dangerous, innate problem with the narrator. He can no longer distinguish his own present from fiction and memory. The narrator’s repetitions begin to take on new meanings. “When the phone does not ring is never a problem,” a seemingly innocuous statement insinuating that the narrator does not like to answer the telephone, ultimately leads the reader to see that the narrator is paranoid and anti-social, or worse. The repetitions of certain passages, word for word, acquire new meaning when the narrator changes the subject of the descriptions. He describes his neighbor, with whom he has a sexual relationship, in the same words as his sister. He describes the neighbor’s car in the same way he previously described his own. The reader begins to question everything he or she has just read, and wonders whether the other characters were ever real at all.
Part of the World is simultaneously accessible and complex. Lopez chooses each word carefully, giving the novel a two-tone sense of superficiality and depth. The repetitive structure gives the reader a distorted perception of reality, parallel to that of the narrator. The banalities of everyday life are reconceptualized as fascinating, important, and complex through the eyes of this equally mesmerizing narrator. The reader must come to a conclusion at the end of this novel and decide for him/herself whether or not to believe the narrator: a refreshing literary technique since the author provides balanced evidence for numerous conceivable endings. Ultimately, Lopez gives the reader the unique opportunity to determine reality in Part of the World.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
2007 Verse Festival Introductions
Andrew Zawacki
Introduction: Peter Gizzi / Andrew Joron / Elizabeth Willis
Verse Festival / Thursday, March 29, 2007 / Mercury Art Works, Athens, GA
-itsy / -antsy / -ing / -oid / -ed
-ology / -ocracy / -onomy
-ation / -ality / -archy
-obic / -etic / -ectric / -ency / -istic / -esse / -esque
These are a few of the lyrical, laconic, lapidary sounds that Peter Gizzi makes in the second of two title poems from his latest book, The Outernationale, while “Standing,” as he puts it, “at the corner of nth and twilight.” Partly suffix and partly self-sufficient—that is, part part and part whole—these fag-ends /slash/ ends-unto-themselves seem to me a fitting way to open this poetry festival, the poem being what, among other things, celebrates the life of words, however mutated, mutilated, or mute. Characteristically plainspoken but elegant, Peter Gizzi seeks, despite all ruptures, “to be complete inside the poem / To be oneself becoming a poem,” “that one day / we might find ourselves lit up.” But not so fast: for poetry is likewise mourning, the cry of an existence that, as the hyphens in Gizzi’s litany of terminations indicate, is at best a half-life. For language, especially poetic language, inevitably standing in for reality by erasing it, to replace with a parallel real, finds itself not only present, as matter placed on a material page, to be manipulated or measured, but also transparent, absented from the reader’s immediate awareness. As a visible, tangible medium, poetry is awake as its own message, and elegizes the thing it signifies, singing a song of itself over the object’s open grave; but as a forgotten, always already posthumous word, poetry eulogizes its referent by effacing none other than itself, keeping quiet so things as they are can speak. In the shorthand of one of Gizzi’s titles, the word, like any corpus, is “Bipolaroid,” with “continuities, gaps.” The fractured once-were-words, or words-in-waiting, scattered throughout Gizzi’s poem—gathered into alliterative and associative phrases of two, three, or four elements, like a verb being conjugated, or a noun declined—are at once dead in spirit, we might say, and alive to the letter. They call out to be completed, but they can also make a go of it alone. As “broken tiles,” to quote another poem, as “sine and cosine,” as both “written speech” and “barely legible,” these crippled but nonetheless breathing bodies arrive “almost home.” Allergic to teleology, then, but nonetheless ambitious to function in our actual world, among human being, the poetic word is, on one hand, revolutionary, a mode of revelry, what Gizzi calls a “Protest Song,” poised anarchically at the outer of the nationale, like an American word with no foothold in France, or a French word unwelcome here; while on the other, poetry is a form of respect (or what we might term reverence), a mode of knowledge (or revelation), and a conduit of dreams (or reverie). The Outernationale makes me think of these things, for it stakes out the frontier not of a poem wherein a fugitive ‘we’ might hide, but of an ‘us’ in which the outlaw poem may remain at large. Across his several poetry books, from Periplum and Artificial Heart through Some Values of Landscape and Weather and this year’s volume, Gizzi offers us a poetry that is as compassionate and communal as it is turncoat and torn-from: “Confetti in April / Confetti in May,” he writes, “This was the last party . . . Bird, enough of your trill.” Gizzi is concerned with the “tink tink” and “Clank, I love you” of language; with the “Ça va?” and “everyday sprecenze” of speech; with the “A is for knee socks” and “O stymie dewy” and “H I J K L banner” of our alphabet; with the “Whoa, Saturday. / Whoa, morning” and “Dear Saturday, thank you” of our ordinary time—but never for their own, lonely sakes. “When I asked what happened,” he says, “I meant what happened to us?”
Andrew Joron is not alien to poetry as the perfumed word, both a rose in its own right and a sign that only signals a further flower. As early as his debut poetry book, Science Fiction, he has been revolving the Mallarméan bouquet within his mind and heart. In his most recent volume, he elaborates this meditation on the mirrorlike traffic between “rose” and “eros” to embrace yet another anagrammatic form, “sore,” thereby returning poetry to its primordial status as pain, as a wound that will not heal or even close. Indeed, we cannot help hearing in the book’s title, The Cry at Zero, an exhilarating cacophony of open channels: zero-degree writing, for instance, and its effort to strip the author of any authority; Dickinson’s “zero at the bone,” her figure for an afterlife of interminable dying, that is, of writing itself; Ground Zero, a placeless place where many of Joron’s most poignant, pressing, responsible remarks on American imperialism are situated; Zeno, who plied the paradox of the halving of halves; the Greek letter tau, often an abbreviation for zero, and also the title of Philip Lamantia’s ‘lost’ poem, to which Joron feels an affinity; and “O, the grieving vowel,” as Joron names it. Joron has staked his poetics, not exactly on the Heideggerian privilege accorded to etymology, but on the hunch that any word is likely the harbinger of other words, whether by homophonic vibration or unexpected coincidence, and that often words appearing to collude in fact collide. Dedicating his book to the late Bay Area writers Lamantia and Barbara Guest, for example, he appropriately conjures “lament” and “ghost.” Elsewhere, though, as when he interposes a colon between “rending” and “rendering,” Joron indicates not equivalence, or even valence, but opposition: to render, of course, is to give, whereas to rend is to sever; so while they seem to share the same root, what the former joins together the latter sunders. Consciously deploying what he calls, in reference to Jacob Boehme, “a musical chord of morphemes,” Joron is far from merely playing semantic games. “Where language fails,” he argues in his opening text, “poetry begins.” For Joron, poetry is the emergence of a Cry that, while composed of language, nonetheless constitutes an emergency for language, which cannot contain it. Poetry is the part that overwhelms the whole. “A poetic impulse,” Joron avers, “will cause the system of language to exceed its own boundary conditions, and to undergo a phase transition toward the Unsayable.” Steeped in the pre-Socratics, in German philosophy, and in the Surrealist hasard objectif, Joron espouses a poetics most indebted to the post-structuralist tradition that has attempted to think the impossible relation between a restricted economy and its exception: for Joron, poetry claims a radically disruptive role, akin to that leveled by the “Autrui” of Lévinas, say, and the “jews” of Lyotard; by Bataille’s “free expenditure” and Blanchot’s “scandal”; by Barthes’ photographic “punctum”; and most recently, by Jean-Luc Marion’s “saturated phenomenon.” Like the human body, our most immediate site of self-disruption, poetry is non-dialectical and non-identical. Bearing out the “structured randomness” so frequently his theme, Joron has organized his so-called “Selected Prose” as a cross- or perhaps non-generic work, wherein essays, book reviews, and even a personal letter are situated alongside ‘prose poems’ that had appeared earlier, in Fathom and The Removes. This is further evidence, if we needed it, that poetry, at once urgent and insurgent, is “the Opening to Otherness” by which we, in turn, are opened.
“We are living in an era,” Andrew Joron argues, “. . . of the convergence of science, mathematics, and poetry.” If that’s true, then we have, among other writers, Elizabeth Willis to thank for it. Science has impelled her art from the beginning, in the guise of thermodynamics. Her first book, Second Law, set decimal to decibel, claiming in the sharded minimalism of her title sequence, “No meaning was before there was a night / No mention before there was Divide.” What was scattered throughout Second Law has been newly bound, as if by gravity’s tug, in her most recent volume, Meteoric Flowers. Yet even its dense prose poems, however compact in rhetoric and thought, are perforated and internally fissured: partly literary and partly “unfixed by science,” their words Willis’ own but their titles taken from Erasmus Darwin, they will not decide between the prose and the poetry that constitute their duality. The title says much about Willis’ style and investigative methods. Whereas a meteor hails from afar, hurtling down to earth from outer space, a flower moves up and away, growing from the inside of the earth toward the sun. From a human vantage, the meteor is vatic, and can harm us; the flower, like us, is veined: “We’re only clay,” Willis writes, “blossom machines.” One is hard, comprised of astral bits broken off from something larger, and rushes headlong toward its destruction, unique insofar as it will never be heard from again, while the other is soft, composed of tiny organic elements, and flourishes slowly before fading—only to return the following season. The marriage of meteor and flower, like the strange harmony proclaimed in the title of her earlier book, The Human Abstract, is Willis’ way of saying that poetry is singular—and plural. So she is sometimes given to lyrical glissando, à la Wallace Stevens, whose epigram, “A poem is a meteor,” provides the book’s epigraph. “What gives, or gave, to get us here, what wired fluorescence?” Willis asks in “Rosicrucian Machinery.” Her answer, from elsewhere in the book: “As luck conducts the inner man, a trumped up art will fly beneath the wings.” But Willis is also pragmatic, demotic, terrestrial, socially and politically savvy: “America owns the moon,” she ventures, not entirely hyperbolically, and “We all live under the rule of Pepsi,” in “the garden of western expansion,” walking around as we do, daily, in Rutherford, or Gatorville, or Brownsville with its flying flag, or Sweet William, Virginia. Whether “at the edge of L.A.” or “the edge of Venice,” according to Willis, we are “living in a desert of bolted-down things,” where what is “public,” she warns, “can’t be protected.” Not surprising, then, are her several elisions between “idyll” and “Idly,” as though America’s relative peace and prosperity were also the surest sign of its doing the devil’s work. “Among the lower orders,” she muses, admonishing the administration, “a W is sibilant.” Trying to negotiate “a careful avalanche of we and they,” while “The world is clanking: noun, noun, noun,” Willis crosses over to the side of the verb, capriciously but with total conviction, transiting and transforming all self-centeredness by speaking from Whitman’s Texas-sized mouth, by trying to discover “how dirt thinks,” by “joy[ing],” as she promises, “to dream / a more fortunate planet.”
Introduction: SÉbastien Smirou / Jena Osman / Olena Kalytiak Davis
Verse Festival / Friday, March 30 / Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA
When a direct object is suddenly asked to become the subject of a following sentence, but is forbidden from relinquishing its role at the end of the earlier, transitive phrase, something confusing and probably uncomfortable happens to our sense of agency and orientation. The story, such as it is, starts to unravel quickly. When an adjective is unwittingly separated from its noun, an adverb from its verb, a pronoun from its antecedent, and when the candidates for any one of these referents are plural, it is literally unclear who’s who, what’s what. When a quatrain tries to become a painting, by converting its words as if into image, its margins into full-justified frames, and when a series of these aspiring tableaux, hung meticulously side by side, shows a book trying to morph into a museum, the onlooker is obviously at a loss for how to proceed through this would-be Uffizi. And when a wealthy Italian statesman, art patron, soldier, and lover tries to live inside the French language, he finds that his currency, as it were, is no longer current. I don’t know, of course, whether this was Lorenzo de Medici’s experience of the Renaissance world, but it is certainly the experience any reader has when facing Sébastien Smirou’s appropriately titled Mon Laurent. In his book, the whole universe may hang in the balance of the tiniest of words. “ayant appris une future rémission des étoiles,” begins the fourth stanza of the eighth and final section, “les médecins / regardent . . .” Laurent is dying of gout, so the court astrologers consult the stars for advice. On first take, the sentence—if one can speak of sentences where there are no capital letters, no punctuation other than parentheses—seems to say: “having learned of a future remission from the stars, the doctors look around,” as though the medical entourage had divined, from the stars, a lessening of Laurent’s malady. This would be a relief, not least for the sick man himself. But there is a second order to the ‘same’ phrase, and it offers information that bodes as ill as the previous version’s promise: “having learned of the stars’ future remission, the doctors look around,” where what is at stake is a pending remission of the stars—their fading or disappearance. Grammatically treacherous, Smirou’s line locates the fate of Laurent, and hence of Medici Italy as such, within the single, seemingly insipid conjunction, des. Nor is the welfare of only one man, one country, or Europe suspended. Just as children of the Copernican revolution were learning that the universe had never revolved around them, despite their illusions, so too does Smirou’s des encapsulate a celestial dilemma: either human proficiency can continue to interpret the heavens, to discover therein its salvation, or else the stars themselves are growing dim, receding to where we will no longer have any access, leaving us to our own, insufficient devices. This is the classical abruptly declassified—but not declassed. Mon Laurent is an elegant, funny, often sad meditation, as concerned with physical arrangement and fractal symmetry as it is with perplexing semantic eccentricity and ruminations on matters philosophical, political, and sentimental. Constructed according to a 4 x 16 x 8 pattern—of lines per stanza, stanzas per section, sections per book—with the gaps separating individual words rendered as regular as possible, Mon Laurent is a mélange of traditional format with an un-constricted modern idiom. Smirou’s emergence began a decade ago with his appearance in the Revue de Littérature Générale, a massive magazine-anthology that detonated on the contemporary French poetry scene, throwing the collective gaze toward new aesthetics and revised ambitions. As founding editor of the micro-editions rup&rud, Smirou once published Peter Gizzi, and he has since been earning an increasingly serious reputation among several innovative American poets, including Cole Swensen, Stacy Doris, and Susan Howe.
The demanding, multifarious work of Jena Osman is an ongoing exercise in displacement. The first thing to be stretched and snap is any conception of the poem as a self-contained, lineated verbal artifact, complete with beginning, middle, and end, and written by a single consciousness. Indeed, many of Osman’s projects are not ‘written’ at all, but are rather curated, coordinated, given space in which to circulate as an interactive collage, in which text, context, and numerous para-texts all border one another. Among the many elements that work together in Osman’s arenas, be it harmoniously or, just as often, through cacophony, are citations, sometimes attributed but often not; handwritten manuscripts, notably Dickinson’s; Supreme Court rulings and other juridical and political memos, including sound-bytes culled from press conferences; images, whether static and pictorial, stolen from a book of gestures, say, or else projected, such as those we’re about to see on screen; phrases whose typeface bolds, enlarges, until suggesting billboard copy, before slimming down to 9-point font, as footnotes, endnotes, asides placed literally at the side of the page, so that suddenly what appeared to be peripheral comes into view as the central concern, pushing the ostensible subject to the margins. Hermeneutically suspicious, adamantly pitched against anything smacking of uniformity or received wisdom, none of Osman’s operations is identical to its neighbors; instead, each ports a logic and a logistics tailored to her present preoccupation. Her writing provides the perfect example of texts “conditioned,” as Andrew Joron has said about someone else’s poem, parts of which were published in Osman’s journal Chain, “but not controlled, by the application of rules,” in which “formal constraint serves as a propaedeutic for the poetic imagination.” The formal constraint of Osman’s “Memory Error Theater,” to take an example from her recent book An Essay in Asterisks, involves a legend, or key, containing a 3 x 7 grid. With each cubicle corresponding to a planet, a copyeditor’s mark, and an abstract idea such as “relativism” and “the question,” the sequence proceeds to open each of those Pandora’s boxes like a computer file, in order to address the slippages of personal and historical record, particularly the way in which memory is invented, edited, revised, changing over time as the remembering agent changes. Ostensibly similar in its consciously hypertextual layout is her 16-page “The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist,” from her first book, The Character: different elements from the table communicate logarithmically with small poems. But as Osman’s note to the text makes clear—although text is obviously a word not wide enough to accommodate what we’re talking about—the activity of reading “The Periodic Table,” as published between two paper covers, is only to experience one of the who-knows-how-many permutations and combinations made available by her parametric experiment. Osman’s ambition is to refuse deciding for the reader what and how to read, and in printing the poem she brings us up against the limits of ‘the book,’ with all the potentially sinister connotations of that phrase. The result of Osman’s ‘poems’ is not to interpret the aesthetic, social, and political spheres in which we inevitably live, although her work makes overtures that direction, employing ‘multi-media’ strategies precisely to critique the perniciousness of news and how it’s fed us. She is too mistrustful of the readymade version, too skeptical of anything that would claim to be “beyond a reasonable doubt,” to want to impose an orthodoxy on us. Instead, suspending anything remotely resembling a full-proof interpretation, what Osman wants to illuminate is the act of interpreting itself, from its procedures through its consequences. For all the formal virtuosity and singular deformations in Osman’s repertoire, it’s that last that strikes me as imperative to her work and why we need it: consequence.
“Hence sordid bullshit, leave me the fuck alone.” Like everyone who’s read Olena Kalytiak Davis’ latest book, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities, I feel the basic human urge to say that line aloud, preferably in front of a roomful of students. Explicitly ironic and explicitly explicit, the invocation mimics the rhetoric of a seventeenth-century sonnet while making no bones, obviously, about its gen-X expletives. And that, according to Davis, may be the very rub that gets irritating: the methods for negotiating the sentimental life that we inherited from poets and lovers of the past are no longer operational, and instead of fixing them we get pissed off, or hurt, when they break down. Davis seems to wear her emotions, her baggage, her dirty laundry, and even her wariness on her sleeve, if not “hanging // down / my deepest cut / shirt,” but that is likely just subterfuge. Her self-reference is a front for a more deeply ingrained self-irreverence, and it leads her to solicit the protection, or at least the presence, of someone else: the Reader, the Lord, you. For it may be, via litany or profanity, that one of these folks can forgive her. But absolution is hard to come by when the confession itself is a lie. “i have never told anybody / about the time i i i / slept with three guys at once,” she admits in “keep some stuff for yourself,” “cause it never happened.” Brandishing a sexuality more volcanic than veiled, Davis is a teller of tall tales and of tales below the belt. To wit, she is less interested in old wives’ tales than in young—perhaps premature—wives’ tales and also ex-wives’ tales. “i have decided that we do not want other people’s . . . husbands,” she writes to a friend, “as we do not want our own.” The question of fidelity has always been on the loose in her work. Her first book, And Her Soul Out of Nothing, contained a diptych of dueling poems, “In Defense of Marriage” and “Against Devotion,” a dilemma to which her more recent book contributes a lyric called “to love” and another called “poem convincing you to leave your wife.” She even fears—or feigns to fear—that her own reader will leave her, for an Italian mistress. The site of all this anguish, of course, is the heart, and Davis is desperate to understand how and why it gives itself, or is taken by force; how it cracks, withdraws out of shyness or spite, betrays or is betrayed; how heavy it is, and how light; how necessary and unwieldy. No amount of bookish consolation will offer any solace, as when she invokes the famous dictum about the heart’s reasons, only to tell Pascal to “shut up!” The speaker of Davis’ poems is indentured to first-hand experience, often leading to disastrous results, as we might expect when a “freakèd heart” is married to a “prosthetic soul,” both of them housed in a body that loses first its virginity, then its vanity—before deciding to sport them both once again. Davis is the Ukrainian-rooted, raised-in-Detroit lovechild of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, a strange offspring when you think of it, he a Jesuit and “time’s eunuch,” she refusing to leave her father’s house. But as parents they imparted a good deal to their daughter: a diction that manages to be both stringent and baroque; a tempo turning ever back on itself; an obsession with salvation and the general oh-shit of the self; a fraught rapport with nuns; a predilection for spring; a valedictory outlook, often self-lacerating, even kinky; and the incredible incapacity to make up her mind. “So far,” Davis writes, “Anti- / Thesis and then, maybe, a little thesis.” But there is also this contrarianism, and a frequently unrepressed anger, and a confusion of love with lust, which makes me think that the father was actually John Donne. “Reader Deaf and Reader // Dear,” beware: something dastardly, something bastardly, is among us, and she introduces herself as “sir olena kalytiak davis.”
Introduction: Peter Gizzi / Andrew Joron / Elizabeth Willis
Verse Festival / Thursday, March 29, 2007 / Mercury Art Works, Athens, GA
-itsy / -antsy / -ing / -oid / -ed
-ology / -ocracy / -onomy
-ation / -ality / -archy
-obic / -etic / -ectric / -ency / -istic / -esse / -esque
These are a few of the lyrical, laconic, lapidary sounds that Peter Gizzi makes in the second of two title poems from his latest book, The Outernationale, while “Standing,” as he puts it, “at the corner of nth and twilight.” Partly suffix and partly self-sufficient—that is, part part and part whole—these fag-ends /slash/ ends-unto-themselves seem to me a fitting way to open this poetry festival, the poem being what, among other things, celebrates the life of words, however mutated, mutilated, or mute. Characteristically plainspoken but elegant, Peter Gizzi seeks, despite all ruptures, “to be complete inside the poem / To be oneself becoming a poem,” “that one day / we might find ourselves lit up.” But not so fast: for poetry is likewise mourning, the cry of an existence that, as the hyphens in Gizzi’s litany of terminations indicate, is at best a half-life. For language, especially poetic language, inevitably standing in for reality by erasing it, to replace with a parallel real, finds itself not only present, as matter placed on a material page, to be manipulated or measured, but also transparent, absented from the reader’s immediate awareness. As a visible, tangible medium, poetry is awake as its own message, and elegizes the thing it signifies, singing a song of itself over the object’s open grave; but as a forgotten, always already posthumous word, poetry eulogizes its referent by effacing none other than itself, keeping quiet so things as they are can speak. In the shorthand of one of Gizzi’s titles, the word, like any corpus, is “Bipolaroid,” with “continuities, gaps.” The fractured once-were-words, or words-in-waiting, scattered throughout Gizzi’s poem—gathered into alliterative and associative phrases of two, three, or four elements, like a verb being conjugated, or a noun declined—are at once dead in spirit, we might say, and alive to the letter. They call out to be completed, but they can also make a go of it alone. As “broken tiles,” to quote another poem, as “sine and cosine,” as both “written speech” and “barely legible,” these crippled but nonetheless breathing bodies arrive “almost home.” Allergic to teleology, then, but nonetheless ambitious to function in our actual world, among human being, the poetic word is, on one hand, revolutionary, a mode of revelry, what Gizzi calls a “Protest Song,” poised anarchically at the outer of the nationale, like an American word with no foothold in France, or a French word unwelcome here; while on the other, poetry is a form of respect (or what we might term reverence), a mode of knowledge (or revelation), and a conduit of dreams (or reverie). The Outernationale makes me think of these things, for it stakes out the frontier not of a poem wherein a fugitive ‘we’ might hide, but of an ‘us’ in which the outlaw poem may remain at large. Across his several poetry books, from Periplum and Artificial Heart through Some Values of Landscape and Weather and this year’s volume, Gizzi offers us a poetry that is as compassionate and communal as it is turncoat and torn-from: “Confetti in April / Confetti in May,” he writes, “This was the last party . . . Bird, enough of your trill.” Gizzi is concerned with the “tink tink” and “Clank, I love you” of language; with the “Ça va?” and “everyday sprecenze” of speech; with the “A is for knee socks” and “O stymie dewy” and “H I J K L banner” of our alphabet; with the “Whoa, Saturday. / Whoa, morning” and “Dear Saturday, thank you” of our ordinary time—but never for their own, lonely sakes. “When I asked what happened,” he says, “I meant what happened to us?”
Andrew Joron is not alien to poetry as the perfumed word, both a rose in its own right and a sign that only signals a further flower. As early as his debut poetry book, Science Fiction, he has been revolving the Mallarméan bouquet within his mind and heart. In his most recent volume, he elaborates this meditation on the mirrorlike traffic between “rose” and “eros” to embrace yet another anagrammatic form, “sore,” thereby returning poetry to its primordial status as pain, as a wound that will not heal or even close. Indeed, we cannot help hearing in the book’s title, The Cry at Zero, an exhilarating cacophony of open channels: zero-degree writing, for instance, and its effort to strip the author of any authority; Dickinson’s “zero at the bone,” her figure for an afterlife of interminable dying, that is, of writing itself; Ground Zero, a placeless place where many of Joron’s most poignant, pressing, responsible remarks on American imperialism are situated; Zeno, who plied the paradox of the halving of halves; the Greek letter tau, often an abbreviation for zero, and also the title of Philip Lamantia’s ‘lost’ poem, to which Joron feels an affinity; and “O, the grieving vowel,” as Joron names it. Joron has staked his poetics, not exactly on the Heideggerian privilege accorded to etymology, but on the hunch that any word is likely the harbinger of other words, whether by homophonic vibration or unexpected coincidence, and that often words appearing to collude in fact collide. Dedicating his book to the late Bay Area writers Lamantia and Barbara Guest, for example, he appropriately conjures “lament” and “ghost.” Elsewhere, though, as when he interposes a colon between “rending” and “rendering,” Joron indicates not equivalence, or even valence, but opposition: to render, of course, is to give, whereas to rend is to sever; so while they seem to share the same root, what the former joins together the latter sunders. Consciously deploying what he calls, in reference to Jacob Boehme, “a musical chord of morphemes,” Joron is far from merely playing semantic games. “Where language fails,” he argues in his opening text, “poetry begins.” For Joron, poetry is the emergence of a Cry that, while composed of language, nonetheless constitutes an emergency for language, which cannot contain it. Poetry is the part that overwhelms the whole. “A poetic impulse,” Joron avers, “will cause the system of language to exceed its own boundary conditions, and to undergo a phase transition toward the Unsayable.” Steeped in the pre-Socratics, in German philosophy, and in the Surrealist hasard objectif, Joron espouses a poetics most indebted to the post-structuralist tradition that has attempted to think the impossible relation between a restricted economy and its exception: for Joron, poetry claims a radically disruptive role, akin to that leveled by the “Autrui” of Lévinas, say, and the “jews” of Lyotard; by Bataille’s “free expenditure” and Blanchot’s “scandal”; by Barthes’ photographic “punctum”; and most recently, by Jean-Luc Marion’s “saturated phenomenon.” Like the human body, our most immediate site of self-disruption, poetry is non-dialectical and non-identical. Bearing out the “structured randomness” so frequently his theme, Joron has organized his so-called “Selected Prose” as a cross- or perhaps non-generic work, wherein essays, book reviews, and even a personal letter are situated alongside ‘prose poems’ that had appeared earlier, in Fathom and The Removes. This is further evidence, if we needed it, that poetry, at once urgent and insurgent, is “the Opening to Otherness” by which we, in turn, are opened.
“We are living in an era,” Andrew Joron argues, “. . . of the convergence of science, mathematics, and poetry.” If that’s true, then we have, among other writers, Elizabeth Willis to thank for it. Science has impelled her art from the beginning, in the guise of thermodynamics. Her first book, Second Law, set decimal to decibel, claiming in the sharded minimalism of her title sequence, “No meaning was before there was a night / No mention before there was Divide.” What was scattered throughout Second Law has been newly bound, as if by gravity’s tug, in her most recent volume, Meteoric Flowers. Yet even its dense prose poems, however compact in rhetoric and thought, are perforated and internally fissured: partly literary and partly “unfixed by science,” their words Willis’ own but their titles taken from Erasmus Darwin, they will not decide between the prose and the poetry that constitute their duality. The title says much about Willis’ style and investigative methods. Whereas a meteor hails from afar, hurtling down to earth from outer space, a flower moves up and away, growing from the inside of the earth toward the sun. From a human vantage, the meteor is vatic, and can harm us; the flower, like us, is veined: “We’re only clay,” Willis writes, “blossom machines.” One is hard, comprised of astral bits broken off from something larger, and rushes headlong toward its destruction, unique insofar as it will never be heard from again, while the other is soft, composed of tiny organic elements, and flourishes slowly before fading—only to return the following season. The marriage of meteor and flower, like the strange harmony proclaimed in the title of her earlier book, The Human Abstract, is Willis’ way of saying that poetry is singular—and plural. So she is sometimes given to lyrical glissando, à la Wallace Stevens, whose epigram, “A poem is a meteor,” provides the book’s epigraph. “What gives, or gave, to get us here, what wired fluorescence?” Willis asks in “Rosicrucian Machinery.” Her answer, from elsewhere in the book: “As luck conducts the inner man, a trumped up art will fly beneath the wings.” But Willis is also pragmatic, demotic, terrestrial, socially and politically savvy: “America owns the moon,” she ventures, not entirely hyperbolically, and “We all live under the rule of Pepsi,” in “the garden of western expansion,” walking around as we do, daily, in Rutherford, or Gatorville, or Brownsville with its flying flag, or Sweet William, Virginia. Whether “at the edge of L.A.” or “the edge of Venice,” according to Willis, we are “living in a desert of bolted-down things,” where what is “public,” she warns, “can’t be protected.” Not surprising, then, are her several elisions between “idyll” and “Idly,” as though America’s relative peace and prosperity were also the surest sign of its doing the devil’s work. “Among the lower orders,” she muses, admonishing the administration, “a W is sibilant.” Trying to negotiate “a careful avalanche of we and they,” while “The world is clanking: noun, noun, noun,” Willis crosses over to the side of the verb, capriciously but with total conviction, transiting and transforming all self-centeredness by speaking from Whitman’s Texas-sized mouth, by trying to discover “how dirt thinks,” by “joy[ing],” as she promises, “to dream / a more fortunate planet.”
Introduction: SÉbastien Smirou / Jena Osman / Olena Kalytiak Davis
Verse Festival / Friday, March 30 / Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA
When a direct object is suddenly asked to become the subject of a following sentence, but is forbidden from relinquishing its role at the end of the earlier, transitive phrase, something confusing and probably uncomfortable happens to our sense of agency and orientation. The story, such as it is, starts to unravel quickly. When an adjective is unwittingly separated from its noun, an adverb from its verb, a pronoun from its antecedent, and when the candidates for any one of these referents are plural, it is literally unclear who’s who, what’s what. When a quatrain tries to become a painting, by converting its words as if into image, its margins into full-justified frames, and when a series of these aspiring tableaux, hung meticulously side by side, shows a book trying to morph into a museum, the onlooker is obviously at a loss for how to proceed through this would-be Uffizi. And when a wealthy Italian statesman, art patron, soldier, and lover tries to live inside the French language, he finds that his currency, as it were, is no longer current. I don’t know, of course, whether this was Lorenzo de Medici’s experience of the Renaissance world, but it is certainly the experience any reader has when facing Sébastien Smirou’s appropriately titled Mon Laurent. In his book, the whole universe may hang in the balance of the tiniest of words. “ayant appris une future rémission des étoiles,” begins the fourth stanza of the eighth and final section, “les médecins / regardent . . .” Laurent is dying of gout, so the court astrologers consult the stars for advice. On first take, the sentence—if one can speak of sentences where there are no capital letters, no punctuation other than parentheses—seems to say: “having learned of a future remission from the stars, the doctors look around,” as though the medical entourage had divined, from the stars, a lessening of Laurent’s malady. This would be a relief, not least for the sick man himself. But there is a second order to the ‘same’ phrase, and it offers information that bodes as ill as the previous version’s promise: “having learned of the stars’ future remission, the doctors look around,” where what is at stake is a pending remission of the stars—their fading or disappearance. Grammatically treacherous, Smirou’s line locates the fate of Laurent, and hence of Medici Italy as such, within the single, seemingly insipid conjunction, des. Nor is the welfare of only one man, one country, or Europe suspended. Just as children of the Copernican revolution were learning that the universe had never revolved around them, despite their illusions, so too does Smirou’s des encapsulate a celestial dilemma: either human proficiency can continue to interpret the heavens, to discover therein its salvation, or else the stars themselves are growing dim, receding to where we will no longer have any access, leaving us to our own, insufficient devices. This is the classical abruptly declassified—but not declassed. Mon Laurent is an elegant, funny, often sad meditation, as concerned with physical arrangement and fractal symmetry as it is with perplexing semantic eccentricity and ruminations on matters philosophical, political, and sentimental. Constructed according to a 4 x 16 x 8 pattern—of lines per stanza, stanzas per section, sections per book—with the gaps separating individual words rendered as regular as possible, Mon Laurent is a mélange of traditional format with an un-constricted modern idiom. Smirou’s emergence began a decade ago with his appearance in the Revue de Littérature Générale, a massive magazine-anthology that detonated on the contemporary French poetry scene, throwing the collective gaze toward new aesthetics and revised ambitions. As founding editor of the micro-editions rup&rud, Smirou once published Peter Gizzi, and he has since been earning an increasingly serious reputation among several innovative American poets, including Cole Swensen, Stacy Doris, and Susan Howe.
The demanding, multifarious work of Jena Osman is an ongoing exercise in displacement. The first thing to be stretched and snap is any conception of the poem as a self-contained, lineated verbal artifact, complete with beginning, middle, and end, and written by a single consciousness. Indeed, many of Osman’s projects are not ‘written’ at all, but are rather curated, coordinated, given space in which to circulate as an interactive collage, in which text, context, and numerous para-texts all border one another. Among the many elements that work together in Osman’s arenas, be it harmoniously or, just as often, through cacophony, are citations, sometimes attributed but often not; handwritten manuscripts, notably Dickinson’s; Supreme Court rulings and other juridical and political memos, including sound-bytes culled from press conferences; images, whether static and pictorial, stolen from a book of gestures, say, or else projected, such as those we’re about to see on screen; phrases whose typeface bolds, enlarges, until suggesting billboard copy, before slimming down to 9-point font, as footnotes, endnotes, asides placed literally at the side of the page, so that suddenly what appeared to be peripheral comes into view as the central concern, pushing the ostensible subject to the margins. Hermeneutically suspicious, adamantly pitched against anything smacking of uniformity or received wisdom, none of Osman’s operations is identical to its neighbors; instead, each ports a logic and a logistics tailored to her present preoccupation. Her writing provides the perfect example of texts “conditioned,” as Andrew Joron has said about someone else’s poem, parts of which were published in Osman’s journal Chain, “but not controlled, by the application of rules,” in which “formal constraint serves as a propaedeutic for the poetic imagination.” The formal constraint of Osman’s “Memory Error Theater,” to take an example from her recent book An Essay in Asterisks, involves a legend, or key, containing a 3 x 7 grid. With each cubicle corresponding to a planet, a copyeditor’s mark, and an abstract idea such as “relativism” and “the question,” the sequence proceeds to open each of those Pandora’s boxes like a computer file, in order to address the slippages of personal and historical record, particularly the way in which memory is invented, edited, revised, changing over time as the remembering agent changes. Ostensibly similar in its consciously hypertextual layout is her 16-page “The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist,” from her first book, The Character: different elements from the table communicate logarithmically with small poems. But as Osman’s note to the text makes clear—although text is obviously a word not wide enough to accommodate what we’re talking about—the activity of reading “The Periodic Table,” as published between two paper covers, is only to experience one of the who-knows-how-many permutations and combinations made available by her parametric experiment. Osman’s ambition is to refuse deciding for the reader what and how to read, and in printing the poem she brings us up against the limits of ‘the book,’ with all the potentially sinister connotations of that phrase. The result of Osman’s ‘poems’ is not to interpret the aesthetic, social, and political spheres in which we inevitably live, although her work makes overtures that direction, employing ‘multi-media’ strategies precisely to critique the perniciousness of news and how it’s fed us. She is too mistrustful of the readymade version, too skeptical of anything that would claim to be “beyond a reasonable doubt,” to want to impose an orthodoxy on us. Instead, suspending anything remotely resembling a full-proof interpretation, what Osman wants to illuminate is the act of interpreting itself, from its procedures through its consequences. For all the formal virtuosity and singular deformations in Osman’s repertoire, it’s that last that strikes me as imperative to her work and why we need it: consequence.
“Hence sordid bullshit, leave me the fuck alone.” Like everyone who’s read Olena Kalytiak Davis’ latest book, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities, I feel the basic human urge to say that line aloud, preferably in front of a roomful of students. Explicitly ironic and explicitly explicit, the invocation mimics the rhetoric of a seventeenth-century sonnet while making no bones, obviously, about its gen-X expletives. And that, according to Davis, may be the very rub that gets irritating: the methods for negotiating the sentimental life that we inherited from poets and lovers of the past are no longer operational, and instead of fixing them we get pissed off, or hurt, when they break down. Davis seems to wear her emotions, her baggage, her dirty laundry, and even her wariness on her sleeve, if not “hanging // down / my deepest cut / shirt,” but that is likely just subterfuge. Her self-reference is a front for a more deeply ingrained self-irreverence, and it leads her to solicit the protection, or at least the presence, of someone else: the Reader, the Lord, you. For it may be, via litany or profanity, that one of these folks can forgive her. But absolution is hard to come by when the confession itself is a lie. “i have never told anybody / about the time i i i / slept with three guys at once,” she admits in “keep some stuff for yourself,” “cause it never happened.” Brandishing a sexuality more volcanic than veiled, Davis is a teller of tall tales and of tales below the belt. To wit, she is less interested in old wives’ tales than in young—perhaps premature—wives’ tales and also ex-wives’ tales. “i have decided that we do not want other people’s . . . husbands,” she writes to a friend, “as we do not want our own.” The question of fidelity has always been on the loose in her work. Her first book, And Her Soul Out of Nothing, contained a diptych of dueling poems, “In Defense of Marriage” and “Against Devotion,” a dilemma to which her more recent book contributes a lyric called “to love” and another called “poem convincing you to leave your wife.” She even fears—or feigns to fear—that her own reader will leave her, for an Italian mistress. The site of all this anguish, of course, is the heart, and Davis is desperate to understand how and why it gives itself, or is taken by force; how it cracks, withdraws out of shyness or spite, betrays or is betrayed; how heavy it is, and how light; how necessary and unwieldy. No amount of bookish consolation will offer any solace, as when she invokes the famous dictum about the heart’s reasons, only to tell Pascal to “shut up!” The speaker of Davis’ poems is indentured to first-hand experience, often leading to disastrous results, as we might expect when a “freakèd heart” is married to a “prosthetic soul,” both of them housed in a body that loses first its virginity, then its vanity—before deciding to sport them both once again. Davis is the Ukrainian-rooted, raised-in-Detroit lovechild of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, a strange offspring when you think of it, he a Jesuit and “time’s eunuch,” she refusing to leave her father’s house. But as parents they imparted a good deal to their daughter: a diction that manages to be both stringent and baroque; a tempo turning ever back on itself; an obsession with salvation and the general oh-shit of the self; a fraught rapport with nuns; a predilection for spring; a valedictory outlook, often self-lacerating, even kinky; and the incredible incapacity to make up her mind. “So far,” Davis writes, “Anti- / Thesis and then, maybe, a little thesis.” But there is also this contrarianism, and a frequently unrepressed anger, and a confusion of love with lust, which makes me think that the father was actually John Donne. “Reader Deaf and Reader // Dear,” beware: something dastardly, something bastardly, is among us, and she introduces herself as “sir olena kalytiak davis.”
Monday, April 02, 2007
NEW! Review of Joseph Lease
Broken World by Joseph Lease. Coffee House Press, $15.
Reviewed by Emily Hunt
In Broken World, Joseph Lease scrambles for self-definition in a deliberately muddled composition of “shiny cars parked in a lot” and bits of broken mirrors, “red buds” and “torn strips of city.” This collection of poems, awash in political overtones, leans on potent imagery to address the corruption of a country once “blank, blank, blank.” Lease tosses text from hand to hand as if it were a solid object; with the repetition and reweaving of single words and phrases throughout the book, he tests the weight of these tools, looking for a way to sculpt an understanding of his identity, inherently colored by America, his home.
Broken World, sufficiently dappled with white spaces and room to reflect, lends itself to a reading in one sitting. Lease’s poems are as vulnerable as they are demanding, as tentative as they are assertive. He asks and tells, gropes and glues. By Part Two, which is composed of twenty-six individual poems that share the title “Free Again,” the reader finds him or herself digging through the contents of a man split open, spilling words.
The structure of “Ghosts,” Broken World’s first poem, signals for readers Lease’s concern with the limitations inherent in words: “the word for dawn / is others / the word for light / is freefall / the word for hand / is others.” The rhythmical piece reads like a man out of breath trying to spit out meaning. Lease has written down these phrases--given them some sort of physical body and enough space to breathe--so that he, like a painter gauging the accuracy of his composition’s proportions, can step back and look at them to decide if they hold true. "Ghost" ends with “nothing,” open and defiantly blank, dangling against a background of airy white.
“Broken World,” the poem to which the collection owes its title, initially gains momentum in its painting of America’s portrait, only to fall back into this naked place, “blank as glass” and “erased by snow.” The repetition of “won’t be” delineates through negation, while phrases like “America equals ghost” lend definitions ultimately void of certitude. By “Soul-Making,” readers discover that this deceptively empty space holds a man, “bodiless and bright,” whose “soul is like a green used car . . . an old drunk king, a patch of ice.” America, then, becomes a nesting doll of ghosts, stacked and stacked with the spirits of men and his objects.
Time and time again, Lease examines the interplay between authority figure and subject, teacher and pupil, superego and ego. Referencing paintings that resemble scratchy lessons on a chalkboard, he speaks through “Cy Twombly” to readers as if he were encouraging a group of curious students: “you are getting it and you are getting it / here or there or somewhere.” The speaker (or teacher) himself searches for a gem of recognition, for “thick ropes of light” inside his words. Later, “Little Lightning Bolt” introduces a recurring “Simon says” theme. As readers we are puppets, hands on our heads, hearts exposed to whatever may fly our way: “Simon says, put your finger on your nose. Simon says, you haven’t done enough . . . Simon says, you only have blood, marsh light, and sparrow.” Through these modified playground commands, Lease cries out from the perspective of a manipulated subject.
Like several of Lease’s pieces, “Lightning” ends with a dash, rushing readers along to the next page. In this case, the dash points to 1944 Litzmannstadt, a scene that stinks of ashes, hunger, and dirty names. Here, Lease continues his exploration of the weight of a word assigned, shaking it out like a dusty rug to see what settles: “They made us garbage--I was garbage-- / they call me / human garbage--I was garbage / so I still am.” Such simple constructions serve as poignant expositions of a culture’s ugly underbelly. Broken World thrives on these moments that address the power of a label, whether it be “garbage,” “Jew,” or “American.”
Lease applies the notion of tabula rasa to America itself throughout “Free Again.” He steps through the mud of a world stuck on money, “drunk on not / having to / respond,” and clouded with the neon emptiness of strip malls and parking lots. Trekking through such an environment, one cannot help but think of how its once-clean slate must have shimmered. Lease begs us to look at our reflections; he highlights bits of shattered self, heavy as glass in the air of this country. In his Broken World, habitat defines inhabitant and vice versa, and both remain swampy. These poems possess an uncanny synchronization of insistence and wonder. A tainted, money-hungry country rapt with the color green (e.g., “When we’re gone our names will mean green body . . . our names will mean green thought”) soaks those born into its homes and tossing in their beds before sleep, cuts their darting thoughts with the bare and haunting honesty of a face in the mirror. Lease cracks open these icy reflections to fish for something worth “free[ing].”
Reviewed by Emily Hunt
In Broken World, Joseph Lease scrambles for self-definition in a deliberately muddled composition of “shiny cars parked in a lot” and bits of broken mirrors, “red buds” and “torn strips of city.” This collection of poems, awash in political overtones, leans on potent imagery to address the corruption of a country once “blank, blank, blank.” Lease tosses text from hand to hand as if it were a solid object; with the repetition and reweaving of single words and phrases throughout the book, he tests the weight of these tools, looking for a way to sculpt an understanding of his identity, inherently colored by America, his home.
Broken World, sufficiently dappled with white spaces and room to reflect, lends itself to a reading in one sitting. Lease’s poems are as vulnerable as they are demanding, as tentative as they are assertive. He asks and tells, gropes and glues. By Part Two, which is composed of twenty-six individual poems that share the title “Free Again,” the reader finds him or herself digging through the contents of a man split open, spilling words.
The structure of “Ghosts,” Broken World’s first poem, signals for readers Lease’s concern with the limitations inherent in words: “the word for dawn / is others / the word for light / is freefall / the word for hand / is others.” The rhythmical piece reads like a man out of breath trying to spit out meaning. Lease has written down these phrases--given them some sort of physical body and enough space to breathe--so that he, like a painter gauging the accuracy of his composition’s proportions, can step back and look at them to decide if they hold true. "Ghost" ends with “nothing,” open and defiantly blank, dangling against a background of airy white.
“Broken World,” the poem to which the collection owes its title, initially gains momentum in its painting of America’s portrait, only to fall back into this naked place, “blank as glass” and “erased by snow.” The repetition of “won’t be” delineates through negation, while phrases like “America equals ghost” lend definitions ultimately void of certitude. By “Soul-Making,” readers discover that this deceptively empty space holds a man, “bodiless and bright,” whose “soul is like a green used car . . . an old drunk king, a patch of ice.” America, then, becomes a nesting doll of ghosts, stacked and stacked with the spirits of men and his objects.
Time and time again, Lease examines the interplay between authority figure and subject, teacher and pupil, superego and ego. Referencing paintings that resemble scratchy lessons on a chalkboard, he speaks through “Cy Twombly” to readers as if he were encouraging a group of curious students: “you are getting it and you are getting it / here or there or somewhere.” The speaker (or teacher) himself searches for a gem of recognition, for “thick ropes of light” inside his words. Later, “Little Lightning Bolt” introduces a recurring “Simon says” theme. As readers we are puppets, hands on our heads, hearts exposed to whatever may fly our way: “Simon says, put your finger on your nose. Simon says, you haven’t done enough . . . Simon says, you only have blood, marsh light, and sparrow.” Through these modified playground commands, Lease cries out from the perspective of a manipulated subject.
Like several of Lease’s pieces, “Lightning” ends with a dash, rushing readers along to the next page. In this case, the dash points to 1944 Litzmannstadt, a scene that stinks of ashes, hunger, and dirty names. Here, Lease continues his exploration of the weight of a word assigned, shaking it out like a dusty rug to see what settles: “They made us garbage--I was garbage-- / they call me / human garbage--I was garbage / so I still am.” Such simple constructions serve as poignant expositions of a culture’s ugly underbelly. Broken World thrives on these moments that address the power of a label, whether it be “garbage,” “Jew,” or “American.”
Lease applies the notion of tabula rasa to America itself throughout “Free Again.” He steps through the mud of a world stuck on money, “drunk on not / having to / respond,” and clouded with the neon emptiness of strip malls and parking lots. Trekking through such an environment, one cannot help but think of how its once-clean slate must have shimmered. Lease begs us to look at our reflections; he highlights bits of shattered self, heavy as glass in the air of this country. In his Broken World, habitat defines inhabitant and vice versa, and both remain swampy. These poems possess an uncanny synchronization of insistence and wonder. A tainted, money-hungry country rapt with the color green (e.g., “When we’re gone our names will mean green body . . . our names will mean green thought”) soaks those born into its homes and tossing in their beds before sleep, cuts their darting thoughts with the bare and haunting honesty of a face in the mirror. Lease cracks open these icy reflections to fish for something worth “free[ing].”
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
NEW! Poem by Kenneth Williams
Kenneth Williams
THE SUMMER HOUSE IN WINTER
The summer house in winter
lifts like a saint into a sky
not blue but bone white,
its orange an anticipation
of the coats of the men
who tromp through
incredible snow.
Aren’t you just sick of gorgeous people
making news in gorgeous settings?
Aren’t you ready
to drop and pray
for those whose joy
is mayonnaise?
The cognac explodes
into oak-paneled flame.
The library dwindles
in significance.
Quick!
Show me all the books by anonymous.
Bring me the head of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Straighten the doornail.
Stem the rose.
I am the very flower of discretion.
THE SUMMER HOUSE IN WINTER
for Lisa Nardi
The summer house in winter
lifts like a saint into a sky
not blue but bone white,
its orange an anticipation
of the coats of the men
who tromp through
incredible snow.
Aren’t you just sick of gorgeous people
making news in gorgeous settings?
Aren’t you ready
to drop and pray
for those whose joy
is mayonnaise?
The cognac explodes
into oak-paneled flame.
The library dwindles
in significance.
Quick!
Show me all the books by anonymous.
Bring me the head of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Straighten the doornail.
Stem the rose.
I am the very flower of discretion.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
NEW! Review of Miranda Mellis
The Revisionist by Miranda Mellis. Calamari Press, $12.
Reviewed by Caitlin Brown
In her novella The Revisionist, Miranda Mellis plunges her readers into a looming, apocalyptic existence where the natural world resembles an ominous machine, and the local convenience store has become known as the new natural jungle. Complemented by the mechanical yet strangely beautiful artwork of Derek White, whose images seem to be almost motorized, Mellis’ story of a nuclear age weatherman paints a world without sensation, or truth, or reaction. Yet, despite the empty void felt between her characters, Mellis manages to transcend the predictable feelings of hopelessness, and subtly, tastefully adds an afterglow of promise to her story.
A short 82 pages, The Revisionist vividly observes the world through the eyes of its narrator, a weather surveillance reporter who documents his--or her, Mellis never tells us--findings from an abandoned lighthouse, seven miles outside the city. Ironically, Mellis emphasizes the heightened sensation that can be felt through the use of the narrator’s telescope--to hear another’s heartbeat, or to read another’s mind--and juxtaposes this advanced machinery with both a narrator who has significantly distanced himself from the subjects of his observations and a human population that fails to feel anything at all anymore.
From the blind to the hearing impaired, Mellis’ world is one in which, as the narrator claims, “nothing was felt any longer, or known through the sense portals, despite the fact that every part of the body was designed for contact.” Some fail to even notice that their bodies are dramatically mutated or gone completely. Indeed, Mellis also intends to highlight the fact that even the animals of this world are more engaging and receptive than the people. While “people howled and chirped at one another” in convenience stores, spiders, seeing-eye dogs, and birds give long soliloquies on selfhood and pain. A postmodern tone of human disconnection and a sense of lost wholeness seem to glaze the narrator’s panoramic view of the broken down metropolis.
The theme of sensation is further emphasized throughout the book, both by Mellis’ spatial designing and by Derek White’s vivid illustrations. Mellis replaces the conventional use of chapters with artistic spacing throughout her prose, almost as if she is leaving legroom for the reader to think, question, or simply stare at the lack of words or images and treat the blank page as an aesthetic experience in itself. The randomness of her spacing choices further accentuates the fragmentation of this world of hers, as if Mellis is forcing the reader to acknowledge the vast distances and spaces present among characters and their stories, refusing to let them be ignored.
As for White’s images, dispersed throughout the book, they not only add an additional aesthetic angle to Mellis’ already pulsating descriptions, but seem to evoke something of the sublime in the reader. When viewed in conjunction with the story, these images are both horrifying and beautiful, painful and pleasurable. Below is one of White’s images, construed from Mellis’ following description: “Through my telescope, survivors were running around in circles. Buildings were curdling. The very air had faded, was pixilated.”
Though the reader knows that he gazes upon a scene of nuclear holocaust when viewing White’s image, he sees horror only in the fact that he finds the image pleasing to look at. Perhaps there is also satisfaction found in the fact that the scene takes place from a distance, just as the narrator sees it. Untouched by the disaster, the reader therefore feels no remorse--and that in itself calls for horrified reflection. Not all of White’s illustrations portray such infernal scenarios, but they are all captivating in their intricate detail, drawing the reader in and beckoning him to study each image for its elaborate elements. One might argue that Mellis’ colorful imagery requires no supplement, but the graphic illustrations are difficult to pass up, and one finds oneself excitedly anticipating the picture on the next page.
The sublime emotion found in White’s drawings provides a reiteration of Mellis’ subtle ambivalence present throughout the story. Though hers is predominantly a tale of loss and absence, of a deteriorating human race, leaving the reader feeling hopeless and depressed is clearly not her aim. Instead, Mellis manages to extract the beauty--or what little, simplified part remains left of it--from the rubble, giving her piece a more optimistic outlook overall. Various pairs of characters find camaraderie or “mitotic love” through each other’s company. In defense of the monotony of the world, the narrator argues for repetition as a new art form, saying “you could pathologize the repetition, call it futile, but if you considered the aesthetics of repetition as such, you might actually begin to embrace eternal recapitulation.” Though Mellis’ sarcasm is apparent, the narrator’s ambivalence between false and authentic feelings presents itself as a constant. Often he deems human feelings and relations pointless, while other times he sways and thinks there is something to them; and this ray of doubt in the uselessness of human contact becomes the beauty behind Mellis’ seemingly sad story. Mellis also mentions an intuition that all humans share, one that helps them know when they are being lied to--perhaps the only sense they still commonly possess, and perhaps the most important one of all: the common knowledge of what it means to be human.
Such instances in the story, though often fleeting, provide evidence that Mellis has captured in The Revisionist an aura of both a slow deterioration towards an end and, perhaps, an eccentric new beginning, tailored from the past. Even the narrator feels unsure as to which direction his world is leading, and this seems to be Mellis’ point--that the questioning and doubting are what must remain after most everything else has ceased to exist. The Revisionist is a tangle of surfaces and images that struggles to undo itself before the reader’s eyes; and its attempt--not its failure--to do so is where its beauty unearths itself.
Reviewed by Caitlin Brown
In her novella The Revisionist, Miranda Mellis plunges her readers into a looming, apocalyptic existence where the natural world resembles an ominous machine, and the local convenience store has become known as the new natural jungle. Complemented by the mechanical yet strangely beautiful artwork of Derek White, whose images seem to be almost motorized, Mellis’ story of a nuclear age weatherman paints a world without sensation, or truth, or reaction. Yet, despite the empty void felt between her characters, Mellis manages to transcend the predictable feelings of hopelessness, and subtly, tastefully adds an afterglow of promise to her story.
A short 82 pages, The Revisionist vividly observes the world through the eyes of its narrator, a weather surveillance reporter who documents his--or her, Mellis never tells us--findings from an abandoned lighthouse, seven miles outside the city. Ironically, Mellis emphasizes the heightened sensation that can be felt through the use of the narrator’s telescope--to hear another’s heartbeat, or to read another’s mind--and juxtaposes this advanced machinery with both a narrator who has significantly distanced himself from the subjects of his observations and a human population that fails to feel anything at all anymore.
From the blind to the hearing impaired, Mellis’ world is one in which, as the narrator claims, “nothing was felt any longer, or known through the sense portals, despite the fact that every part of the body was designed for contact.” Some fail to even notice that their bodies are dramatically mutated or gone completely. Indeed, Mellis also intends to highlight the fact that even the animals of this world are more engaging and receptive than the people. While “people howled and chirped at one another” in convenience stores, spiders, seeing-eye dogs, and birds give long soliloquies on selfhood and pain. A postmodern tone of human disconnection and a sense of lost wholeness seem to glaze the narrator’s panoramic view of the broken down metropolis.
The theme of sensation is further emphasized throughout the book, both by Mellis’ spatial designing and by Derek White’s vivid illustrations. Mellis replaces the conventional use of chapters with artistic spacing throughout her prose, almost as if she is leaving legroom for the reader to think, question, or simply stare at the lack of words or images and treat the blank page as an aesthetic experience in itself. The randomness of her spacing choices further accentuates the fragmentation of this world of hers, as if Mellis is forcing the reader to acknowledge the vast distances and spaces present among characters and their stories, refusing to let them be ignored.
As for White’s images, dispersed throughout the book, they not only add an additional aesthetic angle to Mellis’ already pulsating descriptions, but seem to evoke something of the sublime in the reader. When viewed in conjunction with the story, these images are both horrifying and beautiful, painful and pleasurable. Below is one of White’s images, construed from Mellis’ following description: “Through my telescope, survivors were running around in circles. Buildings were curdling. The very air had faded, was pixilated.”
Though the reader knows that he gazes upon a scene of nuclear holocaust when viewing White’s image, he sees horror only in the fact that he finds the image pleasing to look at. Perhaps there is also satisfaction found in the fact that the scene takes place from a distance, just as the narrator sees it. Untouched by the disaster, the reader therefore feels no remorse--and that in itself calls for horrified reflection. Not all of White’s illustrations portray such infernal scenarios, but they are all captivating in their intricate detail, drawing the reader in and beckoning him to study each image for its elaborate elements. One might argue that Mellis’ colorful imagery requires no supplement, but the graphic illustrations are difficult to pass up, and one finds oneself excitedly anticipating the picture on the next page.
The sublime emotion found in White’s drawings provides a reiteration of Mellis’ subtle ambivalence present throughout the story. Though hers is predominantly a tale of loss and absence, of a deteriorating human race, leaving the reader feeling hopeless and depressed is clearly not her aim. Instead, Mellis manages to extract the beauty--or what little, simplified part remains left of it--from the rubble, giving her piece a more optimistic outlook overall. Various pairs of characters find camaraderie or “mitotic love” through each other’s company. In defense of the monotony of the world, the narrator argues for repetition as a new art form, saying “you could pathologize the repetition, call it futile, but if you considered the aesthetics of repetition as such, you might actually begin to embrace eternal recapitulation.” Though Mellis’ sarcasm is apparent, the narrator’s ambivalence between false and authentic feelings presents itself as a constant. Often he deems human feelings and relations pointless, while other times he sways and thinks there is something to them; and this ray of doubt in the uselessness of human contact becomes the beauty behind Mellis’ seemingly sad story. Mellis also mentions an intuition that all humans share, one that helps them know when they are being lied to--perhaps the only sense they still commonly possess, and perhaps the most important one of all: the common knowledge of what it means to be human.
Such instances in the story, though often fleeting, provide evidence that Mellis has captured in The Revisionist an aura of both a slow deterioration towards an end and, perhaps, an eccentric new beginning, tailored from the past. Even the narrator feels unsure as to which direction his world is leading, and this seems to be Mellis’ point--that the questioning and doubting are what must remain after most everything else has ceased to exist. The Revisionist is a tangle of surfaces and images that struggles to undo itself before the reader’s eyes; and its attempt--not its failure--to do so is where its beauty unearths itself.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
NEW! Poem by Peter Conners
Peter Conners
MEAT ZOO
The monkeys had been burning all morning. In the midst of it all, peanuts were sold at a discount. Polar bears batted seal corpses across their habitat. The cows were made of ground beef with two lamb eyeballs wedged into their heads at odd angles. Penguin skins were doormats; orange duck feet propped open lavatory doors. The crows were laughing in their trees.
MEAT ZOO
The monkeys had been burning all morning. In the midst of it all, peanuts were sold at a discount. Polar bears batted seal corpses across their habitat. The cows were made of ground beef with two lamb eyeballs wedged into their heads at odd angles. Penguin skins were doormats; orange duck feet propped open lavatory doors. The crows were laughing in their trees.
Monday, February 19, 2007
NEW! Two poems by Natalie Lyalin
Natalie Lyalin
TWO POEMS
Düsseldorf Is For Sisters
One is Scheherazade but they both wear overcoats.
One traces sun’s rectangle on the floor but they
both wear overcoats. Are you my sister from Mom’s
uterus? Are you using a fork in that way? Why does
one flower in our arrangement look so eaten?
I’m sailing to you. I’m sailing to you on white sails.
On white cells. I’ve recently counted my white cells.
One is a stirrup, but they both ride in saddles.
One has puffy lips, but they both ride in saddles.
I like names like Angela, Angelica, and Stanley.
I like Beuford, Blaine, and Tammy. Düsseldorf really
is for sisters. Please Bring in the rhinestones,
the leather purses. Bring on the hair pins
and lacquered horses. One wears a metal band,
but they both have pink gums. One doesn’t mind
that much, but they both have pink gums.
Pink and Hot Pink Habitat
They shoot up, the stalks with globular color
with stiff tissue layers poking the air.
You arrange them in water, but do they need water.
The answer is yes. They are alive.
When knocking a vase over, backhand it,
send the globs flying. When visiting college,
you learn that glass is liquid and sloping down.
Backhand your college choices. Arrange an arrangement,
fit into a hounds-tooth jacket. Get a small pipe,
a dried mushroom, and an antique locket.
When people come over, show off you closet.
Your ancient corsets and slovenly coats.
TWO POEMS
Düsseldorf Is For Sisters
One is Scheherazade but they both wear overcoats.
One traces sun’s rectangle on the floor but they
both wear overcoats. Are you my sister from Mom’s
uterus? Are you using a fork in that way? Why does
one flower in our arrangement look so eaten?
I’m sailing to you. I’m sailing to you on white sails.
On white cells. I’ve recently counted my white cells.
One is a stirrup, but they both ride in saddles.
One has puffy lips, but they both ride in saddles.
I like names like Angela, Angelica, and Stanley.
I like Beuford, Blaine, and Tammy. Düsseldorf really
is for sisters. Please Bring in the rhinestones,
the leather purses. Bring on the hair pins
and lacquered horses. One wears a metal band,
but they both have pink gums. One doesn’t mind
that much, but they both have pink gums.
Pink and Hot Pink Habitat
They shoot up, the stalks with globular color
with stiff tissue layers poking the air.
You arrange them in water, but do they need water.
The answer is yes. They are alive.
When knocking a vase over, backhand it,
send the globs flying. When visiting college,
you learn that glass is liquid and sloping down.
Backhand your college choices. Arrange an arrangement,
fit into a hounds-tooth jacket. Get a small pipe,
a dried mushroom, and an antique locket.
When people come over, show off you closet.
Your ancient corsets and slovenly coats.
Monday, February 12, 2007
NEW! 3 poems by Daniel Johnson
Daniel Johnson
THE REFLECTION OF ALL VISIBLE LIGHT
The faces are white.
The flowers white.
I drive around town
expecting the familiar--deer
lashed to trucks, kids
on skates, the metal scent
of winter--
but an empty stadium
floods with light, a sky full of geese
fails.
Time is white.
The yard white.
I turn in the driveway white
as the butcher’s bar of soap.
HUNGRY FOR WONDER
Smoke smeared the sky;
the sun was a hole,
but my mother wouldn’t believe
the river was burning.
Another drowned twin,
a two-headed perch: perhaps,
but water, brown and crooked
as it was, still wouldn’t burn.
Must be a mill caught fire, my mother said.
Streetlights blinked on. The bridge
backed up with rusty cars.
From Strongsville to Cuyahoga,
a steelworker crawled on his knees,
but nothing was said at supper.
The Crooked River was on fire:
Christ would return on a barge.
ANGEL HUNTING
The feathery snares I set
figure-eight in air:
their candied hooks
gaff-sharp, their cat gut taut.
Because a good wind
will muss a noose,
I bell and jewel my lines with glass--
if not to maim, to gash
or nick what thrashes hardest,
what bites free of the trap.
At dusk I rig; dawn I round,
down alleys, through graveyards,
in falconer’s gloves.
THE REFLECTION OF ALL VISIBLE LIGHT
The faces are white.
The flowers white.
I drive around town
expecting the familiar--deer
lashed to trucks, kids
on skates, the metal scent
of winter--
but an empty stadium
floods with light, a sky full of geese
fails.
Time is white.
The yard white.
I turn in the driveway white
as the butcher’s bar of soap.
HUNGRY FOR WONDER
Smoke smeared the sky;
the sun was a hole,
but my mother wouldn’t believe
the river was burning.
Another drowned twin,
a two-headed perch: perhaps,
but water, brown and crooked
as it was, still wouldn’t burn.
Must be a mill caught fire, my mother said.
Streetlights blinked on. The bridge
backed up with rusty cars.
From Strongsville to Cuyahoga,
a steelworker crawled on his knees,
but nothing was said at supper.
The Crooked River was on fire:
Christ would return on a barge.
ANGEL HUNTING
The feathery snares I set
figure-eight in air:
their candied hooks
gaff-sharp, their cat gut taut.
Because a good wind
will muss a noose,
I bell and jewel my lines with glass--
if not to maim, to gash
or nick what thrashes hardest,
what bites free of the trap.
At dusk I rig; dawn I round,
down alleys, through graveyards,
in falconer’s gloves.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
NEW! Review of Charles Bernstein
Girly Man by Charles Bernstein. University of Chicago Press, $24.
Reviewed by Thomas Fink
Lamenting poetry’s lack of centrality in American culture, not a few writers blame this “shame” on intellectual difficulty, lack of direct emotional communication, and presumed elitism in the work of most practitioners. They dream of a populist poetry as antidote. These folks should have a look at an early poem in Charles Bernstein’s Girly Man, “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” which begins “This is a totally / accessible poem” and ends by calling itself “real.” This self-styled populist poem provides the reader with myriad reassurances:
As Bernstein’s satire reveals, with the marvelous baldness of its “hyper-plain style,” such abstract assertions disingenuously mask the “theories” and “pretensions” that underwrite them: emotional “communication” is possible through the language of feelings tied to personal pronouns and through elimination of tropes, intellectual allusions, etc.; “feelings” can be fully grasped by the speaking subject without the interference of something like the unconscious; writing is a transparent adjunct to speech, which embodies feeling. Fascination with uncertainty, as in “Sign Under Test,” would threaten this confidence in representation and must be squelched: “Then again, there are certain things I never understood, yet lately I find myself mesmerized by these blank spots. They have become the sign posts of my consciousness.” For those who wish to posit the emotional coherence of a self in direct contact with other emotionally coherent selves, getting lost is the wrong set of directional signals.
Further, Bernstein’s poet of “simplicity” in “Thank You . . .” presumes that the attempt at transparent referentiality shows respect and even affection for the reader: “This poem appreciates / & values you as / a reader”; “This poem / represents the hope / for a poetry / that doesn’t turn / its back on / the audience, that / doesn’t think it’s / better than the reader.” As the poem’s title suggests, the writer’s “courtesy” will result in the reader’s gratitude. Both parties can be self-congratulatory while flattering the other. I would argue, though, that Bernstein shows respect for the audience through the sizeable demands he often makes on it in a poem; he implies that it needs no pandering and can handle how he stretches possibilities of “communication.” Take “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” a typical wisecracking Bernstein poem, in which he rewrites a line from a revered Shakespeare sonnet and one from an old nursery tune and tweaks a commonly used phrase to produce a double pun:
Respect for the reader comes with Groucho Marxist fun. While it is easy to see Bernstein’s point that speed of consumption characterizes people’s interaction with popular culture (including fast food), the connection between “spackling” and removing a “cartoon” cassette or DVD from the machine with a remote (temporarily ending the “race”) is tougher. “Spackle” might be a trope for critical analysis that fills in cultural gaps prior to adding a new layer to culture and its reception. The perceiver interrogates how the “posing” (presentation and/or duplicity) of a frame (“rink”) produces or conceals meaning; one frame is “closed” so that a more useful frame can replace it. Further, as a section of “In Parts” (one of several poems responding to Richard Tuttle’s conceptual/ minimalist sculpture) tells us, all frames are eventually vulnerable to dismantling: “first, space becomes the frame // like every solution, it looks good at first // the next step: make the frame the first layer of the visual experience // the third is getting rid of it.” Around the “corner” of “the hospital,” beyond strictures of a precise way of bed-making, and after the “coroner” has performed a post-mortem on an old “frame,” readers’ acts of perception can be “refurbished,” not disrespected.
Even as “Thank You’s” persona brags about how he appreciates readers, one egregious slip makes disrespect for some of the potential audience evident: “While / at times expressing / bitterness, anger, / resentment, xenophobia, / & hints of racism, its / ultimate mood is affirmative.” Affirmation of a limited community and negation of others comprise a sinister yes and a contradiction of the idea that the poem “has no / dogma.” In fact, Bernstein does not make right wingers feel “comfortable” with his work; in various poems, he expresses relatively direct, if linguistically playful opposition to the conservative Republican agenda, especially the pursuit of war in Iraq. Here are five quatrains from “The Ballad of the Girly Man”:
Like a handful of poems or sections of poems in this volume and earlier books by Bernstein, this irregularly rhymed and metered “ballad” borders on doggerel--and propagandistic doggerel at that. The internal rhymes “slimed and grimed” join surprisingly with an end word in a slant rhyme, “rime,” and the end-words “Darwin” and “Halliburton” make for a potent juxtaposition. However, the childishly worded apology of those (for the most part) erroneously tagged as “christ-killers” and the awkward, pleonastic wording in the last line above are the most egregious examples of “bad” verse. Because these aesthetic flaws are situated among the numerous stylistic approaches of poems in Girly Man with political content, as well as the prose section “Some of These Daze,” it is obvious that the poet is having fun composing what he knows very well is “bad” poetry from both a traditional and an experimental perspective, but he is also taking an unusual, useful opportunity for the development of a direct, almost linear argument. (Imagine Bernstein being pressed into service as a lyricist for a political rock band.)
The social resonances of “The Ballad” most obviously engage in dialogue with the diary-like prose reflections of “Some of These Daze,” which offer a detailed, “realistic” report of how people in New York City and elsewhere responded to the tragedy of 9/11, and with “War Stories,” one of the most politically acute catalogue poems (that I know of) done by a U.S. experimentalist. The seven-page poem begins:
Revising Clausewitz’s famous sentence and following a binary opposition that appears in Dickinson’s poetry, Bernstein damns prose--surely not the prose-(poetry) of the “New Sentence” by west coast Language poets!--but more generally, the notion that war as a choice reflects the limited imagination of “the aesthetically challenged.” Thus, he links “moral certainty” and indifference to or incompetence in assessing aesthetic value. (Note the allusion in the second sentence to the biggest cliché in Erich Segal’s smarmy seventies pop novel, Love Story.) By “aesthetics,” the poet means something very different from, say, aspects of German Romanticism culled for the architecture of Nazism. Later, we learn that “war is poetry without song” and “an excuse for lots of bad antiwar poetry,” which may allude to some “New American” Vietnam era protest verse. The kind of poetry that Bernstein implicitly valorizes as the opposite of bellicose prose entails exploratory, non-dogmatic negotiation, which offers a better chance for “conflict resolution” than the stultification or proscription of dialogue.
However, unlike Edwin Starr in his celebrated Motown song, “War,” Bernstein resists a thoroughly negative view of war, which can be legitimated as the sole available instrument for “the powerless” to resist “the powerful.” Of course, when he ventures even a slightly pro-war statement, it is productively unclear whether he is being serious or mouthing dubious rationalizations: “War is the reluctant foundation of justice and the unconscious guarantor of liberty”; “War is justified only when it stops war”; “War is an inevitable product of class struggle”; “War is the right of a people who are oppressed”; “War pays for those who have nothing left to lose.” The concepts in these sentences have been supported by a great deal of left-liberal and Marxist thought, especially by notions of oppressive forces’ implacability. Yet other sentences might be used to critique these ideas or to demand that they be severely qualified: “War is the principal weapon of a revolution that can never be achieved”; “War is two wrongs obliterating right. // War is the abandonment of reason in the name of principle”; “War is unjust even when it is just.” Such sentences expose the idea that war can deliver a just, enduring peace as illusory, but Bernstein is aware of how nations (and smaller groups), absurdly, can be backed into war: “War is like a gorilla at a teletype machine: not always the best choice but sometimes the only one you’ve got.”
Many other sentences in “War Stories” make excellent use of allusion. Two more examples should suffice: “War is pragmatism with an inhuman face”; “War is the opiate of the politicians.” The second one needs no gloss; the first may: before the Soviet Union bulldozed its way into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to assert its absolute control of the country, Czech leaders instituted the refreshingly liberal “Prague Spring” with the slogan, “Socialism with a human face.” Bernstein suggests that war is a pragmatic way to impose a particular ideology on those who do not want it and to allow a select group to reap the benefits of that imposition. In dialogue with others in the poem, this aphorism can facilitate analysis of the U.S.’s current perilous adventure in Iraq.
Turning back to “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” we learn that “all / good poems” tell “a story.” “War Stories” and numerous other poems in Girly Man do not; they encapsulate multiple stories--ones without a determinate beginning or end--and perspectives on stories in challenging juxtapositions. Against the boast for the populist poem that “A hundred / readers would each / read the poem / in an identical / manner & derive / the same message / from it,” Bernstein’s poems could bring a hundred readers into a chat room to discover some common ground, engage in many fascinating disagreements, and fill in each other’s gaps.
Reviewed by Thomas Fink
Lamenting poetry’s lack of centrality in American culture, not a few writers blame this “shame” on intellectual difficulty, lack of direct emotional communication, and presumed elitism in the work of most practitioners. They dream of a populist poetry as antidote. These folks should have a look at an early poem in Charles Bernstein’s Girly Man, “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” which begins “This is a totally / accessible poem” and ends by calling itself “real.” This self-styled populist poem provides the reader with myriad reassurances:
There are no new
concepts, no
theories, no
ideas to confuse
you. This poem
has no intellectual
pretensions. It is
purely emotional.
It fully expresses
the feelings of the
author: my feelings,
the person speaking
to you now.
It is all about
communication.
Heart to heart.
As Bernstein’s satire reveals, with the marvelous baldness of its “hyper-plain style,” such abstract assertions disingenuously mask the “theories” and “pretensions” that underwrite them: emotional “communication” is possible through the language of feelings tied to personal pronouns and through elimination of tropes, intellectual allusions, etc.; “feelings” can be fully grasped by the speaking subject without the interference of something like the unconscious; writing is a transparent adjunct to speech, which embodies feeling. Fascination with uncertainty, as in “Sign Under Test,” would threaten this confidence in representation and must be squelched: “Then again, there are certain things I never understood, yet lately I find myself mesmerized by these blank spots. They have become the sign posts of my consciousness.” For those who wish to posit the emotional coherence of a self in direct contact with other emotionally coherent selves, getting lost is the wrong set of directional signals.
Further, Bernstein’s poet of “simplicity” in “Thank You . . .” presumes that the attempt at transparent referentiality shows respect and even affection for the reader: “This poem appreciates / & values you as / a reader”; “This poem / represents the hope / for a poetry / that doesn’t turn / its back on / the audience, that / doesn’t think it’s / better than the reader.” As the poem’s title suggests, the writer’s “courtesy” will result in the reader’s gratitude. Both parties can be self-congratulatory while flattering the other. I would argue, though, that Bernstein shows respect for the audience through the sizeable demands he often makes on it in a poem; he implies that it needs no pandering and can handle how he stretches possibilities of “communication.” Take “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” a typical wisecracking Bernstein poem, in which he rewrites a line from a revered Shakespeare sonnet and one from an old nursery tune and tweaks a commonly used phrase to produce a double pun:
When in a race
with cartoons and French fries, spackle before
autoeject.
Hold tight!
The rink around the
posing is closed for retrofitting.
Refurbishment
is just around the hospital coroner.
Respect for the reader comes with Groucho Marxist fun. While it is easy to see Bernstein’s point that speed of consumption characterizes people’s interaction with popular culture (including fast food), the connection between “spackling” and removing a “cartoon” cassette or DVD from the machine with a remote (temporarily ending the “race”) is tougher. “Spackle” might be a trope for critical analysis that fills in cultural gaps prior to adding a new layer to culture and its reception. The perceiver interrogates how the “posing” (presentation and/or duplicity) of a frame (“rink”) produces or conceals meaning; one frame is “closed” so that a more useful frame can replace it. Further, as a section of “In Parts” (one of several poems responding to Richard Tuttle’s conceptual/ minimalist sculpture) tells us, all frames are eventually vulnerable to dismantling: “first, space becomes the frame // like every solution, it looks good at first // the next step: make the frame the first layer of the visual experience // the third is getting rid of it.” Around the “corner” of “the hospital,” beyond strictures of a precise way of bed-making, and after the “coroner” has performed a post-mortem on an old “frame,” readers’ acts of perception can be “refurbished,” not disrespected.
Even as “Thank You’s” persona brags about how he appreciates readers, one egregious slip makes disrespect for some of the potential audience evident: “While / at times expressing / bitterness, anger, / resentment, xenophobia, / & hints of racism, its / ultimate mood is affirmative.” Affirmation of a limited community and negation of others comprise a sinister yes and a contradiction of the idea that the poem “has no / dogma.” In fact, Bernstein does not make right wingers feel “comfortable” with his work; in various poems, he expresses relatively direct, if linguistically playful opposition to the conservative Republican agenda, especially the pursuit of war in Iraq. Here are five quatrains from “The Ballad of the Girly Man”:
A democracy once proposed
Is slimed and grimed again
By men with brute design
Who prefer hate to rime
Complexity’s a four-letter word
For those who count by nots and haves
Who revile the facts of Darwin
To worship the truth according to Halliburton. . . .
So be a girly man
& sing this gurly song
Sissies and proud
That we would never lie our way to war
The girly men killed christ
So the platinum DVD says
The Jews & blacks & gays
Are still standing in the way
We’re sorry we killed your god
A long, long time ago
But each dead soldier in Iraq
Kills the god inside, the god that’s still not dead.
Like a handful of poems or sections of poems in this volume and earlier books by Bernstein, this irregularly rhymed and metered “ballad” borders on doggerel--and propagandistic doggerel at that. The internal rhymes “slimed and grimed” join surprisingly with an end word in a slant rhyme, “rime,” and the end-words “Darwin” and “Halliburton” make for a potent juxtaposition. However, the childishly worded apology of those (for the most part) erroneously tagged as “christ-killers” and the awkward, pleonastic wording in the last line above are the most egregious examples of “bad” verse. Because these aesthetic flaws are situated among the numerous stylistic approaches of poems in Girly Man with political content, as well as the prose section “Some of These Daze,” it is obvious that the poet is having fun composing what he knows very well is “bad” poetry from both a traditional and an experimental perspective, but he is also taking an unusual, useful opportunity for the development of a direct, almost linear argument. (Imagine Bernstein being pressed into service as a lyricist for a political rock band.)
The social resonances of “The Ballad” most obviously engage in dialogue with the diary-like prose reflections of “Some of These Daze,” which offer a detailed, “realistic” report of how people in New York City and elsewhere responded to the tragedy of 9/11, and with “War Stories,” one of the most politically acute catalogue poems (that I know of) done by a U.S. experimentalist. The seven-page poem begins:
War is the extension of prose by other means.
War is never having to say you’re sorry.
War is the logical outcome of moral certainty.
War is conflict resolution for the aesthetically challenged.
War is a slow boat to heaven and an express train to hell.
War is the first resort of scoundrels.
War is the legitimate right of the powerless to resist the violence of the powerful.
War is delusion just as peace is imaginary.
Revising Clausewitz’s famous sentence and following a binary opposition that appears in Dickinson’s poetry, Bernstein damns prose--surely not the prose-(poetry) of the “New Sentence” by west coast Language poets!--but more generally, the notion that war as a choice reflects the limited imagination of “the aesthetically challenged.” Thus, he links “moral certainty” and indifference to or incompetence in assessing aesthetic value. (Note the allusion in the second sentence to the biggest cliché in Erich Segal’s smarmy seventies pop novel, Love Story.) By “aesthetics,” the poet means something very different from, say, aspects of German Romanticism culled for the architecture of Nazism. Later, we learn that “war is poetry without song” and “an excuse for lots of bad antiwar poetry,” which may allude to some “New American” Vietnam era protest verse. The kind of poetry that Bernstein implicitly valorizes as the opposite of bellicose prose entails exploratory, non-dogmatic negotiation, which offers a better chance for “conflict resolution” than the stultification or proscription of dialogue.
However, unlike Edwin Starr in his celebrated Motown song, “War,” Bernstein resists a thoroughly negative view of war, which can be legitimated as the sole available instrument for “the powerless” to resist “the powerful.” Of course, when he ventures even a slightly pro-war statement, it is productively unclear whether he is being serious or mouthing dubious rationalizations: “War is the reluctant foundation of justice and the unconscious guarantor of liberty”; “War is justified only when it stops war”; “War is an inevitable product of class struggle”; “War is the right of a people who are oppressed”; “War pays for those who have nothing left to lose.” The concepts in these sentences have been supported by a great deal of left-liberal and Marxist thought, especially by notions of oppressive forces’ implacability. Yet other sentences might be used to critique these ideas or to demand that they be severely qualified: “War is the principal weapon of a revolution that can never be achieved”; “War is two wrongs obliterating right. // War is the abandonment of reason in the name of principle”; “War is unjust even when it is just.” Such sentences expose the idea that war can deliver a just, enduring peace as illusory, but Bernstein is aware of how nations (and smaller groups), absurdly, can be backed into war: “War is like a gorilla at a teletype machine: not always the best choice but sometimes the only one you’ve got.”
Many other sentences in “War Stories” make excellent use of allusion. Two more examples should suffice: “War is pragmatism with an inhuman face”; “War is the opiate of the politicians.” The second one needs no gloss; the first may: before the Soviet Union bulldozed its way into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to assert its absolute control of the country, Czech leaders instituted the refreshingly liberal “Prague Spring” with the slogan, “Socialism with a human face.” Bernstein suggests that war is a pragmatic way to impose a particular ideology on those who do not want it and to allow a select group to reap the benefits of that imposition. In dialogue with others in the poem, this aphorism can facilitate analysis of the U.S.’s current perilous adventure in Iraq.
Turning back to “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” we learn that “all / good poems” tell “a story.” “War Stories” and numerous other poems in Girly Man do not; they encapsulate multiple stories--ones without a determinate beginning or end--and perspectives on stories in challenging juxtapositions. Against the boast for the populist poem that “A hundred / readers would each / read the poem / in an identical / manner & derive / the same message / from it,” Bernstein’s poems could bring a hundred readers into a chat room to discover some common ground, engage in many fascinating disagreements, and fill in each other’s gaps.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
NEW! Poem by Eugenio Montejo
Eugenio Montejo
MY COUNTRY IN AN ANCIENT MAP
The cartographer’s lines never lied, tracing
his dream for us. Certainly many
river channels were fabled, and our mountains
don’t stretch such to the south, nor does
the sea brush against them, though it tries
with its hopeful outlines. The size of the islands
is something else in the swell of his colors.
And yet the innocent glow of astonished eyes
was always precise under the brilliance of palms.
So what if the Orinoco extends like desire
farther north, or if this cape is misplaced,
with its face of a woman seeming almost to speak?
They never lied: here stood Manoa
at the end of the rainbow that rose from Dorado,
and farther off, from a paradise whose infinite
innocence made all its vessels’ journeys worthwhile.
What other truth might we extract?
The maps were graceful love letters,
sailors’ tattoos, unstained pages that tell us
life is eternal only on this lip of the Atlantic.
Translated from the Spanish by Kirk Nesset
MY COUNTRY IN AN ANCIENT MAP
The cartographer’s lines never lied, tracing
his dream for us. Certainly many
river channels were fabled, and our mountains
don’t stretch such to the south, nor does
the sea brush against them, though it tries
with its hopeful outlines. The size of the islands
is something else in the swell of his colors.
And yet the innocent glow of astonished eyes
was always precise under the brilliance of palms.
So what if the Orinoco extends like desire
farther north, or if this cape is misplaced,
with its face of a woman seeming almost to speak?
They never lied: here stood Manoa
at the end of the rainbow that rose from Dorado,
and farther off, from a paradise whose infinite
innocence made all its vessels’ journeys worthwhile.
What other truth might we extract?
The maps were graceful love letters,
sailors’ tattoos, unstained pages that tell us
life is eternal only on this lip of the Atlantic.
Translated from the Spanish by Kirk Nesset
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
NEW! Poem by Craig Morgan Teicher
Craig Morgan Teicher
A CURE FOR DEAD DOGS
As if time were a cure. As if all things
pass, this too shall pass were a cure
for time, the time it takes, time enough,
a little more time. As if waking
with a taste in your mouth
were a cure for childhood, a sweaty
sweaty dream, a monster, an
angel in the closet, under the bed
were a cure for a ghost. As if
a thing lost or forgotten, discarded,
fled, written down and revised, revisited
were a cure for dead dogs, dogs
put to sleep, put down, put out of mind,
put that way were a cure for the facts.
As if this were a cure for that.
As if what happened, events as told, as tell
about the teller were a cure for
what ails, what finally ends, what time
has taken its toll on. As if what can be
hoped for, what works, what heals
were a cure. As if a cure were needed.
A CURE FOR DEAD DOGS
. . . as if weather were a cure
for childhood.
--Bin Ramke
As if time were a cure. As if all things
pass, this too shall pass were a cure
for time, the time it takes, time enough,
a little more time. As if waking
with a taste in your mouth
were a cure for childhood, a sweaty
sweaty dream, a monster, an
angel in the closet, under the bed
were a cure for a ghost. As if
a thing lost or forgotten, discarded,
fled, written down and revised, revisited
were a cure for dead dogs, dogs
put to sleep, put down, put out of mind,
put that way were a cure for the facts.
As if this were a cure for that.
As if what happened, events as told, as tell
about the teller were a cure for
what ails, what finally ends, what time
has taken its toll on. As if what can be
hoped for, what works, what heals
were a cure. As if a cure were needed.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
NEW! Review of William Logan
The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin by William Logan. Columbia University Press, $29.50.
Reviewed by Brian Henry
William Logan is a tragic figure. Born at the wrong time--in the so-called tin age of poetry--and doomed to write about it, he earns his living by teaching in an MFA program, thus contributing to the very machine whose products he loathes. His talents and tastes would seem better-suited to a PhD program, but cultural studies and literary theory have taken over, shunning the likes of Logan (or so he would argue). Stuck with the poetry of this time, Logan rages against it. And the saddest aspect of this situation is that Logan’s criticism garners more attention than his poetry. The ignored poet, then, must content himself with being the notorious critic.
Logan’s primary attributes as a poetry critic--invective and predictability--serve him well as a regular knee-capper for The New Criterion but seem less fitting for The Undiscovered Country, a collection of his “odds and ends of criticism.” Predictability can be a critic’s greatest flaw. Worse than faulty judgment, predictability often accompanies a closed mind, or at least a mind already made up. Logan has his pets--Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Donald Justice, Amy Clampitt--as well as his bêtes noires--Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, Adrienne Rich, and, more recently (and infamously, due to the poet’s public threat to thrash the critic), Franz Wright. For the most part, his reviews of such poets follow a pre-ordained path of praise or damnation. His writing on poets who receive mixed and varying reactions--Paul Muldoon, Anne Carson, Charles Wright--is more worthwhile, because Logan actually demonstrates how he has come to terms with their work. Too often, though, Logan remains content with the elevation of personal taste to a general standard, and Logan’s failures as a critic frequently stem from his scuttling of his hero Randall Jarrell’s admonition, “At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.”
Despite his claim to read too many new books of poetry, Logan seems oddly unaware of the state of contemporary American poetry. He admits that trade presses have largely given up on poetry, but one would be hard-pressed to glean this from this selection of reviews. Of the 66 books by contemporary poets under consideration, nearly half (32) have been published by Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House) and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Another 22 are published by W.W. Norton, Ecco/HarperCollins, and Houghton Mifflin. Ohio University Press, the University of Arkansas Press, Wake Forest University Press, and Louisiana State University Press are the only university presses represented; BOA Editions, Overlook, Graywolf, Counterpoint, and Seven Stories are the only smaller independent presses. Considering that major publishers release a small fraction of the notable poetry books published every year, Logan’s near-exclusive focus on books issued by these publishers skews his critical perspective from the outset. It’s difficult to imagine a compilation of 66 books of contemporary poetry that can be as safe as Logan’s and that omits almost every important university press that publishes poetry (California, Wesleyan, Chicago, Georgia, Iowa, Pittsburgh, Illinois) as well as nearly every small independent press (Copper Canyon, New Directions, Talisman House, Burning Deck, Story Line, etc.). For many poets and critics, contemporary poetry would be unimaginable without the work published by these presses, and Logan’s inability, or unwillingness, to acknowledge them does not instill much confidence in his grasp of the present age, be it golden or tin. Logan’s inability to find worthwhile poetry seems due, in part, to his looking for it in the wrong places.
Logan’s introduction to The Undiscovered Country illuminates his weak grasp on the current situation of poetry. This jeremiad rails against the usual enemies--cultural studies, identity politics, the confessional impulse--without engaging any of these issues. The introduction seems outdated (Logan’s diatribe against talk show poetry, for example, would have been accurate and necessary a decade ago but seems largely pointless now, not least because Charles Bernstein made similar charges--in 1980 [in “Thought’s Measure”]--and many other critics have attacked the confessional, and post-confessional, modes), as well as petty; he uses the piece to get in the last word against theory-headed colleagues and others who have disagreed with him. (He also demonstrates, throughout the book, a general disdain for his students, whose ignorance of everything from ancient Greece to scansion to Walt Whitman’s era seems to feed his apoplectic outlook.) This is unfortunate because the book’s introduction is the only thing, other than Logan’s sensibility, that might hold this miscellany together; as such, the introduction’s half-hearted attempt to make an overarching argument works against the book, especially since the crux of that argument--contemporary poetry is mostly terrible--is undermined by Logan’s blinkered view.
For a poet-critic, Logan’s breadth--or generosity--of taste is dispiriting in its narrowness. He makes virtually no discoveries, champions only the already belaureled. The most experimental poets he writes about--John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and Anne Carson--are now safely mainstream. Only Carson maintains anything resembling a cutting-edge position, but even Harold Bloom is wild about her work. Logan seems to read every contemporary American poet through the lens of Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, or W.H. Auden. Though Logan likes to present himself as a contrarian, his major poets are hardly unsung. Logan also seems unaware of emerging or younger poets. One of the three younger poets reviewed in this book, Joe Bolton, committed suicide in his twenties and is a former student of Logan’s. (Bolton also happens to be one of the most interesting poets Logan discusses.) Nearly all of the youngest poets discussed in The Undiscovered Country--Carl Phillips (b. 1959), Li-Young Lee (b. 1957), Henri Cole (b. 1956), Mary Jo Salter (b. 1954), Franz Wright (b. 1953), Mark Doty (b. 1953), Elizabeth Spires (b. 1952)--were born in the same decade as Logan. Deborah Garrison (b. 1965) and Kevin Young (b. 1970), along with Bolton, are the only exceptions. Few critics of Logan’s standing have discovered so little.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Logan’s strongest essays and reviews concern non-contemporary poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, Housman, Marianne Moore, Auden. In these pieces, Logan generally allows his erudition to trump outrage, even as one suspects his re-readings of these poets somehow fuel his splenetic treatments of contemporary poetry. They are more historically based, but also more informative and less judgmental. Logan seems better equipped to unpack poems than to assess them; he is a good reader but a bad judge. Still, he does not hesitate to criticize these canonical figures, as when he writes that Moore’s “animals, those refugees from medieval bestiaries and emblem books, once offered her access to an ethical world; later they seemed merely the point, or beside the point.” Of the three pieces on Shakespeare (reviews of Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare, Berryman’s Shakespeare, and the third Arden edition of the sonnets and Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets), the Arden/Vendler review is the most substantial. Yet one must wonder about Logan’s compulsion toward creating (and maintaining) hierarchies when he specifies how many Shakespeare sonnets “have changed English literature” and how many he would “sell [his] soul for.” The dual focus of that compulsion--on a verifiable canon and on the critic’s own soul--seems rather charming, as does Logan’s willingness to make broad claims about Shakespeare’s fitness for sonnet writing: “Shakespeare’s rhetoric was not well adapted to the sonnet. His signature violence of language . . . rarely survives the sonnets’ casuistic wrangle of heartbreak and passion.” Logan does a fine job of excoriating the trendy idiocies of the Arden editor, Katherine Duncan-Jones, while offering measured praise for Helen Vendler’s study (partly because she is “at odds with current criticism, that tar pit of vengeance and half-baked philosophy,” partly because her criticism, at its best, “sustains itself with self-renewing insight”).
Logan’s clear-headed essay on Sylvia Plath cuts through the haze of myth that has surrounded her work. Though “Plath is as close as we have come to a serious poet formed in the supermarket, with supermarket values,” she “wrote like someone who did not have to worry about consequences.” His review of Lowell’s Collected Poems seems less successful; it skims the surface of each of Lowell’s books, offering mini-reviews with little or no new insights into the work. (His take on the Notebook/History/For Lizzie and Harriet/The Dolphin saga is an exception: “What was intimate [in Notebook] has been rendered remote, supervised, parched.”) Considering how frequently Logan cites Lowell when bemoaning the lack of talent and ambition in contemporary poets, he seems eager to replace Vendler as Lowell’s “primary idolator” (Jed Rasula’s phrase). His statement that Lowell “wrote no major poems after For the Union Dead,” then, seems refreshing in its reluctance to lionize, even if one questions the “major poems” designation.
As a prose writer, Logan has his own tics, most notably the double adjective, which sometimes exhibits an alliterative flourish--“dry, delicate talent” (Marie Ponsot), “dry, devious authority” (Mark Strand), “headlong, hell-bent hubris” (Sharon Olds)--but usually stems from an excess of his own hubris, from a need to outdo the poets being reviewed. Why else would a critic refer to Mark Doty’s “easy, gaudy style,” Anne Carson’s “jaunty, intemperate lines,” Eavan Boland’s “steamy, observant lines,” Cynthia Zarin’s “delicate, whimsical poems,” and Les Murray’s “sloppy, booming ways”? Why would he allow himself such lame redundancies as “sketchy, hither-thither manner” (Charles Wright), “clean, well-mannered lines” (Li-Young Lee), “self-medaled, self-beribboned witness” (Adrienne Rich), “cryptic, sphinxlike poet” (Geoffrey Hill), “modest, untemperamental character” (Elizabeth Spires), “static, lifeless observation” (Frieda Hughes), “tidy, delicate images” (Gjertrud Schnackenberg), “glittery, jewel-like style” (James Merrill)?
Agha Shahid Ali, being a Kashmiri-American, gets twice as many adjectives--“fabulous, delicate (even finicky), alien”--and later, Logan refers to him as “a charming, capable, even whimsical poet.” Perhaps because of her three-pronged name, Mary Jo Salter receives a trinity of adjectives from Logan for her “mousy, tense, off-kilter poems.” The double adjective appears two more times in the same paragraph: “honest, dutiful poems” and “fastidious, well-made poems.” In the space of three sentences, Logan has laid seven adjectives on Salter’s poems while saying very little about the work itself. He also compares her poems to those “a housewife would write, if there were such a thing as a housewife any more.” As if that nugget weren’t offensive enough, Logan later mentions her “hostlesslike sincerity” and “prom-dress exterior,” and toward the end of the review, her “well-mannered, well-manicured poems.” (Determined to win the award for The Most Tasteless Comment in a Review, he ends the review with “under the prim clothes there’s something wild and unmentionable and I wish she’d let it out.”) Logan’s comment on Henri Cole--“We reveal ourselves in our repetitions”--applies equally to himself as a critic, as does his comment on Jarrell: “Adjectives were not Jarrell’s strong point.”
Logan’s other major fault as a critic--his tendency toward the ad hominem attack--is what makes him an entertaining read (and a despised figure in a world full of back-scratching and false praise). These violations of critical decorum contribute more to his status as “the most hated man in American poetry” than his actual critical assessments do. Yet this matter is more than a lapse of decorum; it is a breach that undermines the reader’s trust not only in Logan as a critic but in criticism itself. A reader new to poetry, seeing Logan chastising a gay poet for his gaudy shallowness or an African-American poet for becoming a public figure, cannot be blamed for being turned off. Consider the following irrelevant comment: “Stephen Dunn is a rational man, probably a good husband and father, a generous and genial neighbor.” Predictably, this becomes a way for Logan to dismiss Dunn’s poems as “the stuff of scrapbooks.” While one might agree with Logan’s overall assessment of Dunn’s poetry, one should question his need to discuss Dunn as a person. If Dunn were an irrational man, a terrible husband and father, and selfish neighbor, would that make his poems more interesting? Of course not.
Elsewhere, he uses Kevin Young’s race as an excuse to take a shot at African-American writers in the academy, and accuses Charles Wright--one of the most prolific poets now writing--of “paralyzing laziness,” which apparently means not being as assiduous as Homer or Dante. Logan follows his half-vicious, half-perspicacious comment on Mark Doty--“Too often, he renders a world not transformed, just lacquered and varnished with a FOR SALE sign attached”--with a wholly vicious one: “If you hired him to design your house, it would end up looking like Versailles on a quarter acre, with gushing baroque fountains (concrete, not marble) and interiors by Liberace.” He might have had fun inventing this scenario, but it says nothing meaningful about Doty’s work.
The worst instance, however, concerns Rita Dove. Logan’s overarching argument--that Dove has become too famous to write good poems--turns on itself, since Logan’s entire review of Dove focuses on her fame. He spites his point to prove his point. Logan’s attack on Dove centers on her success--being named Glamour’s Woman of the Year, receiving numerous honorary doctorates, being Poet Laureate, etc.--which, he argues, has nothing to do with her poems. In other words, fame never guarantees good poetry. He’s right, of course, which makes his decision to review Dove’s career--rather than her poetry--questionable. Even when one agrees with Logan--say, when he writes, “[Eavan] Boland may want to bleed poetry, but often she just leaks self-importance,” “C.K. Williams is the guilt-ridden Peeping Tom of American poetry”--one has to question how being so personal can possibly benefit the criticism.
As entertaining as they can be, Logan’s barbs often serve as distractions from the matter supposedly at hand: the poetry. Because Logan is one of the few critics today who can write readable prose about Geoffrey Hill’s work, it’s unfortunate when he resorts to comments like “[Hill] would like to invent a poetry monks could enjoy (if poems came as hair shirts, he would have his own designer label).” There’s something schizophrenic about Logan’s critical persona: half scholar, half cocktail wag, he cannot let himself play it straight for more than a paragraph or two.
To Logan’s credit, he is willing to give a hard time to poets he usually admires--Hill, Schnackenberg, Anthony Hecht--while professing grudging admiration for poets who often annoy him--Carson, Charles Wright, Ashbery. He has come to admire Muldoon despite himself, gushing that Muldoon “sets himself impossible labors and exceeds them.” Sometimes, Logan’s put-downs can seem like wry compliments, as when he refers to Franz Wright as “a demonic version of William Carlos Williams.” And he can be brutally (and impersonally) right: “A poet’s talents exist in productive tension for only a decade or so. Before, the language is all main force, the subjects mistaken, the voice immature; after, the poet often hardens into manner.”
Logan’s model in wit, ambition, and ferocity, is, of course, Randall Jarrell. Like Jarrell, he can come up with zingers in his sleep, but Logan seldom puts them to legitimate use. His prolificness could be a source of this problem. Given limited time with which to engage a work, he too easily gives a book short shrift. If Logan were to live with a book for a year before assessing it, the resulting response would be fuller and more thoughtful, if not more positive. Logan possesses a strong mind and even stronger opinions, and despite its many faults, The Undiscovered Country is worth reading. Logan’s willingness to take a stand--even if for all the wrong reasons--distinguishes him from critics who seem intent on--and content with--passing off extended ad copy as criticism.
Reviewed by Brian Henry
William Logan is a tragic figure. Born at the wrong time--in the so-called tin age of poetry--and doomed to write about it, he earns his living by teaching in an MFA program, thus contributing to the very machine whose products he loathes. His talents and tastes would seem better-suited to a PhD program, but cultural studies and literary theory have taken over, shunning the likes of Logan (or so he would argue). Stuck with the poetry of this time, Logan rages against it. And the saddest aspect of this situation is that Logan’s criticism garners more attention than his poetry. The ignored poet, then, must content himself with being the notorious critic.
Logan’s primary attributes as a poetry critic--invective and predictability--serve him well as a regular knee-capper for The New Criterion but seem less fitting for The Undiscovered Country, a collection of his “odds and ends of criticism.” Predictability can be a critic’s greatest flaw. Worse than faulty judgment, predictability often accompanies a closed mind, or at least a mind already made up. Logan has his pets--Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Donald Justice, Amy Clampitt--as well as his bêtes noires--Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, Adrienne Rich, and, more recently (and infamously, due to the poet’s public threat to thrash the critic), Franz Wright. For the most part, his reviews of such poets follow a pre-ordained path of praise or damnation. His writing on poets who receive mixed and varying reactions--Paul Muldoon, Anne Carson, Charles Wright--is more worthwhile, because Logan actually demonstrates how he has come to terms with their work. Too often, though, Logan remains content with the elevation of personal taste to a general standard, and Logan’s failures as a critic frequently stem from his scuttling of his hero Randall Jarrell’s admonition, “At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.”
Despite his claim to read too many new books of poetry, Logan seems oddly unaware of the state of contemporary American poetry. He admits that trade presses have largely given up on poetry, but one would be hard-pressed to glean this from this selection of reviews. Of the 66 books by contemporary poets under consideration, nearly half (32) have been published by Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House) and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Another 22 are published by W.W. Norton, Ecco/HarperCollins, and Houghton Mifflin. Ohio University Press, the University of Arkansas Press, Wake Forest University Press, and Louisiana State University Press are the only university presses represented; BOA Editions, Overlook, Graywolf, Counterpoint, and Seven Stories are the only smaller independent presses. Considering that major publishers release a small fraction of the notable poetry books published every year, Logan’s near-exclusive focus on books issued by these publishers skews his critical perspective from the outset. It’s difficult to imagine a compilation of 66 books of contemporary poetry that can be as safe as Logan’s and that omits almost every important university press that publishes poetry (California, Wesleyan, Chicago, Georgia, Iowa, Pittsburgh, Illinois) as well as nearly every small independent press (Copper Canyon, New Directions, Talisman House, Burning Deck, Story Line, etc.). For many poets and critics, contemporary poetry would be unimaginable without the work published by these presses, and Logan’s inability, or unwillingness, to acknowledge them does not instill much confidence in his grasp of the present age, be it golden or tin. Logan’s inability to find worthwhile poetry seems due, in part, to his looking for it in the wrong places.
Logan’s introduction to The Undiscovered Country illuminates his weak grasp on the current situation of poetry. This jeremiad rails against the usual enemies--cultural studies, identity politics, the confessional impulse--without engaging any of these issues. The introduction seems outdated (Logan’s diatribe against talk show poetry, for example, would have been accurate and necessary a decade ago but seems largely pointless now, not least because Charles Bernstein made similar charges--in 1980 [in “Thought’s Measure”]--and many other critics have attacked the confessional, and post-confessional, modes), as well as petty; he uses the piece to get in the last word against theory-headed colleagues and others who have disagreed with him. (He also demonstrates, throughout the book, a general disdain for his students, whose ignorance of everything from ancient Greece to scansion to Walt Whitman’s era seems to feed his apoplectic outlook.) This is unfortunate because the book’s introduction is the only thing, other than Logan’s sensibility, that might hold this miscellany together; as such, the introduction’s half-hearted attempt to make an overarching argument works against the book, especially since the crux of that argument--contemporary poetry is mostly terrible--is undermined by Logan’s blinkered view.
For a poet-critic, Logan’s breadth--or generosity--of taste is dispiriting in its narrowness. He makes virtually no discoveries, champions only the already belaureled. The most experimental poets he writes about--John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and Anne Carson--are now safely mainstream. Only Carson maintains anything resembling a cutting-edge position, but even Harold Bloom is wild about her work. Logan seems to read every contemporary American poet through the lens of Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, or W.H. Auden. Though Logan likes to present himself as a contrarian, his major poets are hardly unsung. Logan also seems unaware of emerging or younger poets. One of the three younger poets reviewed in this book, Joe Bolton, committed suicide in his twenties and is a former student of Logan’s. (Bolton also happens to be one of the most interesting poets Logan discusses.) Nearly all of the youngest poets discussed in The Undiscovered Country--Carl Phillips (b. 1959), Li-Young Lee (b. 1957), Henri Cole (b. 1956), Mary Jo Salter (b. 1954), Franz Wright (b. 1953), Mark Doty (b. 1953), Elizabeth Spires (b. 1952)--were born in the same decade as Logan. Deborah Garrison (b. 1965) and Kevin Young (b. 1970), along with Bolton, are the only exceptions. Few critics of Logan’s standing have discovered so little.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Logan’s strongest essays and reviews concern non-contemporary poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, Housman, Marianne Moore, Auden. In these pieces, Logan generally allows his erudition to trump outrage, even as one suspects his re-readings of these poets somehow fuel his splenetic treatments of contemporary poetry. They are more historically based, but also more informative and less judgmental. Logan seems better equipped to unpack poems than to assess them; he is a good reader but a bad judge. Still, he does not hesitate to criticize these canonical figures, as when he writes that Moore’s “animals, those refugees from medieval bestiaries and emblem books, once offered her access to an ethical world; later they seemed merely the point, or beside the point.” Of the three pieces on Shakespeare (reviews of Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare, Berryman’s Shakespeare, and the third Arden edition of the sonnets and Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets), the Arden/Vendler review is the most substantial. Yet one must wonder about Logan’s compulsion toward creating (and maintaining) hierarchies when he specifies how many Shakespeare sonnets “have changed English literature” and how many he would “sell [his] soul for.” The dual focus of that compulsion--on a verifiable canon and on the critic’s own soul--seems rather charming, as does Logan’s willingness to make broad claims about Shakespeare’s fitness for sonnet writing: “Shakespeare’s rhetoric was not well adapted to the sonnet. His signature violence of language . . . rarely survives the sonnets’ casuistic wrangle of heartbreak and passion.” Logan does a fine job of excoriating the trendy idiocies of the Arden editor, Katherine Duncan-Jones, while offering measured praise for Helen Vendler’s study (partly because she is “at odds with current criticism, that tar pit of vengeance and half-baked philosophy,” partly because her criticism, at its best, “sustains itself with self-renewing insight”).
Logan’s clear-headed essay on Sylvia Plath cuts through the haze of myth that has surrounded her work. Though “Plath is as close as we have come to a serious poet formed in the supermarket, with supermarket values,” she “wrote like someone who did not have to worry about consequences.” His review of Lowell’s Collected Poems seems less successful; it skims the surface of each of Lowell’s books, offering mini-reviews with little or no new insights into the work. (His take on the Notebook/History/For Lizzie and Harriet/The Dolphin saga is an exception: “What was intimate [in Notebook] has been rendered remote, supervised, parched.”) Considering how frequently Logan cites Lowell when bemoaning the lack of talent and ambition in contemporary poets, he seems eager to replace Vendler as Lowell’s “primary idolator” (Jed Rasula’s phrase). His statement that Lowell “wrote no major poems after For the Union Dead,” then, seems refreshing in its reluctance to lionize, even if one questions the “major poems” designation.
As a prose writer, Logan has his own tics, most notably the double adjective, which sometimes exhibits an alliterative flourish--“dry, delicate talent” (Marie Ponsot), “dry, devious authority” (Mark Strand), “headlong, hell-bent hubris” (Sharon Olds)--but usually stems from an excess of his own hubris, from a need to outdo the poets being reviewed. Why else would a critic refer to Mark Doty’s “easy, gaudy style,” Anne Carson’s “jaunty, intemperate lines,” Eavan Boland’s “steamy, observant lines,” Cynthia Zarin’s “delicate, whimsical poems,” and Les Murray’s “sloppy, booming ways”? Why would he allow himself such lame redundancies as “sketchy, hither-thither manner” (Charles Wright), “clean, well-mannered lines” (Li-Young Lee), “self-medaled, self-beribboned witness” (Adrienne Rich), “cryptic, sphinxlike poet” (Geoffrey Hill), “modest, untemperamental character” (Elizabeth Spires), “static, lifeless observation” (Frieda Hughes), “tidy, delicate images” (Gjertrud Schnackenberg), “glittery, jewel-like style” (James Merrill)?
Agha Shahid Ali, being a Kashmiri-American, gets twice as many adjectives--“fabulous, delicate (even finicky), alien”--and later, Logan refers to him as “a charming, capable, even whimsical poet.” Perhaps because of her three-pronged name, Mary Jo Salter receives a trinity of adjectives from Logan for her “mousy, tense, off-kilter poems.” The double adjective appears two more times in the same paragraph: “honest, dutiful poems” and “fastidious, well-made poems.” In the space of three sentences, Logan has laid seven adjectives on Salter’s poems while saying very little about the work itself. He also compares her poems to those “a housewife would write, if there were such a thing as a housewife any more.” As if that nugget weren’t offensive enough, Logan later mentions her “hostlesslike sincerity” and “prom-dress exterior,” and toward the end of the review, her “well-mannered, well-manicured poems.” (Determined to win the award for The Most Tasteless Comment in a Review, he ends the review with “under the prim clothes there’s something wild and unmentionable and I wish she’d let it out.”) Logan’s comment on Henri Cole--“We reveal ourselves in our repetitions”--applies equally to himself as a critic, as does his comment on Jarrell: “Adjectives were not Jarrell’s strong point.”
Logan’s other major fault as a critic--his tendency toward the ad hominem attack--is what makes him an entertaining read (and a despised figure in a world full of back-scratching and false praise). These violations of critical decorum contribute more to his status as “the most hated man in American poetry” than his actual critical assessments do. Yet this matter is more than a lapse of decorum; it is a breach that undermines the reader’s trust not only in Logan as a critic but in criticism itself. A reader new to poetry, seeing Logan chastising a gay poet for his gaudy shallowness or an African-American poet for becoming a public figure, cannot be blamed for being turned off. Consider the following irrelevant comment: “Stephen Dunn is a rational man, probably a good husband and father, a generous and genial neighbor.” Predictably, this becomes a way for Logan to dismiss Dunn’s poems as “the stuff of scrapbooks.” While one might agree with Logan’s overall assessment of Dunn’s poetry, one should question his need to discuss Dunn as a person. If Dunn were an irrational man, a terrible husband and father, and selfish neighbor, would that make his poems more interesting? Of course not.
Elsewhere, he uses Kevin Young’s race as an excuse to take a shot at African-American writers in the academy, and accuses Charles Wright--one of the most prolific poets now writing--of “paralyzing laziness,” which apparently means not being as assiduous as Homer or Dante. Logan follows his half-vicious, half-perspicacious comment on Mark Doty--“Too often, he renders a world not transformed, just lacquered and varnished with a FOR SALE sign attached”--with a wholly vicious one: “If you hired him to design your house, it would end up looking like Versailles on a quarter acre, with gushing baroque fountains (concrete, not marble) and interiors by Liberace.” He might have had fun inventing this scenario, but it says nothing meaningful about Doty’s work.
The worst instance, however, concerns Rita Dove. Logan’s overarching argument--that Dove has become too famous to write good poems--turns on itself, since Logan’s entire review of Dove focuses on her fame. He spites his point to prove his point. Logan’s attack on Dove centers on her success--being named Glamour’s Woman of the Year, receiving numerous honorary doctorates, being Poet Laureate, etc.--which, he argues, has nothing to do with her poems. In other words, fame never guarantees good poetry. He’s right, of course, which makes his decision to review Dove’s career--rather than her poetry--questionable. Even when one agrees with Logan--say, when he writes, “[Eavan] Boland may want to bleed poetry, but often she just leaks self-importance,” “C.K. Williams is the guilt-ridden Peeping Tom of American poetry”--one has to question how being so personal can possibly benefit the criticism.
As entertaining as they can be, Logan’s barbs often serve as distractions from the matter supposedly at hand: the poetry. Because Logan is one of the few critics today who can write readable prose about Geoffrey Hill’s work, it’s unfortunate when he resorts to comments like “[Hill] would like to invent a poetry monks could enjoy (if poems came as hair shirts, he would have his own designer label).” There’s something schizophrenic about Logan’s critical persona: half scholar, half cocktail wag, he cannot let himself play it straight for more than a paragraph or two.
To Logan’s credit, he is willing to give a hard time to poets he usually admires--Hill, Schnackenberg, Anthony Hecht--while professing grudging admiration for poets who often annoy him--Carson, Charles Wright, Ashbery. He has come to admire Muldoon despite himself, gushing that Muldoon “sets himself impossible labors and exceeds them.” Sometimes, Logan’s put-downs can seem like wry compliments, as when he refers to Franz Wright as “a demonic version of William Carlos Williams.” And he can be brutally (and impersonally) right: “A poet’s talents exist in productive tension for only a decade or so. Before, the language is all main force, the subjects mistaken, the voice immature; after, the poet often hardens into manner.”
Logan’s model in wit, ambition, and ferocity, is, of course, Randall Jarrell. Like Jarrell, he can come up with zingers in his sleep, but Logan seldom puts them to legitimate use. His prolificness could be a source of this problem. Given limited time with which to engage a work, he too easily gives a book short shrift. If Logan were to live with a book for a year before assessing it, the resulting response would be fuller and more thoughtful, if not more positive. Logan possesses a strong mind and even stronger opinions, and despite its many faults, The Undiscovered Country is worth reading. Logan’s willingness to take a stand--even if for all the wrong reasons--distinguishes him from critics who seem intent on--and content with--passing off extended ad copy as criticism.
Monday, January 22, 2007
NEW! Review of Tessa Rumsey
The Return Message by Tessa Rumsey. W. W. Norton, $14.95.
Reviewed by L. S. Klatt
In The Return Message, Tessa Rumsey composes herself in the aftermath of “a love affair that ended badly.” Behind every lyric is a debris field of emotional wreckage--betrayal, miscarriage, broken engagement. Even the “cherry blossoms” are “caught. / Inside the static loop of loss.” If “all forms of landscape are autobiographical,” as Charles Wright once suggested, then what we have here in the “mountain streams of No-Where” is the poet at an impasse.
But bleak as that seems, The Return Message is not mired in the morbidly confessional; whatever her personal losses, Rumsey investigates the idea of love from a philosophical perspective. Rather than croon about heartache, she seeks ontological answers: if romance is only a biological impulse, then why, after intercourse, do I still long for my partner? “Does the soul--exist?”
The book identifies this craving for love with other human passions--namely, fame and transcendence. Are these evidences of personality or egomania? In one hilarious barb at the Rolling Stones, Rumsey writes, “memo to Mick: a spotlight shone on a body don’t infuse the body with soul.” But, on the other hand, his stage persona, to some extent, derives from audience acclaim. In The Return Message, identity is formed from without and within, at once concocted by others and self-expressed.
How different is Jagger from a Juliet lost in her Romeo’s adulation? “Consider The Individual, a tightly corseted continuum of light and ashes contained. /. . . in a burst of self. / Revelation: an exodus we call ‘falling in love’ or ‘abandoning one’s proper station.’” Untying the corset may not be “proper” but it is necessary; to be fully affirmed, the self must merge. Here and throughout, Rumsey posits a personhood that is blurred.
In Rumsey’s universe, all boundaries are artificial and therefore permeable. “If each world stops at walls of its interior-- / (Where one body begins, where the next body ends--) / Isn’t a wall a way of rubbing up against, of joining, of letting in?”
Even her grammar is not hard and fast. More often than not (note: “. . . in a burst of self. / Revelation”), the reader must ignore the period and roll through the stop in order to follow the thought: a hyper-enjambment.
Nor do the poems comprise a discrete series. Rather, they are paired, sharing a title and, wherever the book is opened, occupying left and right pages. But in these two versions of the same poem, the opposing lyrics are not mirror images but asymmetrical. The poem on the left side is consistently three lines long while the one on the right is more expansive. The first is elliptic, the second, digressive, and the two do not often coalesce.
Yet other poems among the hedgerows Rumsey has cultivated bear striking resemblances, and the reader encounters replications. For example, the “lipsynching” of “Headset” has already been anticipated in an earlier poem: “Because I could not be the songbird I found. / Another to croon my favorite tune.” Or in the opposite direction, “the cherry blossoms” of “April Fools” become “the Paradox of Cherry Blossoms, standing for winter and spring simultaneously” in “Fantasy Coat.” True to the design of a labyrinth--where one never knows which way is in and which is out--these passageways occupy the foreground and are complicated.
Rumsey’s “endless loop of landscape” sounds oddly similar to another line from Charles Wright--“all landscape is abstract and tends to repeat itself”--as if the organic material of Wright’s work has cross-pollinated. Certainly the two poets share an affinity for music, metaphysics, and Zen-like queries, but Rumsey more frequently strikes an exuberant, almost Thoreauvian note: “Don’t disappear! Shine brighter.” Such a plea resonates with “Copperopolis,” where she exclaims, “Every breathing body has a city buried. /. . . And lo! You are lit up from the inside!”
These moments resist the desperation we might expect from a poet obsessed with mortality. Though Rumsey stares down death and its concomitants, she remains inspired by the dazzle of the day-to-day, no matter how brief or troubled. The landscape, as it has for artists ad infinitum, keeps her musings grounded. This, after all, is a peregrinator who is wont “to ramble over. / Earth alone while still transmitting thoughts and feelings to whoever may be listening.”
Reviewed by L. S. Klatt
In The Return Message, Tessa Rumsey composes herself in the aftermath of “a love affair that ended badly.” Behind every lyric is a debris field of emotional wreckage--betrayal, miscarriage, broken engagement. Even the “cherry blossoms” are “caught. / Inside the static loop of loss.” If “all forms of landscape are autobiographical,” as Charles Wright once suggested, then what we have here in the “mountain streams of No-Where” is the poet at an impasse.
But bleak as that seems, The Return Message is not mired in the morbidly confessional; whatever her personal losses, Rumsey investigates the idea of love from a philosophical perspective. Rather than croon about heartache, she seeks ontological answers: if romance is only a biological impulse, then why, after intercourse, do I still long for my partner? “Does the soul--exist?”
The book identifies this craving for love with other human passions--namely, fame and transcendence. Are these evidences of personality or egomania? In one hilarious barb at the Rolling Stones, Rumsey writes, “memo to Mick: a spotlight shone on a body don’t infuse the body with soul.” But, on the other hand, his stage persona, to some extent, derives from audience acclaim. In The Return Message, identity is formed from without and within, at once concocted by others and self-expressed.
How different is Jagger from a Juliet lost in her Romeo’s adulation? “Consider The Individual, a tightly corseted continuum of light and ashes contained. /. . . in a burst of self. / Revelation: an exodus we call ‘falling in love’ or ‘abandoning one’s proper station.’” Untying the corset may not be “proper” but it is necessary; to be fully affirmed, the self must merge. Here and throughout, Rumsey posits a personhood that is blurred.
In Rumsey’s universe, all boundaries are artificial and therefore permeable. “If each world stops at walls of its interior-- / (Where one body begins, where the next body ends--) / Isn’t a wall a way of rubbing up against, of joining, of letting in?”
Even her grammar is not hard and fast. More often than not (note: “. . . in a burst of self. / Revelation”), the reader must ignore the period and roll through the stop in order to follow the thought: a hyper-enjambment.
Nor do the poems comprise a discrete series. Rather, they are paired, sharing a title and, wherever the book is opened, occupying left and right pages. But in these two versions of the same poem, the opposing lyrics are not mirror images but asymmetrical. The poem on the left side is consistently three lines long while the one on the right is more expansive. The first is elliptic, the second, digressive, and the two do not often coalesce.
Yet other poems among the hedgerows Rumsey has cultivated bear striking resemblances, and the reader encounters replications. For example, the “lipsynching” of “Headset” has already been anticipated in an earlier poem: “Because I could not be the songbird I found. / Another to croon my favorite tune.” Or in the opposite direction, “the cherry blossoms” of “April Fools” become “the Paradox of Cherry Blossoms, standing for winter and spring simultaneously” in “Fantasy Coat.” True to the design of a labyrinth--where one never knows which way is in and which is out--these passageways occupy the foreground and are complicated.
Rumsey’s “endless loop of landscape” sounds oddly similar to another line from Charles Wright--“all landscape is abstract and tends to repeat itself”--as if the organic material of Wright’s work has cross-pollinated. Certainly the two poets share an affinity for music, metaphysics, and Zen-like queries, but Rumsey more frequently strikes an exuberant, almost Thoreauvian note: “Don’t disappear! Shine brighter.” Such a plea resonates with “Copperopolis,” where she exclaims, “Every breathing body has a city buried. /. . . And lo! You are lit up from the inside!”
These moments resist the desperation we might expect from a poet obsessed with mortality. Though Rumsey stares down death and its concomitants, she remains inspired by the dazzle of the day-to-day, no matter how brief or troubled. The landscape, as it has for artists ad infinitum, keeps her musings grounded. This, after all, is a peregrinator who is wont “to ramble over. / Earth alone while still transmitting thoughts and feelings to whoever may be listening.”
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
NEW! Review of Nathalie Stephens
Touch to Affliction by Nathalie Stephens. Coach House Books, $16.95.
Reviewed by Meg Hurtado
With Touch to Affliction, Nathalie Stephens explores the poet-as-trespasser. Her speaker wanders through a world to which she clearly feels entitled (she intimately references the train stations and street corners of this poetically consecrated world). However, her cutting lyricism soon reveals that this city exudes not only loss but rapidly approaching danger, and her role within it is more than simply elegiac. Touch to Affliction strives to save what must endure, and Stephens’s speaker is responsible for this task. The poet plays both the elegant bard and the invincible journalist, leading the reader through a “city” that has fallen into the hands of its fate. Her double identity extends to a sense of double vision, which she manipulates gracefully through her awareness of language as song and system. Stephens conjures vibrant images and clarion scenes, but their beauty never compromises their full dimensionality. She has been assigned to search for both the inner and outer story of this “city.”
Her writing itself possesses the texture of light, revealing both what can and what cannot be seen. In one simple example, she says of “a dog lying heavily against a wall” that “It is or is not cold.” In many of the poems, Stephens dramatically expands this sense of double-sight. The fruits of this fearless expansion are several moments in which we know that the speaker is both living and dead. Such moments do not produce horror, nor any sense of a tortured, “ghostly” speaker. Rather, they comprise an achievement in clairvoyance just as serene as it is extraordinary.
The speaker of Touch to Affliction belongs to a world of transparency, a devastated city in which usual boundaries of culture, language, and survival have been removed. Even so, her awareness of such boundaries penetrates the text--constant references to the nature of language at first appear academic, but prove to be anything else. All of her linguistic theatrics eventually assert themselves as essential. Even the tiniest inversions of diction or unconventional, abstract syntax earn their place in this city.
The city could be Paris, to which she makes multiple references, but it could just as easily be 1945-Berlin, or 1917-Moscow, or any other city in time of strife. Fortunately, Stephens possesses such a miraculous intuition for and control of language that this breadth of subject does not damage her visceral nearness to the world of her creation. Though Stephens definitely conjures a visually and intellectually surreal landscape for this “city,” it is a surreality with which she is familiar. Such intimacy with the universal cannot help but impress and fascinate the reader, especially since she graphically describes the emergence of “the city” from her own thigh.
This image resurfaces many times in Touch to Affliction, as do several others, but the thoughts behind them remain ever-original and breathtaking. She identifies her city not only with all cities, but with all individuals. Furthermore, every individual is also a war, a tragedy. She asks, “What part of you is city? What part of you is famine?”
Stephens gives her speaker no immunity against this human-as-war identity. The speaker describes herself in blatantly geographical terms: “You identify me as a contested surface. A stripped margin of land.” Obviously, this gives rise to all kinds of existential questions, the answer to each of which is “yes.” Stephens’s ability to create double-realities seems unlimited--she has created a narrator both omniscient and completely subjective. This assessment also applies to the text itself. The reader may easily traverse half of Touch to Affliction before he or she notices its basic form. Stephens does not compromise between prose and poetry, but exploits language so well that her poems embody and transcend both mediums, just as “the city” must embody and transcend disaster and individuality.
With her view of every individual, including the speaker, as a war zone, Stephens appears “confessional” on many levels. Such a comfortable category feels long-lost and perhaps welcome to the reader, but Stephens boldly and bluntly refuses it, just as it seems to be most supported: “Not confessional. Evidence, rather, of the unspeakable. That thing toward which we move and we are an affront to the language we use to name it.”
She allows us no easy roads, but if one had to “bend [Stephens] into language,” one could call her a tragic poet, in the word’s truest sense--not only does she possess power over tragedy, but inimitable kinship with it. This is the “terrible beauty” of Yeats and the purity of contemporary European writers like Tomaz Salamun, sung by an earth-mother of humility and strength. Though Touch to Affliction waltzes with the tides of violence, Nathalie Stephens writes without fear or compromise, “brazen and stumbling.” Touch to Affliction is a clean, stone Madonna, buckled and rife with violence and the possibility of exultation.
Reviewed by Meg Hurtado
With Touch to Affliction, Nathalie Stephens explores the poet-as-trespasser. Her speaker wanders through a world to which she clearly feels entitled (she intimately references the train stations and street corners of this poetically consecrated world). However, her cutting lyricism soon reveals that this city exudes not only loss but rapidly approaching danger, and her role within it is more than simply elegiac. Touch to Affliction strives to save what must endure, and Stephens’s speaker is responsible for this task. The poet plays both the elegant bard and the invincible journalist, leading the reader through a “city” that has fallen into the hands of its fate. Her double identity extends to a sense of double vision, which she manipulates gracefully through her awareness of language as song and system. Stephens conjures vibrant images and clarion scenes, but their beauty never compromises their full dimensionality. She has been assigned to search for both the inner and outer story of this “city.”
Her writing itself possesses the texture of light, revealing both what can and what cannot be seen. In one simple example, she says of “a dog lying heavily against a wall” that “It is or is not cold.” In many of the poems, Stephens dramatically expands this sense of double-sight. The fruits of this fearless expansion are several moments in which we know that the speaker is both living and dead. Such moments do not produce horror, nor any sense of a tortured, “ghostly” speaker. Rather, they comprise an achievement in clairvoyance just as serene as it is extraordinary.
The speaker of Touch to Affliction belongs to a world of transparency, a devastated city in which usual boundaries of culture, language, and survival have been removed. Even so, her awareness of such boundaries penetrates the text--constant references to the nature of language at first appear academic, but prove to be anything else. All of her linguistic theatrics eventually assert themselves as essential. Even the tiniest inversions of diction or unconventional, abstract syntax earn their place in this city.
The city could be Paris, to which she makes multiple references, but it could just as easily be 1945-Berlin, or 1917-Moscow, or any other city in time of strife. Fortunately, Stephens possesses such a miraculous intuition for and control of language that this breadth of subject does not damage her visceral nearness to the world of her creation. Though Stephens definitely conjures a visually and intellectually surreal landscape for this “city,” it is a surreality with which she is familiar. Such intimacy with the universal cannot help but impress and fascinate the reader, especially since she graphically describes the emergence of “the city” from her own thigh.
This image resurfaces many times in Touch to Affliction, as do several others, but the thoughts behind them remain ever-original and breathtaking. She identifies her city not only with all cities, but with all individuals. Furthermore, every individual is also a war, a tragedy. She asks, “What part of you is city? What part of you is famine?”
Stephens gives her speaker no immunity against this human-as-war identity. The speaker describes herself in blatantly geographical terms: “You identify me as a contested surface. A stripped margin of land.” Obviously, this gives rise to all kinds of existential questions, the answer to each of which is “yes.” Stephens’s ability to create double-realities seems unlimited--she has created a narrator both omniscient and completely subjective. This assessment also applies to the text itself. The reader may easily traverse half of Touch to Affliction before he or she notices its basic form. Stephens does not compromise between prose and poetry, but exploits language so well that her poems embody and transcend both mediums, just as “the city” must embody and transcend disaster and individuality.
With her view of every individual, including the speaker, as a war zone, Stephens appears “confessional” on many levels. Such a comfortable category feels long-lost and perhaps welcome to the reader, but Stephens boldly and bluntly refuses it, just as it seems to be most supported: “Not confessional. Evidence, rather, of the unspeakable. That thing toward which we move and we are an affront to the language we use to name it.”
She allows us no easy roads, but if one had to “bend [Stephens] into language,” one could call her a tragic poet, in the word’s truest sense--not only does she possess power over tragedy, but inimitable kinship with it. This is the “terrible beauty” of Yeats and the purity of contemporary European writers like Tomaz Salamun, sung by an earth-mother of humility and strength. Though Touch to Affliction waltzes with the tides of violence, Nathalie Stephens writes without fear or compromise, “brazen and stumbling.” Touch to Affliction is a clean, stone Madonna, buckled and rife with violence and the possibility of exultation.
Monday, January 15, 2007
NEW! Review of Camille Guthrie
In Captivity by Camille Guthrie. Subpress, $14.
Reviewed by Kate Seferian
Camille Guthrie jumpstarts her second book, In Captivity, with intrigue and exhilaration: her opening poem, “The Start of the Hunt,” spreads over nine pages and sets a suspenseful tone and level of intensity that enable the book to forge ahead and captivate the reader. Guthrie alternates between the contemplative and narrative voice and offers the reader a multitude of speakers--the lover, the prey, the predator, the quiet observer. The motif of the hunt pervades the book, whether appearing blatantly and literally, as in the opening poem when Guthrie writes a list of “What To Bring on a Hunt,” or emerging as the slight shadow behind the poet’s words as she secretly “first saw you / pearled primed bearded beading” in “At the Fountain.” Guthrie manipulates this motif, a theme normally expressed through visual art, to fit language rather than imagery. Most noted for its role as muse for painters and Greek mythology, hunting embodies a strong blend of impassioned emotions rooted in both the senses and the intellect. Historically, hunting hints at aristocracy as well as a social event that calls for rituals in certain cultures, and Guthrie includes all of these facets of the “traditional” hunt in her poems.
Guthrie includes only eleven poems in this collection, but she splits several of the poems over a series of pages, thus allowing the reader an unobstructed path to comprehension and absorption; the creation of sections offers a smooth transition from one page to the next and evades the weight and confusion often engendered in more compact, concentrated poetry. Despite the segmented structure of poems, Guthrie still manages to string the theme of the hunt from beginning to end and enthrall the reader with details of life’s literal and figurative pursuits. She describes herself in the collection’s first lines:
In the following sections, Guthrie erupts with the suspense, violence, and passion born from the chase--“this is the starting point because I look for danger / everywhere putting out feelers”--and later violence bursts to the forefront: “Scent hounds slip from the shore / Rashness, Desire, Anxiety, Fear & Grief / could ambush us you know / their snouts disappear into wild grasses . . . Cacophony rings like unstoppable capital / its edges echo into the trees / Such riches there / to rot have run.”
Guthrie experiments with structural segmentation in “My Boyfriend.” In a note at the back of the book explaining the source of inspiration for some of the poems, she explains that this poem was modeled after a list in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Guthrie breaks down the boyfriend into three parts--his exterior, his interior, and his actions--and the poem is formed from these three sections. Guthrie mixes the earthly, natural, historical, and abstract to build the boyfriend’s character: “a back like chalked sidewalk,” “fingers like sparklers,” “elbows like antidotes,” “a skull like a geode,” “throat like a bold headline,” “bowels like surrealism,” “veins like Japanese characters.”
Guthrie concludes the book with the same segmented format of the beginning, and the final poem, “In Captivity,” while laced with the grief and anxiety of personal, psychological confinement along with more macrocosmic burdens, closes with optimism and anticipation for something greater: “Captured by your debt to pay / You are the genius of this shore / And will be truthful to your words / To all who listen from here on.” Guthrie spends much of the collection reflecting upon her own personal hunts or those that exist around her, but in the final poem she addresses “you,” potentially the reader, and finishes with insight directed toward the audience. In meshing the more intangible, philosophical illusions and aspects of the hunt with the physical and personal, Guthrie achieves flexibility with a topic that could be dangerously limited.
Reviewed by Kate Seferian
Camille Guthrie jumpstarts her second book, In Captivity, with intrigue and exhilaration: her opening poem, “The Start of the Hunt,” spreads over nine pages and sets a suspenseful tone and level of intensity that enable the book to forge ahead and captivate the reader. Guthrie alternates between the contemplative and narrative voice and offers the reader a multitude of speakers--the lover, the prey, the predator, the quiet observer. The motif of the hunt pervades the book, whether appearing blatantly and literally, as in the opening poem when Guthrie writes a list of “What To Bring on a Hunt,” or emerging as the slight shadow behind the poet’s words as she secretly “first saw you / pearled primed bearded beading” in “At the Fountain.” Guthrie manipulates this motif, a theme normally expressed through visual art, to fit language rather than imagery. Most noted for its role as muse for painters and Greek mythology, hunting embodies a strong blend of impassioned emotions rooted in both the senses and the intellect. Historically, hunting hints at aristocracy as well as a social event that calls for rituals in certain cultures, and Guthrie includes all of these facets of the “traditional” hunt in her poems.
Guthrie includes only eleven poems in this collection, but she splits several of the poems over a series of pages, thus allowing the reader an unobstructed path to comprehension and absorption; the creation of sections offers a smooth transition from one page to the next and evades the weight and confusion often engendered in more compact, concentrated poetry. Despite the segmented structure of poems, Guthrie still manages to string the theme of the hunt from beginning to end and enthrall the reader with details of life’s literal and figurative pursuits. She describes herself in the collection’s first lines:
Nevertheless, like a blank piece of paper
I drifted along past buildings . . .
Withdrawing into cloudy heights
I walked up aimless blocks each day
Discord knocking about in my head
Sick with fear that had no form
Captured by my debt to pay
Wanting to make something of myself
Wanting knowledge & intimacy . . .
In the following sections, Guthrie erupts with the suspense, violence, and passion born from the chase--“this is the starting point because I look for danger / everywhere putting out feelers”--and later violence bursts to the forefront: “Scent hounds slip from the shore / Rashness, Desire, Anxiety, Fear & Grief / could ambush us you know / their snouts disappear into wild grasses . . . Cacophony rings like unstoppable capital / its edges echo into the trees / Such riches there / to rot have run.”
Guthrie experiments with structural segmentation in “My Boyfriend.” In a note at the back of the book explaining the source of inspiration for some of the poems, she explains that this poem was modeled after a list in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Guthrie breaks down the boyfriend into three parts--his exterior, his interior, and his actions--and the poem is formed from these three sections. Guthrie mixes the earthly, natural, historical, and abstract to build the boyfriend’s character: “a back like chalked sidewalk,” “fingers like sparklers,” “elbows like antidotes,” “a skull like a geode,” “throat like a bold headline,” “bowels like surrealism,” “veins like Japanese characters.”
Guthrie concludes the book with the same segmented format of the beginning, and the final poem, “In Captivity,” while laced with the grief and anxiety of personal, psychological confinement along with more macrocosmic burdens, closes with optimism and anticipation for something greater: “Captured by your debt to pay / You are the genius of this shore / And will be truthful to your words / To all who listen from here on.” Guthrie spends much of the collection reflecting upon her own personal hunts or those that exist around her, but in the final poem she addresses “you,” potentially the reader, and finishes with insight directed toward the audience. In meshing the more intangible, philosophical illusions and aspects of the hunt with the physical and personal, Guthrie achieves flexibility with a topic that could be dangerously limited.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
new issue of Verse
The new issue of Verse is out. Click on the link above for details. The discounted offer is good through January.
Up next: a big issue devoted to French poetry & poetics.
Up next: a big issue devoted to French poetry & poetics.
Monday, December 18, 2006
NEW! Review of Catherine Bowman
Notarikon by Catherine Bowman. Four Way Books, $14.95.
Reviewed by Meg Hurtado
Catherine Bowman’s Notarikon fills its reader with a profound sense of the obscure, of the million tiny, sticky acts of irreverence that constitute an individual’s window to the world. She quilts together all the minutiae that make a neighbor, a marriage, or a vacation, to name a few. Her own ability to systematize images and information fascinates her, and the book’s title reflects this fascination appropriately: “Notarikon” is a Kabbalist term for making new words out of the first and last letters of other words in holy texts.
Bowman’s gift for synthesis does not always work to her advantage. Several of the poems in Part I veer toward moments in which her abundance of eclectic imagery becomes pure sensory overload. In the poem “Persephone and the Man of Letters,” each stanza focuses on a letter of the alphabet, followed by layers upon layers of imagery. For example, the “E” stanza concerned with the letter contains the line: “Of humidity. Of day-old coffee. And fries extra-crispy.” If this association bears poetic fruit of a Kabbalist persuasion, it excludes the vast majority of readers and appears excessive to the point of self-consciousness. That the poem takes the highly artificial form of a list only reinforces this gap between Bowman’s arrangement of words and what depths it might reveal.
But in the poem “Fish with Coco: Five Havana Milagros,” she manages to array such images as “an animal eye / marinated for days,” “a raft / named Jesus,” “a colossal frosted cake,” and “a pinch / of black camino” into a cohesive lyrical unit. “Fish with Coco” also takes the form of a numbered list, but in its case structure frees lyricism, rather than constricting it. At her very best, Bowman turns those techniques which evoke self-consciousness into absolute vision. Part I of Notarikon contains fourteen poems, and all of them reflect her love of lists, letters, and numbers. Bowman divides “Fish with Coco” into five numbered sections, titled “Eyes,” “Tongues,” “Ass,” “Ears,” and “Heart.” She speckles her poem “The O Store” with words containing the letter “O,” and the twenty-six lines function as an abecedarian.
Bowman also makes use of cross-references between poems, causing the reader to wonder just what kind of intricate world of imagery and meaning they have entered via her work. For example, the first poem is titled “Heart,” as is the last section of “Fish with Coco.” Her poem “1000 Kisses” contains multiple words containing the letter “O” in every line, like “The O Store.” “1000 Kisses” also features the phrase “convulsed, crucified,” which the reader may link to Bowman’s “Jesus’ Feet,” an earlier poem concerned with the moment when Christ has risen from his death by crucifixion and displays his wounds to the apostles.
Religious and spiritual concerns in Notarikon cannot be attributed to detached intellectual exploration. All of her poetry features some degree of “religious” diction, though the poem titled “Jesus’ Feet” displays its religious intention most blatantly--not only because of the subject matter and tone, but because only in this poem does Bowman muffle her impulse to load the poem with radiant eclecticism. What imagery she does employ can be found in the actual story of Christ: “shepherd crossing the valleys,” “vinegar,” “yeasty loaves of bread,” “broiled fish, and a honeycomb.”
In spite of her ability to successfully curb her verse with traditional imagery, Bowman possesses her own conception and spirituality, as well as her own mode of description. For instance, the Eden symbolism in “Heart,” the first poem of the book, is difficult to miss. But Bowman portrays the serpent as an object of wonder rather than revulsion, betraying a penchant for the inversion of values which pervades not only her use of language but the book’s paradigm as a whole. “Heart” ends with the thought that a snake “Tastes like / hope, memory, forgiveness.”
Part II of Notarikon contains a single poem called “1000 Lines.” A strictly composed account of a ten-year marriage, “1000 Lines” boasts one hundred stanzas, divided into ten cantos. Each stanza has ten lines, with ten syllables in each line. If her free-wheeling voice in Part I caused the reader to question Bowman’s ability to function within a strict form, “1000 Lines” leaves behind all such doubts.
Almost every stanza begins, technically, with the word “ten” (Bowman cleverly begins some lines with words like “tenderness” and “tensions,” etc). Her more obscure choices, like “tenement” and “tenebrionid,” would sound out of place if employed by any less skillful author, but Bowman wields them beautifully. She gives each canto a “title” in italics--a list, punctuated by dashes, of the most searing pieces of the stanzas, or the most pivotal moments in the “marriage.” They appear random, but prove rich.
The strict form of “1000 Lines” serves not only an aesthetic, but a reflexive purpose. It binds the reader to the speaker’s paradigm, insofar as the reader must view the poem in very much the same way as the speaker views her marriage: the poem’s beginning contains its end. The uneven manner in which Bowman divides her stanzas into cantos may produce a certain amount of disorientation regarding the reader’s pace, but the fact remains that the speaker’s world of “ten kinds of limbo,” “sulfur springs,” “summer and winter and what’s / found between” will vanish with the thousandth line. Yet, like the speaker, the reader must focus on the beauty and breadth of Bowman’s language because of the honesty and simplicity of the poem’s structure. Even beginning every stanza with the word “ten” never grows tiresome. Rather, the reader becomes devoted to the inevitable pleasure and comfort that the reader will receive from her linguistic cleverness. The speaker of the poem immerses herself in the pleasure of memory free from obvious analysis--“Ten reasons why we ended. I’m drawing / a blank” and “Ten years, and I remember more about / the trees we’ve seen.” The reader, free from the anxiety of over-analysis, engages fully in the act of rapturous hindsight.
“1000 Lines” brings Bowman’s insatiable penchant for eclecticism to intellectual and emotional fruition. Her bizarre, ecstatic imagery finally yields boundless originality and beauty. One parenthetical stanza in Canto 2 epitomizes her gift for synthesis as images of “the red dragon man,” “jailer boy,” “phone sex,” etc, build to a nightmarish pitch. Bowman then ends the stanza with a mystical sense of purpose, by bombarding the reader with the crystalline nature of love: “I screamed, What are / you? He bent down and whispered, I am you!”
With “1000 Lines,” Bowman has unveiled the soul of Notarikon. She finishes the book with only one poem, “Nostrum,” which composes the whole of Part III and functions as a successful sugar-pill to soothe the violence and memory of “1000 Lines.” With such an ending, Bowman exhibits the awareness of her personal strengths and honesty about universal human weakness that make Notarikon both extravagant and essentialist.
Reviewed by Meg Hurtado
Catherine Bowman’s Notarikon fills its reader with a profound sense of the obscure, of the million tiny, sticky acts of irreverence that constitute an individual’s window to the world. She quilts together all the minutiae that make a neighbor, a marriage, or a vacation, to name a few. Her own ability to systematize images and information fascinates her, and the book’s title reflects this fascination appropriately: “Notarikon” is a Kabbalist term for making new words out of the first and last letters of other words in holy texts.
Bowman’s gift for synthesis does not always work to her advantage. Several of the poems in Part I veer toward moments in which her abundance of eclectic imagery becomes pure sensory overload. In the poem “Persephone and the Man of Letters,” each stanza focuses on a letter of the alphabet, followed by layers upon layers of imagery. For example, the “E” stanza concerned with the letter contains the line: “Of humidity. Of day-old coffee. And fries extra-crispy.” If this association bears poetic fruit of a Kabbalist persuasion, it excludes the vast majority of readers and appears excessive to the point of self-consciousness. That the poem takes the highly artificial form of a list only reinforces this gap between Bowman’s arrangement of words and what depths it might reveal.
But in the poem “Fish with Coco: Five Havana Milagros,” she manages to array such images as “an animal eye / marinated for days,” “a raft / named Jesus,” “a colossal frosted cake,” and “a pinch / of black camino” into a cohesive lyrical unit. “Fish with Coco” also takes the form of a numbered list, but in its case structure frees lyricism, rather than constricting it. At her very best, Bowman turns those techniques which evoke self-consciousness into absolute vision. Part I of Notarikon contains fourteen poems, and all of them reflect her love of lists, letters, and numbers. Bowman divides “Fish with Coco” into five numbered sections, titled “Eyes,” “Tongues,” “Ass,” “Ears,” and “Heart.” She speckles her poem “The O Store” with words containing the letter “O,” and the twenty-six lines function as an abecedarian.
Bowman also makes use of cross-references between poems, causing the reader to wonder just what kind of intricate world of imagery and meaning they have entered via her work. For example, the first poem is titled “Heart,” as is the last section of “Fish with Coco.” Her poem “1000 Kisses” contains multiple words containing the letter “O” in every line, like “The O Store.” “1000 Kisses” also features the phrase “convulsed, crucified,” which the reader may link to Bowman’s “Jesus’ Feet,” an earlier poem concerned with the moment when Christ has risen from his death by crucifixion and displays his wounds to the apostles.
Religious and spiritual concerns in Notarikon cannot be attributed to detached intellectual exploration. All of her poetry features some degree of “religious” diction, though the poem titled “Jesus’ Feet” displays its religious intention most blatantly--not only because of the subject matter and tone, but because only in this poem does Bowman muffle her impulse to load the poem with radiant eclecticism. What imagery she does employ can be found in the actual story of Christ: “shepherd crossing the valleys,” “vinegar,” “yeasty loaves of bread,” “broiled fish, and a honeycomb.”
In spite of her ability to successfully curb her verse with traditional imagery, Bowman possesses her own conception and spirituality, as well as her own mode of description. For instance, the Eden symbolism in “Heart,” the first poem of the book, is difficult to miss. But Bowman portrays the serpent as an object of wonder rather than revulsion, betraying a penchant for the inversion of values which pervades not only her use of language but the book’s paradigm as a whole. “Heart” ends with the thought that a snake “Tastes like / hope, memory, forgiveness.”
Part II of Notarikon contains a single poem called “1000 Lines.” A strictly composed account of a ten-year marriage, “1000 Lines” boasts one hundred stanzas, divided into ten cantos. Each stanza has ten lines, with ten syllables in each line. If her free-wheeling voice in Part I caused the reader to question Bowman’s ability to function within a strict form, “1000 Lines” leaves behind all such doubts.
Almost every stanza begins, technically, with the word “ten” (Bowman cleverly begins some lines with words like “tenderness” and “tensions,” etc). Her more obscure choices, like “tenement” and “tenebrionid,” would sound out of place if employed by any less skillful author, but Bowman wields them beautifully. She gives each canto a “title” in italics--a list, punctuated by dashes, of the most searing pieces of the stanzas, or the most pivotal moments in the “marriage.” They appear random, but prove rich.
The strict form of “1000 Lines” serves not only an aesthetic, but a reflexive purpose. It binds the reader to the speaker’s paradigm, insofar as the reader must view the poem in very much the same way as the speaker views her marriage: the poem’s beginning contains its end. The uneven manner in which Bowman divides her stanzas into cantos may produce a certain amount of disorientation regarding the reader’s pace, but the fact remains that the speaker’s world of “ten kinds of limbo,” “sulfur springs,” “summer and winter and what’s / found between” will vanish with the thousandth line. Yet, like the speaker, the reader must focus on the beauty and breadth of Bowman’s language because of the honesty and simplicity of the poem’s structure. Even beginning every stanza with the word “ten” never grows tiresome. Rather, the reader becomes devoted to the inevitable pleasure and comfort that the reader will receive from her linguistic cleverness. The speaker of the poem immerses herself in the pleasure of memory free from obvious analysis--“Ten reasons why we ended. I’m drawing / a blank” and “Ten years, and I remember more about / the trees we’ve seen.” The reader, free from the anxiety of over-analysis, engages fully in the act of rapturous hindsight.
“1000 Lines” brings Bowman’s insatiable penchant for eclecticism to intellectual and emotional fruition. Her bizarre, ecstatic imagery finally yields boundless originality and beauty. One parenthetical stanza in Canto 2 epitomizes her gift for synthesis as images of “the red dragon man,” “jailer boy,” “phone sex,” etc, build to a nightmarish pitch. Bowman then ends the stanza with a mystical sense of purpose, by bombarding the reader with the crystalline nature of love: “I screamed, What are / you? He bent down and whispered, I am you!”
With “1000 Lines,” Bowman has unveiled the soul of Notarikon. She finishes the book with only one poem, “Nostrum,” which composes the whole of Part III and functions as a successful sugar-pill to soothe the violence and memory of “1000 Lines.” With such an ending, Bowman exhibits the awareness of her personal strengths and honesty about universal human weakness that make Notarikon both extravagant and essentialist.
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