Rachel Blau DuPlessis, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

from DRAFT 87: TRACE ELEMENTS

All serifs are seraphim: such is faith in the letter.
Such is the force of the word.
The faith is touching.
In every alphabet
in every technology of memory—
knots, rocks, dots, rhymes,
codes, rites,
monuments and books—
in that shockingly endless tower built
of the balances and loops of wire
ceramic shards set in cement, and mirrors, too,
extendable yet poised in mutual
enjambment—
oh.
There is no verb in this sentence.

The verb is diffuse
it is the feeling of Being
and Reflecting
inside the substance of language
and of time,
making the poem “embodied, embedded,
and extended mind.”

Lidija Dimkovska, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Lidija Dimkovska

MEMORY

My memory is a soldier’s tin of bully beef
with no best-before date. I return to places
I have trodden with only one tongue in my mouth
and beat egg yolks for the natives to give them a good voice.
In a snow of the whites Jesus lies crucified as if in jest.
It takes two tongues for a French kiss,
now that I have several I’m no longer a woman but a dragon.
Like St George, I never learned
to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, my nose being blocked for years
I myself only breathe through others’ nostrils, the EU’s paying.
Aha! There’s something fishy about you, something’s fishy here,
the little fallen angels
collecting old paper and plastic cry after me,
I love them best when they take their cots
out into the corridor to air the DNA
then A. and I sprawl out on them, a side each,
and in a carefully worked-out act of love
all our porcelain teeth chip off,
our gums turn into wide-open eyes, before which
our tongues in the darkness trip each other up,
growling, whimpering and moaning, and we
feel neither fear nor sorrow.
My memory is the black box from a crashed war-plane
with no best-before date. I return to places I trod
with only one blood under my skin,
I cross off fertile days for the natives on the calendars
with their name days and family feasts,
tame animals crave for the wild, the wild for the tame.
Like a Jewish couple during fasts and monthly periods,
so God and I have been sleeping in separate beds for years.


Translated from Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid

Garrett Caples, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)


Garrett Caples

MEMOIR OF THE GRADUATE POETICS PROGRAM

I was A’s third husband within the department. I’d come to study the poems of B with C, but C wasn’t there anymore and I had no intention of fucking D, so I had a lot of time on my hands. Sometimes the other husbands and I would go for walks, but it was cold, and I had little in common with any of them, except E, who was a tennis player, not a poet. (At least E drank!) I started hanging out with F, and we quickly became lovers even though I was already married. But her poetics were going nowhere, so I soon hitched my wagon to G, whose fellowship was the envy of everyone else. But he immediately left me for H, whose father had made it in raisins, and by now I’m like, I gotta get with one of the teachers if I’m ever going to make the big reading! But it was harder than I thought; I introduced me to J but we didn’t get along despite some regard for each other’s work. I began a flirtation with K, but K made considerably less than J—“just like the real world”—so she couldn’t really support me. Finally I settled on L, for, despite the fact no one liked his poems, L had position—meaning he could fuck—and he’d gotten tenure back when you could get it by mail. But M, my advisor, advised me against it, and instead hooked me up with N, who refused to return my calls after the first fuck, so I turned to O for solace, because, let’s face it, he’d fuck almost anyone, but he was already in bed with P by the time I got to his apartment. In despair, I called Q in Thailand and he convinced me to join him—“there’s plenty to fuck,” he said, “and you only write poems when you want to”—but I was waylaid en route to the airport by R, who offered me a teaching assistantship in exchange for sex, so we fucked until the add/drop period ended. That evening I fled in my nightshirt, only to get caught in S’s headlights. We’d read together once a long time ago, so she drove me to her house and gave me some clothes, but wouldn’t let me stay the night. I called T to come pick me up and, though he said he usually didn’t get down like this, since I was in a skirt he’d fuck me for one night and pretend to not know. The next morning, I was late for coffee with U, who I found at the café busily preparing a list of everyone he’d fucked in the program. I scanned its columns for ideas. Finally I settled on V because he was seated at the next table, but all V wanted was a handjob in the car while he drove to class, after which I was on my own again. W’s seminar was about to begin, but W wasn’t a poet, so fucking him was out of the question. X’s workshop was about to let out, but chances of hooking up were slim. Finally I saw Y heading across campus, but when I caught up to her, all she would offer was a golden shower under the footbridge. I couldn’t turn it down. By now my appearance was beginning to attract attention, and I’d already run through the most plausible faculty, so imagine my surprise when I bumped into Z of all people, who was desperate for a piss. Since there were no bathrooms on campus and I was already wet, I invited him under the footbridge, where he hosed me down like a burning building. “Nice work,” Z said, zipping up. “I expect I’ll see you at the big reading.” “What does this have to do with poetry?” I asked, but Z was either hard of hearing or had learned not to notice such questions in advance. “You’re going to be late,” he said.

Landis Everson, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Landis Everson

PRIVATIZATION

(A Poem For Laura Bush)


Privatization is me talking to you
about nobody listening in, about riding
at one end of a long car and you at the other,
about tinted windows and messages off a security phone.
I wear a pink-dyed sable, made up as a 60s lady
and a bug-proof hat that you look a long time at.

This is an act of being secret at the expense
of others, also closed from each other as
we won’t admit everything. Oh darling,
perhaps our contract is too secluded
and we should be released into cornfields. I try

to imagine Buck Rogers in a bunny suit.
But you sit tall and handsome ready to blast off.
As you streak toward the future, I drift into the past.
Oh Buck Rodgers you are reading poetry
by someone from the future I can’t compete with,
me studying Herodotus trying to avoid slip ups.

What goes on under our clothes
keeps the world away, that’s for sure, but
your private thoughts, my private wishes
are running askew lost on a crooked city avenue.
Privatization
may make us rich, like history, but secrecy
folds us up into maps hiding the direction children play in.

Bankruptcy could flatten the tires on our limousine.
Is it time to be apart like radiator ornaments
whose engines have vanished beneath their hearts?
Lift me off this hanger, I’m yesterday’s coat.
They say hangups talk. But I’m telling you they don’t.

Jennifer Moxley, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Jennifer Moxley

LOVING THINGS

We should get over it. If, that is, we are to unlock the mysteries of love. This must be done in the right order, by slow, steep, hierarchical steps. Or so Socrates claims the wise (and probably apocryphal) priestess Diotima told him.

To get over the love of beautiful things (and by extension, people) would be to free oneself of death and decay, of beauty’s transience and our covetous nature. We would fear no footprint. But in order to reach this state of tranquility we must discover the beauty that is “unmixed, not adulterated with human flesh and colors and much other mortal rubbish.” Such a beauty, as must be evident by now, could only be seen with the mind. It cannot be sensuous, it cannot engage touch, taste, smell, sound, or sight. It cannot, therefore, exist in the “things we live among.”

Yet, it is undeniable, much mortal rubbish and adulterated flesh strike us as very beautiful. If they are not actually beautiful, then why do they strike us so? Because they participate in what is so. It is as if there is a zone of rarefied air—Beauty itself—which they pass through, and while in its eternal particles are made to seem, temporarily, to be Beauty itself.

Strange how this air works differently on different matter. On flesh and bone it seems to rest but for a few brief years, before recoiling in horror. On “organized” things, as Emerson calls them—the beautiful results of man infusing form with imagination—this rarefied air seems to linger much longer, sometimes for many millennia. But it is still an illusion, for Beauty exists outside of these things and does not, and never will, belong to them.

He who sees this clearly, and learns to be indifferent to the mineral fact, “touches reality” (not its pale semblance). And it will be granted him “to be the friend of God, and immortal if any man ever is.” Here we have the origin of Western mysticism’s “wormhole” to God. No tedious rituals, trinkets, or icons, just a straight mental shot right to the source.

Bernadette Mayer, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Bernadette Mayer

CINEMA ALLEY

the sun is on the born-again paper
my name is still Bernadette Mayer
just as Spanish people have Irish names
as in “enter: Grace Murphy of Cordoba”

you’d shoot the beginning of the movie
in a bowling alley, setting the scene
middle supermarket, the development of love
the end a bakery window, pastries & reflections

critics would say “this movie’s a sonnet”
but unbeknownst to them a sestina’s structure
would lie beneath & airplanes fly by
whenever one of the end-words is said

     a secret cult classic
     the envy of every cinema buff

Ron Padgett, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Ron Padgett

HOW TO

When people ask me
if I write with a computer
or by hand I pause,
for it’s a question
I do not find interesting
anymore. Forty years ago
I saw how Ted’s old typewriter
fit his bricklike writing one
word-brick at a time, and how
my lightweight portable with French
keyboard let me whiz along
as if halfway in another language.
Now I write with words
that never were mine nor will
they ever be. A demon inside
says I do not write at all.

NEW! Poem by Michaël Vandebril

Michaël Vandebril

STARI BEOGRAD

one-stringed city that perpetually
severs my wrists

nothing to grieve about

I gorge on gluey blood

an army of young gents marches to a dogged beat
dancing across the water--fresh water dreams

like pigs drawn from the river

I look at your young breasts
while you give your mouth to another man

--like a drunken bird
its wings slithering along the bars--

you sing an ancient anthem of the city
and beograd sings softly with you

o white thighs of the balkans
on which I lay my greedy hands


Translated by Brian Doyle

NEW! Review of Baude, Ramos, Ross

The Flying House by Dawn-Michelle Baude. Parlor Press (Free Verse Editions), $14.

Please Do Not Feed the Ghost by Peter Ramos. BlazeVOX Books, $16.

Strata by Joe Ross. Dusie Books, $15.

Reviewed by Andy Frazee

In her endnotes, Dawn-Michelle Baude calls the poems of The Flying House “site-specific writing,” the core of which is “the idea that presence—of the writer, of the word, and of the subject—is intrinsic to the work of art.” She goes on to note how “the act of writing became for me an historical ‘site’ . . . Actual details, conditions and circumstances litter the poems with a story of their making.” With the exception of the staggering, fragmented prose poetry of “Postcards from Ir)Rational Lands,” the poems here are themselves “littered” (probably the better word is “positioned”) down the page; like archeological digs, these excavations work to reveal the intertwined strata of self, place, and language:

                            I was late, delayed

               by a ground fog
           a mistral, a heron
                   I found a piece
                         it was missing
             clung to the rock
the displaced plain
                     I found a number of mirrors

In the nine poems—mostly sequences—of the book, one, the “Fieldwork” series, reappears periodically throughout and serves as both structural principle and investigative model, developing the archeological-historical trope of “site-specific” in full. One is reminded of Emerson’s notion of language as “fossil poetry”—and here Baude’s use of the page, full of a syntactic tension derived from the Projectivist techniques of Olson and Duncan (Baude, in fact, studied with the latter), gives the “ruins . . . we’ve inherited” new life, as in “Fieldwork III”:

             excavated lines
         some spare misfortune at the extremity
                 of provenance          accumulations,

     signs of the imminent
             ruins      what we’ve inherited—

         meandering depictions          odd metaphors,
on the flickering screens
            of the unconscious self
                     thin and liminal

Implied in Baude’s notion of the site-specific, and in her loyalty to the historical and contextual, is a notion of witness. “The Beirut Poems” sequence in particular works to image the violence Baude saw during her time in Lebanon, deftly—through consideration of the teaching she did there—weaving in a discourse of poetry in tension with the destruction going on around her. In section V—a section beginning, “Because the wheelbarrow is red”—the poet juxtaposes the work of William Carlos Williams to the proximate turbulence, and meditates on what use poetry may have in such a world:

                 the rain glazes
       the object that’s attractive
but a friend is in excruciating pain
                   where the good doctor
         applies image to a wound
                     no medicine can ever
     heal.

While this witness isn’t completely divergent from “the poetry of witness” outlined in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting anthology and elsewhere, Baude’s witness implies an attention to the local that is always necessarily political, and is not limited to the singular, catastrophic event. In these poems, the process of the present becoming the past is itself an unending catastrophe of loss. One of the motifs of the book is that of the explosion, one both literal and metaphorical, and the history we are given is the post-detonation “history of gaps, disparity, lacunae” one must both attempt to understand and live within. While the notion of “post-detonation” may lead one to thoughts of “post-9/11,” it is important to recognize that here 9/11 is a recurrence, one catastrophe within many, if not infinitely many. Baude’s witness, thereby, is a kind of attention to the real, the present, the ongoingness of history—it is a mode of being in the world, of being responsible for what one sees and where one is, rather than a response to any particular event.

In this sense, Baude’s archeological-poetic investigation is necessarily also an investigation into the self, as we find it in the world and in language. On the page the “I” is itself figured as a kind of relic—or, more precisely, as a relic among relics; it is “a memory / (family) / (origin) / the artifact” lodged within “the context / of ages / the reliquary.” Ultimately, the book suggests, it is presence, this particular site-specificity in the world and on the page, that allows for the “I” to “orient the resonant fields of association,” thereby “constituting an artifact, its own, a document // in perpetual process and acts of formation.” Recognizing its own constitution as an artifact (though, importantly, as an artifact-in-process), the poem implies, allows the “I” a kind of awe, if not wisdom:

         to let the circle predominate

                 the fluent          the continuous

               no matter how deep

how very          high          overhead

With her concern with history, place, and formal experimentation, Baude positions herself firmly in the Pound-Williams-Olson tradition, and The Flying House extends that lineage nobly, giving us a vision not only of the world and of language, but also of our places in them—a vision not only historical but, as Baude suggests, urgent. “I detected letters in the profusion / a world of shadows // omissions,” the poet writes in “Fieldwork I.” “[H]ow else to know where we’re going // I pluck, gather, salvage what I can.”

*

In Please Do Not Feed the Ghost, Peter Ramos also performs a kind of historical investigation, though while Baude’s work feeds off that of Olson and Duncan, Ramos’s project is more in line with the Robert Lowell of Life Studies. Whatever lukewarm autobiographical verse Lowell’s work may have inadvertently unleashed on American poetry, Ramos takes up what continues to make Life Studies important: a recognition that selfhood is never self-contained, but is a performance that operates within, is even constructed by, the demands of family, desire, and national life—demands which in the work of both poets may take place years before their births.

Ramos’s subject in the most general sense is nostalgia, and the threat of the desire to indulge in it. Specifically, the book deals with the risk of not seeing the past as it needs to be seen, or in replacing the past with a myth that only serves to reinforce one’s illusions—personal or national—in the present. And in this sense the work is as much an exploration of the implications of the autobiographical or confessional mode as it is an example of it. Thus the book opens with the (aptly) quasi-autobiographical, quasi-dramatic delivery of “John Berryman in my Dreams,” where the speaker functions both as Berryman and as the poet dreaming of being Berryman:

Blacking out in some basement café, crowded
And alone in the sad mid century, I come back & go on
Hunting powder-puff angels, the pan-caked faces

Under bangs cut straight, the puckered mouths wet
With lipstick. Then do I move through night, glass
After each empty glass—am I all right?

In this mode of the late-night urban underbelly, the cover of the book, a video still, shows an update of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks—this time of two solitary figures inside a fluorescent-lit Laundromat. The window, as in the painting, puts us at a distance, in the role of voyeurs, with the figures inside like zoo animals. Ramos’s poems are filled with such ghosts of “the sad mid-century,” specters that waver between the worlds of objective presentation and the subjective “return of the repressed.” The former consideration takes into account the poet’s responsibility to the people he renders; “How will you speak for them?” the speaker of “The Put-Together Wedding Cake” asks, speaking, presumably, of his own newlywed parents:

The groom is learning the language, dull-eyed
for remembering what they said: “America the gold
and golden fleece!” The bride thinks of daffodils
which turn to kitchen gloves.

The latter consideration takes into account how those independent agents become figures in one’s own psychology, and of how one uses others in the construction of personality, if not neuroses. Not feeding the ghosts involves not transgressing the boundaries that define ghosts’ uncanny nature, lest they bring you back with them: “October, color gone from the wheat / and you straggle back,” begins the title poem,

your mouth
full of loam, jacket lined with rot, crazy
as the leaves.

Each time I try to sleep you off, hoping winter
will stamp its feet, sober you up.
But the hallways soften. You
stuff me full of mothballs.

But, as the poems indicate again and again, it is just this feeding of ghosts, this return to the sites of origination and loss, where historical and psychological understanding resides, despite the risks.

The poems here, while operating from an autobiographical center, consistently seek to enlarge the context of that core, often taking a genealogical tack in dramatizing the characters of Ramos’s family, as in “The Put-Together Wedding Cake” above. The poet further broadens the landscape in approaching various notions of “America,” as in the tarnished vision of consumerism in “Mid-Century Modern”:

They rust now in the innards,
in the plumbing’s guts. Under linoleum,
secret in dry-wall, torn paper, they
bloom beneath layers of paint.
They are jewels in pitch glue,
asleep in the bracebeams.

These concerns—the autobiographical-genealogical and the historical—come together in the long sequence “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock,” which takes cues from both Lowell and Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, giving us a familial mini-epic of pre- and post-war Americana. In this poem, as throughout the book, the threat of a utopian nostalgia is undercut by the self-destructive grotesquery of the American underbelly—we find late-night cocktail lounges, alcoholics, and “dye-job” blondes, which in other hands may have devolved into nth-generation rehashes of Bukowski. Ramos endows these images, however, with precise description and an undeniable authority of voice—and with turns toward the disquieting and peculiar too concretely imagined to be merely surreal: “We like things clean: the boat flag / snapping in the breeze, // the platinum bee hive / sipping gin from a bird bath.”

As a worthy heir to Lowell’s undiluted project, Ramos’s quirky and often unsettling poems, far from repeating the formula of languid confessionalism, focus our attention on the particulars of the past, and how those particulars form their own kind of personal and shared mythology—one tantalizing, worthy of critique, and, in its capacity to overwhelm the self, frightening. But, the book suggests, we have no choice but to confront it, and to be responsible in understanding our role within it: “The green glass / dust between and all around us / is also too brilliant”—and, Ramos writes, “too excruciating to overlook.”

*

In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams claims that the “difficulty” of poetry “is to catch the evasive life of the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield a moment of insight.” In Joe Ross’s Strata the difficulty the poet sets for himself is less in catching the evasive thing, than in catching evasiveness itself—and the insight is in discovering that the insightful moment is always already lost. The fifty-two short poems here are, in the best sense of the phrase, hard to grasp; they pointedly enact the slipperiness, the fleetingness—not only of the moment, of the real, but of the speech that attempts to convey that moment’s actuality, “[w]hen the / knot finally slips and the world comes back,

When tomorrow correctly takes its place as today.
We began to talk but quickly chased the words away.
We put in a symbol, let it be A. It
immediately left for Not A. How to address this.

Though their true forebear (if we are to choose only one) is more probably Robert Creeley, Strata’s poems, following Stevens, “resist the intelligence almost successfully” in their attempts to capture that gap in time between the thing, its perception, and one’s speaking of it. The moment (“let it be A”) is always infinitely displaced by the discourses of the just after (“Not A”), and the just after displaced into further Not A’s. In those lost moments, the uncanny gaps between the prior to, pregnant with what is the “now,” and the now itself, already displaced, Ross situates the poem as what transcribes A’s leaving for Not A—not the thing itself, not A, but the trace of its passage.

As what populates this gap, what signifies the absent, lost moment, the poem is also what transcends or trans-verses the in-between of otherness. It is, from the point of view of the reader, that there (the recording of someone else’s saying) that is always here (present and immediate in its physical manifestation on the page). “This place, place one puts,” the poet writes in “Here,” “is now, is ever.” In this sense, in Ross’s poems, as in Baude’s, “the act of writing [becomes] an historical ‘site.’” While both poets in this way transcribe the loss of the present-tense of writing into the past-tense of the written, it is Ross who dramatizes it most fully. On each level of the book, from the sequence of the discrete, titled lyrics, to the syntax of each poem’s phrases, Ross emphasizes this displacement of moments and the loss that displacement creates:

This perfect, an act.
Resplendent palm slight of –
Gone from view, those few
we seldom thought of for fear
or its lack. A sudden not speaking
where only yesterday teased into or away
from permanence.

Ross further dramatizes this movement in the ambiguity of how we see the book as a whole. Is it as a collection of discrete lyrics, as the individual titles suggest? Or are we to see it as a poetic sequence or series? The book’s epigraph—“52 is some kind of magic number, isn’t it?”—suggests the latter, positing that these poems are to be seen in the movement of the weeks of the year, each week, and each poem, displacing the one previous, with the previous still present (printed on the page) in a palimpsest of memory and history. The ambiguity seems intentional in that we are persistently made aware of the gaps between the poems, and of our attempts to draw a continuity among them. Coupled with the content of the poems, we are drawn to what is not said, to what happens in between the poems, even as the poems are pointing outside of themselves, to the prior to, to the margin. Each section is both its own center (emphasized by the titles) and, at the same time, peripheral to all the others, and this schema extrapolates into the political: “The shallows / collapse. What was built upon mere sticks or the backs / of the lesser. The coal of civilization about to be / forgotten.” And: “To take up / arms or to reach out.”

While undeniably engaged with philosophical and theoretical discourses, these poems are—equally undeniably—poems of a lyrical moment, suggesting, intriguingly, that the instance of critical inquiry is as worthy of the heightened language of lyrical artifice as any other. In tension with the relative tonal flatness and syntactic gaps reminiscent of Language poetics we also find in the book, the poems often enact their investigations through a palpable music and an elegiac mood:

The words won’t
come, or do and not connected to
memories severed link of an attachment
to all that was, all that was once
the person on the end of bed.

These, and other pleasures generally considered “traditional”—an attention to the natural world, a hint at the loss of love, to name two—make Strata’s complex epistemological considerations an engaging, if not exhilarating, read. “Looking out / into the next break, we pause. / Frozen into stare, the eye cannot help / see itself,” Ross writes in the last poem of the book—one titled, aptly, “Beauty.”

contents of new issue of Verse

Anselm Berrigan (excerpts from two long poems)

Garrett Caples (poems plus part of Philip Lamantia's Tau)

Lidija Dimkovska (novel excerpt plus poems)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (long poem)

Landis Everson (23 of his last poems)

Kathleen Fraser (nonfiction, poetry, letter, translations)

Pierre Joris (interview, poems, translations)

Gerard Mace (photographs, essay)

Nathaniel Mackey (poems)

Bernadette Mayer (poems)

Jennifer Moxley (essays)

Michael Palmer (essay)

Ron Padgett (poems)

Susan Stewart (poems)

Catherine Wagner (excerpt from verse drama)


456 pages / 15 contributors

$15 (postage paid)

Verse
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173

NEW! Review of David Lau

Virgil and the Mountain Cat by David Lau. University of California Press, $16.95.

Reviewed by Douglas Piccinnini

“[M]ost not alive, I wasn’t afraid to die,” affirms the speaker in “Civil War,” from David Lau’s first book, Virgil and the Mountain Cat. “Civil War,” like many poems in this collection, maneuvers with razored precision through contemporary and historical dramas. Lau approaches his subjects with quick, lean, gestures and offers portraits of civilization doubled over, brought on by what seems to be the effects of late Capitalism. “Civil War” begins:

I read, I write, I hate my life word after word.
Telescoping Mercury remains
a Septembrist in burglary,
eyebrows an overthrow

spring, snaky splinter
signal to another season, oppositional
turn back on the first day of the new?
The more mortal each jealous mischief/

All men are murderers the more the uneaten
fell out of charge as poems without words
(& i.e. etc. / CSPN e.g. Enron
found in the anthology of aging aleatory broadsides),

Lau’s syntactical constructions and deconstructions surprise and deliver meaning in parts equally fresh and astringent. The enjambed second line of “Civil War” carries on for six lines and, while failing the needs of more conventional grammar and syntax, this movement achieves a kind linguistic acrobatics. In the first stanza, the interplay of the repetition of “I” in the long “i” sounds found in “I read, I write, I hate my life” shifts in the second stanza to the short “i” sounds and consonance of “spring, snaky splinter / signal.” This type of craftsmanship endures throughout Virgil and the Mountain Cat, and the result is an often-jarring collection of poems that resist ah-ha! moments and succeed in their ability to enlarge the dimensions of expressive language and communicate complex and elusive swatches of reality.

In “Going Out,” a runway of visions magnifies a pre-apocalyptic age, yet the speaker does not seem to exist on the precipitous edge of doom, but instead merely accepts the dysfunctional as a surrogate for normalcy.

You say nuclear; I say nuclear.
What kind of word is together?
On Cadmium dunes we treasure our Celts.
A plane to parachute from, a city: you want the radio:
if you want the radio for free charge the living: you have to,
ladies and dental plans. Sprig of mint
on the bib ineffective against further
spread of contagion.
In pain like a blouse,
this period is a peacock
in our history: drive the continent apart:
one lung left in the window
display of the BBQ restaurant.

Despite the loaded-gun feel of “nuclear” appearing twice in the first line, Lau manages a bit of humor in homophonically translating the formal address of “ladies and gentlemen” to “ladies and dental plans” and in doing so swings the mood of the poem (though the tone never achieves lightheartedness). Beyond the casual critique of “this period is a peacock / in our history,” “Going Out” continues to scrutinize what it means to exist in the 21st century. The poem’s later mention of the “[c]ity at the growth spurts of a city” and “your interior tangle of wires” suggests an imbalance between internal and external features of existence.

Perhaps, the burden of generation after generation of artists and writers is to feel as if civilization is at its most critical moment, a world wanting to snap off the orbital grid shot perilously into space. And though the end is perpetually near, Lau seems all too familiar with this burden, and successfully shrugs off the what-happens-after features of human egotism and instead navigates the ceaseless traumas of existence.

The book’s penultimate and title poem, “Virgil and the Mountain Cat,” points toward an empire at its twilight, flickering in however long its dusk may last,

I was thinking I would like to own this house. Then I fell. Under
hat, stone, cent, moss. Cranberry season into black smoke
season. Plus a knife in the branchy flophouse.

She was coming at certain daytime, with interest. We were getting
ready. Carried dishes that smelled like a hoax candle in the
empty room. Nighttime followed the switch the guards used to
guard everywhere it went on the mountain. As she, this changed.

And:

Knew. Knew alert. Those alarums her boy had bargained to us.
The glow would lightbulb around his head as the sun banged
down the western slope. The newspaper headline reported foreign
container ships’ rust flakes profuse in the harbor. So we were
telling. It hadn’t happened yet.

As the shore sounded.

The portentous feeling, which lurks throughout “Virgil and the Mountain Cat,” is delayed in its fruition as the speaker notes, “It hadn’t happened yet.” However the final poem, “Jellyfish,” formally address the ostensible source of this feeling, and begins “Dear XX century,” and goes on to condemn the spineless 20th Century as an age that has burned in a kind of hellfire. “Jellyfish” continues,

no one can darken skies like,

have you even been in meaning?

the forest on fire grows and glows
with sediment gorges hauled by

the clinking antiquated chain gaff:
words are worms more than what it’s not:

“The Unnamable” “The H Age”

a fucking sick hello, hymeneal subjoinder
from the whole fire and the sick

Colorfully dense, Virgil and the Mountain Cat is a rewarding book that demands rigorous attention as Lau constructs and deconstructs his subjects. Much like an Abstract Expressionist painter, Lau uses a kind of mark-making to engage with the materiality of language, and explores the semantic and sonic possibilities of verbal and ideological expression, while avoiding non-representational babble.

A detail of Cy Twombly’s Tiznit (1953) aptly adorns the cover of Virgil and the Mountain Cat, and subsequent images of Tiznit act as gateways to the book’s three sections. In a rare, published statement, Cy Twombly once proclaimed, “one must desire the ultimate essence even if it is ‘contaminated.’” Lau neither insists on nor resists presenting “contaminated” or dystopic visions in his poems. The presence of Twombly’s visual cues reminds a reader of Virgil and the Mountain Cat of not only the gestural intimacy and immediacy of art but also its ability to provoke and disturb. Twombly’s graffiti-like scratches on the canvas convey the limits of the application of his materials. The effect in Tiznit is that of raw (though intentional) rakes of color, which question not only the formal elements of painting as a medium, but the medium itself. And Lau, like Twombly, achieves a heightened connection to his subjects in an almost violent application/presentation of his materials. And for both Twombly and Lau, this complicates their authorial connection to creation, as the act of creation involves a condemnation and/or a potential dismantling of their subjects, the medium and its history.

NEW! Review of Jennifer Moss

Beast, to Be Your Friend by Jennifer Moss. New Michigan Press, $8.

Reviewed by Sara Lockery

Jennifer Moss’ Beast, to Be Your Friend is a collection of dense, kaleidoscopic poems whose dynamic energy propels the reader through a world in which trapdoors hallucinate, clouds are “arranged by pain,” and “smoke rises like seraphim.” Sharp, burnished, and fiercely original, Moss’ poetic voice animates the static and grants precision to the most intangible and abstract of concepts. In fact, the atmosphere is oftentimes just as (if not more) alive than the poem’s subject. Skies “noose” horses and “rush over startled skins,” sentences and voices “uncoil over the square acres,” “fasten down the land,” and “twist in the air.” Tension and contrast are alive, not only in the form, which fluctuates between narrative past and the lyrical present, but also in style and tone, which alter from mythological and detached to distinct and personalized.

One staple of Moss’ poetry is the ambiguity of the speaker’s attitude toward her subject. For example, in “Ducking in and out of Shadows,” the goat is initially portrayed in a sympathetic, humane manner. “I felt a debt to the goat,” the speaker confesses, her “womanish head bobbed up and down, one yellow eye turned toward the sun.” However, the tone darkens as the speaker almost immediately goes on to describe the unsightly gash in the side of the goat, which she then hits “with a switch.” Similarly, in “Beasts Framed the Field IV,” the speaker gallantly declares, “Beast to be your friend I’d gather the clouds swarming / over the river,” after which she goes on to threaten/propose, “I’d like to feed you…the suffering inborn / disease of my blood.” In each case, the tonal transition occurs in such a way that it almost suggests manipulation on the part of the speaker. By initially personifying the animal subject, a sense of connection with and sympathy for the animal is established. Therefore, when the animal is ostensibly hurt or threatened by the speaker, the reader almost feels deceived. At once menacing and inviting, coolly detached and warmly humane, Moss has generated a daunting atmosphere of unpredictability in which the reader is left susceptible to her whims.

Throughout the book there looms a general sense of interconnectedness. In “Making the Centaur,” the will of the horse is “fiercely tangled” with our own. “Portrait” creates a similar situation, in which the speaker unites the isolated man waiting atop a building to commit suicide with every other living thing with the statement, “You know he is going to die sometime…everything does.” “The Storm” displays signs of cerebral interconnectivity in its opening statement, “Where one mind stops, another begins,” as well as in the speaker’s portrayal of the sky as a giant, cohesive spider web in which “the dead bees of memory” of all living beings are housed. Related to a sense of multiplicity and interdependence is the recurring phenomenon of projection; internal emotions are often transferred into external entities. “I fill his body with my mind / to give my thought a shape,” the speaker informs us of the zebra in her poem “In Mammal Hall.” Such cohesiveness and interaction between subjects not only blurs the line between individual humans and all other humans, but also between humans and animals, calling forth a surreal landscape in which animals take on human characteristics; beasts and centaurs speak, and octopi are depicted as “aristocratic.”

Moss’ stylistic treatment is equally as compelling. Throughout the book, the speaker intentionally universalizes, or lends abstraction to, a particular image. For example, in “Making the Centaur,” the atmosphere is portrayed as “earth’s symbols.” All elements of nature, presumably sun, sky, and other natural manifestations, are grouped together under a single blanket term, thus blurring distinctions between them. Likewise, in “Beasts Framed the Field II,” the speaker equates the beast’s act of digging a hole to digging back in time to his “red and black birth.” Moss’ generalization of these images establishes an atmosphere of mystery, opening up limitless possibilities as to the precise visual representation they will form in the reader’s mind. Additionally, the act of symbolizing grants these poems the weight and feel of legend. The use of the phrase “earth’s symbols” harks back to ancient Greek and Roman mythology, and the act of digging has become a universal emblem for reaching an earlier, more primordial state.

Furthermore, the use of such generalized language provides a counterpoint to Moss’ equally consistent use of precise, pared down imagery. In fact, the same objects Moss lends abstraction to are elsewhere sculpted into sharp, specific images. Several lines up, the same beast who is portrayed as a distant figure of mythology, “digging back to [his] red and black birth,” is perceived so clearly by the speaker that she can “see the vein jump in [his] neck / and the salt shimmering over his lip.” Likewise, at the end of the poem, the same horse who is situated in the legendary position of being chased by the “earth’s symbols” is so real that the “foam smeared over his flanks” is visible and the “tingle in his nerves” can be sensed. This sense of clarity and immediacy directly contradicts the formerly vague, allegorical treatment of these subjects. The effect of this is twofold; by pairing mythology side by side with realism, each acts as a foil to the other, emphasizing their differences. At the same time, however, portraying the subject of the poem in manifold ways blurs the distinction between them and suggests the possibility of their interrelatedness.

Beast, to Be Your Friend masterfully balances surrealism with minimalism, violence with humanity, and past tense narrative with the first person lyrical. Just like the “silver thread blowing in and out of visibility” in “Fields,” the seamless movement of Moss’ poems explores the discrepancies as well as the connections between these disparate elements, reflecting the larger theme of an underlying connectivity and multiplicity. “The signs sit in everything / They are true, but untranslatable,” the speaker tells us. Indeed, delivered in a detached, elusive voice and peppered with furtive allusions, one could say the same of Moss’ poems themselves.

NEW! Review of Katy Lederer

The Heaven-Sent Leaf by Katy Lederer. BOA Editions, $16.

Reviewed by Sara Lockery

Katy Lederer’s The Heaven-Sent Leaf probes the conflicting yet interrelated concepts of art and commerce, establishing a fruitful tension between the technical and the emotional in contemporary society. At the heart of this tension lies the startling observation that the spirit of money occupies the core of such timeless institutions as poetry and love. “There is, in the heart,” Lederer reminds us, “the hard-rendering profit.” Likewise, the threat of art continually rebels against the order of city life, voicing a recurring plea for its emancipation from the doldrums of industry. Behind every facade of society, we are told, the artist is “waiting, like an animal, / for poetry.” The dynamic quality of Lederer’s language further exemplifies this tension; alternating between observational narrative and lyrical rhapsody, it is at once detached and intimate, tentative and insistent.

One of the most apparent themes in The Heaven-Sent Leaf is the interaction of the external world of business (money, capital, trade) with the internal, primal state of passion (love, art, nature). Such association becomes evident in the second “Brainworker” poem, in which the narrator begins by expressing the need to “keep drear managerial impulse away from the animal mind.” Located along the borders of logic within the mind, however, is a “silky white cat. / Howling,” an image soon interrupted by the narrator’s anxiety over her “year-end review.” The poem finally closes with “The moon… settl[ing] into its shadow” and the narrator “howling.” The reference to the cat howling within the “mind’s little prison” gives the impression of entrapment and suppressed desire, which reflects Lederer’s recurring assertion that the expression of the artist is stifled by the monotony of the business world. Additionally, the perpetual oscillation from the dreariness of office life to the unruliness of the creative intellect establishes a tumultuous dialogue between these two opposing forces, exemplifying the state of constant flux that pervades much of the book.

Another way in which Lederer creates tension between opposites is by structuring her poems as quasi-sonnets that simultaneously transcend and adhere to form. Such experimentation with the sonnet is evident in “Heavenly Body.” For example, in the second to last line, the formerly detailed depiction of vast distances (“Between these mountains runs a pass blasted through by the / movements of water and indebted plateaus. / Imagine it widening, eternally, as the owl will fly or flower bloom”) is solidified into “Long silences between us.” Likewise, the previously elaborate reference to the serenity of the moon* is compacted into “Imagine, Love, the patience of the moon.” In clear, sparse language, the ending thus operates as a kind of condensed summary of the fundamental elements of the poem, a technique characteristic of the sonnet. And by breaking the poem into thirteen lines, Lederer roughly recalls the sonnet form. But the odd number of lines defeats the possibility of consistent couplets and the poems do not regularly follow iambic pentameter, thus distinguishing Lederer's work from the sonnet by upsetting its symmetry. In this way, the structure of Lederer’s poems provides an additional example of the interaction between order and chaos.

Aside from the continual fluctuation of subject and style, Lederer’s technique is further distinguished by her ability to grant physical, tangible properties to the abstract. For example, in “The Rose, The Ring,” thoughts are depicted as diamonds falling to the floor. The genius of this portrayal lies in the fact that something as theoretical and intangible as thought is successfully embodied in the distinct, concrete form of a jewel. Furthermore, such characterization resonates with the larger theme of commerce; the narrator has in effect transformed the act of thinking into a commodity: “We sweep them up, the little jewels,/ The little bastard trinkets.” By illustrating human thought as a token of sorts, Lederer has raised the possibility that anything of value, even ideological value, has the potential to be channeled into a form of capital and used to obtain power. The seeming disparity between the timeless, psychological value usually associated with mental reasoning and the temporary, mechanical value Lederer assigns to it reflects the general atmosphere of tension that characterizes her work.

An additional trademark of Lederer’s technique includes a distinctive kind of repetition that involves a refocusing or development of particular concepts. Take, for example, these lines from “Heaven-Sent Leaf”: “To imagine oneself as a river. / To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water, / Pouring into basin or brain.” The repetition here is both linguistic (the reusing of the phrase “to imagine oneself”) and conceptual (the recurrence of the idea of water). However, in the first line the tone is dry, fragmentary, and abstract, whereas in the following lines it is lyrical, rhythmic and precise. The idea of a river has thus been extended and developed into something entirely different. The effect of this particular kind of repetition at once ties the images together through shared wording and conceptual grounding and isolates them by splitting them up into two tonally and stylistically separate contexts. The interaction between the opposing ideas of variation and repetition and between unification and differentiation reflects Lederer’s larger theme of the interrelation of conflicting concepts (money and love, business and nature).

Lederer’s adeptness of execution, including the way in which rhythm, alliteration, and repetition perpetuate the mood of the concept at hand, further demonstrates the strengths of The Heaven-Sent Leaf. The phrase “The legs are mimetic of the mind’s locomotion” is a particularly effective instance of such cohesion between style and content. The aural similarity between “legs” and “mimetic,” as well as the alliteration established by the words “mimetic” and “mind,” suggest the repetition and circularity involved in the act of imitation. Moreover, the gradual widening exemplified by the transition of sound (‘eh’—‘eye’—‘oh’) mimics the regulated motion that characterizes the functioning of machinery. Together, these linguistic factors both aurally and mentally enhance the motion and circularity inherent in the concept of moving legs, cycling machinery, and imitation. The fusion of the technical and conceptual aspects of writing amplifies the impact and intricacy of Lederer’s poems by generating an alternate layer of complexity and cohesion.

With panoramic scope and fluidity, The Heaven-Sent Leaf depicts contemporary society in a way that at once criticizes and embraces its materialistic impulses, artfully balancing the conflicting extremes of art and office life. The title itself effectively embodies the core tension of Lederer’s poetry: a symbol of nature as well as materialism, of temptation as well as salvation, the heaven-sent leaf can take the shape of either a leaf from a tree or a paper money to be used for barter. The perpetual flux of its tone mimics the natural rhythm of human thought, and the conceptual variation of the collection as a whole masterfully articulates the dual nature of reality.



* The sarcasm inherent in the lines, “Is she angry? Is she edified? / Does the moon crawl into bed at night, drunk and restless as any kept woman…?” suggests the outrageousness of the moon acting in such a way, thus intimating, by reverse logic, that the moon is normally associated with calmness and serenity.

NEW! Review of L.S. Klatt

Interloper by L.S. Klatt. University of Massachusetts Press, $15.

Reviewed by Daniel Shoemaker

Interloper begins with the inscription (attributed to Walt Whitman) “The day wore on, and the sun went down in the west; still the interloper, gloomy and taciturn, made no signs of departing.” Klatt, like his hero Whitman, is the interloper, the poet. He is the unsolicited prompter of questions. His voice is deliberate and wise, making no dogmatic claims, preferring to elicit meditations on the “indefinite. Infinite,” though rarely succumbing to it, as his poem “The Ominous Cross” suggests.

“Provincetown,” the book’s opening poem, establishes many of the motifs and stylistic trademarks that Klatt returns to throughout Interloper. It is a characteristically brief poem (none is more than a page long) about a model glider. In it, the innocence and ignorance of a child is undermined by the implicit violence of his war fantasies:

Yokefellow, how steep our swoop,
what coastline what distance?

As if we travel well,
as if potentate

The hinge of the engine-less rudder

Solarized
It sing-songs

A plane alone does not know what to do, or towards what shore to fly. It, like Klatt’s poetry, needs a helmsman, someone to interpret the scenes and posit advice.

“What can be salvaged?” “How then do we prophesy?” If Klatt asks, it is because he does not know. His poetry is steeped with humility before the vastness of space and the harshness of reality. Klatt invokes Jesus, Darwin and the purple of the cosmos to situate civilization as near a microscopic molecule in some greater eternal body. All his questions do not speak to such sanctuaries of thought. Klatt also asks, “when do these canned meats expire?” His subtle humor carries the book from beginning to end in one sitting, and linguistic cocktails like “forlornographic” make palatable the self-pleasure of misery.

As in “Provincetown,” the relationship between innocence and violence is explored in great depth throughout Interloper. Children’s toys and games often become vehicles of dominance and contention. In “I Swallowed a Deck of Cards” spades and clubs act out racial tensions, despite their common origins, culminating in a reenactment of the horrific 1998 lynching of James Byrd. “International Orange” describes a model F16, destined for “moonlight immolation” and piloted by a stick figure who plays “Aces & pick-up sticks.” The poem “Fetus in Orbit” entertains imagery from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s indictment of technology and man’s penchant for violence. The movie’s final image of a human fetus floating through space becomes that of an unborn cow, a playmate and a wonder for the narrator, who later unwillingly encounters the violence innate and pervasive in the pursuit of survival,

I was told I would eat a thousand cows,

I lay there, disbeliever, like a figure 8 in milk

As much as Klatt may seek direction, he concedes to the futility of intention: he “[has] no more use for a steering wheel than an 8 ball.” Klatt’s questions spin back upon and bisect themselves, his imagery does “loop-the-loops & figure-8s.” The recurrent use of this reoriented infinity is a mathematic and pictorial tool. Klatt employs both throughout Interloper, balancing his existential inquiries with data and numbers, graphs and graphics. Symbols and charts become non-verbal poetry. A head without a body swings from an un-played game of hangman. The circle that sways from the minimally rendered gallows may also be metronome mid-beat or a hypnotist’s tool or perhaps some lever in the machine the narrator is forced to kiss.

As much as some of the poems in Interloper are verbally irreproducible, many are driven by their percussive cadence. Music is used as a second native language. Its symbols become words and ideas that scope beyond written language. There are “musical rules for the apocalypse” and a “siss-boom skitter beat” for love. Words tumble together into a symphony of images, often correlated only by their context. Together the sounds and their meanings paint a large sonic canvas peppered with explosions of life and stasis, an image to be read over ages.

The poems in Interloper belong to no one time. They contain pork that expired in March 2009 and domestic relics like a washboard. There is a strain of post-industrial mistrust that loosely situates, and runs parallel through, most of these poems. They often chart the evolution of humans away from humanity and leave foreboding hints towards their mutual demise. In a collection of poetry so kinetic and transitory, using literal vehicles as metaphorical vehicles, scenes of atom bombs and the apocalypse offer possible limits to the telescoping path of humanity. In “Body: Rhapsody” a smashed car is a crumpled Coca-Cola can. U.S. recklessness and consumerism collide. There is a distinctly American tone to Klatt’s work: from paranoia to pride, the American ethos is called into constant question.

Interloper is a cohesive body, indicative of many years honing. Its vibrant images of memory and doubt, despite their ambiguous cohesion, foster a common ground between author and reader. Existence is portrayed as equally uninviting and inevitable.

NEW! Review of James Shea

Star in the Eye by James Shea. Fence Books, $15.

Reviewed by Douglas Piccinnini

James Shea’s first collection, Star in the Eye, considers the expanding and shrinking values of experience with vivid strokes of suspicious wit. His poems wander through dreamscapes, retaining their lucidity. And though it seems as if a sudden gridlock of nerves is impending, the speakers of Shea’s poems maintain composure and as “Panoplies” asserts, “[y]ou are not free to enjoy the nostalgia.”

The collection begins with “Turning and Running” and quickly establishes Shea’s shrugging expressions of alienation and peculiar rapport with the natural world— themes which stripe this solid debut.

The sun was backing away from me,
slowly, like one I have betrayed.
So I ran to the river to burn in it.
And they blocked the road with ambulances.

Shea’s compressed narration moves in logical jerks that result in the delightful accretion of visual surprises. The speaker’s relationship to nature evokes a kind of eco-consciousness, which resists slipping into clunky agitprop critique. Instead the speaker of “Turning and Running” insists on a reappraisal of [his] conditional relationship to nature and concludes, “There were at least four things / I should have said. Do not step on the rug / with the live birds sewn into it.”

“Turning and Running” befits an era of uncertainty— the title immediately ushers us out of the nearly chewed-through first decade of the 21st century. Shea’s voice captures an intense perception of the natural world taking us beyond Whitmanesque awe, and instead invokes a Stevens-like suspicion of both the perceiver and the perceived features of nature. Consider the opening of Stevens’ “The Green Plant”:

Silence is a shape that has passed.
Otu-bre’s lion-roses have turned to paper
And the shadows of the trees
Are like wrecked umbrellas.

The effete vocabulary of summer
No longer says anything.

Stevens’ violent image of “wrecked umbrellas” finds the natural world in human terms imagining nature as a kind of failed machine, i.e. a wrecked umbrella is a worthless machine, perhaps abandoned on the street. For Stevens and Shea, human activity and perceptions of nature push and pull on one another.

In the last lines of “Turning and Running,” a human product (a rug) and nature (birds) are unnaturally wed. The speaker’s cautionary closing signals a disturbing hybridization of nature and technology in a seemingly inevitable marriage. Shea’s speaker in “Turning and Running,” like Stevens’ in “The Green Plant,” experiences the “effete vocabulary” of a natural world that “[n]o longer says anything.” Though Stevens’ lament appears to be seasonal, it too, like Shea’s, suggests a betrayal by the natural world. As a result, both poets’ vocabularies shape the natural world into a kind of bio-technological event. Stevens’ bare branches are like twisted metal; Shea’s freakish magic carpet is ineffectual— to step on the rug with “lives birds sewn into it” is to wound or kill the birds: its potential for flight removed. As “Turning and Running” closes, only one of the “four things” the speaker “should have said” is said. In a similar outcome, the final stanza of “The Green Plant” suggests the difficulty in negotiating competing perceptions:

Except that a green plant glares, as you look
At the legend of the maroon and olive forest,
Glares, outside of the legend, with the barbarous green
Of the harsh reality of which it is part.

In Star in the Eye, many of Shea’s poems inhabit a “harsh reality,” which is to say nature corrupted, or co-opted by human experience, and yet these poems contain sensuality. In “Mechanical Foliage” the speaker feels “the rapid turning of the sun in [his] direction” and, like “Turning and Running,” is again faced with a natural encounter that leads to feelings of internal conflict.

A young entrepreneur sold me his business card.
He told me this was one of the beautiful days.

He offered a presentation on my whereabouts:
half of you awake, the other half was not asleep.

He said I would see handsome epiphanies,
a vision unifying the particulars, for example.

The poem ends with this promise fulfilled as the speaker’s senses heighten:

I heard sheets of ice clink over the lake.
I found the extraordinary moment and recorded it.

I wash small trees with my hands, sponging
the trunk and leaves. I live once supposedly.

In a type of cleansing ritual, having found the aforementioned “vision,” the catalytic sun again leads to a moment of insight in the natural world. Perhaps the sun is the “star in the eye” of Shea’s poems.

Shea’s talent for plain-spoken acuity is best laid out in the string of haiku-like segments contained in “The Riverbed,” which is one of two longer sequences in Star in the Eye. Shea’s “The Riverbed” uses “riverbed” as a thematic anchor: “On the Riverbed,” “Autumn Riverbed,” “Family of Riverbeds,” “Riverbed Water,” and so on. These gentle, playful lyrics mark an airy section, not only in its sparseness on the page but like the satisfaction one might feel seeing a box kite sailing in the sky.

In “Dream Trial,” the other long sequence that closes the book, part 12 codifies the interiority of Shea’s voice: “What if only my anxieties keep me alive? / What if only my anxieties transmigrate?” Shea’s speakers experience the bewildering clarity of not an unforgiving world, but one that simply persists in endless renewal. In the final moments of the book the speaker again faces the sun— the star, albeit hidden by cloud cover:

I lie down on the splintery lawn.
Sparrows ’round me like corners.
Above: a small re-release of rain.
No one can stop the Spring from coming.

the panharmonicon

[from an abandoned essay on the panharmonicon]

In one of his many journal entries, Ralph Waldo Emerson envisions a new genre for a new country—the panharmonicon—which builds from oratory (namely the lecture and the sermon) and in which “everything is admissable, philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ventriloquism.” Aside from its startling inclusiveness, the panharmonicon serves as a salutary example of genre-opening: Emerson seeks to expand the possibilities for poetry by breaking down traditional generic boundaries.

Many of Emerson’s lectures are monologues, proto-performance pieces that, if performed by another, would be as vibrant and dramatic as a traditional dramatic monologue. According to Emerson, “A lecture is a new literature … It is an organ of sublime power, a panharmonicon for variety of note…”

Many of James Tate’s more recent dramatic monologues (see Worshipful Company of Fletchers and Shroud of the Gnome in particular) adopt a didactic tone—the narrators seem half-sane or otherwise under extreme psychological stress, but they do their best to convey their knowledge of the world and the urgency of that knowledge. In their own way, they lecture. The poems parody knowledge or, more specifically, the conveyance of knowledge. Erudition becomes a matter of particulars, not of breadth. While Tate’s dramatic monologues rarely approach or court the sublime, they do attain a “variety of note” that openly autobiographical poems cannot accommodate. This is perhaps even more evident in Tate's last three books, which feature free verse/prose poem hybrids narrated by various personae.

With increasingly porous boundaries between prose and verse, more and more poets seem to be realizing Emerson's vision. Which seems appropriate, since Emerson's poetry was in his prose.

the plain style in poetry

“Innovation does not mean change for the sake of change; experiment does not mean fiddling with a perfectly serviceable tool. Innovation is a necessary response to force of circumstance in which the apparent utility of the medium is insufficient.” --Jed Rasula, introduction to Syncopations


“this importance cannot be seen in what the poem says, since in that case the fact that it is a poem would be a redundancy. The importance lies in what the poem is. Its existence as a poem is of first importance, a technical matter, as with all facts, compelling the recognition of a mechanical structure. A poem which does not arouse respect for the technical requirements of its own mechanics may have anything you please painted all over it or on it in the way of meaning but it will for all that be as empty as a man made of wax or straw.” --William Carlos Williams, 1934 review of George Oppen’s Discrete Series


“I am moved by work that does one or more of the following: includes emotions seldom found in contemporary poetry; unsettles the limitations of genre and convention; subverts cultural complacencies; articulates emotional states for which there is no norm; enacts the reader’s sublime.” --Alice Fulton, “A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge,” in Feeling as a Foreign Language

“Simplicity is prized as a symptom of sincerity...” --Alice Fulton


Plain speech, as Marjorie Garber notes in Quotation Marks, is “often a cover for the most successful and duplicitous (or at least manipulative) speech.”


The assumptions inherent in the plain style: of readerly collusion, of frictionlessness. Poetry is a language art; it contains artifice. To pretend otherwise is to pretend. Poetry written in the plain style is as rhetorical in its colloqualisms and accessible diction as stylized poetry is in its involutions and disjunctions. The difference is in the poet’s assumptions of the reader’s reception. The plain style poet expects the reader to slide with ease across her words in order to focus better on her content, whereas the more resistant poet expects the reader to work at reading, to experience the textures of language as an integral part of the content.

quotation in poetry

“Quotation confesses inferiority.” --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) describes quotation as occurring when “a writer expresses himself in words that have been used before because they give his meaning better than he can give it himself, … or because he wishes to show that he is learned and well-read. Quotations due to the last motive are invariably ill-advised.”

So Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze, Adorno, etc. appear regularly, and often unnecessarily, when a poet is writing about poetry. Always out of context and frequently misunderstood and/or misapplied, these noble figures are used for their weight, to give ballast to the drifting rafts of text the unsure writer is putting into the world.

Like a cliché, a quotation stops thought for a moment, giving the “author” a break from having to put his or her own thoughts into words. Quoting other writers has become such a common, if not automatic, process that most writers who leap to recognize others they admire do not augment themselves but disappear themselves. They get lost behind the figures they conjure through the act of quotation even as they seek to align themselves with what they quote.

Is it possible to cite without citing? To benefit from others without bowing to them? To quote is to simultaneously step aside and assert oneself. But the stepping aside can be a problem, because it is evasive—one’s own ideas are what are being evaded. And asserting oneself in this way can be a problem, because all that is asserted is one’s tastes and reading habits, one’s endorsements and affiliations.

Fortunately, poets are increasingly finding ways around the problem, through collage, graftings, montage, erasure, treatments, compost, palimpsest, documentary and investigational poetries.

The Trouble With Billy Collins [part 3]

from an unfinished essay [see note for part 1]

But Collins was not always so milquetoast. “Hart Crane,” for example, stands out as a well-developed piece that imagines Crane’s body hitting the water and feeling the water around him change from wake to wave. The poem seems perverse in its lack of emotion—Crane is an object, already a corpse in Collins’s hands—but this perversity, being absent elsewhere in Collins’s work, is refreshing. It seems fitting, then, that Collins omits this poem from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, which includes only the safest poems from his first book. (Of the 45 poems in that book, 15 appear in Sailing Alone Around the Room.) So “Child Development,” in which he refers to Samuel Johnson as a “fatuous Enlightenment hack,” is gone, perhaps because it might offend someone. He also omits “Cancer,” which addresses the difficulty of saying the word and in an unexpected, moving conclusion, applies this difficulty to the poet’s father, who apparently suffers from the disease. Such pain, however genuine, does not earn a place in the Collins canon. And when cancer is allowed into the New and Selected Poems, it’s only through a humorous simile, in “My Number,” in which death is “busy … scattering cancer cells like seeds.” And “Flames,” which portrays Smokey the Bear setting a forest on fire “to show them / how a professional does it” does not make the cut. Though little more than a bad joke, the poem demonstrates a spark, at least. Collins omits even the minor terror of “Hopeless But Not Serious,” in which “every morning begins like a joke” and “trouble is you cannot remember the punch line / which never arrives until very late at night, / … just before you begin laughing in the dark.”

Originally buried on page 50 of The Apple That Astonished Paris, eleven poems from the end of the book, “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House” is given pole position in the New and Selected Poems. A reader unfamiliar with Collins could not be blamed for expecting a political poem (gun control being an ever-contested issue in the United States), or at least a poem with an edge. That reader, of course, finds something else instead—safe wit, a dog “sitting in the orchestra” to accompany a symphony by Beethoven “as if Beethoven / had included a part for barking dog.” The title, then, remains outside the poem, as a joke framing it, and this indirect relationship emerges as the poem’s primary strength. Given the shallowness of most of Collins’s work, a title that does not comment straightforwardly on the poem seems like an achievement.

It becomes easy to predict which poems from Collins’s earlier books will be chosen for the New and Selected: those that are thoroughly safe, tentatively clever, and aiming to please—or to be less generous: those that are passionless, shallow, and obsequious. It also helps if the poems take place in museums, on vacation in Italy, in libraries, or on college campuses: apparently the favorite haunts of the NPR-listening audience Collins depends on so much for his book sales. To jettison the macabre and the disturbing from one’s New and Selected smacks of self-censorship, and is especially unfortunate given the broadening effects those elements would have on this career- and income-boosting volume.

Charles Simic has noted that “Collins is fun to read” even though “he has absorbed all the modernist techniques and uses them well.” Unfortunately, Simic does not articulate what these techniques are, aside from calling Collins “self-consciously literary” and pointing to his homages to Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and W.H. Auden. In any event, despite their allusions and occasional self-consciousness, Collins’s poems read nothing like Pound’s, Eliot’s, Stevens’s, Moore’s, Crane’s, Stein’s, or any other poet considered modernist, and the claim seems contradictory, since modernism is apparently what killed the popular audience for poetry.

Simic is more accurate when he points to the Collins persona: “Collins comes across in his poems as a slightly eccentric but friendly neighbor, a professor with a nice wife in some affluent suburb or small town, who walks his dog and does the usual errands and chores associated with that kind of life” (italics mine). In other words, simply SWM. In his poems, Collins is not seriously eccentric or misanthropic, his wife does not make his life difficult, he has no financial worries, he does not beat or otherwise abuse his dog (Collins likes his dog, but not enough to give it a name in his poems, perhaps because he wants his dog to be the NPR ur-dog) or neglect or bemoan his position in the social fabric. Simic adds, “Probably one of the reasons for the success of his books is that he gives the impression to his readers of being like them.” Collins himself claims no ambition to disturb his readers: “I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside.” Given the commercial success of Collins’s books, he must be an accommodating host.

Yet Simic also admits that in Sailing Alone Around the Room “too many poems have predictable conclusions.” And “Collins is so much in control that by the end of a poem I’m left with the feeling that I’ve been told everything that there is to know. … there has to be a countercurrent, a touch of ambiguity and uncertainty” to keep things interesting if not edgy. This gentle criticism coincides with Collins’s own description of his process in his Paris Review interview: “I want to start in a very familiar place and end up in a strange place.” But his poems fail to tell the reader what the reader does not already know. One learns almost nothing from Collins. This is probably why he has become a popular success. Ever palatable, never disturbing, Collins is a poet for everyone. And that is the problem.

I am not arguing for accessibility as an end or cure-all, nor as a mean toward a larger readership. Because poetry is often difficult to write, it can be difficult to read and still be valuable to culture. It is especially difficult to write strong, accessible poetry that does not pander to the reader. Yet when a poet comes along who can gaze outward as powerfully as s/he gazes inward and write poems compelling at the levels of language, perception, and imagination, the virtues of accessibility are realized—at least in the case of David Berman’s Actual Air—and readers will notice.

The Trouble With Billy Collins [part 2]

from an unfinished essay [see note for part 1]

Among American poets who have not become entirely mainstream, David Berman seems particularly adept at bringing a larger audience to poetry. Berman has published one book, Actual Air, which has sold more than 12,000 copies in five printings and received wide notice (in literary magazines as well as major newspapers and magazines like the New York Times, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, and Spin). Berman’s status as the singer/songwriter for The Silver Jews surely helped his sales, but has had little bearing on the literary world's response to his book, which has been mostly positive. Consider the following excerpts from reviews: “Actual Air is one of the funniest, smartest, and sweetest books of the year” [GQ]; “Actual Air is actual poetry. Berman is on a mission to make the world strange, to find in the doo-dads of daily life a profound weirdness” [Spin]; “Berman’s debut announces the discovery of a great American poetic storytelling voice by a new generation” [Publishers Weekly].) As a poet and literary critic, David Kirby, reviewing Actual Air for the New York Times Book Review, would hardly be swayed by Berman’s music career in his assessment of the book. Despite some quibbles, Kirby concludes that Berman’s poetry has “great promise.” And in Boston Review, the poet-critic Ethan Paquin has described Berman as “a master collector of American miscellany.”

Berman’s poems work because of the quality of his imagination, his understated flair with language, his humor, his compassion, and his sense of timing. In his own words, his poems are “psychedelic soap operas” (Redivider interview). Although attracted to the possibilities and textures of language, Berman is less committed to formal innovation than are more challenging lyric poets. Neither disjunctive nor oblique, arcane nor stylized, his poems evince an attractive ease. But they present the alert reader with sufficient resistance to give the reader a sense of progress in moving through the poems. One does not finish a Berman poem wondering what one has just read, as many people do when reading contemporary poetry for the first time. His poems meet the reader halfway without pandering to the reader. Even the title of his book was selected out of a desire to assuage people’s skepticism about poetry. As he explains in an interview, “I wanted to express in the offset, before someone opened up the book, that poetry is speech, which of course is totally dependent on the fact that you can push air through your mouth and that these words are just air filtered in a certain way” (Brett Burton, “Coming Up for Air,” City Paper).

One of Berman’s signature moves is to treat himself as a character, not as an impermeable construct. This is a direct result of his poetic imagination. He mocks his own sensitivity and pretensions to sensitivity, but he can be disarmingly straightforward in the process, as in “Self-Portrait at 28”:

I am trying to get at something
and I want to talk very plainly to you
so that we are both comforted by the honesty.
You see there is a window by my desk
I stare out when I am stuck
though the outdoors has rarely inspired me to write
and I don't know why I keep staring at it.

My childhood hasn't made good material either
mostly being a mulch of white minutes
with a few stand out moments…

Berman does not evince the “hatred of Identity” (Evans 13) that characterizes the work of an increasing number of contemporary poets, but a distrust of Identity is common in his work. (According to Steve Evans, avant-garde poets reject “the type of identity conferred by the commodity form” in an attempt to respond to the dehumanizing effects of capitalism, imperialism, and their recent offspring, globalization. “Introduction to Writing from the New Coast”, Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetries of the 1990s, edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks.) Berman engages in identity politics by questioning the authority traditionally associated with his identity group, the straight white male. By questioning this authority, he undermines his own position in a social hierarchy which the white heterosexual male has historically dominated. One could call this interrogation an identity crisis, but one that, because of its political ramifications, goes beyond the typical Romantic poet’s questioning of the self. The self in Berman’s poems mutates, turns on, agitates, and generally fucks with itself so as to destabilize the lyric tradition in general and SWM privilege in particular. The lyric voice is assaulted through multiplicity and refraction, but it is consistently maintained, which distinguishes this poetry from radical or otherwise avant-garde poetries. He subtly questions the cultural privilege assumed by and ascribed to SWMs. This social aspect pushes Berman’s poetry further into the public sphere.

Berman’s frequent relinquishment of SWM privilege also appears in James Tate’s poetry, as Lee Upton has pointed out: “The actual work of the poems in their demasculinizing of male characters and caricaturing of heterosexual desires, in the voicing of need, weakness, and contingency, boldly counters patriarchal posturings of expertise” (Upton, The Muse of Abandonment). But Tate is a slippery poet, and at Berman’s age he was more preoccupied with the surfaces of language and more inclined to experiment with words than Berman is. Like Tate, Berman knows that humor can be an effective means of simultaneously inviting the reader into the poem and disorienting the reader.

Berman, in some ways, sounds like Billy Collins. An unusually bland poet with an unusually large readership, Collins is accessible without writing doggerel, humorous without being aggressive, self-deprecatory without being anguished, SWM without being particularly virile. He writes in free verse composed according to the phrase; he does not attempt verbal pyrotechnics. Thus, he offers an unthreatening presence on the page. He even wrote one of the two blurbs for Actual Air (Tate wrote the other one), which might signal an aesthetic affinity between Berman and Collins. Yet I find little to like or even enjoy in Collins’s poetry, even after reading all of Collins’s work, from his first book to Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems and The Trouble With Poetry. Why, then, do certain readers embrace one poet and ignore or shun the other?

First consider Collins’s own thoughts on poetry, as expressed in his introduction to his anthology Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry. Here he recycles the well-worn narrative about modernism killing off poetry’s readership: “During the heydey of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Crane—that Mount Rushmore of modernism—difficulty became a criterion for appraising poetic value,” and thus “readers fled in droves into the waiting arms of novelists” (I agree with Collins that the “hunt for Meaning” is often the surest way to ruin poetry for a reader. But there are ways of talking about a poem that do not rely on meaning or different interpretations but that can be intellectually engaging and enjoyable. Paying attention to—and trying to understand the effects of—the sounds and moves a poem makes, pretending that one is writing the poem and thus making decisions at every step, can effectively involve readers in a poem.)

For Collins, “clarity is the real risk in poetry. To be clear means opening yourself up to judgment.” Collins’s denouncement of difficulty and embrace of clarity is meant to forward his own poetics of accessibility, where there is no “obscurity for its own sake,” since “the willfully obscure poem is a hiding place where the poet can elude the reader and thus make appraisal impossible, irrelevant.” Collins’s discussion about the public reception of poetry has shifted from aesthetic terms to ethical terms: difficult poetry not only turns off readers, but is a sign of an evasive, untrustworthy author who under no circumstances wants to connect with readers. This shift points to a major problem in Collins’s thinking—and in others like him—since the question of audience for poetry does not need to become a question of the moral, ethical, or social fitness of the poet. But because Collins obviously has a stake in the legitimacy of the accessible poem and the speciousness of the difficult poem, he must attack the authors of difficult poems, not just the poems themselves. The fact is, difficult poems often seek a deeper connection with their readers than most accessible poems (especially Collins’s) do. By virtue of the work—active reading—a difficult poem can require, the reader can join the poet, temporarily, in the act of the creation and interpretation of meaning. The difficult poem can enlist the reader as much as it can shut out the reader, but Collins does not acknowledge that site of possibility because it is not in his best interest to do so.

Poetry 180 arose from the Poetry 180 project, a program that Collins, as Poet Laureate, initiated to bring a daily poem to high school students. The anthology seeks to present “a generous selection of short, clear contemporary poems which any listener could basically ‘get’ on first hearing.” In theory, Poetry 180 is a worthwhile and potentially effective endeavor. By exposing high school students to a poem every day, without quizzes, tests, papers, or even discussions about the poem, the project implies that poetry does not have to be an academic exercise even if it occurs in an academic setting. Even though Poetry 180 is geared toward high schools, the absence of the usual academic activities creates more possibility for enjoyment. But Collins’s tastes are so bland and out-of-touch that I have difficulty imagining many of the poems he selects appealing to teenagers. He admits to including poems in Poetry 180 that would appeal to high school students—thus the presence of poems about sports and cars. But the poems about sports and cars are almost always written from a middle-aged (and SWM) perspective, and thus (in the eyes of a high school student) from Dad’s perspective. Another example: Paul Muldoon, whose poetry I very much admire, is represented by a poem about a sonogram—not exactly the kind of poem the average, or even above-average, teenager will respond to. “Gathering Mushrooms” (or any number of Muldoon’s shorter poems) would have been a more appropriate choice here. Likewise with Joe Wenderoth, represented here by the allegorical (and relatively “difficult”) “My Life” rather than a piece from Letters to Wendy’s. So Poetry 180 is a case of good intentions—and a good idea—but ultimately a missed opportunity.

Collins’s poems, too, represent numerous missed opportunities. His poems are formally unassuming, written in a free verse that rarely acknowledges the line as a site of possibility. Built almost entirely on the prose phrase, Collins’s lines are among the least notable in contemporary poetry because they are the most common. There is nothing singular or distinctive about them. Although sporadically punctuated, Collins’s line breaks demonstrate little enjambment, as if to use line breaks rather than allow them would prove unpopular or otherwise alienating to the reader. Stylistically, Collins is an adept of the McPoem—a phrase coined by Donald Hall and subsequently encapsulated by Reginald Shepherd as “a little reminiscence, a little nature description, a little epiphany.” At first glance, Berman’s relaxed style can resemble that of Collins, but Collins’s poems admit are almost pathologically bent on small epiphanies. For Berman, the failure of epiphany is as important as its arrival.

Collins’s poems are full of redundancies, imprecision of thought, and lame narratives. Even Collins’s concept-driven poems stem from the most banal concepts. Consider the beginning of “Schoolsville”: “Glancing over my shoulder at the past, / I realize the number of students I have taught / is enough to populate a small town.” This would seem trite and poorly written in prose; that it is cast into lines does not help the idea gain substance. Collins’s set pieces—“Advice to Writers” and “Introduction to Poetry”—are really just two innocuously tongue-in-cheek didactic poems that read like watered-down Kenneth Koch. That said, “Introduction to Poetry” is practically the only poem of any imaginative worth or vigor in Collins’s first book.

Because the narratives in the poems themselves are so lightweight, he sometimes puts all of his energy into a poem’s ending, as in “Vanishing Point,” the first poem in The Apple That Astonished Paris: “You have heard of the apple that astonished Paris? / This is the nostril of the ant that inhaled the universe.” Collins would do well to replicate such wit, however modest, more often in his work. What distinguishes Collins from Berman is his complacency. Formally slack, morally unengaged (despite his claims to the contrary), and politically detached, his poems are polite, almost treacly in their determination to please. They never make the reader—or the poet—uncomfortable. The pleasure they give is without risks. Nowhere does Collins seem menacing, misanthropic, distressed, or otherwise unlikeable. A desire for a negative personality can play into the cliched image of the agitated Romantic poet, but negative emotions appear in almost every poet worth reading. Berman, on the other hand, frequently implicates himself in the pain that can accompany pleasure and therefore attains a more difficult—and more human—equilibrium. Collins’s is a white-washed, white-bread poetry designed for mass consumption and easy digestion. No one leaves a Collins poem troubled or otherwise disturbed. Collins’s style is the non-style.