NEW! Review of Leonard Schwartz

Ear and Ethos by Leonard Schwartz. Talisman House, $13.95.

Reviewed by Maged Zaher

1. Otherness

The moment one enters Leonard Schwartz's new collection, one becomes a witness and an accomplice to his dialogue with the Other. Schwartz does not assume Rimbaud's “I is an other” stance; instead he starts from a realization that the other exists outside the self's boundaries--hence the need for dialogue. Conducting this dialogue seems to be the imperative under which Schwartz writes. Or, as he states in the poem “Six Ways Two Places At Once”: “The very being of language / Implies an other with whom to speak.” As the title of the poem suggests, this dialogue is not selfless: the other triggers the self's desire to explore, to be in two places at once, to experience life six different ways. The Other, then, is both an independent interlocutor, to be respected, and a channel allowing the self to expand.

Schwartz's poems embody this very idea of an expanding self through the multiplicity of forms they take: prose poems (“The Eden Exhibit”), short, jazzy poems (“Sheep's Head”), long-lined lyrics (“Occupational Hazards”), and sonnets (“Apple Anyone”). Just as Schwartz uses myriad forms, he also adopts a variety of voices, from the playful and witty--“I want to eat every mango / There ever was like a small / Unemployed carpenter / Not Christ, just a small unemployed carpenter” (“Method”)--to the soft yet constrained--“Sometimes I must seem hard to you, the starts gathering and glittering in your eyes bursting with focus. Wash your hands, eat your noodles, pick up the clip, and so on. And all the while the bomb continues its downtown countdown. One, two, three, four, five, all gone. What is the name again of the city we live in?” (“The Eden Exhibit”)--to the philosophical, essay-like--“Because its material substratum remains transcendental / the freedom of the subject, which the transcendental is designed to rejuvenate, / allows us to inhale and exhale refreshing drafts just as we approach the summit” (“The Library of Seven Readings”).

Schwartz's openness toward otherness manifests itself in the spectrum of others he addresses--political, cultural, poetical. At the heart of this task, he confronts modern-day colonialism and “Orientalism”: in his “Apple Anyone” sonnets, he collages English words of Arabic origin with lines from Shakespeare's sonnets, in an attempt to demonstrate that the Islamic East and the West are not two radically different cultures; they can mix. Dialogue with the East becomes an alternative to the conservative dehumanization of Arabs:

. . . a whole system
Howling “Sub-Humans”
And acting on that precept
Having pursued in tanks
     The tortured
Right into their ruined hives?
(“Six Ways Two Places At Once”)

2. Poetry and poetics: the gap and the opportunity

In his 1990 essay “A Flicker At The End Of Things,” Schwartz made a Hegelian move, positioning the “Transcendental Lyric”--his brand of poetics--as a synthesis of largely content-based poetry, with its reliance on “immediacy of the self,” and some of the radically formal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, characterized by what Schwartz called “negation of the immediate” via insistence on the “exclusivity of the material, social, and linguistic nexus from which the poem arises.” Schwartz defined the Transcendental lyric as that which “involves an art in which language is used in such a way as to produce at least the illusion of the presence of regions of being outside personal experience, an art in which subjectivity is again given access to visions.”

Although some of the poems in Ear and Ethos, such as “The Eden Exhibit” and “Six Ways Two Places At Once,” operate under this banner, others are less faithful. In some of the strongest poems of the collection, Schwartz deals with immediate and timely political issues. In “Occupational Hazards,” his subject is the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. He builds his poem from a collage of news reports, reflections, fragments, and commentaries:

It was while the army demolished a neighboring house, belonging to the family of a militant from Islamic Jihad, that the wall fell on the Makadamah family.
Opposition came swiftly from the 36 hidden justices.
. . .

With ambulances blocked from reaching the scene, Mrs. Makadamah, 41, died while neighbors were carrying her to a clinic.
. . .

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. . .

Not genocide, not ethnic cleansing: a name has yet to be conceived for what is undergone in these curfewed quarters.
…

Penelope transfers her strength to the medium of her subjective expression, in order to then subordinate herself to that medium, more than subjective, in the act of destructive defiance.

And in the brilliant poem “Invitation,” Schwartz's weaving of the names of different Palestinian cities into this text becomes an investigation of love, hate, occupation, and language:

Yes, your visa will expire at the end of this poem.
Yes, you will need a new passport to exit
This nightmare, a new genre of passport.
If every veteran of reality rose up and protested
Every single case of war mongering
                   Or Jenin.

In this set of poems, Schwartz lets go of dialogue and comes as close as possible to identifying himself with the other, as he rewrites Marina Tsvetaeva's line, “All poets are Jews” as “All poets are Palestinians.”

Also in these poems, Schwartz works outside of the Transcendental lyric insofar as he exhibits more visceral reaction, anger, and immediacy. This recalls Donald Hall's observation, in the article “Theory X Theory,” that a poet whose poetry exactly matches his or her poetics can end up being very boring: it is in the space between poetics as project and actual poetry that good poetry is created. In a way, true negative capability puts the poet in tension with her or his poetics, and in Ear and Ethos Schwartz sidesteps--or perhaps expands--his poetics. The transcendental is no longer universal but grounded in the immediate. This sideways or expansive act is negative capability at its best, the work of a mature and important poet.

NEW! Review of Wayne Chambliss

The Traveling Salesman Problem by Wayne Chambliss. The Caitlins.

Reviewed by Brandon Downing

Wayne Chambliss' The Traveling Salesman Problem is a small book of ten-line works, each ostensibly sent by the author as 'postcard dispatches' to his project managers as he coursed around the country peddling "biological agents, content management software, and engineering services" (and perhaps a touch of snake oil) from such locations as San Francisco, Oak Harbor (WA), and New York City. The book is also a wonderful aggregate of light heartbreak, throwback meter, lost-kid watchfulness, and truly fresh air. It has been a long time coming.

The author has previously published several installments of excellent translations, particularly of the Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto, and, while scattered outbursts of his own work have been showing up more frequently in journals, this is the most substantial dose of his work most readers will have seen.

Wayne Chambliss was an underground legend at Stanford University, where rumors swirled about this wild performer of old-style 'verse' who semi-haunted the campus. One Friday, as Spring Quarter was winding down, I caught a ride down from San Francisco to catch a Wayne 'event'. The performance had been advertised only by word of mouth: Wayne was going to do a show right in front of Rodin's bronze doors, The Gates of Hell, sculptural jewel of the University, just before dark. But when we showed up, there was a real crowd gathered up for it, stretched out across the lawn, little picnics at sunset, many of whom, somewhat nervously, seemed to know what was in store. "He's really into Brodsky," someone whispered, but when I heard him boom and trill out the first four or five hundred lines of a middle-aged-persona-lament of the seasons and the arthritis of time--fully from memory --I was thinking about more than Brodsky. This was old throwback oratory of the first, and weirdest, order: pulsing, William Jennings Bryanesque monologue, fiery, fully convincing and fake, elated and depressed. And it was fiction: true theater, seeming to inhabit the desperate pull of bitterness and regret, global consciousness, goofball rumination. It was like the gangleader’s opening speech of The Warriors (1979), translated by James Merrill.

I was quite blown away. This was unearthly shit. Recited by a chain-smoking, surfer-handsome, baseball-cap sporting kid of twenty-four or so who slept many of his nights in the Student Union, having slipped through the grill of the Stanford system a few years before, circulating from couch to couch with his book-bag and toiletries, hitting on smart girls. I got to know Wayne a little bit over the ensuing years, as he cycled through several phases of sofa-surfing, jobs as the 'encyclopedic' cashier at different video stores, the brain behind several brilliant (and perhaps less-than-brilliant) internet start-ups. He has ended up doing just about everything and running around just about everywhere. And that's one of the reasons so few of us have become familiar with his work. The Traveling Salesman Problem should help with that.

While the author's peripatetic condition, and occasional instability, has perhaps prevented him from rooting his work and letting it grow in the past, this rich motif of displacement lies right at the heart of the The Traveling Salesman Problem:

Everywhere now, intimations of North.
Even the little bronze weather vane's attempting a migration.
And cats grow lean in the court-
yards watching the peregrinations
of squirrels with cheeks like Louis Armstrong.
Cinnamon, hickory, chamomile, clover.
Embedded in the eiderdown,
"you reach for a shirt and the day is over."
And words are off-colored as leaves, flecked with the old neurosis,
gasping like wind in the trees. Or else tuberculosis.

And that's the poem. There are about twenty more of them here. His four- and five-hundred line odes of endurance have become, in this short new collection, ten-lined, epigrammatic videotapes of change. With some of his earlier wilderness shed for a brighter sense of purpose and passing time, there remains that clever Britishized need for rhyme, and that ex-patriotic style of line breaks. It’s a real campfire.

Wayne Chambliss is The Traveling Salesman. That makes it even more perfect that his new collection is so titled. Ironically, it's here in NYC--where The Traveling Salesman Problem itself ends all cute and abrupt--that Wayne, always at the perimeter of so many lives and influences, has found worth settling into for a real spell. I can only hope that work like this continues to be the result of his new rooted-ness, however illusory it might be. And while these short poems retain much of the epic nature of his earlier work, here it’s much more graspable and lived: the moment-to-moment flashes of mood, gentle japanese rhyme, shadow puppetry, the weariness behind all that fucking mobility. Let this be the beginning of a lot more Wayne.

NEW! Review of Andrew Gottlieb

Halflives by Andrew Gottlieb. New Michigan Press, $7.

Reviewed by Summer Block

It is fitting that Andrew Gottlieb’s chapbook Halflives takes its title from a line by James Salter, the Korean War veteran known for a down and dirty style that eschews ponderous ruminations in favor of swift, powerful images and manly forthrightness. “Still, it’s depressing,” the quotation reads on Gottlieb’s title page, “One feels like a fugitive from half a dozen lives.” Though Gottlieb follows Salter’s example of clear, concise language, his empathy for “half a dozen” other lives is uniquely his own. In an era of writing that can be so challenging as to seem antagonistic to the reader, Gottlieb is refreshingly approachable. His style is human, narrative, and observational.

For a man who makes his home in soggy Washington, Gottlieb’s poetry is redolent with heat: “leaping heat seers skin deep,” “long dry days,” “hot sun burns,” “the heat of summer,” “still air,” “black smoke and grease,” “heat, static as a junk car,” “stale air.” The result is poems that feel at times claustrophobic, suffocating. “Standing Patterns,” the first poem in the volume, constructs the American South out of rusty screen door hinges, sweltering summers, and the skitter of roaches. A fretful young bride feels the still, oppressive heat stifle possibility. Time is slow: “Second hands clack / and you see how often life is a wait / you weather.” Only in “Spider” can Gottlieb say to the wise creature of the title, “You know time’s an ally.”

Gottlieb’s portrayal of women is kind, even when not very nuanced--he has the compassion to feel a young girl’s “hope [as] a seed in warm peat”--but the subtlety of poems like “Standing Patterns” is missing from “All She Wants” and “Amaryllis,” explorations of teen girlhood that feel more voyeuristic than empathetic. What’s lacking is the wisdom of a line like “A man / will remember a love that left him / but will settle again for his house, porch, family / noise like a TV, and with a cold beer / in the backyard, he’ll know the chilly twinge / of unreceptive things piled in his garage,” from the excellent “Choosing Channels.”

If the women in these poems feel somehow false, Gottlieb is a master of masculine reticence, the long ache of stubborn silence: “How two men / tooled of the same line / can argue themselves to silence.” The fishermen in “On Mere Point” “toss these baits in frail hope / that one dark mouth will take the hook, / end up caught in a cold bucket / of lost talk,” and while “Men are good / at missing out on lessons,” he explains, his work nonetheless offers many poignant ones. There are the occasional clichés--strippers, dive bars, taciturn men with beer bellies and sad eyes--but his consideration gives them depth and substance.

Gottlieb is on his surest footing when mapping the losses that make up family life. “Tourist Canoe” feels less fresh and more familiar: the scope is too wide--not the intimate wanderings of a spider or struggles of a hooked fish, but the whole American West--and the canvas is too large, the brushstrokes too hasty. “California’s ancient golden invitation” is a well-worn idea, without the dash and vigor of lines like “The weather’s like a fight you want a knife in: / unpredictable and quick.”

Gottlieb’s gift for observation serves nature no less than his characters. He takes careful note of weather patterns, insects, birds--a function of his characters’ stoic patience. But nature here is not all flowers and rainbows. Halflives is full of images that force us to confront the gross bodily manifestations of illness and decay: “thin, wrinkled lips taut over teeth / reddened with blood she coughed,” “clothes clotted and black.” Families hold vigils over the dying or stand helpless in the face of calamity. Infirmity and death are ever present, as a reminder of our true, physical selves. In “Fugue For Wheelchair,” Gottlieb gently chides, “We’d find my father sprawled on the hard wood / floor of the master bedroom, fallen from / his scooter--as we called it, hoping names / could make things not what they were.” Euphemisms are an indulgence, a false comfort. In “Stand-Off, Bedside,” gathered relatives implore their dying grandmother to hush her anguished muttering “as if silence / could comfort our watching,” but the grandmother speaks on in a rush of words that carry her life away with a “march” and a “song.”

Despite the book’s title, these works are less about incompleteness than metamorphosis. Here stasis is a misery, but change is still avoided, or impossible, or unrelentingly cruel. Only animals, not freighted with fear, can live spontaneously and without regret: “Overturned, a boat / that doesn’t float will shade a spider or a mink / or some other surprise, live or long past / needing shelter.”

NEW! Review of Pam Rehm

Small Works by Pam Rehm. Flood Editions, $12.95.

Reviewed by Jason Stumpf

The poems in Small Works are short pieces and sequences of short pieces--small works--but “small” describes not only their length but also their style. The poems are spare. They foreground white space, silence, and the precise unfolding of language and idea. Their speaker moves not from place to place but among the remnants experience has left her. Each line feels legitimated by hard thought and expresses, or seeks, hard truth. The mind within these poems enters and contemplates moments, meticulously separating from the daily, from the domain of the self, perhaps from the domain of the soul. For Rehm, abstractions such as memory and wonder have an almost personal presence and are, in places, literally embodied, as in “Charm for Sleep,” where “Fear has an ear / in it.”

The title Small Works is, in one way, misleading: it suggests that the book might read as if assembled to catalogue a subset of the poet’s corpus. However, the poems are not an odd gathering of pieces united only by their size; they share an animating sensibility and the project of drawing language from truth and truth from language. One exemplary case is the poem “Eden,” which begins:

Endure has an end
you may rue
at the outset

But it also has need

and need is an Eden

“Eden” goes beyond being merely clever. That is, it has more to offer than the realization that the word “endure” contains letters to spell the words “end” and “rue” and that the letters in “need” can be reordered to produce “Eden.” Here, anagrammatic play provides a means for revealing the connections between words, but the true link, it seems, is born from the speaker’s experience of their meanings. The valence of the letters depends, as Rehm writes later in the poem, on “How I hold it.” One doesn’t feel as if Rehm shook the words to see what fell out, but that these meanings had been hidden all along. This notion about language--that its arrangement and rearrangement conjure an already existent understanding or belief--is central to Rehm’s work. In this and other ways, Rehm’s sixth collection roams similar terrain to her previous books, especially Gone to Earth and The Garment in Which No One Had Slept. In this newest book, her language is as stark and honed as ever.

While Rehm’s references include symbolically charged Biblical imagery--paradise, Hell, Solomon, shepherds, lamb--her primary subject is not faith but the experience of faith, which is to say the poems’ threads spread from an individual dwelling in the world rather than emanate from a pure, impersonal concept. The poems unfold with a careful beauty of thought--an authority--that announces a mind in contemplation of the world. For example, “Bow Down” tracks spiritual longing while observing the natural world:

Faith comes to one noiseless
and yet, keeps one exasperated

Eager to touch touch

A bird’s nest

Here, as elsewhere in the poem, the physical and spiritual are blurred, as faith and touch are intertwined.
The second of the book’s two sections, “Acts,” accounts for approximately the last third of the collection. Here, the linkages between poems are most apparent, signaled by each poem’s title as an act: “Acts of Anxiety,” “Acts of Will,” “Acts of Knowledge.” The poems share the project of distilling abstractions to essential associations and experiences. Such is the case with “Acts of Habit,” where the speaker equates habit (and building a habitat) with myth-making and, in turn, creation myths:

A spider’s web rebuilt at dawn

With nothing wasted
Does not change with the times

So earthly and ancient

The myth of morning
The morning makes us

Given the ways insight springs from these poems’ spare gestures, perhaps the title Small Works refers not to poetic works but to the work that precedes their making: the daily, personal exchanges between belief and reality, and the wresting from language what one can be said to know. In Rehm’s hands, this work, much more significant than it first appears, is imbued with a richness and urgency that beckons us to return.

NEW! Review of Edward Foster

What He Ought To Know: New and Selected Poems by Edward Foster. Marsh Hawk Press.

Reviewed by Nicholas Manning

Edward Foster’s New and Selected is once more proof of his often astounding poetic capabilities: sureness of register, intelligence of arrangement, delicacy of emotional patterning, elegance of effect. Which only makes the flaws of What He Ought to Know all the more surprising. And disappointing. The question is perhaps not, finally: how well can Edward Foster write? We know that he can write very well indeed. What seems more pointed is rather: why has Foster chosen to include some of the poems in this volume? Are they simply weaker, or do they rather indicate a different--and for Foster, perhaps equally valuable--aesthetic orientation?

If one had to identify a dominant preoccupation here--and on the one hand, “why?” but on the other, “why not?”--one would no doubt point to the tension everywhere present between knowledge and desire. Desire as a form of knowledge, but also knowledge as a form of desire. Desire as a means of obtaining knowledge, but also knowledge as a modifier of all initial impulses. Thus, we find Thomas Mann quoted above the poem “Watch Hill”: “Desire is a result of not knowing enough.” (That this desire is homosexual desire has perhaps already been too dwelt upon by critics.)

There is a great tenderness to Edward Foster’s verse. Such is his intelligence, however, that he manages to express this tenderness while, if not parodying it, at least undermining it, enabling the reader to see, by means of a profoundly empathetic gaze, the absurdity of everyday intimacies: “What kind of man / rolls over saying (in effect), “‘Don’t wait on me / to wait on you.’” The elliptical conclusion here, as elsewhere, rings true of an emotion which somewhere, on its way to expression, has lost its way. We see what the speaker means, in a general sense: but the confusion makes us feel that this language is so charged with sentiment that it has become, in a positive way, obscured by it.

This is one example of the subtleties of Foster’s verse. In fact, this is the sort of word one often thinks of with regard to these poems: subtlety, nuance, gradation, tone, hue, variation, light. But there is another category of terms as well, equally important, and it is perhaps the complex combination of the two that is interesting: control, balance, order, restraint, arrangement, structure, elegance.

It is precisely this unlikely amalgam which confers upon Foster’s poetry its particular beauty: order and arrangement, but also the careful colouring of this order with emotional light:

The hills, we said, were made for tourists. The broken bits of columns, Adonis in his grave. The earth was closed, we’d say, or, then, the boy at least was ill. His face, we knew, would never heal, and women would be kind. He would depend on them. This night, what difference if the words were not the same. I move your hand, and now for all the world, we never change and live in this decision.

What is so refreshing about such pieces is the sheer linguistic, emotional, and imagogical control often absent from the contemporary “prose-prose.” The limitation this writing seems to impose upon itself, even during the act of its being set down, means that it remains focused upon its goal, and thus stable in its relentless forward movement.

Foster, then, is capable of writing well: what is surprising is that he his also capable of writing, if not poorly, at least poems strangely lacking in direction. One would be tempted to call these pieces “occasional.” Of course, occasional poetry can be very good: one need think only of the brilliant dedicatory vers of a Mallarmé or Apollinaire. But “occasional” here refers rather to a general laxity uncommon to Foster, as in “Careless Love”:

You want me to belong
The work is done
All acts are simply acts

The parlor’s bright
The guests have gone
All acts are simply acts

We once did things together
You make your choice alone
All acts are simply acts

You choose another carelessly
You make your choice alone
All acts are simply acts

Now, what is aimed at here, we may think, is no doubt the sort of song-like, refrain-based lyricism found in mid to late Yeats. (It is interesting to note, for instance, the almost identical form of Yeats’ “Crazy Jane on God,” which has as its constant post-stanza refrain “All things remain in God.”)

What we get from Foster, however, is a veritable jumble-sale of ideas. Firstly, one need merely point to the bizarrely anachronistic, fin de siècle, listless Eliot moment in: “The parlor’s bright / The guests have gone / All acts are simply acts.” Thankfully, the guests here are not talking of Michelangelo, but we feel they could be. This moment of emotional anaemia is then followed by a series of love-truisms, which culminate in the moral of the story: “You choose another carelessly / You make your choice alone.” The sentiment is trite: we care little for a speaker who expresses in this way a situation so possibly rich in sentimental meaning. Of course, one may argue that this is precisely the lyrical tone Foster was aiming at here. But what does this tone achieve? We may think, for example, that in regurgitating clichés about love (“We once did things together”), Foster is again employing the delicate, faceted irony underplayed so effectively in his other poems. Unfortunately, however, it seems that in this case he is not: this poem is pure surface. There is nothing to indicate a deeper awareness that these expressions are in fact clichés, nothing to indicate the underlying mechanics of the speaker’s emotional state. The tone is singular and immutable. Like another failed “song” in the collection, “Wheat From the Chaff,” there is little energy here; any initial music is quickly stifled by an absence of tension.

On the page facing “Careless Love,” we are treated to a photo of pigeons congregating on ten (or so) urban marble steps. Their black shapes speckle the white locale. This is useless illustration in the worst sense, a moment when Foster’s unabashed, often delightful “aestheticism”--by this term we simply mean an explicit valuing of the poem as visual and aural object--takes a turn for the worse, reducing the poem and its (supporting?) image to the status of product, as thin as the paper upon which it is reproduced.

This brings us to the unfortunate issue of Foster’s own photos throughout the collection. These photos are not necessarily bad: they are attractive in a picture-postcard sort of way. (Here a tree in a snowy field, there a crepuscular sun over a dark wood.) But their relation to the poems, and to the book as a whole, is at best uncomfortable. To take the example of the first image in the book: we have a poem, “Former Care,” which spirals into a beautifully controlled meditation on decay and disappearance: “This stage is bare, / and, sensibly, abstractions mark / the guilt we found in fairy tales.” However, beside “Former Care” is a photo of crumbling ruins. This rapprochement is vaguely insulting, for if we are indeed meant to find parallels between the image and its facing text--and this is everywhere implied--then do we not demand a more satisfying parallel than this? Individual dying, thus monument in decay: the image forces us to read “Former Care” in a way which the poem itself does not want to be read: that is, simplistically, isolating one element of its nature to the detriment of other conflicting subtleties. This is all the more unfortunate because “Former Care” is a fine poem: it has no need whatsoever of this type of metaphoric reinforcement.

This is fortunately the case for very few pieces in What He Ought To Know. In the main, these are poems of stunning tension and beauty. Take the first poem of the book, “In Your Words,” quoted here in its entirety:

In time, we will not kiss, and your face given into fire will tantalize my dreams, and I will sear my hair as I lean close, looking at your shadow in the smoke. That much will rise, and singing for me then, as you cannot sing now, it will emerge with other songs, in tight unyielding chords.

This is strong passion so strictly controlled, so forced into the regular shapes demanded by expression, that we feel the poem itself has become the song of which the speaker dreams, made of “tight, unyielding chords.” The sentiment here, though perhaps initially in conflict with this imposed restraint, is finally strengthened by it, and thus brought to its full fruition.

The variation in forms throughout the volume is effective: Foster’s prose is as well-handled as his verse, but it provides us with moments of an entirely different pace and atmosphere. As we follow Foster through Venice, Moscow, and St Petersburg, the prose form reveals itself as being entirely appropriate to these almost journalistic portraits. Mood governs these pieces, the “baroque and Prussian palaces” of St Petersburg and the “islands” of Venice providing the central motor of these veritable hymns to Nostalgia. (Like these “travel pieces,” Foster does Ut pictura poesis refreshingly well, as proved by his “Ophelia, And the Reeds, At the Tate”).

Sadly, however, the contrasts continue. There are some embarrassing moments of self-reflexivity:

Poems
can’t be made
to self-destruct,
the way a garden can.

But then, to make up for it, we have poems of such extraordinary force as “The Litany”:

And there is nothing to be longer seen.
           Crystals refract
                and darken his sight:
                        desire is the imagined
aspiration he has never seen but always known.

The sheer beauty of these calm and affectionate poems, which are never didactic nor overbearing, and which seem to constantly assert their proud if unassuming presence, is impressive. It is simply regrettable that several times the reader is irritated by errors of judgement which, I would suggest, are of a critical, rather than poetical, nature. Without the weaker pieces, along with the postcards which accompany them, we would be left with a collection of a rare beauty, and of a rare humanity as well.

letter/response from John Olson

"May I ask how language can listen to itself?"

             ---  Matthew W. Schmeer

Ok, I will tell you. Implicit in Eshleman’s observation is the idea that language has a living dynamic. It has a pulse, it has a biology, it has texture and skin. Tang, temper, tongue. It has, most importantly, a certain autonomy. Poets who respond to the inherent autonomy of words  -  words in collision, collusion, or tumbling colluvium  -  write great poetry. Great because they are not so pompous and ridiculous as to trump it up with their silly plumage. Great because they have discovered the genius of language and have learned how to nourish rather than tame and control it. To create a compact, jewel-encrusted Tiffany prose poem you can show off to your friends or use to win prizes and grants is fine. But it isn’t really poetry. Because poetry, whether it is a free verse howl, cyclonic pantoum, nuclear sonnet or double-barreled sporophyll disguised as a prose poem, has this one quality about it: it is alive. It spits, sputters, spins. It ambles forward angry and confused chased by frightened villagers. It breaches in the ocean a thunderous hulk white and marvelous. It squawks and sprouts and spurts. It roars. It stomps through Tokyo. It wings its way over Manhattan casting dark shadows. It glides on a pond preening its neck. It knocks its beak against the skull of the reader. Those who can hear the life in the egg of a word and have the minds to warm and incubate it until it breaks from its shell and assumes flight in the imagination are responding in the truest way possible to the polymers of a language self-replicating itself in surprising, unpredictable patterns. The very language underlying all life, DNA, would still be a stinking pool of amino acids if it did not develop a capacity to listen to itself. 

John Olson

NEW! Review of Amy Clampitt's Letters

Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt, edited by Willard Spiegelman. Columbia University Press, $41.50.

Reviewed by David Galef

All too often, the careers of well-known American poets follow a predictable pattern: early promise capped by a major award, followed by years of uneven work or a slow downslide. Late-blooming exceptions are almost refreshing: Wallace Stevens, for instance, whose first book came out when he was 44, though one should distinguish between a late bloomer and a late publisher. The career of Amy Clampitt presents a striking instance of this second career flight, cut short in 1994 by ovarian cancer. Clampitt’s poetry has always been both sensuous and cerebral, with a layering of the past in nature and culture. The poet herself, or at least the persona in her work, made her seem like the kind of individual you’d want to meet: modest but with high standards, slightly romantic but pragmatic where it counted, and perpetually curious.

Now, a decade after her death, Willard Spiegelman, an American literature professor who once described Clampitt’s verse as half voluptuous and half Quaker, has published a carefully tailored selection of Clampitt’s correspondence to present, as he says, “A poet’s life in letters.” The picture is an intriguing mosaic with some early pieces missing. The last fifteen years of her life, Clampitt encountered fame, which makes for its own distortions, though she seems to have handled it rather well.

Graduating from Grinnell College in 1941, Clampitt left the midwest for New York, though for quite some time she worked at a low-profile job, first as a secretary, then as a librarian, later doing editorial work. In these respects, her career arc was like that of the British novelist Barbara Pym, an author whose quiet but penetrating work Clampitt admired: two smart, talented young women who went to the big city and performed office work for years while writing on the side--in Pym’s case for the African Institute, for Clampitt, the Audubon Society. Their interests, too, seem to have coincided: flora and fauna, the weather, and landscape, as well as food. Judging from their letters (Pym’s were collected in 1984 under the title A Very Private Eye), neither was immune to celebrities, though if they were snobs, it was only in the Virginia Woolf sense: they valued talent. Both retained their intelligence to the end.

Love, Amy starts in March 1950, with a letter to Barbara Blay, an Englishwoman whom Clampitt first visited in London the previous year. Blay, the recipient of letters on everything from the holes in Clampitt’s shoes to the presence of Seamus Heaney, represents just one of many long-term friendships that sustained Clampitt over the years. She wasn’t a temperamental artist famous for feuds. And her letters are sustaining rather than vitriolic. As she writes in her essay collection, Predecessors Et Cetera, in a review of women’s epistolary literature: “The writing of letters--real old-fashioned ones, as distinguished from the copiously scripted and distributed appeal to its recipients’ worst or better instincts, or even to both at once, that like weeds in an untended plot may soon crowd out all else--is a dying art.” Her prose is chatty but structured, with casual observations on life often linked to art or literature. In this respect, she seems a fine embodiment of the thinking, feeling poet whom T. S. Eliot praised, the kind who connects reading Spinoza and falling in love.

But Clampitt never adopted the crabbed, progerian stance that Eliot often affected--an early 1940s shot of her in Central Park makes her look like Carson McCullers--and she displays unabashed enthusiasms. As she writes her brother Philip in the early fifties, “Then there was the evening when I listened to a poet reading Yeats aloud, and practically floated out of the window, the effect was so intoxicating.” She could also be political and droll at the same time, referring to left-leaners as “the dictatorship of the vegetariat.” And always, always, she writes about what she’s been reading, from Toynbee to Stendhal and back. Clampitt clearly continued her education on her own long after leaving college. In one of her letters to Philip, she thinks about taking The Faerie Queene on the subway, a scene similar to Arthur Miller’s reading War and Peace while strap-hanging from Brooklyn.

For all her reading, in the 1950s Clampitt went through some failed-novelist years. As her letters show, she could work lovely descriptive touches but wasn’t as adept at reproducing scenes, and her unsuccessful narratives were apparently skimpy on plot and characterization. Certainly, she could be both clinical and lyrical in evoking atmosphere, as in “From a Clinic Waiting Room”: “Down in the blood bank / the centrifuge, its branched transparent siphons / stripping the sap of Yggdrasil / from the slit arm of the donor, skims / the spinning corpuscles, cream-white / from hectic red.” She could also quickly penetrate to the heart of a matter, which may be one reason for her impatience with the Freudian fervor of the fifties and sixties. She preferred the rigor of religious morality over psychoanalysis, as she explained in a letter to Philip back in 1957, concluding, “And good luck with your psychotherapy!” She was a free spirit, though not a careless soul--that Quaker background. Hence her self-description in a letter, “Within limits, I do pretty much as I like,” and a telling reference to “My own brand of nonconformity.”

Clampitt’s letters also reveal the family she left behind in Iowa (for a poignant view of her great-grandfather, “A settler / From Indiana, his mind scarred by whippings,” see her long poem “The Prairie”). Clampitt herself was one of five children, and her sister Beth spent some time in and out of institutions. Clampitt, for her part, spent time in and out of church. In fact, a semi-embrace of Episcopalianism around 1956 seems to be involved with her starting to write poetry. By the 1960s, she grew dis-enamored of the church, quit her job at the Audubon Society, and began to travel more. Around the same time, she became more overtly political, canvassing for Eugene McCarthy and proclaiming anti-war sentiments. Her February 1971 letter to Henry Kissinger about the Vietnam War is a masterpiece of controlled, eloquent frustration. Almost ten years later, she revealed in a letter to a family friend that she’d grown distant from the church because of its lukewarm reaction against the war.

But she never lost her adoration of art. She writes admiringly of other writers: A. R. Ammons and his poetry book Sphere; an old reliable, the work of e. e. cummings; and the chants of Allen Ginsberg, whom she terms “completely himself.” But she also notes, in 1975, that the definition of poetry has lost all coherence nowadays. Her work was more in line with that of Elizabeth Bishop, clearly a poet whose sensuous grace influenced Clampitt significantly. Finally, around 1979, Clampitt’s own poetic career began to blossom. The poet Mary Jo Salter plucked a few of Clampitt’s poems from the slush pile at The Atlantic Monthly and decided to write her a real letter, thus beginning a correspondence (in both meanings) that would last some fifteen years.

Clampitt took a creative writing workshop with a public reading as a practicum and writes to Salter about “how heady a pleasure it can be to have an audience,” though in the same letter, she notes ruefully: “more poets writing than there are readers, it would appear.” In a March 1978 letter, she notes triumphantly that a poem of hers is to be printed in The New Yorker. From that point on, Howard Moss, the “kindly, unassuming, pleasant” poetry editor at The New Yorker, figured in many of her letters, and Clampitt started meeting Big Name poets, including James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, Joseph Brodsky, Galway Kinnell, and Derek Walcott. The Harvard-based scholar and critic Helen Vendler also entered the picture, at first puzzled by the appearance of this poet without academic credentials but quite cognizant of her talent. Along with Frederick Turner of The Kenyon Review, Vendler was an anointer who could make a poet’s reputation. (She was probably instrumental in securing Clampitt a Guggenheim and eventually a MacArthur Award.) Clampitt’s letters to her show how a critic can help a poet with the work itself: editing suggestions. She also relied on a man with a musical ear: her life partner, the law professor Hal Korn, whom she had met at a political rally in 1968.

Even before Clampitt was “discovered,” life was a fairly pleasant mélange. Writing to Blay in 1977 from Corea, Maine, where she and Hal spent the summers, she mentions work on a Dutton manuscript, that they’re living on blueberry pie and crabmeat, and that she and Hal saw a local production of Così fan Tutte. These details could easily figure into a Clampitt poem, a loose commingling of the natural and the stylized, though so much depends on the arrangement and the vocabulary. This is a woman who casually refers to vernissage, physids, and amphipods. And for all her book-knowledge, her letters also include a lot of naturalism, not surprising given her interests and work at the Audubon Society.

Spiegelman shows the poems enclosed in a few of Clampitt’s letters: a version of “Palm Sunday,” for instance, eventually pared down for inclusion in her first volume. From her letters during this busy era, one can appreciate the texture of her life: house guests arrive and depart; she and Hal are jogging these days; “The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews” is published in The New Yorker for a payment of--an exultant note here--$183. And after some uncertainty about whether she would ever come out with a book, a new editor at Knopf, Alice Quinn (eventually succeeding Moss at The New Yorker), accepted the book that came out as The Kingfisher in 1983. After that, Clampitt published four more full volumes: What the Light Was Like, Archaic Figure, Westward, and A Silence Opens.

Such prolific success, and at the expense of the reigning minimalist aesthetic, occasioned a fair amount of criticism. In a letter to Salter, she notes that another poet accused her, “You’re in love with words.” Though this label seems the very definition of a poet, Clampitt is typically modest: “What he meant, I guess, was that I tend to use too many of them.” During the summers, she and Hal reread Dickens and George Eliot, and in late 1981, Clampitt writes Blay that she’s learning ancient Greek.

In the last years of her life, she became a luminary, and some of the placid pleasures change to descriptions of reading tours, publication events, and meeting other luminaries--not to mention the inevitable reviewing work thrust at her, as well as judging literary contests. But New York was changing, and the 1980s were not the 1960s. In a sign of the times, Clampitt’s beloved 12th-Street walk-up turned co-op, and The New Yorker altered under the editorship of Tina Brown.

A June 1993 letter to the poet George Bradley refers almost glancingly to surgery and chemotherapy. She left Manhattan, selling her place on 12th Street and buying a retreat in Lenox, Massachusetts, with money from her MacArthur. Growing increasingly weaker, she married Hal three months before she died. A photo in this volume records the event, with Clampitt, unable to stand but wearing a smile under a swoopingly broad-brimmed hat. The last letter in the selection is dated September 5, 1994, from Phoebe Hoss, writing for her friend, who died just five days later. As for what remains, her Collected Poems, issued by Knopf in 1997, is a good place to start. The volume shows the same multiplicity of interests as in her letters. As she wrote to Philip back in 1954: “I have never known exactly what the accepted version of myself was, if there is such a thing.” Posterity shimmers in these refractions of a variegated life.

letter from Clayton Eshleman re: Olson review

Schmeer operates out of a simplistic prose poem theory. When he cannot saddle John Olson's rambunctuous and unpredictable sallies and branchings, he pouts: tin ear, poor stream of conscious imitation of Gertrude Stein (Olson's writings actually have little to do with Stein--even tho there is a fascinating homage to Stein in this book--he is much more akin to the Jackson Mac Low of Pieces O' Six--that is, in Olson, we have a granular, self-listening language, surging in jump cuts and waves, sometimes purely associational, sometimes with a "subject," which becomes the stem of branching variations).

Rather than seek a weak phrase or limp line (any poet, Stevens as well as Olson, can be made to look stupid by singling out the occasional botch and highlighting it), Mr Schmeer (one wonders if this is a pseudonym--if it is not, alas) should have focused on what Olson can do. For, in my opinion, Olson is the most dynamic and far-ranging prose poet of the last fifty
years. He has, like Robert Kelly, an extraordinarily inventive imagination, and he takes real risks, another reason to praise him.

At the point that the reader puts on critical pajamas, imaginative delight falls asleep. So Schmeer becomes a lie detector diviner, looking for howlers.

It must be acknowledged that Olson, at times, zigs like a digger wasp seeking an unknown host! Wonderful! Such are the perils for one of our masters, exercising, like Robert Duncan and Rommel, "his faculties at large."

Clayton Eshleman

NEW! Review of Brandon Downing

Dark Brandon by Brandon Downing. Faux Press, $15.

Reviewed by Jen Tynes

Reading Dark Brandon, I am thinking, in a very unpoetic way, about sources: how we define, acknowledge, utilize and integrate them and to what end. This collection of poems is cross-listed with cinema studies; both its titles and poems make reference to films and television, and a reader will respond to these poems differently depending on their relationship to the allusions, but Downing lets us understand pretty quickly that we are off-book, off-source. The "dark" in Dark Brandon is, in part, the darkness of the screen and screening room, the ability of a program that is more ambient than focused or focusing to intimate, isolate:

"You poor, poor Jonesy." "The story
Made you want to cry, all over the French kids."
"In a fiery metropolis of woods."
Bug-eyed children make for a starry outlook branch,
And find a candy jinx made with neat rox.
Pissed, colossal checkerboard rivets. Fake!

Poems like "Johnny the Giant Killer (1950)" seem to reference and extend their "sources" in several different ways: possibly by quoting from the film directly, describing images, and summarizing plot points, but these poems also freely interpret and associate movies and the contexts (both personal and universal) of movies. Lines are crossed, and film becomes a natural element, a force akin to nighttime or conversation. Words are occasionally underlined, creating an emphasis but also possibly reading as dead links, gateways to a context from which we have been disconnected. Who owns or makes these elements is a minor but nagging question for both the author and the reader. Where is the constant by which we understand the variable? The poet tells us what he thinks and understands via his choices and correlations. Ambient language is necessarily without specific direction or particular source. The poet doesn't matter and the allusions are only part of the landscape; the reader is forced to invent a new context for the poems.

But I don’t think this book is truly ambient, certainly not without focus. The title itself includes the author's name, and the collection both begins and ends in self-consciousness. The first poem, "Joseph Campbell & The Power of Myth," begins:

In the creation, you are a creature, a motif,
One who always plays Bluebeard, but interpreting

Blame, a woman's tendency, with a spontaneity,
Like teflon, all the love thrown off

Or the priest's freak refusal to affirm life,
For heaven's sake, or an opposite's downfall,

Passive in the sight of a phantasm.
To thoughtlessness? For you and me never

We deplore the teachings of Jesus Christ.
To participate definitively, without reticence, rancor . . .

He just wasn't a human, he went on deadly diets
He wrote poetry and he was a hero.

"What do you mean, 'Poetry'?" An accord of underlines.
I promise he will have nothing to do with history.

In one of the later poems, "Philharmonik," Downing writes, "I like to use this poem on wizards. / This book is ending badly; I don't apparently / wash dishes right," and the last pages of the book include a series of poems titled "Poems." This awareness of what a poem is, should be, could be, is both funny and worthwhile but, most importantly, it reaches back into the world, becomes viable. Forrest Gump’s “accent was bad, bad like the puke of / 15 Dr. Peppers.” A poem titled “G.W.B.” faces a terrifyingly close, cropped photo of George W. Bush’s face, and it begins:

Again:
You warned our culture of the approaching Rock.
It run off to get questions ready for my black oracles.
But the joke is me being another of the walking dead:
I know there ain’t nothing I can do about female couples.
They gone into Sam Goody, doing their windshield-wiper
moves & hanging amulets.
It’s my guys are gonna respond: Mike, nuke the goddamn bread.
Track down the fuselage: nothin’ leaves the forest.

Other images in this book are equally ghastly--restaurant placemat advertisements and cartoon heads that are both familiar and strange, funny and terrifying. The author’s hand--his cropping, graffiti, doctoring--is hardly distinguishable from the original strangeness, the obscenity. That is, we need little additional focus to see these images and languages for what they are; what they are is sourceless. Sourcelessness is both a reality and a danger. The preoccupation of these poems suggests an immersion, even some love, but the author does not drop his critical eye. One poem, titled “Poems,” ends, “I was not wedded to their decisions, / I walked out on the back balcony instead . . . / & I stood out like a bulb.”Another, also titled “Poems,” reads in its entirety:

Attack, after attack
After attack, after
Attack.

NEW! Review of John Olson

Oxbow Kazoo by John Olson. First Intensity Press, $12.

Reviewed by Matthew W. Schmeer

Since Christopher North first coined the term in his essay “Winter Rhapsody” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1831, writers and critics have argued over what constitutes a prose poem. The modern take is that the genre is coiled in tension created by what the British poet Nikki Santilli calls the intersection of “the axes of poetic and prosaic language.” And, Santilli adds, the prose poem should be brief, because tension increases with containment. Thus, the prose poem demands an imposed structure, and more often than not that structure has been the narrative--however loosely a writer cares to interpret. Narrative is the underpinning of lived and imagined experience, and taking a poetic approach to narrative discourse means the writer must balance the prosaic and the poetic so as to clearly display the difference between poem and paragraph. This definition might seem loose to the casual observer, who perhaps would apply Oliver Wendell Holmes’s line about obscenity to the form: we know it when we see it, or more accurately, hear it. This idea of the aural quality of prose poetry is what ultimately separates it from dry, commonplace prose. But there’s more to it than simply writing rhythmic prose.

In Oxbow Kazoo, John Olson, to his credit, often relies upon the poet’s skills of synecdoche, cacophony, onomatopoeia, assonanace, consonance, and other aural elements. But the volume, the author’s fourth collection of prose poems, also illustrates a tin ear for the structure of prose, and this ultimately reveals what’s wrong with too many writers’s approach to the genre. Too often, these pieces read like minor treatises on their subjects masquerading as prose poems; Olson’s attempts read like poor stream-of-consciousness imitations of Gertrude Stein. This is not to say that Olson doesn’t have flashes of insight. But these are often buried in blocks of dense nonsense. Take, for instance, the brilliant punch that misses its target at the end of “Sweet Fever”:

. . . The telephone rings. It’s a credit card company. Tell them to send us a credit card immersed in leeway. Let’s order a box of cogs and build a cognition and move it around with tongs. Or tongues. Or tom-toms. Or tokens. Tornados and trout. Translucence and trowels. Transcendence and tops. Tarpaulin and tone. Tone is where the moods unlock. Tone is the hum of five hundred volts. Tone is the bone of the button of being. Tone is the timber of timbre and the pi of the punch of topaz. Sympathy density wax. It is the summer of our discombobulation. It is the sparkle of consonants stiffened and still and heavier than air. Ad-libs and egrets. Women’s apparel and a few exuberant pesos of blown glass. Is there really such a thing as loose change? The recession makes it all seem pertinent. Language is to consciousness what seasoning is to soup. I feel engorged with prognostication. There is a paste of the past called memory and a glue of the future called reach. Movement sternum and suede. Nothing is given. Everything is made.

All the wham-o, right-on-target lines about tone lose their energy when he kills the mood with the nonsensical but alliterative “sympathy density wax” followed by the cheeky allusion to Richard III. But even worse, he stops to explain himself (a habit Olson ought to avoid) with a line right out of the now-discontinued SAT verbal section: “Language is to consciousness what seasoning is to soup.” Yes, it is the most lucid idea in the entire piece, a gem tumbling in a steady stream of babble, but it indicates Olson lacks an understanding of how chefs carefully layer and combine seasonings to enhance the taste of a dish, not render it unpalatable.

To better understand Olson’s problem with how prose poems should taste, try these opening lines from the last poem in the book, “Writing in Light”:

One can write the word light but in writing the word light does the word light light up? Does the meaning of the word light correspond to the actuality of light? I say yes. I say when the word light is written the word lights up. So if photography means, literally, writing in light, writing in light must be an actuality. But a photograph always disappoints. It is never the moment we experienced. It is only a weak visual representation of a moment isolated from its gestalt.

Writing a poem that contains a declaration of intention damns the poem to failure. Olson’s pieces often suffer this fate. To indulge in a mini-discourse on semiotic theory in a volume of poetry is just bad form (even if it is at the end of the book).

Individually, some of the pieces have their merits, especially the early poems that feature Arthur Rimbaud as a central character. But on a whole, the book is a mess. This perhaps is the central problem with Oxbow Kazoo: it seems good at first taste, but upon closer scrutiny it’s a spoiled broth.

Olson’s pieces here lack that necessary seasoning, that ingredient that unifies and completes the dish, that holds everything together. He has not imposed an overall structure--linguistic, grammatical, or otherwise--on his prose, but instead relies on the shock of juxtaposition to carry the day. This is a different and weaker approach than other current prose poets such as Eric Baus or Noah Eli Gordon, who create temporary alternative grammars that carry their work, or even Ray Gonzalez, who tends to layer word-sounds in anaphoric patterns. Instead, Olson merely zigzags and crisscrosses, substituting adjective-noun pairs or noun-verb pairs in faltering attempts to surprise. The results are spectacularly unsatisfying.

NEW! Review of Mark Rudman

Sundays on the Phone by Mark Rudman. Wesleyan.

Reviewed by Daniel Sofaer

Readers expecting a mood of ease and hominess, of a quiet Sunday chat on the phone, will soon encounter something more intense. We learn early in the book that Rudman mostly dreaded his mother’s phone calls, which rang shrilly on a green phone at exactly 10:47 AM. In fact, most of the mother-son conversations in the book are face-to-face conversations, and this is all to the good, since Rudman is a kind of lyric dramatist, and his mother’s character impresses us most in person.

Though this book is the last volume in a quintet, it stands on its own quite well. Some of the poems present Marjorie directly, in some we catch glimpses of her, while others are still more remote, but linked to the story of Mark and Marjorie by themes like shock, displacement, the sense of violent attack: “In my mental world, someone is always attacking me.” Rudman also intersperses the poem with lighter pieces about his childhood and youth.

Hovering over the characters of mother and son are the tragic figures and sublime unsteady language of Medea and Hamlet. Rudman spins a metadramatic megafantasy, in which these two greats face off without bothering too much about Gertrude and Jason. Rudman lets in Medea by including a poem inspired by the Abbey Theatre fall 2002 production starring Fiona Shawe, at the climax of which Rudman heard what he renders as a “horripilating electronic screech.” Hamlet comes in a little later, once mother and son get to talking.

What most moves me in the book is a courageous and sometimes desperate effort to find common terms, common ground. Mother and son have come to live in different worlds. They speak very different English. Rudman isn’t afraid to represent himself, the character in the book I’m calling Mark, in a somewhat unattractive light, as a bit of an aesthetic snob. For instance, one feels while reading it matters a little too much to Mark whether his mother has read Jane Austen or the poems of Blake, whether she knows Latin. This self-representation amounts to a self-reckoning, even an atonement. For his mother wins out in the end, and the poet Rudman wins too by rescuing her words from oblivion. Also, in the end, he does find common ground, common language, and proves to all concerned that his mother did authorize him to be a poet, despite never having conferred on him the official title.

One artistic thing Mark learned from his mother was concentration, trance: “When she played [a record], she listened.” And as she later remarks, “I know about trances, why do you think / I did all that painting, gardening, swimming.” When she finds him listening to her copy of Ella in Berlin, she tells him that what he is hearing is called scat. “I adored the name like a key to an earthly heaven.” And Rudman is careful to transcribe: “da da da da dee dee dee deed um dad um dad um da da da da . . .” They could discuss “Walker Evans’ Depression period,” go to museums, and in her letters his mother presented him a calmer, more verbally masterful self. They also share a psychological incisiveness, a hatred of phoniness, and a sort of feminist protest at the stupidity of the men around them, their unfair advantages in life.

When Marjorie gets older, this side of her gradually disappears, and Mark experiences more of her rage and compulsiveness. He is also disappointed by the fact that she takes no interest in his son Sam. It is grim but funny that the only question she ever asks Sam, and only when told to ask him directly, is “Do you eat anything other than steak and noodles?” But the way his mother speaks in her rages is also close to poetry, closer, perhaps, than Mark’s proper diction. There is something ludicrous about Mark’s “She must have intuited that because I was little I would like the diminutive fowl.” Compare the bluntness but also the playful metonymy of one of Marjorie’s mantras: “I married one bottle and then I married another bottle . . . I didn’t know that Rabbis came with bottles.” Elsewhere, Rudman manages to juxtapose the voices of son and mother in a single line: “you unsheathed your spite and penned / a vicious missive about ‘two skuzzballs, human slime . . .’” But my favorite of Marjorie’s dicta has to do with her brother-in-law, Mark’s uncle: “Mark, Jack wasn’t a fake. He didn’t have to play mind games or lay on the charm like Sidney. He wasn’t a talker, he was a doer. It was he who introduced the idea of aptitude testing as a business.” That’s the beautiful humorous note that goes back to Delmore Schwartz’s “America, America.” It doesn’t matter that aptitude testing is now soberly questioned by readers of the Times. Marjorie is talking about the life she has seen and lived. As Schwartz’s story puts it: “She spoke always of her own life or of the lives of her friends; of what had been; what might have been; of fate, character and accident; and especially of the mystery of the family life, as she had known it and reflected upon it.”

NEW! Review of Stephen Burt

Parallel Play by Stephen Burt. Graywolf.

Reviewed by Mike Smith

Writing on Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell observed that “it is impossible to comment on him without the humiliating thought that he himself could do it better.” I feel similarly about reviewing Stephen Burt’s Parallel Play, for I first became aware of Burt through his work as a critic and scholar. But perhaps this is suggestive of the kind of poet Burt reveals himself to be in his second collection. Like Jarrell, Burt the poet shares much with Burt the critic: the speaker in Parallel Play is, with few exceptions, the author; the poems are often in second-person (the reader as conversation partner or eavesdropper); Burt’s voice is discursive, witty, precise. There is a satisfying tension between the topicality (and topical language) of these poems and the subtle use of more conventional devices, not to mention the considerable intelligence evident behind them.

Despite the book’s title, the favored moment of these poems is the twilight of contemporary American adolescence rather than toddler-hood. Often, the poems evoke and comment on instances of stubborn persistence in the face of stubborn persistence, the plans that should not work but do, the imitation product that is “‘funner,’ a customer says / agreeably, ‘than the real thing.’” It’s the formality of the precisely placed “agreeably” that sticks with you, not the young customer’s misuse of language. The characteristic stance is the ironic “Us/Them” of, say, high school theatre groups who watch the spectacle of the Oscars for the camp, not the clothes.

Burt’s connection to Randall Jarrell is stronger than the happenstance that they are known equally as poets and critics. Burt has authored a book on Jarrell and collaborated on another. Aesthetically, they share a great deal, and, in places, Jarrell’s presence becomes almost corporeal, as in “Rachel Newcastle: Diptych: Girl and Diary”:

She balances her journal in one hand:

The trouble is, when you’re not anything
You think you could be all kinds of things
And then you choose. And then you are one thing
And nothing else is you--the other things
You could have been aren’t yours to keep or say.

Is it possible not to perceive “A Girl in the Library” behind the blank-verse (though Burt’s iambic pentameter is much stricter than Jarrell’s) and occasional rhymes, the speaker’s literary voice charmingly sympathetic to its subject “Half-lost in the large world of settled things”? More often, I see this affinity with Jarrell through Burt’s preference for female speakers and subjects, basketball players, and kittens. However, Burt’s female subjects and speakers are all heroes: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not the unhappy woman of “Next Day”; a professional basketball player so good she plays by her own rules, not an undergraduate sleeping under an official rulebook.

Parallel Play is divided into four sections, and poems of personal history bookend the collection. The second section is devoted to poems about NYC, the poet and his companions as tourists. The third section continues this theme of traveler, but also includes some overtly political poems that are the least achieved in the book. The experiment of these poems is whether or not the poet can master, for his own purposes, the mode of spin practiced by our current administration, in which reasons and justifications do not matter. Or, if they matter, it’s only for their usefulness as catalysts to further action. For the most part, Burt masters this mode of discourse without paying many of the predictable costs. And it’s a brave move, requiring an odd mix of looseness and certainty, though sometimes in these few poems the voice becomes too familiar, the well-meaning friend who repeats the same conversation over and over again, earnestly fighting fire with fire, as in the sestina “Our History,” which begins: “What else can I say about my country / this country where the worst of the evildoers / win popularity contests, and the poor / crowd into the army.” But I’m being unfair. Even within this third section, the successful pieces outnumber the poems I’ve been describing. “The Road Builder” strikes a different note entirely: “Nothing is spared. / The prayerful, seemingly rickety high / Radio towers let the wind beseech / Them.” Such poems recapture the voice of the first two sections of the book and its nearly endless capacity to surprise and to fulfill.

The last poems of Parallel Play recapture this voice as well, and they also return to the territory of the first two sections, further proving Burt’s considerable lyrical gifts. We also get in this fourth section a decent dose of Ekphrastic verse, that well-lit room in the house of poetry in which most contemporary writers spend some time and into which some even move their bureau and bed. I admire Burt’s choices, Gerhard Richter and Franz Kline, but I’m even more impressed by the poems that respond to other literature, such as the expertly rendered, wicked, and funny “Six Kinds of Noodles.”

Have
you, too, been trying to keep up with John Ashbery?
Every time I check there’s another new book,
another entry--entrée--on the menu
from which I seem to have ordered my whole life . . .

The familiar forms present in Parallel Play are structural more often than metrical and achieve their effects through off-rhyme, assonance, and even greater stretches. I suspect that the same aesthetic impulse that lies behind Burt’s preference for non-metrical, historically pseudo-serious forms such as the sestina and villanelle (or his remarkable “Paysage Moralise,” in which the same word ends each of the poem’s thirty lines) lies, also, behind the attempt to recover the possibilities for ironic earnestness buried in the language of American commerce and politics. The villanelle I have in mind is “For Lindsay Whalen,” WNBA basketball player. It’s characteristic of Burt to choose a form of evident strain to convey observations like “You don’t show off. We know you by your moves / A feint, a viewless pass, a perfect tease / Make space for all the skills that you can use.” Then, later: “--Win or lose, // Such small decisions, run together, fuse / In concentration nothing like the ease / We seem to see in all the skills you use, / Till someone wins. Then someone else will lose.” Burt’s not showing off either, since so many of the poems point out the consequences of action and performance. Above all, this book is courageous work.

NEW! Review of Mary Jo Bang

The Eye Like a Strange Balloon by Mary Jo Bang. Grove Press.

Reviewed by Donna Stonecipher

Curiouser and curiouser. That’s the trajectory of Mary Jo Bang’s four books, culminating in The Eye Like a Strange Balloon. As her work progresses, it gets marvelously odder, and the singularity of her vision asserts itself with more and more force. To use one of Bang’s own important reference points, the poems seem to fall deeper and deeper like Alice into the rabbit hole.

The Eye Like a Strange Balloon is an ekphrastic book: each poem has a work of art attached to it, which assumes the title. The poem, one presumes, is inspired by the work. Such a strategy presents questions for the reader. Must I know the work of art to “get” the poem? How much am I missing if I don’t know it? Ekphrasis is a wonderfully elastic practice. There are ekphrastic books like Cole Swensen’s Such Rich Hour, for example, which is based on one work of art (the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry); and there are books like Bang’s, in which 37 different artists are represented (two of them film directors), and only a few of the artworks are canonical (such as Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”). Only an art fiend (and Bang herself) would know all the artworks in question, but Bang is so meticulous that this fact doesn’t detract from the pleasures of the poems. Reading her work is such an intensely visual experience, in fact, that trying to keep one picture in mind while being presented with picture after picture in the poems would be pretty much impossible. The lion’s share of the artworks (17) are by Sigmar Polke, the multifarious German pop artist of sorts whose obsession with artifacts matches Bang’s. Where they diverge is that whereas Polke’s style can change radically from artwork to artwork--such that standing in a museum in a roomful of Polkes, one would never guess that they were all made by the same person--Bang has an instantly recognizable style that is unmistakably her own.

That style is a style of impaction. The poems proceed by small, tight units of short sentences or phrases or even single words. The content of the units is often stretched to the limits of heterogeneity. It is rare that one of the poems in the book remains within a single visual event or narrative; rather, the poems generally move from thought to thought as if under a great press of referents and signifiers. This pressure begins in the very titles of the poems, in which Bang has sometimes included a parenthetical further title, such as “The End (Or, the Falling Out)” that doesn’t belong to the artwork, but adds another signifying unit to the poem and signals the dizzying negotiation with referents and phenomena (and meanings) to come. Teases of narrative--often domestic dramas--are sacrificed to the greater excitement of association, of the mind using its cloisonné wings to fly from idea to idea, daring the reader to keep up. Take, for example, the opening of the poem “Spots”:

A pink-faced lovebird cooed from its roost.
A box had been opened, a vase broken.
And against the green wall, the sea was sliding
back again.

The lovebird, the box, the vase, the green wall, and the sea are all whole images, but the velocity of the poem transforms them into fragments. Bang’s poetry moves at the hurtling speed of the 21st century, but never loses its desire to linger.

The visual is, of course, the primary concern of the poems, which are full of eyes, mirrors, cameras, lenses, monocles, microscopes, and blind people. There are also repeated references to scenes, sequences, televisions, stages, operas, and films--all forms of constructed experience that the eye watches. The eye, therefore, is complicit in the artificializing of experience through its representation. Windows appear in many of the poems--but then, so do curtains. The window, the frame, the stage, the screen, the page: all are devices that crop and order experience, that enforce rationality out of the chaos of the world. As Bang herself writes: “There is that box / into which we are drawn.” But the visual as consciously constructed illusion predominates: a beautiful castle is only stage scenery, the cat is wearing a cat mask. The artwork haunting each poem adds to the multiplicity of possible meanings that Bang’s poems have always invited.

Bang is also interested in the construction of pictures that don’t fully make the leap from the abstract to the concrete. What, for example, is a “Swiss circle,” and how might I picture a Swiss circle rising--or, for that matter, rising “canonical”? Or, what is a “Babylon of lean slab forms”? I am reminded of the Surrealists and those paintings with shapes that almost resolve themselves into objects the viewer could easily identify--sausages, musical instruments--but not quite. If everything was easily “see-able” in the poems, Bang would be less faithful to her aesthetic. However, the latter line especially points up another crucial aspect of Bang’s work, and that is that the poems proceed as much by sound as by sight. One uses one’s “visual ear” to read her poems. Puns and double entendres turn into images. Images cede themselves to sonic grandeur. It is this high-stakes game of the visual and the aural, and their interplay as in a whirling two-butterfly mating dance, that give Bang’s poems their particular charge. She writes: “The seen blurs / into the just heard.” And: “‘Being had become an eye . . .’” where Emily Dickinson’s famous “and Being, but an Ear” is turned, well, if not on its ear, then on its eye. The poems’ sound effects--rhyme of all kinds, alliteration, assonance, repetition, puns--are not just tricks up the poet’s sleeve, but actually construct meaning--or construct, to be more precise, meaningful ambiguity. This ambiguity can at times sound close to arch.

But archness is courted in the book. Things are always falling in the poems; the word “fall” appears again and again. It is Alice falling and falling through the rabbit hole, but it is also the heroine falling to the floor for effect, the willow tree’s falling branches, the curtain falling on the act. Alice in Wonderland is really about adolescence, about the painful process of growth that one has not asked for and isn’t particularly happy about; and something of this reluctance to be dragged from innocence to experience makes its way into Bang’s poems. In the first poem, “Rock and Roll Is Dead, The Novel Is Dead, God Is Dead, Painting Is Dead,” she writes, “We’re in this season’s floral print / jammies and feeling very sleepy.” Back when we were in our jammies, we believed in things like God and rock and roll; we were happy to be wearing--we noticed that we were wearing--this season’s floral print. It’s a postlapsarian world in Bang’s poems, and falling is a way to escape its injunctions. It’s also a noir world, but the darkness is so glamorous, so bejeweled, that one is entranced by it. This dialectic between innocence and experience is further signaled by a recurrent motif of coyness, and by seemingly rhetorical questions that are quickly answered: “For what? For this” and “Is everything / all right? It was--.” Questions are a child’s luxury, an invitation to contemplation that can’t be indulged in among the breakneck speed of adult experience; there’s no room for innocence--except in the degraded form of coyness--and a decent interval is a thing of the past. But even experience itself is constructed: an “I” has an experience in a brothel, for example, but it’s actually a brothel diorama.

The tone of the poems is one of Bang’s greatest accomplishments. She can, in lines like

What is a theory
but a tentacle reaching for a wafer of reason.
The inevitable gap tragic. Sure, tragic.

manage to sound a complex of notes at once--resigned, ironic, aggrieved, reassuring, nefarious. It’s impossible to pin down the tone of the thrilling “Sure, tragic.” In lines like “Sex with an effigy. // How much fun could that be? Tsk. Tsk,” the tone is sly, naughty, and somehow sad all at once.

The speakers of the poems don’t, like Alice, get to wake up and find that this complexity is all a dream; though, with the amount of sleeping and dreaming going on in the poems, the reader might be forgiven for construing that as a desire. After all, as one of the poems begins, “We were going toward nothing / all along.”

NEW! Ed Davis poem

Ed Davis

SOFT, CUDDLY, and LASHED TO THE FRONT OF A TRUCK

Although they're officially forbidden, you might see one on trash day if you're lucky. A handless Hulk Hogan. A desiccated Wile E. Coyote, remnants of his fluffy guts hanging out of a burst seam. A Hello Kitty with a hole in her head. Usually fastened firmly to the radiator with rivet-studded wire ties. People throw them out because they're broken. Yet to the garbagemen who pluck them from the trash they're "mongo"--found treasure. Particularly fetching mongo sometimes ends up adorning the bumper guard of their trucks, where it gradually turns grey and disintegrates in the soot-stream of traffic.

Ms. Ukeles, the artist in residence at New York City's Department of Sanitation, says the grille-mounted stuffed animals remind her of "spirit creatures accompanying the drivers on their endless journey in flux." That sounds a little silly to me, but isn't it wonderful that the NYCDOS has its own artist in residence? That's really why New York is the greatest city in the world. Oh, what I wouldn't give to tell someone I'd just met at a cocktail party that I was the artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation.

Still, though I'm sure that Ms. Ukeles is very good at her job and otherwise absolutely marvelous in every way, I'm not entirely certain she's correct. My friend Kurt the anthropologist says the plush toys are heraldic devices--anthropomorphic forms that both proclaim and conceal the identity of a huge machine, like the figureheads on the prows of Viking ships.

Whenever Kurt mentions Vikings, I get a little suspicious; he's always been obsessed with them, so I ask my cousin Heather, who's been an assistant curator at an art gallery for three years. "It's a folk expression of the abject art movement," she says. "The filth, the distress. It's a little 90s, but still tres informe."

That's just French for insides oozing out. I don't know why I even asked; her gallery's latest acquisition is a scale model of San Francisco constructed from 15 different kinds of Jell-o. Heather calls it a "jewel-toned Jell-o masterpiece." I decide to ask Mrs. Bridgewater. She played canasta with my mother every Saturday for years, until her husband Gerald died and she decided to make herself useful by spending her weekends at the museum as a volunteer docent. "I think it's sweet," she says, "It's like an act of rescue. But the poor dears are probably embarrassed by their soft sides; that's why they can't keep them in the cab. It must seem more macho to tie them to the bumper and let them get all beat up like that."

Since Mrs. Bridgewater tends to relate all strange phenomena to unchecked machismo, I decide to ask my therapist. "It's a perfect illustration of a Jungian archetype of aggression," she says. "They're debasing these emblems of innocence. Rather pathetic, really. But more importantly, how do you feel about it? Do you often find yourself thinking about plush toys?" I change the subject. I think she has a knife to grind; she has three spoiled children who always call her cell phone during our sessions. She doesn't answer it, but I've caught her glancing at the phone vibrating on the accent table next to the box of tissues.

My friend Erik teaches social studies now, so I'm surprised to learn that he worked for the DOS for two years back in college. He laughs when I tell him about the stuffed animals. "It's simple," he says. "There's no better way to get the ladies to look twice at your garbage truck."

reviews 2005

Books & chapbooks reviewed on the Verse site in 2005:

Overboard by Beth Anderson
Selected Prose by John Ashbery
Backroads To Far Towns: Basho's Travel Journal, translated by Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu
Fence Line by Curtis Bauer
Lord Brain by Bruce Beasley
Open Clothes by Steve Benson
Museum of Space by Peter Boyle
Sea of Faith by John Brehm
The Unrequited by Carrie St. George Comer
Adversaria by Peter Dent
In the absent everyday by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit by Timothy Donnelly
Einstein Considers a Sand Dune by James Doyle
Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum by Norman Dubie
Small Weathers by Merrill Gilfillan
Periplum and Other Poems 1987-1992 by Peter Gizzi
Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems by Durs Grünbein
Island by Charles O. Hartman
The Other Half of the Dream by Cecil Helman
American Godwar Complex by Patrick Herron
Lou Lou by Selima Hill
Our Fortunes by Julie Kalendek
Prime Time Apparitions by R. Zamora Linmark
Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems by Roddy Lumsden
Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing by Michael Magee
In a Combination of Practices by Barbara Maloutas
The Singing Fish by Peter Markus
Ancient Capital of Images by John Mateer
Representing Absence by Deborah Meadows
The Glaze From Breaking by Joanne Merriam
Lure by Nils Michals
Proof Of Silhouettes by Sheila E. Murphy
Red Juice by Hoa Nguyen
Waltzing Matilda by Alice Notley
An Essay in Asterisks by Jena Osman
Growling by Brian Louis Pearce
Watermark by Jacquelyn Pope
Fallen from a Chariot by Kevin Prufer
i my feet: selected poems and constellations by Gerhard Rühm
Tremors by Andrew Sant
Florida by Christine Schutt
Late Psalm by Betsy Sholl
The Book of Jon by Eleni Sikelianos
Aunt Lettuce, I Want to Peek Under Your Skirt by Charles Simic
Political Cactus Poems by Jonathan Skinner
The Window Ordered To Be Made by Brian Kim Stefans
In The Criminal's Cabinet: An nthology of poetry and fiction, edited by Val Stevenson and Todd Swift
In the Dark by Ruth Stone
Reel by George Szirtes
Some Mariners by Stacy Szymaszek
Subject to Change by Matthew Thorburn


Magazines reviewed on the Verse site in 2005:

1913
Chain (Public Forms)
Chicago Review (Edward Dorn: American Heretic)
Coconut
First Intensity
The Tiny

NEW! Ed Davis poem

Ed Davis

THE WEARINESS OF EXPERTISE

It’s getting cold. Consumers will feel the pinch this winter. Soon, we’ll pay dearly for our pantyhose and bleach and disposable diapers. On East Quality Street, a suicide mistaken for a Halloween decoration hangs from a tree.

I discuss it with an acquaintance at the doughnut shop. She’s reminded of a mutual friend of ours, a kleptomaniac dead “these twelve years.” She tells me she became a Buddhist after he died. “The Buddhists do death really well,” she says. “Even now, I can feel him around me as just--energy.” She licks some powdered sugar from her lips.

Even reduced to energy, I doubt Justin would ever condescend to haunt a doughnut shop. His travels were always more whimsical. Once, he flew to Luxembourg and jumped from the most ornate bridge he could find. In his letter, he reminded us that there are 30,000 suicides a year in the U.S. He preferred not to be a negligible statistic.

Afterward, I went to his room to collect the things he had stolen from me: a few records, an ashtray from Graceland, and my Unrest t-shirt with the glittery logo. Myself, I once stole a Pixies CD from a boy with an artificial leg named Ben; he called his good leg “Sydney”. Anyone who indulges in gratuitous Mary Poppins jokes deserves to be robbed. I believe in treating the handicapped as equals, except for the blind--they should be feared. They can hear our louder thoughts. To protect myself, I distract them by whispering, “You know, the Lions Club has been collecting old eyeglasses for ages.” I sprint away before they can recover from their shock.

As for Justin, I have fond memories of him rifling through my attic, looking for hidden listening devices planted by a shadow. “They’re waiting for you to utter your fondest desire, so they can prevent you from attaining it,” he said. I tried to dispel his paranoia by telling him that my fondest desire was a stewardess covered in foam. His disapproving look cut me to the quick. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant a flight attendant covered in foam.”

He was too exacting. When he saw me with my notebook, he chided me bitterly: “You’re going about it all wrong. All the great Victorian poets, not to mention James Agee, wrote without pants. You’re just wasting your time.”

Perhaps he was right. And now it’s nearly winter, and nobody knows when I don’t eat. I need to find a moisturizer for life and a new perspective on my dining room. I want to live in an Italian atmosphere, but I don’t know who to call. Still, I’m sure I’ll remember his words the next time I find myself sitting on a curb, handcuffed and shivering in the cold, while a detective knocks on the door of my seedy motel room.

NEW! Review of Jonathan Skinner

Political Cactus Poems by Jonathan Skinner. Palm Press.

Reviewed by Chris Pusateri

Among the most difficult tasks facing an emerging poet is the crafting of a poetics. This undertaking is often complicated by opposition from above: it is a longstanding pastime for established poets to treat the contributions of subsequent generations with reactions ranging from mild bemusement to outright hostility. As we look back at American literary history, we see that each new wave of poets has had its professional foil--almost invariably an academician of canonical stature--who led the charge against the scurrilous influence of the young.

This pervasive skepticism has spawned a number of responses both public and private. One of the more even-handed treatments of the subject came in a recent issue of Boston Review, where Hank Lazer speculated that the poetics of the early 21st century were given more to refining earlier innovations than to creating new ones. He attributes this, at least in part, to the recent professionalization of poetry, which privileges craft--or the mechanical application of technique--over formal experimentation.

Upon first glance, one might think a book entitled Political Cactus Poems extends that earlier innovation known as ecopoetry. We recall that once upon a time, the prefix eco- politicized any word it modified. With its emphasis on sustainable practices and ecological interconnectedness, it was assumed to be antagonistic to the aims of global capitalism (a market logic in which increased productivity promoted limitless consumer appetites).

If anything, Skinner seeks to revive environmentalism’s radical roots. Ecopoetry is, for him, more than simple nature worship; it is a political act located in the space where humans encounter their environment. Not content to forward a warmed-over variant of nineteenth-century pastoralism, Skinner eschews the radical individualism of Thoreau in favor of a collective politics: one that sees people as an extension of their surroundings.

untroubled by impasto, her biography
would include a history of colors
nails, she conceded, were gutsy
but imperfect in this age of plastics
the spewed and shredded earth
hung about her ears, with one foot
she typed the word sardonic

There is little doubt that nails in the age of plastics are risky business. With broad strokes, Skinner lays the plasticity of human invention over the faux-permanence of the natural world, so as to point out that the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic are increasingly difficult to demarcate.

This book also intimates that any theory of eco-logic must acknowledge that the majority of the world’s populace now lives in cities. While environmentalists of the past dismissed cities as part of the problem, Skinner suggests that any modern ecological politics must count the urban environment as one of its core concerns.

FREIGHT

hiccup then what
a side of something or peas
clattering down the way
elevator siding Tifft’s fence
Santa Fe Rail’s last ride
smashed down
in the brake with a muskrat
a friendly wave from the engineer
rattles the loose change

As the book’s endnotes suggest, the reference to Tifft is an allusion to Tifft Farm Nature Preserve, which, as Skinner points out, is “264 acres of secondary forests and wetlands reclaimed from 1.6 million cubic yards of municipal waste, since 1975, within the city limits of Buffalo.” The inclusion of Tifft subtly expresses the arduous but necessary task of resuscitation. A viable ecopolitics must not only critique environmental damage, but propose plans for its rehabilitation. As a people, we are fond of making our problems invisible (for instance, municipal dumps are typically located in remote areas or in urban districts adjacent to poor neighborhoods). Such strategies confirm the aphorism that putting something out-of-sight indeed places it out-of-mind. By making these sites (and their rehabilitation) occasions for poetry, Skinner makes them visible once again.

But as goes nature, so goes society: if we are to reverse environmental degradation, we must first examine those factors that contribute to it, such as overconsumption, poverty, and war. An ecopoetics, if it is to be effective, must realize that all environmental crises are the result of social problems and that no real progress is possible unless those issues are addressed.

the terminal, dome-like cephalium
of orange-brown bristles
at the thought of anything less
than total self-destruct, controls
one half by blowing off limbs
in random cow fields

Here we see the poetic field as a mine field, as a site of hidden peril. More procedurally, we see passages of textbook description intercut with the rough-hewn statements of political declaration. Beneath a seemingly beautiful façade lurks a threat both literal and figurative. Yet under the layers of beauty and danger, we have the makings of something sacred, something new.

If we return to Lazer’s earlier point, we might see Skinner’s ecopoetics as begging a larger question: what, precisely, is innovation in the arts? Since all progress is nourished by the developments that precede it, at what point does refinement give way to innovation?

Should we argue this point long enough, we’ll end up sounding like copyright attorneys who quarrel over an operational definition of “original work.” Skinner, however, has more practical goals in mind: the cultivation of a poetics whose concerns exceed the merely theoretical and whose lessons might extend from the page of a poetry book to our everyday lives. While Auden might have questioned the efficacy of poetry, Skinner’s book implies that, in a time characterized by war and social atrophy, the thing we can least afford is a poetry that does nothing.

NEW! Review of John Mateer

Ancient Capital of Images by John Mateer. Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Reviewed by Mani Rao

John Mateer’s poems visit the scene after violence and its echoes have vacated, and narrate what is seen or encountered--minus opinion, minus sensation. In “Sanjo-Dori” of the sequence “The Ancient Capital of Images,” “His shop is deep and dim, like the cavity left in the face / after an eye has been removed.” Taken as they are, the anecdotes and encounters have the content of haunting horror. In “The Tourist” of the sequence “Ethekweni”: “The wall persists, abrasive, against his cheek / as he’s being bitten on the shoulder in this land of AIDS.” But the approach strips them of horror before it forms: “The tourist just off the plane has no witness to his struggle, / no one but himself to testify to his calm.”

The encounters are also political (with the poet implicated), but the voice persists in calmness and the consciousness does not tip over into distortion and perspective--at the most, it veers at the edge of half-wondering about its own blankness. In “One Year”:

In the autumn, when the elms refused to shed their leaves
and I spent the long calm days lounging at the pool,
I found myself explaining nightly to my students that simply being awake
is not insomnia, is political.

In every poem, the reader is acknowledged, shown a seat, and presented to--explanatory titling acts as captions and locates the events of the poem.

Place-detail is firmed up in a summary slide, usually in the first few lines, setting the scene or arrival at the scene. In “Encountering a Bear” from the sequence “The Deepest North”: “Facing the Sea of Okhorsk, to my right the mouth of the invisible Iwaobetsu River.” In “Thoughts of Tatamkhulu Afrika” of the sequence “Uit Mantra”: “Climbing Bo-Kaap’s cobbled streets. In Nyoongar Country’s Statue of Mokare: I’m walking down the colony’s main street.”

These clear pointers at the outset are like postage stamps marking the envelope, but the postcard that falls out has the slap of the “plain simple,” and the movie is in mute. This is the distinguishing grain of Mateer’s voice--a quiet witnessing that is well beyond sensations, coming close to purity.

“Encountering a Bear” is a typical poem from this volume, an anecdote understood by the addition of the image (which is not a bear but “as a bear,” as if removed from reality) and the poet’s response (“nor do I know I’m running”.)

The is-it isn’t-it speculations and remarks, if any, are usually about the lack of pain. In “Contemplating a Migraine,” he writes, ”But maybe I am the mountain, / and the pain, hidden in cloud, is a foreboding shrine, unvisited.” In “Of the Northern Peoples” in the sequence “The Deepest North”: “Then he’s Yamamba, the Mountain Crone, my dying self/wordlessly screaming.” The structure of the narrative is chronological and goes like this: What was to the right, what was to the left, what was ahead, where was the poet, what went on, and did the poet act, oh? curious, and a mutter.

Stripped of event-based sensations, the sensations in these poems are the place-names. Mateer imports these new textures into his map and mouth of English: “Hanamikoji-dori,” “Sanjo-dori,” “Makwerewere.” This also sets up an opposition to the commonness of his own first name, notably in “My Name is Also John.”

Encounters with the twists and articulations of the cultures encountered are through words, without immersion, seen and heard from a distance: “Did you not hear the poet’s izithakazelo” in “The Valley of a Thousand Hills,” or “Of their words all I hear is the prophet’s name: Shembe Shembe Shembe” in “The Worshippers.”

South Africa, Japan, and Indonesia are the framework around which the poetic insight--and zen--is conducted, but if you take out the framework of places and characters, what you have left is emptiness as in the epigraph below--and this is evident even without the eulogies to emptiness in the book, functioning as the artist statement: “Because there is no answer but emptiness. --Tamura Ryuichi.”

NEW! Review of Hoa Nguyen

Red Juice by Hoa Nguyen. Effing Press, $7.

Reviewed by Nikki Widner

Hoa Nguyen's latest chapbook has the same affect that small pictures on walls do. Red Juice imbues the sense of walking into a stranger's house and being fascinated by what may be revealed. Room by room these poems trace the books, interior walls, paintings, portraits, snapshots, furniture, knick-knacs, and floors. The cover also evokes a sense of the everyday, watermelon red flowers, seed, stems, and rabbit on ivory paper, which looks like remnants of a house: wallpaper, bed sheets, and children's book illustration. Each poem is this kind of familiar arrangement, small snapshots of the everyday. Visceral and urgent, they are anything but ordinary.

“Up Nursing then make tea / The word war is far / 'Furry,' / says my boy about the cat / I think anthrax / & small pox vax / Pour hot water on dried nettles / Filter more water for the kettle / Why try / to revive the lyric.”

Her lines in motion turn both inward and outward (kettle and lyric), up and down (war and furry, cat and anthrax). They reflect lists or thoughts, agile and effortless. Yet they are built with rhythmic tension, open and active. In “Up Nursing,” the rhyming patterns are stressed at the end of words and lines (“anthrax / & small pox vax”). They, like her word arrangements, are unexpected sounds and tensions, as if they are replaying an arrival.

Nguyen's lines also disrupt expectation with imaginative leaps: “I could click the Earth / with my finger spin / to continents holding a cardboard box / on my head / I was trying it ou t/ It was an invention” (“Journey with Investigative Bees”). This poem expands outward from the page, from two to four dimensions, a pop-up book folding directions. It is the journey of possibilities, specific with each beginning or with each day.

“the lake was skinned Membranes /” exemplifies a physicality rooted in the poems' space (“YESTERDAY”). It is the reader, too, who belongs in these poems, who finds familiarity in a welcoming home. The walls made of dreams, stones in small hands, gold lacquered coasters and the smell and sound of eggs cracking and potatoes frying. Or the relationship between the shapes: stones, eggs, potatoes, earth merging in the act of creation, “The muse with cookies.”

Balancing such forces as destruction and creation, the poems refuse simplistic dualities. Opening the poem through disruption, layers of sound fold into timelessness. These limits are self-imposed, weaving tiny frameworks for greater discovery. “I am she who unknots the cord / and lashes us boatless.” This is how we travel in Red Juice, boatless floating in liquid. We are written into a small frame that stills us quiet, contemplating our journey and hoping that after the last page we can enter again, soon. We carry these pictures in memory and shapes in hand, shared but often discarded moments. What we are left with is the memory from her rhymes, her pattern making.