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.

NEW! Review of Brian Kim Stefans

The Window Ordered To Be Made by Brian Kim Stefans. A Rest Press.

Reviewed by Mark Mendoza

With a new book (What Does It Matter) appearing on Barque Press and a job at the joystick of UbuWeb, “The Kim Stefans sneak attack is [indeed] now in progress”. The Window Ordered To Be Made marks his most consistent and 'accessible' book to date. Though visually less varied than previous outings, there is a remarkable range of poetic modes covered in its beautiful binding, from the surprising masculine personism corrupted in 'Oliphant And Castle' to the communistic sentence-strokes of 'Attitudes And Non-Attitudes In May' à la Jeff Derksen. With hardworking titles such as 'Prelude To The End Of This Book', a well-tuned use of slashes and parentheses, and a wry lisp of lingo vispo invention and ambient ante-vellum throughout, the reader is made to feel the arbitrary restraints and loopy dupes surrounding a bit-stream that eschews the self-help service industry of main street poetics. For those who like their poetry on the wrong side of the fast conceptual art track, Stefans scores the poetic for its potential (anti)literariness, achieving a startling unidirectional détournment to added features in the absence of a known target. The result is refreshingly rhetorical at times (e.g., not afraid to superimpose hypotactic prolixity over an otherwise paratactic pick-n-mix), especially as arguments made in his other publications come to fresh forms and intractably matter.

While poets like Michael Palmer and J.H. Prynne might move us with calculated deferrals of semantic trade routes, Stefans--in this aspect rather like Tom Raworth--impresses us with the wisdom of a potluck presentation and the witty speeds he can wield when responding to an overcoded senseless sensory world. To mix metaphors, reading The Window becomes an act of making fun of hypercognitive pretensions. A veritable connect-for wizard, Stefans' poems shove their way past the plague of 'quiet, understated' high street poems, “where lightness is fitness”, by asserting their status as undecodable inscription, the surprise “surprise” wrenched from a clockwork deconstruction. In a comparable manner to Charles Bernstein, his greatest momentum follows the wandering of a well-aimed pun, where the time of laughter and carnival permits neither slipstick nor peel-back to reveal fancy. With a style that is both ironic and funny ha-ha, the madcap types, gifting us with a wealth of superb one-liners and thorny phrases: “We make high ceilings in central post offices in an effort to supplant old religions”, “Here is the colon: / and here, it's Happy Meal”, “the Gabriela Sabatini Intelligence Project. . .”, and “The Amish getting squeamish”.

Using the pharmaka-dart of satire to undermine the Hypocritical Oath, the poet revels in revealing the assonance of the grotesque. When this strategy trips up on its own premises, the result is little more than an anticipation of 'nothing happening' or observational comedy that curbs the reader's enthusiasm. For example, “Everyone thought you were beautiful / Now, to deliver the urban landscapes / Seems only normal: upsets, lapses, hosannas, bananas. . .” seems less inventive than other instances where the stakes seem greater. Similarly, “To be free / and ice skating!” might be more effective the closer you live to Central Park but otherwise risks sounding a cheap shot. And yet, in contrast to many other younger U.S. poets, at least the labour of the line-break here is recognised (though better so in “You consider Nicaragua / the imagination”), so as to liberate disaffection with the end of the poem. Given the risks each poem takes, the tender steaks they refuse, it is no wonder there is further to fall. Stefans 'goes there' equipped with the reconstituted grit and “twin flagpoles” ('I Had that Idea') that every good PomoRomo deserves.

In order to confine the 'impure' element or glitch and neutralise it after the event by non-dialectic com-position, lines separate into discrete events promising further trouble in the production of tickler pro-files. Sparing us the production of “remarks of unintended kindness out of undernourished witticism” permits the poems to sublate the uncounted “cavities of the Future” with decisive autopoesis (the window ordered to be made rather than the “Stained- / glass windows” or Microsoft icons that “keep the descendents / unhappy, but productive in masses”).

The word's out: cut your mouth. Bargain in the park.
I should just rip up those poems and create prose narratives
out of them, like I'm doing
now. It's now coming back,
with conversation about social leperdom
in 1952. Lucked / Bird / Perspective.

The cut of such lines produce randomised stop-gaps and strategic delays in conventional discourse, coaxing the striking from the open universe between full-stop and capital. Much of the poetry here relies on an interplay of the breakdown and recovery of the forms of direct statement or a presentation of the rhetorical blank at the heart of said discourse (e.g., “Putting a square patch on your shoulder to kill an instinct”). The beginning of 'General Statements Concerning The Rubberyard' is a good indication of verse that is less reliant on collage than accidental or nude mechanical arrangements of personal and public file contents:

General blankets descend on the rubberyard.

This pistol holistic
piles in the whinny
of the rubberyard. The dorsal trope
adjusts the rubberyard, until
stentorian, “profound.”
Germinal sweetness in the rubberyard.

Such repetitions seem to mimic the circuitous route of the academic approach to concept-forming and the spidery anaphora the poet favours in his works so far--represented here by the prose-block and paean to soft labour 'We Make'--likewise pleases by deprivation (like the instructive uselessness of Kevin Davies' memorable 'Anselm's fisting Cheetos' in Comp). There is a tactics of Duchampian counters and faked resets in The Windows, where “Of an 'ooh' and an 'ohh' we know nothing / but numbers.” Another look through these zeroes and one can see a serious criticism being made of logicians like Rudolf Carnap who have presumed that thought can be reduced to language, leaving feelings to lag behind as blind discharges of self-expressive demonstrations. This may also explain why Stefans enjoys using contrariness as a basis for reflections that do not regress into reflex navel-hazing:

These are like
Dropping off the guys off somewhere
(Bakunin's temp hair is limp)
The anonymity of the “I” on the web page
Remembers graduation

A careful economy is at work here, with the end-position of “like” and the suggestion of failed revolt (Bakunin's strategy of “the free association of all productive associations”) leading logically to a condensed statement regarding the current maturation of the ego in the electronic job market. The plural tone creates a congruence as opposed to coherence, sampling the loony tunes of everyday defeats, “with this kind of information / available to panic”: “the Chinese years symbolized by animals/ Worthy of reading / If only for the erotica category” (a sly nod to Said Orientalism and the new meanings my generation attaches to Asian-fetish). Appropriately, in the facing poem entitled 'Midas Ears' we have a snotty “punk” utterance, “divided between the rout of Pollocks / and What's Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers.” Rather than accept the blumen-speech of abstract modernism, Stefans uses his Smart Word Paint to spray these flowers through a variety of tools until they resemble Saying, e.g., the “spilled cosmos made patterns / of roses in the pool.” ('Howlings in Favor of Tulsa') “[S]hut off all / auto-correct features” ('I Had That Idea'); in a poetics that allows the 'programme' to demonstrate its monstrosities, don't expect these indeterminable acts to come up rosy: the capitalism of the history-machine is not the history of the capitalist machine. . . “Given any time, and the web of incestuous comeuppance / generates its angular rose. / Vocal / Caverns.” Sources emerge as pointers and flash-backs of alienable experience that dislike their coding in snap images or the lyrical tag hung around the emotional tie-rack. The dialectic of singular negative production and the labouring of burrowing meet in a cautious reframing of expression allowing cross-pollination from urgent masks.

The Windows proffers the shock of reprogramming when two provisionally isolated and hollow grams are juxtaposed and misled to an embrace worth its weight in icing sugar. For instance, many of the finest passages rupture the involving orders of ordinary syntax with deictic prescience (“No symbols are involved. . .”), performing the arbitrary or pro-grammatic organization of alphabetic lists ('Gatt's Freedom') and regimental linguistic fatigues:

Move to Brazil. Something like Pink Floyd
atmospherics; something decades-past
achieves new relevance. Peek-a-boo eyes
like steady-cams in the toilet swilling darkness: lost.

At the end of the game they alphabetize the names.

Count yours in it.

Too / Tall / Harry.

One / With / Sun / Stick.

Instrumental break will not convert them;
she races through the galleries, gender-crippled.
Hostile arrangements:
it's called editing.

Read slowly, these lines show something of the alienating aspects of the culture-jamming and “editing” the poet must undergo in order to achieve a form sufficiently open for incisive political put-downs and a decentred wellness. Another fine example, “Self-hatred: keeping your arms spread out”, appears in a short poem entitled 'Corso', after the 'Beat poet' who famously predicted the sad course of a socialist writer's 'post-spectacle' stance when he wrote “Standing on the street corner waiting for no one is power.” There are no more books of pleasure; even “Raoul Vaneigem // ended up on one of those Iraqi playing cards.”

The model of the contemporary poet downloaded by Stefans antagonises the distinction of s(t)imulation, using his relibidinized mouse and customised Explorer to delineate the deprivations of the reality principle in poetic pleasures. However, the principle behind such pleasures is free to speculate on further speech-acts in order to maximize satisfaction, sparing the reader the trauma of actually living out the content of their drives and offering instead an embedded interface, in-yer-face. Even the ungoogleable cannot keep their heads above the deluge of junk information, rehashable trivia, and the snooze that stays news. “Another conveyed his position on recent developments / in Van Halen: he was an 'anti-Samite.' / I want to be immune again” ('The Journalist'--the last line of the stanza quoted here rhyming crudely to my ears with the hero's lament at the end of Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries). That is, we are all users, “tiny zeroes in the astro-turf. . .” ('Provincial Hack'), “we make codas out of what we were once highly anticipated, fresh beginnings.”

From the misgivings the poet has found expressed in the “politics out of unsorted data” comes a persuasive disarticulation of reconfiguration before it can become orthodox reconnaissance. The complex lets its context slip, exposing the shadowlife of line feeds; where forced digits are as unreal as Pop's satellite dishes. Thank the Stefans module, for a book that is--in the (r)ear of advertising idioms--critical of its own 'flashy' uses and avoids baiting readers into passionless beholding. Rather, readers are asked to consider themselves as subject-positions that do not belong to the web, but are a limit of the web, entangled in a composite of hyperlinks.

Gerald Bruns' The Material of Poetry

: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics (Georgia, $24.95)

includes cd with poems by Steve McCaffery, Christian Bok (doing Kurt Schwitters' 20-minute "Der Ursonate"), John Cage, Jackson Mac Low & Anne Tardos, Henri Chopin, Francois Dufrene

based on a lecture series delivered at Georgia Southern University


Contents:

1. Poetry as an Event of Language: The Conceptual Achievement of Contemporary Poetics
2. The Transcendence of Words: A Short Defense of (Sound) Poetry
3. Poetic Materialism: The Poet's Redemption of Everyday Things
Conclusion: On Poems of the Third Kind (a Thought Experiment)



two excerpts from chapter 1:

"My idea is that what is philosophically interesting is a poem that is not self-evidently a poem but something that requires an argument, theory, or conceptual context as a condition of being experienced as a poem (or of being experienced at all), as if poetry were, as I think it is, a species of conceptual art, where the relation between theory and practice is a two-way street. In reading a poem, one might experience a theory of what poetry is. The point is that what requires no thought, what can be accepted without question--the chesnut, the museum piece--cannot be of much philosophical interest. A kind of oblivion hovers over 'the canon.'"

"Academic quarrels about critical methods notwithstanding, the university study of poetry, such as it is, is not governed by concepts and examples much different from the criteria and models that underwrite such respectable institutions as The Harvard Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The New York Review of Books, the poet laureateship of the United States, the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month, the Pulitzer Prize, and Garrison Keillor's Writer's Alamanac. Ours is, being Western, an Aristotelian culture, where unity and coherence of form, clarity of meaning, and rhetorical accessibility are indispensable conditions of efficient coexistence."


Steve McCaffery is a major presence in the book. Bruns quotes his "Poetics: A Statement": "I have no steady poetics, no position or school that I defend, no fixist stance on art or anything else. I have a constant stream of feelings and ideas that constantly change, modify and carry into action as techniques for living. What I try to do is understand this flux and develop for myself a thoroughly nomadic consciousness; a mind in constant movement through stoppings and starts, with the corollary of a language art in permanent revolution, contradiction, paradox and transform."

Clark Coolidge appears, too: "there are no rules. What I think is that you start with materials. You start with matter, not rules." Bruns continues: "And the matter is language or, more exactly, words or, more exactly still, the material of words--the sounds of the voice and the letters of the alphabet, where the letters are experienced not only phonetically but also, as in visual poetry, as patterns of print or ink."

Bruns also writes about Lyn Hejinian's and Charles Bernstein's poetry and prose: "Bernstein's poetry is difficult not because it is obscure in the way poetry often is (sheer density of language) but because it is rooted in parody, quotation, mimicry, and pastiche--and also in what performance artists call 'breaking the frame.'" Further on: "Bernstein's poetry theatricalizes the languages of everyday life, including the contexts in which these languages are used. ... Theatricality is the enemy of naturalization, normalization, standardization, routinization, and obliviousness."

As is probably clear by now, much of the book is a defense of "difficult" contemporary poetry--finding ways to read it "as something other than nonsense." While some readers will wonder about the need for such a book now that this poetry has infiltrated/broadened the mainstream (and thus MFA programs and literary magazines and even the awards superstructure), it's worth recalling that the book began as a lecture series and that the organizations mentioned in the second excerpt above do their best to ignore this kind of writing. (Bernstein's "official verse culture" doesn't mean exactly what it did when he first advanced the phrase, but it's still relevant.)

To that end, one of Bruns' more common approaches in the book is as follows: "the problem [of Coolidge's book-length poem The Maintains] is arguably not one of nonsense but of too much sense, augmented or invigorated by alliteration, assonance, and echoes of all sorts. ... The poem forces us to expand our boundaries of what we think of as meaningful." The Maintains "teaches us something about the limits of exegesis or about the shortfall in the way we are taught to read in school, where the rules of information theory are almost exclusively in force."

Oddly enough, Bruns echoes Vendler's comment re: John Ashbery (in a review in The New Republic): "We make sense of a poem not by the application of critical methods but by living with it until we are part of its world."

Is Bruns a kind of Vendler, but a Vendler with a greater capacity for / interest in experimental writing? If Vendler's attempts to offer "synopses" of Ashbery poems seem misguided or old-fashioned, then how do we take Bruns' attempts to "make sense" of McCaffery and Coolidge (and Bernstein and Hejinian and Retallack) poems? If both Vendler and Bruns want to make sense of difficult poems--i.e., to render the effects of the poems in normative prose--then are they as different as their topics / associations / tastes would lead us to believe? Or do venue / rhetoric / assumptions trump method in how we view / align critics of contemporary poetry?

Does one need to be an experimental critic to write about experimental poetry in an appropriate way, or just an open-minded reader? Do university-based critics still need to follow the rules of academic prose when championing work outside the center?

Bernstein clearly has demonstrated a way (or, really, many ways) around the normative in his criticism, but most prose about "difficult" poetry is as straightforward as the poetry it denigrates. A prominent example is Ron Silliman's writing on his blog (ronsilliman.blogspot.com), which contains some of the clearest, most cogent writing about poetry today; yet Silliman does not work in a university and thus seems freer than Bruns or Vendler to pursue non-normative critical prose. But the techniques of his own poetry (as well as those of the poetry he champions) and of the writing on his blog seem quite different, if not at odds.

Bruns has a sharp mind and wide-ranging tastes (he also writes approvingly of Marvin Bell in the book), but The Material of Poetry cannot be considered experimental itself. This could be due to the book's origin in a lecture series, though when one considers the possibilities for innovation in that necessarily performative format (in which Bruns played sound poems for his audience), that doesn't seem like a valid reason. Consider a book on the same topic and with the same impetus if David Antin, or Bernstein, wrote it.

Verse would welcome responses to the questions above as well as responses to The Material of Poetry itself. You can use the comment field or send 'letters to the editor' to Brian Henry at bhenr [at] yahoo [dot] com.

new issue of Verse

The new issue of Verse is out. It includes an interview with Mary Jo Bang

& poems by

Charles Simic
Tomaz Salamun
René Char
Charles Wright
Cate Marvin
Arielle Greenberg
Oni Buchanan
Andrew Joron
Richard Roundy
Jennifer L. Knox
Ted Mathys
Joy Katz
Christopher Edgar
Debbie Urbanski
Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle
Michael Farrell
Wayne Koestenbaum
Michael Savitz
L.S. Klatt
Juliet Patterson
Herbert Scott
Kerri Webster
Philippe Jaccottet
Peter Jay Shippy
Julia Story
Chuck Stebelton
Vona Groarke
Aaron McCollough
Craig Coyle
Sharon Kubasak
Nathan Hoks
Lisa Fishman
Alissa Valles
Elena Karina Byrne
Megan Johnson
Steve Langan
Jennifer Militello
Kevin Craft
Karla Kelsey
Christof Scheele
Philip Gross
Beverley Bie Brahic
Joshua Kryah
Isabelle Garron
Thomas Heise
Julianne Buchsbaum
Carl Tillona
Nick Twemlow
Daniel Coudriet
Meta Kusar
Charles Wuest
Richard Meier
Jamie Thomas
Kostas Anagnopoulos
Karen Leona Anderson
Abby Millager
Garrett Doherty

152 pages in all.

Copies are available at a discount for $6, postage included, until December 1 (after that, they're $8 each). Order by sending a check to Verse, English Department, University of Richmond, Richmond VA 23173.

NEW! Review of Coconut

Coconut #1.

Reviewed by Teresa M. Pfeifer

When you arrive, Dear Reader, you will want to laugh. Maybe it is that big red coconut, but Bruce Covey, editor and designer, has a keen sense of web page design. The organization of this site is lovingly ordered for easy reader navigation. The front page connects the reader immediately to the work through five sprouted coconut trees of saturated colors, lined up and hot linked--they are the “buttons” to: 1. Contents (listed by author) 2. Notes 3. Submission Guidelines. 4. Links (a compilation of other online journals), 5. The Associate Editor(s) and Copyright statement. Open any coconut tree button, and find each subsequent page lined with faint coconut tree wallpaper behind the text, except for the poem pages which are infinitely white. Also, at the main page, a very large, very ripe, red, extrovert coconut greets you.

Here's where it gets fun. The font is large enough that it is accessible to readers with impaired vision, it looks great, the words are fairly bulky, and because of many of the writers' take on language, this enhances the word as object in virtual space. It is to Covey's credit that he has forsaken the bells and whistles approach for a form that mirrors content while being pared down to the essential.

Once you enter and click on a poet's name, the author's name is at the top of the page with the poem below it (this is worthy of note because the author's name is hot-linked to the Notes page where readers can shift back and forth to read about the poem, the writer, the process, before, during, or after reading the poem). Reading through the Notes, one discovers that there is a keen interest in the online world among these writers: Covey has used the “I'm Feeling Lucky” feature at google.com to create a composition structure; Aaron McCollough uses what he refers to as “google-sculpting.”

The poetry is a wonderful collection of emerging and established-yet-questing poets with different sensibilities, occupational backgrounds, a bit of a generational mix, and very distinctive voices.

Coconut highlights include a glimpse of Alice Notley's tentatively entitled, A History of the Ghouls, “The Rare Card” being the first poem in the third section of her new work. Trinidad offers two stanzas of a work that, upon completion, will consist of twenty stanzas. His notes reveal part of his modus operandi: “each stanza must be written in one sitting; the first line of each stanza must include the word 'pink'; each stanza must include a confession.” These are heartbreaking and hilarious, reminiscent of Frank O'Hara; not surprisingly, the project is dedicated to the New York School.

Wang Ping (her notes should be updated) has three poems in this issue that throw weighty punches. It's lovely to read a poet who can weave language on a delicate thread that ties one in a rigid, unbreakable hold. Ping can elevate open sentiment to a sacrament, as in “Crab and Catfish,” when the poem's narrator observes what happens when buckets of crabs and fish have been accidentally dumped onto the street in Chinatown. The narrator expresses full throttle sentiment while observing her own reaction from an objective stance: “Outside the crowd my tears come / This is a kingdom where low creatures are killed daily / Like the moon circles the earth / Like hunters hunt, peasants plough / And trees fall for highways and cows / There's no more reason to cry for the bottom feeders / Than for the little girl in a dingy bakery / Devouring noodles and wanting more.”

Jon Leon's language moves like machinery, according to some algorithm that Kurt Schwitters might have endorsed for breakfast were he a digital native. Do they have any siblings?: “5.9 suburban outpost. Get 4.9 jobber, / relative, over. Squeeze ventriloquist shasta. / The sea squires whisking parrot.”

The poems of Frank Menchaca are not for consolation; rather, they take note, with an eye that is bent on observing the unseen. Although only one of these poems was written in response to the collapse of the World Trade Towers, each carries a sense of loss. Weird and wonderful, in “The Secret City” Menchaca perfectly distills the digitized world, its clarity, and its requirement of something human.

Fabulous work by Ken Rumble, the edginess of self-consciousness over everything! The obsessive, awkward, and pleasing rules. And don't miss Amy King's moves from the devastating to the hilarious. In one poem she is able to say “Love has always been / the woman in the lake,” snd later, in the same poem “But mostly, I am taken / by the sense / of a blue suede dress / that shrinks to fit you.”

Alex Lemon's poems read like laments. Laurel Snyder's voice is deadpan funny, Chaplinesque, and, like artful comedy, completely tragic. In her poem “It's Only Natural” the narrator begins “The little girl pulling the puppy's tail / Should stop her pulling. No amount / Of force exerted will turn the puppy / Inside out.” The subsequent turns in the poem are well worth the ride. Also, included in the journal and equally worthy of remark is poetry by Shanna Compton, Katy Lederer, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Lisa Lubasch, and Sawako Nakayasu.

NEW! Review of Peter Markus

The Singing Fish by Peter Markus. Calamari Press, $10.

Reviewed by Andrew Richmond

What I want to do is associate words so they produce a certain fact. If you mix two chemical products you produce a reaction. In the same way if you put together certain words you’ll obtain a reaction which will have a value for people on this planet. --Sun Ra, cosmic philosopher and jazz composer

The Singing Fish demonstrates Peter Markus’ ability to cut away a familiar landscape and shape into its place a perfect language. Using words that are character of their sound such as “moon,” “mud,” “river,” and “fish,” Markus forsakes the limits of designation and uses reiteration and persistence as catalysts for a rhythmic language that feels like impeccable mantra. Calamari Press has put together this comprehensive and vibrant vessel for these hypnotic stories, at last providing Markus some real estate for a fixation that has spanned seven years and resulted in hundreds of comparable stories scattered across a litany of literary journals.

To be fluent in the language of The Singing Fish is to be confident in its folklore. In the collection’s bellwether piece, “What The River Told Us To Do,” we are provided exactly what we need in order to take on the anima mundi:

Us brothers said some words back to our father, words such as ‘moon’ and ‘mud’ and ‘river’ and ‘fish,’ but even these words, words that were the world to us brothers, these were sounds that our father did not hear.

This isn’t to say that without such an introduction we would be unable to appreciate each story in The Singing Fish. The stories are carefully supportive of each other and allow the collection to read more like a novel whose components you can rearrange and still feel grounded.

The characters in these stories carry on in their own obsessions. The narrators, two brothers who exist mostly indistinguishable from each other, tell their fables in a single voice:

Us brothers sometimes have this thing between us. Sometimes we say what it is the other brother is or has been thinking.”

Aside from an ongoing argument over which each brother is “Fish Head One” and “Fish Head Two,” the voice is consistent and unswerving. The brothers are captivating in their interpretation of boyhood, and at once can seem innocent in their bond or apparent as colorable, wall-eyed, and gaping mouthed creatures.

Other characters are just as extraordinary. The brothers share a mother and father who offer little dialogue but maintain their cohesiveness, be it through displays of affection or stern authority. We are also introduced to a tongueless “Boy,” afforded characteristics of a dog before ultimately becoming a “keeper.”

On more than one occasion we engage in a relationship between the brothers and a girl they construct from mud and fittingly refer to as just “Girl.” In one story, Girl’s eyes become moons and then shatter into stars, and in a different story the brothers crawl into Girl like a cave and discover their stick-figure representations on the wall. Their sequence of encounters isn’t key. What is principal is that the events happen and it is telltale of Markus’ ability to craft astounding fiction.

The omnipresent themes in The Singing Fish hinge on creation, mortality, and revival, and feel both haunting and jubilant. Anything goes in the world Markus has created for his brothers. Characters are created from mud and spring from the natural world just as easily as they are dismissed, only to reappear again. We learn of the brother’s obsession with mud, to the point of ingestion, and their obsession with fish, perhaps most notably involving a telephone pole studded with fish heads--measurement of the brothers’ merit and devotion.

Markus has a gift of warranting the circumstances for which his language is contained. And in doing so he is able to manipulate word play that feels foreign at first, but continues and remains sweet and eloquent, such as, “Out back to the back of our back yard,” or when Markus renders ownership to less obvious proprietors, “Our front yard’s ground” and “Our bedroom’s window.”

Markus’ language is not just clever text built around bizarre characters and circumstances, but illustrative sound that frees us from the concrete provisions and provides an environment for the text. When those sounds come together and tell such a story as The Singing Fish, the obtained reaction throws a wrench into our own realizations and holds intrinsic value for people on this planet.

NEW! Review of Jacquelyn Pope

Watermark by Jacquelyn Pope. Marsh Hawk Press, $12.95.

Reviewed by Emily Taylor Merriman

Jacquelyn Pope's first book of poetry, Watermark, coheres: her voice is mature, and the tone is strong and even throughout. The cover image, an intriguing old map of Amsterdam, grounds the reader in the world of the poems, many set in the Netherlands, where the American poet lived for seven years.

The first of Watermark's three sections establishes the atmosphere of living as “other” and as “wife.” In poems like “Woman in Translation” Pope describes the experience of being transplanted and needing to learn other ways of living: “Let me / be written into this world: / something of substance / behind me now.” The second section explores ongoing adjustment and beautiful, strange flowerings, in “Ghostlily,” “Iris,” “Anemone,” “Tulips.” Departure and loss mark the final section, but with a narrative undercurrent of time's renewing force. This section also meditates on home, as when she writes, “I've settled with dust / and disbelief. I'm home” in “Letter in Two Drafts.” Pope reimagines her past for the reader, who is invited to experience intimately the sensory and mental world that the poet once inhabited, and, through the poem's re-creation, can inhabit again in spiritual form, even as a “devoted old ghost.”

The opening poem, “Raddled,” explores life's dynamic movements between separation and connection, dissolution and integration. The collection develops these simultaneously embodied and psychical movements through an impressive range of poetic forms, including a prose poem, “Red Scarf.” Pope makes good use of internal rhymes and alliteration. Some of the poems (“Hoogstraat,” “Vagabond”) are tightly woven; in others (“Iris,” “First Lesson in Silence”) the syntax starts to unravel. This range of formal textures inhabits the broad territory now open between the competing powers of the traditionally formalist and the experimentally “free.” At the same time, Watermark stretches the conventions of the mainstream personal lyric.

Pope's poems often enact a transformative movement, most often a descent (“Persephone Descending,” “Woman in Translation”), sometimes a rising (“The Baker's Wife”), and often a horizontal movement--for example, out to sea (“Hoogstraat,” “Rain Diary”). In the final stanza of “Dwelling,” Pope succeeds in keeping still and moving up, down and out all at once:

Under blankets, under beams
we sheltered by blank windows
tucked under roof tiles
and chimney stones, under
the briny air, its muddied stars.

The frequent descents suggest the influence of Weldon Kees, and the lively poem “Mrs. Robinson” is a response to Kees, simultaneously an act of homage and an implicit remonstrance at the marginalization of women in the world of the Robinson poems. There are also echoes of W.H. Auden (“I asked for hope, and no hope came”), of Sylvia Plath's sharp humor (“You wouldn't stick by the likes of me, / but you do, you do”), and of Adrienne Rich's determination to glean and grow from the past.

In Watermark, time and weather bear down on the human psyche. Time sours, but also heals: “Time cured me past caring.” Scars are “weathered by the dark”; one can become “wind-grown.” Many of the poems succeed in moving between the realms of cityscapes and seascapes in the outer world, and landscapes of the unconscious. These scenes do not merge, but flow into each other--like the fresh water into the salty sea, the poetic line into the poem, reality into imagination--as in the powerful final poem, “World's End”:

One day I shall walk out and cross the sea
and crossing it shall carry me from tides
below the oyster shell of sea meeting sky
and I shall come up on the other side--
back of beyond, a land covered with frost,
studded with fires.

The last line, “I'll come alive in the wrack of the sea,” is an unsentimental assertion of survival, a subtle reference to poets like Kees and Hart Crane who have drowned, and even an apocalyptic vision in which, post-tempest (and the last section is full of storms), this great globe itself shall dissolve. The word “wrack” here is excellent, incorporating seaweed cast on the shore (a metaphor for the unavoidable detritus of each lived life, for destruction, for the ironic eventual “wreck” of the sea itself--place of so many shipwrecks) and the “rack” (wisp of cloud) of Shakespeare's “leave not a rack behind.”

Pope is particularly good at evoking the experience of being a woman participating in heterosexual domestic relations (“The Good Wife,” “Dwelling,” “The Baker's Wife,” “Persephone Descending,” “Mrs. Robinson,” and “Furiouser and Furiouser”). “Household Economy,” written in cookbook second-person, employs a clipped iambic pentameter, with lines that often lose the opening unstressed syllable, in illustration of the poem's purported message: “Begin by paring back, by peeling down . . .” In the penultimate line, “Cut down or turn out whatever wears out,” the poem's first spondee aptly interrupts the iambs, as if the rhythm of the verse were itself wearing out. The last line yokes the poem's themes of keeping house and keeping silent: “save your breath for shaping mending words.” The meanings of “shaping mending words” multiply: words may mend; words may need to be mended; the woman poet may need to speak up, or be quiet, for the sake of peace in her home, and she also needs to write. Jacquelyn Pope's poems are at once recipes, whose ingredients are carefully selected and kept words, and the spicy, savory, or even sour meals that those words--cut, stirred, and simmered--create.

NEW! Review of First Intensity

First Intensity: a magazine of new writing, #19. $14.

Reviewed by Heidi Lynn Staples

The dream people need me
and I need them. They come
and move outside the tent of sleep
I see their shapes moving
on the pale fabric wall, shades
cast by the dawn of light
and I know they come for me again.

So dream people bid Robert Kelly go in the opening poem of the most recent issue of First Intensity. Similarly, poetic reverie invites this issue's readers; works beckon by writers such as (listed in order of appearance) the aforementioned Robert Kelly, Diane Ackerman, Laura Moriarty, Robert Vivian, W.B. Keckler, Robert Haynes, Sean Mclain Brown, Toni Mirosevich, Christopher McDermott, Michael Rothenberg, Tom Whalen, James Grinwis, Bradley Greenburg, Joseph Harrington, Richard Rathwell, Jacob M. Appel, Ryan G. Van Cleave, John Rinnegan, Arielle Greenberg, Jeanne Heuving, Michael Heller, Michael Hassan, Ray Di Palma, Miriam Seidel, Bruce Holsapple, John Olson, Robert Wexelblatt, Geoffrey Detrani, Jaime Robles, Debra Di Blasi, Priscilla Long, Max Winter, Tim Keane, Peter Gurnit, and several folks reviewed and reviewing.

Following Kelly's “Twelfth Night,” Diane Ackerman's three non-fiction pieces--“The Beautiful Captive,” “A Magic Lantern in the Pacific,” and “The Fibs of Being”--firmly set up #19's investigation into human consciousness--what Ackerman calls “the great poem of matter.” These pieces explore the limits and possibilities experienced by “the animal that studies itself. The animal that worries. The animal that lies most easily and most often.” Much of the work in #19 draws attention to the peculiar fact that where there is language, there is liar and there is lyre; that with our narcissism, trepidation, and bullshit, “somewhere in the human beast, dreams are made, art is created, romance unfurls.”

A delightful formal variety distinguishes the issue. A great many pieces inhabit the space between lyric play and instrumental prose. Prose poems, short-shorts, lyrical stories, and hybrid texts create a formal continuum. Joseph Harrington's “Flag,” a stream-of-consciousness piece concerning American idealism, includes first-person narrative, parenthetical interludes, and lyrical passages like the following:

Everywhere else is only a sign: We are the flag. Flog. Stripes. Signs of stars. Bright, flashes, probably in the mirror. This planet ends where the rest of the world begins: broken parts, dust, limbs, fences through water, corrugated metal (rusted), peonage, detonated hills, falling birds. Stick your thumb in your ear and say the jesus prayer--that's a spell that you can only tell over and over and over: america strikes back america payday loans america standing tall america standing firm--

#19 reveres the quotidian as artistically and spiritually relevant. James Grinwis' “Three Loki Pieces,” for example, celebrates a simple dog named Loki. Here's the entire first section:

Loki my dog was braying in the living room. It was 6 a.m. I was lying in bed next to my wife because we usually don't get up until 7:30. 'What do you think he's barking about?' Loki had been experimenting with the oral form in unusual ways these past ten months. 'A fly,' she said, 'a fly is buzzing around outside.'

John Olson's manifesto “Debuffet Buffet” urges readers to find the divine in the daily: “No way is more clear than that of impulse. Treasure accidents caused by chance. Don't cut art off from the world. Every stroke, daub, and smear is a birthday.”

Articulating a strong editorial vision, the selection and presentation of the work in #19 places a high value also on the mysterious between. Jeanne Heuving's poems “Limbing” and “Limning,” for example, unite theological and sexual discourse, collapsing the binary between the sacred and profane so that the body's holes are the holiest of holes:

Insert into me and my body
will talk, one-thousand petalled lily.
Uvula. Vulva.
Enfold. Enclose.
Mary took a pound of pure nard,
and anointed his feet,
and wipes his feet with her hair;
and the house was filled with fragrance.
Filling the gap.

Often the pages of First Intensity #19 summon one to read and write a return from habitualized states of recognition toward states of heightened perception, to develop (as Ray DiPalma puts it in his poem “What Were Their Names”) “A reach unlike the written frame a reach / unlike a common place of pain.”

Enter a word world in which creative production holds primacy in the human quest for a spiritual experience that embraces life's inscrutable unfolding; read First Intensity #19. Depart. In Max Winter's words from “By Way of Explanation,” take “a drive so pronounced it almost whirs.”

NEW! Review of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

In the absent everyday by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa. Apogee Press.

Reviewed by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

In Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s new book, In the absent everyday, virtually every line is written in such a plain-spoken style, that the eeriness and wonder of these poems don’t slip into one’s mind until well into a first reading. But there is an elegance here, too, as with lines like “Fern moss covers a name on the wall / and so a story becomes secret” from the book’s title poem. The form of Dhompa’s poems--long lines; mostly complete sentences punctuated much like prose; mostly single stanza chunk-like poems, solitary or broken into sections--allows for a meditative accumulation of recollections, held moments, patient attention to detail, and unraveled musings. Even with the largest leaps from line to line, the sentences the poet constructs never seem to compete with one another, and that is the marvel of this book.

Perhaps oddly, then, nearly all of In the absent everyday’s 48 poems start with a line/sentence of reflection like these: “Nothing in her life, she liked to say, prepared her for this”; “Mrs. Dondup says life is not a happy lollipop / and she has said that before”; “Politeness prohibits saying what I really think.” But the prose-like feel of the introductory lines again and again is subsumed seamlessly into the meditative, lyrical lines that follow them, as with the poem “Spotless pots”:

Nothing in her life, she liked to say, prepared her for this.
They were never sure what she was referring to. When she
said this, her fingers pointed towards a metal spoon
embedded in the wall. A remnant of a passionate outburst.

The poet’s lyrical meditations, stunned questions, silly ribbing, fragments, and saddest, loveliest lines all seem of a single arc. The magic of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s poetry is precisely that uncanniness (the familiar strangeness) of myriad lines which simultaneously do and do not cohere at once, which seem disparate and effortlessly linked at the same time.

Even when the eeriness or wonder (or elegance) turns to silliness, the poet’s humor doesn’t shout over its own simplicity: “But here again Betty, the family fish, bangs into her reflection / all day. She is forgetful we say. Perhaps she likes herself too much.” And even the lovely line, “Part of the confusion lay in the way light appeared on the / horizon like a thin sheet of marmalade,” is followed by the stark “You were not / prepared for it.” What is it that “you were not / prepared for”? The confusion? The “part of the confusion” embodied in the appearance of the light? If a gravity lurks behinds these lines, the unusual observations, the plaintive play of the language, always take hold.

Thus, the poet’s found beauty never seems self-congratulatory and her humor never seems content enough with itself to offer up mere punch lines, as with these two lines: “The youngest in the family has learned her first word. / Mother, she says to the milkman who comes to the door.” In the hand of a lesser poet, those lines would never be followed by “In a free country, we say, this girl would have a brother / or a sister. In a free country, her father would be her memory.”

The poet’s gift is that smart balance between spontaneity and control, between seeming like she’s wondering aloud and nonetheless designing layered and enigmatic poems. Perhaps more than most prose poets, Dhompa is a master of the sentence and the line; in fact, much of the book is comprised of full sentences. The simplicity of the tone is disarming and the prose-like sentences are enjambed deftly in peculiar ways that invite the reader still further into the structures she builds.

When a poem seems to proffer a platitude (“The function of the earth is to be constant and to enfold” or “It will all end happily, again”), those commonplaces are often juxtaposed with her strongest, strangest lines:

Sentences shaped like the swallow
of your throat. When the pied piper comes
to this town, you will hide your shoes
and cover your ears. The river will not rush,
the mountains will not cleave. Chocolate
trees will bend so you can lick
their sweat off. It will all end happily, again.

With certain poems, like “Explosion of tires has no meaning,” it’s tempting to wonder about the poet’s biography (Dhompa’s biographical note at the end of the book says that she “was raised in India and Nepal”). Consider the following lines: “The prince / declared his love for a common girl and the parliament / dissolved before astrologers could be reached. If I send / you love letters it is because this is not the age for it.” I know next to nothing about Tibet and I imagine that, if Dhompa’s poems last, and I insist here that they should, someone better equipped will come to explore the traces of the political, biographical, and geographical in her poetry. Indeed, the subsequent lines make me wish I myself were better equipped:

Once a week we question whether our
country will be free. We are not warriors. We know
a working bowel is proof of a healthy life. We know
people who do not speak our dialect are sitting
at a table. With a pen and paper they will map our future.

Remarkably, the poet never seems to romanticize the past or her childhood environs, and better still, she avoids peppering poignant-sounding bits of other languages to stand in for the “depth” of her transnational experiences, thus shunning stereotypes of her own Asian landscapes and history without avoiding those same landscapes, histories, or experiences.

In the poem “Increments” she writes, “Oh, cuttlefish, / I say, but the invocation is a test to see the effectives of the / word against a mundane moment.” What strikes me here is that the poem’s speaker doesn’t rely either on a romanticization of the “orient” nor on a meta-poetic disclosure to keep the experience of coming to terms neatly boxed away in linguistic reflection. The “test” is always there in these poems, and the experience the poet recounts and enables through language is more fully developed because of her testing--with all the humor, sorrow, beauty, and perplexity intact.

In his note on the book, Ron Silliman writes, “There is an inevitability implicit in the directness of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s poetry that leaves the reader quite unprepared for the sudden leaps in reality it then proposes.” Yes, the book makes leaps, but it seems to me they are less on the order of “reality” than on the order of the various worlds the poems construct: worlds full of frank humor and unresolved reflections, a child’s world in the presence of elders, a daughter’s world far removed from her mother’s. And each poem is a scene where the poet’s questions seem to extend from her own longing, curiosity, and pleasure in order to reflect on them from a different angle into something knowable or recognizable, even if only for a moment. The result is a disarming, beautiful, and uncanny book of poems.

The Best Australian Poetry 2005

With all the talk of the latest Best American Poetry, edited by Paul Muldoon, Verse would like to call attention to another BAP edited by a non-U.S. poet: The Best Australian Poetry 2005, edited by Peter Porter.

Highlights include Javant Biarujia's prose poem "Icarus," MTC Cronin's "The Dust in Everything," Michael Farrell's "Poem without Dice," Jennifer Harrison's "The Lovely Utterly Cold Snow," J.S. Harry's 15-page "Journeys West of 'War,'" John Kinsella's "The Vital Waters," Anthony Lawrence's "Wandering Albatross," Jennifer Maiden's "Thunderbolt's Way," Peter Rose's "Quotidian," Craig Sherborne's "Journo," John Tranter's "Transatlantic," Chris Wallace-Crabbe's "From the Island, Bundanon," and Fay Zwicky's "Makassar, 1956."

Unlike Les Murray (who edited The Best Australian Poems 2004 for another publisher), Porter does not include his own work in the anthology.

One drawback in this series is its general editors' decision not to include poems by Australian poets published in journals outside Australia. This is unfortunate because a lot of Australian poets have been publishing in U.S. journals like Verse, Slope, TriQuarterly, and others. This policy also restricts the number of journals represented in each issue (BAP 2005 features work from only 14 periodicals). Granted, it makes sense for Australian journals to represent most of the poems published in the series, but it would be useful--and more accurate, in relation to Australian poets' publishing practices--to include U.S., British, and online journals that regularly publish Australian poets. This year's guest editor is a case in point: he lives in London and regularly publishes his own poems in non-Australian periodicals.

NEW! Review of The Tiny

The Tiny #1, edited by Gina Myers & Gabriella Torres. $8.

Reviewed by Summer Block

New York may be a sprawling metropolis, but its new magazine The Tiny is a tribute to "small" poems. Without an official mission statement or editor's letter, The Tiny nonetheless presents itself as a skillful compilation of the careful, the precise, and the minutely observed. At a respectable 6x8, the journal is not unreasonably small, but retains its spare feel with clean fonts, a simple layout, and an absence of drawings, notes, or other cluttering marginalia. One may take issue with the tricky reverse cover, its retro-lettering served up in an unprepossessing pink and brown. Still, the same respect for simplicity is evidenced here: "The Tiny" is spelled out without any further information; interested parties can repair to the copyright page for credits, contact information, and volume number.

Inside, the magazine is full of elegant, austere work, most of it comprised of few words. These tiny poems aim to pack as much curiosity and cunning as possible into a handful of lines. For rookie poets, ellipses and telling pauses can be a mere gesture towards mystery, a way of willfully obfuscating the message, a haughty antagonism to the reader. But when ably handled, the tiny poem is not only complete, but dense, self-contained, essential--every word is carefully chosen, nothing is filler.

The most powerful small poems are those that marshal nuances, that put telling gestures to work in the service of big ideas. Aaron McCollough’s "The First Poem of Jan Vandermeer" is full of such weighty gestures, with its wry musing on "my Michigan (camero hood propped / up with a hockey stick) of Netherlands." Humor is often in short supply where serious poetry is concerned, but Daniel Magers displays a rare, self-deprecating wit in his piece "The Dylan Songbook," a meditation on growing older and inward-looking.

In other places, small poems hold out the possibility of intriguing narratives, of landscapes that the imagination is left to populate. "Dramatis Personae," by Kristin Abraham, demonstrates the possibility of a tiny poem to suggest so much, with its cast list for an imagined "mortality play." Shaefer Hall's "And Then The Whole Place Got Dark" is cinematic rather than theatrical--a movie told in fifteen lines. Maggie Nelson, Del Ray Cross, and Karl Parker are others that deserve special mention for their extremely intricate pieces. In "From a Purely Mechanical Standpoint," Mary Ann Samyn discusses the experience of producing these carefully crafted missives, where "Completion made its small animal yawn."

A number of entries are nature poems--and sometimes, poems that examine the possibility of nature poems in the modern world. The beautiful "Nocturne," by Amira Thoron, is perhaps the most successful, in which night is populated by "the viscous breath / of moles, the furtive // diggings of a skunk, / grubs coiled / in moonlight." Meanwhile, with "In the Pastoral I am a Deep Red Rose," Mike Sikkema ruminates on "pixies and billy goats," daisies that are "safe and feral," and "coin-operated epiphanies."

These delicate selections are lent additional weight by the inclusion of two well-considered essays, Samyn's "Two Bits of Tiny" and Geof Huth's "Why Visual Poetry." The latter, followed by several examples, seems a bit of a departure from the rest of the journal's collection, especially when concrete and other visual poetry styles are often associated with the large, public, and outrageous. What unites Huth with the other "tiny" poets is his use of revealing details to suggest more than what is being said.

The first issue of The Tiny is rich with reference, a network of allusions that stretches far beyond this magazine to incorporate Shakespeare, Rilke, and Christopher Guest, among many others. Aaron Raymond, in particular, creates a conversation between Hamlet's ill-fated friends in his "Rosencrantz Letters" (excerpted in the magazine), and in the process enters a conversation about "Hamlet" that encompasses hundreds of years and extends around the world.

If the creative inspirations that drive The Tiny's inaugural poets are wide-ranging, their social network can feel insular. It's no surprise that these very gifted writers should be accomplished, published poets assembled from a variety of MFA programs and journals, but their biographies reveal that by and large, they have all published previous work in at least one of a small group of other journals, the same small group of journals The Tiny links to on its website. There is certainly nothing inappropriate about this, but hopefully an open call for submissions will diversify future volumes of this densely powerful magazine and allow new writers the chance to be a part of this exciting new project.