NEW! Review of Cecil Helman

Irregular Numbers of Beasts and Birds by Cecil Helman. Quale, $12.

Reviewed by Zackary Sholem Berger

Few things are as foolhardy as venturing a definition of poetry, but the history of poetry can provide safe harbor. One of many strands that has contributed to poetry is the song. Thus the reader seeing a poem for the first time, blessed or encumbered with common cultural baggage, would expect it to be something singable, or at least tuneful. If you claim that a poem can be nothing more than a virtuosic display of variegated wordforms, I can still ask where the music is. Though the question may be naïve, it is not illegitimate.

Trying to define the prose poem would be just as foolhardy, but the historical uses of prose provide one way to understand the genre's possibilities. At its broadest, prose has been whatever can be put down on paper, from lists of military conquests to the roll-call of the dead. So the prose poem is not the intersection of prose and poetry, but the use of prose in the widest sense of the word, in the way encompassing the most possibilities.

One way to explore these possibilities is to turn back the clock, imagining that the deadening effects of various contemporary uses of prose can be reverted. You can become a myth-maker, mining a spare but connotative vocabulary that has its parallels in the Bible or the French neoclassical playwrights: the same words, images, and ideas, repeated over and over again in different combinations, can cover the entire universe--just like (it is said) God took only ten utterances to make the whole world.

This mythmaking lies at the foundation of Irregular Numbers of Beasts and Birds, a book of prose poetry by Cecil Helman. Besides being a novelist and a poet, Helman is best-known for his medical anthropology. Story-archetypes, and the ways they are made concrete in lives and bodies, are his very bread. People falling in love, giving birth, dying, becoming insane--these basic stories appear time and again in Helman's research and his literature.

The most effective poems in Helman's book preserve the immediacy and vividness of such basic stories. It feels wrong to give away for free “The Second Ark,” the last poem in the collection, but it's hard to resist quoting:

The Second Ark

I think of Noah, his crowded Ark. The symmetry of it all. The neat geometry of design. The two-by-two of everything. Half male, half female. Two doves sent out. A Flood that lasts exactly twice times twenty days. Not more. All this symmetry makes me think that, somewhere out there, there's another Noah. In another Ark, on another Flood. A chaotic Ark, filled with irregular numbers of beasts and birds. A bewildered Noah with three wives, or none. Still floating. Sending out doves in random threes, or fives. A Noah who cannot calculate when it will all end. Whether the Flood will go on forever, or end the day before it began.

This prose poem encapsulates Helman's strengths: the cyclic nature of all existence that he can contain within these short pieces; the deceptively simple approach, beginning with a short remark ("I think of Noah . . .") that blossoms into an entire garden of observations. Here, a myth (the Bible's) with a definable beginning and end, destruction and redemption, is transformed into something more like our own experience, with an unclear destination and no promised rebuilding. Because Noah doesn't find his Ararat, because he might have to sail on forever, his experience is more like our own. But for that very reason--because the reader's eye does not light upon the expected redemption--this prose poem is wonderfully strange.

This is what Helman does throughout the book, bringing myths (scientific, romantic, religious) into confrontation with our everyday, whose cycles are less sublime. In "Relativity," we meet the woman who bends time: "Wherever that woman is, time either stops, or it runs too slow." Another woman (in a different piece) speaks hieroglyphics. In "Bar Scene," a "crowded bar[, s]moke and sweat, and juke box roaring" gives way to a series of images, and increasing confusion on the part of the narrator:

Woman in a leopardskin leotard, big earrings, peroxided hair, screaming into my ear. Who is she? . . . Behind the bar the barman pours me out yet another drink, shrugs. Why is he shaking his head?

For the reader fed on prose, such deceptively simple myth bust-ups pose a problem. When an image from the everyday is presented as an artistic unit, without enlivening context, it can seem only everyday--boring, trivial. The piece "Therapy" can be read as a sharply ironic portrait of a therapist ("Tick-tock. A plush Persian carpet. Uh-huh. I'm afraid our time's up. See you tomorrow, then. Same time. Tick-tock."), or, on the other hand, as a same-old-same-old therapist cliche. Sometimes Helman asks too much of such a reader, piling on the blunting cliches just when a piece is tapering to a point. "Relativity" ends with: "They say even Einstein was puzzled by her. And so am I." The last observation is unnecessary. "Artist" is a clever portrait of a renowned artist whose canvases are all blank, whose paints are untouched: "That's why they say he's a great artist. Perhaps the greatest abstract artist of them all. They must be right, I guess." Here too the last affirmation weakens the poem.

If poetry should be good prose, this should be all the more true for prose poetry. But this is a misleading supposition, especially if "good prose" is taken to mean (as it often is) clear, workaday, expository sentences. When reading a prose poem, we should expect different things from what our quotidian eye is trained to see. We want to strip away our layered expectations and arrive at a basic, mythic, immediate understanding. (At least, this is one possible way of approaching the prose poem. It could be called the Turgenev model, as opposed to Baudelaire's conception, rich, heady stews just this side of overwrought.) If this is the approach we want to take, we should give the prose poet some leeway, enough to let him use certain tropes ("And so am I") which have become cliched through careless overuse. We should cut him some slack as--we hope--he cuts away the weeds and leads us back to the myths which language was connected to in its earliest days.

The question is, then, how to appreciate Helman's book. The myths are powerful but the cliches are dangerous. If a balance can be struck, it might require the ability to synthesize the two: the familiar patterns of the expository in the service of poetry's ability to creatively undermine. This ability, in turn, might depend on the reader even more than the author. Which is to say that the reviewer (like this one) who felt impatient at this book's cliches should also be grateful for the myths dissected by Helman.

NEW! Review of Kevin Craft

Solar Prominence by Kevin Craft. CloudBank Books, $12.95.

Reviewed by Carrie Olivia Adams

Kevin Craft knows how to spin a metaphor and to disrupt what seems simple. In his first collection of poems, Solar Prominence, he proposes:

If the body is eighty
percent water, a man
might drown simply lying
down to sleep, or walking
to the corner store
for bread and a newspaper
find himself struggling to stay afloat
in the riptide of his own bad blood.

These lines from “Medical History” are enough to make us uncomfortable and untrusting of our own individual bodies. Craft skillfully constructs his lines to unsettle, as evidenced by the unparallel structure of the stanza above, in which the second dependent clause has already lost (or drowned, or pulled under) the subject.

As much as his verse is unsettling, Craft writes about being unsettled. His poems are fascinated with the idea of the journey--in the physical sense of a journey from place to place, in the sense of the progression of time, as well as in the sense of the emotional and intellectual journey of a self through life. These are poems infused with world travel, sailing voyages and shipwrecks, the arrival of comets, and the importance of the weather in heaven, among other subjects of roaming, begetting, becoming. He states in “The Difference”:

His thesis was terminal restlessness--
cloudy islands and theatrical volcanoes,

bays groomed by canoes and circled by float planes,
the migratory stunts of coho and flycatchers,
a small brown estuary
in the saucer on his table.

Craft might as well be describing the thesis and tone of his poetry, which has its own relentless restlessness. In “To an Amphora, Salvaged @,” a poem unlike the others in the collection due to its long, wordy sentences that tumble and roll down the page, he writes:

. . . --all motion
ascribed to the heart's steady restlessness
but likely more akin to an electron's
struck from the shell of its whirlwind and spinning
out counterclockwise to the antic world,
the cipher sea, @ large again, a silence
speaking volumes, blinking now and then

like a Cyclops whose godsent ship's come in.

Throughout his poems, Craft captures the movement and resonance of various journeys in the images and descriptions of the small things glimpsed and gathered along the way. As he writes in the long poem “After a Journey,” “To journey is to make a day of it, / to find dailiness sufficient, the mundane divine.” As a result of the act of journeying, the mundane is elevated to the role of souvenir and thus assumes a significance beyond the ordinary:

I make a little pile
of stones I've picked up there & here--
my hermeia, ambit cairn
of touchstone souvenirs--
agate, jasper, meteorite, carnelian,
each enamored of a mile.

Of course, it is a given that the journey puts one in a liminal position: “ --broken instep, stone half / skipped, half sunk restlessly between.” It is this tension “between voyage and the void,” that makes these souvenirs so important. The traveler is a body in motion, and consequently arrival guarantees departure: one has always already left, and therefore one is perpetually absent. In the poems of Solar Prominence, the souvenirs are tangible placeholders, markers of an undertaking, a voyage undertaken.

“After a Journey” concludes:

The story is restoration, sing-along,
in millennial Avignon: the city plans
to rebuild its bridge's famous, missing
spans, only to tear them down again
the following year. At what cost? A song.

It is to this question of cost that I find myself returning, upon reading Craft's poems. These are poems written in a language carefully honed within a syntax that begins on a straight path, then twists and turns and rises and falls in keeping with content. Yet, despite the glimmering moments when Craft encourages us to question the commonplace, as he does in “Medical History,” the poems are, in general, lyrical without a cost, without risk. This is their weakness. The poems stand at a distance, for one to admire them; however, one does not feel invited into their travels. As a result, this volume is a formidable step toward a work as intense as the celestial phenomenon its title evokes.

NEW! Review of Fulcrum

FULCRUM #4. $15.

Reviewed by Chris Tonelli

The fourth installment of Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics showcases a worthwhile dichotomy. Part of this might have to do with the actual size of the journal--it is a bear, a yearly, and well over 500 pages and bound to include a variety of poetic ranges. In this respect it sort of reads like an anthology. But because of the segment “Poetry and Truth,” in which nineteen poets and critics answer a questionnaire that addresses the very nature of poetry and its place in society, a particular set of opposing poles is established. So what ends up happening is that poets and critics give their thoughts on poetry, and then the reader gets to see how the actual poems align or diverge, providing a sort of litmus test for the authors and critics as well as for the reader. While the poles set up in this issue could certainly be labeled in a number of ways, for me they boil down to poets who view their vocation as a sacred one and those who view their vocation as a ridiculous one. And by this I mean in terms of their aesthetics--presumably none of the poets or critics thinks poetry is ridiculous per se. But certainly the question this issue seems to beg is how sacred should poetry consider itself, or rather, how sacred should poetry sound about itself.

W. N. Herbert sets the table for the volume-long conversation between the divine and the silly. When asked “What is the most important poetry?,” he answers, “The most important poetry for me doesn’t need to talk about the big picture because it’s in the act of adding to it. Poetry is there to be with you.” On the philosophy of poetry or the fact that maybe there needn’t be one, Herbert comments: “I suspect, wherever it’s not completely expressed by and embodied in a poem, it’s just morning-after-breath.” Like his preceding poems (written in both Scots and English), Herbert’s answers are at once yeoman-like and playful.

Don Share’s poem “Squandermania, or: Falling asleep over Delmore Schwartz” follows. Share--in true Merrillian fashion (he rhymes “fuckit” with “bucket” to end the poem)--combines the formal and the colloquial. And David Lehman, like Larkin (“They fuck you up your mum and dad”), plays on the resonance of strict rhyme and the explicit in his “Crazy Jane Mouths Off”:

I walked past someone I used to fuck,
who made me give him head.
Is this the cock I used to suck?
Life’s a hotel. We keep changing beds.

Both engage and pay homage to historical figures of varying poetics (Share: The Who, Lorca, etc. Lehman: Yeats), as well as other figures of the past (presidents, astronauts, parents, priests), and their poems balance respect and rebelliousness towards these figures and traditions.

In moments like these, poets blend the dictions and forms of the reverent and the irreverent. For example, in “My Paris” Jeet Thayil writes:

on a bench in the sun
in the Rue Boucherie, kicking it
with Our Lady of the Stone
Face and Troubled Spirit.
Maybe asleep in the bookshop,
maybe waiting for the rain to stop.

While Paris romanticizes itself as soon as it enters any poem, especially when the speaker is taking cover from the rain in a bookstore, “kicking it” mixes the diction, showing an awareness that Paris is also just another place in which the self dwells.

But certainly not all of the poems in this tome incorporate such balance. Some poets seem to choose sides. David Kennedy’s “Calendar” has moments in which the poet is an oracular vessel of sorts: “Our skin is an archive . . . Our bodies are reservoirs / of writing.” And in the final stanza of his “Near Death,” Kennedy writes:

In a room, we remember
the dead with films, poetry.
We open our mouths, hold death
on our tongues in a plain room;
watch the light’s work on the clean walls.
A little way up the road,
traffic control deals planes up,
stacked planes down, drowns the squeals
of starting and the low drones
of ending in each other.
Winds crash around a plain room,
shriek through the cracks, into our mouths.

Though his poems here seem to consistently put the poet in the role of receiver and archiver, after being asked “What is and what isn’t poetry? What is poetry’s essential nature (if any)?,” Kennedy responds (with non-traditional punctuation and no caps), “i might even say that i think there is something wrong with poetry that people can still ask these questions after all we don’t ask them about film or painting.”

And when asked “What is the most important poetry? Who are the greatest poets? What do they accomplish?,” he answers, “the stuff that gets my attention the ones that get my attention getting my attention creeley gets my attention in a really big way these days because his work is about attention and that interests me yeats on the other hand has never got my attention.” While his poems lean more towards Yeats, his response owes more to Creeley.

To the question “Is there (or can there be) a meaningful philosophy of poetry?,” Kennedy says, “might be don’t make the world reducible and don’t be reducible yourself poetry has to keep reminding us about excess that the world is excessive.” While Kennedy takes a stance in his poetry, one gets the feeling, based on his commentary, that these stances are only poem deep, that beneath each of his poems is a poet waiting to disagree with himself in the very next poem, and in only that way can he capture what he sees as an excessive world.

For this reason, Kennedy is quite representative of what this issue of Fulcrum seems to be up to. When asked “What is/isn’t poetry? What is poetry’s essential nature?,” Alexei Tsvetkov responds, “One is tempted to give the famous answer about pornography: I know what it is when I see it. But this won’t do for an obvious reason: pornography tries to appeal directly to our physiology, poetry does not and cannot; thus, what I know is not necessarily what someone else knows; our opinions are not vouched for by our common bodily functions.” To which I thought, really? What makes a poem sad but the tricking of our body via words by replicating a situation that would normally elicit the sad chemicals. Whether I, as a reader, agreed with Tsvetkov or not, I found myself prompted to explore possible rebuttals.

When Tsvetkov was asked about the relationship between truth and poetry, he answered, “Poetry, among all arts, probably comes closest to the search for truth since it expresses itself in language, which is the truth medium,” and I found myself wondering if language would be just as viable if someone were to call it the fiction or lie medium. Simon Armitage, for example, soon follows by defining poetry as “inventing significance in a life which is otherwise meaningless.”

Other poets, not as reverent perhaps to poetry as a medium, do their part to out a particular kind of poetry that simply seems to be doing a bad impression of itself. Landis Everson, in his one page essay “Limitation of Birds” (one of the real gems of this issue), depantses poetry and some of the more typical things it does to assure readers that what they are in fact reading is a poem: “A poem can often be made much more successful if the poet puts into the poem, freely and unselfconsciously, all the birds he wants. Once the poem is finished (if a poem is ever really finished!), he then simply discards all of them.”

It is this kind of back and forth that Fulcrum #4 spurs. For every James Woods, who says that poems “line the pockets of our minds w/ arrangements of words that are easier to remember than to forget, and which warm us in our days,” there is a Charles Bernstein who says, “[p]oetry does not relate to the human condition, it articulates ways of encountering & acknowledging it; sometimes it changes it. Poetry, by necessity, rejects the human condition.” Fulcrum does a nice job of being inclusive while exposing the reader to polar opposite aesthetics, inadvertently encouraging us to take a side. And then I thought . . . Fulcrum. Nice choice of a name for a journal that see-saws in a good way.

This same debate shows up just as consistently in the second half of issue four. “Give the Sea Change and it Shall Change: Fifty-Six Indian Poets (1951-2005)” is the Jeet Thayil-edited anthology of Indian poets writing in English featured in the final 300 pages of the issue. Perhaps the isolation and cultural confusion that Thayil eludes to in his intro lends itself to Mamta Kalia’s bitterness in “Against Robert Frost”:

I can’t bear to read Robert Frost.
Why should he talk of apple-picking
When most of us can’t afford to eat one?
I haven’t even seen an apple for many months--
Whatever we save we keep for beer
And contraceptives.

But much like the rest of the journal, for every poem that is wary of poetry’s time-honored figures, there are poems that pay homage to such traditions. R. Parthasarathy in an aubade entitled “East Window” writes:

Few are the body’s needs:
it is the mind’s that are insatiable.
May our hands and eyes open this spring afternoon
as the blue phlox open on a calm Salem Drive
to the truth of each ordinary day:
the miracle is all in the unevent.

What home have I, an exile,
other than the threshold of you hand?
Love is the only word there is:
a fool wears out his tongue learning to say it,
as I have, every day of his life.

Perhaps it is because, by this point in the journal, the reader has become attuned to such polarities that poems like these two seem to continue the conversation begun in the first section of the issue (after all, the anthology pre-existed the issue and there are no questionnaires in this section). In any case, “Give the Sea Change and it Shall Change” is at once an intriguing glimpse into a pocket of poetry a reader might not otherwise come across and a consistent partner piece to the rest of the volume.

Though the fourth issue of Fulcrum is a mountain of a journal, it provides enough variety of voice to avoid redundancy and enough consistency regarding form and style to avoid lacking an identity. It’s features on “Poetry and Truth,” on Landis Everson (and his correspondence with Duncan and Spicer), and on Indian poetry in English provide solid frameworks with which to read the core contents and offer the reader some pretty unique material.

NEW! Review of Tenney Nathanson

Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) by Tenney Nathanson. O Books, $12.00

Reviewed by Thomas Fink

The author of a major tome on Walt Whitman, Tenney Nathanson in Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) has produced a long collage-poem of Whitmanian energy and scope. The poem consists of 108 dizains (ten-line stanzas), and Nathanson has created diverse effects within this form in an unusual way: he has packed in so many overgrown “versets” in some sections that they take up much more space than others. Occasionally, two-and-a-half dizains fit on one page, whereas one section sometimes occupies more than a page. While there is variety in the alternation among medium length, long, very long, and outrageously long lines within a single section, the overall impression given is that of a breathless onrush of poetic data.

Much of this data, a little more than half in each section, comes from “intertexts,” as Nathanson’s list--one book per section (except in dizain 70)--at the end of the book calls them. Many major British, American, and continental modernist (and nineteenth century) fiction writers serve as sources. Poetry by Whitman (of course) and Frost, literary criticism, critical theory, cultural studies, Zen texts, a scientific treatise, and a diet book are also included. The variety of intertexts allows for ample diversity in verbal texture.

Dizain 5, whose source texts are three different essays from Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, begins with the line: “messengers is law a gloomy way a firm place in a long existence impossible here.” Nathanson’s source is the essay, “Franz Kafka,” in which Benjamin writes: “What may be discerned . . . in the activities of those messengers is law in an oppressive and gloomy way for this whole group of beings. None has a firm place in the world. . . . There is not one that is not either rising or falling, . . . none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence. To speak of any order or hierarchy is impossible here.” Notice that Nathanson severs the copular link of discernment and “law” (and the secondary importance of “messengers”) in the original passage and gives us the grammatically strange equation making the servants of “law”--which might include language as well as human functionaries--identical to this authority. Indeed, in the “gloomy way” of Kafka’s work--and the feel of this comes through in dizain 81, whose intertext is The Castle--bureaucrats embody the full force of coercive regulations for hapless citizens. While Benjamin emphasizes individuals’ lack of security (“firm place”) and the “long existence” of their suffering, the poet ties “firm place” and “long existence” to the “law” before undercutting the notion of firmness with “impossible here,” which in the original passage was linked with a declaration about “order’s” absence. However different Nathanson’s deployment of the intertext’s words, effects of his collaging convey some of the darkness of Kafka’s work and Benjamin’s interpretation of it.

Obviously, the kind of intertextual labor I performed in the previous paragraph is not a practical overall reading strategy. But a general awareness of possible traces of the source text in harmony or conflict with Nathanson’s own words enhances the reading experience, as in dizain 44, where scientific discourse from Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions , and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory is juxtaposed with “natural” imagery of Nathanson’s own approximation of a Thoreau-like transcendentalism: “Focused on the electron, this discussion charged particles the same way that rocks on everyday sanctum increase in strength / sitting and dwindling down into wind, rain, the flecked rocks hunkered and washed by the lake, your insight breathing / short theories of 10 space-time dimensions.”

The poet’s mode of collagistic presentation does not deliver hard information like scientific findings to the reader; his “discussion” can “charge” heterogeneous “particles” of discourse to “increase” the “strength” of multi-contextual suggestiveness. “Rocks” could be stable enough to support an “everyday sanctum,” but the phrase’s potent strangeness exceeds its aptness in importance. Note how enjambments between the first and second and between the second and third lines are not arbitrary; for example, phenomenological “insight” about nature can inspire (“breathe”) much more abstract, theoretical formulations; the two are parallel ways of experiencing/measuring “reality.”

Depriving canonical fiction of its narrative motion through fragmentation, Nathanson retains some of the thematic charge and feeling tone of not-so “empty words.” Lines taken from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter foreground the pun in a central after-effect’s name and convey the pleasure/agony of Hester’s union: “on the wooded hills of no scandal, shine, pearl/ passionately his burning walked among kindred, so pure in horror. He bids you” (Dizain 33). The “range” (scope) that Nathanson is at “home” on is a wide array of scriptive cultural artifacts. Collage deployment of that scope engenders the “homelessness” of the between, of intertextuality: such poetry ranges in ways that a time-traveling Whitman would probably judge to “contain [new and old] multitudes”: “say I also return, translucent, beetles rolling balls of dung, winds surging, shaded, are the others down / and sundered, no, they’re down where the tall grass twines under the oak tree having a Swabian picnic. swell” (Dizain 92).

NEW! Review of David Baker

Midwest Eclogue by David Baker. W.W. Norton, $23.95.

Reviewed by Kevin Cantwell

“My mind’s not right,” Coleridge says through Lowell and says again here through David Baker, in whose meditative pastorals and epistolary natural histories we hear not so much the uneasiness of living in the poem but a sense of the poem as timbre for the uneasiness of the poet’s mind. Baker’s poems trust that ordinary language can still leverage the liminal moment through a kinetic syntax and conversational force that easily carries his sometimes cumbersome conceits. If the language is ordinary, it is heightened by an exactness of diction charged when the meter balances itself on the blank-verse edge of free verse. When his meter is more intricate, we are never distracted by rhyme’s more constructed assumptions. This is an American, perhaps middle-American, poetry, rural in a painterly way but drawn by a complex personality, one that overhears a line of satire always faintly evident in the pastoral.

This connection to Europe renews and adds gravitas to Baker’s vision (the oldest subversion of and sometimes solution to American thought). Although his poems generally keep their distance from the more fruitless rehearsals of poetic eurocentrism, even his initial poem has trouble resisting a trope of poetic royalty. “Monarchs Landing and Falling” observes a young couple distracted by their affection for each other, and who cannot quite be aware of the monarch butterflies “balanced on bridges of plume grass stalks/ and bottlebrush, wings fanning, closing, calmed . . . ”; neither is the couple aware of how they too have been positioned in the poet’s blank verse. We are not so much surprised by the poem’s conclusion--“by the time we look again they’ve flown”--as we are pleased by a release of syntax that propels this line. Here, the conversational drama of the iambic can be made even more tensile. Shorter sentences, sometimes two to a line, heighten caesura into a measure of tempo that checks and then compels the motion of run-over lines:

Then a stillness descended the blue hills.
I say stillness. They were three deer, four.
They crept down the old bean field, these four deer,
for fifteen minutes--more--as we watched them

in the field, in the soughing snow . . .

In this poem about his daughter, her quiet look at deer belies her twitchy, frantic inattentiveness--before he and (the poet Ann Towsend) his wife “learned what was wrong.” The father frets for the child and tries to control his temper in the face of this frustration, yet the lyric bracket of the meter lets the mind take a breath.

Unlike the young Coleridge who marveled at the peacefulness of his sleeping infant, Baker consoles his anxiety by watching his daughter “hunkered over her drawing pad, / humming, for an hour.” Art can console, as Derek Walcott has said about the classics, “but not enough”; for the speaker, the ominous “hour” of the line above portends the parents’ knowledge that respite, even in art, is not for long.

With his daughter’s personality on his mind, he turns to a familiar habit of American poems, a kind of high-end bio-poem (see biopic). In Baker’s “Bedlam,” fashioned from sources about the rural genius John Clare, the never-cured innocent of nineteenth-century English verse, is here recovered through poetic new historicism. Baker’s affiliation with rural descriptions of the American Midwest makes his the perfect ocular prism by which to weaves lines of Clare into a more personal discourse on his grip on his own mind:

More and more I recognize the torment
in another’s mind better than my own.
I’ve got a mean streak a mile wide. But why?
. . .
But it’s nothing a little balm won’t soothe,
nothing another pill won’t ease.

Burton’s melancholy is now Baker’s pharmacology of “Adderal, Prozac, Paxil / Dezyrel, Wellbutrin . . .” One of these meds could have changed Clare: “[I]t kills me to think what a decent pill / might have meant to the man.” One of those pills might make his daughter’s life more bearable, both to her and the poet himself. Baker complains about his life by complaining about someone else’s life, especially as a drain on his own creativity, yet acknowledges the sustaining nature of complaint. The elegy itself comes back to us in another way when reading Baker--satiric in its take on how the folly of the body, displaced by the foibles of dementia, wrings the heart also. First, though, it tries his patience. In Baker, it is the tug of satire that keeps the full grip of mourning from closing down the mind.

If the tone and manner of apprehending the present is a method (to make either a more scholarly Brief Lives or a more poetic one it’s hard to tell), this dramatic ploy does not mask its perceptions in the way that Browning, Merrill, and Howard ghost through their projected voices. There is more the editorial omniscient here and more the discursiveness of colloquy--an apt field guide to another poet’s mental illness in the nineteenth century. Some aspects of this genre are more quirky.

Birders wander the thickets of English and American poetry; they also vex the landscape with their peculiar and slightly neurotic ornithology. Although a comforting eccentricity guides us through this strange life-listing (Waggoner, Plumly, or Bottoms), Baker is less certain when he takes this approach to Whitman, whom he places “in Canada, / 1880, tracing the flights of birds” and “up to his knees in mud, / bugs.” Although the poem eventually widens its scope to regard the late career of the Poet when “he is simply Walt,” the sense of Whitman’s politics later in the poem feels wearisome with its direct quotes and its cross-outs, indicating Whitman’s notebooks as sources; but Baker’s skill and his affinity for Whitman overcome how this textual fussiness slows down the poem. Yet in shorter lyrics like “Winged,” we read lines that could hardly be written more beautifully:

If this were the sea and not snow, morning-
cold, Ohio, the slick black trees standing
for themselves along our ice creek, then
these birds might seem ready for flight.

The mid-length lyric, on the short side of that range, is still Baker’s trump. When he ventures into some longer poems, the prosody seems heavier. In a poem like “Cardiognosis,” the sense of what a poem can accomplish is enviable, but the form of this elaborate anatomy of the heart, parts from early medical literature, is at times more disheartening as an exercise than it is a dramatization of prosody’s dexterity. Most poems, however, are exquisite, among them “Spring of Ephemerals,” “Melancholy Man,” “The Waves,” “Hedonism,” “The Blue,” “Silo Oaks,” and the title poem. Baker has mastered the metrical resources of one line of American poetry, which places him among its most eloquent and accomplished writers, with each new book “becoming / the next thing.” There is always the sense that the David Baker poem is going to tighten yet another turn, meter upon thought, thought upon theme, in elegant and powerful devices of perception.

NEW! Review of Cue

Cue #2.2. $6.

Reviewed by Micaela Morrissette

The latest issue of the prose poetry journal Cue is slight in form, slim and modest, and it must be confessed that many of the poems therein are rather slight as well. There are no grandiose failures, no doomed but brave and wild bids for glory. Nearly nothing is truly awful, which on the one hand is a perfectly respectable quality, and on the other hand is a clear recommendation for a good, healthy shot of hubris.

Several of the poems succeed inasmuch as they can be said to have fulfilled the rather paltry goals set for them by their authors--for example, Michael Malinowitz's "Handicapping the Help." This little riff on bigotry is as amusing and light as such things can be, and it identifies itself, in a witty, polite undertone, as racial humor about racial humor, a new dilution of the presumably once-pure bloodline of the metanarrative.

An excerpt from Ron Silliman's "Zyxt" suffers from a similar sort of friendly timidity. There's nothing wrong with this poem; each individual line stands up and is counted, but the overall effect is of having been invited to dinner and provided with a meal made up of leftovers. The sensation the passage gives is of having been cobbled together from stabs at other, unfinished poems. (It's true that this is taken from a longer work, but presumably it was judged by the author and Cue editors as worthy to stand alone.) These hypothetical other, nascent poems would have been good, too, had they been written, but the bits and pieces Silliman combines don't add up to one complete poem, or even one meaningful or evocative passage, but to an additional bit-and-piece.

Michael Schiavo's "Prothalamion" has a similar kind of final effect in which the stitching of patchwork is sewn too loosely. In this case, though, the strong repeating structure of the litany of lines is enough to create a vessel that holds the piece together, and individual passages do contain overt connections or a sense of building to something utterly satisfying: "The man whom fog knows as fog. . . . The man in certain places summoning autumn. The man guarding the secret wall from whence the woman emerged. The woman emerging. The woman smaller than a stockpile, larger than wool. The titanic woman. The woman of shoals."

"Prothalamion" is the last of a group of three poems by Schiavo that opens this issue of Cue and that is among its most wonderful offerings. The first poem, "Ode," is a kind of bourgeois ecstasy that celebrates not immortality, but death deferred, not wild celebration, but swooning absence from pain. "O pornography on Sunday morning--O pineapple--the royal peasant incarnate-- / . . . / O practical resistance to impractical love--O Donald--O Constance-- / O catfish on my plate with mustard-- / . . . / O nature I abhor--O I am done with wonder-- / . . . / O location of the hidden treasure--O Eye that Sees Through the Ages-- / O my big hands and feet and O my, madam, I agree-- / . . . / O the mountains do not crumble O-- / The mountains crumble slow." Here as in "Prothalamion" Schiavo makes effective use of insistent repetition of syntax, but here the lines call out to each other and reply to each other; the echo does not bounce only from one line to the next but ricochets in perfect angles from line to line and from poem to reader and back.

The middle poem of Schiavo's contribution is quite different: quieter, darker, more delicate, perhaps even more lovely. "Romantiqest" takes place in a house haunted by angels (possibly those cast out of Heaven), and it is a brooding poem in two senses: first, it is gently ominous, softly sinister; second, it broods like a hen on her clutch, nesting, protecting a secret too fragile or too monstrous to reveal. The haunted house where the poem lives is really an apartment ("These apartments, they keep them so small") where "something dwells imfumable, lavish and pomped." There is a "billionaire at love's open door, rebuffed by the angels dining at the table / On orange-cake and sweet tea, their sulfuric arsenal unguarded." The poem ends by escaping the haunted house in the very last line, but the reader may be grateful to be still trapped behind the tremulous shutters: "Tired throughout the household, nonetheless the shutters shook. The rest of the night was silence, / A silence somewhere else."

Schiavo's poems are not the only successful ones in this issue; he is well-matched by Janet Kaplan. Where he is moving and sublime, she is exclamatory and intellectual, but each has a knack for measuring out doses of pure, addictive loveliness in small teaspoonfuls. Kaplan's poems, "Change" and "Meals," both deal with dichotomies in a manner playful, beguiling, and in the end, profound. "Change" takes movement as its trope. The invocations of Ulysses suggest that this movement is a return, homeward-bound; the repeated use of words like "lost," "fleeing," and "evaporated" suggest obversely that the movement is an exodus: "The aftermath of Gabriel fleeing, like a palette of charcoals--ashes aglow--cold as galvanized steel. . . . The surface of the moon seen from television shortly before lift-off. Ulysses is visible in Circe's mirror, fleeing the spacecraft." The dichotomy in this poem is not only between exodus and return, but, as we can see in the passage above, between art and reality. Kaplan has a deft way of understanding the real world as a canvas or sculpture, if by "real world" we mean not simply the natural world, unaffected by man, but also cities, which are manmade but difficult to understand as distinct artworks and myths, which are works of imagination but also depict historical events. As she describes the "palette of charcoals" that color the flight of the Angel Gabriel, so she describes the "accordion folds" of "rain solidified in thin metallic beams. A-line dresses and steeples, giraffe necks and raised rifles. My lost aunt, her perfect bouffant." Of "ice-slough, snow-melt, runoff," she writes: "Such control in an abstract piece. It gets darker as it moves from left to right." Or again: "organic bomber planes, zucchini flowers, captions. All of it blurry, a Seurat that never comes clear, no matter how far you stand."

This mode of description, this sort of simulated coldness and distance of approach, is put to use in Kaplan's "Meals" as well, but in that poem the dichotomy of figurative/abstract, concrete/imagined, real/art is the subject under discussion as well as the mode informing the voice. "Meals" is accomplished, wry, hilarious, intelligent, intermittently gorgeous. It plays in varying keys on the theme of that which exists as it is versus that which exists as we understand and describe it. Or, to put it infinitely better, in the words of Kaplan's epigraph from Damiel's "Wings of Desire": "To be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal. . . ." And to put it better still, in Kaplan's words: "Wide brushstrokes are meals, black and green and orange. They descend and encroach upon the blue limited place. . . . A poached egg that illuminates inward. And here on earth a light that doesn't reach the foreground and is therefore not the cause of the colors one sees in these peaches. What is the cause? The painter's mind, her own dual nature? Then there's the skull. . . . Two bowls of spaghetti. One is sharp but uneaten. The other is vanishing quickly and so the mind paints over it, actively and malignantly abstracts it. . . . How much is intentional and how much is chaos? Eggs equal gravity. Flour equals dominant subject matter. Mustard equals the disturbance, getting closer to or further from the disturbance. Wine vinegar means that the rectangle, though disappearing, is still very strong. . . Wind pushes the fork, rain sweeps away the knife. . . . The placement of the condiment is often a paradox."

There is one other unqualified success in this issue of Cue: Tony Tost's "A Game of Tennis." Tost's tennis match is played like Risk, with gods on one side of the court, apes on the other, an Emperorship as trophy, and stands packed with outlaws, fishermen, and others of the teeming dispossessed. An epic poem that punctuates the battle narrative with occasional rhapsodies and glosses it with political overtones, "A Game of Tennis" is consummate work: "A peculiar, visual game of tennis, which this is, must change. Overhaul. Is what I can call experimental myth not so different from myself. Destruction may pave the courts in time. There can only be one champ & one simple rule: apes are not allowed to know a thing about gods. . . Event of the game: not up to the ape! . . . The perfect game is the game of reconciliation; exquisite, closer. . . . Beds, meds, & affordable housing. Some details of a winning strategy. . . . Complete massacre of a defenseless people: is this not merely the game of one game refusing another game? On one side of the net, even before his real trial starts, a guy runs around. His mind is endless picture. Words confuse this territory not as outcome but as duration. Countries are ignored or deflected by an ear that has been waiting so long to hear them. Utterance-game that never replies. Game: put these philosophies together as one man, as an Emperor of ours. The game will be played by a dramatically invisible & theoretically simple Emperor (he has already lost the game)."

Tost's poem is followed by work by Karen Brennan, who's a bit of puzzle. Her first piece, "Tributes and Tribulations," suggests a sort of fragmented mini-narrative--a dinner party, a stroll in a garden, the departure of the guests--that rides on the back of a massive, submerged narrative the way a whale plunging through the deeps will cause a current to run on the surface of the sea far above it; or the way the creaking and settling of a house can be caused by unheard footsteps--innocent, predatory, sleepwalking?--several rooms away (in her words, "a whisper along the track of floor boards, creak of galoshes, as in the story where snow falls as a metaphor, covers our heads & scarves"). But her second selection, "Two Prose Poems," isn't nearly as good. The first section reads like a series of hints at experiences that ought to be shared but really are private. That sounds promising, but the way she conducts it is a dead-end: "She wore what you'd expect with a name like that. . . [T]he walrus still has that walk. You know the walk." And the second section is a series of perfunctory slashes toward tragedy, like the desultory hacking of a self-cutter who's more interested in the aftermath of scars than the immediacy of pain. The kind of despair Brennan is interested in evoking here can't be taken down in the shorthand she employs: "In the museum the boys had other plans. . . Dick said, I can't seem to get a good grip on the edges. A rectangle of sky. A triangle of roof. What means these views? . . . We have to keep doing what we're doing, she whispered. Or else we'll all die sooner than we thought." Obviously Brennan is a good writer, but she needs a more expansive form than brief vignettes to do justice to her themes.

Even Brennan's failures aren't total flops, though there are a few of those in the issue, most notably the poems of Donna Stonecipher and Deborah Bernhardt. Stonecipher has an unfortunate knack for giving a false impression of innovation by punctuating passages of banality with abstracted questions or quotations, as in "Inlay (Emerson)," which interrupts a truly mediocre meditation on snowflakes, grasshoppers, and autumn leaves with the question "Who doesn't want a little piece of the vestigial?"; or as in "Inlay (Oppen)," which sets repeated fragments from George Oppen's "Of Being Numerous" against such undistinguished examples of Stonecipher's own thought as "But which is it [the grass] doing--ruining the sidewalk, or starting a meadow?" or "And why is it then, when all one loves is flawed, one tries to make perfect things?"

Bernhardt's poems are tame little paeans to lust ("Mistletoe's no hedge--cover me, pagan. Permission's running rampant in our veins."). Her "The Kiss," however, is not the only poem in this issue guilty of the abrupt confessional about-face. By this I mean that inexcusable tendency to write a poem about themes more or less outside the poet before, in the last line, ferociously bringing it all to bear on personal woe, usually romantic, usually self-pitying, usually with the expectation of a deep profundity being thereby cast upon the poem as a whole, rather than, as is usually the case, any hint of profundity gained previous to that point being shattered and ground to bits by these sorts of surprise endings. In Bernhardt's case it goes like this: "Over ninety percent of all creatures kiss. Kissing is a landmark. Are we all programmed to put a kiss before a fondle? Glancing from eyes to lips: a Jungian kind of thing? Kiss-etiquette? The famous Klimt clasp-bodies are spun in gold paint euphoria. Doisneau's clinch is silver emulsion. Rodin's version, Francesca and Paolo, is a first kiss. . . . He did not kiss although his hands had flown down my sides like the seams of a long dress, already grazed the length of me."

Mary Ruefle is perhaps even more guilty of being an undercover confessional operative in "Peek-a-moose": "And I knew somewhere deeply recessed, 'away from it all,' the real with-it-all took place; there, in the undulating mists, a moose eating the dark green mosses was barely seen through the pines . . . all around him millions upon millions of other moose lie dead and buried, and no one ever had a peek of them (though there were glimpses) and in the glare light of the pizza parlor I chose anchovies which I did not like but seemed ancient and suffering, such small animals, and I took the pie home with me and ate it with my mouth gaping, painfully aware I was not a moose and had never been a moose and would never be a moose, but I had loved you in such an eerie and unnatural way." Moose and anchovies have some potential for interest, but in "Peek-a-moose" hints do exist, from the beginning of the poem, that they are only stand-ins for the real meat of the speaker's personal, trivial preoccupations. But even when Ruefle does not betray her themes with private sorrows, she undermines them with mannered, glancing treatments, as in "Lichen," where perfectly servicable ideas about the inscrutability of lichen, the inability to draw distinctions between living and dead or young and old, the morality of kidnapping, and the hold of bears on the imagination, are dealt with summarily and neurotically.

Mark Horosky is the ersatz confessional poet in this issue, the voyeur or interloper who pretends to be a native. Horosky writes poems about the gritty, sensual, nasty, uncomfortable lives led in suburbia, in trailer parks, in low-income urban housing developments, rife with visceral, authenticating details ("duct tape on the guitar case," "heavy metal karaoke"); and the intensity of his documentary need is awkwardly evident ("Out to make change for my laundry at the Circle K, I saw a man wrestled to the parking lot's grit. I've spat on that parking lot before. . . . I was one of those people."). But Horosky's attempt to bridge the gap between him and his adopted homes is strained, unconvincing, and nearly hysterical in its pitch ("Bleeding, a cigarette came to rest between my lips in a kitchen of bad curtains" ["On Seeing an Engagement Photo of a Girl I Used to Date"]; "She asks in a voice that cigarettes rude, could you shave my pussy? . . . Feeling the razor catch, feeling it catch" ["Mender"]).

The final three poets with whom this issue concludes are Donna Steiner, Luke Trent, and Hugh Steinberg. Steiner's poem "Light Tenders" nearly succeeds in creating a mysterious and compelling alternate or fringe existence lived on dark ships, in prismatic light houses, amidst buckling ice. But Steiner's work is undermined by her tendency toward epigrams and explanations ("A circuitry of desire; sometimes we shun what we've summoned. . . . Resistance is erotic"), which pin down and kill the strange fluttering realities, like moths, that she ought to set free. Luke Trent's "Snow White" is also almost amazing; it catalogues a few minutes, or an entire night, in the career of a mortuary worker, who is perhaps herself a corpse. It's extremely well-executed, but Trent's vociferous use of adjectives at every possible juncture muddies it up ("new dawn," "pink cursive," "soft love," "dangling tag," "well-meaning book," "scattered notes," "pasty graveyard tongue," "fiery chew," "unbendable blue," "fine, healthy cuticle," "yellow liquid"). And Hugh Steinberg's piece, "K-Series," simply fails to beguile. It plays with the idea of a strange language called "K," which can be spoken without the speakers knowing what they say (and which incorporates many other mysteries). There is something shallow about "K-Series," something obvious, as in the way Steinberg makes references to Special K and Kafka's K. ("K is not a car, not a cereal, not a drug. Nor is it a measurement. Or men in hoods, or a man from Prague"). Something like banality in disguise ("What began with sympathy meant I had to see someone who wasn't you"). Something that follows up strength with weakness ("The choice is K or swallowing your own teeth, from keeping too many secrets").

Regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of individual contributions, Cue does an impressive job of gathering together a wide range of those specimens that travel with the passport of "prose poetry." These poems have broken lines, paragraph blocks, numbered sections. And the voices vary widely in their articulation and their themes, which does credit to the editors. Certainly it's worth picking up a copy of this issue for the innovations of Michael Schiavo, Janet Kaplan, Tony Tost, and Karen Brennan, and for the interesting questions posed by the less compelling contributions.

new issue of VERSE

new issue of Verse

The Sequence Issue (part 1)

includes poem sequences by

Mary Jo Bang
Dawn-Michelle Baude
Michael Burkard
Maxine Chernoff
Inger Christensen
Craig Coyle
Theodore Enslin
Kevin Hart
Paul Hoover
Christine Hume
Kathleen Ossip
Standard Schaefer
Leonard Schwartz
Susan Wheeler


& essays by

Marjorie Perloff (on Louis Zukofsky)
Ashley David (on Ben Lerner)


Available now. Blog price: $7 postage paid. ($10 in stores.) Send cash or check to Verse, English Department, University of Richmond, Richmond VA 23173.



The Sequence Issue part 2 will appear later this year and will include sequences by Marianne Boruch, Jenny Boully, Gillian Conoley, Anthony Hawley, John Matthias, Thorpe Moeckel, &c, as well as reviews of books by Julie Carr, Joshua Corey, Theodore Enslin, Jennifer Moxley, &c.

NEW! Review of Leonard Schwartz

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

Reviewed by Maged Zaher

1. Otherness

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

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

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

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

2. Poetry and poetics: the gap and the opportunity

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

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

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

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

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. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW! Review of Wayne Chambliss

The Traveling Salesman Problem by Wayne Chambliss. The Caitlins.

Reviewed by Brandon Downing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW! Review of Andrew Gottlieb

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

Reviewed by Summer Block

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEW! Review of Pam Rehm

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

Reviewed by Jason Stumpf

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

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

Endure has an end
you may rue
at the outset

But it also has need

and need is an Eden

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

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

Faith comes to one noiseless
and yet, keeps one exasperated

Eager to touch touch

A bird’s nest

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

A spider’s web rebuilt at dawn

With nothing wasted
Does not change with the times

So earthly and ancient

The myth of morning
The morning makes us

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

NEW! Review of Edward Foster

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

Reviewed by Nicholas Manning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

letter/response from John Olson

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

             ---  Matthew W. Schmeer

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

John Olson

NEW! Review of Amy Clampitt's Letters

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

Reviewed by David Galef

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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