NEW! Review of Eleni Sikelianos

The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls by Eleni Sikelianos. Green Integer, $10.95.
The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos. Coffee House, $16.

Reviewed by G.C. Waldrep

Eleni Sikelianos established herself (in Earliest Worlds, 2001) as a poet of ecstasy, that is, of sensual epistemology. The human body mediates between a sensual intelligence and a phenomenologically verifiable exterior world; poems create fields of resonance between an objective, even scientific natural world and the subjective, lyrically charged perception of the poet. The question to which Sikelianos returned again and again in Earliest Worlds was what, in such a fearfully expansive universe, might constitute grounds for hope, joy, love? In the context of Sikelianos's deployment of language--her formal intuition vis-a-vis those lyrically charged perceptions, and the generous skill at which that intuition was deployed (the inimitable formal shaping of her poems)--such questions seemed not only fresh, but also perhaps even answerable, at least in some subjectively specific way.

The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls picks up where Earliest Worlds left off. The poems of the first section of the book, "Captions for My Instruction Booklet," continue the poet's quest not only to render ecstasy but also to communicate (via that rendering) beyond the charmed circle of the poet's Blakean rapture. To quote from the tapestry-like sheets of Sikelianos's verse deprives the excerpts of the exquisite texture afforded by context. Here is a shorter poem in its entirety:

FIRST GREEK POEM

I the roses love in the garden of Adonis
I the salted fry of marguerite love, the one chamomile, the
tiny white that snaps
dancing in the gutter with funny
I reddest poppy painted in blood love
Love I the final columned crown
Ever a flower inventory wept, I dreamt
Of death, wedding flower; treading
purple will I go
Into that drowning house
With wet little lambs one-day old (amakia), white horses
(waves) lapping
at the heart-knobs
When the slave pumped the handle, and the water rose

In this poetics, nothing exists apart from ecstasis, not Science, not airplanes, not even Alice Cooper. From "The Cooking Stove Has Thoughts":

Real math shimmeringly swimming somewhere
on a plane high
above the head--Nothing

ever came from heaven, not even

your foul
mouth, child, unleashing
Alice cooper's brutal planet--Does he know the
military method
of taking an M-16 apart?

"This is a subregister of a larger field," Sikelianos writes in another poem, "perhaps / of a desert hunt with wild dogs." In rapture, even failure is beautiful: "Will I fail // in a brittle manner, like glass, or will I fail / in a ductile manner, like gold?" These are astonishing poems.

In the second and third parts of Monster Lives, Sikelianos's lush language and peculiar investment in the physical world remain constant, but the locus of the poet's voice shifts. The book's middle section, "Summer at St.-Nazaire," is a poetic sequence chronicling a season in France. Whereas Sikelianos's earlier poems had described events in space--the dilation of event (time) inside a larger, shifting theater of location and from an ever-shifting point of view--the poems in "St.-Nazaire" constitute a dilation of space within a larger, shifting confabulation of time. The poet's voice, in its role of conveying point of view, remains more constant. In the third section of the book, "The Bright, The Heavy," the focus is on neither place nor event but on the poet's own subjective intelligence: these are the most recognizably lyrical poems in either Monster Lives or Earliest Worlds, at least in terms of an "I" that seems relatively fixed. In both sections, the poet's syntax is more relaxed, more standard than before; less pressure is placed on the mechanics of the language, and there is a greater unfolding in terms of the affective content of the poems. The net result is a slowing, or calming, of the manic electricity, the intellectual rush to wonder that characterized Earliest Worlds and the opening poems of Monster Lives.

Sikelianos followed The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls with The California Poem, a book-length lyric meditation on her home state. As the title suggests, The California Poem builds most obviously on "Summer at St.-Nazaire." The lush language, the poet's subjective eclecticism, the lyric "I" are all yet present but are subject, here, to a larger design. That design is the place, or rather Place: Sikelianos's California is a cynosure, an object of attention and reverie, if at times a troubling one.

The poem, Sikelianos has said, began with lines written in a dream, and it retains a spacious, dreamlike quality. In part this is the poem's sheer length (196 pages), in part the expansiveness of stanza and (especially) line, in part the inclusion of black-and-white photographs that heighten the visual registers of Sikelianos's discursive text. The work is panoramic on multiple levels. Some of Sikelianos's frames of reference exist wholly within the imagination; othe¬rs thread the poet's childhood, or else that (peculiarly Californian) space between imagination and reality, the cinema. And then there are moments of pure collage, from history textbooks, guides to endangered species, etc. In The California Poem there is not so much a dilation of time as a multiplication of times: the poet's personal and familial histories, historical time, geological time ("A spine brought to the whole length of California was laid out like a golden wheel-veil / of cascades of oldest & largest living things and everything was crushed"). And of course what Mircea Eliade called sacred time, "the Big Time" in which Virgil and Descartes, Herodotus and Karl Malden, General Patton and Evel Knieval coexist. There is a California of the soul.

Which leaves us with the present, the contemporary moment. "Now: to let go what we knew / to not be tight, but / toney; to find a world, a word / we didn't know." This could well have constituted a charter for the ecstatic verse in Monster Lives, but to my reading it's an imperative that falls curiously flat in The California Poem. There are, to be sure, moments of ecstatic recognition:

Mob rule of toxic monarchs & desert Queens, fiery brushfoots burst forth
from parti-colored caterpillar feeding on backlot milkweed
jewelry for a ringfinger

The tobacco hornworm eyes me from a tomato plant, its threatening spike veered north

Instars of my larval life running
through poison oak & toothed coyote brush, tethered to mountainsides & falling
for the honied romance of names

But there are also moments, indeed entire passages, where the images and the rhetoric slacken, where the gesture seems too easy--where the poet's hand merely mimics the donnée, rather than drawing a tuned landscape to itself. At one early point, California is described as

all of New York, New England,
Pennsylvania, & New Jersey combined.
Laugh for the eucalyptus as an object of pity
The truth of Georgia is not to be found here in sushi dinners

but there is the dirt bike parade
in the mud behind subdivision A-3, Santa Maria . . .

There is nothing exactly wrong with these lines, except for the listless way they cycle through the standard cultural lexicon. The California Poem will eventually invoke cactus, film sets, John Steinbeck, Crips & Bloods, jacuzzis, Hollywood, LaBrea, the Spanish, Jayne Mansfield, Death Valley, condors, Big Sur, Marlon Brando, earthquakes, avocadoes, "a lot of pot," the gold rush, the effacement of Native American cultures, smog, Haight-Ashbury, Evander Holyfield, Junipero Serra, the San Joaquin, Ronald Reagan, redwoods, Lana Turner, Tom Hanks, Chinatown, the San Andreas fault—but too often in such a cursory way it feels as if the poet, in wanting to cram everything California into this one poem, was merely crossing tropes off a list. (I kept waiting for the Manson Family, the Donner Party, and/or Altamont, though it's possible I missed them in passing.) Ultimately, The California Poem is less a successful whole than a brilliant congeries of moments, some lyrical, some descriptive, some affective, some biographical. I wished for more distillation, in terms of both the thought and the language--for a more insistent precision of language, for a more indelible whole.

To say that The California Poem makes an attempt at the epic is to place the book less in a league with its Greek or Roman predecessors than with such modernist classics as Hart Crane's The Bridge and William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Charles Olson's Maximus Poems and Thomas McGrath's Letter to an Imaginary Friend. "Who is / the hero in / this dream?" Sikelianos asks at one point. In the most persistent of American myths, the heroic figure at the heart of the landscape is always the landscape itself. At the level of engagement, however, the poet's gaze is distended over simultaneities of space and time that threaten to swamp the specificities of language. "Memory can be anyone's shimmering / Albion," Sikelianos writes at one point, "bathyspheric hellhole hideout trop sevère / in such a book of sun I like too much . . ." The best of Sikelianos's work constitutes an electrifying phantasmagoria of exquisite moments. For all its pleasures, The California Poem is a book of sun the poet likes too much: she is not always able to see clearly on account of the glare.

NEW! Review of Brenda Hillman

Pieces of Air in the Epic by Brenda Hillman. Wesleyan University Press

Reviewed by Tara Gorvine

The second book in what will be a tetrology of the elements, this collection takes air as its subject. Writing an entire volume of poetry based on a concept is a tricky business, and one that in less adept hands often feels forced. But Hillman avoids this pitfall. Air by its very nature is mutable, and hence can change identity and avoid feeling like an affected trope. Here air appears in different guises: wind, space, breath. We don’t always recognize immediately whether it is the subject, object, or protagonist of a poem. Air takes yet another form when translated into space on the page--extra space between words and phrases, odd breaks and enjambments--so that we pause after each, give them more weight, and wonder what is missing and what else could be said.

Hillman’s approach now has more in common with language poetry than with the lyricism of her earlier work. Her transition--or perhaps transformation--is that of a figurative painter who turns to abstraction. Much of it is intentionally cryptic:

When you enter the colorless
Center of the epic
If they sideways a harp
After the inlaid griffin
Into a courtyard of foam and mint

It is then a single air will spin the epic
Suffering of a little epic

Is there meaning here, or must the reader make his own? Well, a little of both. These poems demand participation. The reader is given the materials but must put them together himself. This makes for challenging reading, and some may find themselves feeling confused, possibly even alienated. Others may find in Hillman’s work exactly what they are looking for, and feel liberated at the freedom the poems achieve.

To read Hillman we must trust her. Only she knows the way through her poems; there is no guessing where they will go. Whereas lyrical and narrative verse makes order out of chaos by establishing patterns, Hillman willfully breaks sense down even further, makes an effort to avoid order. We are not able to build expectations. Her vision is fractured, refracted, dispersed by space. In the first poem, “Street Corner”

meanings grew past a second terror
finding their way as evenings, hearing the peppermint
noise of sparrows landing
like spare dreams of citizens where abstraction and
the real could merge.

Here we have a moment of pure lyricism, “the peppermint / noise of sparrows” encountering the intersection of abstraction and the real world--the method of the collection as a whole and a fair description of what we encounter in subsequent poems--lines as strange as someone else’s dream bleeding into moments of clarity and precision.

Rather than relying on a lyrical thread or narrative line, Hillman is associative. In this way she approaches the heart of her poems, coming at them from every angle, taking away the form and leaving the language, an accumulation of sense and sound. Her language is often whimsical and deliberately opaque, as if to mirror a likewise incomprehensible world. It is as if the poet here makes no claim to greater wisdom, and cannot, will not, make order and meaning out of that which has none.

In some poems the “I” feels less like a narrator than a point from which to describe another piece of the epic. Such is the case in one of the “Nine Untitled Epyllions” (“epyllion” being the word for little epic or scrap of poetry):

I am a seamstress
I have no country
So when I count our dying hero’s breaths
as stitches carrying Trotsky
south, it seems cloth
is a state though
every century changes what
cloth is.

Lines like these create and keep a certain distance. This is an existential riff, more intellectual musing than heartfelt question. Yet there is a greater sensibility behind these poems, and the “I” may turn and address us, as this poem does in the very next line:

Now you
might enter: what kind
of cloth is your
soul, do you think.

This is no idle question, but neither is an answer expected.

Few American poets these days are as forthrightly political as Hillman in this collection. It’s risky, in the sense that the polemics can easily overtake the poetry. In these moments however, her language gains force and there is no mistaking the meaning. Because such lines are interspersed and not the whole body of a poem, and because her poems change like quicksilver, these moments are an interesting contrast to the abstractions around them: “They were mostly raised in tanklike SUVs called Caravan or / Quest; winds rarely visited them. Their / president says global warming doesn’t exist.” And a bit later in the poem, enter Iphigenia, the perfect marriage of air and epic, sacrificed for wind to blow the troops to Troy. Hillman offers a compelling twist--sailors who had the wind all along:

Her
father could have removed the sails
and rowed to Troy. Nothing makes
sense in a war, you say. Throw away the hunger and the war’s
all gone. There’s a section between
the between of joy & terror where the sailors know they shouldn’t open the sack of winds. It gives the gods more credit.

Here the language of the epic gives Hillman the perfect entrée into political territory, a conceit with which to discuss it. But what is the epic of the title, and since we’re asking, the air in the epic?

For centuries people carried the epic
inside themselves . . .
Side stories leaked into the epic,
told by its lover, the world.

In the world of this book the epic includes the gods, men and women of classical mythology. We, it would seem, are the side stories that have leaked in, our breath joining theirs.

NEW! Review of Matt Hart

Who’s Who Vivid by Matt Hart. Slope Editions, $14.95.

Reviewed by Keith Newton

The shape that many of the poems take in Matt Hart’s first book, Who’s Who Vivid, is one of dizzying self-definition. Some variation on the fundamental ways we have for defining our experience (“I am . . . ,” “I was . . .”) recurs throughout the book, determining the formal construction of the poems and revealing to us what’s at stake for the poet. From the opening lines of “Completely by Accident”--“I was in a fix. / I was sloshing with joy. / I was looking at my feet and my feet looked good”--to the formula by which the closing poem proceeds--“I am of the mind . . . I am of the gut . . . I am the shadows . . . “--Hart undertakes the urgent, frightening, ridiculous task of self-recognition, and through that process shows us what it means to inhabit our identities in a culture of mesmerizing falseness.

The subject of Who’s Who Vivid is not hard to define: the modern search for authenticity, the search for the authentic self. But, of course, it’s what we find along the way that interests us, and in those terms Hart’s journey is immediately compelling. Attributing to itself aspects of both coherence and incoherence, the book takes us through the pleasures and absurdities of our cultural moment (“Tristan Tzara . . . Welcome / to America, may I take your order”) without relinquishing the strong, consistent lyric voice that guides the poems, a voice at once cheerful, irreverent, disarming, and sad, lost but hopeful, cynical but optimistic. It is the voice of the faux-naif, but also of the faux-skeptic, with a kind of innocence that has somehow already passed through a stage of total disenchantment. Yet there is, at first, no way to know how this condition has been achieved. Does this sense of the self come, perhaps, a little too easily? A little too cheaply? It is the risk of this cheapness, in fact, that makes the book work so well, since it is Hart’s knowledge of the inherent absurdity of our search for ourselves that drives both the thematic and psychological tension of the poems. In “Poem Where the Message Trails Off,” Hart manages to evoke, in an absurdist mini-epic of losing and finding oneself in a dark wood, not only the self-perpetuating conventions of poetic urgency and poetic vision that we use to generalize our experience of identity, but also the paradoxical nature of the actual language of the self:

Once upon a time I was missing completely
and that time, once upon, was now.

In my shoes an intruder.
In my face a world of trees.

Whosoever may know these seas, row your boat out
to the meadow to meet me.

Do it soon, and do it quickly.
Don’t stop to read this, please!

The title of the book, Who’s Who Vivid, goes a long way toward characterizing these tensions--and those of the volume as a whole. Certainly there’s a kind of playfulness and light-hearted absurdity, but also a deep-seated misgiving about the relation of language to identity, an inherent refusal to give to language the capacity to identify us. Implicit in the title is the problem of how we recognize the individual self: does it operate as a question, an opening of possibilities, or as a clarification, a defining and closing off?

In poems such as “Nervous Aluminum Rabbit” and “Giant Traumatism,” Hart displays an energetic lyric mania that is one of his strongest modes. Through the force of the poems’ imaginative momentums, built on the disjointed logic and propulsive absurdity of a mind adrift in a culture already lost to itself, Hart evokes the ways in which we never cease to be called by the world to take part and--although “there are no incorrect answers,” as he writes in “Self-Helper”--to be sustained in an endless hunger to know the meaning of our experience. What complicates Hart’s writing throughout the book is that, despite his attachment to the idea of a poetic mode of candid self-expression that not only exists but is, by its nature, a condition of authenticity, he reveals a profound instinct for a satiric and parodic style that takes the materials of self-expression as one of its primary targets. The book’s final poem, “To the People Who Know Better, Let Me Say in My Defense,” negotiates this division perfectly, since the apology comes to serve as the natural mode of self-definition, simultaneously self-revelatory and self-justifying.

The poems “What’s Inside a Giraffe?” and “Letter to a Friend Who I’ll Never See Again,” each self-defining catalogues of the poet’s life, also make this conflict explicit. In “Letter to a Friend,” the act of self-definition takes the form of rendering what the poet “believe[s]”--and what he reads and thinks and feels and remembers--in a style as down-to-earth and conversational as he’s supposedly capable of, while the form of “What’s Inside a Giraffe?” is that of an actual list, answering the question he poses in the title with, in a sense, his whole life. This means, in fact, not only his memories and experiences but also all of the detritus of culture that forms his associations: “Narcissus. / Mommy, I’m thirsty. / Somebody give me a beer. / Evening caught in a parasol weeping. / Nerval out walking his lobster on a leash. / Rooftops. / Postmarks . . . / The proper method for modeling a turtleneck. / The distance from here to your mother in spots. / From there to your father in shredded coconut. / Why pregnancy isn’t an option . . . / Survey says . . .” That all the books and movies and music and TV shows and culturally conditioned beliefs and fleeting images of childhood could ever possibly do the hard work of making a self is clearly being parodied in both these poems, yet what Hart slyly suggests under the surface is the idea that without this detritus, without the accumulation of the bits and pieces of our life and thought, without the ridiculous and arbitrary nature of the culture we happened to be born into (“Completely by Accident” is the opening poem of the book), we would never come to recognize ourselves, never come to be attached to the world and attached to an idea of ourselves in the world, and therefore never come to recognize the self.

Is this an argument that the source of our authenticity is the hours we spent watching Family Feud? Not exactly. But what Hart shows us is how easily we confuse the “surface” and the “depths” and don’t think to look for ourselves in the most familiar places, for fear of discovering our inherent poverty. For all of Hart’s successes, though, the book has weak poems, which tend toward the unfocused, with touches of the sentimental, and treat the absurd more as a posture than a state of being. Because he maintains a consistent voice through the book, Hart also runs the risk, at times, of the constriction of a limited register. Yet overall this is an exciting first book, in which it’s easy to share the poet’s sense of the “ridiculous/delicious” aspects of the world. “What luck!” he writes in “Half-Empty,” “to be alive and engaged.” Or, as he puts it another way in the same poem: “Yippee!”

NEW! Review of Yunte Huang

Cribs by Yunte Huang. Tinfish Press.

Reviewed by Victoria Chang

Although biography does not always seem relevant to a poet’s writing, it seems essential to Yunte Huang’s project. Huang came to the United States in 1991, after graduating from Peking University with a B.A. in English. He then earned a Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo in 1999 and teaches at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He has published several books of criticism, but it wasn’t until 2005 that Hawaii-based Tinfish Press published his first book of poems, Cribs. Tinfish describes Huang’s book as follows:

Cribs is a discrete sequence of critical and poetic probing into the manifolds of the book’s title word: ‘crib’ as a small child’s bed, as literal translation, as plagiarism, as a summary or key to understanding a literary work, as a manger for feeding animals, as confinement, as home, as a memory aid for illegal immigrants, and so on. Speaking in a forked/chopsticked tongue, the author explores translingual and cross-cultural terrains where the inchoate, tangential, and back-translational emerge and diverge to unsettle an adopted diction.

Despite the publisher’s attempt to explain what Huang’s book is “about,” it is precisely the difficulty of articulating the book’s subject matter that is at the core of the book’s intelligence. In Huang’s own words in the long-titled poem “A Crib-ute to Gertrude Stein, who, according to one critic is ‘engagingly childish’”:

what is life
“that” is

caught up
in a narrative

that goes nowhere
but now here

For Huang, poetry is not about a conclusion, an end-point that can be neatly tied into a bow, but rather it is about the playful process of language and all the discoveries and paradoxes along the way. To Huang, “what / is a death sentence.”

Huang’s book is innovative and interesting in many ways. The most obvious way is through his playful punning with language. During a reading at the University of Southern California in February 2006, Huang said: “Language is autoeroticism. It reveals itself.” Language, for Huang, an immigrant from China, is not fixed; the land of signs and signifiers is never straightforward or set in stone. In one poem, “Nearly Half of Crib Deaths Tied to Sleep Position,” Huang begins a poem with a syntactically straightforward phrase: “do you love / a cup of tea / in the afternoon,” but the meaning of such words keeps morphing as Huang prunes the phrases and rearranges words to show the boundless potential variances in meaning:

do you love
a cup of tea

in the afternoon
or do you love

in the afternoon
or just love

the afternoon

as for me
i love

the tea
after

In another poem, “For MIA, Made in America,” words are only tenuously attached to their meanings. In Huang’s world, words are parts of other words that have vastly different meanings. Here, “bell” becomes “belly,” “nip” “nipple,” and “yes” “eyes.” In Huang’s poems, there is a sense that everything is connected and nothing is connected:

I am
the bell of your belly
nip of your nipple
yes in your eyes
no in your nose
should on your shoulder
so in your torso…

It’s important to note one of the effects of Huang’s punning and playful language, which is humor. Granted, Huang uses language in many poems to depict more serious issues, but Cribs can be outright laugh-out-loud funny. And in a world of deeply pensive, self-reflective, personal Romantic lyrics, funny is refreshing. In the poem: “The Pullet Surprise” (an obvious pun on “Pulitzer Prize”), both emotions intermingle and the poem begins humorous, shifts into pathos, and returns to humor:

“I won! I won!! ‘I’ wins!!!
--the ‘Pullet Surprise’ for poultry,
better than lottery!
for years and years
I have pulled and tried
to get at that fishbone
stuck in my throat;
sometimes I wonder
if it’s just a tape
tucked under my overcoat
--a tape of foreign words
that ‘practical gods’ can use
when traveling
in strange countries.”

This poem shows Huang’s ability to use language for many purposes--to access and unlock the multi-faceted emotions of his speaker.

In a few cases, Huang makes his ideas regarding poetry and language apparent. “The Token Road,” another humorous pun on Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” he states: “poetry is not derivative enough.” Later on in the same poem, he explains his reasons for writing:

I write in order
to pilfer epiphanies
every turn of the verse
serves as
reverse, converse, averse, adverse
inverse, obverse, traverse, perverse
but never universe
I call it nerverse…

In another poem, “The Liver Failure of Poetry,” Huang discusses the problem of the epiphanic moment in a more conventional lyric poem. He likens the epiphany to a “delivery:”

after years of alcoholism
straight shots of “the me”
or on the rocks
poetry finally delivers
having the spongy mass removed

it is a moment
of bilious epiphany
emotional enzymes released
from the hepatic artery
professionals call it a click
otherwise known as delivery

But in the speaker’s mind, nothing needs to click in a poem for it to be a poem. In this way, Huang is questioning the very notion of “a poem”:

…2. It is as though you needed some cri-
terion, namely the clicking, to know the
right thing has happened.

5. We are again and again using this sim-
ile of something clicking or fitting, when
really there is nothing that clicks or that
fits anything.

Here, we also begin to see the structural variances in Huang’s poem. There are numbers, but the numbering is not linear or logical, going from a “2” to a “5.” Part of the poem is in this prose form, while other parts are right-justified. Here, and in other parts of Cribs, Huang places quotation marks around entire prose sections, but there are no references to who is being quoted. Such floating quotations, in a sense, question the very use of references, of authority, of establishment. Some of his poems do not use capitalization and others do. In fact, in one poem called “Polish Central,” Huang points to the arbitrary currency attributed to capitalization: “if i capitalize all the letters / what will the interest rate be?” In our culture, capitalization is equated with importance, but Huang turns that notion upside-down and questions the very value of such rules by pairing capital letters with something seemingly unrelated--interest rates.

Although so much of Huang’s book is not necessarily “about” anything, it would be false to say that the book entirely lacks subject matter. One of the themes Huang confronts in the later sections of his book are those related to racism and ethnicity. But Huang does not recycle ethnic subject matter in an expected way. Many other poets such as Marilyn Chin in the much-anthologized poem, “How I Got My Name” (from Chin’s book, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty) have already addressed such issues in a more conventional manner:

I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin
Oh, how I love the resoluteness
of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative
of “be,” without the uncertain i-n-g
of “becoming.” Of course,
the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paperson
in the late 1950s
obsessed with a bombshell blond
transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.”

Instead, Huang manages ethnicity and race issues in a wholly fresh way. In “A Foreign Student,” he uses language and punning as a frame for discussing race: “hey, behave your language / and take out the cabbage / be man, ok? or even manner / did you say you’ve lost / a tooth or truth?” In another poem, “Polish Conrad,” Huang touches on the potentially autobiographical “I” (although we can’t assume the speaker is the poet) but he couples it, unexpectedly, with a story about the Polish writer, Joseph Conrad. Huang follows the passage about Conrad with a quoted prose section that is written a very traditional narrative style:

“My grandparents on my mother’s side, for instance, used to
come over late after work and make my mother wake me up
and take me out of the crib just so they could ask me to perform
something--usually a song or poem, in either English or Japa-
nese (they spoke very little English, so naturally I was bilingual)…”

But then Huang follows this traditional narrative with a more journalistic prose passage on the arrival of Chinese immigrants to America: “They came by boats. Thousands of them, claming to be sons and daughters of native-born U.S. citizens. Paper-sons and paper-daughters….” This factual section of the poem is followed by a printed survey-type dialogue that illustrates the questioning that immigrants received, and how such answers to questions would need to match the answers of other villagers in order to receive immigration. “How many houses are there on your row, the first one?” and “When did he die?” are examples of such questions. Huang ties the theme of immigration and race issues with the idea of “cribs” by noting on the bottom of one page that the Chinese detainees relied on “coaching notes” or crib notes to remember basic facts about their villages so that their answers would match those of other detainees. Huang’s approach to ethnicity and race are entirely new and his fresh perspective allows him to re-approach a dusty topic with new interest.

One final example of Huang’s innovative approach to race issues is his use of humor, a topic already discussed earlier, but worth mentioning again in a different context. Much of topically ethnic poems are more serious. A recent example is A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, a book about an African-American girl who, in 1936, was kept from winning a spelling bee because the judge used a word not on the official list. A few representative lines: “I sit alone. / I am Job, a leper, skin / But not flesh, flesh but / Not soul, soul but not human, Human but not equal being.” Unlike Jordan, however, Huang injects his poems on similar ethnicity issues with humor, as in “Not a Chinaman’s Chance:”

One day, in the street of New York City, he was asked
by a white man who was apparently annoyed by his
exotic appearance: “What sort of ‘nese are you? A
Chinese, Japanese, or Javanese?” The famous author
of The Book of Tea replied: “What sort of ‘key are
you? A Yankee, donkey, or monkey?”

And that is how Huang ends Cribs--with humor, the humor of language, and an understanding of the role humor and language plays in the sphere of the human condition. Huang’s book is anything but simplistic, but it is anything but complicated; it is happily both and happily neither. Huang’s work is original and bodes well for Asian American poetry, avant-garde poetry, and poetry at large.

NEW! Review of Ray Gonzalez

Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems by Ray Gonzalez. BOA Editions, $23.95.

Reviewed by Peter Ramos

It’s heartening to think of Ray Gonzalez as the latest American poet to take up from his masters--James Wright, Robert Bly, and W.S. Merwin, among others--the long tradition of the deep image. This is all the more gratifying when we realize that Bly and Wright, among the first poets of this country to name and incorporate the deep image, developed this poetic tendency in no small part through their translations of Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo and Octavio Paz. No less “American” than his masters, Gonzalez is linguistically at least, if not ethnically and culturally, closer to those Spanish-speaking poets whose work served as the original, mold-smashing model for Bly and Wright almost a half century ago. But Gonzalez brings to the deep image the very element so painfully missing in the work of his mentors: history. In its most Jungian aspects, the deep image tended toward the a-historical, seeking to recover some long buried universal object from the collective unconscious--some original stone or light we would all recognize, no matter the differences in our separate cultures. Gonzalez’s work never allows us to forget the striations of civilization and conquest one must break through to get to that image.

In this collection, one that spans almost twenty years and includes his newest, uncollected poems, Gonzalez’s practice directs itself toward the historical elements that force the speaker backward, illuminating the power and the transient nature of the colonial past. In “The Carved Hands of San Miguel,” the speaker begins by confronting the Christian, authoritative statue:

I stood before the carved hands at San Miguel.
They could not touch the child walking home,
so they touched me.
The carved fingers were cold and hard
and they jabbed me in the heart.

By the poem’s end, the speaker has broken through toward that original element out of which the statue was carved.

I stood before the carved hands at San Miguel.
They could not touch me, so I held them
until I could reach beyond the wrist
and the arm--the form of rock that
became the white body left behind.

Climbing up or digging down, the speaker in so many of Gonzalez’s poems begins from a particularly situated “home” in order to reach that place we might all recognize, despite our different origins.

In “Ascending the Stone Steps at the Gran Quivira Ruins,” it’s difficult not to hear an echo of Neruda’s “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” and yet, Gonzalez’s poems remind us over and over that one cannot confuse the particularity of home. This is not Peru but Southern New Mexico. It is only by way of a perspective--from below or from up above--that we can see beyond our particular, historically situated place. More often than not we can only imagine such a place. Reaching the top of the mountain, the speaker senses a universal clarity to be imagined, even glimpsed, but not secured:

I totter there and wait,
mountains to the north and south
threatening each other with
the black reach of a short day
when the valley below does
not catch up with the truth,
ignoring the impassable ceiling
of time I can’t reach, the ledges
above the holding place
where many died, some rose,
a few giving birth to the turning
tide that took the people away.

Translation, as Bly and Wright both demonstrated, offers poets and readers alike the chance to see the world anew. Certainly their contribution to the deep image practice depended on their ability to translate German and Spanish verse into stateside English. But, as Gonzalez reminds us through his own work, translation is only another term for transformation, new possibilities of thought through language. In this sense, each stanza in his poem “Another” addresses this multivalent characteristic of translation:

Another word for understanding is light,
as in the light that leaves the mind
and kneels over the garden.
. . .

Another word for knowing is darkness,
as in the falling bird that lands
in the green and disappears.

Combining elemental, transforming images with the kind of assertive biblical language that Merwin is known for, Gonzalez nonetheless keeps the poems particular in time and place: not any stone of any age, but this stone here. The repeating possessive pronoun in “My Brothers” reminds us that the speaker’s brothers here are not necessarily “ours”:

My brothers lie under the darkened stones.
When I wake them, they ask my name.
When I answer, they disappear
and I keep polishing the stones.
. . .
My brothers tell stories under the rubble.
When I am left out of the legend, tree roots
grow to the horizon, their underground
roads never crossing my path.

Such a separation often seems to exclude the speaker as well. These may be “his” brothers, but they are locked away, obscure, out of and beyond this particular time. In fact, throughout Gonzalez’s work there is this sense that history is the mark itself giving way to cultural and social division. Here is most of “Tiny Clay Doll with No Arms”:

Given to me by my sister as a gift,
the tiny Indian doll stands with no arms.

Received so I can raise my hands
and stop the world from getting closer.

Something has been taken from here--
a day when reaching out was death.

Something has been lost
with my own hands.

. . .

The clay doll stands on my bookshelf.
It stares out the window.

It does not have any arms.
I don’t know why it was carved that way,

Don’t know what it means, why
Invisible palms hold everything together. . .

As in Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” this delicate, inscrutable object from an unrecoverable time and place nonetheless commands the living speaker in this present.
The power of silent objects, of dolls in particular, is a familiar poetic conceit: we see this not only on Rilke but in the work of many of the deep imagists as well. Charles Simic makes considerable use of such images. But in Gonzalez’s use of these silent objects, he is able to both include and question the presence of an historical, ethnic connection: the Indian doll points to a Pre-colonial past of what became the modern Americas. While the speaker feels responsible for preserving this object, compelled to hold it up at the end with “sweating hands,” he/she cannot read the significance of the object’s lack of arms, cannot understand what the doll is trying to say.

Again and again, Gonzalez’s verse positions the work of history itself on a particular speaker in a particular time and place, marking the transformations that separate. But such transformations also give rise to new possibilities. A once obliterated past might return transformed, as in “The Head of Pancho Villa”:

The rumor ran that the head became
the mountain surrounding the town.
Others said it was the skull that sat for years
on the highway west to Arizona.
It was true because my grandparents lived there,
told their children the skull glowed
on the roads, until my grandfather died
and his family returned to the other mountain.

I see the head of Villa each time I drive into El Paso.
It rises off the setting sun as the evening turns red.
By now, I am convinced the eyes are open, the hair longer.
After all, the moon is enough when I turn to take a look.

Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems plots the trajectory of Gonzalez’s work in the last twenty years. As the current and latest heir to the deep image practice, Gonzalez corrects an oversight of the earlier practitioners in so far as his poems remind us of the consequences of ignoring history and its effects. These are poems that repeatedly present us with a speaker who struggles responsibly to make something in the present out of a vanishing, hardly conceivable past.

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.
. . .

Click here to receive 50% Off Home Delivery of The New York Times.
. . .

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.