Reginald Shepherd, another poem

from Verse

Reginald Shepherd

One of Their Gods

Was he lightning poured from a smashed flute,
music carved from someone's bones
I know? Qualities absently enter his mouth
where spring and snow are the same, song
-bred, sound-led: frozen in parenthesis.

Warped windows ripple like light
snow (grayed pane a single plane
waves past, wet leaves meander
winter winds), the curtness of his lyric
body, male odalisque with unlit

cigarette: in danger all the time, in winter
falling ice, in summer falling safety
glass, blue-smoke-flowering stars
uncounted as of yet, some illion or another
night obscured by streetlights, head

-lights, an oceanic black with islands
in it, incursions of opaque color
at patterned intervals, contingencies
of trees and buildings blinking out. Club
-headed weeds, wet pebbles, my beloved

is white and muddy: these tattered
bodies sheeted in news as if it were
sleep rub off on the hands,
flowerboats spilled of all cargo.
He will scatter on black waters.

i.m. Reginald Shepherd, 1963-2008

Reginald Shepherd

Probably Eros

The whole is not his fault, elegy
full of small bird and the light
starting to starve. Gods are sucking off
gods in alleys and I call it spring,

a gap between catasrophies
until the day I am a tree. Afterward
they smoke clove cigarettes. The reigning
bees, the rain he’s been, the present

tense ripples into form: front yard
sunflowers fascinate tomorrow’s August, days
dry grass and filled with old news, new
spores. Dead ladybugs smear windowsills

with laws of wall, good fruit become s fuel
will turn to ash: turn the latch. (Seasons
pass through me like flaws, rattling
rust-worn gates, dried gourds.) Birds

are chirring branches green and the bees
want to have sex with them, all things
are full of monetary gods, world-sick
with ritual outline and poisoned

by too much song. The beautiful
boys ruin my sky, raw meat wrapped
in silk and spoiled milk: boredom’s
ache in the shoulder blades, arms

raised in the epiphany posture.


[originally published in Verse]

Verse's new format

Beginning in autumn 2008, Verse will shift to a new format--to a portfolio, or dossier, arrangement. The magazine will appear annually, and each edition will include approximately 25 pages by approximately 12 writers. This new format will allow us to feature a chapbook's worth of material by each writer.

We have been planning this change since 2006, but needed to complete our two issues in progress--French Poetry & Poetics and the second Sequence Issue--before making the switch.

In keeping with Verse's commitment to publishing innovative prose and cross-genre work, we plan for each edition to be multi-genre.

The first issue in this format will focus on writers who have not appeared in Verse before, but whose work we have admired and wanted to publish in the magazine for a long time.

This new format also will bring a change in submission policy to Verse as well as a lower subscription cost. Stay tuned for details.

next issue of Verse

The sequel to our sequence issue is almost out. The 296-page issue includes sequences and series by

Rosmarie Waldrop
Laynie Browne
John Kinsella
David Wojahn
Gillian Conoley
Jenny Boully
Corinne Lee
Richard Kenney
Rusty Morrison
Guy Bennett
Kate Fagan
Anthony Hawley
Daniel Coudriet
John Matthias
Barbara Hamby
Thorpe Moeckel
Marianne Boruch
Sean McDonnell

plus interviews with Theodore Enslin and Rusty Morrison,

and reviews of Theodore Enslin, Inger Christensen, Barbara Jane Reyes, Julie Carr, Ed Roberson, John Kinsella, Allyssa Wolf, Catherine Imbriglio, Sarah Riggs, Craig Watson, and Jennifer Moxley

by Graham Foust, Judith Bishop, Andy Frazee, Evelyn Reilly, Christina Pugh, Ezekiel Black, James Wagner, Joshua Hussey, Eric Smith, Ted Pearson, and Marci Nelligan.


If you order the issue by May 31, you'll receive a 25% discount and free postage. Send a check for $9 to Verse, English Department, University of Richmond, Richmond VA 23173.

NEW! Review of Garrett Caples

Complications by Garrett Caples. Meritage Press.

Reviewed by Brian Strang

“The firefighter” is an overdetermined sign that receives disproportionate adulation, an adulation that has turned to worship since 9/11, a celebration of the paramilitary protector. The firefighter is a self-congratulatory symbol of male preparedness, strength and protection--though women do the job as well. It has become controversial to suggest anything resembling a criticism or parody of this sign because of the increasing association of firefighters with militarism, which is often confused with patriotism. One can now find firefighter coffee table books--emblazoned with icons of multi-headed axes, nestled among similar books on the four branches of the military with similar symbols on the covers--in heaps at the local branch of a mega-bookstore chain. But curiously absent are books like these on police.

One might expect that our society would bestow similar praise on law enforcement; after all, police put themselves at a similar risk of physical harm in service of the public and are just as much symbols of authority and paramilitary. In my own city, Oakland, currently the fourth most dangerous city in America, the police department has been trying for years to fill vacant jobs, but when the fire department announced that it had a few open positions, it got thousands of applicants. While firefighting is understood to be unambiguously good, police work is messier, more entangled with social issues. Most people have mixed feelings about police because they (or someone they know) have unpleasant run-ins with them at some point in their lives or because police are perceived as sadistic enforcers of an unjust social order. But, whatever one thinks about police and how they fit into our society, law enforcement is a job that requires all sorts of interpersonal skills, traits that are far too human. Few people spit on firefighters (as they do on police); our society wants icons, not people.

The firefighter is a hero in the Greek sense, a demi-god, a superhuman who risks life and limb for the greater good. The reality, however, is that firefighting doesn’t even make the list of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country; fishing and logging are consistently at the top two spots. And other important jobs that involve risk and sacrifice--garbage collecting, high-school teaching, bus driving--do not have the same heroic associations, even if some of them are every bit as important to the successful functioning of a society. Watch how quickly things go haywire when garbage collectors go on strike, for example. Still, the firefighter icon remains unambiguous, simple, a strutting flag, an externalization, a desperate search for reductive clarity in a complicated world.

But in order to apprehend and understand the world accurately, one must see complexities in their fullness. I would argue that we need far fewer and radically different models for the traits we find beneficial, and we need no hero-worship in a culture that has become narrowed by the reductive fascination with icons. To worship icons is to become inhumane, because one no longer looks toward the difficult and messily human, but toward a clean and reductive symbol. Reductionism is a pervasive influence in our society, and though it may serve certain purposes of clarity and understanding, when it becomes a philosophy or all-encompassing way of being it leads to simple-mindedness. The iconoclast is necessary to crack the iconic shell and restore a complicated dimensionality, but it is a counter-dependent stance, one not always adequate to the task of deeper understanding. Smashing icons is no less reductive than building them. To engage with and live in a more accurately complex world, complications must be embraced or dealt with in their fullness, not merely denied. To resist, it is not enough, for example, to hate firefighters or police, but to understand them and their symbolic representation fully.

All of this is a way of saying that I really like Garrett Caples’ new book, Complications, less a direct confrontation of icons than an attempt to wrestle with, and rewrite, the complexities inherent in twenty-first-century being. In The Garrett Caples Reader (Black Square), Caples was an iconoclast without a trace of Victorian limitations who, with his libertine erotic surrealism, was willing to take on anyone or any thing. This book contained poems with lines like, “We were looking for a place on a street not named Euclid: where lightning unzips the sky or two lips open like an eye.” And it had essays that, like a carnival sideshow, covered a range of the freaky and bizarre, with titles like “Humped by Barrett Watten” or “Celebrity Wettings,” a piece that examines the sexual fetish of watching well-known people caught in moments of incontinence. In this way, one could see Caples as a kind of contemporary Tristan Tzara, an antidote to the messianic death dreams of our times. Tzara’s words helped me understand Garrett and his work: “The individual . . . lives poetry every moment that he affirms his existence. The poetic image itself, as much as experience, is not only the product of reason and imagination, it is valid only if it has been lived. Every creation is therefore, for the poet, an aggressive affirmation of his consciousness.”

Seven years later, in Complications, Caples is no less bold but perhaps more measured in his approach. Rather than scything down icons of repression, he uses a more complex approach to his “permanent revolution.” The self-congratulatory externalization inherent in many of our reductive cultural assumptions is necessarily and methodically dismantled with wit, clarity and heart. But I don’t want to give the wrong idea; Garrett has not been defanged or housebroken, a fact that becomes immediately apparent in the first section of the book, “All Chemical: Symbolist Poems.” In it the reader finds the characteristic voice that permeates his short-lined works:

my body should not be
a tapestry

but somehow it always is

I’m a red girl
I don’t remember

being wool

to the balls
of my feet

(“All Chemical”)

Caples bends, twists and jumps through images and voices, but manages to maintain a sense of narrative and narration, however indeterminate. Far from being a mere collection of ironic syntactical collisions, this mode of his poetry, while often ironic and funny, coheres as it advances. It does not move in straight lines but, rather than being atomized and scattered, clearly demarcates a weird and wonderful movement that at times even attains lyrical grace:

o cross-kneed
and painted
alabaster
apologies

I twist
like a handkerchief
caught on a line

on soft and unlikely wings

(“All Chemical”)

Often in his work, Caples takes shots at cultural icons, and in this collection, he takes a friendly swipe at Michael Palmer in “Chanson de Googoo,” a piece that is as much an indirect critique as a poem in its own right. This piece is both sincere homage and send-up, an “amorous elbow” and, therefore, dimensional: “lucid cloud / i owe you / one.”

Caples grapples with and snips at the cool, international figure that is Michael Palmer--whose work is always beautifully measured and potent--with jabs at his immersion in theory, “my buyer says / sell theory now” and, perhaps, his public reading persona: “i needa nodoz / from your prose / but you pose / in those robes / like rousseau.” In lines like this it is Caples’ humor that creates surprise and allows him the position he takes on. André Breton said “that the black sphinx of objective humor could not avoid meeting, on the dust-clouded road of the future, the white sphinx of objective chance, and that all subsequent human creation would be the fruit of their embrace.” Caples seems happy to stand between the gaze of these two lionesses and welcome surprise. Barbara Guest claimed that, “the element of surprise is a poem,” and throughout his work Caples surprises with each twist of the line. In the end of “Chanson de Googoo,” he comes to a conclusion about poetry that, strangely, does justice to Palmer in a way that only could have come from Caples:

poetrys
not a
job

its a set
of dentures

wobbling
in the lobby
of a library

awaiting
gums

dumb
enough
to swallow

delicious
abundance

This critique should, I believe, be read more as one of Michael Palmer’s readers, those who speak in hushed reverent tones, than Palmer himself. Anyone coming to this poem for affirmation has come to the wrong poet. In his humorous way, Caples has taken on the complications that reading someone like Palmer creates. For decades now, Palmer has been at the top of the experimental poetry heap, deservedly so, for his poetry is spare, lyrical, apocalyptic and mysterious. He has also translated extensively and written important and influential criticism. His influence has already been great and will most likely continue for decades. So who is Caples to be poking him with a stick? That’s exactly the point: Palmer’s position in the current poetry world makes him iconic and heroic (and therefore dimensionless) to some readers. And he deserves to be read more clearly than this. Caples’ work at times even echoes Palmer’s in its sound and shape:

There is much that is precise
between us, in the space

between us, two of this
and three of that

(Michael Palmer’s “Baudelaire Series”)

Perhaps precision between Caples and Palmer is revealed in Palmer’s designation for this poem, “after Vallejo.” Caples has a Surrealist lineage in common with Palmer, however the two might seem to differ at first glance. As such, Caples approaches poetry as a set of dentures, not as a series of urns: his poems bite, lovingly, in order to elicit a human “ouch.” Our reading of Palmer is altered slightly after Caples’ poem. The inhumane icon that some readers might otherwise make Palmer out to be is now replaced by something messier. We begin to feel Palmer from Caples’ strange, subjective and deeply human angle; this is Tzara’s “aggressive affirmation of consciousness.” And the reader becomes more immediately aware of the intimacy in Caples’ critique, because as surprise and humor lead one along, one must question one’s own complicity in it. Did you laugh? If so, where does that leave you in relation to Palmer? If you didn’t laugh, why not?

What makes Caples’ poetry unique among his peers is the ability he has had to transcend the current cultural segregation in poetry between the hip-hop and ‘experimental’ communities. Few writers from the latter have more than a passing interest in the broad proletariat movement that has been working its way deeper into the mainstream for the last 25 years. Hip hop is no longer exclusively a culture of the outsider--any political ideology now seems to have been replaced by the Republican mantra, “life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money,” currently personified in the dying star of 5o Cent. But those with their ear and heart closer to the ground, like Caples, know that the underground is alive and well, especially in the Bay Area. Caples is a well-known hip-hop journalist who dives deeply into the local scene, a music he sometimes refers to as folk music. He continues to do the Bay Area’s most insightful articles on these musicians and the cultural context in which they live, rap and sometimes die (his article for The Bay Guardian on Mac Dre’s memorial is both homage to the man and an editorial about the tragedy of handgun availability in communities like Vallejo, Richmond and Oakland).

So in his poetry, it is fitting that one can practically hear the slap, pop and beat of hip hop (“sonic nipple / can you feel sound,” he asks in “Synth”), and his poems include many hip-hop conventions, such as in “Dub Song of Prufrock Shakur”:

i’m on a
date off
grapes

in a pink
mercedes

from the early
eighties

with a pair
of ladies

from the
republic
of haiti

and they
oughta hate me

but they
masturbate me

and serve
cunt to me

while my
country

is fucking
theirs

a mack ho
economic
plan

very
slavery
amerikkka

lord save us from
international
terror

tell allah
to chill

or go
to hell

In a passage such as this, most readers likely to come across Caples’ book will squirm, having their sensibilities jarred by the mixture of misogynistic language and political commentary, even if the Haitian “pair of ladies” lands here in Caples’ work strictly for their rhyming potential and cartoonish content. Few readers would probably identify the word “grapes” as slang for marijuana, though they would easily accept the political content. Poems like these are linguistic intrusions (rhyme itself is an intrusion) from an unsanitary world, one not so different from that of the blues (which is now safely archived and revered by academics). Yet the language of the Bay Area’s underground hip hop, specifically, arises from its social conditions, where sexism, poverty, fear and profound suffering are commonplace. One need not accept or celebrate this language, but its political context cannot be separated from the social conditions which give rise to its unsavory and offensive characteristics; to do so would be to engage in overgeneralization and cultural hegemony. Placing this poem in the first person, Caples is inviting trouble for the reader, the problematic layers of experience that add dimensionality to the work, and creating a demand to reconcile the first eight stanzas in the selection above with the last seven. The latter fall flat (into an all-too-familiar trope) without the strange and uncomfortable incursion of the former. What’s remarkable about the passage is not just the servile dynamic between the narrator (presumably male?) and the two women, or the corresponding characterization of an economic plan as “mack ho,” but also the surprising turns the passage takes in 66 words, touching on the coded, silly, erotic, bizarre, familiar, offensive, political and religious.

Caples addresses political and social issues in a clear-eyed manner in the essays this collection includes, especially in the prescient “Written on September 11, 2001.” In these works, one finds Caples’ beliefs stated plainly. They help to contextualize and counterbalance the poetry, especially the prose poems, where his humor is often most evident (“Robocop Imagines Accepting Other Roles” is the funniest). Caples discusses the Surrealist conception of black humor directly in “The Delicacy of Ambrose Bierce.” In the prose poems, the multifaceted approach of his lined poetry is still there, with similar themes, as in “For Thom Gunn” which begins, “i’m sorry you had to die at a time when evil’s got this country by the balls, cracks them and sucks them like eggs,” and later continues, “i’m so happy i’m suicidal, like a psylosybin trip that’s moved in for good and his name is george bush.” As a whole, the book gains quite a bit of range by the inclusion of the essays and prose poems. Such range is an essential talent for a writer taking on such diverse tasks. It’s a wild, wonderful trip.

Scantily Clad e-chaps

e-chapbooks by Tomaz Salamun, Andrew Lundwall, Mathias Svalina/Paula Cisewski, Ryan Daley, Brooklyn Copeland

NEW! Review of Donna Stonecipher & Serge Gavronsky

Souvenir de Constantinople, A Poem by Donna Stonecipher. Instance Press, $14.

ANDORTHE by Serge Gavronsky. Talisman House, $16.95.

Reviewed by rob mclennan

It began with a foghorn,
filling my bell

of a dress. I heard
in it a sound, nothing

I’d ever heard
before, an elsewhere

so complete--
It was beauty

tolling the fog
of the foghorn, beauty and

her profound gray
attendants calling my

name . . .

On the surface, Souvenir de Constantinople, A Poem by Donna Stonecipher is about travel and about a place, but also about more than that--as any good travel work should be)--as it works itself, stalking and sneaking through, in lyric and even postcard-type fragments. An American poet currently living between Berlin and Athens, Georgia, Souvenir de Constantinople is her second collection, after The Reservoir. When Alberto Manuel wrote about The Odyssey, or Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz, both understood that all stories about travel were essentially about home, and the hope of an eventual return. Writing her poem through references that include the journals of Marco Polo (a badly written but infamous travelogue), after her trip and her travels, and all that her narrator has learned, is this all Stonecipher is left with? Through her travels and trauma, is all she has left this “souvenir,” writing out Constantine’s famous city that lasted a thousand years before it was sacked by the Mongol hordes? Writing postcards and asking for same, is the narrator the one leaving or the one being left?

The seducer
is not about

plot. Nor is the seduced
picking up the novel

to find out what
happens to the tiger

lily awakening to a bee
feeding and feeing tenderly upon its

paralysis
(“What the Pilgrim Wishes to Make Clear from the Start”)

She writes, “Trafficking in glossaries / Someone spoke too many languages” and, referencing in part the Ottoman Empire, what became Turkey around the year 800, “O my grand vizier // I am lying on your / ottoman, braceleted by // your charms, your / charms, your // thousand nights of charms / upended.” Is this poetry written of abandonment or of being abandoned?

I love the flow of her lines, her short, fragmented phrases and line breaks that flow slowly but ceaselessly down the river of page; a lyric of finding and going and leaving, writing close to the end:

And when
the traveller decides to stop

travelling, to stop
wanting

to escape,
wasn’t it too

late? didn’t
the mind read

the eye
reading

the arabesque’d note

to stay as the note
to escape

from the escape?

Souvenir de Constantinople asks out loud if it is possible to leave for so long that any return becomes impossible. You can’t go home again, it’s true, but people do; does the traveler run the risk of becoming foreign in her own land?

Working from influences including Zukofsky, Gavronsky’s ANDORTHE writes the poem between the poem, literally back and forth between fragments from the connectors “and,” “or” and “the.” Not unlike Robert Kroetsch’s Sad Phoenician, crafting his back and forth “and/or,” or the more recent Darren Wershler-Henry book tapeworm foundry, or Dennis Lee’s yesno (bold enough to attempt to update Celan’s diction of what can or can’t be written through world and personal trauma), Gavronsky’s ANDORTHE seems surprisingly light, given what has come before.

A Ponge mimosa

A bouquet asked
She hesitates

Here now

1920’s
without a following

a critical
alternate
hate that
word

imminent danger

transcendental
“un dentier”

lower mashing
of teeth

upper
sounds

grating
windows

in politics
eschewed
chewed on
something like

Gavronsky’s poem happens between the words “and,” “or” and “the,” writing the spaces between what the poem actually is, bouncing off and between surfaces to come out through its own invented weight. What is left after such things are removed? Working references to other writers, such as Ponge and Williams, what is it he is aiming for, and what does he want from this long extended and pared-down speech?

shaky hand
sensuous illusion

rhythm sitting ova-
tion

What solace

Forget it

This is certainly a book that deserves many deeper readings and reachings, and could potentially go far further in the end than many other collections. But why do I get the feeling that I’ve heard it all before?

NEW! 3 poems by Rusty Morrison

Rusty Morrison

AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS


What sway in the noncommittal elm.

Gathered into my empty basket a wicker sky.

A crow, scissoring its call, clips the downward fall from my fiction of completion.

Do our senses imbricate to offer us a wing of ascent?

Succor of leaf-sound in the branches, each movement remaking shelter.

I see a progressive acceleration in the colors of sunset tonight, until it is stillness that disappears.

How to feel when roots break through the underside of my idea of them?

I pitch my listening to the tone of ivy growing.

Each leaf merely repeats, will not remain with me in the present.



AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS


Dour in the millpond, the material hours, built up on force alone.

The moth pushes and the sky falls down around it.

In the soft of redwood’s bark are deep furrows narrow enough for a serpent in sunlight to suggest itself.

Thicket of weeds and dwarf oak did not admit me into its filament though from a distance I saw how it incandesced.

Needing only one hand for balance on the dry marsh’s steep bed, my other hand couldn’t help but tear idly at the last growth of delicately tufted sedge.

Make a paste of ash, then paint out to the edges. Of what prophesy? When bindweed will spray silver-backed into blossom.

Lay down the idea of cathedral upon the redwood grove, as if this were accomplishment.

Sexed it with the crackle of leaves fallen.

So do I think to widen my imaginary surplus.



AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS


To value withering, I call it condensed light.

In the keep of mists is condensed distance.

Figuration is only the flower-head of a less visible frequency.

Where have I left its leaves this time?

When I’m steeped in flower stalk, uterine wall, tree-lined glade, humming is a way to avoid looking up or down.

Concocted my meadow foxtail.

Too quickly I pinnate each floating with the hyperbole of flight.

I could create slur, but neither birth nor cessation, in the stalks of late summer’s grasses.

Sunlight so easily abolishes philosophy.

NEW! Poem by Brian Lucas

Brian Lucas

FROND VAULT

Thorny sky the possession enjoyment brings suspended in a circle of blue messages. The flotation a person settles is an ear in sound where appearances give us their all. Bringing focus to the flagstones, early morning walk and I’m doing nothing. The hole where lights are seen. Star in a vise so we experience headache. This gives us the brightness we reflect onto others—faces yet to be grown, the walk still needing to be taken, another imprint on awareness. Things don’t begin the way they used to—if we gaze into linear reverse we see that death has preceded us.

···

Arena pieces in electric city maw. Behold my hand, itself a sinister word, an invention marred by its own relation to departures: giving the boat a push, counting down, a wave farewell… See you when the arena is rebuilt, I’ll say my first word then.

···

He had never once used those words, nor even learned to handle the instrument that would’ve made their written form possible. The words in question were discovered in a volume formed in concentrically rippling circles, flat like a sundial. Between each letter there rose (or was it emanated?) a fragrance that could be seen by those standing at a slight angle to the page. The curls and indentations this fragrance left in the air was enough to cause the onlookers to be paralyzed. If all hallucinations could be true, and not only a matter of physiological perspective, the world and its words would be held captive by a possibility of olfactory interpretations and reinterpretations lying over the seasons like a palimpsest of the brain’s canals during monsoon.

···

A cloak of linen, the back of a hand, a falling through space shows what musculature has given us over the years, years spent listening to the walls of a room that speak with an exhaling known to grant favors. An adherence symmetry avoids, feeling pitched to a previously unknown elevation. The dandruff of stars because they are a desert breed, something we didn’t mind shouldering at the time. Not like the weight that accompanies expeditions like these—quietly in a house of sonorous doors and thresholds opening onto amber hills where caretakers divine water with crossed eyes.

···


Inside my body is an anti-body.

NEW! Poetry by Nathalie Stephens

Nathalie Stephens

from T H E S O R R O W A N D T H E F A S T O F I T


The dead warn copiously against love.

I spent the last of winter emptying sand from my shoes. From end to end of a single long shore interrupting the sea. Walking. As though cobble could account for grief. And my feet could subdue the sovereignty of retreat. It was a moment of many moments with my two arms swinging and my hands tied. The water ran over and sifted me. Weathered me. Until I became dark rock and the hard waters below. It was a whole edge of earth splintering. Where skin split runoff endangered me.

All the waters of the world run to the sea. To where the earth is comfortable and worn.

We wash the dirt from our hands. We are that cowardly.

_____

Just as I was leaving.

The citydust fretting the street. It was a book of many fragilities. The sanctioned, the vilified, the meek. J. said an inhumanity. For the poised the poisoned the constancy. I wanted to touch what was underneath. To dislodge the body from performance gesture from posture. To make the heart the first place. Before even the mother. Before even the sea.

It was the brother’s voice came after me. The son of the mother. The brother of la fille. It was the book’s spine breaking the weight of my fingers. It was the body’s weight subtracted from the body’s breach. A hollow hollowing. Sutured. Stuttering. A book marked folded. Smouldering.

It was unloved smothering. The small hands gathering spit sleet. The momentum of the thing coming at me. The many faced years pressed up hard against concrete. Night ground into me. The broken the breaking.

Whoever said Nathalie founded that trajectory. Threaded me l’aporie. Then said pointing an ugliness a discrepancy. A girlness unremedied.

It was sleep unsleeping. Edging body from earth. Mouth from an architecture of misery. The soft words from the soft place unheeded.

_____

Say: Distance is only distance insofar as it displaces you. Desire as it broadens you. The wide pall of earth is an emptiness, a yearning. Listen for the call of the beasts. For the light pad over wood of animal feet.

Say: What sacrificed want for need weakened humanity.

_____

Every distance is a walkable distance.

The city designed a body of conjecture. A body of seemingly. Took the bone-crack of grief and laid it alongside the iron railings, the steel spikes, the concrete reefs. Grafted that relief onto a sublimated geography. Made distance decisive, unmysteried. Pushed what was splayed in deep. Wanted for a certainty. A fantasy of free.

So walk with me. To the cut edge of winter. To the carved out memory of sleep. Set fire to the cities welling out of me.

We fashioned ourselves of genealogies. Of bloodshed. Falsified the familiar gesturings.

I will tell you: The thing kissed into me. The thing made the city unsightly.

Ran. Runs from me.

_____

[ … ]

_____

Must I defend the maddened against the maddening?

Truss the unruly legs of speech for the sanctity of the bindery. Touch what became unsheathed. The language of what is unspeakable. Unseen.

The body anticipates its own retreat. Furrows into the blood drained carcass. Opens itself along a thin edge of steel. Beckoning defeat. Something more wild. Less complete.

There is a savagery to telling. How the body becomes disorderly. What is held, then misled. The mother foresaw the first disgrace. From inside years of the same wounded tirade. Etched like this finely on the body’s page. It is nothing worth reading. It is all the torn paper from all the worn books rutting the many bookshelves. It is all the cities burning. It is all the water running from all the mouths into the charcoaled streets. It is the very plague that surrenders grief to some implacable enemy.

So how will you guard against the frayed edge of sleep? The brother’s breach? How will you love what is unloved in the first place? Trace the blooded furrows to where the body has no need for names?

It is too much anticipating. The climb and then fall. The cut and then bleed. The hammer then cleave. The language then call.

What was madness was simply the sound of bones breaking. And the noise that buried them.

_____

Say to me: Nathanaël the thing I held in the palm of my hand. It was the play of light on water. It was the same stone buried twice. It was the drought and the waterfall. It was the dry desert of the mouth. And the knot of desire hardened in the groin. It was the body unfolded from its pain. It was the overgrown streets and the whole earth in rain.

Say to me again and again: Nathanaël you were not born into this. The wind came and I touched your name. Nathanaël. Again and again. Nothing remains.

_____

I hadn’t intended for.

The thing coiled at the base of the spine.

I stand at the foot of Gordon Street and beckon the rivers to me. It is as close as I will get to remembering. But for the hollow on my tongue and the cleft in my chest. The heart grows a wilderness and the dogs roam freely. I offer them the impartiality of suffering. The throb of some memory beneath a plate of steel. A finely etched carving suffocating the body’s ability to feel.

What then? Touch the place beside me. It is full of having been. That whole length of living. From the lake to O’Connor and no place in between.

_____

Who do the wounded wound?

Who wanders a finite distance along a dark road up a steep hill to a rock jutting out to sea? Says: Steal into me. Wake me from sleep. Spill out of me.

The drowned are drowning here in this hemisphere. We’ve discontinued the waters for something less deep.

There is a symmetry of rutted and bleed. In this particular fantasy the train derails and we walk on. It is not so much a courage as it is an insistence. To touch what doesn’t want touching. To maim ourselves any way we please.

Says: History girded me. Placed reinforced walls right in the middle of me. It was up and then over. And again and again. With a small knife in my teeth that I swallowed each time I fell. Where were you when the earth came at me? When the sweep of that particular dream left? I held your voice from the phone and the eight words you wrote. It was the many pages tearing. It was the many lines stopping. It was the many gardens stifled by the earth hardening. It was the swell of your organs against a particular memory. It was all the ways for leaving. And again and again. You might have caught me. It was up and then over. Every time I fell.

Doesn’t say: Make me.

Our bones break when we drop to our knees.

_____

The book began as a misgiving.

As an obstruction, albeit pliable. It was possible, then, to lean into it. To crease the unworn face and speak it from a particular sensorial fold. It was open even as it closed. It was a whole earth that wanted rescuing. And the waters that submerged.

What a place.

What goes in is one thing. But what came out hung on the way the jaws of little dogs do. So I hung on too.

What have I to show for it? Book shelves lined with Celan, Kofman, Pizaranik. And a long white scar from breastplate to groin. It was the heart wanted bisecting. All that bile spilling out. It was the fingers wanted evidence of some soft bloody thing. The blade was rusted. The wooden hilt came off in my hands. Not so much what washes off as washes under.

The day you arrived you placed your two hands against a pane of glass. For the light. For the viscosity. It might have gone something like that. Had it not been for the little dog’s jaws and all that water.

_____

Where the beasts run the skin folds over and over. It is what is wild to begin with, the fall of hooves, the shiver of the whole earth, the whole earth shivers, that certainty. And the question that follows. The sky unanswering and our dark eyes closing. What touches is less certain than the word set against it. Is a rush of water over land that migrates into the sea. Is the mind’s inability to recall even the simplest of things. The mouth emptied of its names. A body unfolding. A voice demanding Surrender me. Body to mouth. Earth to atmosphere. It is all the ways in which we come apart. It is all the ways in which we agree to leave.

_____

There is not enough night until morning.

The blood gorged vessels open what is closed. The tightly fisted muscle loosens its hold. A surge of sound from the viscera.

We run our hands through the ravages. We touch the relic of a thing once whole. As though the hands in that thick liquid foraged a wildness that might yet be human, a substance that needn’t yield to form, a heart, the shape of which is unknown.

Who wanted for that fantasy? For the command of what is fearsome forlorn. For the rending the rendering.

The place where we walk is already miseried and our feet heed the lament of the fragile ground.

What might enter what is open that might be offering? That might bleed for the bloodied and kiss the earth’s swollen mouth in mourning.

NEW! Poem by Marcus E. Darnell

Marcus E. Darnell

MEAT

The cat's head is mashed by the wheel;
it steams,
the fluorescence devours.

The luncheon meat flowers up the fridge,
ham,
the roach sniffs beneath the fridge,

assumes: fresh kill.
A cloud from the pig factory
is bait to the bats,

while sister chicken prays
in the guillotine shed.
Mrs. Schurman is doing a

wrist job into the bathtub.
What would dead Mr.
have said, seeing these

home-cooked, fresh bleeding
lips on her wrists?
The roach smells her juice:

it must be the juice
of Jesus, he longs
to eat Jesus.

Bats pick gnat meat
from the pig air.
They faint, drop

when too much pig cloud
has come along.
It's raining mice.

The chicken hears
the rabid downpour,
thinks the bathtub lady

has come for her eggs
or meaningful guts.
The luncheon meat world

and the bathtub
blood heaven
yank the roach's soul apart,

who to eat and find peace in.
The Mrs. dizzies out:
why did he leave me

alone to eye the death
of this dry neighborhood
while he is munched

in the ground
on that fucking
Holy Hill?

I can't hold his sweaty
hand on the porch
anymore while behind

yellowed shades
stains are being made,
oh my thin Lord!

She feels nothing for
the cat brains swarming
with bats rejuvenated

by the pig cloud.
They swarm like the gnats
they bagged.

The fluorescence is hungry
again and angel-wings out
to that salty,

sexed pig air.
The factory lurches
inches closer, but

only at this preyish
time of night.
Inside the factory

unholy things happen
to meat--
the chicken knows,

and the Mrs. would
have known had she lived
to whack off

the chicken's humanly
begging head, but
the factory is another

sphere with its own
foul disciples
harpooning sacrifices

through the eyeballs.
The factory is
a honey-cured hell

blessed be.
The chicken shits
an egg in an effort

to be saved.
The bats flee to
chimneys--they've had

too much pig air.
The kitty bones
still steam.

The bats activate
their upside-down acids.
They dream of snouts.

The fridge's hum
begins to stutter
and choke: the ham thinks.

The Mrs., drained,
doesn't leave herself
as long as she is flesh.

The fat in her brain
quivers, the roach
chooses religion

between her legs;
he'll live like a scarab
in her coffin till

Ra tells him otherwise.
The chicken is the last
awake in the night.

Her eggs cracks open
before she can squat.
She has the privilege

to see her abortion
as the golden Eye.
It is not meat

but it smells of pig.

Nathaniel Tarn on "difficulty and obscurity"

"While it is true that the great discoveries of modernism preceded the academicization of 'creative writing,' my sense is that the progression of 'writing' toward unreadability has been helped by that academicization. Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism... [see Paz quote below] I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call 'disjunctivitis.' The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment 'mainstream,' to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against 'late-capitalist' discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wildnerness?"


At the beginning of the piece, Tarn quotes Octavio Paz's "Corriente Alterna" (1973): "If imitation becomes mere repetition, the dialogue ceases and tradition petrifies; if modernity is not self-critical, if it is not a sharp break and simply considers itself a prolongation of 'what is modern,' tradition becomes paralyzed. This is what is taking place in a large sector of the so-called avant-garde. The reason for this is obvious: the idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention ... it has become an article of faith that everyone subscribes to ... all this raking of the coals can be reduced to a simple formula: repetition at an ever-increasing rate. Never before has there been such frenzied, barefaced imitation masquerading as originality, invention, and innovation."


from "Octavio Paz, Anthropology, and the Future of Poetry" (1999) in The Embattled Lyric (2007)

Nathaniel Tarn on "competitiveness"

"Bored to death on the one hand by the interminable repetitions of the MFA clones of their MFA teachers and, on the other, by the unreadable so-called writing of the reigning avant-gardists, the last general reader left, faced in addition with this lemming-like overpopulation, has a desperate need of selection. This leads straight into the terminus of competitiveness: the winner-take-all syndrome, another familiar 'late-capitalist' life-enhancing marvel. The award system is the crowning glory of this syndrome. It is deleterious not because it is unjust (nothing human is perfect) but because it inflicts an apparently consensual body of opinion on a public not usually aware of its options. The moneybags, playing it even more safely than the universities, select a group of allegedly trustworthy canonizers and mainstream writers conveniently gathered in a number of 'Academies'--a group in whom the public can be induced to trust since they are already, are they not, 'so trustworthy'--and regularly disburse large sums ... almost always into the pockets of the already fortunate."

from "Octavio Paz, Anthropology, and the Future of Poetry" (1999) in The Embattled Lyric (2007)

Nathaniel Tarn on interdisciplinarity

"...while everyone today in the academy pays lip service to interdisciplinary work, such work only has to appear on the scene for it to face almost insuperable difficulties in being consumed, respected, taught, published, and generally treated as a part of culture. Our specializationism, to coin an awful word meant to double-underline the depth of our classificatory disease, is that strong."

from "Translation/Antitranslation // Culture/Multiculture," in The Embattled Lyric

NEW! Review of Paige Ackerson-Kiely

In No One’s Land by Paige Ackerson-Kiely. Ahsahta Press, $16.

Reviewed by Lytton Smith

In “Foreplay,” the opening poem of In No One’s Land, Paige Ackerson-Kiely wryly notes, “There are times when an absence of pride means the lion is eating his cub.” Unflinching and steel-eyed, this hallmark Ackerson-Kiely moment abruptly enters the reader into a hard-surfaced land of diners and liquor stores where, in landscapes of the arctic north and the edge of wilderness, the urban has neither taken over nor entirely stopped trying.

Here and elsewhere Ackerson-Kiely’s muted jokiness acts as a barbed challenge. To look away would be perilous: “any minute now someone will push his way through the door and announce something.” Potential events are as tangible as their actual counterparts, and more threatening. Though we never hear the announcement, whether “dinner is served” or “you will have to come with us,” we sense that what is being announced has nevertheless happened, “The fields to the left and right / full of glassy blackbirds / resting.”

In No One’s Land deftly gives a physical presence to the peripheral and the transitional--the terror of loss in headlights flashing by, the reassurance and gratitude a waitress finds in folding napkins. Ackerson-Kiely’s particular gift with the simile, for instance, is to allow the compared object equal status as the original, such that the comparison has an unusual credibility. Objects likened fuse into one another. In the poem “Instructional Lecture for a Liquor Store Clerk,” the trainee has to decide whether customers without money will come back later to pay for their liquor or “never return, like the buck in November cruising the knotweed.” All at once we are among the deer, told how an orange cap “to the buck . . . has a grayscale wash that is easy to ignore,” and the store has momentarily fallen away.

The collection’s shifting--between the visual and the felt, from lineated to unlineated poems and back, within the grammar of a single sentence--is haunting and sustaining. Addressed often to “you,” they instill in the reader a sense of responsibility both for the land and the speaker. At times it becomes clear that the rules of this place and these poems are still in formation, the reader left to navigate the topology of poems such as “Deer Population at Night”: “Broken, bro. ken, when // divided brother, to know.” What is fascinating is that the speaker, admitting “a bird could / land on my voice’s wire line,” is equally guideless, at the mercy of what happens to her in her struggle to express experience in language. In “Brother” she compares a halted procession of cattle to

like when you discover your blouse
has become unbuttoned
& must turn away
& in doing so forget
the placement of words
or the forgiveness of strangers.

What started out as a comparison becomes an event. The scene observed gives way to what was all the time just below the surface, and the poem becomes about “someone in distress,” a memory relived. The ground has shifted beneath us, and yet our new footing is more satisfying precisely because it is less certain.

Certainty is an undesirable, even dangerous, position in these poems. Ackerson-Kiely’s cautious way with language is evident in the idea of “the forgiveness of strangers”: the forgiveness belongs to the strangers as much as it is asked of them. Certainty involves a loss of power, as when “I know clearly that I will / remove my pants / when it is requested / I remove my pants.” The last line seems, visually and grammatically, a description rather than a conditional. If it has a certain pathos because it happens “though no one calls / to me specifically,” it still does not invite pity; it is, instead, resigned.

Sex, whether alone or with others, runs through In No One’s Land like a live wire, its effects never earthed. The knowledge that “I will / remove my pants / when it is requested” comes amid the pastoral opportunities of “Shepherding.” In “Onenightstand”, perhaps the most tender poem in the collection and fittingly found at is epicenter, the speaker connects sex to “the way an explorer pours himself into the map of his conquest until he becomes north.” Faced with the familiar idea of sex as conquest, she questions who--or what--is claimed, and in what ways. At the moment where sex might reach orgasm, the speaker instead asks her partner how he once fed deer, “how they approached your hand, which you pretended held food, but was merely a closed fist.” The speaker admits to being “frightened of the intimate thing” even while fascinated by it, by “the stranger’s hand with blue veins spread out like meth in a small town.”

These poems are rooted in the earth and in the animal world, impressively aware of the soil and convenience stores and atmospheric pressure of existence. To read In No One’s Land is to look into a beautiful and disconcerting reflective surface and to find that the image there is too alien to be ourselves, and too familiar not to be. The effect is as mesmerizing as it is disconcerting. We hear and see these poems, they touch us and inhabit us, before they begin to work on the intellect. In No One’s Land is a highly sensual collection and also the keenly observed reflections of a quasi-hermetic figure who knows “I will build the home I will die in / the home I will build.” It is one of the best debut collections of this decade, and it has the temerity and quietness to end, in the afterhours of a diner, with a gratitude that resists our notions of what gratitude is: “The desserts offered are too beautiful. No, nothing else // thank-you.”

NEW! Poem by Adam Strauss

Adam Strauss

DEAR


Dear is all I know.
A party I'm not at.
Bliss of solitude--
A room rude to company:
I cannot have guests
Unless they insist;
I'm convinced
My friends didn't, don't, judge;
I wish my nature was
Tidy, not seemingly
Rigged to deflect
Society--what are those islands like?

NEW! Poem by Marcus E. Darnell

Marcus E. Darnell

GLASS

Glass petals from a glass rose
tremble down my tongue.
It told me to partake
its brittle, wristy, sugar face.
Its pollen rumbles in my lungs.
I cough shards delicately.
I scar my windows just by touching--
my armpits shatter just by reaching,
sprinkly eyelids wingedly there,
sheltering crystal eyeballs,
eyebrows snow-ghost hair.

I flake into a snowstorm, the sky agrees.
The sun, a magnifying bird,
magmafies my looking-glass heart.
I meteor stormless to the seas,
deprived of poisonous legacy
or recyclable soul.
The impact cuts my fire apart.

I am a cup of stomach sand,
a diamond-studded S.O.S.
Without my bulbs’ sexing
the darkness will cry.
My filament needs tender fixing--
I don’t want to die,
but alone and castle-dark one may try.
That none see me in fractures
I cannot forgive.
That my eyes are rubies in pictures
is no blood urge to live.

It is the purgatory of glass--
I am the transparent colossus
worshipped too long.
They pray right through my cracks,
recount irrelevant pain with stonehenge song.
They only know me as a dome,
I’m not half the cat’s eye I used to be.
I’m not the chip that bloomed to storm
or the coal that souled the sea.

I’m a funereal liquid too slow to fall,
an unhooded angel animal standing tall.
They mistake my rainbows for keys or cues
to commence my chiseled dissection,
but these hues are not heaven clues,
they are my screaming refractions.

I’m a country far away as flesh,
engraved into provinces senseless.
I would have been content to be
one step removed from shatter,
maybe hairline,
not holy fallen stone condemned to plain.

I wish I had found a middle--
not as a wrenching gust of northing glass dust
nor a plexi-doll worshipped spectrally,
just a glittered hump in the rain
without windshield, bubble, scratch or stain,
no blinding span of ache, name,
or enlightening, imprisoning riddle.

new issue: French poetry & poetics

new triple issue of Verse on French poetry & poetics

edited by Andrew Zawacki and Abigail Lang

with contributions by

Emmanuel Hocquard
Caroline Dubois
Jean Frémon
Jacqueline Risset
Dominique Fourcade
Oscarine Bosquet
Jacques Roubaud
Bénédicte Vilgrain
Pierre Alferi
Craig Dworkin
Olivier Cadiot
Jean-Jacques Poucel
Anne Portual
Christophe Tarkos
Suzanne Doppelt
Claude Royet-Journoud
Anne Parian
Sébastien Smirou
Philippe Jaccottet
Kevin Hart
Frédéric Forte and Ian Monk
Michelle Grangaud
Marie Borel


translated by

Steve Evans
Jennifer Moxley
Rod Smith
Cole Swensen
Peter Consenstein
Sarah Riggs
Omar Berrada
Guy Bennett
Eleni Sikelianos
Keith Waldrop
Anna Moschovakis
Rosmarie Waldrop
Beverley Bie Brahic
Chet Wiener
Micaela Kramer
Jennifer K. Dick
Andrew Zawacki
Judith Bishop


& reviews of

Stéphane Mallarmé by Timothy Donnelly
Charles Baudelaire by Tom Thompson
Edmond Jabès, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Steven Jaron by Michael Heller
Jean Grosjean by Ted Pearson
Two Worlds: French and American Poetry in Translation by Nathalie Stephens
Claude Royet-Journoud by Rusty Morrison
Jacques Roubaud by Beverley Bie Brahic
Suzanne Doppelt by Eduardo Cadava
Valère Novarina by Antoine Cazé
Olivier Cadiot by Eleni Sikelianos
Esther Tellermann by Dawn-Michelle Baude
Anne-Marie Albiach by Peter Ramos
Gérard Macé by Judith Bishop
Serge Fauchereau by Laird Hunt
Jean Frémon by Chris McDermott
Claire Malroux by Kevin Craft
Emmanuel Moses by Andrea Stevens
Yves Bonnefoy by Paul Kane
Jacques Réda by Chad Davidson
Michel Deguy by Michael Fagenblat
Jean-Michel Maulpoix by Jacques Khalip
Valérie-Catherine Richez, Marie Borel, Isabelle Garron by Kristin Prevallet
Marie Borel by Nicholas Manning
Pascalle Monnier, Jean-Michel Espitallier by Marcella Durand


365 pages

special blog price: $12 postage-paid through November 15

send check to:

Verse
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond VA 23173

NEW! Review of Mónica de la Torre

Talk Shows by Mónica de la Torre. Switchback Books, $14.

Reviewed by Anne Heide

Mónica de la Torre’s new book, Talk Shows, uses the navigatory apparatuses of synonym, antonym, palindrome, anagram, and translation, among others, to steer her poems directly in upon themselves. Shaped from multiples of sound and meaning, Talk Shows is a text that uses concentrated variation to complicate the sense of the “original.” Whether working from a source text or (re)generating her own work, de la Torre reckons directly with the idea and possibility of “source.” The poems in this collection are narrative impressions of each other that create a textured vertical field, one that all depends upon us looking downwards, into a stratified storying. An exuberant text that takes on the complications of communication, Talk Shows deliberately confuses a sense of source by fully undoing the ease of transmitting idea.

De la Torre uses coverings to layer lines against each other. In “Skin is Warm: 31 Nudes,” juxtaposed phrases act as coverings for each other:

Asleep I am all. (She stretches.)
I wake. (A question.)
To see the world from a bed.
If I could cover my face with one finger.
Or be. (Flower in hair.)

I am many. (Seen from behind.)
Black is white. (Placid turning.)
I will lie.
We are not different. (Face with a stain.)

The parenthetical lines overlay the text they follow in what seems to be an attempt to discover the counterparts of meaning. In this poem, as in the majority of the text, single tactics do not suffice; synonym is placed on antonym, which is in turn woven into translation. All of these can attempt approximation at meaning, but the effort seems targeted towards a layering of counterpart.

In “On Translation,” denotation is covered, replaced by gesture: “Not to search for meaning, but to reenact a gesture, and intent. / As a translator, one grows attached to originals. Seldom are choices so / purposeful.” While the original here is valued above the translation, de la Torre recognizes the inability to recreate or possibly ever reach the original. In Talk Shows, de la Torre performs the translator’s task, even when she isn’t reproducing a text from one language to another. In “Bankrupt Books: A Collage,” de la Torre lists antonyms of bestsellers, where A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is transformed into “ridiculous accounts of staggering idiocy” and Tuesdays with Morrie is turned to “Sundays on a couch.” Some words allow for this translation; others, like “Beowulf” remain in their original form, seemingly untranslatable, and so, untranslated.

De la Torre tells story by returning to story, in a sense navigating further into the narrative with every (re)telling:

María was usually bumping into
furniture. Each time she got closer to what
she wanted. “What do you want from me?”
“Nothing,” he replied, so she took off
and felt like migrating birds. But many.

“Bumping/into furniture” would seem to halt movement instead of bringing the character “closer to what/she wanted,” but here, it is in the act of moving, of telling, that precision is gained. Additionally, María is many birds--a flock that cannot be divested of its counterparts. It is to this collectivity that de la Torre seems to be speaking. In “The Script,” she traces the constellation possible in gathering in on a story, in reckoning with the inherent multiples of meaning:

To permutate dots so that lines are never identical to each other.

To return to known places and act always the same, thus the slightest
change might become apparent.

To force things to happen.

To pretend there’s meaning when all that comes out is “My dog loves
me and he’s no showboat.”

Here, the desire to return waxes against the possibility of returning ever to the same place; we can pretend at meaning, but it will always be pretend. In returning to apparently similar events or places, we can play at getting closer, we can “trace the line that / connects the dots,” but “dots speak louder.” Any attempt at distinguishing the whole becomes a seemingly fruitless task; in fact, this task of confronting the meaningless, or lack of meaning, often takes on the tone of the absurd.


Absurdity isn’t something de la Torre shies from. “The Other Practitioner Writes Back” begins with a series of palindromes, none of which come close to the dialogic ideal:

Hey babe, Kiev love star! Rats evolve, I kebab. Yeh!

Try again.

Ne morose ode: More grow on Kiev, love star. Rats evolve, I know, or Gerome does, or omen?

Try again, open your eyes so you can look closer.

                OJO

              OHIO
            -        -
              -     -
                -    -
Rongi rattad ragisevad - Ruedan las ruedas del ferrocarril
                -    -
              -     -
            -        -
              OIHO

The attempt in this poem seems to be the thrust towards meaning with the understanding that meaning will never arrive, that despite doubles and rearranging, only absurdity can arise from the attempt to make sense. And de la Torre revels in this play with the ridiculous and incongruous, accepting it with ready vigor.

Within the interaction of these counterparts, however, the text seems held together only by adaptation, or difference. At times, the text feels dissociated from itself, pulled apart, as though dependent only on alterity. This results in an unsettled discontinuity, where the poems individually speak forcefully, but drawn into a collection, seem unhinged from each other. Although Talk Shows is a jubilant text, its moments of quiet are few; this is not a manuscript in which one can find rest, and the unvarying reveling tends to wear the text out. The poems end up feeling as varied as the ways in which de la Torre approaches meaning, in which a mirror is held up to language, but in it, we see only the reverse image. The title poem, “Talk Shows,” intersects multiple unattributed voices, presumably the chatter of talk shows:

-Get away from me! Who do you think you are, hitting my arm like
that! What kind of person are you? A terrorist?

-Don’t look at me as if I was a woman with a rotten tooth, look at me
as if I was me.

-¡Viva Mèxico cabrones!

-I can’t think of anything I’d like less to do than to go to Disney with my dad.

Although each of these phrases, like each of the poems, hold individual intrigue, when collaged, they don’t so much reflect on each other, but instead point to the disparate genre that holds them together, and often, disparateness alone cannot sustain a text. The inertia created by the narrative and visual pull of the text slows when the poems become so disparate that there is little to hold them together but their continuity of difference. De la Torre has set a difficult task for herself in attempting to create an exuberant text that directly tackles problems of linguistic apprehension, and while Talk Shows is an intrepid attempt at achieving this complicated undertaking, its persistent difference eventually destabilizes itself.

NEW! Poem by Zach Savich

Zach Savich

CITY

Fruit the color of the sky, apples blue. A hat, an aspect, flight. Eyes represented by small birds at a fountain (if I am a day). As when you dream you're awake and I say what did you say and you wake and say what did I say. The watch changes itself as though nothing has changed. Handprint on the mirror three nights old and between me and the mirror you touching the mirror. "Section reserved for silent prayer." As it happens (the only spot from which one can see the contemporary metropolis). Sebastian swoons through arrows.