NEW! Review of Rupert Loydell's The Museum of Light [Chris McDermott]

The Museum of Light by Rupert M. Loydell. Arc Publications, 6.95 pounds.

Reviewed by Chris McDermott

Rupert M. Loydell’s tenth book, The Museum of Light, confronts a world where epiphanies are everywhere for sale, and explores the creative process as the sole means for discovery and understanding. Whereas Yeats proposed that one must choose “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” Loydell is weary of the easy confidence behind any such formulae--as if the initial choice itself were the true difficulty--and is loath to rally behind any fixed motto for long. What he does instead, and his project is decidedly an active one, is a celebration of the interchangeable ars poetica. Insisting upon the freedom of choosing any path of investigation only insofar as it remains interesting, Loydell is quick to interrupt any direction with another. In the book’s first poem, one of five called “Background Noise,” he writes:

My own specialties
are beginnings and endings.
Everything used to be plausible.

Curl up and enjoy the possible,
draw nearer to the process
which forges the world we live in.

Garner a fair amount of interest.
How much do you need at the present time?
Become the object of your desire.

A recurring pattern in the book is the use of the imperative, the commands that set the process of vision and revision in motion. Like Eliot’s Prufrock who asks “how should I begin?” already midway through the poem, Loydell seeks freedom from the momentum of habit, but his tone, rather than conveying defeat, is much more varied, shifting between despair and optimism. A book’s overall tone is very often established by the echo of its ending, and Loydell’s final line, “Try to understand everything. Language is remarkably persistent” is an affirmation of using language as a material for making art, and art as a vehicle for understanding life. In this respect, he has much in common with George Oppen and the Objectivists, for whom life itself was always the greater canvas. Loydell, who is also a painter, is aware of “creating within the constraints of materials” (“Background Noise”), but refreshingly, he doesn’t wallow in a complaint over language’s inability to signify. In a poem titled “Instructions for the Journey,” he explores a wide range of word as deed, with such imperatives as “Consume novels you would not otherwise read,” “Possess superficial scraps of detail,” “Sit writing at a table,” and then swerving to such wryly ambitious “to do” items as “Eliminate social problems. Wipe away centuries of class division, inserting a layer of ironic distance.”

At the end of the book, Loydell lists more than twenty “sources,” including writings by John Cage, Charles Bernstein, Gilles Deleuze, and Loydell’s private correspondences. This raises the question as to which lines are Loydell’s, and which have been appropriated. In “Background Noise 3,” subtitled “The Museum of Light,” Loydell addresses this matter: “The poem does not need its own citations, otherwise it will never surprise you. // Do you know the source of the quotation? / Does it bother you?” It is as though citing quotations will lead to perceiving them not in a new context, but instead with a deadening, habitual association. The effect of the book’s title, then, is to propose a place where moments of “light,” as short-lived illuminations or epiphanies, can be stored. Whether they are perceived as curiosities, to be visited not for any redemptive clarity, but for evidence of a process of inquiry, or for something to try out for a while, would depend on whether the reader finds nostalgia or surprise. In “Background Noise 5,” he writes:

Any piece of information is potentially mine;
I am moved by the wish to preserve something.
I nearly always have a specific mission
when I insert myself into the work this way.

Loydell has alluded to the nature of this “specific mission” in “Background Noise 2”:

History gives us cause for flexibility and adventure.
There is an enormous amount of trash in this room;
a need for stability and order in the flow of events.
Scrawled translations prove discussion took place--
I end up letting myself be convinced.

It is belief, then, however tenuous or transitory, that serves as the catalyst. Doubt leads only to passivity, waiting, death. In “Adagia,” Wallace Stevens, who allegedly converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, wrote, “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” Loydell’s museum is one where either belief or doubt can govern as long as the process is alive. One of the book’s epigraphs, by Helene Cixous, includes the statement, “writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where light and darkness meet.” For Loydell, this process must be an individual one. As he writes in “Background Noise 2,” “It’s a self-refining process which takes for granted / that meaning exists and, if you press the point, / will form the basis of an equation for anything else.”

NEW! Nathan Jones poem

Nathan S. Jones

LET US CROSS THE WATER

your shrill lurching god moves
on the water like you always say, my mother was just a girl you say, her face
                                        turned to the sun, pink as a crab. and you
pray yearly

for the discontinued model,
the full brunt of e coli and white count in the womb’s sagwater, mewing
                                        of the deep water and dusk, such a jellyfish
of young tongues,

and you love. you bray perpetual
about doubt and drag, about cool circumfluence and fusion with the lunar body,
                                        replicas of heaped garments like Michelangelo’s
half-done pieta.

you’ve been stone-broke
since the Pleistocene, wind-swept and glum. you’re caught in the act of seclusion
                                        --all types of saviors approach, all sorts mull
the mother’s load.

NEW! Review of Joy Katz's Fabulae [Joyelle McSweeney]

Fabulae by Joy Katz. Southern Illinois University Press, $13.95.

Reviewed by Joyelle McSweeney

Title aside, Fabulae is more concerned with divining parallels and mapping spatial relationships than with storytelling. Katz observes form in the world and bodies out her findings in metaphor.

An orange leaf on every finger bowl: a dozen tongues,
mute about their clear water and their own orange scent

and the way the glass presses the heavy, white-flossed linen
a little, as a cat flattens grass in the yard

reads a poem which responds to Stevens’ "The Poems of our Climate." "I don’t know how to live with beauty," the poet-speaker remarks halfway through this poem, yet her skill belies her claim. This carefully drawn world in which form answers form seems beauty’s ideal habitat, and a human one.

Katz’s poems are simple in their approach, depicting seaside drives, the deja vu effects of travel, one body learning the sense of itself in various houses or near other bodies. Against such simplicity, Katz’s beguiling metaphors are set like gems. The seaside drive reveals "neat paragraphs of beach"; the wary traveler observes "Black-eyed Susans / gone dead except for their centers--a cloud of small entrances"; a new wife considers "The new word husband / hush of a car up a street." Katz’s metaphors make these poems, and are poems in themselves.

The best pieces in Fabulae are those concerned with vision and artmaking, because it is in these that Katz relies most fully on her gifts of description and comparison. In the very lovely "Still Life,"

How things come to light as I draw them: the curved-wire stem
of that flower which, until my eye moved to the prill of dried petal
and past that to the dead sepal
and then down to the stalk, I didn’t see.
I can draw that, prill, which is both the look and the sound
that piece would make, if it could, the way a thumbnail skimming comb tines
sings this small-spoked bunch of reeds.

One senses delight on the part of the author in this observation-cum-self-observation. With precision and agility, she moves from straight description to an efficient disquisition on "the look and the sound," before settling on a metaphor which combines both senses. The entire poem has a neat trompe l’oeile effect, rendering the depth of the room on the flat space of the page, one kind of vision inside another.

Also noteworthy in Fabulae are the numerous poems charged with the misperceptions of childhood and memory. "Falling Toward the Furnace" recalls Bishop not only in its title but in the controlled yet hazardous panache with which it moves through its ingeniously patterned subject matter: cats inhabiting heat ducts, a girl inhabiting a mis-constructed dress, and a speaker stumbling through a new house in a blackout. Another poem about a house, "Four Storeys," also capitalizes on misprisms of scale as the speaker lifts away a (dollhouse?) roof and meditates wittily yet meaningfully on the precarious life therein: "The second story, with its darkened bedrooms, is empty save for the sleeping mother--and comes up too easily, like a glass pitcher that turns out to be plastic."

Given Katz’s skill in drawing from her own perceptions and memories, those poems attending to a diverse array of outside sources are less satisfying. While her explorations of footbinding and Adam and Eve are fully inhabited enough to be fine, there is something lacking in the corollaries drawn between accounts of the Holocaust, or of Jefferson the linguist, or of various naturalists and explorers, and the speaker-poet’s own life and poem-making. Set against history’s bulkweight, her two-way arrows seem flimsy. Yet there are enough pleasurable and surprising poems in Fabulae to counteract these transhistorical efforts. Katz is a poet of invention and verve.

The Yale Review, new issue

The new issue of The Yale Review (July 2004) is out. My favorite poem in the issue is the stun-gunning "Tomorrow's Living Room" by Jason Whitmarsh, a former managing editor of Verse and a much-missed presence. There also are interesting poems by Annie Finch, Nadia Herman Colburn, Barbara Hamby, and Elena Karina Byrne, whose "Moon Mask" ends with a 32-line syntacrobatic sentence. If you want some wisdom with a capital W, try Philip Levine's "The Great Truth," which ends, "... some / great truth to live by now that it was too late / to live in the world other than I do." There's also a translation of Mallarme by Richard Howard. Anthony Hecht has an essay on Keats, which begins with a look at Keats' hungry reading practices, esp. of Shakespeare, and ends, "It ['To Autumn'] is one of the most beautiful poems in the English language." Stephen Yenser's essay, "Inkles, Shreds, and Scales," is an engaging collage/notebook; it begins, "Not a knot of identity, nota bene, though perhaps a net, a nanonet, certainly never a naught, a nit, the salt and whit of difference, the bread of life." Among Yenser's own musings, the piece includes excerpts from Whitman, William James, Barthes, Bishop, Foucault, and, of course, Emerson.

NEW! Review of Lohren Green's Poetical Dictionary [Thomas Fink]

Poetical Dictionary: Abridged by Lohren Green. Atelos, $12.95.

Reviewed by Thomas Fink

In the "Preface" to Poetical Dictionary, his first book, Lohren Green declares that, while a "traditional dictionary" can lose "its sense of words" and become "a tome of variable tedium" that "immobilizes" language, he wishes to facilitate appreciation for words' heterogeneity. Rather than "definition," Green is interested in "informed portraiture, a conceptual calligraphy, a combination of lexicography and poetry ... that knows the style of information, the viscosity of concepts, the atmospherics of these sonic cum tropic logics that we call words." Although there are several fairly predictable, pedestrian entries (such as "heft," "impart," "pixel," and "torpid"), in most cases, the poet's elegant "self-blurb" is an accurate characterization of the poems. As Green claims, the forty words chosen for poetic exploration betray "no one overriding principle of selection," but the concept of change or transition, if not "viscosity," is important to numerous words.

The four-definition entry for "concurrence" is concluded by four diagrams that illustrate differences among "incidentally adjacent" movements, "elements" that "coincide in the abstract," "elements" that contribute to one another's motion, and ones that "converge." The second entry cogently dramatizes the rich diversity of intersections or confluences:

... the multiform schemata of a time:
coded twists of DNA that split and writhe
by the billions beneath a cut of clothes,
the winter jet stream pulling on the peaks
of a demand curve, trade zone contours,
the logic of the queue, a whole
statistical scurry of human circulation
catching in cross-section patterns of day
beneath concentric broadcasts
that pulse open like invisibly
mottled data flowers
among the bar-graph buildings.

The first image displays the vast disparity between the riotous growth and decay of human genetic processes and the relative simplicity of the appearance of clothing on an individual. Also, the connection and distinction between the "split" of one and "cut" of the other is striking. In this evocative catalog, the swirl of scientific and mathematical abstraction against less rarified concepts and concrete discourse, as well as intense focus on one:many perspectives is oddly reminisicent of A.R. Ammons' poetry, as are some other poems about dynamic processes. However, Green, emphasizing poetic condensation, avoids Ammons' chattiness, and his mention of "demand curve" and "trade zone" has a more political edge than Ammons' musings.

The poem for "doodle," which features an "allover (the page) composition" of brief, short-lined strophes, breaking up of some words into smaller components, and even a sentence fragment that undulates like a doodling wave, is far from Ammons in its affinity with the page-play of Susan Howe and other Language poets. "Doodle," Green reminds us, is related to "dawdle." The poem is full of agile alliteration involving the letter "d" and intricate assonance:

      Dew  a   spr  ink ling
    dawn's  days  with  dots'  still
  so   point  les  sly  many
     un  wed  ways    .

This poem enacts what it is "about": freedom, pleasure, and an expressive medium's material presence. In "sprinkling," there is the doodler's "ink" and an "inkling" of a "dewy" figuration within abstraction. In "pointlessly," there is somehow a "point," perhaps on the "sly."

"Miro" celebrates an aesthetic exemplar of freedom and pleasure. With effectively balanced line-indentations and evocative imagery, Green offers a fine ekphrastic approximation of "dabbling" "feats / of balanced motion" in European Modernist painting. Green's zest for imaginative phrasing is true to Miro's biomorphic shapes and offbeat landscapes: the poet speaks of "petri dish playgrounds" and "dumbbell / stars," and he coins the compound terms, "beak-line" and "cross-wisped."

Whereas "Miro" hails pulsing energies, in "pale" the poet aptly reduces affective intensity in the way he leaves spaces between words in sentences yet still allows for a residue of verbal "luster." The stark monosyllables of "Definition 1" suggest how "pale" connotes movement from presence to absence, from proximity to diffusion:

alba ,  a quiet miss ,  bone  faint  and  out/ spread, or apart

Here, "miss" is achingly close to "mist." The third definition offers a subtle surprise to tweak what would otherwise be a visual cliche:

      vague ,  and

  dimming  outwardly  (photos  bleaching  into  light ) ;

 not  vital the difference  wan  losing  itself ,  less

The pun on "light" (noun or adjective?) and its relationship to the preposition "into" force us to ask whether "bleaching" paradoxically causes "photos" to evince a new illumination, however "pale," or whether this process leads to photos' being less dark. Interestingly, the second, more obvious meaning involves the more unusual grammatical form. Also, the juxtaposition of "wan" and "losing itself" concisely underlines how "paleness" can signal diminishment of material or psychological features of an entity's "self."

"That" fascinatingly calls attention to the complexity, strangeness, and arbitrary patterns of linguistic functioning: "that" can be a "pron., adj., adv., and conj.," and it is "a most general specification that / is always particular..." Through deft and surprising enjambments, Green achieves an excellent modulation of short, medium, and long lines that imitates the uncanny variety of "that":

A. that,
I mean that right back there, B. that which is not this, or C.
that further away in space or time which
is not this,
or D. a subject or object that
serves in a relative clause, or E. the convergence
of rapier and wit, take that-

The poem goes to K., but A. through E. furnish a strong sense of Green's analytic extension of the attention to the seemingly "humblest" words that found in the poetry and criticism of Zukofsky, Williams, and other Objectivists.

The dictionary format provides an enabling structure for emphases on process and diversity in Green's book. The book, however, provides meta-commentary on epistemological and sociological aspects of dictionaries less than it embodies an effective collection of poems that foregrounds a multiplicity of linguistic and contextual possibilities.

NEW! Joy Gonsalves poem

Joy Gonsalves

MENAGERIE

Observe the breakable bird,
both compass and a root,
eking shadows on the wall. It is fixed,

at least, on alighting. Living things
have made homes in its claws.
In one lost corner, a woman needs

dusting. Called to fetch the day
with her chin, to slip the evening
a sin, to catch a drop of water and a coat--

she’d like to trim the wick on her finger.
And here, a man without hands,
feet, or breath, is loosened from the rubble

of roadbuilding. A spare wire driven
through a block rests his body on air.
He has begun to smell like the seasons.

Inocencio says they are his creations,
these wayside boughs that neither
trees nor passersby want. He preserves

the shape given them by rain, wind, the toe
of a boot. But first to whittle them: from banyan
to bird, woman to light, leper to resurrection.

NEW! Review of The Canary No. 3

The Canary, No. 3. Edited by Joshua Edwards, Anthony Robinson, & Nick Twemlow. $10.

The new issue of The Canary contains an extraordinary amount of strong work between its subdued & elegant canary yellow covers. (We were wondering when The Canary would go yellow.) There is no interior or cover art, there are no panels or forums or doodles or cartoons--just poems, lots of really good poems. We do wish the bar code was on the back cover, to keep the front cover clean & textual, but the magazine is still a beautiful thing to (be)hold with its restrained design, matte finish & squareness. (Sometimes, when we wonder why magazines like Fence, American Letters & Commentary, LIT, & Crowd are squarelike, we pick them up & remember why: they're pleasant to hold--more pleasant to hold than Verse, we think, but oh well, we'll stick with the 6x9.)

Every issue of The Canary has demonstrated a determined eclectism & keen editorial intelligence. Issue No. 2 seemed to set the bar impossibly high, but this issue, we'd venture, exceeds our already high expectations, not by changing the formula or adding new features, but by maintaining & building on what's made this one of the most exciting new print journals for poetry.

The mix of un- or recently published poets, innovative lyric poets (NY Schoolish, Post Language, etc.), emerging poets (i.e., those with 1-3 books), & unsettled established poets (i.e., they're not content with being established) also seems healthy, & welcome, & good. Almost no one in this issue seems to be riding on name recognition or laurels, though a few were probably invited to contribute. The Canary seems to combine open submissions with solicitation, thus generating the mix we see here.

Overall, the issue features a range of aesthetics, approaches, concerns, emotions, moods, & forms. There are prose poems of various stripes & lengths, poems in couplets (the issue's dominant form) & tercets & quatrains & sestets, single-stanza free verse poems, double- and triple-spaced poems, a hemistich, and some visually oriented poems. Traditional forms are more gestured toward than followed, so those yearning for tradition should stick with The Hudson Review.

Of the poets whose work we consistently read with interest, most show up in fine form. Here's a quick rundown/summary.

Hoa Nguyen's untitled poem about pregnancy makes room for emotion--positive emotion! (remember that?)--without getting sappy; & as usual, her approach to language is full-on & engaging, a collision of disparate yet wholly appropriate dictions.

The first half of Mark Levine's "Refuge Event" is oddly reminiscent of W.S. Merwin, in terms of style & content. Nice, but we were happy to see the poem take an unexpected turn midway through, in "the workshop."

Peter Gizzi's "Scratch Ticket" is, as usual, precise & moving & unpredictable at every point.

Joyelle McSweeney's three poems are energetically performance-oriented in both concept & language.

Joe Wenderoth's excerpt from "Agony: A Proposal" is an annotated list of "Terms Used in Academic Discourse Touching on Agony."

Anselm Berrigan's, Matt Hart's, and Cathy Park Hong's poems are captivating & fun, not least because of their languorously agitated voices/personae. (Does Hart have a book? If not, he should.)

Brenda Hillman's "Clouds Near San Leandro" opens with some clean iambics that seem intended to smooth out the violence depicted in those early lines, & part 1 of the poem is marked by an uncommonly keen eye & mind for detail. The violence-smoothing iambic comes back in the second line of part 2 ("you cast aside the brittle flame"), & the poem mulls on how, in middle age, "we're done with the old ironies." So no more Liz Phair.

Donald Revell's "Landscape With Free Will and Predestination" brings Christian thinking/living (angel, Christ, God) into domestic life, which creates a productive contrast with Maggie Nelson's two punch-lined angel poems. (Revell's and Nelson's poems are also strong on their own, but The Canary people put them in close proximity.)

Kevin Young's "The Alias" & "The Suspects" are from a forthcoming noir/verse novel, & provide glimpses of a compelling narrative/narrator.

Kevin Larimer's "Whether the Abbatoir" is terrifying & weirdly beautiful, kind of like its title.

Kent Johnson's "The New York School" claims to invent a new form--the Mandrake--& does.

Brandon Downing is represented by four solid poems (five if one counts "Two Poems" as two poems instead of one). Our favorite is "New Sonnet." Everyone's been looking for the new sonnet. We'll be looking for his new book.

In Rae Armantrout's "A Distance," the lines "A girl's doll is herself, / caught as if / unawares" seem so true & memorable as to be instantly Immortal, or at least worth passing along to girls with dolls--a kind of immortality, we think, & something worth aiming for.

D.A. Powell's poem is untitled & unpunctuated, & contains long lines in couplets--like almost all of his poems.

Also recommended: Christina Mengert's "Storytellers," Lisa Lubasch's "On Hysteria," Jennifer K. Dick's "Kiln," Michael Tyrell's "October in Idleville," Cal Bedient's "Hippo, the Logic of This Music, To Walk on the Bottom of Such Copia," Elizabeth Robinson's "Wind," Martha Silano's "No Refunds, No Exchanges," Max Winter's "The Dive Into the Drought" & "Stopped Along," Gabriel Gudding's "Dear Eagles," Christine Hume's "Field of Suspicion," Tracy Philpot's "Watching Coyote Porn," Rae Armantrout's "Seed," Kevin Larimer's "Untitled," Mark Levine's "Document," John Koethe's "Adelaide," Aaron McCollough's "Superliminare #25," & Andrew Feld's "C" & "Intermission."

Of the poets whose work is un- or less familiar to us, Ted Mathys ("A Whole in the Factory of Null" & "The Factory of Liquid is a Lair") really knocks off socks with his poignant, manic, friction-full, layered energy.

Bridgette Bates ("Broadside at Night / 12 November"), Lisa Cooper ("Emphasis"), Jeff Bernard ("We Are Merely House Guests, Awkward Like House Guests" & "The Increasing Generosity in Absence"), Sasha West ("Naming"), Ed Skoog ("Horror Show"), Albert Flynn DeSilver ("Cranial Vineyards Incorporated"), Kevin Litchfield ("Moonlight Arrangements for Whispers and Chitin" & "Clams"), & Alex Green ("Summer Job, Year Seven") also make us eager to see more of their work.

We don't see much point in reading magazines if they don't offer some news, & The Canary brings a lot of news to the table. That a good deal of this news comes from new poets is to be expected only because the editors have worked to make it happen.

At $10, this issue is priced barely above cost, especially considering the distributor's cut, so we suggest ordering directly through the magazine's web site. That way, the 40-50% that usually goes to the distributor can go to the magazine.

*

Disclaimer-like note & policy announcement: two current Verse associate editors--Lara Glenum & Sabrina Orah Mark--have poems in this issue, which includes work by 50 poets.

Sometimes, magazine reviews on this site will cover magazines that include work by someone affiliated with Verse--there currently are a dozen such poets (maybe more), floating around the desk & elsewhere, & most of them are publishing, often in new(er) magazines. It just so happens that new(er) magazines are the ones that benefit most from being reviewed & thus are the magazines we're most interested in having reviewed here. (Please note, however, that we won't limit magazine reviews only to new(er) magazines, especially if people are finding interesting work in more established venues & want to mention it.)

We ask that reviews of magazines that include work by Verse-affiliated poets not specifically recommend these poets' work. (This request does not apply to poets who no longer work with Verse--if in doubt, just ask--or to poets affiliated with Verse Press, which is a different entity & edited from a different state & by different people than Verse). We realize it is possible that a positive review of such a magazine could be construed as a positive review of, or plug for, the Verse-affiliated poet(s). But this makes sense only if a negative review of a magazine that publishes a Verse-affiliated poet is then a negative review of, or dig at, the Verse-affiliated poet(s). The two don't necessarily compute, & neither really makes sense because we do not dictate the content or tone or angle of any of our reviews, or even commission all of our reviews.

Our primary intentions in publishing magazine reviews on the site are to spread the word, foster community, acknowledge hard work, provide hints to poets publishing in other magazines to submit to Verse, start some conversations, & bring some attention to poets who (because they haven't yet published books) otherwise wouldn't get reviewed. That said, we will accept negative or mixed reviews of magazines, regardless of who's included.

As always (& especially when we try something new), we welcome feedback.

NEW! Review of Joanna Fuhrman's Ugh Ugh Ocean [Jerry McGuire]

Ugh Ugh Ocean by Joanna Fuhrman. Hanging Loose Press, $15.

Reviewed by Jerry McGuire

Jeffrey McDaniel, in a characteristic razzle of enthusiasm, has picked Joanna Fuhrman as one of his "Real Chancellors of American Poetry," paying special note to her work at the Poetry Project at Saint Mark's. Ugh Ugh Ocean is her second book (following Freud in Brooklyn), and it rings with the eclectic energies of that noble venue, which is to say that its virtues (which are many) like its vices (which are not so many) are both interesting and fun.

Fun is kid stuff, of course, of which more later. It's worth first identifying three tendencies of her writing that combine in a distinctive way to shape her voice. The first is an enthusiastic anteing-in at the game of chancy image-making sometimes called New York Surrealism. Second is an investment in postmodern mythophilia, in the Barthesian sense in which myth signifies incipient symbolic realizations of the cultural imaginary from Advertising to Zeus, with nods to Bible, Fairytale, the Holy Company of Muses (Berryman, Berrigan, and Spicer, to be sure, but also Duchamp, Judy Garland, and Will Rogers, as molders of her imaginative possibility), and Chance itself, as the locus of coincidence from which our overdetermined flashes of insight bound upon us like the weirdly familiar monsters they are. The third psychologizes the surreal and mythic tendencies in personifications and near-personifications--more a loopy leaping among, and connecting, the inner life of objects (window, door, hydrant) and the narrative suggestions of mythic grandees (Zeus, Orpheus) than a technical enactment of je est un autre. It's not true ventriloquism, but it's close enough to give her wiggle room for imagistic extravagances and catachreses that might otherwise seem no more than the reproduction of a school insignia--the way, sadly, much leaping--image stuff feels. Fuhrman's associations don't just leap, they bounce.

But back to the matter of fun. Generally (sadly) this tends to be the province of poets who aren't "serious." "Serious" ideas may be ironized for tropic scrutiny or deployed according to their tragic repercussions, but not orchestrated in Spike Jones (or Jonz) extravaganzas of play. The exceptions to this truism are good for real, deep pleasures: John Ashbery and Bill Knott, Bernadette Mayer and Heather McHugh, the Charleses Simic and Bernstein. McHugh and Bernstein, in particular, seem like a Sublime Maternal Wisegirl and a Paternal Mensch Supreme to the younger poets--of whom McDaniel and Fuhrman are preeminent examples--who've defined their projects in terms of a two-faced attention to worldly sadness and verbal pleasure. In McDaniel this intersection tends to lead to dark humors; Fuhrman's world is brighter, though wetter.

The reason for this distinction is partly in Fuhrman's investment in the oceanic imagery indicated in her title. More conceptually than formally (there are a sestina and a villanelle here, but the poems aren't adventurous in their spatial expression), Fuhrman's poems feel much more open than McDaniel's, whose distinctive space is both claustrophobic and vertiginous--the "bad pilgrim's room" in which his speaker was confined as a child, for instance, or "The Mirror in Which I'll Be Judged" or "The Everlasting Staircase" (from his Splinter Factory). Fuhrman's spaces feel lonely, perhaps, but not strictly isolating. They're much more likely to make one feel lost than confined, confused than imperiled. Even for her book's primary epigraph, instead of choosing Stevie Smith's poem in which a swimmer who appears to be "waving" is in fact "drowning," Fuhrman quotes Jules Supervielle: "A man in the sea is waving and screaming 'Help' / and the echo is replying, 'What do you mean by that?'" This steers Fuhrman's oceanic preoccupations away from tragedy and toward puzzlement--indeed, toward a perspective of childhood.

For one lure of ocean is regression--think of Stevie Smith, or Cummings--and Fuhrman frequently indulges a bigeyed wonderment in the face of largeness, mixing a diction of child-sized straight talk (“BAD STUFF / STILL HAPPENS / EVERYWHERE”) and a babble of syllabic play. The key to poetic regression has always been two-fold: first, the child one becomes still feels transported by the wonders of language and the world; and second, the poet and the reader/other have both been here, have shared this language in its freshness by virtue of having been children before being anything else. It is also a regressive impulse, I think, that puts the special bounce in Fuhrman's imaging. Of course, "bounce" is no simple concept, but a variable effect dependent on a variable spin--leaping with english on it. It has a distinguished history in music, especially jazz. It shouldn't be confused with rhythm, which can be, and often is, a quasi-mathematical set of values, admirable but abstract. When "bounce" comes into play, rhythm engages the imaginal body and turns into dance. Its analog in poetry, too, entails a bodily connection--not rhythm under the abstract cover of formal variations from a metrical structure, but rhythm as a manifestation of the body danceable, the body prior to being shamed into abstracting itself.

The poets I've named above all have that function in some measure, and many of today's performance poets (though not McDaniel or Fuhrman) are willing to sacrifice other poetic virtues to sustain it. Such sacrifices are an old story in music, too, as "bounce" has been lifted from the synthetic complexities of jazz and reduced by various "pure" dance musics to a sine qua non and, sometimes, the only thing happening. There are excellent reasons for this--more people want music to make them dance than to make them think, or even to make them feel some sort of aesthetic complexity. Popular younger poets like McDaniel and Fuhrman, too, are faced with a special problem of balance that has already been solved in very different ways by jazzmasters like Ashbery, Bernstein, and McHugh--how to satisfy the thirst for bounce that your position as public poet constantly imposes while holding true to other conceptual and formal demands that your cultural experience tells you are critically important. McDaniel's provocative list of "Real Chancellors" reflects his own preferences for balancing such competing public and personal demands. Ugh Ugh Ocean reflects some struggling on Fuhrman's part, I think. If it were necessary to point up a failing in the book, it might be an occasional lapse from bounce--or, better, an occasional refusal to sustain the expectations she's set up because she needs to articulate something that doesn't have much bounce in it--having established those conditions, some complexity of thought or figuration forces her to abandon them. Failures like this are evidences of rigor and integrity, and ought to be welcomed.

NEW! Kerri Webster poem

Kerri Webster

LEXICON

There’s a word for sadness that dwells in the small
of the back, the dell where you bury your chin. You mark
the page where the animal comes down to drink
from stale water. There’s a word for release born of grief,
tempered with soapy musk in the creases. There is no
gazelle. There’s a catalogue of frequently absent hours,
a figure of speech for ellipsis that starts at the throat
and sashays night continents, skirting veldt, dwelling eons
in tundra where underbrush is just story, fabulous tinder.
You rise several times to drink from the sink’s moony
white, under-pipes moaning like vast mammals
shimmying through canyons of sea ice, somewhere
a ledger that measures the damp of the sheets,
charts all things alluvial between first longing
and loss, breviary of the sub-zero plains where I toss,
insomniac, missing. There’s a phrase for absence gullied
just short of reckoning, ghost-damaging your rise
and falling weight inside me, there’s a verb for slow peril
logged in a commonplace book dog-eared
and oily--finger, finger. You mark the chapter where drowning
mirages into understanding, the whole book stab-stitched
or was it accordioned, a flaunt of unfolding and the pilgrim
drinking from a dirty glass.

NEW! Review of Timothy Liu's Of Thee I Sing [Danielle Pafunda]

Of Thee I Sing by Timothy Liu. University of Georgia Press, $15.95.

Reviewed by Danielle Pafunda

Crazed as many contemporary readers are for identifying identity in poetry, Timothy Liu (wherein we might mine Mormon, Chinese, American, scholar, gay, missionary) has been a jackpot, a goldmine. But it is a mistake to use identity as the key to Liu’s work, even as Of Thee I Sing tempts us to do that very thing. Of his Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, Liu has said, "my anthology seeks to complicate the relationship between one’s sexuality and one’s textuality." Similarly, in this new book of poems, Liu complicates the relationship between the tripartite--one’s spirituality, sexuality, culturality--and one’s textuality. An articulate complication arises in poems such as "Anniversary":

The monthly rent check due.

Camouflaged by smoke.

Could someone open a window in here?

A marriage in lieu of talk.

In the metaphor of self as dwelling, as an apartment, it is stuffy and crowded, the dinner has burned, and the money spreads thin. At the same time, lovers persist. There is a "marriage in lieu [self] of talk." Language is unified where the trappings of identity are not. The language is newlywed, passionate, strained, and through its filter, the dingy surroundings are transformed from lodgings to home.

But this home refutes its own romanticization. On the Poetry Society of America Web site, we find Liu’s "That's what's American about American poetry--a place to call home after all is said and done." Apply this definition to poems such as "Felix Culpa":

Beguiled by excess.

By like-minded folk
enthroned

in ever tinier courts.

wherein we might read a nuclear family, with whom one shares a lifestyle of ease, but can never be at ease. A family with whom one must retain, in the den or at the dinner table, only those tropes of identity which do not place him in contempt of court. Or consider "Just You Wait," in which "plates came / crashing down on entry-hall tile" in the first two lines, and we recognize:

a tone in us that we had somehow
always known whenever our home
began to sail out of the harbor--

The very structures in which we craft identity may be uprooted and tossed to sea. They house courts and battleground, they are "wrapped up in burnt-out / Xmas lights." The short lines, in couplets, tercets, or boxlike stanzas further evoke the tract house or cramped apartment.

The families who reside in these structures suffer, luxuriate, and construct an ill-fitting solace in their complicated, contradictory labels. We find parents who are not parents, defined by those domestic activities in which they can no longer participate, as in "Marriage":

Not feeding

is also a kind of feeding
that feeds on everything

we have known, our child
already two years dead.

We find "A Blessing" in a sin unrealized:

 She does not seem to know her husband
stops at a roadside strip club each night ...
  ... where those pussies in fishnet
panties hover just inches from his face

"The Gates of Hell" ironically provide shelter for the lovers, who in public, would be scrutinized, perhaps reviled:

another

room between us opened
wherein we could feast
without anyone’s notice.

Here, in particular, Liu has co-opted a label, has reshaped a prison into a haven. While this may provide little compensation to the object of a violent label, we must acknowledge such a remarkable survival skill. Perhaps language is the site in which such a transformation is most possible. In public, in politics, church, or family, we cannot so easily rid ourselves of the connotations of the labels with which others identify us. We cannot transform the rock through the window into the dove on the sill.

In language, then, in American poetry, one might be alchemist. One might be architect of a home that defies the physics of our quotidian America. On the page, Liu occupies paradoxical space, his tropes of identity rendered vehicles for the language, and the language complicating the vehicles on which it travels. If we enter Of Thee I Sing without our contemporary lexicon, without our cultural pricing gun, we readers might find an anthem, an empathy, might find a lean-to in which to shelter.

NEW! Review of Richard Greenfield's A Carnage in the Lovetrees [Joyelle McSweeney]

A Carnage in the Lovetrees by Richard Greenfield. University of California Press, $16.95.

Reviewed by Joyelle McSweeney

When served up the rarefied souffle of poetry-writ-from-academia, many are the readers who gnash their teeth, pound their flagons and cry for "content!" In his first book, Richard Greenfield plates the red meat of lurid, psychological content--yet it is not in its seeming confessionality but in its language, its self-consciousness, and its careful technique that A Carnage in the Lovetrees is a strange and memorable book.

In the field of traumas come the base savannas--crosshairs tighten
on the flaring pink of the evening.

Recognize the world. After the bit of blue, after a window opened
to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after--

These couplets open the book and its first poem, "Schema," though almost any stanza in this book could serve as well as another to represent Greenfield’s sensibility, which fact speaks to the claustrophobic Cinerama that is this poet’s paradoxical metier. Greenfield writes long lines which brim to the margins, yet these lines progress phrase by painstaking phrase, girded by patterned syntax, partial rhyme ("traumas"/"savannas," "tighten"/"evening") and assonance. That even the seemingly abundant is fractured and effortful is the book’s subtheme and its governing aesthetic.

Another of Greenfield’s habits is the shoehorning of boundless abstraction into the syntactic space conventionally reserved for the concrete, and vice versa; witness "the portioned stereo of love and grandeur," and the "flaring pink" and "bit of blue" which substitute for sunset and dusk in the passage above. Also characteristic is a kenning-like compression of parts of speech so that noun is pressed into service as adjective, verb as noun. Thus, birds become ‘sorrowbirds’ or ‘roofbirds’; trees become ‘flametrees’ or the eponymous ‘lovetrees.’ Many lines feature both effects, as in "I watched the windowbird at the honey-feeder eating loss, eating love-me."

It is this overtly writerly world that the reader is then commanded to "recognize." And in the firm hands of this poet, we do begin to recognize, to breathe heavy air, to feel, as an overwrought phrase in another poem has it, "the quarterlight dawn." But Greenfield’s overwroughtness is not contemptible, as it might be in the hands of another poet. Indeed, it is often lovely, and also useful, in that it points up again and again the wroughtness of memory, selfhood, and certainly poetry. This awareness dominates the book. Poem titles that suggest confessional account ("The Abuses in Color," "Burn the Family Tree") are outnumbered by those which brazenly insist on the artifice of what follow ("Schema," "Vantage," "Vectory," "Piece Together," "Two in a Series of Encryption," "Cipher in Scene," "Camera Obscured," etc.). The poems themselves are rife with beautiful metapoetic passages:

In a revision of the line, I walk among electric ruins and memory
loss. In another, nothing happens. I find the crop. I see it framed--
I see it arrive. I see it replayed endlessly.

This pastiche of metapoetics and imagery creates a lush, well-seamed, repeating landscape for the speaking "I" to traverse--and because this "I" is a product of these same artificial processes, he can indeed traverse it, to wondrous effects.

Ironically, the madeness of this speaking "I" is particularly emphasized when the speaker asserts his own immediacy. "I have called it the fluttery bird-heart. I have seen the everlasting burn of the forest," he declares, but the symmetry of these statements, their order, and the hyperbolic poeticism of both the "fluttery bird-heart" and the "everlasting burn" suggest that witness ("I have seen") has no precedence over madeness ("I have called"), and that the witness’s account is no less artificial than the poet’s invention.

What, then, of the threads of confessional-seeming content running through the book? Incest, beatings, parental drug use, abandonment, incarceration, and (possibly) murder put in appearances in these poems, forming a vague undernarrative of something very bad indeed, and the speaker’s continual return to the vantage of childhood seems to gesture towards the autobiographical nature of these referents. Yet this disembodied account is but one element in a potently edited montage and, if anything, is crowded out by a welter of imagistic and linguistic novelty. Greenfield’s achievement in A Carnage in the Lovetrees is to have created a readable, saturated universe of thinking, writing, and memory, in which no term provides purchase on another.

NEW! Brandon Downing poem

Brandon Downing

SANDY ICE-WATER

Poor bored Teutonic virgin,
Passion for gold, & the lockjaw of a friend.
The ultimatum of her pants.
This environment is my dragon, greedy,
But I always finish fourth in poetry.
Just some weak rocks near the light-houses.

Pass a kid living in the woods,
He beats you with ham.
As a kid living in the woods,
Being most of his elite selves.
Where does money come from?
Where that’s evil of meditation.

Or bring it up to the family,
They have incredible concerns.
Their little misgivings are always children of the self.
How do you get to that? It’s spiritual, right off 57th Street
And 5th Avenue: you sit down with a butterfly’s mouth,
You drink the sandy ice-water.

NEW! Ray DiPalma's "Agora" [poem in 20 parts]

Ray DiPalma

AGORA

1
Never solved the world within
the world without
come from so far
set in the right place proposing
morning already securing
not harmony but something put to the test
neat footprints in the snow
that have fallen through eleven floors
accountable to the dream
and its unfinished storm
radiant and exacting
lit by a solemn burning of wood
crouchings gala and interpreters ancient
scavenge a torpid enlightenment

2
lights before and after the flood
the slowly brightening face an
oddity of conviction
an alchemy of cadence
a bundle of printed documents
tied together with broad red tape
alias upon alias
misattributions of mood or belated prophecy
brittle and occulted by
a deposition of mirrors
deeper and deeper in the overlook
the rose-ace snagged
in a loop of ash lifted by
the mordant scuff of plumes
a parody of piety and shame
the arcane restraints of restitution

3
inexact as step from step
the desert the clarity beyond
any sense of memorized time
extruded from the lurk of symbol
prelude is stray measure
lengthening the complexions of sleep
its perfected vexations are
attrition and query in
a cartouche of ropes and weeds
pictograms and night signals
arrangements of names
fill a folklore of fragments
the sample of one and its reflection
canonic sentiments and
makeshift paradoxes
a panel of yellow light
on a faded ochre wall

4
surprises fed on disappointed warnings
extended by the blowing sands
to any creature hanging on the guess
fever or birdsong passed through degrees
and textures of preliminary sound
first before first before first
interdiction as a mode of chagrin
the moon unravelling
drifts across her eyes assessing a river life
eyes that look back
infinity summoned by color

5
Four circular rooms
of varying sizes contiguous
to a central rectangular room
There are no windows
or compromise with light
The chalk lines of the builder
after three hundred years
still mark the limits of the central room
a reciprocation of the codices
of Euclid and the dimensions
abstracted from the quarry
The eye goaded by conceit
is pulled away from every corner
to the arcs beyond
The absence of features
indicates disquiet and
a regard for wholeness
and decided mass
held within the centrifugal
sweep of the cloister

6
sound falls on your name
this is what the hands have done
to make their preference known
a word at a time
a miracle of hanging air
the remainder a phenomenon of foreground
the luminous air’s
separation from all migrating birds
under whose scrupulous motion
you stand reading a letter
contrived of veiled concessions
and the moving parts of an apology
an ill-assorted collection
of hagglers in bird masks

7
a snap of flint
more syntactic than lexical
no longer a part of the city
always six hours behind the sun
certain ideas and symbols keep occurring
excuses for newsprint facts
of a short-lived dream
held in hand to
fade away more quickly
its emphatic secrecy
dado and scrollwork
lit from behind

8
recast is the discard
episode and admonition
the metaphysics that interferes
the patinas of an internal life
what turns from the center
reenacting the doubt
with grinding intuition
an owl vamping
its sense of the dark
the run of the sky
of sound of words
spoken on a road
that ebbs away

9
handwritten letter shapes
fill the page
animation dismantles anarchy
the testimony left
a mobius a zero dilated upon a zero
what is exemplary is unnamed
every day’s jagged edges
broken under the tongue
a ratio moving from fact to facet
directs the sound by light
surviving the r’s and l’s m’s and n’s
maps and pawns

10
invented to be described
sent instead of given
nothing of it remains
what else is there
what is in the breakers
what deduction
what do they count to each other
facing one facing
I could hear the words
but other words separated me
from what they meant
to pronounce or recall
the buffalo and the white whale
their epic qualities seen in new places
amid a failed sense of duty

11
a famous subtraction
preserved in red lacquer
only bread and hypnotism
permit its proper name
a yellow sky set against
a grey circle of moving clouds
the closer to the sun
the more important
a given surface
nothing moves
following the circle

12
a brutal flatness
a kind of modesty
no water only ink
drained from the inner ear
a few sentences scratched
in the dirt with a match
cold as smoke
analogs and conclusions drawn
from certain isolated facts
six plus five minus nine plus
seven minus three plus six
a circle ever thinner
five plus three minus five
plus seven minus one
hand and eye turning
one upon one

13
the final version
left on the tongue
what has been said
change and depiction
placed side by side
as second thought
drops of the flood traces
of the adduced revelation
a scrimped oblivion
of imagined privileged moments
anxious with surmise

14
agreement is subversion
of direct action
what matters cannot
be remembered or named
shelves of books tilted paintings
and scattered papers
the damp-stained walls
a lament that achieved
some general expression
just another set of terms
confided to its own alphabet
every mark of punctuation
isolated and repeated two
or three times along
the bottom of every page
elements in the embodiment
of second-hand privacies

15
printed in red ink
and 100 point type on folio
sheets of grey paper
all the street-smart words
not who but when
not where but why
determine their accuracy
a translation indebted
to an associative procedure
involving interpolations of motive
corresponding to mutually
identified expressions of debt
once familiar and dependent
now confined and continuous
nothing given nothing shared
nothing taken nothing lost

16
speaking for one whose name
was never recalled who spoke
for one whose name was never known
no more than a guess
an assembled story of themselves
scenes in a hymn sung
in total darkness
the page left unfinished
bearing no dates as
is the custom when scarce
and isolated things are rendered
at the limits of a coherent life
run along a pavement radius
over the lip of an horizon
that barely spans a desk
a wall and a ceiling

17
in the jungle thirty miles
from the capitol
patience wears thin
there was no such man
kept in a room
blindfolded and poorly fed
a number with a story
about another number
an emerald dealer stands
under an elm whose branches
touch the ground he
has nowhere else to look
what time is it he asks
are you leaving right now
it’s been the twelfth of the month
for at least a year
nothing else pulled from another pocket
improper distances improper time
obedient to but unmoved by the sun

18
dust lifted from a reference
intuition error and stubborn conviction
it still may happen
an unnamable point of view a prediction
closer to a legal right than a need to be said
given a colloquial emphasis
suspicion slowed to a start
the wrong person in the right place
at the wrong time
the next direction anything off the map
exposure pushed between the dark drifts
against the far wall

19
black red white and grey knots
in thick threads of similar hue
a tally of tributaries and moments
of silence put to use while old doubts
persist as as a species of luck
more what the bones say when the water
floats them than the fable that explains
how the practice of waterbones began
all that’s certain is that there was some
point to placing the windmill in a valley
rather than on any of the adjoining hills
but something about the feigned civility
that tempered the lengthy explanation
made the windmill and the shadow it cast
as suspect as the thistle offered for a handshake

20
100 miles of road say it’s okay to want something
after all something broken will always
conspire with anything impartial
first person to first person
glare provides for any lack of detail
overhead the seasons get easier
the scarecrow totems of the uninitiated
as uncomplicated as they are cautionary
the only thing to do when they blow over
if they turn up head or feet first
is to step around but never over them

1998-2001

Review of Kenneth Koch's New Addresses

New Addresses by Kenneth Koch. Alfred A. Knopf, $23.

Reviewed by Michel Delville

Kenneth Koch’s new collection undertakes a systematic exploration of the most important events and cultural forces that have determined the course of the poet’s life and career. Like Whitman, who addressed drops of water and smoke rising from buildings, and, more recently, Koch’s friend Frank O’Hara before him, Koch adopts the "address" form, a form of apostrophe in which he addresses a variety of objects, ideas, and past experiences ranging from his twenties, marijuana, and city life to tiredness, fame, and old age. Koch’s poems have the immediacy of personal content and leave us with a sense that each poem is testing the powers of poetry to draw us into unexpected corners of the poet’s life in a way that is freed of preconception and expectation.

Throughout the book, Koch also affirms his intention to write not for art’s sake but for the sake of remembering ideals and forms of experience writing can serve. Reflecting on his New York School years in a poem entitled "To Some Abstract Paintings," he comments that the aesthetics of abstract expressionism held the promise of "a meaning inside the meaning / That surpassed the meaning or would even come up with a new one / That everyone would see." Even though the author’s experience of abstractionism does not seem to have fully lived up to this project, Koch remains grateful to an art that taught him "how to develop / a certain kind of elation to non-objects," a statement that accounts for Koch’s gradual move away from the abstract and evocative linguistic experimentalism of his early years towards a type of lyricism that favors a more transparent form and a (deceptively) simple, straightforward diction.

Jewishness is the subject of three poems contained in New Addresses. In one of the most successful pieces of the collection, Koch explains that the influence of Jewishness and Judaism on his life was similar to that of poetry in that it rescued him from "the flatness of [his] life" by "[giving] ceremony / To everyday things, surprise and / Symbolism and things beyond / Understanding." Other, more obvious determining forces on Koch’s development as a poet include his experience as an infantryman in World War II ("I kept thinking of lines of poetry. One that came to me / On the beach in Leyte / Was 'The surf comes in like masochistic lions.' / I loved this terrible line. It was keeping me alive") and psychoanalysis ("You gave me an ideal / Of conversation--entirely about me / But including almost everything else in the world. / But this wasn’t poetry it was something else").

Central to Koch’s poems is an awareness of the incomprehensible mystery that presides to a life "famous for being horrible, wonderful, irreplaceable." As the poem "To Yes," the opening piece of the collection, recognizes, poetry grows out of a recognition that the world remains unknown, possibly even unknowable, but nonetheless deserves to be investigated in a way that celebrates the urges of the mind and body to collaborate on a process favoring self-reflexive analysis while seeking to avoid the traps of egocentric talk. New Addresses leaves us with a sense that poetry is there to help us see even the unknown in a new light:

... Am I a yes
To be posed in the face of a negative alternative?
Or has the sky taken away from me its ultimate guess
About how probably everything is going to be eventually terrible
Which is something we knew all along, being modified by a yes
When what we want is obvious but has a brilliantly shining trail
Of stars. Or are those asterisks? Yes.

From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3 (2001). All rights reserved. For more information about this issue, see Arielle Greenberg's poem below.

Matthea Harvey poem

Matthea Harvey

SAD LITTLE BREATHING MACHINE

Engine:@

Under its glass lid, the square
of cheese is like any other element

of the imagination--cough in the tugboat,
muff summering somewhere in mothballs.

Have a humbug. The world is slow
to dissolve & leave us. Is it your

hermeneut's helmet not letting me
filter through? The submarine sinks

with a purpose: Scientist Inside
Engineering A Shell. & meanwhile

I am not well. Don't know how to go on
Oprah without ya. On t.v, a documentary

about bees--yet another box in a box.
The present is in there somewhere.

From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3 (2001). All rights reserved. For more information about this issue, see Arielle Greenberg's poem below.

Review of Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets

Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets, edited by Michael Brennan and Peter Minter. Paper Bark Press, $21.

Reviewed by Ethan Paquin

A colleague, reviewing this collection for another journal, remarked in a recent conversation on his belief that Australian poetry was languishing in "amateurish" hands. Conceding the work of Peter Boyle "had moments," his protestation shifted to the "experimental" work of Javant Biarujia, Geraldine McKenzie, and others, none of whom lived up to his standards of "high quality" verse. Then, the realization: just what feeds these tired standards, and what will it take to move on past the influence of the Old School? Can we understand that testing the bounds of expression is not an act confined to, or reserved for, the great yet past-their-prime bards (pick one, any one, from America or elsewhere), writers who have perhaps overstayed their welcome because they’ve instilled the unfortunate public belief that further exploration of language and self are out of the question--or worse, "amateurish"?

If some American readers, thinkers, and writers have trouble with staking new ground, why don’t the 30 younger Australian poets in Calyx? Though they can surely smell, and are probably saturated with, the pervasive grease that is the literary United States--with its bored, waxy compound of theoretical explanations and categorizations, e.g. "Post-Post-Modern Sensibilities" and "Elliptical Poets"--it’s not apparent in this anthology. The overall impression Calyx provides, however accurate or not, is one of a community of poets writing so urgently and fervently they dare cross the Ashbery Boundary--a place where envelopes are not only pushed to the table’s precarious edge, but are folded into hundreds of diving, swirling paper airplanes, propelled by political, national, and geographical issues in a way unique from any other nation. Turning to poets like those Brennan and Minter have selected may not provide our salvation, but possibly something just as valuable: a recognizance and reaffirmation of what it means to retreat into our souls, to question the mechanisms of the word and spirit, to acknowledge humor and suffering and humiliation and distress and joy and do it as it’s not already been done countless times. Michael Farrell aptly starts this ball rolling in his poem "John Ashbery Impersonator." For all its implications, it’s a tender study of a poetry festival onlooker who hides behind bushes, trying to glimpse the man we gather is his personal hero; "i noted everything he said to use later in / a poem in which the silent changes might / occur," we are told, only to discover by turns that such a process turns young, earnest poets like himself into "monolingual ventriloquists." This one-note droning, this copy-cat act of hiding behind the tried-and-true tonal affectations and storytelling of those who’ve written before us--resulting in assembly-line and carbon-copy verse--simply does not appear in Calyx.

Inside there is a peculiar brand of Australian duende that echoes hauntingly, lusciously. It’s felt across the stylistic board: sprawling, avant-garde gems rest comfortably and naturally next to quiet pensum; clearly, the editorial work is as thoughtful as the poetry within. Particularly magnetizing are the seldom-heard (in America, at least) voices of Luke Davies, Susan Bowers, and Kirsten Tranter. Davies’s cyclical conundrums fascinate--"In the landscape / the flesh & // when the flesh is gone / the landscape," from "History of Violence"--and he can strike the right grave tone ("There are older agonies / than churches"), though one wishes the sentimentalism of abstract moments like "The infinite sadness of finite joys / in the season of rain and death // when the magpies sing" packed more visceral and less aethereal heft. Still, it’s hard to find fault with his deft, eerie homage to Stevens, "Passage of Time," a three-part suite examining the "humility of journeys" through the eyes of a hawk:

Always the rat between us and the great rest.

Always the dark shadow of a greater hawk
looming above us and blocking the sky:
oh father with your sparrow bones, death
descends on you and that’s your day.

Bowers’s poems are spare, straightforward, and unexpected. They remind of Holub’s assertion that "poetry is not only about using the senses and the sensitivity and the sensibility but ... using the plain human mind in the way a plain human being is using it while crossing the street." Indeed. But they approach as if a mist that hints of something forgotten or overlooked:

Farms are never by the sea
but this one was.
There was a farmhouse
of course
because farms without
people
makes no sense.
("Little Red Jelly")

Bowers, like Farrell, gets her jabs in at bloated Americana in "Triptych," examining "Marilyn," "Marlon," and "Elvis" ("I’ll pretend that I’m / in a film with you / while you’re cutting / a bullet out of my leg"). Another long poem, "Space and Technology Series," sounds as if written by a proselyte to techno-speak, to the wonder and fright of scientific creations; the innocent, reverent, and wide-eyed voice within is alarmingly sexy ("When the earth was flat / we could have walked forever, / picking intense cornflowers, / but I know the earth is round / because I see it reflected in your helmet. / And so the cornflowers are obsolete now / and instead we exchange moon- rocks"). Tranter, too, has an ear for the sumptuous and the sensory, for the disjunctive and emotive, and an inner eye for Matisse-like scenery:

Her yellow dress stands still in the heat
The couch is covered in roses in a tapestry
while your letter shows scorched on my hands
It rises, it gathers itself
with a growl, something like jealous
("Her Yellow Dress")

Biarujia, Arthur Spyrou, and James Taylor, the most structurally challenging and innovative in Calyx, certainly deal in organic rather than lyric form, recalling Zukofsky’s proclivity for "sight, sound, and intellection" in their greatly wild, messy, stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Biarujia is as comfortable within the confines of the prose poem or dictionary entry as he is with verse; Spyrou’s "Ode to Sir Philip Sidney" contains a superb balance between meticulous observation of the physical, historical and emotional realms ("we learn to observe / with the pity / of broken clocks // the patience // of a dead saint’s / riven / digit"), rendered in a fragmented style that meanders about the page like Merton’s "Cables to the Ace." Taylor’s "Ambiguity as a Bowl of Milk" is divided into columns, the poem speaking to itself, and his "Forfeit of & For" can literally not be described; here, collage finds its way into poetry with amusing results.

There are many high points of the collection--Kate Lilley’s gorgeous mix of pop and classicism, Adam Aitken’s and Nick Riemer’s stark locales--and those poets who are better-known in American circles, including Louis Armand, Alison Croggon, MTC Cronin, Coral Hull, Emma Lew, and Tracy Ryan, nestle well against the lesser-known Adrian Wiggins, Felicity Plunkett, and Jane Gibian. By no means a flawless anthology, Calyx has got to be one of the best in-roads toward gaining a semi-holistic sense of what’s going on past the international date line.

Back to my colleague and his need for standards. In the end, in gauging the "successfulness" of writing, we must ask not only whether these contemporary Australian poets communicate effectively but whether we, as readers, are invigorated. Calyx is a series of pistons in rapid fire; the level of high energy and perplexity is consistent and fairly unwavering. As a bonus to the Australian-Australasian neophyte, glancing at its catalogue of cultural references, one sees the points of contact throughout this vast land converging in one spot, and it is dynamic. If these, along with being dissatisfied with time-tested ways of probing psychic, geographic and personal landscapes, are the hallmarks of a group of "amateurish" writers, who needs professionals?

From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3 (2001). All rights reserved. For more information about this issue, see Arielle Greenberg's poem below.

Dara Wier poem

Dara Wier
 
PROGRESS
 
There was a time when the guillotine meant progress,
Past the hacking axe, the slippery sword,
The gagging hangman’s noose.
There was a man who had his head replaced
With a wooden head with one eye on the front
And the other on the westside shaded with a
Green and white striped awning. A little
Windowbox stood under it filled to over-flowing
With sweet-smelling come-give-cream-to-granny
Roses. Purple martins flew in and out of his
Head in the early evening. Little glass lizards
Sunned themselves on him in the morning.
The paperboy really tried to deliver the paper
Very gently. And this, too, was progress.
 
 
From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3 (2001). Reprinted in Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2001). All rights reserved. For more information about this issue, see Arielle Greenberg's poem below. The new issue of Verse--Volume 20, Numbers 2 & 3 (2004)--includes an interview with Wier.

Review of Cort Day's The Chime

The Chime by Cort Day. Alice James Books, $11.95

Reviewed by Laura Solomon
 
In The Chime, Cort Day conducts a philharmonic as cacophonous as it is sonorous. Words do indeed chime--within a line, a poem, between poems--though the resulting music varies from reverberant to tinny. While "There is no disharmony in the skyline," Day milks every friction. Consistently playing on the paradox of being both one and many, the poems, and the book itself, resemble the stratified unity of a chord, each note wavering with vibrato. What Day deftly builds, however, is dis-chord, atonal progressions that fragment as quickly as they compose. His writing "suicides" as it "flowers": "Terminal, it likes to destroy itself" ("Monad, a Deluxe Pastoral, Deepens and Unwinds"). Poet and poem vie for dominion to no avail. True, Day is conductor--both god and vector--inflecting and channeling bolts of sound and light ("All the gods on this plain are capacitors"); it is language, nevertheless, that proves the ultimate string-puller, the invisible hand "setting all the puppeteers to dancing" ("Not a Cloud in the Sky"). In monadic fashion, Day divvies complexities in ten-line increments while rhythmically employing and subverting the pentameter--the basic metrical unit in ratio with the basic monetary unit. While these poems are frugal in line and length, even terse on the surface, they do not economize a reader’s time. The Chime is a jealous book, demanding repetitive reads and rewarding one’s input with variable decimals and decibels of output.

Like so many poets, Day tropes on text as textile, as woven, unraveling. What distinguishes his cloths, suits, garments from the crowd’s is a multi-layered figurative play and keen attention to etymology. The poems turn on the masked, the disguised, the encoded--what is being invested, enshrouded like the word’s root--and what is being tailored to market, is marketable (i.e., the quotidian dismantling text trope). Like Zeus (another tired but vendible figure), the poems mutate in a blink, sometimes within a given reading. In this sense, Day exhibits a very palpable self-consciousness toward self-consciousness, an ironic stance intimately wary of irony’s trappings. His pivots on the word invest, his delvings into the economies of guise, are innovative and revealing, but the result can be poems plagued by paranoia, verse that must morph incessantly and inwardly to evade its own gong. Day tempers tongue-in-cheek quips aimed for a post-modern reader-consumer, ("I only get ten minutes in this mask"; "Every portfolio has a tapeworm"; "I sell you the words for nipple, for strawberry") with apologetic, stirring passages like the following whose very lyricism must finally question any attempt at sincerity. Here, too, the poem must succumb to the jangle of change:
                       
When your body left mine, a chime.
The sun, vibrating imperceptibly,
causes monad to invest in chains
of waterfalls, green vitreous strands
I resonate inside. Investigate me.
I’ve been awarded a franchise.
 
Day spins verse that evolves as it revolves, and this tendency to convert, to turn and return, complements the book’s central motif of transaction--be it carnal, fiscal, or verbal. In "White, Ordinal," the modifier "white," as it is repeated, becomes modified by that which it describes ("boxes," "string," "logic," "keys"). In an illustrative move, the poem then begins to orbit outward from its axial repetition:
 
Reach inside
a forest turns. Reach, you just might touch
your father’s hand, your mother’s face. As this
displays, the forest hardens. As this is white,
the forest turns, dangerous. So you turn
softly. You are holding "fields of phlox."
 
Like money, words function as instruments of exchange, phonetic representations void of any inherent value. There is no gold or Platonic standard to a given word. Meaning is dependent upon present usage. Day writes: "I pin currencies to you. They rise and fall." The poet executes a shifting nomenclature ("I classify us as bone ash, then as lilies") as intermittent as the world it describes ("Tool & Die was the Lord’s purpose"). Whether employing the imperative or moving in curt declaratives, the poems always confirm economic cycles, dictating the market’s ultimate condition of consumption and waste. In "Elect Bastard Toadflax," Day directly addresses this condition, this "tiny application running inside everyone: / disposable, disposable, disposable, disposable." It is this repeatability, this pending replaceability, of people and words that make them commodities of narrative. Later, in "Tiny Fable," this theme explicitly recurs:
                       
Darling, your infant’s been whispering
into my dictaphone again, and its tiny fable
scares me: it says the new Disposable Symphony
will repixelate all property as green or
"rain is money."
 
Indeed, fable and myth proliferate due to the same ingenuity and repeatability that dull them. Similarly, Day’s chiming repetition alternatingly enlivens and deadens a poem’s cadence, a word’s significance.

Given the book’s fascination with the deadening of language, it should not surprise anyone that the first line of the first poem contains two cliches: "Off to market. Not a cloud in the sky." From the start, the poet announces his intention to transpose the jingle, to revive the fable, and does, at least to the extent that language and market will permit him. For still, language must be bracketed, can never just be. Language proves similic, easily commodified, often motive-driven, always an approximation: "By then my voice was 'a neutral, / highly ionized gas' involving the entire planet, / and then it was my turn, and I had nothing to say" ("A Little Song About Plastic"). These punctuated interjections are far from gratuitous, performing roles as various as the dictions that chime in and as disparate as the resulting images. At his best, Day forces us to recognize death as animate and inherent to life, "The sack cloth / corpse leaning forward in your rib cage," as he seeks to excavate a soul or at least make room for some sort of non-automation existence, doubting the possibility of such all along. What connects us to one another and what connects a word to its meaning is an inevitable disconnection. Day offers us this beautiful nightmare, the clangor of consciousness, and always we are "amazed / at the living and dying getting done in our extremities."
 

From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3 (2001). All rights reserved. For information about this issue, please see Arielle Greenberg's poem below.

Peter Ramos poem

Peter Ramos
 
PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE GHOST
 
October, color gone
from the wheat and you straggle back,
howling in your pulled wool, your work boots,
come to yuck it up with me, your mouth
full of loam, jacket lined with rot, crazy
as the leaves.
 
Each time I try to sleep you off, hoping winter
will stamp its feet, sober you up.
But the hallways soften. You
stuff me full of mothballs.
 
From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2 & 3 (2001). All rights reserved. For information about this issue, please see Arielle Greenberg's poem below.

Review of Rosmarie Waldrop's Reluctant Gravities

Reluctant Gravities by Rosmarie Waldrop. New Directions, $12.95.
 
Reviewed by W. Martin
 
Rosmarie Waldrop’s Reluctant Gravities completes a trilogy of books that have had enormous impact on the terrain of postwar American poetry. All three grew in relation to works by early twentieth-century Central European writers: Kafka, Wittgenstein, and Musil. In Reproduction of Profiles (1987), Waldrop interpreted Wittgenstein by applying grafts from the Tractatus onto her own material and simultaneously subverting what she calls, in her 1990 essay "Alarms and Excursions," the "closure of the propositional sentence," by enacting semantic shifts within such sentences in a manner that reflects back onto Wittgenstein’s own investigation of language use. As Waldrop herself informs us, alternating sections of the book are configured according to the homosocial narrative schema of Kafka’s "Description of a Struggle," in which one male character bonds with another by talking about his necessarily absent girlfriend. Waldrop’s variation, however, has "the man telling a woman about another woman. So there is a situation of jealousy" ("Conversation with Carole Maso and C.D. Wright," Tripwire 4, 2000)--a situation that recalls her novel The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter, published the previous year, which involves the stories of two extramarital affairs (and, more importantly, is Waldrop’s most direct attempt to come to terms with the national socialist past of her childhood in Germany). More significant than the fact of interpersonal triangulation for both Reproduction and Hanky, however, is the fact of relation in a discursive sense, i.e., that one character is telling another about an absent third. This resembles the grammatical constellation of a subject and two indirect objects, with the space between them occupied not by a direct object but by the act of speaking/ narrating itself.

The second book in Waldrop’s trilogy, Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993), which she wrote as a direct extension of Reproduction, is likewise grounded in the narrative structure of a story by an early twentieth-century Austrian writer. This time it is Robert Musil’s "The Perfection of Love" (1911), which begins with an ethical dialogue between a wife and a husband on the erotic misdemeanors of a (male) character in a book they’ve both read and continues in a rich and recondite narration of the woman’s exploration of her own feelings of self and desire. In Lawn, Waldrop similarly explores the concept of the "empty center," which may be understood on one level as the grammatically negative space of telling, or even of Auseinandersetzung (a German term that means both examination and altercation, but literally translates as "taking apart" or "parsing"), but which she identifies as a generative matrix that is both a locus of creativity and a kind of essentially feminine epoche. Perhaps as an aid to those confused by Reproduction, the book includes at the end a list of precepts, which, while directing the reader’s aesthetic engagement with it, emphasize the book’s contribution to a feminine theory of cognition. I wondered when first reading it if Waldrop had appended these "directions for use" out of an anxiety over the poems’s aesthetic effects and a need to control them. Nevertheless, of the three parts of Waldrop’s project, Lawn of Excluded Middle is the one I have returned to most often; the pieces in it feel inspired and more lyrically intense than those of Reproduction of Profiles.

With the perspective of Reluctant Gravities now available, it seems to me that the emphasis on its participation in a philosophical discourse is necessary to the problematic of voice so crucial to the whole project. In the first book, the poet’s voice (Waldrop’s own, presumably) and the philosopher’s (Wittgenstein’s, as we know) are combined in counterpoint to the alternation of androgynous "I" and "you." In the second, it is a single, identifiably feminine voice that speaks two discourses, one poetic, one scientific, at once. In Reluctant Gravities, Waldrop attends explicitly to issues of voice and of dialogue, and gives us the dialectic of two other, clearly gendered pronouns, a "he" and a "she," against the neuter backdrop of their narration. Eschewing the complex propositional mode of the two earlier books, Waldrop alerts us at the beginning of the "Prologue" to the fragmentary, gestural, and uncertain presence of speech in this final book of the trilogy: "Two voices on a page. Or is it one?"

Reluctant Gravities has as its point of departure another early story by Musil, "The Temptation of Quiet Veronica" (1908), which begins, "Somewhere one must hear two voices. Perhaps they merely lie as if mute on the pages of a diary beside one another and in each other." Like the other preliminary narratives by Musil and Kafka, this story too involves a triangulated eros, a situation of jealousy, though here the relationships are more ambiguous, anticipating the incestuous union at the heart of The Man Without Qualities as well as the strange menage of Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina. Reluctant Gravities is systematically structured as a sequence of twenty-four "Conversations," each comprising four prose paragraphs alternating the utterances of a male and a female speaker. The "Conversations" themselves are divided into six groups of four, and between each group are placed "Interludes" comprising 1. a "Song," 2. a "Meditation," and 3. another "Song." The "Songs" are lyrics, each having two short quatrains followed by an even shorter couplet. In the "Meditations," brief sections of prose are interspersed with lines of verse. And both "Meditations" and the "Conversations" are devoted, like essays, to a particular abstract concept or experience, such as "Desire," "Vertigo," "Aging." More rigid than that of either Reproduction or Lawn, this structure would seem to run the risk of suffocating its inhabitants were it not for the randomness and openness of the language itself. A different conception of the period is evident here; complete sentence abuts against fragment. A few examples: "If I must have a god I’ll take the matter between noun and verb. The nothing that defines, shapes next-to into phrase or cleanliness"; "Not sit, he says. Arrows toward new setting out even as the day sets in"; "So to slide down and stand there. Such self-gravity. So narrow the gap between mistake and morning sickness." In Reluctant Gravities, Waldrop dismisses the problematic of propositional sentences and attempts instead to disrupt the closure of narrated dialogue, the triangulation of speakers and the interiorization of experience as subjectivity, and the identification (or, again, closure) of self with self. She does not deploy method consistently; and this has the effect of a surplus, poetry, which is different from the surplus generated by a rigidly administered system. Nevertheless, the book’s contraption suggests that she is working here not with the sentence, the line, the prose poem, or the series, but with the book itself as the primary generic category.

What is the relationship between these pieces of language, assembled in terms of collage and transition, and anything that is not them? This book struck me as more deeply personal than either of the other two; and as with many of Waldrop’s other works, it was difficult not to imagine the relationship between the man and the woman as having a referent in Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop’s actual marriage. Further, the book is quite elegiac in tone; in addition to the perspective it provides on the aesthetic and theoretical project of its predecessors, its invocations of "Aging," "Slowing," "Childhood," and "The Millennium" suggest a biographical specificity. Beyond that, however, the book resonates with references to Nietzsche, William Carlos Williams, nineteenth-century French science, New England geography, digital technology, and many other subjects of varying degrees of familiarity to a reader. When I first read it, I kept thinking of Emmanuel Levinas; and
although it would take a considerably greater effort to support this claim with any certainty, I still feel that, consciously or not, Waldrop’s own "ontological adventure," beginning with her treatment of language and mysticism in her 1971 book Against Language?, is in some measure in dialogue with his work, especially Otherwise Than Being, on ethics and the self. The struggle that Waldrop enacts in Reluctant Gravities is, in any case, a profound, rich, and appealing one. Like its predecessors, it is a complex book that deserves to be read with considerable attention.
 
From Verse, Volume 18, Numbers 2&3 (2001). All rights reserved. For more information about this issue, see the Arielle Greenberg poem below.