NEW! Review of Carol Snow

The Seventy Prepositions by Carol Snow. University of California Press, $16.95.

Reviewed by Sandra Simonds

In her latest collection of poems The Seventy Prepositions, Carol Snow describes a world that is constantly “repositioned on the loop.” With a near clinical eye and ear, Snow investigates the linguistic and psychological implications of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Each poem becomes a study of the relationship between position and momentum where perception is king. The closer we get to the subject, like Heisenberg’s particle, the more we seem to miss. The following excerpt from “Notwithstanding” expresses this dilemma: “so when the artist extends his thumb before the / subject: what’s that about?--what (could have) / happened?--still missing--happened.” In these poems perception is a sort of puzzle-making, but each linguistic piece does not always fit with the next. Snow tears apart familiar lines from literature such as Shakespeare’s “a coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but one” and splices her own questioning voice into them, thereby rendering the familiar line surprising. Take the poem “Considering,” quoted here in its entirety:

some act/ experience resists description--
    ‘beggaring’--a coward…a thousand…
  --that which demanded a
‘threshold language’--said of it: something held
   me back

Snow positions voices as diverse as Rogers and Hammerstein, Stevie Smith and George Oppen like “the fifteen changeless / stones in their five worlds” in a Japanese rock garden. But Snow’s puzzle-making is much more than an idle game. She is trying to piece the world of language together much in the same way that L. Zaseysky, the subject of A.R. Luria’s The Man With a Shattered World, does after being shot in the head. Snow quotes Zaseysky in the epigraph of The Seventy Prepositions: “then I’d take the words, sentences, and ideas I’d collected in this way and begin to write my story in a notebook, regrouping the words and sentences, comparing them with others I’d seen in books.”

In certain places Snow’s use of the child’s textbook as a form reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III. Compare Bishop’s “What is geography? / A description of the earth’s surface” to Snow’s “1. are / Some are saved and some are drowned” then “2. during / Would he hold my hand during it?” Bishop and Snow deconstruct a textbook style formal education which is the first time the task of organizing language becomes institutionalized; both of their analyses result in a sort of vertigo.

Narrative becomes a sparse thread woven through the book, which is somewhat of a departure from Snow’s previous collection For. When snippets of narrative do surface they are signposts the reader must use to find her way to connect the personal to the philosophical: “Mrs. Larney assigned / “Polonius’s advice to La-ray-tees” (we duly misread / ‘Laertes’) / and the Seventy Prepositions, rote.”

In her difficult and urgent world there are several funny moments as well: “when the mental “thwonk”s, my idiot sing-along, / -began” or “Amor fati / The love of fate”--but uh-oh will never / know whether it would have been better to-- / missing--” which arise out of verbal quirks and games. These instances serve the book well by lifting the weight of inquiry and providing range for the reader’s experience.

The integrity and master craftsmanship could easily be overlooked in this collection. Snow attempts to hold the world together via the careful positioning of voice, focusing on minute linguistic pieces. Prepositions are words that pivot a sentence into further meaning, but in this book they are the titles in the final section that serve as the jumping-off point to being pulled further down Alice’s hole: “either way the well was very deep or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and wonder what was going to happen next.”

NEW! Sarah Lang poems

Sarah Lang

TWO POEMS

But here, light begins as water rising

to break as a body falls. A chinook
over patched ground. You are

as a ghost, a stray hair stilled
in photograph already gone. How

to remember
and in what hue.


*

if whether this fell
if pin, gardens
if laugh's forgiving satin
sheen
if neat passes
if neat, bone
if feel and choice to
if of parts
will better
if better a tactile
grouping
if angled in a way
is a home is a spring
in health

NEW! Paul McCormick poem

Paul McCormick

PETRICHOR

Lately, when I dream of home, all the important people have turned to mice. It’s not that sycamores form a canopy to limit my words, but since you died, I’ve had to stand tiptoe on chair to watch the trains arrive beyond the fence line. Buttercups come in a flash.

And go. And what worries me is not whether today’s monkfish is today’s monkfish. “No those are bats.” “No those are swifts.” “No those are swallows.” --But how long he’s been iced. This goes on until the yearbook ends up in a hoax and the names are forgotten.

Festoon the warriors with quotes from Bartlett’s. The queen rodent, the one who’s jumped in the canal after her husband, assures me the bond market is stable. “You don’t look any different than before.” Not until she begins nibbling at my forefinger.

Was it really rhododendron that splayed so many in the hills?

For every bee there’s a man down and what looks like lunar haze is really just a lack of candy? I’m talking about the past: very little fool’s gold to assuage the moss-bitten locks, the underground city. The boy who confused the bat for a bird felt distorted.

Ergonomic deficiencies were the major culprit, though Seattle bore a thin lisp on the totem. When I say distorted I mean “looking through the fish tank.” I’ve shackled myself to the last tree and am preparing a statement for the film crews.

Here’s how it will go.

NEW! Review of Ethan Paquin and James McCorkle

Evidences by James McCorkle. APR, $14.
Accumulus by Ethan Paquin. Salt Publishing, $15.95.

Reviewed by Eric Pankey

I hesitate to refer to James McCorkle's first collection, Evidences, as a debut. Such a label suggests the work of an apprentice. Evidences is a mature and ambitious collection and would seem as ambitious and mature if it were McCorkle's fifth or sixth book. The poems are accessible without every sacrificing their intricate complexity. McCorkle's poems call to mind the epigraph Wallace Stevens used by Mario Rossi for "Evening without Angels": "the great interest of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, and the voluptuousness of looking."

The first sentence of the book's first poem, "Estuarine," announces the bounty of the seen-world's air and light, the precision and bounty with which the body beholds it:

It would be here, the light soaring
Above the grasses, the flats that stretch

Across the bay or river gap, here the light
Molten, the birds glints

Of turned glass, the wash of things
In and out of vision, the water pushing

Out flat, tarnished, tannin seeped,
It would be here what is as

Abstract as light finds its measure,
Heaping up in weight, the sky

Pressured by fullness, where everything
Is below the surface, below light's press.

Whether in the body and the mind, or in both, each poem in Evidences is a journey through time, thought, and landscape, a lyric-meditation that pushes toward the not-yet-known

Where the fresh water of a river and the tidal salt water of the ocean meet and merge is the estuarine. Throughout the collection, the journey across or sojourn at such a threshold is the here. "What we know hurts us, and /" he writes later in "Estuarine," “What isn't known waits." McCorkle reads and rereads the oracular evidences before him, whether an epic-sized painting by Anselm Kiefer or the seasonal changes, but rarely settles upon a reading of what waits to be revealed, deciphered, or envisioned. In "The New Season," “Everything is a guide, I had thought, / But then the world would be here / Only to keep us from being lost.” The mind at work in McCorkle's poems wrestles with and against the conclusive, with and against the lyric's headlong plunge toward an end. He pushes to unearth new evidence, struggles to find what is consequence and what is coincidence.

McCorkle's sentence-making tempts us with the finality of their form. But their termination is then questioned and parsed, and the truth (we thought to be certain) transmutes into the indeterminate and the process begins again. The poems in Evidences keep "The dwindling and the absent tallied" and denote the "Convergences among / Script and light."

McCorkle archives as much as he can because "Everything holds it own beginnings." History, philosophy, physics, and botany serve as ways toward figuring the world, a world, as momentary and uncertain as that world might be. Theodore Roethke writes, "A poet must be a good reporter; but he must be something a good deal more." McCorkle is a good reporter and a good deal more as is evidenced in the closing lines of "Pyromancy," by their voluptuousness of looking and of seeing:

In one thing another becomes and then passes on
To the next, resplendent to the dark, and back,
And yet there all the while--

A blue light that flashes off the Pacific or Gulf of Campeche,
Another sudden divinity that comes, evanescent,

Coming each summer, when the salvia turn to sparks
Among blades of freesia
And spiked globes of beebalm,

That stays with us through winter, iridescing
The snow, the wings of crows,
The water running off our skin as we rise from the streaming bath.

Ethan Paquin's Accumulus is, in fact, two books: a reprint of his lively first book, The Makeshift, which was published in England originally and not available here, and a new collection, Dead July. If James McCorkle's work calls up Stevens and Ashbery in the rational, contemplative, and introspective habit of his syntax, Paquin will remind readers of the mischief that Stevens and Ashbery can make as they follow sound into sense into nonsense. With the book closed before me, I remember a smart, wry, witty, and elegant voice more than any single poem. I do not mean to suggest that the individual poems are not whole, but that style is at the heart of this poet's project and it is a style here that can haunt, tickle, charm, and even throw a knock-out punch.

Where in McCorkle's work, you can observe the path of the mind at work, the mind in conversation with itself, Paquin's mind darts about with almost dizzying speed. Paquin is a poet of leaps and strange juxtapositions, as in one of three poems with the title "Woe":

Such is my little disease--
like a poodle in a meadow
she makes the sky fall out of its joints.

She makes me ask what it's
been through--"What did you go through?"
I crouch. Creaky little melodies--

Can no longer stand the heft
upon which clouds shatter.

Paquin is a poet who is willing to embrace and discard a bit of poetic convention in a single instant, using it for all its power, while admitting to its obsolescence, as with the pathetic fallacy in "Thunder Over Louisville." a love poem of sorts:

Did you come last night

       but at least the lighthouse light
swung around the sky a bit, a bit
of consolation on my lonely grass

                          so even if you didn't

The tongue-in-cheek allows for sentiment--"my lonely grass"--as it mocks sentiment.

Paquin's poems play often at the boundary of the carnivalesque. Both Paquin and McCorkle confront what McCorkle calls in "Disruptive Patterning" "the old press / of contraries, the law of here and gone." Paquin does not strive for gnosis and insight, but something much more ambivalent: the melding of the self as performer and the self as spectator, the merger and marriage of dis-ease and impatience. We laugh, but feel uneasy in our laughter, as in "Bolus": “That bolus Z is no more mealy than your retinal discord, / The caldera in your stomach, the lymphatic gnosis your eyes corral / in vernal seascape--lone boats, toss'd umbrellae, ad inf.”

As Paquin shuttles from "Z" and "ad inf.," we discover a new world unhooked from gravity, where language is a world and the principle product of that world. Accumulus calls to mind poets such as Andre Breton and Paul Eluard. Dismissing Surrealism, Stevens writes that it is "invention without discovery." But Paquin's poems invent and discover. Then they innovate upon the invented, push beyond toward discoveries not always coupled with the previously discovered.

NEW! Paul Kane poems

Paul Kane

Three poems

THE KNOWING

There came a day when to hear an airplane,
whether hard-edged drone or high whine,
gave one pause. We never were innocent,
only incurious within our managed lives,
worshipping household gods, lending unawares
our good name to a curse in others’ mouths.
What has befallen us befell the world
a long time ago--long before we forgot
the club, the knife, the whip were ours too,
that the land absorbed blood as readily as rain.
Look at the garden and the order of these flowers:
circle within circle, like a dance or
a beautiful song that catches the breath.
It is mid-afternoon in late summer,
the sky’s high dome of blue almost infinite.
Layers of sound separate out, each
a different register: the wind in the trees,
the cicadas in the grass, the birds calling
and twittering, and the wind chime ringing
pure notes, improvising a melody.
The eyes behold and are held by color--
the red barn, blue door, all the shades of green
and the riot of the garden. Even
the long shadows are clarifying.
Set this world on fire, you will know its worth.


ADMIRALTY BAY

Bequia, the Grenadines

The man on the mast swings in his red cloth chair
working to fix a snag in the mainsail rigging:
the labor of others is more compelling than
our own. The man in the chair raises and lowers
himself as a water taxi skims past in bright
Caribbean colors, with “African Pride” painted
below the gunwales, red on a yellow background,
like a national flag of dispossession.
Despair is the fruit of disparity, and where
it ripens it never falls far from the free.
The sailboat will cruise away leaving money
in its wake. The motorboat circles the harbor,
catching fares and chasing fairness in the guise
of freedom. No nation is an island says
Geo-Politics; no island is a nation
says Multinational Markets. To develop
importance, you import development
but you outsource sovereignty.
                                       The man in the chair
knows the precariousness of in between
but his yacht attests to wealth that’s grounded in
securities. “African Pride” cuts his
engine and glides to the dock, smooth and practiced,
professional. The yachties are set to sail:
the auxiliary engines billow diesel
fumes on the water as the boat finds a way through
the harbor out of the bay to the open sea.
Naked children, blonde and bronzed, with orange floats
on their arms, splash among the waves on the beach.


THE KOAN

I am the mask I wear and know as little
about the wearer as the puppet the puppeteer.

The life I live isn’t mine, it lives through me
and I through it dance and strut on my strings

in counterfeit. If you told me about myself
I would not believe you, for how can I be other

than what I have known? When I die, who I am
will step out into the light to try another life,

while I--having passed away--will know all
and nothing. In the dark, I am riddled by doubt.

NEW! Ray DiPalma poem

Ray DiPalma

SALT PLUMES

A pleat of light has been here twice
back to the day and the day back
a bearing refused at its source
the stalled mercury fused in its glare
with no conjecture to mark the limit
the motion is modified

convolutions of ancient scripts
half drawn half animal birth

the arch of the back

one surface
one depth
one changing shape

an apology for
crossing the pulse of offspring

       •

Uncommon offerings commonly intuited
a wooden bowl with a gilded edge
five dark stone knives
a small clasped vessel for oil with a floating wick
flanked by two wax birds

space is a factor whose
mapping disturbs
our conversation
a prospect of careful planes
tended by argument and birdsong
then abandoned to palindrome

the flex of barrier
and immaculate reticence
relent in equal shares unseparated
by edge or rhythm’s orientation

amid the subtle claims of threnody
no other sense of praise
than wonder

       •

Predation
mythic proxy inflected
the unanimous struggle of particulars
primed in situ
white for decay
red for the eye
blue beneath the snow

a cold wind noticed too late
now equitably disposed
something brought to completion
though the worm was in it
beyond the forms of Baal

       •

Emptied markers burning in the ruts

deliberative motives
more in balance than real
fixtures of an arguing anxiety
more generous less fragile

neglected by speculation
plainest increase finds the barb
in the morose distortions of small forms
and the thin yellow words of the infatuation

it brings its own set of questions

like something brought to be abandoned
by the side of the road

       •

Description is what has been taken away
the infinite lost in the simulacrum of displacement

a number not in arrangement but farther on
not in the distance but insistence

the hours gained in anonymity
the years lost word by word

contradicted by the myopia of its internal logic
uphill favors sediment

imago the gift imparted
the cross-eyed shuffle of expedience

too late the song too late the door flies open
too late the spoken mercies too late the fabric bone

       •

Wandering ligatures accelerate expansion
to primary acquisition

nomadic recourse
absorbed in gerundive detail
reclaims the discretionary pursuit

essentials
the exactions of light
extolling the riot of genetic ambivalence

no ulterior duplicates
no delivered verges
in shallow equilibrium

only the instruments make rapid movements
adapting to internalized mechanisms
adjusted by accretion

       •

Proliferation
and impossible replicas

regret or loss
become a gesture for that limit

schemes of evidence
offered in contradiction

      •

As intimate as doubt
all that is personal in chance
distinguishes one to one from
the one from the other

reinterpreted in the dark
and shared only with number
the objects in the room
the articles on the desk

are an assent to a consequent perfection
that is abandoned in moving on
pursuing neither a conclusion nor
a new point of entry

what had become unacceptable
is now overburdened only partially remembered
timed to the word denied with nothing
else to take its place or make its order

sustained by mechanism and the simulation
of some capable version or familiar resource
a preemptive predecessor quietly virtual provides
something other than an option

July-August, 2001

NEW! Review of John Kinsella's Peripheral Light

Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems by John Kinsella. Norton, $23.95.

Reviewed by Stephen Cushman

As any equestrian statue has in its family tree the statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Campidoglio in Rome, any author photo in a book of poems published in the United States has somewhere in its bibliographic genealogy the engraving of Whitman at the front of the 1855 Leaves of Grass. Although Whitman hardly invented the convention of introducing readers to books by means of visual images of their authors, he did introduce a new visual vocabulary of body language and clothing: the cocked hat, the open collar and visible undershirt, the fisted right hand on a hip, and the left hand casually pocketed. Like Whitman’s, John Kinsella’s first American book of poems has had what Emerson called “a long foreground,” but unlike Whitman’s, Kinsella’s presents its long foreground in the form of an “Also by John Kinsella” list, placed before its title page, as a kind of poetic passport through U.S. literary immigration: twenty published books, sixteen of them verse, two fiction, one a collection of plays, and one an autobiography. Meanwhile, a visual image of this prolific writer, born in western Australia in 1963 and so only forty when Norton published Peripheral Light, awaits his reader in color on the inside flap of the back cover: longish hair prematurely gray; a youthful, friendly face with a wide, white smile; glasses with large lenses that suggest bookishness and intellect; black open-necked, long-sleeved shirt, black pants, black shoes; a straight look at the camera; and a comfortable pose on a bench in a green-grassed park or on a college campus (he teaches at Kenyon), legs crossed, left arm bent at the elbow and resting on the back of the bench.

Elegant, even dapper, intelligent, balanced between age and youth, balanced between formality and informality, something conventional, something unconventional, openness, reserve: what can be said of the visual vocabulary in the photograph also goes for the nearly two hundred pages of poetry in the book itself. Anyone needing more of an introduction to Kinsella and his work than that provided by the list of other publications and the photograph can plunge into Harold Bloom’s twenty-page prefatory testimonial, about which more later, but unfortunately he or she cannot consult a scrap of chronology, since neither the poet nor his editors thought it necessary to include a single date anywhere in the text or to group poems by previously published books. As a result, a reader coming to Kinsella’s work for the first time cannot tell new poems from selected ones or know which poems came at which points in his career. This large omission will not bother all readers or perhaps even many of them, but those who do notice the complete suppression of chronology may wonder about the reason for withholding such basic information.

A tendency to withhold something informs Kinsella’s work at another level as well. At the uncharacteristically straightforward opening of “Approaching the Anniversary of my Last Meeting with my Son,” the poet puts the matter bluntly: “I never write ‘confessional’ poetry / but your voice--like forked lightning / etching a thunder-dark river--leaves me / no choice but to speak directly.” Saying that he has no choice but to speak directly at this moment implies that at other moments the speaker does have a choice between speaking directly and not doing so and that at such moments he usually opts for the latter mode. No existing law mandates that a poet speak directly, and in the history of American poetry, amidst which Kinsella’s book now asks to be considered, precedents for not doing so abound. Whitman often spoke of approaching a subject, such as the Civil War, by indirection; Dickinson advised us to tell all the truth but to tell it slant; and Frost slyly asserted that poems are the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. If Kinsella chooses as his rule indirectness, so that in his work directness becomes the exception, he has plenty of good company around him. But in fact in his case the matter may present more complications, complications having something to do with his wanting to hold the word “confessional” at arm’s length, handling it gingerly with the typographic tongs of quotation marks. (Interesting that in a book heralded as the poet’s American debut, the copy-editor has retained the Anglo usage of single quotation marks.) What do these marks mean? That Kinsella does not trust us to recognize the term “confessional” as naming a mode of American poetry that has been around since the 1950s? That he feels a little uncomfortable with the term, as though he were saying “so-called confessional” poetry? That he can only approach the term ironically, winking at those of us who know better than to take seriously such a misguided enterprise as writing confessional poetry?

This moment has some awkwardness to it, and its awkwardness provides a glimpse into Kinsella’s poetics. Whether one relishes or despises confessional poetry, to have any accurate sense of what the confessional mode can do at its most effective, one must recognize immediately that it has its own set of conventions and artifices and that among them perhaps the most successful and memorable are those that generate illusions or images of directness, so that what appear to be directly literal first-person revelations actually function as another set of figurative maskings, slantings, and indirections. Surely, Kinsella knows all this at some level, but just as surely a new reader of his will quickly discover that the poetry of Peripheral Light, much of which is good and worth several rereadings, does not often commend itself by way of the personal and the confidential, or by images of the personal and confidential. Instead, as suggested by poem titles such as “Eclogue on a Well,” “Chilli Catharsis,” “Skeleton weed/generative grammar,” “Bluff Knoll Sublimity,” “Anathalamion,” “Skylab and the Theory of Forms,” “Sine Qua Non,” “Lyrical Unification in Gambier,” “First Essay on Linguistic Disobedience” (there are seven such essays), “The Semiotics of a Truck Overturned in Fog,” “Boustrophedon,” and “Intimations of Sign and Subjectivity in York,” the sensibility behind these poems, no matter how deeply involved in personal matters of the heart, chooses to represent itself primarily in a way that tends toward the impersonal language of the head, often self-consciously literate and literary, intellectual, abstract, theoretical, and academic. To say so is not to judge that sensibility and its creations negatively, but rather to attempt to describe quickly and efficiently the delights and instructions they offer, as well as those they do not.

Kinsella claims never to write confessional poetry and distances himself from speaking directly, but confessional poetry and direct poetry are not necessarily the same things. One way to approach Peripheral Light is to study its shifting tides of direct clarity, albeit non-confessional, and indirect opacity. Here are neighboring strophes of the long sequence “Field Notes from Mount Bakewell,” which is dedicated to Bloom:

xiv.
Bandwidth locusts mono rain
bending frequency interlock wandoo
rock sheoak the botanist
Ludwig Preiss, priority one taxon,
and, of course, Thomasia montana,
which I don’t see: oedipal, unreceptive,
adjusting the bandwidth.

xv.
The guy from the chemical company
drinks a half-glass of Herbicide.
“There you go, harmless to humans.”
The farmer, impressed, sprays
and gets his sheep straight back in there.

Fans of Stein, Williams in Kora in Hell, Pound’s Cantos, and Language poetry written over the last twenty-five years can probably find the first strophe perfectly legible (wandoo and sheoak are trees), while fans of simple, free-verse narrative of the kind that has dominated so much American poetry since reductive imitations of Williams began to emerge, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, can feel right at home with the second strophe. These two modes define the extremes of Kinsella’s range, and an impressively wide range it is. The second strophe contains the baldest verse in all of Peripheral Light, and its exceptional uniqueness comes as no surprise in the work of a poet who elsewhere rails against “this sick patriotism to vernacular,” but the first strophe does have various cousins throughout the book, as in this bracingly unvernacular moment from “Diagnostics”: “gnosis epodes dogma / all agisting the form / and offerings.”

Reading Bloom’s introduction to Peripheral Light, one would have no sense of the linguistically disobedient side of Kinsella’s poetic practice, as not surprisingly the Sage of Yale and NYU massively represses his subject’s sweet tooth for verbal play and experimentation in order to adopt him into the Bloomian canon of the strongly sublime and to link him at various points with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, Ruskin, Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Crane, and Ashbery. Kinsella makes clear his fealty to Bloom (is he the Harold to whom the book is jointly dedicated?), and the people at Norton are savvy enough to know that the Bloomian name-recognition factor enhances the marketability of Peripheral Light. But Kinsella has another, un-Bloomian side, or perhaps many other un-Bloomian sides, to his mercurial poetic temperament, and it would be a shame if Bloom’s sponsorship cost him readers who might otherwise find something congenial in his work.

One aspect of poetry, and Kinsella’s in particular, that does not interest Bloom enough to draw commentary from him is formal technique. As lovers of the Romantic sublime can find something in Peripheral Light, along with lovers of Language poetry and its antecedents, so can lovers of traditional poetic form and formalism. Examples of the villanelle and terza rima, along with copious rhyme and meter throughout, will surely please them. Kinsella’s verse may be at its best, combining tautness with suppleness, when he shortens his lines to a two-stress norm, as he does at many moments in the book. Not every formal feature of Peripheral Light reaches impeccability, though. Kinsella has, for example, a weakness for lackluster enjambments between adjectives and nouns, the latter widowed as one-word syntactic remainders, as in “from the heart of the white / silo,” “through its unguent / body,” “out of an uncharacteristic / torpor,” “fizzes and winces with impending / rain,” “at their exclusive city boarding / schools.” Such enjambments become distracting tics, making no use of the Miltonic legacy of drawing sense out from one line to another in order to generate phantom images, double meanings, or opportunities for suggestive misreading, and they mar the verse. Usually, however, the high quality of Kinsella’s lines and stanzas strongly suggests that students who study creative writing with him have the opportunity to learn from a skilled craftsman.

But it would also be a shame if debate over his poetic allegiances, affinities, and bloodlines distracted Kinsella’s potential readers from his most immediate and substantial contribution, the deeply textured evocation of a realm unfamiliar to most Americans, the landscape of western Australia, with its distinctive flora and fauna and features and objects and words that appear throughout Peripheral Light: spinifex, cockatoos, salt paddocks, sheep skulls, mallee, sheoak, dugite, wandoo, echidna, jinker, rosellas, digeridoos, and always everywhere in this oasis of fertility the wheat, which farmers struggle to grow and harvest and which, when gathered in a silo, can drown the boys who play in it. Some may opt to read Kinsella’s poems about the Australian wheatbelt under the literary sign of the pastoral, associating him perhaps with Frost, from whom he clearly has learned. But the imaginative scale here is larger than in Frost, for although Frost gave us poems from the then overlooked world north of Boston, Kinsella has given us, or at least many of us in America, a vision of a wholly different, powerfully strange world, a world in which the “hot glacier” of salt encroaches on the fertile world of wheat, a world dotted by sheep skulls that come to glow and haunt like the visionary totems of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of the American southwest. The scale of accomplishment, at least in the context of geographical representation and all it entails, is analogous to that of Derek Walcott, who first showed so many American readers the beauties and layers of St. Lucia and the Caribbean. It is a large achievement, and although it may be unfair to him and to us to burden a mid-career poet with Bloom’s prophesy of “a major art,” it is an achievement that deserves both attention and gratitude.

NEW! Mark Lamoureux poems

Mark Lamoureux

Three poems from "Astrometry Organon"

KAKKAB

I wait for a voice like rain
on an umbrella, the silver April weather
rushing like molten glass to
the speaking fissure where harp
strings stretch as sutures, solemn
& the white darts fall
where they may--a dark face
backlit, harboring the terror
of words: burns eyes when read
this necronomicon my heart holds
burnished secrets, my poison
idols: a little ghost
collects in the damp lamplight the green
hairs on my barren arms make a banyan
tree. Some wasted thing, a letter
in a bottle in the hull of
the Flying Dutchman: tiny metal balls
in the bloodstream are all that's
left of that adventurer, no dry
season, a shadow tells a story
to the votive candle: I might've forgot
myself in you, remember my arms
as if they were alive, a cage wrought
with jade holds a canary face-
up, I named this constellation
for you before all
those suns went out


ALFECCA MERIDIANA

The heat is her &
it hurts me.

Pull-top
travelogue,

caught in this
black jade loop:

polar memory,
the shoals' air
lifting

off her sandal-blood &
the machete-
colored unsheathed
beach:

months made
of mealy apples,
mothman

helmets, dangling
pendulums
arraigning arcs for
self-prestidigitation.

I hid it in
my sleeve, scatter
ashes or salt

behind the hydraulic
equipment, the swollen
clownface
a plastic tongue

pulls you down
to the weak earth,
the weaker sky,
the weakest of
all my darling you
are paper-pulp,
you are a stickbug's

leg that breaks
in the goddamn
breeze.


MARKAB

Futurist bulb of an office box
shines its red robot vampire
eyes between the old shaman-
rattles of the trees;

when that midnight & its
kooky horses come-
th in the night of the comet, of
comely daggers--well or in
come said horses, the horses'
daggers, that midnight &
its robots, its lonely trees,

its merlot spit--unkempt spirit: Speedy
Gonzalez, enter the gnomes
with the dawn, fat bakers come
with the bacon &

the only remnant of that other life is
those dead spoons dang-
ling from their noses.

NEW! Review of Rae Armantrout's Up to Speed

Up to Speed by Rae Armantrout. Wesleyan University Press, $13.95.

Reviewed by Thomas Fink

A typical poem in Up to Speed, Rae Armantrout’s first collection since Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001), consists of several numbered sections or parts separated by asterisks. Each section tends to have one- to three-line strophes with relatively short lines, and occasionally there is a single-sentence paragraph or one with a few sentences. These formal qualities are not dissimilar from those of Robert Creeley’s post-60s serial poetry, but the quirkiness of the imagery, gender-inflections, and line breaks ensure that the work could never be confused with Creeley’s. Generally, the relationship among Armantrout’s sections is far from transparent, and titles seldom solve the issue.

In “Almost,” Armantrout speaks of disjunction as a humorous defense against death: “the way we joke / by using non-sequiturs, elliptical remarks / which deliberately suppress context / in advance / of time’s rub-out.” The “we” may include Armantrout’s fellow Language Poets. Successive rereadings of her poems enable possible “contexts” to crawl gradually beyond “suppression.” Before giving a more general account of Armantrout’s persistent themes, I will support this contention with a close look at the three-section “Afterlife,” which begins with a terse judgment about “heaven” as a failure, even an exhaustion of imagination: “Heaven is just this: // twined strands / of winking bulbs // and shiny, fragile ornaments / understood to represent grace // weakly.” This strangely lyrical passage embodies “the paleness of representation” without gesturing toward hope of a vital alternative.

Section two, itself divided into four parts in prose, seems to depart drastically from the title and the first section’s critique of heaven; three separate mini-narratives involve a male (not necessarily the same in each) and the last a male’s observation about the speaker’s poetry:

That morning he feel asleep on the couch, or seemed to, giggling
himself awake repeatedly, once saying, “Orange hair! Orange hair
is orangutan hair!”

*

Or when we were in bed, he throwing me into a new position
every few seconds as if frantically searching for something.

*

I followed him to the store because he’d been gone too long. As
I rounded the corner, he was just coming out, but, instead of
turning toward home, he went into the parking lot, scanning it. I
noticed his walk was different.

*

He always said my poems were lonely, as if each thing (word, per-
son) stood still, waiting for meaning.

In each part, efforts at representation seem incomplete; each perception (“thing”)--perhaps waits “for meaning”: an achievement of a goal (assessment of implications of a discovery of sound-relations, sexual pleasure as profound understanding, exposure of unacceptable behavior). Also, they each include at least an implicit reference to home (“the couch,” “in bed,” “instead of turning toward home”), and the fourth may suggest that a linguistic tendency involves “homelessness.” Then again, in retrospect, the opening section is full of imagery--Christmas ornaments--associated with home, and “heaven” or “afterlife” are figures for home in the anticipated life-after-death.

Section three begins, “I think your homeland / is in sleep’s vicinity.” Indeed, “unconscious desire” is “home,” however uncanny. Next, we find talk of “some reiterative / noodling / in absentia, // almost ‘brush-clad’”: is the poet conveying that the dreamer, absent from conscious intention, repeats waking themes in the dream-state, or that the dead, more literally absent, are used by the living who “noodle” around with “pale” conceptions of “afterlife”? The bizarre adjectival phrase “brush-clad” intensifies uncertainty.

The listener/reader is taunted to articulate the impossible--what the speaker/author, “in absentia,” perceives at the time of utterance: “Can you tell me / what I’m seeing?” Each individual’s vision of “home” is probably unique, but includes a desire for psychological security amid uncertainties about living and “afterlife”:

There’s a sound like voices there
singing, “Don’t worry.”

Does that make any sense
to you?

I think you’re being escorted
Between “woe”
and “woven.”

Then the tip encysts
where a search
has been called off

Desire causes listeners to turn mere “sound” into a simile with the command of reassurance. “Between” the two words enclosed in quotes, difference depends on the presence or absence of “v” and “n,” but the words also gesture toward something between hopelessness/homelessness (“woe”) and a perfectly “woven” expectation of “home.” Gaps threaten this weaving of possibility; so does the sense of premature closure, an end to the search for “home,” “heaven,” or alternative concepts. Such closure promotes infection at “the tip” of thinking. Against this infection, the poet refuses to end the last sentence with a period.

As “Afterlife” suggests, many of the book’s poems dramatize self-understanding as a persistent problem: “Does a creature / curve to meet / itself? / Whirlette!” (“Up to Speed”). This is not a matter of “confession” or excessive inwardness, because exploration of the self is intertwined with the measure of the environment. Awareness of the unreliability of whirling perceptions is crucial, and the often comic ambiguities of language engender further complications: “The material world is made up / entirely // of collisions // between otherwise / indefinite objects. // Then what is a collision?” (“Entanglement”). In a grammatical sense, “the indefinite object” is protected from direct “collision” with the subject, but a material “object,” though surely discernible, is not “definite” because of the mutability resulting, in part, from its colliding with other material elements.

The interaction between dream and waking states is a persistent trope for the difficulties of sorting perception, of being “up to speed” with one’s experience: “Can a dreamer / outwit her dream? // Not on a first date” (“My Advantage”); poetry can act as the “second date” of consciousness: “When a dreamer sees she’s dreaming, / it causes figments to disperse” (“End Times”). “Figments” recall “fragments” which the perceiving self must not coerce into an illusory totality, “Luxuriant and spurious code // as art”; the speaker in “End Times” recognizes that the “time-consuming” and “rushed” transcription of experience breeds error, deviation: “It occurs to me that later I may not be able to read what I wrote.” Even though specific, imagistic description--“Solemn, / blunt flash of sun / off the window / of a Coor’s Light / truck” (“Form”)---appears in many Armantrout poems, such flashes of perception are not reliable touchstones for sensory understanding but keep the individual “an ignorance / on the point of revelation” (“The Fit”).

In “Box,” a poem consisting of single-line stanzas, a dream image suggests how time and the representation of death are the problematic elements for the self, who tries out defensive clowning: “We laugh // to accommodate death. // Dream someone’s placed me // in a red, plastic box // from which now I pop up, // clown-like, // into consciousness. // A time when we agree // the present does not exist, // has never existed.” Of course, how can the eternal non-existence of the present be conceptualized in time as “a time”? How can the living imaginatively enter the “box” of the dead, the non-space of the absence of consciousness/unconsciousness?

Laughter cannot “accommodate” this “beyond,” and the language of paradox exposes its own limitations. It is not Armantrout’s job to resolve such difficulties, but to “play” them on her subtle instrument, to pursue them elaborately, from diverse angles. She masterfully keeps exposing “thought” as “a wish for relation / doubling as a boundary” (“Interior Design”) and keeps representing the frailties of such boundaries.

Note: Rae Armantrout has six new poems forthcoming in the 20th anniversary issue of Verse.

NEW! Joseph Donahue poem

Joseph Donahue

A SERVANT OF GOD WITHOUT A HEAD V

Back then, the dying lay
hypnotized. We let each see
his desire. (Dialysis took all day.)
One might love making birdcages:
Step into your shop. Another,
crave heaven: climb this street --
See the far off glowing wall.
We’re out of your wine,
the waiter concedes, words
cut up in clatter, face starred
in disco light from the dance floor.
But we have another, a lot like it,
from a vineyard called Clouds At Night.
There will be a gap in the black
when you die. Luckily, you are
board certified for instrument flight,
or the joy of seeing miles in darkness,
cities and farmhouses scattered along rivers
would be a fireball as the plane races
into a mountain, upside down.
So, Days of Awe dwindle away.
A moon, unseen for 47 years,
announces “hawg killin’ weather.”
Leaves turn the color of bourbon
and hogs tremble deep in their guts.
What dark force has deleted
the Email refuting all this? What
devious legion from your past drags
out the nickname you hoped would be
forgotten, O "Pythagoras Reborn?"
(On the news, Guliani lets slip --
The Surrealists are back from the dead.
They have consented to reside here,
in New York City, under cover,
for the foreseeable future.
Reporters stir, astonished,
shouting out names. Breton?
Artaud? Desnos? Eluard? Dumal?
Perhaps the long lost Pierre Unik?
Marcel Noll, not seen since
the Spanish Civil War?
The mayor lifts his hand:
If you knew who and where
they were, he cautions, it could
compromise their dreaming.)
Or here, in the swamp of
Neveranger Isle, where our souls
turn the deepening blue of patients
in an imperiled ward. And I lie down
where your lovely scent falls
like rose petals from a cloud,
and the pain under the bandage
on my side flares. Elsewhere
in this video game called
Acts of the Apostles,
an elixir wagon speeds
into the next county, just
ahead of the sheriff, and the voice
of W. C. Fields rises in the last
flickering of the day's flame
over a forest of thirsty snakes,
at the hour the grandson of
Herod kills the brother of Christ,
hour I open the home testing kit,
piss like there’s life inside m . . .
We are trading our hopes
away like derivatives based on
cloud flow over the Valley of the Kings,
where a circus tumbler turned adventurer
finds, now, the tomb of whoever
I once was: 1) Osiris, 2) Eros,
3) Christ, 4) Marcus Antonius,
or 5) whoever’s viscera now
win rebirth as bait in that final
pit bull match behind the military
school, where leaves are turning
the color of a lemon cake made
for a birthday, if this were Honolulu,
and the night sky were a blindfold,
black, as the thicket from which
Abraham pulled the lamb, black
as the bodice of a pop diva.

Note: Joseph Donahue has two new poems forthcoming in the 20th anniversary issue of Verse.

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.