With all the talk of the latest Best American Poetry, edited by Paul Muldoon, Verse would like to call attention to another BAP edited by a non-U.S. poet: The Best Australian Poetry 2005, edited by Peter Porter.
Highlights include Javant Biarujia's prose poem "Icarus," MTC Cronin's "The Dust in Everything," Michael Farrell's "Poem without Dice," Jennifer Harrison's "The Lovely Utterly Cold Snow," J.S. Harry's 15-page "Journeys West of 'War,'" John Kinsella's "The Vital Waters," Anthony Lawrence's "Wandering Albatross," Jennifer Maiden's "Thunderbolt's Way," Peter Rose's "Quotidian," Craig Sherborne's "Journo," John Tranter's "Transatlantic," Chris Wallace-Crabbe's "From the Island, Bundanon," and Fay Zwicky's "Makassar, 1956."
Unlike Les Murray (who edited The Best Australian Poems 2004 for another publisher), Porter does not include his own work in the anthology.
One drawback in this series is its general editors' decision not to include poems by Australian poets published in journals outside Australia. This is unfortunate because a lot of Australian poets have been publishing in U.S. journals like Verse, Slope, TriQuarterly, and others. This policy also restricts the number of journals represented in each issue (BAP 2005 features work from only 14 periodicals). Granted, it makes sense for Australian journals to represent most of the poems published in the series, but it would be useful--and more accurate, in relation to Australian poets' publishing practices--to include U.S., British, and online journals that regularly publish Australian poets. This year's guest editor is a case in point: he lives in London and regularly publishes his own poems in non-Australian periodicals.
An international literary journal from 1984 to 2018, Verse now administers the Tomaž Šalamun Prize.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Monday, September 12, 2005
NEW! Review of The Tiny
The Tiny #1, edited by Gina Myers & Gabriella Torres. $8.
Reviewed by Summer Block
New York may be a sprawling metropolis, but its new magazine The Tiny is a tribute to "small" poems. Without an official mission statement or editor's letter, The Tiny nonetheless presents itself as a skillful compilation of the careful, the precise, and the minutely observed. At a respectable 6x8, the journal is not unreasonably small, but retains its spare feel with clean fonts, a simple layout, and an absence of drawings, notes, or other cluttering marginalia. One may take issue with the tricky reverse cover, its retro-lettering served up in an unprepossessing pink and brown. Still, the same respect for simplicity is evidenced here: "The Tiny" is spelled out without any further information; interested parties can repair to the copyright page for credits, contact information, and volume number.
Inside, the magazine is full of elegant, austere work, most of it comprised of few words. These tiny poems aim to pack as much curiosity and cunning as possible into a handful of lines. For rookie poets, ellipses and telling pauses can be a mere gesture towards mystery, a way of willfully obfuscating the message, a haughty antagonism to the reader. But when ably handled, the tiny poem is not only complete, but dense, self-contained, essential--every word is carefully chosen, nothing is filler.
The most powerful small poems are those that marshal nuances, that put telling gestures to work in the service of big ideas. Aaron McCollough’s "The First Poem of Jan Vandermeer" is full of such weighty gestures, with its wry musing on "my Michigan (camero hood propped / up with a hockey stick) of Netherlands." Humor is often in short supply where serious poetry is concerned, but Daniel Magers displays a rare, self-deprecating wit in his piece "The Dylan Songbook," a meditation on growing older and inward-looking.
In other places, small poems hold out the possibility of intriguing narratives, of landscapes that the imagination is left to populate. "Dramatis Personae," by Kristin Abraham, demonstrates the possibility of a tiny poem to suggest so much, with its cast list for an imagined "mortality play." Shaefer Hall's "And Then The Whole Place Got Dark" is cinematic rather than theatrical--a movie told in fifteen lines. Maggie Nelson, Del Ray Cross, and Karl Parker are others that deserve special mention for their extremely intricate pieces. In "From a Purely Mechanical Standpoint," Mary Ann Samyn discusses the experience of producing these carefully crafted missives, where "Completion made its small animal yawn."
A number of entries are nature poems--and sometimes, poems that examine the possibility of nature poems in the modern world. The beautiful "Nocturne," by Amira Thoron, is perhaps the most successful, in which night is populated by "the viscous breath / of moles, the furtive // diggings of a skunk, / grubs coiled / in moonlight." Meanwhile, with "In the Pastoral I am a Deep Red Rose," Mike Sikkema ruminates on "pixies and billy goats," daisies that are "safe and feral," and "coin-operated epiphanies."
These delicate selections are lent additional weight by the inclusion of two well-considered essays, Samyn's "Two Bits of Tiny" and Geof Huth's "Why Visual Poetry." The latter, followed by several examples, seems a bit of a departure from the rest of the journal's collection, especially when concrete and other visual poetry styles are often associated with the large, public, and outrageous. What unites Huth with the other "tiny" poets is his use of revealing details to suggest more than what is being said.
The first issue of The Tiny is rich with reference, a network of allusions that stretches far beyond this magazine to incorporate Shakespeare, Rilke, and Christopher Guest, among many others. Aaron Raymond, in particular, creates a conversation between Hamlet's ill-fated friends in his "Rosencrantz Letters" (excerpted in the magazine), and in the process enters a conversation about "Hamlet" that encompasses hundreds of years and extends around the world.
If the creative inspirations that drive The Tiny's inaugural poets are wide-ranging, their social network can feel insular. It's no surprise that these very gifted writers should be accomplished, published poets assembled from a variety of MFA programs and journals, but their biographies reveal that by and large, they have all published previous work in at least one of a small group of other journals, the same small group of journals The Tiny links to on its website. There is certainly nothing inappropriate about this, but hopefully an open call for submissions will diversify future volumes of this densely powerful magazine and allow new writers the chance to be a part of this exciting new project.
Reviewed by Summer Block
New York may be a sprawling metropolis, but its new magazine The Tiny is a tribute to "small" poems. Without an official mission statement or editor's letter, The Tiny nonetheless presents itself as a skillful compilation of the careful, the precise, and the minutely observed. At a respectable 6x8, the journal is not unreasonably small, but retains its spare feel with clean fonts, a simple layout, and an absence of drawings, notes, or other cluttering marginalia. One may take issue with the tricky reverse cover, its retro-lettering served up in an unprepossessing pink and brown. Still, the same respect for simplicity is evidenced here: "The Tiny" is spelled out without any further information; interested parties can repair to the copyright page for credits, contact information, and volume number.
Inside, the magazine is full of elegant, austere work, most of it comprised of few words. These tiny poems aim to pack as much curiosity and cunning as possible into a handful of lines. For rookie poets, ellipses and telling pauses can be a mere gesture towards mystery, a way of willfully obfuscating the message, a haughty antagonism to the reader. But when ably handled, the tiny poem is not only complete, but dense, self-contained, essential--every word is carefully chosen, nothing is filler.
The most powerful small poems are those that marshal nuances, that put telling gestures to work in the service of big ideas. Aaron McCollough’s "The First Poem of Jan Vandermeer" is full of such weighty gestures, with its wry musing on "my Michigan (camero hood propped / up with a hockey stick) of Netherlands." Humor is often in short supply where serious poetry is concerned, but Daniel Magers displays a rare, self-deprecating wit in his piece "The Dylan Songbook," a meditation on growing older and inward-looking.
In other places, small poems hold out the possibility of intriguing narratives, of landscapes that the imagination is left to populate. "Dramatis Personae," by Kristin Abraham, demonstrates the possibility of a tiny poem to suggest so much, with its cast list for an imagined "mortality play." Shaefer Hall's "And Then The Whole Place Got Dark" is cinematic rather than theatrical--a movie told in fifteen lines. Maggie Nelson, Del Ray Cross, and Karl Parker are others that deserve special mention for their extremely intricate pieces. In "From a Purely Mechanical Standpoint," Mary Ann Samyn discusses the experience of producing these carefully crafted missives, where "Completion made its small animal yawn."
A number of entries are nature poems--and sometimes, poems that examine the possibility of nature poems in the modern world. The beautiful "Nocturne," by Amira Thoron, is perhaps the most successful, in which night is populated by "the viscous breath / of moles, the furtive // diggings of a skunk, / grubs coiled / in moonlight." Meanwhile, with "In the Pastoral I am a Deep Red Rose," Mike Sikkema ruminates on "pixies and billy goats," daisies that are "safe and feral," and "coin-operated epiphanies."
These delicate selections are lent additional weight by the inclusion of two well-considered essays, Samyn's "Two Bits of Tiny" and Geof Huth's "Why Visual Poetry." The latter, followed by several examples, seems a bit of a departure from the rest of the journal's collection, especially when concrete and other visual poetry styles are often associated with the large, public, and outrageous. What unites Huth with the other "tiny" poets is his use of revealing details to suggest more than what is being said.
The first issue of The Tiny is rich with reference, a network of allusions that stretches far beyond this magazine to incorporate Shakespeare, Rilke, and Christopher Guest, among many others. Aaron Raymond, in particular, creates a conversation between Hamlet's ill-fated friends in his "Rosencrantz Letters" (excerpted in the magazine), and in the process enters a conversation about "Hamlet" that encompasses hundreds of years and extends around the world.
If the creative inspirations that drive The Tiny's inaugural poets are wide-ranging, their social network can feel insular. It's no surprise that these very gifted writers should be accomplished, published poets assembled from a variety of MFA programs and journals, but their biographies reveal that by and large, they have all published previous work in at least one of a small group of other journals, the same small group of journals The Tiny links to on its website. There is certainly nothing inappropriate about this, but hopefully an open call for submissions will diversify future volumes of this densely powerful magazine and allow new writers the chance to be a part of this exciting new project.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
NEW! Review of Peter Gizzi
Periplum and Other Poems 1987-1992 by Peter Gizzi. Salt Publishing.
Reviewed by Anthony Hawley
In “Deus ex Machina,” one of the many outstanding poems from Peter Gizzi’s Periplum, the poet makes the following declaration:
If read as a kind of ars poetica, these lines indicate exactly what Gizzi makes it his business to do in Periplum: craft a new and personal geography. And, fortunately, Salt Publishing’s recent reissue of Gizzi’s Periplum, Music for Films, and Hours of the Book again provides the reader with a copy of the poet’s valuable atlas. Periplum and Other Poems 1987-1992 brings together all of Gizzi’s poetry outside of Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998) and Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), and represents the poet’s humorous and sorrowful lyric, sometimes nonchalant, often seriously concerned with fashioning a unique map of the real. Here, in his excellent early work, Gizzi plots the “coordinates” of the seen and unseen, attempting to reconcile the sticky relationship between “ghosts” and “talk.”
First published by Avec Books in 1992, Periplum takes a youthful, surreptitious, but likewise sincere attitude towards its subjects. A very real current of grief runs throughout the poems in Periplum, a grief that both mourns and feeds on absence, on the gaping land that the book attempts to map: “And there are fissures too small and / too many, everywhere, to find.” Tension between what can and can’t be apprehended runs throughout this book. Consider the following section of “Mise en Scène,” which begins with a literal mapping of space:
Here, the reader gets the impression that dissemination of self and self-knowledge threaten speaker and personal pronouns alike. Only the “achievement / of evening silence” can compensate for the very public and publicized world (“commerce”), and the poem becomes a kind of anthem for the vanquished. But if these songs sing allegiance they do so to an interior, to “the music in our night space” from these later lines in “Mise en Scène,” or to the “inescapable cant of the axis/heart” that Gizzi elsewhere mentions:
Perhaps in this loud climate, a poetic rendering can only be accomplished by writing an “alphabet of silence.” Or perhaps any other kind of alphabet besides a silent one would be inadequate for these times. In either case, what strikes the reader is that the alphabet is directly related to the flesh: “the formal alphabet of silence / . . .reveals a language of the spine and sphinx / of wrists and ankles.” In Periplum, as Gizzi maps, charts, and graphs anew, weary of trusting others’ prefabricated divisions, he turns to the body to help him accomplish his re-mapping, “for body is an instrument.” The landscape of the book privileges intimate scenes and addresses that plot the points for a phenomenology in a fractured, untrustworthy environ, where the speaker and the spoken to often dissolve into each other.
Formally, the long, thirty-plus-page sequence of brief, highly compressed lyric in Music for Films (published the same year as Periplum, this time by Paradigm Press) offers another sort of reading experience than Periplum does. But the two books’ conceits are not dissimilar:
As with Periplum, Gizzi is still “telling the real,” though perhaps in a more “broken” manner. While Periplum often displays an absence, Music for Films enacts it. The syntactical compression, almost Zukofskian, makes for an Objectivist blending of body and space, in which the distinction between foreground and background dissolves and lines like those above appear a single “thing.” Interestingly the “+” sign that so frequently divides passages in Salt’s “Music for Films” didn’t appear anywhere in the original Paradigm Press volume. The latter’s lack of a divisive sign further enacted the blending of figures and ideas. The new volume, however, forces a pause that dramatically alters the experience of the book. The reader is forced to stop after “I was telling the real” before proceeding to “as approach of”--a strange, if not significant, alteration.
Much of Gizzi’s work takes its cue from Spicer, and Gizzi is, of course, a great reader of Spicer. Nowhere is Spicer’s Letters to Lorca felt more than when reading the line “I was telling the real.” When Spicer writes, “I want to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste,” the reader can trace an almost direct line between Gizzi and Spicer. Both poets are trying to fashion “live moons, live lemons, live boys in bathing suits . . . a collage of the real.” Gizzi also sometimes reproduces the self-deriding tone so characteristic of Spicer’s poems. However, he is at his best when combining this tone with a kind of New York School levity, and in this way, he differs from Spicer. Take, for example, the following lines from “Life Continues”:
What has always struck me about this poem, and many of Gizzi’s, is his ability to put forth serious concerns about meaning production while not taking himself too seriously. To me, the first paragraph is so thought-filled it seems about to burst. But the strangely beautiful and funny second paragraph rescues the first from preciousness. Thus the poet can get away with “question[ing] the infinite” as long as he remains self-aware and aware of his “gnarl” and returns to “the humidity of touching,” itself enough of a “blur,” or as Gizzi says in “Mise en Scène,” a “sphinx.”
In “Poem for John Wieners,” from “Other Poems,” the third and final section of the Salt volume, Gizzi makes one of his strongest cases for the poet’s orphic role:
Much of the poem’s strength lies in the choice to use comparatively relaxed syntax and casual diction to convey so revelatory a message. That the poet is bound--bound to reality--comes as no surprise. But the very dichotomy in Gizzi’s work between having to “tell the real” and not being a poet because “I live in the actual world” makes the work intriguing beyond its years. We are lucky to have it available again.
Reviewed by Anthony Hawley
In “Deus ex Machina,” one of the many outstanding poems from Peter Gizzi’s Periplum, the poet makes the following declaration:
I will compare knowing and saying
and tell of such coordinates
that run together to the river replete with its ghosts
in this instance of talk.
If read as a kind of ars poetica, these lines indicate exactly what Gizzi makes it his business to do in Periplum: craft a new and personal geography. And, fortunately, Salt Publishing’s recent reissue of Gizzi’s Periplum, Music for Films, and Hours of the Book again provides the reader with a copy of the poet’s valuable atlas. Periplum and Other Poems 1987-1992 brings together all of Gizzi’s poetry outside of Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998) and Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003), and represents the poet’s humorous and sorrowful lyric, sometimes nonchalant, often seriously concerned with fashioning a unique map of the real. Here, in his excellent early work, Gizzi plots the “coordinates” of the seen and unseen, attempting to reconcile the sticky relationship between “ghosts” and “talk.”
First published by Avec Books in 1992, Periplum takes a youthful, surreptitious, but likewise sincere attitude towards its subjects. A very real current of grief runs throughout the poems in Periplum, a grief that both mourns and feeds on absence, on the gaping land that the book attempts to map: “And there are fissures too small and / too many, everywhere, to find.” Tension between what can and can’t be apprehended runs throughout this book. Consider the following section of “Mise en Scène,” which begins with a literal mapping of space:
The shortest distance between
two points is around the world
and commerce is a word we can
appropriate to use here, but more
than this it is our achievement
of evening silence. A scarf
billowing, draped upon a door latch
in fragrant air. Vulnerable is
another word to attach to this
opening, a vivisection I fill
with eyelash teeth.
Here, the reader gets the impression that dissemination of self and self-knowledge threaten speaker and personal pronouns alike. Only the “achievement / of evening silence” can compensate for the very public and publicized world (“commerce”), and the poem becomes a kind of anthem for the vanquished. But if these songs sing allegiance they do so to an interior, to “the music in our night space” from these later lines in “Mise en Scène,” or to the “inescapable cant of the axis/heart” that Gizzi elsewhere mentions:
. . . Although
there was no piano to state the theme
there is music in our night space.
Breath making skin upon ribs taut.
That the formal alphabet of silence
(with or without a future) reveals
a language of the spine and sphinx
of wrists and ankles.
Perhaps in this loud climate, a poetic rendering can only be accomplished by writing an “alphabet of silence.” Or perhaps any other kind of alphabet besides a silent one would be inadequate for these times. In either case, what strikes the reader is that the alphabet is directly related to the flesh: “the formal alphabet of silence / . . .reveals a language of the spine and sphinx / of wrists and ankles.” In Periplum, as Gizzi maps, charts, and graphs anew, weary of trusting others’ prefabricated divisions, he turns to the body to help him accomplish his re-mapping, “for body is an instrument.” The landscape of the book privileges intimate scenes and addresses that plot the points for a phenomenology in a fractured, untrustworthy environ, where the speaker and the spoken to often dissolve into each other.
Formally, the long, thirty-plus-page sequence of brief, highly compressed lyric in Music for Films (published the same year as Periplum, this time by Paradigm Press) offers another sort of reading experience than Periplum does. But the two books’ conceits are not dissimilar:
silence within lives
the teeming meaning gleaned
annealed
from a broken tongue
broken song
I was telling the real
+
as approach of
afternoon
had your mouth
about it
As with Periplum, Gizzi is still “telling the real,” though perhaps in a more “broken” manner. While Periplum often displays an absence, Music for Films enacts it. The syntactical compression, almost Zukofskian, makes for an Objectivist blending of body and space, in which the distinction between foreground and background dissolves and lines like those above appear a single “thing.” Interestingly the “+” sign that so frequently divides passages in Salt’s “Music for Films” didn’t appear anywhere in the original Paradigm Press volume. The latter’s lack of a divisive sign further enacted the blending of figures and ideas. The new volume, however, forces a pause that dramatically alters the experience of the book. The reader is forced to stop after “I was telling the real” before proceeding to “as approach of”--a strange, if not significant, alteration.
Much of Gizzi’s work takes its cue from Spicer, and Gizzi is, of course, a great reader of Spicer. Nowhere is Spicer’s Letters to Lorca felt more than when reading the line “I was telling the real.” When Spicer writes, “I want to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste,” the reader can trace an almost direct line between Gizzi and Spicer. Both poets are trying to fashion “live moons, live lemons, live boys in bathing suits . . . a collage of the real.” Gizzi also sometimes reproduces the self-deriding tone so characteristic of Spicer’s poems. However, he is at his best when combining this tone with a kind of New York School levity, and in this way, he differs from Spicer. Take, for example, the following lines from “Life Continues”:
The world happens at your doorstep. There is no method to
decipher the day. The birds and the bees are both moving geometric patterns. To connect one plain with another horizon. There are doors everywhere we walk and occasionally stumble upon a carcass, which now is only a frame--the door is ajar. This place once marked by an exit. Today it is a wall. Where is the magician of openings?
To question the infinite is an inarticulate gnarl, better to blur at the humidity of touching. Love, I stopped by to pitch some woo, we walked to town in Chinese shoes. There are doors into which we can enter, to move through this room, indecision and terror.
What has always struck me about this poem, and many of Gizzi’s, is his ability to put forth serious concerns about meaning production while not taking himself too seriously. To me, the first paragraph is so thought-filled it seems about to burst. But the strangely beautiful and funny second paragraph rescues the first from preciousness. Thus the poet can get away with “question[ing] the infinite” as long as he remains self-aware and aware of his “gnarl” and returns to “the humidity of touching,” itself enough of a “blur,” or as Gizzi says in “Mise en Scène,” a “sphinx.”
In “Poem for John Wieners,” from “Other Poems,” the third and final section of the Salt volume, Gizzi makes one of his strongest cases for the poet’s orphic role:
I am not a poet
because I live in the actual world
where fear divides light
I have no protection against
the real evils and money
which is the world
where most lives are spent
Much of the poem’s strength lies in the choice to use comparatively relaxed syntax and casual diction to convey so revelatory a message. That the poet is bound--bound to reality--comes as no surprise. But the very dichotomy in Gizzi’s work between having to “tell the real” and not being a poet because “I live in the actual world” makes the work intriguing beyond its years. We are lucky to have it available again.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
NEW! Review of Steve Benson
Open Clothes by Steve Benson. Atelos, $12.95.
Reviewed by Thomas Fink
Self-reflexivity is built into the structure of Open Clothes. The “After Notes” cites the procedures that Steve Benson used to generate the book’s poetry/prose-poetry and experiences he underwent in the process: “The words in the texts in this book are, with extremely rare exceptions, just the same words as were written or spoken in the acts of composition described below.” Benson also includes a transcript of a question and answer session with him about a talk-piece transcribed in the book. Framed from within, this volume by a noted Language Poet features three poems composed of mostly declarative sentences and eight--like Ron Silliman’s quarter-century-old Sunset Debris--entirely in question form. The book’s first poem “’Until the Fall’ was written over thirteen months, one line at a time, on a folded sheet that Benson kept “in a back pocket of [his] pants.” He sought “to come up with each line at a different occasion, without trying to stay faithful to any other governing plan, theme, or principles about how to write the poem.” Some poems, like “Crows Landing,” were spoken without premeditation into a tape recorder; others, like “Did the Light Just Go Out,” materialized in front of a live audience.
What, then, is “open” about Open Clothes? If actual words are “clothes” (fabric) on the body (process) of writing, Benson’s procedures, precluding revision and thus discouraging a great deal of conscious control over theme, development, patterns of imagery, and tropes, etc., “open” his texts to accident and heterogeneity, including unanticipated elements of closure (“clothing”?): “So there’s the quality of closure and openness that occurs at every point, at least potentially.” Contrasting his “talk poems” with David Antin’s more narrative work, Benson admits that, since he is “channeling from all the contingencies . . . of thought, mood, the room, what I saw this afternoon . . . to make some verbal material,” “whether the . . . material is continuous or discontinuous is . . . pretty much out of [his] control.” This is no paean to Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought”; Benson understands the risk that “first thought” might be dully thought:
Given how revision is proscribed, the poetry of Open Clothes cannot always manage this opening passage’s lyric energy, balancing evocative concreteness and cogent abstraction. “Crows Landing” includes the following forgettable lines: “The darkness / the loo k/ we’re almost there / raindrops glistening on the windshield / streams in the darkness.” But why hold Benson to higher standards than someone like the less experimental A.R. Ammons, whose meandering Tape for the Turn of the Year, for example, has its share of dull stretches about weather?
In some of Benson’s question-texts, exploration of the process unfolding and its contexts and intriguing juxtaposition of questions foster powerful overtones and undertones. The five-page paragraph “Am I just listening to myself think” begins: “Am I just listening to myself think? What makes you say that? Who do you think you are?” The defensive second question and indignant third one suggest that a respondent has somehow given an affirmative answer to the first, but ironically, by acknowledging the perspective of a “you,” the talk-poet may undermine the sense of solipsism. In holding the floor, he lacks access to the audience’s spoken words, but he may scrutinize their reactions while “listening to [himself] think.” Of course, “you” could be a signifier for another side of him. Further, the third sentence might serve as a literal, honest call for audience-members’ articulation of subject-positions--outside this procedural framework. Many of the prose-poems’ questions point to the irony of exclusively using the interrogative mode while being unanswerable, except perhaps in an interpreter’s transposition of a subsequent question into an answer. Benson soon asks: “Can the answers trail slowly behind like slugs on leashes, or do they have to race ahead like frisky terriers?”
Clearly, Benson in this prose-poem is not “just listening to [himself] think”; as its ending indicates, he raises problems of political intersubjectivity. First asking whether the tremendous “inequivalence . . . between the experience of someone who is safe and faced with the challenges of balancing wants and needs and” that of one “whose physical and psychological integrity is so repeatedly in jeopardy and occasionally violated to the point of trauma” destroys possibilities of “communication between them,” the poet pursues the issue from various angles:
Even if Benson, speaking in the middle of W. Bush’s first administration, overtly criticizes how the “inner disturbance” of individual egos undermines the efficacy of social justice movements, the accretion of his questions shows how the economics of the expenditure of physical and psychological “energy” in both “private, intimate” matters and public efforts becomes too complex for simple yes/no answers or black/white moral judgments. For the reader/listener, these questions can be much more than rhetorical.
Reviewed by Thomas Fink
Self-reflexivity is built into the structure of Open Clothes. The “After Notes” cites the procedures that Steve Benson used to generate the book’s poetry/prose-poetry and experiences he underwent in the process: “The words in the texts in this book are, with extremely rare exceptions, just the same words as were written or spoken in the acts of composition described below.” Benson also includes a transcript of a question and answer session with him about a talk-piece transcribed in the book. Framed from within, this volume by a noted Language Poet features three poems composed of mostly declarative sentences and eight--like Ron Silliman’s quarter-century-old Sunset Debris--entirely in question form. The book’s first poem “’Until the Fall’ was written over thirteen months, one line at a time, on a folded sheet that Benson kept “in a back pocket of [his] pants.” He sought “to come up with each line at a different occasion, without trying to stay faithful to any other governing plan, theme, or principles about how to write the poem.” Some poems, like “Crows Landing,” were spoken without premeditation into a tape recorder; others, like “Did the Light Just Go Out,” materialized in front of a live audience.
What, then, is “open” about Open Clothes? If actual words are “clothes” (fabric) on the body (process) of writing, Benson’s procedures, precluding revision and thus discouraging a great deal of conscious control over theme, development, patterns of imagery, and tropes, etc., “open” his texts to accident and heterogeneity, including unanticipated elements of closure (“clothing”?): “So there’s the quality of closure and openness that occurs at every point, at least potentially.” Contrasting his “talk poems” with David Antin’s more narrative work, Benson admits that, since he is “channeling from all the contingencies . . . of thought, mood, the room, what I saw this afternoon . . . to make some verbal material,” “whether the . . . material is continuous or discontinuous is . . . pretty much out of [his] control.” This is no paean to Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought”; Benson understands the risk that “first thought” might be dully thought:
It is winter
Can I write a poem one sentence at a time?
I can do anything
Still I hope for more
I hope the sky will pop blue
In a moment, it has
It has a place in the remote present
One frame at a time.
Given how revision is proscribed, the poetry of Open Clothes cannot always manage this opening passage’s lyric energy, balancing evocative concreteness and cogent abstraction. “Crows Landing” includes the following forgettable lines: “The darkness / the loo k/ we’re almost there / raindrops glistening on the windshield / streams in the darkness.” But why hold Benson to higher standards than someone like the less experimental A.R. Ammons, whose meandering Tape for the Turn of the Year, for example, has its share of dull stretches about weather?
In some of Benson’s question-texts, exploration of the process unfolding and its contexts and intriguing juxtaposition of questions foster powerful overtones and undertones. The five-page paragraph “Am I just listening to myself think” begins: “Am I just listening to myself think? What makes you say that? Who do you think you are?” The defensive second question and indignant third one suggest that a respondent has somehow given an affirmative answer to the first, but ironically, by acknowledging the perspective of a “you,” the talk-poet may undermine the sense of solipsism. In holding the floor, he lacks access to the audience’s spoken words, but he may scrutinize their reactions while “listening to [himself] think.” Of course, “you” could be a signifier for another side of him. Further, the third sentence might serve as a literal, honest call for audience-members’ articulation of subject-positions--outside this procedural framework. Many of the prose-poems’ questions point to the irony of exclusively using the interrogative mode while being unanswerable, except perhaps in an interpreter’s transposition of a subsequent question into an answer. Benson soon asks: “Can the answers trail slowly behind like slugs on leashes, or do they have to race ahead like frisky terriers?”
Clearly, Benson in this prose-poem is not “just listening to [himself] think”; as its ending indicates, he raises problems of political intersubjectivity. First asking whether the tremendous “inequivalence . . . between the experience of someone who is safe and faced with the challenges of balancing wants and needs and” that of one “whose physical and psychological integrity is so repeatedly in jeopardy and occasionally violated to the point of trauma” destroys possibilities of “communication between them,” the poet pursues the issue from various angles:
Is it possible to get on the phone with someone in this kind of fix and not waste their
time? Is there any good reason not to, again, write to Washington, read the data, talk
with friends and family about it, and get to work organizing? Is your heart a safe place? When do you listen to your fatigue and try to stop putting out so much energy? How do you know when to research and when to act out? What inner disturbance undermines that impulse to engage in social organization to correct injustice and cruelty? What makes private, intimate distress at humiliations suffered in an intimate relationship overwhelm pragmatically evaluated efforts to do the right thing?
Even if Benson, speaking in the middle of W. Bush’s first administration, overtly criticizes how the “inner disturbance” of individual egos undermines the efficacy of social justice movements, the accretion of his questions shows how the economics of the expenditure of physical and psychological “energy” in both “private, intimate” matters and public efforts becomes too complex for simple yes/no answers or black/white moral judgments. For the reader/listener, these questions can be much more than rhetorical.
Monday, August 29, 2005
NEW! Clayton A. Couch poem
Clayton A. Couch
from SENTIENCE
33.
Quits and walks, or presupposes a redneck firecracker party. They're the dead come knocking. Where the shades are drawn and cats careen into woods. Savor my head, drawn up at dawn. That I quit is self-evident, but what is drawn against the dead is another paragraph. The ceiling was described as chaotic seething. Strange organisms, shadow people if you will, came running for their offspring. You can see them where your eyes meet the back of your head. To invite your hair to dinner. My, what bad table manners you've displayed in front of your neck! Or, to heave the same hometown down the gullet. Wonder what they're doing? Diagramming verbal infusions for the sake of the rugrats and fixing chicken casserole. Mustard seeds to grow on, and the smell of red onions mixed into guacamole. Wine kicks back, and I'm on Amazon giving away cash. Approximately 3.5 billion years ago, a large meteor collided with ocean. Only bacteria on high mountains survived, and you're sure that Shangri-La had something to do with it. Recent tests would say that we're due for a whole lot of wreckage, which is another way of saying that the space debris will eventually write an alphabet of craters across the Midwest. Burial mounds call it payback, a long snake undulating up the stem. Reawaken to dawn of coffee, and in this taste, the carrier pigeon of the New World Order slides into the northern Atlantic right along with the Greenland ice sheet. The creation is spoken, and you would do well to share the milk. Or give orders to your own hands. I think of Peter Sellers. They say that monotheism began in Egypt, where economics ruled all other gods into the Earth's hiding places, by order of the Pharoah Amenhotep IV. I've been busy making it up. Vote on it. The same day the wreck of a shipping liner was recovered, some signal bounced off of our galactic center and returned home.
from SENTIENCE
33.
Quits and walks, or presupposes a redneck firecracker party. They're the dead come knocking. Where the shades are drawn and cats careen into woods. Savor my head, drawn up at dawn. That I quit is self-evident, but what is drawn against the dead is another paragraph. The ceiling was described as chaotic seething. Strange organisms, shadow people if you will, came running for their offspring. You can see them where your eyes meet the back of your head. To invite your hair to dinner. My, what bad table manners you've displayed in front of your neck! Or, to heave the same hometown down the gullet. Wonder what they're doing? Diagramming verbal infusions for the sake of the rugrats and fixing chicken casserole. Mustard seeds to grow on, and the smell of red onions mixed into guacamole. Wine kicks back, and I'm on Amazon giving away cash. Approximately 3.5 billion years ago, a large meteor collided with ocean. Only bacteria on high mountains survived, and you're sure that Shangri-La had something to do with it. Recent tests would say that we're due for a whole lot of wreckage, which is another way of saying that the space debris will eventually write an alphabet of craters across the Midwest. Burial mounds call it payback, a long snake undulating up the stem. Reawaken to dawn of coffee, and in this taste, the carrier pigeon of the New World Order slides into the northern Atlantic right along with the Greenland ice sheet. The creation is spoken, and you would do well to share the milk. Or give orders to your own hands. I think of Peter Sellers. They say that monotheism began in Egypt, where economics ruled all other gods into the Earth's hiding places, by order of the Pharoah Amenhotep IV. I've been busy making it up. Vote on it. The same day the wreck of a shipping liner was recovered, some signal bounced off of our galactic center and returned home.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
NEW! Review of Betsy Sholl
Late Psalm by Betsy Sholl. University of Wisconsin Press.
Reviewed by Chivas Sandage
A psalm is a poem meant to be sung, and Betsy Sholl’s Late Psalm is filled with narrative, rhythmic jazz songs meant to be spoken. The collection’s central metaphors revolve around sound, song, and speech--bird, musician, singer, writer, and speaker are woven throughout. Sholl’s sixth book picks up where her latest, Don’t Explain (1997), left off: its title poem, which appeared next to last, ended, “the music couldn’t keep itself from breaking.” And while the fear of lost song is an underlying tension throughout, the collection is triumphant, embodying song itself.
Sholl’s newest book is darker, braver, recounting deaths without flinching, yet is full of feeling--something she breaks down, note by note, into a score of aural sensation. This poet hears music in everything--the screech as well as the aria. Rising from the pages of Late Psalm, “You’ll hear / engine grind, halyard clank, and fog’s / ghostly horn . . .”; “a sign swinging on one rusty hinge” in a “parched yard / where the clothesline has squealed on its pulleys / all spring”; or a mockingbird’s jazz solo that goes like this:
Found sound is no greater or lesser than other forms of music such as jazz, opera, gospel, rock, or rhythm and blues. And Sholl writes as if she plays, as if she knows: “It’s a deep groove in the brain, / whether you play on top or behind the beat, / walk the line or break out.” The narrator, maintaining one consistent voice, redefines the nature and sources of sacred song; a Walkman’s dying batteries give birth to a new, slow-motion sound from James Carter’s saxophone: “arriving at / such a viscous tone, it’s as if he played / through viscera, deep throat of God” leaving the speaker “stunned by the belly, the being of song.” The failing cassette player reveals an elemental, inner core of the music that cannot be heard in real time.
The breaking down of things--entropy, illness, death--is an essential subject in Late Psalm; often handled with humor, it is always embraced, made beautiful and true. In “Shore Walk With Monk,” the narrator describes the final moments of a worn-out, “eaten” cassette tape:
Developing upon Sholl’s previous book, what is damaged is significant, almost celebrated. We are told “Whatever rises, falls,” and this “law” appears in numerous poems, many of them elegies. While Sholl states, “Maybe music’s a way of weeping,” grief is continually balanced by the speaker’s experience of meaning derived from listening, observing, and feeling. And instead of offering answers, this poet asks questions that begin “Maybe,” “Will we,” “Can we,” “Is this,” “Do they ever,” and “Who isn’t?”
In Late Psalm, sound breaks down in the process of being born into words; turning thought and feeling into sound and sense can prove a trap. In the poem “Impediments,” Sholl writes: “No more stammer and ruse, / quick switch to a safer word, slippery mind / faster than the mouth, so the world’s all translation.” There is tension evoked here, as if there’s a singer inside this narrator who longs to hit her notes with ease “after all those years of throat lock and panic / at the lips, roadblock, detour.” What Sholl does not write: stammering as score! Why not let a word be caught, break down to its syllables and root? Perhaps stammer as jazz would be the ultimate transcendence of:
Sholl’s use of psalm, the biblical name of the Hebrew book, counters and plays off poems that are irreverent, multifaceted responses to contemporary life, and like their namesake, “range in mood from joyous celebration to solemn hymn and bitter protest” (Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature). The collection begins with a line from Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope . . .” and proceeds to string together, through call and response, arguments that go beyond being simply about or against hope and despair. Sholl inverts our most basic beliefs about what keeps us going--or fails to--when she writes lines like: “lice-ridden prayers, nothing to do with / what you wanted, with sorry or please--“; “I was suicidal, my friend said, / until I got cancer; or “a bird is all instinct and moment, no ambition, / no better and worse driving it to the edge of song.” Sholl ends the book by saying “And maybe our best chance, yet, is to believe / the world’s not empty, not nothing in fine clothes, / but everything, marrow, muscle, skin.” Ultimately, these poems suggest that hope is a kind of endurance born of longing--instinctual as hunger.
The book’s title offers a koan that echoes one of the book’s underlying questions--even if it’s too late for hope, does it matter? Sholl thinks and writes about giving up, ends the first poem of her book asking, “And for what?”--a question the book goes on to grapple with in poem after poem. These late songs suggest that our demise is as natural as our rising, and bears a depth of being--even beauty--with a power of its own. And perhaps, if we can hear the broken music that is around us and within us, the experience of listening is more vital to our lives than survival, or however the song ends.
Reviewed by Chivas Sandage
A psalm is a poem meant to be sung, and Betsy Sholl’s Late Psalm is filled with narrative, rhythmic jazz songs meant to be spoken. The collection’s central metaphors revolve around sound, song, and speech--bird, musician, singer, writer, and speaker are woven throughout. Sholl’s sixth book picks up where her latest, Don’t Explain (1997), left off: its title poem, which appeared next to last, ended, “the music couldn’t keep itself from breaking.” And while the fear of lost song is an underlying tension throughout, the collection is triumphant, embodying song itself.
Sholl’s newest book is darker, braver, recounting deaths without flinching, yet is full of feeling--something she breaks down, note by note, into a score of aural sensation. This poet hears music in everything--the screech as well as the aria. Rising from the pages of Late Psalm, “You’ll hear / engine grind, halyard clank, and fog’s / ghostly horn . . .”; “a sign swinging on one rusty hinge” in a “parched yard / where the clothesline has squealed on its pulleys / all spring”; or a mockingbird’s jazz solo that goes like this:
three simple notes,
then a complicated run, then she squawks
like a crow--back and forth, notes and braided twill,
something else I can’t grasp, punctuated
with that crow blat, as if she’s pushing
a sax so far out she has to flutter back
start over, from the top, voice after voice . . .
Found sound is no greater or lesser than other forms of music such as jazz, opera, gospel, rock, or rhythm and blues. And Sholl writes as if she plays, as if she knows: “It’s a deep groove in the brain, / whether you play on top or behind the beat, / walk the line or break out.” The narrator, maintaining one consistent voice, redefines the nature and sources of sacred song; a Walkman’s dying batteries give birth to a new, slow-motion sound from James Carter’s saxophone: “arriving at / such a viscous tone, it’s as if he played / through viscera, deep throat of God” leaving the speaker “stunned by the belly, the being of song.” The failing cassette player reveals an elemental, inner core of the music that cannot be heard in real time.
The breaking down of things--entropy, illness, death--is an essential subject in Late Psalm; often handled with humor, it is always embraced, made beautiful and true. In “Shore Walk With Monk,” the narrator describes the final moments of a worn-out, “eaten” cassette tape:
unraveling
a Mobius strip of Monk, Monk billowing
over dune grass and rocks, ringing the car’s
antenna, Monk in hundreds of tiny
accordion pleats I couldn’t undo
no matter how I try, all spiraling out
of their plastic shell, catching the light, pouring
a kind of broken music the maker’s
done with, just slipped out of and left behind.
Developing upon Sholl’s previous book, what is damaged is significant, almost celebrated. We are told “Whatever rises, falls,” and this “law” appears in numerous poems, many of them elegies. While Sholl states, “Maybe music’s a way of weeping,” grief is continually balanced by the speaker’s experience of meaning derived from listening, observing, and feeling. And instead of offering answers, this poet asks questions that begin “Maybe,” “Will we,” “Can we,” “Is this,” “Do they ever,” and “Who isn’t?”
In Late Psalm, sound breaks down in the process of being born into words; turning thought and feeling into sound and sense can prove a trap. In the poem “Impediments,” Sholl writes: “No more stammer and ruse, / quick switch to a safer word, slippery mind / faster than the mouth, so the world’s all translation.” There is tension evoked here, as if there’s a singer inside this narrator who longs to hit her notes with ease “after all those years of throat lock and panic / at the lips, roadblock, detour.” What Sholl does not write: stammering as score! Why not let a word be caught, break down to its syllables and root? Perhaps stammer as jazz would be the ultimate transcendence of:
the enemy within,
that stymied child unable to say a word
without foot stomps and blinks, unable to let
a thought come easy and smooth. So much
feeling coiled inside her, a mouthful of sparks.
Sholl’s use of psalm, the biblical name of the Hebrew book, counters and plays off poems that are irreverent, multifaceted responses to contemporary life, and like their namesake, “range in mood from joyous celebration to solemn hymn and bitter protest” (Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature). The collection begins with a line from Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope . . .” and proceeds to string together, through call and response, arguments that go beyond being simply about or against hope and despair. Sholl inverts our most basic beliefs about what keeps us going--or fails to--when she writes lines like: “lice-ridden prayers, nothing to do with / what you wanted, with sorry or please--“; “I was suicidal, my friend said, / until I got cancer; or “a bird is all instinct and moment, no ambition, / no better and worse driving it to the edge of song.” Sholl ends the book by saying “And maybe our best chance, yet, is to believe / the world’s not empty, not nothing in fine clothes, / but everything, marrow, muscle, skin.” Ultimately, these poems suggest that hope is a kind of endurance born of longing--instinctual as hunger.
The book’s title offers a koan that echoes one of the book’s underlying questions--even if it’s too late for hope, does it matter? Sholl thinks and writes about giving up, ends the first poem of her book asking, “And for what?”--a question the book goes on to grapple with in poem after poem. These late songs suggest that our demise is as natural as our rising, and bears a depth of being--even beauty--with a power of its own. And perhaps, if we can hear the broken music that is around us and within us, the experience of listening is more vital to our lives than survival, or however the song ends.
Monday, August 22, 2005
The Verse Book of Interviews
One of the last books published by Verse Press, The Verse Book of Interviews collects interviews with an array of poets--including Charles Wright, Tomaz Salamun, Medbh McGuckian, John Yau, Marjorie Welish, Hayden Carruth, Agha Shahid Ali, Anselm Berrigan, Marcella Durand, John Kinsella, Christine Hume, Matthew Rohrer, Dara Wier, August Kleinzahler, Reginald Shepherd, Martin Espada, Claudia Rankine, Miroslav Holub, Lisa Jarnot, and Ed Dorn. Though most of the interviews are reprinted from previous issues of Verse, some were commissioned specifically for the book.
Friday, August 19, 2005
NEW! Review of Jena Osman
An Essay in Asterisks by Jena Osman. Roof Books.
Reviewed by Kathleen Ossip
When I read Jena Osman’s The Character in May 2000, I wrote the following in my journal:
Two years later:
Already I’m the unreliable reviewer. What happened in those two years? I reread and got less defensive about a poetry that was doing something I myself had no interest in doing. And I caught on to Osman’s M.O. and let go, a little, of a need for the old music. Then too, a serious political poetry seemed more important and more relevant in 2002 than it had in 2000.
Now we have Jena Osman’s new book, An Essay in Asterisks, which I necessarily read with a more open mind, but I do think this is a much richer book than The Character, more generous in its pleasures. Here she is again, probing consciousness and politics and language in a variety of inventive ways. These tricks might be called wordplay but the end is anything but playful. The best element of the collection is its political (and I mean the word in its broadest sense) content. Osman’s poetry might be considered truly utilitarian were there any chance it could end up in the hands of a reader who did not already believe, for example, that the U.S. war on Iraq is wicked or that the justice system doesn’t always live up to its name. Since that is all but impossible, I suppose the book might be considered a memento mori or memento belli, a reminder of what we already know, for the purpose of bringing it to our fore-minds, encouraging meditation and, perhaps, action.
The opening piece, also called “An Essay in Asterisks,” lets us know from the start that nothing perceived will go unquestioned:
Thus, the setup: Osman’s speaker does not trust language, does not believe perception and wants to persuade us to the same. How can we disagree? But the logic of her arguments is always complexly didactic. The ellipses in the above excerpt take the place of action images, whether from life or from cinema we don’t know. For example:
From this first piece to the last, pieces of various types of language are put together; Osman’s meaning emerges in the ways the pieces jostle each other. Yet Osman does proceed--what else can she do?--to fill that space where words are missing with words . . . or almost all of it. It is the space that’s left where the emotional (and philosophical) meaning resides. This is the logic of juxtaposition.
Her methods are Socratic; she interrogates language, as the engine of belief. Her aim is philosophical/epistemological; she asks “How do we create memory? What makes communication possible and meaningful?” If in the past 15 or 20 years there has been an explosion of poets interested in using every resource of language (in An Essay in Asterisks, Osman uses textual and typographical and graphic and photographic effects), and if they seem to fall into categories, Osman lives squarely in Gertrude Stein’s villa.
I think the term “experimental poetry” is cringe-worthy, but it is currently used to suggest poetry that foregrounds language, letting content recede. “Experimental” poets, then, trust to some degree in the wisdom inherent in language. Osman does a neat turnabout: she uses this wisdom to cast a very skeptical eye on the capacities of language, its distorting powers, its powers to create unrealities. Osman is an experimentalist in the same way that all poets are who write beyond the edge of their own confidence and certainty (which means all poets who deserve the name), and the results of experiments must always be open to failure or they’re not worth much. So “Press Scrutiny: The Doubles” includes the following elements:
This list isn’t exhaustive, and many of the elements are gratifying, pleasing, thought-provoking, but I’m not sure they strike against each other and ignite.
Other, more successful sections include “Bowdlerizer,” which considers euphemisms in contexts from popular music to the Bush administration’s newspeak; “The Astounding Complex,” in which the author subjects Supreme Court case summaries to various linguistic procedures in the hope of investigating how much of “certainty” is “grammar”; and the final, long “Memory Error Theater,” a rigorous exploration of memory which springboards from the speaker’s discovery that “three sharp images from my childhood” were actually memories of the Nicholas Roeg film Walkabout. The inventiveness of An Essay in Asterisks is bracing and truly impressive; this is an essentially didactic book that is also extremely readable.
Reviewed by Kathleen Ossip
When I read Jena Osman’s The Character in May 2000, I wrote the following in my journal:
For me, a book like The Character is just about as sentimental as Hallmark verse. In that it assumes its reader is already on the same page with it, it is preaching to the choir. Maybe any language that does not seek to elucidate something new--really elucidate, for someone who might find the point tough--is sentimental. . . . It's almost pornographic too in that one side of things--what would you call it: the intellectual, haute philosophical?--is highlighted, twisted, powdered and rouged, overblown and fetishized to the exclusion of all else. All other pleasures are forbidden. No lyric pleasure. Just as there is no pleasure in pornography other than the sexual, and no pleasure in Hallmark other than the crudely emotional. And "experimental" (the word connotes the opposite of conventional) it may be, but it never steps outside the conventions of the experimental. In this, it is genre writing.
Two years later:
Update (6-02): I now love Osman’s book. I pulled an Yvor Winters and slammed something because it didn’t conform to my preferences . . . I would be embarrassed to admit this . . . Alas, I do still feel it’s preaching to the choir in its political content ... no one but the choir is likely to read it. But at least it has content ... And it is interesting, not too starchy to read, and has an appealing form . . .
Already I’m the unreliable reviewer. What happened in those two years? I reread and got less defensive about a poetry that was doing something I myself had no interest in doing. And I caught on to Osman’s M.O. and let go, a little, of a need for the old music. Then too, a serious political poetry seemed more important and more relevant in 2002 than it had in 2000.
Now we have Jena Osman’s new book, An Essay in Asterisks, which I necessarily read with a more open mind, but I do think this is a much richer book than The Character, more generous in its pleasures. Here she is again, probing consciousness and politics and language in a variety of inventive ways. These tricks might be called wordplay but the end is anything but playful. The best element of the collection is its political (and I mean the word in its broadest sense) content. Osman’s poetry might be considered truly utilitarian were there any chance it could end up in the hands of a reader who did not already believe, for example, that the U.S. war on Iraq is wicked or that the justice system doesn’t always live up to its name. Since that is all but impossible, I suppose the book might be considered a memento mori or memento belli, a reminder of what we already know, for the purpose of bringing it to our fore-minds, encouraging meditation and, perhaps, action.
The opening piece, also called “An Essay in Asterisks,” lets us know from the start that nothing perceived will go unquestioned:
If we place all stock in the space where words are missing, there is greater possibility of emotional range. Because memory is often like that as well . . . You fill the blank (the hollow of what you can’t remember) with a picture. First there is a series of images that you can’t shake, as if you were there and it was a significant part of your childhood: a burning car, the crux of a tree, a desert scene and walking through branches. Also a bright kitchen in the sun . . . These must have been part of your life. Yet later you learn that they were just images from a film . . .
Thus, the setup: Osman’s speaker does not trust language, does not believe perception and wants to persuade us to the same. How can we disagree? But the logic of her arguments is always complexly didactic. The ellipses in the above excerpt take the place of action images, whether from life or from cinema we don’t know. For example:
If we place all stock in the space where words are missing, there is greater possibility of emotional range. Because memory is often like that as well . . . LOCKING THE BOX AND PUTTING THE BAG OVER SHOULDER. You fill the blank (the hollow of what you can’t remember) with a picture. First there is a series of images that you can’t shake, as if you were there and it was a significant part of your childhood: a burning car, the crux of a tree, a desert scene and walking through branches. Also a bright kitchen in the sun. WALKING OUT THE DOOR WITHOUT LOOKING . . .
From this first piece to the last, pieces of various types of language are put together; Osman’s meaning emerges in the ways the pieces jostle each other. Yet Osman does proceed--what else can she do?--to fill that space where words are missing with words . . . or almost all of it. It is the space that’s left where the emotional (and philosophical) meaning resides. This is the logic of juxtaposition.
Her methods are Socratic; she interrogates language, as the engine of belief. Her aim is philosophical/epistemological; she asks “How do we create memory? What makes communication possible and meaningful?” If in the past 15 or 20 years there has been an explosion of poets interested in using every resource of language (in An Essay in Asterisks, Osman uses textual and typographical and graphic and photographic effects), and if they seem to fall into categories, Osman lives squarely in Gertrude Stein’s villa.
I think the term “experimental poetry” is cringe-worthy, but it is currently used to suggest poetry that foregrounds language, letting content recede. “Experimental” poets, then, trust to some degree in the wisdom inherent in language. Osman does a neat turnabout: she uses this wisdom to cast a very skeptical eye on the capacities of language, its distorting powers, its powers to create unrealities. Osman is an experimentalist in the same way that all poets are who write beyond the edge of their own confidence and certainty (which means all poets who deserve the name), and the results of experiments must always be open to failure or they’re not worth much. So “Press Scrutiny: The Doubles” includes the following elements:
A synopsis of a New Yorker article on censorship in Burma
Snippets of a conversation in which mishearing plays a part
Several short fiction-like narratives
Some language equations that call language into question (e.g., “HOSPITALITY” = THE END OF LOVE)
Some language transformations (e.g., “analysis of the straight right” in one section becomes in the transformed next section “synthesis of the late night”)
A couple of short-lined lyrics
A consideration of a list of homophones (air, heir, ere, err)
This list isn’t exhaustive, and many of the elements are gratifying, pleasing, thought-provoking, but I’m not sure they strike against each other and ignite.
Other, more successful sections include “Bowdlerizer,” which considers euphemisms in contexts from popular music to the Bush administration’s newspeak; “The Astounding Complex,” in which the author subjects Supreme Court case summaries to various linguistic procedures in the hope of investigating how much of “certainty” is “grammar”; and the final, long “Memory Error Theater,” a rigorous exploration of memory which springboards from the speaker’s discovery that “three sharp images from my childhood” were actually memories of the Nicholas Roeg film Walkabout. The inventiveness of An Essay in Asterisks is bracing and truly impressive; this is an essentially didactic book that is also extremely readable.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
RIP, Verse Press (2000-2005)
Verse Press is now officially defunct. The press is being folded into Wave Books, a new venture which will have Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman as its editors and Lori Shine and Monica Fambrough as its managing editors. Charlie Wright will be the publisher of Wave Books. The press will be based in Seattle and western Massachusetts.
Existing Verse Press books will be sold through / distributed by Wave Books from now on, which makes The Verse Book of Interviews, Gillian Conoley's Profane Halo, and Dara Wier's Reverse Rapture the last crop of Verse Press books.
Verse magazine will continue with Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki as editors, Henry Hart as managing editor, and Chris McDermott as associate editor. The magazine will have offices in Richmond, Athens, and Williamsburg.
Existing Verse Press books will be sold through / distributed by Wave Books from now on, which makes The Verse Book of Interviews, Gillian Conoley's Profane Halo, and Dara Wier's Reverse Rapture the last crop of Verse Press books.
Verse magazine will continue with Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki as editors, Henry Hart as managing editor, and Chris McDermott as associate editor. The magazine will have offices in Richmond, Athens, and Williamsburg.
Monday, August 01, 2005
NEW! Review of Michael Magee's Emancipating Pragmatism
Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing by Michael Magee. University of Alabama Press, $27.50.
Reviewed by Rodney Koeneke
Michael Magee is out to save democracy. His Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing uncovers the hidden nerve structure that connects Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harryette Mullen via figures as dazzlingly diverse as John Dewey, Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Burke, Ornette Coleman, William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, Frank O’Hara, William James, Susan Howe, and Ralph W. Ellison. What Magee sees as the link between them is a practice he calls “democratic symbolic action”: an insistence that the meaning of democracy--its yen for heterogeneity, improvisation, and collaborative experiment--be enacted at the level of the sentence. Through a lucid riff on the pragmatist tradition, he reminds us that the search for a relationship between aesthetic practice and political action so central to contemporary poetics has been an ongoing obsession in American letters since at least the 1850s.
Pragmatism is the Kevin Bacon of American literature: scratch any writer in the last couple centuries who’s looked for a uniquely U.S. voice and sooner or later you’ll find an engagement with our only homegrown philosophy. Even Ezra Pound, in the deeps of 1940s Rapallo and Fascist dreams, could summarize the whole Modernist constellation of experiment as simply “Pragmatic Aesthetics.” What’s fresh about Magee’s study is the way he shows pragmatism as growing out of a profound engagement with African American culture: the product of blacks and whites together trying to find sense in the paradox of a democracy with slaves.
The book begins with a brilliant rescue operation on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Magee takes the oracle of Concord by the heel and pulls him down from the Transcendental aether, through the latter-day self-empowerment folderol of Oprah and Dr. Wayne Dyer, to ground him in the heat and muck of Emancipation politics on the eve of the Civil War. The slavery debates of the 1850s make civic life under George W. look like a Mormon sockhop, and Magee argues that Emerson’s growing involvement in the abolitionist movement galvanized his politics in ways that fundamentally changed both his prose and his sense of self. The propaganda that made slavery defensible in terms of freedom or constitutional rights drove Emerson to deepen his notion of a ‘liminal self’; a subjectivity alert to the contextual basis of meaning, the dynamic instability of language, and the need for novel ways of speaking to address a social world constantly making itself anew. Magee connects these ideas to Emerson’s late style, full of suggestive indirections and syntactic leaps that invite the reader’s collaboration in the making of meaning. As the Civil War ground on, this ideal reader increasingly began to take shape for Emerson as the African American soldier. “American genius finds its true type,” he famously announced in 1864, “in the poor Negro solider lying in the trenches by the Potomac with his spelling book in one hand and his musket in the other.”
Emerson’s conviction that terms like ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ turned to “bilge water” at the hands of pro-slavery interests has an uncanny parallel in our present day Iraqi adventure, and Magee does a deft job bringing Emerson’s insights about the democratic possibilities inherent in language into the 21st century. He shows how Ralph W. Ellison fuses a pragmatist approach to writing (via Kenneth Burke) to the African American tradition of jazz improvisation in Invisible Man; how Amiri Baraka and the “Poetics of the Five Spot” fueled O’Hara’s sense of the poem as “a heterogeneous inclusiveness”; and how contemporaries like Susan Howe and Haryette Mullen continue the practice of literature as a form of emancipation that lies at the heart of the pragmatist tradition. A bias toward contingency, process, polyvocality, indeterminacy and improvisation over fixed meanings, classical ‘finish’, universal truths and the transcendent subject has been a staple of avant-garde writing for nearly a century; Magee shows how these qualities flow directly from an American habit of working to see what democracy might mean when it’s extended to other forms of cultural life, and how that effort in turn connects to black music in rich and surprisingly direct ways. His analysis of Emerson’s dirge for the mixed-race 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and of O’Hara’s close but respectful attachment to the new black music pouring out from the Civil Rights-era Village, lend especially strong struts to his thesis that “pragmatism survives most unexpectedly, and therefore most startlingly, in black music and contemporary experimental poetry.”
One strength of Magee’s study is the sense he gives that he’s not just “onto” something but “into” something: not splitting hairs over academic definitions but out to make pragmatism do work in the present. Since L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E there’s been a certain guardedness about equating writing experiments with social change, and given where we are now it’s reasonable to wonder whether a new way of writing ever really changed the world. Magee makes me rethink what I mean though by ‘world’, and why the social dynamics in a jazz performance or a poetry reading or in the myriad invisible exchanges that take place between readers and writers aren’t just as real a measure of democracy as a hijacked presidential election. When you’re into the moment, going on your nerve and riding along with whoever you can find, freedom is always somewhere in the room. The great gift of Emancipating Pragmatism is to remind us that those contexts still exist, that democracy’s happening around us all the time.
Reviewed by Rodney Koeneke
Michael Magee is out to save democracy. His Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing uncovers the hidden nerve structure that connects Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harryette Mullen via figures as dazzlingly diverse as John Dewey, Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Burke, Ornette Coleman, William Carlos Williams, Paul Goodman, Frank O’Hara, William James, Susan Howe, and Ralph W. Ellison. What Magee sees as the link between them is a practice he calls “democratic symbolic action”: an insistence that the meaning of democracy--its yen for heterogeneity, improvisation, and collaborative experiment--be enacted at the level of the sentence. Through a lucid riff on the pragmatist tradition, he reminds us that the search for a relationship between aesthetic practice and political action so central to contemporary poetics has been an ongoing obsession in American letters since at least the 1850s.
Pragmatism is the Kevin Bacon of American literature: scratch any writer in the last couple centuries who’s looked for a uniquely U.S. voice and sooner or later you’ll find an engagement with our only homegrown philosophy. Even Ezra Pound, in the deeps of 1940s Rapallo and Fascist dreams, could summarize the whole Modernist constellation of experiment as simply “Pragmatic Aesthetics.” What’s fresh about Magee’s study is the way he shows pragmatism as growing out of a profound engagement with African American culture: the product of blacks and whites together trying to find sense in the paradox of a democracy with slaves.
The book begins with a brilliant rescue operation on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Magee takes the oracle of Concord by the heel and pulls him down from the Transcendental aether, through the latter-day self-empowerment folderol of Oprah and Dr. Wayne Dyer, to ground him in the heat and muck of Emancipation politics on the eve of the Civil War. The slavery debates of the 1850s make civic life under George W. look like a Mormon sockhop, and Magee argues that Emerson’s growing involvement in the abolitionist movement galvanized his politics in ways that fundamentally changed both his prose and his sense of self. The propaganda that made slavery defensible in terms of freedom or constitutional rights drove Emerson to deepen his notion of a ‘liminal self’; a subjectivity alert to the contextual basis of meaning, the dynamic instability of language, and the need for novel ways of speaking to address a social world constantly making itself anew. Magee connects these ideas to Emerson’s late style, full of suggestive indirections and syntactic leaps that invite the reader’s collaboration in the making of meaning. As the Civil War ground on, this ideal reader increasingly began to take shape for Emerson as the African American soldier. “American genius finds its true type,” he famously announced in 1864, “in the poor Negro solider lying in the trenches by the Potomac with his spelling book in one hand and his musket in the other.”
Emerson’s conviction that terms like ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ turned to “bilge water” at the hands of pro-slavery interests has an uncanny parallel in our present day Iraqi adventure, and Magee does a deft job bringing Emerson’s insights about the democratic possibilities inherent in language into the 21st century. He shows how Ralph W. Ellison fuses a pragmatist approach to writing (via Kenneth Burke) to the African American tradition of jazz improvisation in Invisible Man; how Amiri Baraka and the “Poetics of the Five Spot” fueled O’Hara’s sense of the poem as “a heterogeneous inclusiveness”; and how contemporaries like Susan Howe and Haryette Mullen continue the practice of literature as a form of emancipation that lies at the heart of the pragmatist tradition. A bias toward contingency, process, polyvocality, indeterminacy and improvisation over fixed meanings, classical ‘finish’, universal truths and the transcendent subject has been a staple of avant-garde writing for nearly a century; Magee shows how these qualities flow directly from an American habit of working to see what democracy might mean when it’s extended to other forms of cultural life, and how that effort in turn connects to black music in rich and surprisingly direct ways. His analysis of Emerson’s dirge for the mixed-race 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and of O’Hara’s close but respectful attachment to the new black music pouring out from the Civil Rights-era Village, lend especially strong struts to his thesis that “pragmatism survives most unexpectedly, and therefore most startlingly, in black music and contemporary experimental poetry.”
One strength of Magee’s study is the sense he gives that he’s not just “onto” something but “into” something: not splitting hairs over academic definitions but out to make pragmatism do work in the present. Since L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E there’s been a certain guardedness about equating writing experiments with social change, and given where we are now it’s reasonable to wonder whether a new way of writing ever really changed the world. Magee makes me rethink what I mean though by ‘world’, and why the social dynamics in a jazz performance or a poetry reading or in the myriad invisible exchanges that take place between readers and writers aren’t just as real a measure of democracy as a hijacked presidential election. When you’re into the moment, going on your nerve and riding along with whoever you can find, freedom is always somewhere in the room. The great gift of Emancipating Pragmatism is to remind us that those contexts still exist, that democracy’s happening around us all the time.
Monday, July 25, 2005
NEW! Review of Nils Michals
Lure by Nils Michals. Pleiades Press, $15.95.
Reviewed by Marc McKee
From the initial poem in Nils Michals’ austere debut collection, Lure, the reader swiftly recognizes a decided lack of couches; one senses immediately that there is no desire on behalf of the speaker(s) to entertain or comfort the reader. Instead, the poems, one after another, open a seismic line of inquiry that ushers the reader into bracing--if discomfiting--confrontation with questions of perishability, being, and making at times so strident that one might be given to despair over whether there is any point pursuing a relationship to or appreciation of the world. Over the course of the book, however, it becomes clear that the rigorous attention given to world through the foci of Michals’ speakers emphasizes a discriminating search for what humanity is capable of grasping that, though it more often than not privileges lament over celebration, never devolves into dogma or sentimentality.
“Westerly” opens the collection with an objective separation--a sunken ship is lifted from the sea--which enacts a gesture that refines the subjects of the poems to follow: the essential separation of nature from human endeavor. The poem is one of four throughout Lure regarding a warship from the 18th century rescued nearly intact in 1960; and with its fellows, “Southerly,” “Northerly,” and “Easterly,” it laces together a number experiments with negative capability (it’s no accident that the third poem in the book, “Diodic,” invokes the dying Keats with Severn in Rome). Via Michals’ opening lines, the reader is treated to an exquisitely concrete version of being in uncertainty:
The inquiries compressed here hint at the death of God not only as maker or solvent, but even as idea or semi-imaginable, ghostly ear. It almost makes sense to read the situation of the boat in this first poem to that of any person cast out of the garden of faithful reliance on an intelligent and invested Designer, though it also calls up connotations to birth and long dark nights of soul-doubting self-awareness. In the absence of the divine, the motif that arises in opposition to human endeavor is often the natural world. It’s one of the wry jokes of the book to illustrate again and again the fallibility of any design by the unintelligible forces of nature and time; the sea and wind (as well as allusive “sand”) collude in the erasure of all forms made to ease, facilitate, or (in the case of the warship) violently define being. It’s appropriate that a collection so resolute in its dedication to convey the endangered experience of the made world against the tableau of irrevocable loss and erasure begins with a man-made object that the natural world has not yet entirely voided from the scene.
The poems that follow angle through monologues by famous artisans (“Stradivari, 1763”), epistolary dialogues between sculpture and sculptor (“The Stone Letters”), the aforementioned visitation to Keats and Severn, and several hinged sequences that act as exacting refractions of Michals’ essential questions. Though the poems enter and exit these locations of meditative pause, there is more at stake than a poet puppeteering a speaker through a resumé of historical trivia. Michals is not Mr. Peabody and we are not Sherman: these inhabitations of historical points are not serial lectures, but investigations. In Lure, the trivia isn’t trivial flashiness, but distinct and challenging opportunities for the various speakers to open sympathies in the reader at the same time it begs the question of any semblance of divine presence, as in “Westerly,” or the folly of making anything, as in “Stradivari, 1763”: “So I’ve slipped in the last / thin rib. You see? And for what?”
It’s a testament to Michals’ deftness that these poems never feel like anything other than scrupulous and quickening meditations on the nature of being. A lesser poet may use the matter of history as a device to give credence and weight to lackadaisical ruminations, but the speakers in Lure unequipped with an historical pedigree fare every bit as well as the personages in the utterance of philosophic urgencies. One such urgency arises out of a moment of slightly delirious lyricism in “After Surgery”:
The poem ends here, with the irony of someone who has presumably been repaired reflecting on death. Though the path of this irony may be well-trod, Michals’ treatment deepens it, effectively conveying how what may or may not come after life (whether of objects or beings) is occluded and only vaguely approachable in the imagination, as well as how the unfathomability of not being at the same time obscures existence. The titular poem “Lure” expands on this tack and ends with a “small dark disc center[ing] itself,” closing the collection with a return of man-made object to the sea, which at once suggests an unassailable closure and a human echo which may be the only quality that succeeds death. The poem itself is a colossal intersection of terrible events, transcript scraps, and haunting meditation.
Throughout the book, the lyric “I” is often subject to the eye, in the service of rendering a world at once beautiful and doomed. That Michals often uses the hands and the eye in his poems is telling: the milieu with which he deals is the interstices between seeing and making against erasure. Often, these moments result in lovely transfigurations, as in “Aloha,” where the speaker observes the sky, “the eye taking pleasure / in whether encompassing or being encompassed” and wants to “grant what arrived unasked-for / stay, and that I having become, might / accordingly return the world its long-forged self / more exquisitely, more wanted,” which contributes to the undercurrent of longing that attends many of the poems. At other times, this longing is bereft or unfulfilled in the failures of supplication or action, as in “Prayer,” where the speaker wonders “How can I do this? How go / the hands?” or in “The Ambulance Came & We Know How That Goes,” where the speaker first says “The hand moves / & is the world / & flaming a little in the hand / the polished instrument vaguely in error . . .” before noting “(The word made as they were dying, / the wounds under a sunned hand, in it / fresh white gauze),” which underscores our helplessness. The mortality of forms echoes the inescapable fact of our own term limits.
The only drawback in such a project may entail the loss of power to rescue experience from its inherent temporariness. If metaphorical locutions are just conflations that veil the sheer subtractions of our terms on earth and our essential disconnectedness from it (as one may conclude when Michals takes another poet to task for using the phrase “the desperation of the fields”), what can offer any succor, or at the very least understand existence as anything but a capricious joke? This is not to suggest that any or all poems’ job is to console us, but negative capability’s desire to live in uncertainty demands a reflective ambivalence which can and does contain joys (or at least moments in which pain and fear are suspended) whether one believes in a god, the pleasures and consolations of making, or neither. Upon finishing Lure, one may come away with the feeling that the scale of vision is weighted far more heavily on the side of darkness, that death and disappearance hopelessly overwhelm and color every aspect of being alive. The end of the book may be read as suggesting that all that remains of us is a black box, a tattered record that enunciates moments of coming to terms (or failing to come to terms) with imminent obliteration--not exactly a poster poem for exuberance or celebration.
Read another way, however, the abundance of connections and their radiance in poems like “Lure” bespeaks a preoccupation with the improbable yet certain gift of beauty, no matter how fleeting. The power and artfulness of the book, while demanding a severe attention to some of the more difficult truths, also call for an accounting in the reader. This may be the greatest strength in a very powerful book. If Lure is a repeated question, albeit elegantly and variously posed, of whether or not there is anything to recommend the actuality of living, then it subtly creates a dialogue with any reader likely to come along that cannot help but emerge as either affirmative of being or darkly aware of its voracious subtraction. The subtle actions of these meditations, especially given Michals’ powers of stunning lyrical deployment, accrue meaning with a depth and significance that live beyond the text, the lure that leads us to a different world when we close the book and look up.
Reviewed by Marc McKee
From the initial poem in Nils Michals’ austere debut collection, Lure, the reader swiftly recognizes a decided lack of couches; one senses immediately that there is no desire on behalf of the speaker(s) to entertain or comfort the reader. Instead, the poems, one after another, open a seismic line of inquiry that ushers the reader into bracing--if discomfiting--confrontation with questions of perishability, being, and making at times so strident that one might be given to despair over whether there is any point pursuing a relationship to or appreciation of the world. Over the course of the book, however, it becomes clear that the rigorous attention given to world through the foci of Michals’ speakers emphasizes a discriminating search for what humanity is capable of grasping that, though it more often than not privileges lament over celebration, never devolves into dogma or sentimentality.
“Westerly” opens the collection with an objective separation--a sunken ship is lifted from the sea--which enacts a gesture that refines the subjects of the poems to follow: the essential separation of nature from human endeavor. The poem is one of four throughout Lure regarding a warship from the 18th century rescued nearly intact in 1960; and with its fellows, “Southerly,” “Northerly,” and “Easterly,” it laces together a number experiments with negative capability (it’s no accident that the third poem in the book, “Diodic,” invokes the dying Keats with Severn in Rome). Via Michals’ opening lines, the reader is treated to an exquisitely concrete version of being in uncertainty:
What comes off the sea recalls nothing
of loving a world and for those with eyes
wishing something other than what is seen
it says: listen.
Comes off the sea and does not care, says accept
there may or may not be a hand
in this: a taste of spray,
salt, some origin no longer
encompassing us with calm, says
you are on your own now.
The inquiries compressed here hint at the death of God not only as maker or solvent, but even as idea or semi-imaginable, ghostly ear. It almost makes sense to read the situation of the boat in this first poem to that of any person cast out of the garden of faithful reliance on an intelligent and invested Designer, though it also calls up connotations to birth and long dark nights of soul-doubting self-awareness. In the absence of the divine, the motif that arises in opposition to human endeavor is often the natural world. It’s one of the wry jokes of the book to illustrate again and again the fallibility of any design by the unintelligible forces of nature and time; the sea and wind (as well as allusive “sand”) collude in the erasure of all forms made to ease, facilitate, or (in the case of the warship) violently define being. It’s appropriate that a collection so resolute in its dedication to convey the endangered experience of the made world against the tableau of irrevocable loss and erasure begins with a man-made object that the natural world has not yet entirely voided from the scene.
The poems that follow angle through monologues by famous artisans (“Stradivari, 1763”), epistolary dialogues between sculpture and sculptor (“The Stone Letters”), the aforementioned visitation to Keats and Severn, and several hinged sequences that act as exacting refractions of Michals’ essential questions. Though the poems enter and exit these locations of meditative pause, there is more at stake than a poet puppeteering a speaker through a resumé of historical trivia. Michals is not Mr. Peabody and we are not Sherman: these inhabitations of historical points are not serial lectures, but investigations. In Lure, the trivia isn’t trivial flashiness, but distinct and challenging opportunities for the various speakers to open sympathies in the reader at the same time it begs the question of any semblance of divine presence, as in “Westerly,” or the folly of making anything, as in “Stradivari, 1763”: “So I’ve slipped in the last / thin rib. You see? And for what?”
It’s a testament to Michals’ deftness that these poems never feel like anything other than scrupulous and quickening meditations on the nature of being. A lesser poet may use the matter of history as a device to give credence and weight to lackadaisical ruminations, but the speakers in Lure unequipped with an historical pedigree fare every bit as well as the personages in the utterance of philosophic urgencies. One such urgency arises out of a moment of slightly delirious lyricism in “After Surgery”:
Evening disintegrates in frames
arrested, a red chariot that unpins
helplessly outside itself, the wheel
a windmilling O with its own mind for glory.
Someone walks light-heeled up the path,
reconsiders.
At the point of glass, an arrangement, flawless.
Darkness drops clickless over the lake,
a light patter of fog dripping
from lake pines on the skylight--
what happens to the man
who remembers the outlines of boats
in fog, then only fog--
The poem ends here, with the irony of someone who has presumably been repaired reflecting on death. Though the path of this irony may be well-trod, Michals’ treatment deepens it, effectively conveying how what may or may not come after life (whether of objects or beings) is occluded and only vaguely approachable in the imagination, as well as how the unfathomability of not being at the same time obscures existence. The titular poem “Lure” expands on this tack and ends with a “small dark disc center[ing] itself,” closing the collection with a return of man-made object to the sea, which at once suggests an unassailable closure and a human echo which may be the only quality that succeeds death. The poem itself is a colossal intersection of terrible events, transcript scraps, and haunting meditation.
Throughout the book, the lyric “I” is often subject to the eye, in the service of rendering a world at once beautiful and doomed. That Michals often uses the hands and the eye in his poems is telling: the milieu with which he deals is the interstices between seeing and making against erasure. Often, these moments result in lovely transfigurations, as in “Aloha,” where the speaker observes the sky, “the eye taking pleasure / in whether encompassing or being encompassed” and wants to “grant what arrived unasked-for / stay, and that I having become, might / accordingly return the world its long-forged self / more exquisitely, more wanted,” which contributes to the undercurrent of longing that attends many of the poems. At other times, this longing is bereft or unfulfilled in the failures of supplication or action, as in “Prayer,” where the speaker wonders “How can I do this? How go / the hands?” or in “The Ambulance Came & We Know How That Goes,” where the speaker first says “The hand moves / & is the world / & flaming a little in the hand / the polished instrument vaguely in error . . .” before noting “(The word made as they were dying, / the wounds under a sunned hand, in it / fresh white gauze),” which underscores our helplessness. The mortality of forms echoes the inescapable fact of our own term limits.
The only drawback in such a project may entail the loss of power to rescue experience from its inherent temporariness. If metaphorical locutions are just conflations that veil the sheer subtractions of our terms on earth and our essential disconnectedness from it (as one may conclude when Michals takes another poet to task for using the phrase “the desperation of the fields”), what can offer any succor, or at the very least understand existence as anything but a capricious joke? This is not to suggest that any or all poems’ job is to console us, but negative capability’s desire to live in uncertainty demands a reflective ambivalence which can and does contain joys (or at least moments in which pain and fear are suspended) whether one believes in a god, the pleasures and consolations of making, or neither. Upon finishing Lure, one may come away with the feeling that the scale of vision is weighted far more heavily on the side of darkness, that death and disappearance hopelessly overwhelm and color every aspect of being alive. The end of the book may be read as suggesting that all that remains of us is a black box, a tattered record that enunciates moments of coming to terms (or failing to come to terms) with imminent obliteration--not exactly a poster poem for exuberance or celebration.
Read another way, however, the abundance of connections and their radiance in poems like “Lure” bespeaks a preoccupation with the improbable yet certain gift of beauty, no matter how fleeting. The power and artfulness of the book, while demanding a severe attention to some of the more difficult truths, also call for an accounting in the reader. This may be the greatest strength in a very powerful book. If Lure is a repeated question, albeit elegantly and variously posed, of whether or not there is anything to recommend the actuality of living, then it subtly creates a dialogue with any reader likely to come along that cannot help but emerge as either affirmative of being or darkly aware of its voracious subtraction. The subtle actions of these meditations, especially given Michals’ powers of stunning lyrical deployment, accrue meaning with a depth and significance that live beyond the text, the lure that leads us to a different world when we close the book and look up.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
NEW! Jennifer L. Knox poem
Jennifer L. Knox
IN EXCHANGE FOR SOME MORE
I think I might've clipped you
back there: sorry. I thought
you were a traffic cone
the way you wobbled. So
how could I resist? Please
accept this unwieldy inflatable safety bumper
as a large gesture.
Look: the whirling dervishes
have returned to the feeder.
They've forgotten all
about the poison (they've been really
busy). We counted on them to be just
the way they are, bubbling under
their little purple turbans.
I think you might've poisoned me
back there: sorry. You thought
I was a polar bear
asleep in the snow
because I told you so. Please
accept my tongue
as an apology.
IN EXCHANGE FOR SOME MORE
I think I might've clipped you
back there: sorry. I thought
you were a traffic cone
the way you wobbled. So
how could I resist? Please
accept this unwieldy inflatable safety bumper
as a large gesture.
Look: the whirling dervishes
have returned to the feeder.
They've forgotten all
about the poison (they've been really
busy). We counted on them to be just
the way they are, bubbling under
their little purple turbans.
I think you might've poisoned me
back there: sorry. You thought
I was a polar bear
asleep in the snow
because I told you so. Please
accept my tongue
as an apology.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
NEW! Jason Koo poem
Jason Koo
MAN ON EXTREMELY SMALL ISLAND
I think I must be sitting on the kneecap
of a gigantic woman: stretched out
on the sea-floor, one long leg folded in,
triangulating heavenward, her knee
just breaches the surface enough to make
my seat. How she came to be here, how
I happened to wash up on her kneecap
shore, why she never puts her leg down--
these are questions I do not pursue.
Instead, I try to picture the woman's face:
eyes lidded, mouth upturned in sleepy
pleasure, she can just bear the tickling
my body gives her; naturally, I'm afraid
that if I move too much a giant hand
will come whalebursting out of the water
to thwop me like a golfball into the sea.
So, still as possible. Once, I did an experiment:
I got down on my belly--gingerly--
seal-wagged my upper body down
the eastern slope of the knee, and sent
my hands snorkeling--a distinct shudder.
Was that her thigh? That shudder
nearly broke my ribs, so I've never tried
the opposite slope for shin. Sometimes,
as is my way, I begin to feel ungrateful:
why couldn't it have been a breast
instead of a knee? I could lie down,
feel cared for, sleep. I could relax . . .
The irony, of course, is that, from the sky,
the knee probably looks like a breast,
with me as nipple, so, when you notify
the Coast Guard about my situation,
be sure to warn them of the resemblance.
Not that I expect anyone to find me.
By the time you get this message--if
you get it--I'll have been swallowed up
by a storm; the fact that I haven't been
already I would call a “miracle,” but
when you throw yourself off a ship, lose
consciousness, and come to on a kneecap,
can anything else go by that name?
Miracle. And all those years I asked
for a smaller nose. I said to God, Just
give me a chance. This isn't a nose--
it's a melon. Just make it a little smaller,
something a woman can convince herself
to live with if I am a good enough man . . .
When I came to that first strange morning
I thought I'd washed up on a giant nose.
I said to God, Very funny, very very funny.
Hilarious. I'm dying here. You kill me.
Then I put my nose into my hands and wept.
But now I think kneecap--I won't give God
that satisfaction. And my sea-goddess,
she has no nose. Just a space where mine
can fit.
I'm running out of shirt.
You might be wondering where I got
this bottle--someone must have thrown it off
the ship. There was another message inside.
I'm alone, it said. Find me, find me.
I threw it in the water.
Strange--
I used to hate sitting in my apartment,
night after night, hearing murmurings
in the apartments around me; now
I stare at the endless, sunshot blue
and try to imagine walls.
MAN ON EXTREMELY SMALL ISLAND
after a Mordillo cartoon
I think I must be sitting on the kneecap
of a gigantic woman: stretched out
on the sea-floor, one long leg folded in,
triangulating heavenward, her knee
just breaches the surface enough to make
my seat. How she came to be here, how
I happened to wash up on her kneecap
shore, why she never puts her leg down--
these are questions I do not pursue.
Instead, I try to picture the woman's face:
eyes lidded, mouth upturned in sleepy
pleasure, she can just bear the tickling
my body gives her; naturally, I'm afraid
that if I move too much a giant hand
will come whalebursting out of the water
to thwop me like a golfball into the sea.
So, still as possible. Once, I did an experiment:
I got down on my belly--gingerly--
seal-wagged my upper body down
the eastern slope of the knee, and sent
my hands snorkeling--a distinct shudder.
Was that her thigh? That shudder
nearly broke my ribs, so I've never tried
the opposite slope for shin. Sometimes,
as is my way, I begin to feel ungrateful:
why couldn't it have been a breast
instead of a knee? I could lie down,
feel cared for, sleep. I could relax . . .
The irony, of course, is that, from the sky,
the knee probably looks like a breast,
with me as nipple, so, when you notify
the Coast Guard about my situation,
be sure to warn them of the resemblance.
Not that I expect anyone to find me.
By the time you get this message--if
you get it--I'll have been swallowed up
by a storm; the fact that I haven't been
already I would call a “miracle,” but
when you throw yourself off a ship, lose
consciousness, and come to on a kneecap,
can anything else go by that name?
Miracle. And all those years I asked
for a smaller nose. I said to God, Just
give me a chance. This isn't a nose--
it's a melon. Just make it a little smaller,
something a woman can convince herself
to live with if I am a good enough man . . .
When I came to that first strange morning
I thought I'd washed up on a giant nose.
I said to God, Very funny, very very funny.
Hilarious. I'm dying here. You kill me.
Then I put my nose into my hands and wept.
But now I think kneecap--I won't give God
that satisfaction. And my sea-goddess,
she has no nose. Just a space where mine
can fit.
I'm running out of shirt.
You might be wondering where I got
this bottle--someone must have thrown it off
the ship. There was another message inside.
I'm alone, it said. Find me, find me.
I threw it in the water.
Strange--
I used to hate sitting in my apartment,
night after night, hearing murmurings
in the apartments around me; now
I stare at the endless, sunshot blue
and try to imagine walls.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
SALT's final issue / Part 5: Metrical Poetry Feature
SALT Metrical Poetry Feature / edited by Annie Finch
K. Silem Mohammad
Two poems
THE RAMONES
The storms name them
not smartest, nor
at rest, maroon
them on no shore.
Restore them, Mars,
one ransom more:
no theme more rash,
no ears so sore.
As some men moan,
so others snore.
No one tames them,
Namor nor Thor,
no Roman son,
no orator--
stern men at arms,
at stones to roar.
TULLY
Conscript fathers, how you adore your rhetor's
sweet declaiming! see how the curile aedile
tilts his chair back, not of a mind to veto
even a sparrow.
Bench by bench, a reverie tames the senate,
all Rome passed out, drunk on his eloquentia,
rococo Rome, buzzing with lyres and zithers,
goddesses bathing.
Marble columns girding the vatic dreamwork
form a ring supporting a convex awning,
Helicopters thump in the massive dome-space,
fiery searchlights
trawl the clouds, and bolts of polluted lightning
bas-relief the forum in yellow flashes.
Gazing up, the consul's opponents tremble:
Mars the avenger
rides in screaming. Faces of murder victims
rise in each conspirator's guilty conscience,
terrorized, insultingly mutilated,
slathered with lipstick.
Strip away the quaestor's oneiric bugbears:
under dead skin, honeycombs made of razors
harbor clumps of ten-in-the-evening mayflies,
terminal, flaccid.
Stony rhetor, cast in the role of the bad cop,
eulogize your laureled Italian headlands:
fields of honor, sweetened by phlox and lupine!
Watch as they vanish--
sunlit meadows brightening into evening,
crossed by horsemen, afterwards shadows of horsemen,
lastly, cankered remnants of fading twilight
spreading infection.
***
Arielle Greenberg
THE METER OF THE NIGHT SKY
I wonder what would happen if the K in knife was said,
if part of all the Hs in the book had rubbed away,
changing up the shapes of our ancestor's good white bones.
I wonder who's been sleeping in this bale of hay before,
how many eyes adore me, how many needles here.
I wonder who is bedded, sharp and low, like any twin,
kindled by the flickering camp lantern of my name.
It doesn't happen suddenly, but with a rolling hush:
some blossom, something citric, and oh so cavalier,
moves without me, moves in chorus with the pulse of the night sky.
It's my velvet artwork, making pleasure of a peephole.
without me, it can wonder every G-note in the scale,
every Aries made of starlight. It's the whirring of my plum.
***
Ann Fisher-Wirth
THE SKELETON LEAVES
I know how to find you.
I go where your sleeping
is filled with the shadows
of leaves, where the leaves have
bled their green,
and all that remain are
their skeletons, nearly
transparent, translucent,
and tissue gone blurred as
the moon among clouds, as
the fur on a moth's wing,
and tips as if trailing
through water--
Such leaves are not common.
In this snowy country
they cherish them, save them,
the white skelettbladen--
like us, they have died, to
become more enduring.
***
Ben Mazer
A STAR IS BORN
Her feigned indifference stung his vanity;
a small town girl with sawdust in her veins;
a modern pilgrim, who had changed her name;
a girl with glasses, thrumming in his brain;
the brazen hypocrite, she knew his name;
subscribed to Star and Screen, jumped out of cakes;
yet she had got his goat; he hit the brakes,
but felt his life was founded on a lie.
Big parties were his own familiar waters;
life took his coat; his name was on its lips;
he spent the evening in the servants' quarters,
trying to get a date, and washing cups.
He told the boss he wanted a screen test;
the studio would write him a blank check;
he told her that she never would be his,
that now she never could be like the rest.
His will was done; the out of town reviews
killed the first rushes, but the biggest news
was that her presence had eclipsed his fame;
each questionaire was filled out with her name.
Now in the afternoons when she came back
he had prepared a cozy little snack,
and they let down their hair; he didn't dare
tell her his fears, but she knew what they were.
He slapped a reporter, not the thing to do
when he had credit nowhere in the town,
except among the elder set who knew
just what it was the younger man had done.
Then finally left on his own holiday.
Prepared the picnic, but forgot the brunch.
He dropped his robe and swam out to the stars;
now you can see which one of them is hers.
***
Rodney Koeneke
FRANKENSTEIN'S PURSUIT
For weeks we yo-yo'd up and down the Five.
Stopping for gas, I’d find the bill was paid.
He'd wait for me when I fell behind.
Elizabeth, my perfect family, dead . . .
Near the interchange I caught his plates.
He slowed down, leering as I roared past.
His yolky eye, the tell-tale brainpan stitch--
Is it these imperfections that I hate?
I see in you a part of what I am.
You see in me the thing you cannot be.
Some incompletion drove me to persist;
Of all my rotting parts you are the sum.
Needing a god to blame, how could you see
It's in those borrowed eyes that I exist?
***
C.J. Sage
PRAYER FOR MANY EYES
Let the thousand visions fall away.
Let the sleep of reason grace our eyes
kindly with its many veils, to stay
the knowledge of the hurtful world. --Deny!
Men I know have fallen (many men)
prey to the temptations of sight and sense.
Women kept to their convictions, then
gave them all up, just to walk the fence:
pain on one side, more pain on the other.
Now let the lids of knowing take their rest;
let me close my own to the faults of brothers
and sisters in this life, difficult at best.
Let us be grateful for the wealths of boredom.
Let us, heirs of Argus, be more dumb.
***
Charlotte Mandel
Two poems
OF NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES
No, I do not envision sky-light welcome
Nor that bomb-shattered flesh evolves to angel
In Recovery, all stopped And I knew it
Spinal surgery siphons red from marrow--
Your black twin-mirror pupils distant . . . distant . . .
Blessing flows via tubes transfusing plasma
Tunnel high as you will, but take a flashlight--
Acid batteries stencil wings on darkness
Heaven stages desire and speaks in echo
Clouds like papery hymnals shuffle praise-songs
A blink rinses the eye of sorrow's visions
Windblown cirrus revolves in blades of jet smoke
DECEMBER PARADELLE
Days resemble each other like sheaves of wheat
Days resemble each other like sheaves of wheat
Gathering hurt feelings I trail after your blade.
Gathering hurt feelings I trail after your blade.
I like your hurt. Feelings resemble other days
gathering sheaves of wheat after each blade trail.
Your voice like smoke surrounds me in the room
Your voice like smoke surrounds me in the room
Blurs all words of a dream I want to recall
Blurs all words of a dream I want to recall.
I smoke to recall words in a voice like the room
Your dream surrounds, blurs all want of me.
Answer the telephone although it never rings.
Answer the telephone although it never rings.
Letters sleep in this box no postman comes to.
Letters sleep in this box no postman comes to.
It comes to this: the postman rings: letters sleep
in telephone box. Never answer no.
No smoke blurs the hurt to me of your answer.
Sheaves of dream letters trail the postman.
Days sleep in this room like a telephone box.
It rings. All words come to resemble each other.
I never voice feelings--although recall surrounds
like wheat after blade. I want your gathering in.
***
Anand Thakore
Two poems
DEAD, AT YOUR MOTHER'S FUNERAL
As if to quench the first little wisp of flame,
Rain fell in torrents when I reached the grounds,
Beating wildly upon the low tin roof,
Like a great hurt beast no will could tame.
Sweat covered your forehead, your blue sleeves wet,
As you took the hot brand into your palms,
Turning towards me before you lit the sticks,
Your brown hair drenched as when we first met.
Can I say I still loved the man I saw,
Whose loss I turned so quickly away from?
I saw you through tongues of leaping flame,
And cold eyes of ice no flame could thaw,
Your mother burning as I thought of my own,
Seeking no way into the cell of your grief;
No way out of mine as I heaped her with twigs,
Poured oil on damp wood and watched you like a stone.
FOG AT PANCHGANI
I have waited all morning for this fog to clear,
Looking through its folds for stray signs of green;
Yet now that the terraced slopes and paddy-fields
And the woods that it hid draw steadily near--
The thick moss on a branch, the full height
Of a hill, and the lily-spotted weir
Shimmering insistently in late noon heat,
The eye retreats in fear from approaching light;
And I long more strongly for the fog to come down,
Covering in a single length of shroud
The bright greens it wrapped in torn scraps of grey;
And the watcher outside whom it would not drown.
Great Maker of Fog, release my eyes.
Cast them into this swirl of grey and green,
Till they come to feel at home in change.
Grant them the craft of swift goodbyes.
***
Mary Agner
OLD DOMINIA
She wears tobacco tucked in her auburn hair.
Her eyes, the hues of Chesapeake Bay distilled.
Hilt gripped, she stands prepared to sever
tyranny's neck in the muddy Piedmont.
Each empty, wind-wrenched autumn, her hands in paint
that splatters whole leaf piles and the yellow winged
forsythia for me to play in--
loneliness blurred by kaleidoscoped trees.
Virginia, older sister that I have lost,
I almost see her cresting and winking waves
here, moving through the pines. My palms freeze
missing her hand in my hand when leaves fall.
***
Oliver Murray
MONROVIA, LIBERIA
("Taylor's men roam and kill at will. They are
dressed in shower hats and wedding dresses
The shower hats are for the rain.
No one knows what the wedding-dresses
are for" --Denis Johnson, war correspondent. )
Mind your step because of the piled up corpses.
This night's haul is over two hundred dead and
killers roaming streets in their white lace dresses.
make people fearful.
Off the sidewalk, people in lanes and alleys,
retching, think of cannibal voodoo rumour
hope that what they've eaten was not cadaver--
that's what the dogs eat.
Sharks this year are circling in shallows waiting.
Wedding dresses add to the terror, killers
drag the corpses down to the blood-frilled surf for
that's what the sharks eat.
***
Jerry Harp
THE CREATURE FINDS HIS MARK
My man showed up again, the one
Whose skin I breathed for days--appeared
Among a sidewalk's tables and chairs.
He looked my way, his perfect wave
Of hair accosting the breeze.
Savvy monks crept from his eyes.
The sidewalk voices knocked and rang
Like iron balls beaten against brick walls.
He looked my way again, and in a single sweep
Took in a crow, a cloud, his table companion,
Some handsome guy in a vanilla suit.
His half smile told a tale.
My Creature wrath and desire were razed
To the street. Where else were they to go?
The flickering streetlight cast an aureole.
***
Eve Adamson
Two poems
THE AFTERNOON I WAS BORN OUT OF MY OWN HEAD
1.
Remember the serpent from the other story?
We'd met him before, read his CV
(Part myth, part bald-faced lie), found his cream-and-coral
Complexion something admirable.
Remember how we let him crawl all over us?
That was before you had a face,
Before you taught me what I didn't know I knew
That day we crumpled into two.
2.
I'd imagined this kind of birth before,
The inevitable yowling yellow terror,
The serpent a memory in the center,
The slicing of flesh, the bloody armor,
But nothing ever actually changed.
The severing and rearrangement
Birth requires offended me.
Then one afternoon, white sky,
Smack in the middle of the long light,
A stash of tools in the window seat
I found and told myself to get to work.
What I dug out squirmed in its own dark.
What I let loose struggled to stand
And as I squinted, held out my hand
For the thing to take, I knew it well.
It lived and grew and opened a hole
And there I was, straight out of my head,
Carrying on, armadillo-armored,
Helmeted and defying protection,
Challenging myself to a dual of dissection,
My wise assumptions on their knees.
Here swarms the yellow curtain of bees,
Folding in the warrior's wake,
Piqued and blushing, thundering in Greek,
Veiling with honey vapor the mother's eye.
Let's tell it like it is: relinquished "I,"
And Once there lived a snake, wise as dirt,
Stacking the bones to cage the throbbing heart,
But now his shredded skin is rent,
And where one waited, two contend:
The girl compelled to brandish a sword,
Scratching in stone them fightin' words;
The father whose immortal, gasping wound
Makes of his brow a portal; a jagged crown.
WRAPPED IN A WRINKLED SHEET
Wrapped in a wrinkled sheet, beside
The window's senseless whisper,
Close to the weed-infested yard,
Close to the pond's soft chatter,
Loud in her cries and louder,
Erect above her gentleman,
Sways the nocturnal lover,
Sings the sirenical tongue.
Beneath the hot, mismanaged man,
Past shriller groans and ranker,
She rolls her prey, a whirling fan,
With blades and switch and cable,
A sexual inspirer,
The fawn, the fay, the devotee,
The decadent, the noble,
Noble at least today.
The loveless and unlovely skin
Reclined around about her,
The Nuzzled One, the Not-at-Home,
The nuzzled and the sated,
Her watchings-close have turned her eye,
She kicks against the weak and pale
The careless and the fated
With tongue and arch and nail.
***
Landis Everson
Three poems
Note: Landis Everson was part of the original "Berkeley Renaissance" in the late '40s, an intimate of the Duncan-Spicer-Blaser circle (Spicer was in love with him, and to Duncan he was the "Poet-King"), and later (circa 1960) a member of the Spicer-Blaser-Jim Herndon-Landis Everson Sunday reading group in San Francisco. Ashbery printed some of his things in Locus Solus in 1962, but Landis did not appear in print until two sequences (Postcard from Eden and "The Little Ghosts I Played With") were printed in their entirety last year in Ben Mazer's anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance in Fulcrum 3 (2004), Everson's first appearance in print in more than 40 years. He is now in his mid-70s, alive and well in San Luis Obispo, and has started writing poetry again. This spring, A volume of new and collected poems, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005, edited by Ben Mazer, is forthcoming.
BALANCE
The morning snapped up like a window shade
When dogs came barking down the hill
Filling memories and the sleeping rooms
With savagery. Not hard to tell
What puny prize they chased or why a day
That warmed its fingers on my chest
Was busy elsewhere cheering life and death.
An egg and bacon regularity
The minutes calm as coffee passed
And stuck. I waited for the cry of fate
Outside the house and thought, this world
Of love pretends no modesty--hope
And fear like rancid habits bound
Across the apple seeds and dust of danger.
MEMORY CHEST
Things he had discovered,
A watch, a gold tooth, a diary,
Lay before him in the box
After sixty years of death.
The elephant was also there
Something like a rose leaf
Jammed in, pressed and faded
After sixty years of death.
Things he had discovered
Jammed in pressed and faded
Something like a rose leaf--
What else had he expected?
The elephant was also there
Lay before him in the box.
A watch, a gold tooth, a diary--
What else had he expected?
After sixty years of death
What else had he expected?
He jammed himself within the box
And hugged the dead-set elephant.
PANTOUM
Hunger led him to discover
(That ancient enemy of the belly)
Starving on a mountain top
The form that trembled in the thickets.
That ancient enemy of the belly
Told its knowledge to the heart.
The form that trembled in the thickets,
Something love and hate could eat,
Told its knowledge to the heart--
All is prey that can be swallowed.
Something love and hate could eat
The eye was well trained to remember.
All is prey that can be swallowed
The earth exceeds itself in offering
The eye was well trained to remember
Beauty has a double shape.
The earth exceeds itself in offering
Both the beauty and the flesh.
Beauty has a double shape--
One the bow kills one the heart.
Both the beauty and the flesh
(One the bow kills one the heart)
Leapt up stricken from his fancy--
He ate the world up with his eyes.
One the bow kills one the heart
Hunger led him to discover--
He ate the world up with his eyes
Starving on the mountain top.
***
Michael Ladd
MID LIFE
You notice which lights have gone out in which signs,
and Time, Time, how you paw over Time.
The sound, in your mind, of closing doors
is a distant, ominous roar
like the sea heard in a rented shack, late at night.
You pace, you fret on what might
or might not have been.
The thousand life possibilities that you saw
have come down now to three or four.
You follow the streets of this moonless town,
feeling youth come back like heat stored
in the day, released now from the night's brick walls.
In a shop window--an LP sleeve, a mirror ball,
tawdry things invested with such sweet aching;
a life once yours.
The past: chew on it, gnaw
the rancid bone, that's what it's for.
***
Regina Derieva
Two poems
Translated from the Russian by Alan Shaw
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Consisting as I do of scraps of dreams,
of lands I've never seen, of underpinnings,
of air and salt, of elemental things
unmeddled with by endings or beginnings,
of clay and iron, and of ocean wave
and shingle crowds of feet have trod upon,
of faith and hope, stood at the wall, to brave
the rifles, turning into heavenly stone,
of quiet and simplicity, bestowed
upon us by a woman among women,
of emptiness that stretches like a road
into a vastness where things lose their meaning,
of whisperings, of looking long at that
which goes among us by the name of God,
at death, which never was, and now is not,
at life, of which so little can be had.
THE AGE WAS IRON: IT'S GONE TO RUST
The age was iron: it's gone to rust,
corroded over like a knife,
the edge of naked power lost
that had worlds trembling for their life.
A shard of dingy steel remains.
they carefully polish it with sand,
and the awful muscle strains,
with primal impulse, at the hand.
***
Gwyn McVay
SECOND BARDO SONG
Put your ears back
Put your eyes back
Put your mouth back
Put your mind back
You won't need them
Throw your arms down
Throw your legs down,
jump in after
after falling
you'll hear voices
These are demons
Listen closely,
imitate them
with your shining
Put your ears back
Put your mind back
***
Harriet Zinnes
PINK
Pink--the very sound is odd.
Why "p" and "k" together?
The gentle and the harsh,
the melodious and the rugged?
Nothing is, after all,
that cannot be together,
and yet, and yet,
the marriage of the gentle and the harsh
is a combination questionable though real
Let the word resound anyway.
Let the child laugh at the pink hair on her doll,
and the servant in the kitchen
recall the pink undies of her fallen mistress.
***
Henry Gould
RIDDLE OF THE KINGDOM
You won't find it in the newspaper;
nor in some Caribbean hideaway.
Not in the careful phrases of professors, nor
the alcoholic dénouement of a working day.
Deep in the framed confusion of a window,
a bird's rehearsing (hidden in a tree).
Warbling the only song he knows,
with aching slowness, tenderly.
Only the bird knows it's an imitation.
Echo of a sound heard once, far off . . .
creak of a swing, or distant train . . . oh
grave, earthbound tune-freighted with love!
***
John Hennessey
CONNECTICUT RIVER REPORT
I'm jumping ship. We've keeled the shallows, beached
Along pacific rims that idle east
Of urgency, and old idioms won't work here.
The tide is always changing in the Berkshires.
We've measured quite a bit more mass than weight--
And run aground where steeples prick the nape
Of dusk beyond the bridge. The law's mosaic,
An orthodoxy of bits and pieces, cracked
Contingencies a sort of sexy gear.
The tightest seal's on the subliminal here:
An astronaut turned poet laureate snaps
His boots across the sky, his leather chaps
And halter burning. His death is comedy,
One side effect of zero gravity.
***
Lyn McCredden
Two poems
IN THE SUNNY AIR
Years from now, standing in the sunny air,
you're holding something precious in your hands.
Leaning, contented, by your side there,
someone's smiling; around you light expands.
The camera's keen, but it's unprophetic
and cannot tell me what it is you hold
so tenderly. It's your fragile secret
furled in the future. But it makes you bold:
those bright blue eyes look back, direct, assured,
reflecting open skies, a blessedness
you share with all you touch, unconfused
by tawdry prizes, this world's injustice.
The treasure you hold in the sunny air
is what I will never see, with you, there.
OLD FRIEND
I choose to live in a mongrel suburb,
my scruffy street a united nations.
You live on the leafy side, unperturbed
by sameness, your own face, your relations.
You tell me, over coffee and éclair,
that on a rare train trip last week you'd seen
a boy from Footscray, or somewhere out there,
you know, tats, moccasins and stove pipe jeans.
He'd vomited in the carriage, right there
in front of everyone. Didn't clean up,
just stared round with a stupid grin. Who cares?
The look on your face was not quite disgust,
telling your little Western suburb story,
but unamused, self-congratulatory.
***
Charles O. Hartman
FLAMENCO SKETCHES
I. Miles
Still fall
Another drift of sunshine
A day, and then some
No need for snow
Strange creatures scaled down
We tune a canny ear to the unmoved hour
Strung high, the icy cloud sings of a blue trapped
in a blue
And so: too
Off on one hand the rind of an undiscarded moon
Off-season fields lie paralyzed for some Persephone
Her place held firm by a zero
Between's return
Then again, the spring's wound one way
Ideally, the poem's rhythmic regime should need no explanation at all, because it means to be compulsory: granting only the need to speak slowly, a reader speaking these lines aloud should reproduce the exact rhythm of Miles's solo on the last track from Kind of Blue. [Note: the originally released cut, not the alternate take also available on current CDs.]
The principles are simple in the abstract: one syllable per note of course (though here and there identifying either one can be tricky), composed into lexical and syntactical strings that, aside from making sense locally and globally, enlist the intonation and rhythmic patterns of English to approximate the musical rhythms of the solo. Because syllable-length is audible in English (though not semantic as in Classical languages), it's possible to mimic musical notes' combination of duration and distribution within the bar. Consonant clusters can be used to slow down the speech, clitics to speed it up, assonance to foreground it. Line-breaks can enforce the boundaries of musical phrases and not merely indicate them. Denser and looser syntax, more and less figurative language, modulate the rhythm as much as word- and phrase-stress do. Rhythm concerns emphasis as well as speed.
In practice the application is difficult because features on all levels of the linguistic hierarchy from phoneme to clause are in play jointly and continuously--drawing to a four-dimensional inside straight.
This explains why section I is not yet accompanied by section II, "Coltrane" or section III "Cannonball." Miles, for instance, distributes just 97 notes over the 95 seconds of his solo; the densest of Coltrane's 25 measures contains 24 notes.
In this passage, italics are used to indicate the point in his solo where Miles moves closer to the microphone.
***
Tom See
UNUDHUR SOEJERNUZ NIITSONG
And dhoe dhe niit iz gadhring
and dhu skii groez daak,
uhed dhoez klaodz aar blaizing
and dhaer singing tou mii haat:
you--yaur daiy iz throu--
mai yau rest bee trouw!
And dhen niit staats:
Giv mee yaur weerines
--dhu haat uv aul mii loenlines--
iil giv you miin
soe wee boeth riim
in good tiim.
***
Rachel Loden
NINEVEH FALLEN
Nineveh fallen. My
Ghostly battalion
Silver-bell ankle rings
Tatterdemalion
Babylon Cadillac. Black
Candle guttering
Nettle-leav'd bellflowers
Sweet-faced American
Elvis in Cuneiform
Black-winged deity
Fifteen-gate city of
Mooncalf & talisman
Nineveh fallen. My
Ghostly battalion
Daughters of Sargon
Be carried away
***
Mike Smith
WINTER SONNETS 1 & 2
1.
Snowfall after a softening week of rain.
We say the season's going, then it‚s gone.
Waking in the night, I feel the after-pain
of something broken, nothing to be done.
Something broken or something torn. Outside,
I hear the grate of a paw on muffled ground
and think, Pointless to resist the dark's sure slide;
binders of the dark, we are by darkness bound.
Then I think how often and against what odds
the poem gets written. Common as breath,
or the breath's slow ceasing. (The great head nods
toward the sudden figure at the door.) One wish:
To wake in the night and find the night has passed,
the world around us itching like a cast.
2.
One stopped his walk to watch the headlights grow.
One left the engine running in a grove.
One, by thirty, knew all there was to know
then happened on her lover with his love.
One learned to find her name carved in the sky.
One died to reach the wisdom of the bone.
One lived to get his own back in the eye.
One to this very day remains unknown--
Not pain, but after-pain, pain's reprobate.
(For they say it‚s winter and we‚ve come too late.)
Yet who among us, taking the moment‚s measure,
wouldn't mortgage fully the unglittering end?
Who among us could resist the ancient wager,
waking from its lair the hibernating fiend?
***
Amy King
RECORD KEEPING
These are the things you think you said.
It's just that I have no way of knowing
what to tell you. I fill you full
of roots and prefixes, signifiers and
the dialectic, and still my company mixes
with the party. I won't tow the line
though. Better the diagnoses than
prescriptions. Herein, my drink remains
displaced. She ambles along in
her careful constructions. Against
the wall, she overlaps her shadow upright.
The table over there offers refreshments.
When I say I am of does that follow
with good riddance? The end of man
often lies at hand, but whereof can one
not speak? It is on the table; it is in my grasp;
it has soaked into the carpet. As a woman,
my permission opens me aimlessly:
I move my mouth and walk therein.
***
Mimi Khalvati
GHAZAL
When you wake to jitters every day, it's heartache.
Ignore it, explore it, either way, it's heartache.
Youth's a map you can never refold,
from Yokohama to Hudson Bay, it's heartache.
The moon in a swoon, you're in his arms,
the fandango starts, the palm trees sway, it's heartache.
Oh love, love, who are centuries old.
It's not time or absence I can't weigh, it's heartache.
Heartache with women, heartache with men.
Call myself straight or call myself gay, it's heartache.
Stop at the wayside, name each flower,
the loveliness that will always stay: it's heartache.
Wherever I am, I'm elsewhere too
in a cloud you'd think, but isn't, grey. It's heartache.
Why do nightingales sing in the dark?
What the eye can't see, the soul will say, it's heartache.
Who would dare to call their pain despair?
As long as faith holds true, men can pray, it's heartache.
Let the Sufi meaning of my name,
'a quiet retreat', heal as it may its heartache.
***
Michael Helsem
FEGEFEUER
Distances I never chose
and those to come
converse together where I stand
abandoned and dumb.
The birds sing shrill and very loud
in a crowded tree;
I wonder what it takes to cure
futurity
that sings within my bloodstream like
a psychic gale,
and yet allows no single bare
airt to prevail . . .
So I remain, and cobble whims
of crimson from
distances I never chose,
and those to come.
***
Nikia Billingslea
Two poems
I. AFRO SAPPHO
Nappy heads make for strong minds against bullshit.
Dreadlocks are not so dreadful when they conduct
Ra energy, divine, on naked gray streets
strewn with blood money.
II. COFFEEHOUSE PROPHET
With long bony fingers tugging reddish brown
goatee, he sits at the bar‚s end watching
caffeine-stimulated drama; his onyx
eyes look straight through me.
III. S.I.N. ON STAGE
Caramel and Chocolate, Sappho‚s daughters.
When they speak, echoes of African drums beat
trance-inducing rhythm while they extol the
virtues of the P.
IV. JAZZ ELITE
Crescent and star on Black fingers pluck bass strings
under trapped sun, shining brilliant gold for
people who can afford to buy some sol on
an overcast night.
V. URBAN TAO
There are Taoist monks in our midst. Quietly
they walk concrete streets, flowing with the tide of
the masses, but impenetrable. With minds
of stone, hearts of clouds.
VI. SHEPSU
The crimson juice of strange fruit stains my white gown.
Head raised--not bowed--at the candle-lit alter
in reverence to ancestors who give me
strength when I falter.
VII. TRIBAL VIBE
The vibe collective, descendent of the tribe.
Not daisies and free love, it's how we survive.
Star babies left to die come in the cipher
and get loved alive.
INVESTIGATION OF THE ROYAL MASSACRE
The desert's share of elves
Alluringly recedes, a highway night
Disclosed in orbs that flicker, hover, melt
And leaving, jab with knives:
The desert's share of elves.
The thievish dealer says
One day you too shall vanquish with the moth;
Anything to lose this daily death.
You hazard it, because
The thievish dealer says.
The desert's share of elves,
The thievish dealer says,
Is more yours with the fading felth.
***
Sharon Dolin
FIRST SPRING FLOWERING YELLOW BUSH RETICULATED FORSPENT
Sore pity her so pithy here
pour hints to her for
Cynthia (seen rhymier far
rheumier) nor rent to her for
scent to her fear soothing her tore loose with her more
ruth with her worn
tooth with myrrh withal
beware forbear the ear
far worthier so soiled there ur springier forcing the air
poor thing her hair ignored a year
see farther err ere
warring rear now firth in we're
unpetalling here [forsythia]
(sith he forswears).
***
Robert Stanton
natter quicker
uliginous
fame, the wanted
latent fuss
K. Silem Mohammad
Two poems
THE RAMONES
The storms name them
not smartest, nor
at rest, maroon
them on no shore.
Restore them, Mars,
one ransom more:
no theme more rash,
no ears so sore.
As some men moan,
so others snore.
No one tames them,
Namor nor Thor,
no Roman son,
no orator--
stern men at arms,
at stones to roar.
TULLY
Conscript fathers, how you adore your rhetor's
sweet declaiming! see how the curile aedile
tilts his chair back, not of a mind to veto
even a sparrow.
Bench by bench, a reverie tames the senate,
all Rome passed out, drunk on his eloquentia,
rococo Rome, buzzing with lyres and zithers,
goddesses bathing.
Marble columns girding the vatic dreamwork
form a ring supporting a convex awning,
Helicopters thump in the massive dome-space,
fiery searchlights
trawl the clouds, and bolts of polluted lightning
bas-relief the forum in yellow flashes.
Gazing up, the consul's opponents tremble:
Mars the avenger
rides in screaming. Faces of murder victims
rise in each conspirator's guilty conscience,
terrorized, insultingly mutilated,
slathered with lipstick.
Strip away the quaestor's oneiric bugbears:
under dead skin, honeycombs made of razors
harbor clumps of ten-in-the-evening mayflies,
terminal, flaccid.
Stony rhetor, cast in the role of the bad cop,
eulogize your laureled Italian headlands:
fields of honor, sweetened by phlox and lupine!
Watch as they vanish--
sunlit meadows brightening into evening,
crossed by horsemen, afterwards shadows of horsemen,
lastly, cankered remnants of fading twilight
spreading infection.
***
Arielle Greenberg
THE METER OF THE NIGHT SKY
I wonder what would happen if the K in knife was said,
if part of all the Hs in the book had rubbed away,
changing up the shapes of our ancestor's good white bones.
I wonder who's been sleeping in this bale of hay before,
how many eyes adore me, how many needles here.
I wonder who is bedded, sharp and low, like any twin,
kindled by the flickering camp lantern of my name.
It doesn't happen suddenly, but with a rolling hush:
some blossom, something citric, and oh so cavalier,
moves without me, moves in chorus with the pulse of the night sky.
It's my velvet artwork, making pleasure of a peephole.
without me, it can wonder every G-note in the scale,
every Aries made of starlight. It's the whirring of my plum.
***
Ann Fisher-Wirth
THE SKELETON LEAVES
I know how to find you.
I go where your sleeping
is filled with the shadows
of leaves, where the leaves have
bled their green,
and all that remain are
their skeletons, nearly
transparent, translucent,
and tissue gone blurred as
the moon among clouds, as
the fur on a moth's wing,
and tips as if trailing
through water--
Such leaves are not common.
In this snowy country
they cherish them, save them,
the white skelettbladen--
like us, they have died, to
become more enduring.
***
Ben Mazer
A STAR IS BORN
Her feigned indifference stung his vanity;
a small town girl with sawdust in her veins;
a modern pilgrim, who had changed her name;
a girl with glasses, thrumming in his brain;
the brazen hypocrite, she knew his name;
subscribed to Star and Screen, jumped out of cakes;
yet she had got his goat; he hit the brakes,
but felt his life was founded on a lie.
Big parties were his own familiar waters;
life took his coat; his name was on its lips;
he spent the evening in the servants' quarters,
trying to get a date, and washing cups.
He told the boss he wanted a screen test;
the studio would write him a blank check;
he told her that she never would be his,
that now she never could be like the rest.
His will was done; the out of town reviews
killed the first rushes, but the biggest news
was that her presence had eclipsed his fame;
each questionaire was filled out with her name.
Now in the afternoons when she came back
he had prepared a cozy little snack,
and they let down their hair; he didn't dare
tell her his fears, but she knew what they were.
He slapped a reporter, not the thing to do
when he had credit nowhere in the town,
except among the elder set who knew
just what it was the younger man had done.
Then finally left on his own holiday.
Prepared the picnic, but forgot the brunch.
He dropped his robe and swam out to the stars;
now you can see which one of them is hers.
***
Rodney Koeneke
FRANKENSTEIN'S PURSUIT
For weeks we yo-yo'd up and down the Five.
Stopping for gas, I’d find the bill was paid.
He'd wait for me when I fell behind.
Elizabeth, my perfect family, dead . . .
Near the interchange I caught his plates.
He slowed down, leering as I roared past.
His yolky eye, the tell-tale brainpan stitch--
Is it these imperfections that I hate?
I see in you a part of what I am.
You see in me the thing you cannot be.
Some incompletion drove me to persist;
Of all my rotting parts you are the sum.
Needing a god to blame, how could you see
It's in those borrowed eyes that I exist?
***
C.J. Sage
PRAYER FOR MANY EYES
Let the thousand visions fall away.
Let the sleep of reason grace our eyes
kindly with its many veils, to stay
the knowledge of the hurtful world. --Deny!
Men I know have fallen (many men)
prey to the temptations of sight and sense.
Women kept to their convictions, then
gave them all up, just to walk the fence:
pain on one side, more pain on the other.
Now let the lids of knowing take their rest;
let me close my own to the faults of brothers
and sisters in this life, difficult at best.
Let us be grateful for the wealths of boredom.
Let us, heirs of Argus, be more dumb.
***
Charlotte Mandel
Two poems
OF NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES
No, I do not envision sky-light welcome
Nor that bomb-shattered flesh evolves to angel
In Recovery, all stopped And I knew it
Spinal surgery siphons red from marrow--
Your black twin-mirror pupils distant . . . distant . . .
Blessing flows via tubes transfusing plasma
Tunnel high as you will, but take a flashlight--
Acid batteries stencil wings on darkness
Heaven stages desire and speaks in echo
Clouds like papery hymnals shuffle praise-songs
A blink rinses the eye of sorrow's visions
Windblown cirrus revolves in blades of jet smoke
DECEMBER PARADELLE
Days resemble each other like sheaves of wheat
Days resemble each other like sheaves of wheat
Gathering hurt feelings I trail after your blade.
Gathering hurt feelings I trail after your blade.
I like your hurt. Feelings resemble other days
gathering sheaves of wheat after each blade trail.
Your voice like smoke surrounds me in the room
Your voice like smoke surrounds me in the room
Blurs all words of a dream I want to recall
Blurs all words of a dream I want to recall.
I smoke to recall words in a voice like the room
Your dream surrounds, blurs all want of me.
Answer the telephone although it never rings.
Answer the telephone although it never rings.
Letters sleep in this box no postman comes to.
Letters sleep in this box no postman comes to.
It comes to this: the postman rings: letters sleep
in telephone box. Never answer no.
No smoke blurs the hurt to me of your answer.
Sheaves of dream letters trail the postman.
Days sleep in this room like a telephone box.
It rings. All words come to resemble each other.
I never voice feelings--although recall surrounds
like wheat after blade. I want your gathering in.
***
Anand Thakore
Two poems
DEAD, AT YOUR MOTHER'S FUNERAL
As if to quench the first little wisp of flame,
Rain fell in torrents when I reached the grounds,
Beating wildly upon the low tin roof,
Like a great hurt beast no will could tame.
Sweat covered your forehead, your blue sleeves wet,
As you took the hot brand into your palms,
Turning towards me before you lit the sticks,
Your brown hair drenched as when we first met.
Can I say I still loved the man I saw,
Whose loss I turned so quickly away from?
I saw you through tongues of leaping flame,
And cold eyes of ice no flame could thaw,
Your mother burning as I thought of my own,
Seeking no way into the cell of your grief;
No way out of mine as I heaped her with twigs,
Poured oil on damp wood and watched you like a stone.
FOG AT PANCHGANI
I have waited all morning for this fog to clear,
Looking through its folds for stray signs of green;
Yet now that the terraced slopes and paddy-fields
And the woods that it hid draw steadily near--
The thick moss on a branch, the full height
Of a hill, and the lily-spotted weir
Shimmering insistently in late noon heat,
The eye retreats in fear from approaching light;
And I long more strongly for the fog to come down,
Covering in a single length of shroud
The bright greens it wrapped in torn scraps of grey;
And the watcher outside whom it would not drown.
Great Maker of Fog, release my eyes.
Cast them into this swirl of grey and green,
Till they come to feel at home in change.
Grant them the craft of swift goodbyes.
***
Mary Agner
OLD DOMINIA
She wears tobacco tucked in her auburn hair.
Her eyes, the hues of Chesapeake Bay distilled.
Hilt gripped, she stands prepared to sever
tyranny's neck in the muddy Piedmont.
Each empty, wind-wrenched autumn, her hands in paint
that splatters whole leaf piles and the yellow winged
forsythia for me to play in--
loneliness blurred by kaleidoscoped trees.
Virginia, older sister that I have lost,
I almost see her cresting and winking waves
here, moving through the pines. My palms freeze
missing her hand in my hand when leaves fall.
***
Oliver Murray
MONROVIA, LIBERIA
("Taylor's men roam and kill at will. They are
dressed in shower hats and wedding dresses
The shower hats are for the rain.
No one knows what the wedding-dresses
are for" --Denis Johnson, war correspondent. )
Mind your step because of the piled up corpses.
This night's haul is over two hundred dead and
killers roaming streets in their white lace dresses.
make people fearful.
Off the sidewalk, people in lanes and alleys,
retching, think of cannibal voodoo rumour
hope that what they've eaten was not cadaver--
that's what the dogs eat.
Sharks this year are circling in shallows waiting.
Wedding dresses add to the terror, killers
drag the corpses down to the blood-frilled surf for
that's what the sharks eat.
***
Jerry Harp
THE CREATURE FINDS HIS MARK
My man showed up again, the one
Whose skin I breathed for days--appeared
Among a sidewalk's tables and chairs.
He looked my way, his perfect wave
Of hair accosting the breeze.
Savvy monks crept from his eyes.
The sidewalk voices knocked and rang
Like iron balls beaten against brick walls.
He looked my way again, and in a single sweep
Took in a crow, a cloud, his table companion,
Some handsome guy in a vanilla suit.
His half smile told a tale.
My Creature wrath and desire were razed
To the street. Where else were they to go?
The flickering streetlight cast an aureole.
***
Eve Adamson
Two poems
THE AFTERNOON I WAS BORN OUT OF MY OWN HEAD
1.
Remember the serpent from the other story?
We'd met him before, read his CV
(Part myth, part bald-faced lie), found his cream-and-coral
Complexion something admirable.
Remember how we let him crawl all over us?
That was before you had a face,
Before you taught me what I didn't know I knew
That day we crumpled into two.
2.
I'd imagined this kind of birth before,
The inevitable yowling yellow terror,
The serpent a memory in the center,
The slicing of flesh, the bloody armor,
But nothing ever actually changed.
The severing and rearrangement
Birth requires offended me.
Then one afternoon, white sky,
Smack in the middle of the long light,
A stash of tools in the window seat
I found and told myself to get to work.
What I dug out squirmed in its own dark.
What I let loose struggled to stand
And as I squinted, held out my hand
For the thing to take, I knew it well.
It lived and grew and opened a hole
And there I was, straight out of my head,
Carrying on, armadillo-armored,
Helmeted and defying protection,
Challenging myself to a dual of dissection,
My wise assumptions on their knees.
Here swarms the yellow curtain of bees,
Folding in the warrior's wake,
Piqued and blushing, thundering in Greek,
Veiling with honey vapor the mother's eye.
Let's tell it like it is: relinquished "I,"
And Once there lived a snake, wise as dirt,
Stacking the bones to cage the throbbing heart,
But now his shredded skin is rent,
And where one waited, two contend:
The girl compelled to brandish a sword,
Scratching in stone them fightin' words;
The father whose immortal, gasping wound
Makes of his brow a portal; a jagged crown.
WRAPPED IN A WRINKLED SHEET
Wrapped in a wrinkled sheet, beside
The window's senseless whisper,
Close to the weed-infested yard,
Close to the pond's soft chatter,
Loud in her cries and louder,
Erect above her gentleman,
Sways the nocturnal lover,
Sings the sirenical tongue.
Beneath the hot, mismanaged man,
Past shriller groans and ranker,
She rolls her prey, a whirling fan,
With blades and switch and cable,
A sexual inspirer,
The fawn, the fay, the devotee,
The decadent, the noble,
Noble at least today.
The loveless and unlovely skin
Reclined around about her,
The Nuzzled One, the Not-at-Home,
The nuzzled and the sated,
Her watchings-close have turned her eye,
She kicks against the weak and pale
The careless and the fated
With tongue and arch and nail.
***
Landis Everson
Three poems
Note: Landis Everson was part of the original "Berkeley Renaissance" in the late '40s, an intimate of the Duncan-Spicer-Blaser circle (Spicer was in love with him, and to Duncan he was the "Poet-King"), and later (circa 1960) a member of the Spicer-Blaser-Jim Herndon-Landis Everson Sunday reading group in San Francisco. Ashbery printed some of his things in Locus Solus in 1962, but Landis did not appear in print until two sequences (Postcard from Eden and "The Little Ghosts I Played With") were printed in their entirety last year in Ben Mazer's anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance in Fulcrum 3 (2004), Everson's first appearance in print in more than 40 years. He is now in his mid-70s, alive and well in San Luis Obispo, and has started writing poetry again. This spring, A volume of new and collected poems, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005, edited by Ben Mazer, is forthcoming.
BALANCE
The morning snapped up like a window shade
When dogs came barking down the hill
Filling memories and the sleeping rooms
With savagery. Not hard to tell
What puny prize they chased or why a day
That warmed its fingers on my chest
Was busy elsewhere cheering life and death.
An egg and bacon regularity
The minutes calm as coffee passed
And stuck. I waited for the cry of fate
Outside the house and thought, this world
Of love pretends no modesty--hope
And fear like rancid habits bound
Across the apple seeds and dust of danger.
MEMORY CHEST
Things he had discovered,
A watch, a gold tooth, a diary,
Lay before him in the box
After sixty years of death.
The elephant was also there
Something like a rose leaf
Jammed in, pressed and faded
After sixty years of death.
Things he had discovered
Jammed in pressed and faded
Something like a rose leaf--
What else had he expected?
The elephant was also there
Lay before him in the box.
A watch, a gold tooth, a diary--
What else had he expected?
After sixty years of death
What else had he expected?
He jammed himself within the box
And hugged the dead-set elephant.
PANTOUM
Hunger led him to discover
(That ancient enemy of the belly)
Starving on a mountain top
The form that trembled in the thickets.
That ancient enemy of the belly
Told its knowledge to the heart.
The form that trembled in the thickets,
Something love and hate could eat,
Told its knowledge to the heart--
All is prey that can be swallowed.
Something love and hate could eat
The eye was well trained to remember.
All is prey that can be swallowed
The earth exceeds itself in offering
The eye was well trained to remember
Beauty has a double shape.
The earth exceeds itself in offering
Both the beauty and the flesh.
Beauty has a double shape--
One the bow kills one the heart.
Both the beauty and the flesh
(One the bow kills one the heart)
Leapt up stricken from his fancy--
He ate the world up with his eyes.
One the bow kills one the heart
Hunger led him to discover--
He ate the world up with his eyes
Starving on the mountain top.
***
Michael Ladd
MID LIFE
You notice which lights have gone out in which signs,
and Time, Time, how you paw over Time.
The sound, in your mind, of closing doors
is a distant, ominous roar
like the sea heard in a rented shack, late at night.
You pace, you fret on what might
or might not have been.
The thousand life possibilities that you saw
have come down now to three or four.
You follow the streets of this moonless town,
feeling youth come back like heat stored
in the day, released now from the night's brick walls.
In a shop window--an LP sleeve, a mirror ball,
tawdry things invested with such sweet aching;
a life once yours.
The past: chew on it, gnaw
the rancid bone, that's what it's for.
***
Regina Derieva
Two poems
Translated from the Russian by Alan Shaw
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Consisting as I do of scraps of dreams,
of lands I've never seen, of underpinnings,
of air and salt, of elemental things
unmeddled with by endings or beginnings,
of clay and iron, and of ocean wave
and shingle crowds of feet have trod upon,
of faith and hope, stood at the wall, to brave
the rifles, turning into heavenly stone,
of quiet and simplicity, bestowed
upon us by a woman among women,
of emptiness that stretches like a road
into a vastness where things lose their meaning,
of whisperings, of looking long at that
which goes among us by the name of God,
at death, which never was, and now is not,
at life, of which so little can be had.
THE AGE WAS IRON: IT'S GONE TO RUST
The age was iron: it's gone to rust,
corroded over like a knife,
the edge of naked power lost
that had worlds trembling for their life.
A shard of dingy steel remains.
they carefully polish it with sand,
and the awful muscle strains,
with primal impulse, at the hand.
***
Gwyn McVay
SECOND BARDO SONG
Put your ears back
Put your eyes back
Put your mouth back
Put your mind back
You won't need them
Throw your arms down
Throw your legs down,
jump in after
after falling
you'll hear voices
These are demons
Listen closely,
imitate them
with your shining
Put your ears back
Put your mind back
***
Harriet Zinnes
PINK
Pink--the very sound is odd.
Why "p" and "k" together?
The gentle and the harsh,
the melodious and the rugged?
Nothing is, after all,
that cannot be together,
and yet, and yet,
the marriage of the gentle and the harsh
is a combination questionable though real
Let the word resound anyway.
Let the child laugh at the pink hair on her doll,
and the servant in the kitchen
recall the pink undies of her fallen mistress.
***
Henry Gould
RIDDLE OF THE KINGDOM
A man becomes the song he sings.
--Irish proverb
You won't find it in the newspaper;
nor in some Caribbean hideaway.
Not in the careful phrases of professors, nor
the alcoholic dénouement of a working day.
Deep in the framed confusion of a window,
a bird's rehearsing (hidden in a tree).
Warbling the only song he knows,
with aching slowness, tenderly.
Only the bird knows it's an imitation.
Echo of a sound heard once, far off . . .
creak of a swing, or distant train . . . oh
grave, earthbound tune-freighted with love!
***
John Hennessey
CONNECTICUT RIVER REPORT
I'm jumping ship. We've keeled the shallows, beached
Along pacific rims that idle east
Of urgency, and old idioms won't work here.
The tide is always changing in the Berkshires.
We've measured quite a bit more mass than weight--
And run aground where steeples prick the nape
Of dusk beyond the bridge. The law's mosaic,
An orthodoxy of bits and pieces, cracked
Contingencies a sort of sexy gear.
The tightest seal's on the subliminal here:
An astronaut turned poet laureate snaps
His boots across the sky, his leather chaps
And halter burning. His death is comedy,
One side effect of zero gravity.
***
Lyn McCredden
Two poems
IN THE SUNNY AIR
Years from now, standing in the sunny air,
you're holding something precious in your hands.
Leaning, contented, by your side there,
someone's smiling; around you light expands.
The camera's keen, but it's unprophetic
and cannot tell me what it is you hold
so tenderly. It's your fragile secret
furled in the future. But it makes you bold:
those bright blue eyes look back, direct, assured,
reflecting open skies, a blessedness
you share with all you touch, unconfused
by tawdry prizes, this world's injustice.
The treasure you hold in the sunny air
is what I will never see, with you, there.
OLD FRIEND
I choose to live in a mongrel suburb,
my scruffy street a united nations.
You live on the leafy side, unperturbed
by sameness, your own face, your relations.
You tell me, over coffee and éclair,
that on a rare train trip last week you'd seen
a boy from Footscray, or somewhere out there,
you know, tats, moccasins and stove pipe jeans.
He'd vomited in the carriage, right there
in front of everyone. Didn't clean up,
just stared round with a stupid grin. Who cares?
The look on your face was not quite disgust,
telling your little Western suburb story,
but unamused, self-congratulatory.
***
Charles O. Hartman
FLAMENCO SKETCHES
I. Miles
Still fall
Another drift of sunshine
A day, and then some
No need for snow
Strange creatures scaled down
We tune a canny ear to the unmoved hour
Strung high, the icy cloud sings of a blue trapped
in a blue
And so: too
Off on one hand the rind of an undiscarded moon
Off-season fields lie paralyzed for some Persephone
Her place held firm by a zero
Between's return
Then again, the spring's wound one way
Ideally, the poem's rhythmic regime should need no explanation at all, because it means to be compulsory: granting only the need to speak slowly, a reader speaking these lines aloud should reproduce the exact rhythm of Miles's solo on the last track from Kind of Blue. [Note: the originally released cut, not the alternate take also available on current CDs.]
The principles are simple in the abstract: one syllable per note of course (though here and there identifying either one can be tricky), composed into lexical and syntactical strings that, aside from making sense locally and globally, enlist the intonation and rhythmic patterns of English to approximate the musical rhythms of the solo. Because syllable-length is audible in English (though not semantic as in Classical languages), it's possible to mimic musical notes' combination of duration and distribution within the bar. Consonant clusters can be used to slow down the speech, clitics to speed it up, assonance to foreground it. Line-breaks can enforce the boundaries of musical phrases and not merely indicate them. Denser and looser syntax, more and less figurative language, modulate the rhythm as much as word- and phrase-stress do. Rhythm concerns emphasis as well as speed.
In practice the application is difficult because features on all levels of the linguistic hierarchy from phoneme to clause are in play jointly and continuously--drawing to a four-dimensional inside straight.
This explains why section I is not yet accompanied by section II, "Coltrane" or section III "Cannonball." Miles, for instance, distributes just 97 notes over the 95 seconds of his solo; the densest of Coltrane's 25 measures contains 24 notes.
In this passage, italics are used to indicate the point in his solo where Miles moves closer to the microphone.
***
Tom See
UNUDHUR SOEJERNUZ NIITSONG
And dhoe dhe niit iz gadhring
and dhu skii groez daak,
uhed dhoez klaodz aar blaizing
and dhaer singing tou mii haat:
you--yaur daiy iz throu--
mai yau rest bee trouw!
And dhen niit staats:
Giv mee yaur weerines
--dhu haat uv aul mii loenlines--
iil giv you miin
soe wee boeth riim
in good tiim.
***
Rachel Loden
NINEVEH FALLEN
Kuyunjik, palace mound
Nineveh fallen. My
Ghostly battalion
Silver-bell ankle rings
Tatterdemalion
Babylon Cadillac. Black
Candle guttering
Nettle-leav'd bellflowers
Sweet-faced American
Elvis in Cuneiform
Black-winged deity
Fifteen-gate city of
Mooncalf & talisman
Nineveh fallen. My
Ghostly battalion
Daughters of Sargon
Be carried away
***
Mike Smith
WINTER SONNETS 1 & 2
1.
Snowfall after a softening week of rain.
We say the season's going, then it‚s gone.
Waking in the night, I feel the after-pain
of something broken, nothing to be done.
Something broken or something torn. Outside,
I hear the grate of a paw on muffled ground
and think, Pointless to resist the dark's sure slide;
binders of the dark, we are by darkness bound.
Then I think how often and against what odds
the poem gets written. Common as breath,
or the breath's slow ceasing. (The great head nods
toward the sudden figure at the door.) One wish:
To wake in the night and find the night has passed,
the world around us itching like a cast.
2.
One stopped his walk to watch the headlights grow.
One left the engine running in a grove.
One, by thirty, knew all there was to know
then happened on her lover with his love.
One learned to find her name carved in the sky.
One died to reach the wisdom of the bone.
One lived to get his own back in the eye.
One to this very day remains unknown--
Not pain, but after-pain, pain's reprobate.
(For they say it‚s winter and we‚ve come too late.)
Yet who among us, taking the moment‚s measure,
wouldn't mortgage fully the unglittering end?
Who among us could resist the ancient wager,
waking from its lair the hibernating fiend?
***
Amy King
RECORD KEEPING
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
--Wittgenstein
These are the things you think you said.
It's just that I have no way of knowing
what to tell you. I fill you full
of roots and prefixes, signifiers and
the dialectic, and still my company mixes
with the party. I won't tow the line
though. Better the diagnoses than
prescriptions. Herein, my drink remains
displaced. She ambles along in
her careful constructions. Against
the wall, she overlaps her shadow upright.
The table over there offers refreshments.
When I say I am of does that follow
with good riddance? The end of man
often lies at hand, but whereof can one
not speak? It is on the table; it is in my grasp;
it has soaked into the carpet. As a woman,
my permission opens me aimlessly:
I move my mouth and walk therein.
***
Mimi Khalvati
GHAZAL
When you wake to jitters every day, it's heartache.
Ignore it, explore it, either way, it's heartache.
Youth's a map you can never refold,
from Yokohama to Hudson Bay, it's heartache.
The moon in a swoon, you're in his arms,
the fandango starts, the palm trees sway, it's heartache.
Oh love, love, who are centuries old.
It's not time or absence I can't weigh, it's heartache.
Heartache with women, heartache with men.
Call myself straight or call myself gay, it's heartache.
Stop at the wayside, name each flower,
the loveliness that will always stay: it's heartache.
Wherever I am, I'm elsewhere too
in a cloud you'd think, but isn't, grey. It's heartache.
Why do nightingales sing in the dark?
What the eye can't see, the soul will say, it's heartache.
Who would dare to call their pain despair?
As long as faith holds true, men can pray, it's heartache.
Let the Sufi meaning of my name,
'a quiet retreat', heal as it may its heartache.
***
Michael Helsem
FEGEFEUER
Distances I never chose
and those to come
converse together where I stand
abandoned and dumb.
The birds sing shrill and very loud
in a crowded tree;
I wonder what it takes to cure
futurity
that sings within my bloodstream like
a psychic gale,
and yet allows no single bare
airt to prevail . . .
So I remain, and cobble whims
of crimson from
distances I never chose,
and those to come.
***
Nikia Billingslea
Two poems
I. AFRO SAPPHO
Nappy heads make for strong minds against bullshit.
Dreadlocks are not so dreadful when they conduct
Ra energy, divine, on naked gray streets
strewn with blood money.
II. COFFEEHOUSE PROPHET
With long bony fingers tugging reddish brown
goatee, he sits at the bar‚s end watching
caffeine-stimulated drama; his onyx
eyes look straight through me.
III. S.I.N. ON STAGE
Caramel and Chocolate, Sappho‚s daughters.
When they speak, echoes of African drums beat
trance-inducing rhythm while they extol the
virtues of the P.
IV. JAZZ ELITE
Crescent and star on Black fingers pluck bass strings
under trapped sun, shining brilliant gold for
people who can afford to buy some sol on
an overcast night.
V. URBAN TAO
There are Taoist monks in our midst. Quietly
they walk concrete streets, flowing with the tide of
the masses, but impenetrable. With minds
of stone, hearts of clouds.
VI. SHEPSU
The crimson juice of strange fruit stains my white gown.
Head raised--not bowed--at the candle-lit alter
in reverence to ancestors who give me
strength when I falter.
VII. TRIBAL VIBE
The vibe collective, descendent of the tribe.
Not daisies and free love, it's how we survive.
Star babies left to die come in the cipher
and get loved alive.
INVESTIGATION OF THE ROYAL MASSACRE
The desert's share of elves
Alluringly recedes, a highway night
Disclosed in orbs that flicker, hover, melt
And leaving, jab with knives:
The desert's share of elves.
The thievish dealer says
One day you too shall vanquish with the moth;
Anything to lose this daily death.
You hazard it, because
The thievish dealer says.
The desert's share of elves,
The thievish dealer says,
Is more yours with the fading felth.
***
Sharon Dolin
FIRST SPRING FLOWERING YELLOW BUSH RETICULATED FORSPENT
Sore pity her so pithy here
pour hints to her for
Cynthia (seen rhymier far
rheumier) nor rent to her for
scent to her fear soothing her tore loose with her more
ruth with her worn
tooth with myrrh withal
beware forbear the ear
far worthier so soiled there ur springier forcing the air
poor thing her hair ignored a year
see farther err ere
warring rear now firth in we're
unpetalling here [forsythia]
(sith he forswears).
***
Robert Stanton
natter quicker
uliginous
fame, the wanted
latent fuss
Monday, May 30, 2005
SALT's final issue / Part 4 [Reginald Shepherd, Gabrielle Fletcher]
[edited by John Kinsella]
Reginald Shepherd
Five poems
AT WEEP
Can't move can't speak can't think to wonder
why that's so. Song says I still
believe, can't think of what, who
that might be. Their faces gather
blackness, can't be seen. Song says I
and I and I. It sounds like cry,
like someone crying in the woods
by Stewart Park (the dirty woods, let me
be filthy, stain me, let the bones
come together, bone
to its bone and tainted too):
like someone crying but he has
no eyes no ears no mouth no
voice to speak of. Speak to me.
Can't hear you anymore, can't ask
for more. Song keeps repeating
shit where you eat, don't shit
where you eat. The day
begins with burning, then remembers
to wake up: sweetbitter resins,
pollens, dripping cum smells
flower, white. Highway's haunted
by remembered men and boys, no light
but passing pickup trucks, Nero burning
in the Tiber's unmade bed:
ecology of lack and want
and never lack of want, no never
want. Want to go home. Not yet
a you, or he, an it (no want
of want), a something to be seen
and see what comes
of it (can't see anything now, walking
past black woods). Here he comes.
Song litters upstate New York maps
with classical towns, Attica, Utica, Syracuse,
Troy, lining the throughways with Latin
and Greek: Ithaca and the other islands
fingering slim lakes. Seneca
slits his wrists in the bath,
too late for life in ancient Rome.
MODERNISM
And “I” is a conjecture,
simile that's become science:
calyx torn down both sides, the only
decipherable word among five
Bird nest supplied by paraphrase,
some spurious other, much restored:
talents are money, two mutilated words
hence the extension beyond lexicography
Death as a gift, a ruin of paper
for the opulence of Gyges:
“calamitous” perhaps sounds like
opening the right-hand half
You have taken a cricket
by the wing, mixed thighs and
courtly love: papyrus burned at the top
a black-butted fellow, badly damaged
The meaning is obscene, Eros' red balls
earlier than arrows: they vomited
their mass of pride from a pottery shard
The same papyrus gives “ear dripping blood”
Note: This poem is comprised entirely of phrases from Guy Davenport's notes for his volume of translations 7 Greeks (New Directions). They have been rather drastically selected, condensed, and rearranged, but only one word has been altered.
NATION: AN ELEGY
They took the young men to grind
like ostriches in the wilderness, a river
more ruddy than rubies. His footstool
overcame them between the straits.
Princes among the provinces made the rampart
and the wall lament, even the sea monsters
fell under the wood. My virgins in the midst of me
embrace dunghills in scarlet for meat.
My breach is like the sea, the foxes walk upon it
as if it were a garden. Who is he that saith
My liver is poured upon the earth
because of the arrows of his quiver?
My mighty men remembered not her gates
sunk into the ground, mouth in the dust
we have swallowed up a cloud. Our water
for money, I am their music among the heathen,
polishing sapphire: the yoke
of our transgressions, a net for my feet.
Note: This poem is comprised entirely of phrases from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the King James Version. Though they have been condensed and rearranged, only two pronouns have been changed.
REMAINDER'S EDGE
He's sleeplessness pulled through
a sieve, snake branch beliefs
dangle from, overgrown
with flourishing abjections. Glance
wears down grass to gravel, lamb
to less than sacrifice, night contours
weather with its full vocabulary
of line. Night and hunting made a pledge
to stay the shape of sundriness,
waxing lunatic with blood and pride,
part of light's rhetoric decayed
to prey. (Predictably stained
verdigris, the wall of what he was
where grass blades cut me green
as clinging vines, climbed me verdant
with impossibility.) Wind fingered
sky to azurite (blue-basic carbonate
of copper, a semi-precious stone
derived therefrom), weather
wondered how much longer
he would wait beneath the abalone
shell iridescent against question's
kiss, awake to any irony. The ghost
is ready but the meat is raw, so
many salted handfuls tossed like rain
across the shoulder. Downpours of place
align the seen, the happiness worn away
to damp sidewalks, spring-colored
cures for love. He sleeps away each day
all night, failed carnivore, blank axiom.
WATER IS A MUSEUM
Broke the glass and cut my hand
again, the water looks like shards
churned up, not enough world
to come clean, wash my hands
of me. Here comes the blood, lukewarm,
dilute, and insufficient: contaminated
anyway. So let the water overtake
myself, so let me disappear in drown;
I heard the sibyl said I want to die.
After a lost squall, sea sung slowly
wrong, the poisoned moon
goes gray, standing at the threshold
of whiteness, witness: even
the purest winter sullies me, clouded
over with denial. And the others
more sure of salvation, salve on
the ragged wound? They watch
while I am leaked ashore
with faces of wonder why
and what I must have done. Blood
seeps into the dirty sand of personhood
and paints it black, my song
gone wrong again, capsized, toxic
by-product of me. They say I made myself
my fate, and make it sad; concern
evaporates like morning mist.
Whatever is a hand
must want to harvest me, thresh me
grain-like, husk crumbled small enough
to fertilize its fields of virtue, sheer
virginity, if there should come to be
some water. I might have been a
somewhere, I might be something
you need to destroy.
***
Gabrielle Fletcher
CULLING THE EPISODE
She has a face like an old fruit scone. Observing from the small corner at the left of the coffee machine, it would be easier to say she is Beautiful. No need to force imagery out of the kitchen. She could just sit and let her allure hang. Instead she has strung cloves of old invective around her neck to clear some space. She doesn't know how hard she is making subtlety work to absorb her. It. Whatever this seems to be.
I'm sitting with a napkin and a pencil, trying to draw a fan-forced oven. I realise later I'm wondering if I'd eat this woman. It's better to state this now rather than let it rupture the dynamic, further to the nearness of the end. I could have had myself trying to sketch moistened dough instead. Flour, water and eggs are easy to represent on any small white surface. But the combination of such basic ingredients is beyond prediction. Finally. So I pledge more general symbolism and slide into the table facing her.
Leaning over I ask 'Is this seat free?' I'm so close I could glide my tongue across her nose. But she would notice, and either scream, or lick back. I don't want extreme response of any kind. Not yet. My mouth is focused only on thinking taste.
She doesn't look up. Just says 'Nothing is free. Piss off,' trying to add me to her lumpy necklace. My ends are wet by the sharpness of her rejection. So direct and knowing in her own lack of appeal. It's a self-cradling reaction. Wanting to make me feel like grit because I'm curious. She thinks she's seen me a thousand times before. Is sure I won't get in. But she is wrong.
The morning sun is shafting the muffin display with that fierce light that shows the age of things. Still she won't look at me. I study her hands and note she is younger than I thought. Fingers like shortbread. Stacked upon a book about fish, pretending to read. Occasionally buttering her hair behind her ear. I eye the waiter and signal for some service.
'I'm not very hungry,' I lie. 'I'll just have a short black with cream on the side.' I am staring, daring darkly into the top of her head.
'And what would you like, honey?' I ask. There is a hefty pause between us. Biscuit hand poised with indecision above the wordy entrée. I know I have the advantage. The café is full and she is wedged into the side of it. Her body is a mass of roughly packaged doughnuts. I say 'You know a good breakfast will fill the holes. There is no shame in meeting your needs. Don't be shy.'
She doesn't flinch. Her eyes still pretending. The tiny dimples in her crusty hands seem steady. But I know her. She is trying to hide the signs of discomfort. I have taken the slightness of the pause as initial dilation. She shouldn't be hard to lever open.
I am aware that the waiter is there. Waiting. I dismiss him with an order of four croissants and a large hot chocolate, with marshmallows. I would rather not cultivate an active audience. The fleshy ornaments hunched at the other tables intent on empty talk are an exposure that insulates us. This woman and what I am doing to her. They won't look.
'What do you fucking want?' she says. Sounds like custard diving onto a platter of teacake. There is a delicate fury in the abnormal blinking rate. That's all she is giving me to read. Sense takes what is convenient.
'You,' I state simply. I feel like I'm seven and in the slaughter shed at my uncle's pig farm. He is cutting open a carcass in his technical way and splices through a clot the colour of deepest liver. Not everyone has seen a bruise from the inside. It is winter and the wind ripples through the paddock grass and smacks the cheeks. The bracing sensation is keen again on my lips. Full and parted ready to taste the gorge, not afraid like I was then.
She shifts her weight. Not happy with my answer. 'Why?' her voice splashes to the back. This is the moment my patience has been aching for. She is engaged. Now I can pinch for ripeness. Hold and start to palpate. Make her want to look at me.
I close my eyes and inhale one long stroke of spine. The nutty pressure jostles with my lungs. Then wraps around itself. Fused and rocking. A mammoth, probing surge that could blow through the lid of my skull. If I let it. I would never be that artless.
'Because you're here,' I say, watching her hair. Like random toffee strings slipping off a spoon.
'What's that supposed to mean?' She's still not happy.
'What would you like it to mean?' I give her a slender slice. If only she would pick it up off the plate. I refuse to feel guilty for the fairy bread she is trying to feed me. I expect a woman like this to roll her fingertips along her mouth, and glue the crumbs in the creases to know the feast is over. There is no more. She is the last.
I suppose she enjoys denying such an intangible, calculated serving. I am twenty-two drinking all night at a pub near a railway station. It's 6.00am and there are two men, old jockey types, sucking on stout to start their day. I talk about punting. Ignore the cataracts pulled over their hearts. One tells me I am ugly. Then I look down and see he has no fingers. Maybe a horse confused them for sugar cubes, and he cauterised the edges with a farrier's iron. Rounded the nubs with sunrise glass. This is how it happened. It wasn't the other way round, be clear about it. I could have understood that. No sense of contrast. This is what she is like. I can't feel sorry for her. I won't.
The croissants and chocolate appear. Her greed crawls along the interruption and she grabs. Retreats to her ample bunker. I've seen her breasts. Lumbering apple flapjacks. With a cinnamon rash flaking into lacy apron pans. My coffee arrives. She is disinterested. There is no useful bulk in liquid, although the cream could have semi-solid appeal, if there was nothing else. This is the problem with choice. Comparison points at what is easy. Details make it longer than it needs to be. She had no problem taking what she could bite, a minute ago. I am offering her a substantive meal, from a thoughtful bowl. She thinks the concrete is less confronting. She can break her jaw.
It is not necessary to point out that I am angry with her. This whole thing is pitched with fever. I need to centre it. I swivel the coffee cup in my hand and look at the arcing croissants. Made for a well-shod beast, to cushion the sole. The frame is full of starry nights. Vanilla bleeds into blueberry cheesecake. Swirls lubricate arid palettes. Mouth is a river of jam.
She fondles the cup. Traces the rim. She is sickened by the debit that sits across from her. She knows I will collect. Withholds a direct gaze, won't shift it. She thinks it hurts me. Because I want to confirm what she is. She considers what is least expensive on my menu. She hasn't felt the bill inserted yet.
'I'm here because I have a right to walk the world,' she says. I have counted every gram of fat she has ever chewed. Refrained from pushing words into saliva. I don't move as she turns breakfast into bubbles that float her high above the jeering pricks of life. I am waiting with a nickel-plated needle. And she believes that she has rights.
'I have walked your mouth,' I say. She has sought shelter on the waffle banks above the seedy stream. Or lashed her gums on peanut brittle, depending on the fare.
'Just fuck off,' she says. 'I'll give you the money for the food.' The doughnuts nudge the table. She is reaching for her purse.
'When was the last time anybody wanted you?' I ask. I am twenty-nine. My father is loading wet socks down my throat because I am noisy and won't stop crying. He is burning my mother's pregnant stomach with cigarettes, drawing a picture of a chef with my older brother's foetus still inside. I can't breathe and my shirtsleeves are full of bread knives. There are dark-haired uniformed people in the background, sipping on Drano martinis. Laughing.
'You aren't the only one with pain,' I say. 'Heat rises.'
The steam unfolds my flesh. Every pore is open, suckling on her massive form. Fluids filling every vessel, soaking every crack. Eyes a blade to cut her face, if only she would look. Just a glimpse would do it. Enough to start the split. My fingerprints are screaming.
She is clutching at her bag. Scrambling like an egg to get away. I move to block her. She tries to shovel past. My hands move up, around her spongy stalk. I'm kneading hard. The batter slaps against the moderate oven door. It's a pleasing sound. She can't complain. Who else would squeeze her flavours with such passion?
MESSING WITH JACOB'S PARTICULARS
The recurring dream that Jacob is having about teeth crumbling and falling away is at the heart of his resistance. He checks the weekly magazines that say it is a sign of vulnerability, and agrees that this is probably true. But the words don't explain the aching gums or the bleeding tongue in the morning.
He runs to the medical centre after he spits the images into the steel sink and wipes the iron from his lips in exasperation.
The doctor is weary and desperate to write his memoirs in a sunny room. Impatient for his evening pipe and bridge game, the doctor is dismissive but adequately human.
'You're fine, Jacob. Just too much grinding and a touch of neuralgia. Common enough stress symptoms. Nothing to worry about. You could change your life and try to avoid oral sex. In the meantime, go home and relax.'
Jacob goes. The doctor knows nothing about life or change. Jacob is quietly furious with no time to waste. And the doctor has no fucking right to pretend everything is okay. Jacob knows he is a wreck. He thinks of drinking vinegar for relief, and by now his ears are pulsing.
Jacob moves down the steps of the ailment factory and feels he needs friendship to swab his mouth. He crosses the street, the railroad tracks, the timber yard and stops at the milk depot. The thought of refrigerated yoghurt is soothing to Jacob's tastebuds, and a culture he admires. He pulls the suctioned door at the side of the main building, and for a moment feels like God creating protein.
Boris and Ana Sinikoski are tinkering with the generator in the third cool room. They have been working since 3.00am. Milk is their life. They wouldn't have it any other way. They have always liked to contribute to bones and see it as a preserving act. They were Polish before milk, but too much brittleness and shrinkage of social order makes people think of other pastures. So they escaped on a cow's back, and they are happy. They have sidelined into vegetables and juices lately to compete with big business, but they remain sincere people who Jacob truly loves. And they love him.
Jacob follows the thrumming of the generators. Hears the echo of tinker and smiles, anticipating the pearling gestures of his friends. Boris and Ana hug him warmly, comment on his blanched complexion with utmost compassion, and usher him into the office.
These three understand each other. It is obvious in the affectionate tones and honest engagement. A friendship like cream that never goes rancid, Jacob pours himself into their ears. And they homogenize with care.
They know he wants to write, until he dies he will have stories. They know he worries everything is about himself, and words are maps to his missing pieces.
They also know that once he went three and a half weeks without speaking to anybody, not by choice. He hadn't avoided anything, he'd gone about his business as usual. He realised afterwards it just was. A little later the dream had started, with the teeth. And because of their belief in the goodness of milk, Boris and Ana are particularly concerned.
'How can I speak with my tongue so swollen? What value is there in thick sentences?' Jacob asks.
Boris looks at Jacob and says 'You eat pins, you will bleed,' and feels guilty for being direct. Ana is always more subtle, and not because she is female. 'Dreams are not kind to questions,' she says, and feels guilty for being oblique. Jacob is not sure they are right. He forgives their perspectives and they turn to dairy talk.
Boris wants Jacob to give up ideas and join Ana and himself at the depot. Ana sees Jacob reeling. She wants to say slow down, because his mind is fevered by the lure, and empty lines can strain the flesh and flood the heart.
Instead, Boris says that milk is upright.
Jacob would normally stay longer, but decides to leave so he can think. The three part with warm sadness, assuring each other they are there for themselves. As Jacob turns to go, Ana places a business card in his hand. 'Thresholds - Sandplay Studio for a Powerful Path to the Inner Self. Estelle D. Shepherd, PhD.' In the corner there is a logo of a butterfly emerging from a child's plastic bucket.
Jacob puts the card inside his pocket. Boris and Ana are decent people, but mis-en-scene is not the play. They can only relieve his bloodied mouth. So now Jacob feels guilty for making excuses and placing too much expectation upon friendship as a cure.
Jacob fingers the card that Ana slipped into his hand. He extracts it from his pocket and lingers on the imagery. He was not a child to pull the wings off insects. And he has never liked the beach. But the butterfly inside his bucket body is close to sinking to the bottom of his feet and rolling over, dead. So Jacob moves in marathon. He directs his cells to take the path across the synapse dunes to E. D. Shepherd. Jacob thinks that maybe she can put his teeth back where they belong. It would be nice to chew on life again. And for it not to chew on him.
Jacob knows his talent lives beyond his nerves, as he turns left, then right, then through the school, the park, the further on. Towards the leafy greens of lofts and private practice. The pain to make a sentence work insinuates exquisite scales, and Jacob weighs each letter gingerly, mindful of the balance. He sees himself in alchemy, with the potential of the perfect formula justifying anguish. But since the dream about the teeth, the triumph sinks from Jacob's lips. Assuming it was there at all.
It's been an hour now. Jacob notes the changes in the architecture. How knowledges and money expand the spaces people fill. Broader. Taller. Styled. Like permission to forget the stencilled cave. Jacob stands outside the number on the card. His tongue is aching, his head is numb, his body small and coarse. The butterfly is falling to his ankles.
Estelle D. Shepherd, PhD, is in the studio. Cleaning symbols. It's an important ritual after every client, wiping the energy off. The unconscious sticks like fingerprints, and clarity is hard enough to touch. She keeps it simple. Tepid water traced with salt, and a soft disposable cloth. She rakes the sand tray level and turns off the light, wiping the doorframe as she goes. Twenty years of sandplay leaves its mark, and Estelle D. Shepherd knows the walls between worlds are thin. Unblocking the depths of non-verbal potential is understandably draining, and sometimes she is frightened she will end up in the thinness, unable to talk herself. It's not as if she has never been hurt. Her therapist friends laugh and say she is balanced, and it would have happened by now anyway. But just in case, she takes a session with her consultant once a week to keep her plumbing clear.
Jacob is on the other side of Estelle's walls, trying to fend off the ether threatening his feet. Transfixed for the longest seconds, it is the Sinikoski faith in milk that finally propels him forward. Along with their upright compassion and his own desperation.
The concrete path falls away as Jacob purls towards the door like the graceless grub he feels. The doorbell rings and wall meets wall. Jacob and Estelle find themselves within the thinness. She sees, he needs. Pain has a way of direct introduction.
Jacob is escorted directly to the studio. He sits on a comfortable black sofa, with white scatter pillows tossed artfully about. Estelle suggests coffee before they talk, and when she leaves to make it, Jacob is free to look at what he's done. His eyes walk along the floor to the bookcase. Volumes on insecure attachments and Madonna symbolism. And an amazing array of miniature artefacts line customised cabinets. Whales. Moons. Eyes in hands. Then Estelle is back. He tells her about his dream, with the teeth. And about the words and ideas that torment his bloodied, swollen tongue.
'Jacob,' she says. 'Sandplay is about the between of the sleep and the wake.'
E. D. Shepherd moves towards one of the customised cupboards and returns with an object. Jacob sees a single tooth.
'Here is your dream. Your eyes are open. I have brought it to the surface and we can talk about what it means.'
Jacob peers into the clear grey eyes of the mind-comber.
'It is fraught with interpretation,' he says.
The Estelle in her wants to cradle Jacob's exhaustion; the PhD insists upon agreed symbolic meaning. So she invites Jacob to make two selections from any of the objects in the customised cupboards, to demonstrate that what is there is clear to both of them. And she hopes that he won't notice how much they speak of her.
Jacob is quick with his selection. Images grab at blood, and he is sitting in the blackness of the sofa promptly. He places them on a white scatter pillow for Estelle to view.
'The Cosmic Egg,' she says. 'Symbol of sun and re-birth. An eclipse of identity. A nourishing image.'
Jacob agrees. Then asks after the second.
'A gold nugget. Symbol of value and rarity. An image of self-belief.'
Jacob looks at the nugget. He had believed it to be a cornflake. He tells Estelle it is easy to argue that he simply hasn't eaten.
'Interpretation is fraught,' he says.
She massages the pen that wrote her dissertation, feeling somewhat fraught herself. They decide that his thinness is caught between walls that are thick, like his tongue. And that money and time will leave tracks on the beach. Eventually. Or sooner. They arrange for a session the next day, acknowledging the struggle for self. They shake hands, as much an exchange of energy as a binding symbol of the partnership. Firm. Connected. Sensing. Then Estelle D. Shepherd, PhD, wipes her hand along her leg, because twenty years of sandplay leaves its mark. Jacob sees the gesture. And knows the smear. He feels as if Estelle has knocked his teeth out. His open eyes are shut in reflex. Jacob is sick of empty mouths. He will never trust knowledge again. He thinks of putting the sandplay business card in his shoe, pissing in it, then putting it in Estelle's pocket. And watching. In stillness is dance, they say. And in darkness is light.
By now the uncomfortable architecture is a reflux of space. Jacob is crossing the park to the school. Maybe the butterfly inside his toe-ends is right: maybe he isn't worth the rescue. Just ahead he sees a vagrant, sitting on a grassy nub alone. Life has a way of sucking at rainbows leaving fleabites, and Jacob puts his head down to avoid the view he feels. The vagrant offers up a jagged homily, reminding Jacob of his dream:
'Don't put all of your eggs in one bucket, friend. Maybe they'll crack.' Jacob is startled by the flash of PhD. His head still lowered, he can only see the vagrant's feet. The shoes are blisters. From too much stillness, probably. Jacob wants to take a salty, tepid bath to cleanse the beading fingerprints. He needs some walls to light his way, but doesn't have the heels to hike back home.
The cabbie is a large man. The capillaries on his cheeks are from too many working class burgers washed down with Beam. He has the kids every second week, and won't admit he visits Lottah's Relaxation Centre for excitement. But he does. When the tension mounts he finds a vacant saddle helps. So between the bourbon, beef and banging, the cabbie squeezes work. And although the vinyl of the taxi seat makes him sweat and stick in summer, the cabbie knows it could be worse. His job is to drive along the intervals, and deliver lives safely to their chosen doors. He listens like a backstage pass and forces talk when necessary. He sees a fare hailing from the kerb, and idles in.
Jacob is sitting awkwardly in the back seat. He gives directions and the cabbie eases into drive.
'So you like the beach?' the cabbie asks the quiet rear-view mirror. Jacob thinks the cabbie may be over-reaching, and turns his head to look outside. The prospect of this conversation stings.
'Now me, I love the beach. That salty crunch. I'm building my own boat, you know. And when I retire, I'll get out of this bloody insect jar. And fly.' The cabbie elaborates heavily on the design and construction of his escape.
'I'm even doing my own wiring,' the cabbie continues.
'Stop,' says Jacob. 'This is far enough.'
The cabbie brakes and swings into the gutter. He asks no questions. Just accepts the fare produced, and the something for the inconvenience. Jacob opens up the door and puts one foot down on the pavement. The cabbie wants to thank him for the bonus.
'Hey,' the cabbie says. 'If you ever need to light your life, just say. I've got enough wire to string up a cow.'
Reginald Shepherd
Five poems
AT WEEP
Can't move can't speak can't think to wonder
why that's so. Song says I still
believe, can't think of what, who
that might be. Their faces gather
blackness, can't be seen. Song says I
and I and I. It sounds like cry,
like someone crying in the woods
by Stewart Park (the dirty woods, let me
be filthy, stain me, let the bones
come together, bone
to its bone and tainted too):
like someone crying but he has
no eyes no ears no mouth no
voice to speak of. Speak to me.
Can't hear you anymore, can't ask
for more. Song keeps repeating
shit where you eat, don't shit
where you eat. The day
begins with burning, then remembers
to wake up: sweetbitter resins,
pollens, dripping cum smells
flower, white. Highway's haunted
by remembered men and boys, no light
but passing pickup trucks, Nero burning
in the Tiber's unmade bed:
ecology of lack and want
and never lack of want, no never
want. Want to go home. Not yet
a you, or he, an it (no want
of want), a something to be seen
and see what comes
of it (can't see anything now, walking
past black woods). Here he comes.
Song litters upstate New York maps
with classical towns, Attica, Utica, Syracuse,
Troy, lining the throughways with Latin
and Greek: Ithaca and the other islands
fingering slim lakes. Seneca
slits his wrists in the bath,
too late for life in ancient Rome.
MODERNISM
For Amy England
And “I” is a conjecture,
simile that's become science:
calyx torn down both sides, the only
decipherable word among five
Bird nest supplied by paraphrase,
some spurious other, much restored:
talents are money, two mutilated words
hence the extension beyond lexicography
Death as a gift, a ruin of paper
for the opulence of Gyges:
“calamitous” perhaps sounds like
opening the right-hand half
You have taken a cricket
by the wing, mixed thighs and
courtly love: papyrus burned at the top
a black-butted fellow, badly damaged
The meaning is obscene, Eros' red balls
earlier than arrows: they vomited
their mass of pride from a pottery shard
The same papyrus gives “ear dripping blood”
Note: This poem is comprised entirely of phrases from Guy Davenport's notes for his volume of translations 7 Greeks (New Directions). They have been rather drastically selected, condensed, and rearranged, but only one word has been altered.
NATION: AN ELEGY
They took the young men to grind
like ostriches in the wilderness, a river
more ruddy than rubies. His footstool
overcame them between the straits.
Princes among the provinces made the rampart
and the wall lament, even the sea monsters
fell under the wood. My virgins in the midst of me
embrace dunghills in scarlet for meat.
My breach is like the sea, the foxes walk upon it
as if it were a garden. Who is he that saith
My liver is poured upon the earth
because of the arrows of his quiver?
My mighty men remembered not her gates
sunk into the ground, mouth in the dust
we have swallowed up a cloud. Our water
for money, I am their music among the heathen,
polishing sapphire: the yoke
of our transgressions, a net for my feet.
Note: This poem is comprised entirely of phrases from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the King James Version. Though they have been condensed and rearranged, only two pronouns have been changed.
REMAINDER'S EDGE
For Gene Tanta
He's sleeplessness pulled through
a sieve, snake branch beliefs
dangle from, overgrown
with flourishing abjections. Glance
wears down grass to gravel, lamb
to less than sacrifice, night contours
weather with its full vocabulary
of line. Night and hunting made a pledge
to stay the shape of sundriness,
waxing lunatic with blood and pride,
part of light's rhetoric decayed
to prey. (Predictably stained
verdigris, the wall of what he was
where grass blades cut me green
as clinging vines, climbed me verdant
with impossibility.) Wind fingered
sky to azurite (blue-basic carbonate
of copper, a semi-precious stone
derived therefrom), weather
wondered how much longer
he would wait beneath the abalone
shell iridescent against question's
kiss, awake to any irony. The ghost
is ready but the meat is raw, so
many salted handfuls tossed like rain
across the shoulder. Downpours of place
align the seen, the happiness worn away
to damp sidewalks, spring-colored
cures for love. He sleeps away each day
all night, failed carnivore, blank axiom.
WATER IS A MUSEUM
Broke the glass and cut my hand
again, the water looks like shards
churned up, not enough world
to come clean, wash my hands
of me. Here comes the blood, lukewarm,
dilute, and insufficient: contaminated
anyway. So let the water overtake
myself, so let me disappear in drown;
I heard the sibyl said I want to die.
After a lost squall, sea sung slowly
wrong, the poisoned moon
goes gray, standing at the threshold
of whiteness, witness: even
the purest winter sullies me, clouded
over with denial. And the others
more sure of salvation, salve on
the ragged wound? They watch
while I am leaked ashore
with faces of wonder why
and what I must have done. Blood
seeps into the dirty sand of personhood
and paints it black, my song
gone wrong again, capsized, toxic
by-product of me. They say I made myself
my fate, and make it sad; concern
evaporates like morning mist.
Whatever is a hand
must want to harvest me, thresh me
grain-like, husk crumbled small enough
to fertilize its fields of virtue, sheer
virginity, if there should come to be
some water. I might have been a
somewhere, I might be something
you need to destroy.
***
Gabrielle Fletcher
CULLING THE EPISODE
She has a face like an old fruit scone. Observing from the small corner at the left of the coffee machine, it would be easier to say she is Beautiful. No need to force imagery out of the kitchen. She could just sit and let her allure hang. Instead she has strung cloves of old invective around her neck to clear some space. She doesn't know how hard she is making subtlety work to absorb her. It. Whatever this seems to be.
I'm sitting with a napkin and a pencil, trying to draw a fan-forced oven. I realise later I'm wondering if I'd eat this woman. It's better to state this now rather than let it rupture the dynamic, further to the nearness of the end. I could have had myself trying to sketch moistened dough instead. Flour, water and eggs are easy to represent on any small white surface. But the combination of such basic ingredients is beyond prediction. Finally. So I pledge more general symbolism and slide into the table facing her.
Leaning over I ask 'Is this seat free?' I'm so close I could glide my tongue across her nose. But she would notice, and either scream, or lick back. I don't want extreme response of any kind. Not yet. My mouth is focused only on thinking taste.
She doesn't look up. Just says 'Nothing is free. Piss off,' trying to add me to her lumpy necklace. My ends are wet by the sharpness of her rejection. So direct and knowing in her own lack of appeal. It's a self-cradling reaction. Wanting to make me feel like grit because I'm curious. She thinks she's seen me a thousand times before. Is sure I won't get in. But she is wrong.
The morning sun is shafting the muffin display with that fierce light that shows the age of things. Still she won't look at me. I study her hands and note she is younger than I thought. Fingers like shortbread. Stacked upon a book about fish, pretending to read. Occasionally buttering her hair behind her ear. I eye the waiter and signal for some service.
'I'm not very hungry,' I lie. 'I'll just have a short black with cream on the side.' I am staring, daring darkly into the top of her head.
'And what would you like, honey?' I ask. There is a hefty pause between us. Biscuit hand poised with indecision above the wordy entrée. I know I have the advantage. The café is full and she is wedged into the side of it. Her body is a mass of roughly packaged doughnuts. I say 'You know a good breakfast will fill the holes. There is no shame in meeting your needs. Don't be shy.'
She doesn't flinch. Her eyes still pretending. The tiny dimples in her crusty hands seem steady. But I know her. She is trying to hide the signs of discomfort. I have taken the slightness of the pause as initial dilation. She shouldn't be hard to lever open.
I am aware that the waiter is there. Waiting. I dismiss him with an order of four croissants and a large hot chocolate, with marshmallows. I would rather not cultivate an active audience. The fleshy ornaments hunched at the other tables intent on empty talk are an exposure that insulates us. This woman and what I am doing to her. They won't look.
'What do you fucking want?' she says. Sounds like custard diving onto a platter of teacake. There is a delicate fury in the abnormal blinking rate. That's all she is giving me to read. Sense takes what is convenient.
'You,' I state simply. I feel like I'm seven and in the slaughter shed at my uncle's pig farm. He is cutting open a carcass in his technical way and splices through a clot the colour of deepest liver. Not everyone has seen a bruise from the inside. It is winter and the wind ripples through the paddock grass and smacks the cheeks. The bracing sensation is keen again on my lips. Full and parted ready to taste the gorge, not afraid like I was then.
She shifts her weight. Not happy with my answer. 'Why?' her voice splashes to the back. This is the moment my patience has been aching for. She is engaged. Now I can pinch for ripeness. Hold and start to palpate. Make her want to look at me.
I close my eyes and inhale one long stroke of spine. The nutty pressure jostles with my lungs. Then wraps around itself. Fused and rocking. A mammoth, probing surge that could blow through the lid of my skull. If I let it. I would never be that artless.
'Because you're here,' I say, watching her hair. Like random toffee strings slipping off a spoon.
'What's that supposed to mean?' She's still not happy.
'What would you like it to mean?' I give her a slender slice. If only she would pick it up off the plate. I refuse to feel guilty for the fairy bread she is trying to feed me. I expect a woman like this to roll her fingertips along her mouth, and glue the crumbs in the creases to know the feast is over. There is no more. She is the last.
I suppose she enjoys denying such an intangible, calculated serving. I am twenty-two drinking all night at a pub near a railway station. It's 6.00am and there are two men, old jockey types, sucking on stout to start their day. I talk about punting. Ignore the cataracts pulled over their hearts. One tells me I am ugly. Then I look down and see he has no fingers. Maybe a horse confused them for sugar cubes, and he cauterised the edges with a farrier's iron. Rounded the nubs with sunrise glass. This is how it happened. It wasn't the other way round, be clear about it. I could have understood that. No sense of contrast. This is what she is like. I can't feel sorry for her. I won't.
The croissants and chocolate appear. Her greed crawls along the interruption and she grabs. Retreats to her ample bunker. I've seen her breasts. Lumbering apple flapjacks. With a cinnamon rash flaking into lacy apron pans. My coffee arrives. She is disinterested. There is no useful bulk in liquid, although the cream could have semi-solid appeal, if there was nothing else. This is the problem with choice. Comparison points at what is easy. Details make it longer than it needs to be. She had no problem taking what she could bite, a minute ago. I am offering her a substantive meal, from a thoughtful bowl. She thinks the concrete is less confronting. She can break her jaw.
It is not necessary to point out that I am angry with her. This whole thing is pitched with fever. I need to centre it. I swivel the coffee cup in my hand and look at the arcing croissants. Made for a well-shod beast, to cushion the sole. The frame is full of starry nights. Vanilla bleeds into blueberry cheesecake. Swirls lubricate arid palettes. Mouth is a river of jam.
She fondles the cup. Traces the rim. She is sickened by the debit that sits across from her. She knows I will collect. Withholds a direct gaze, won't shift it. She thinks it hurts me. Because I want to confirm what she is. She considers what is least expensive on my menu. She hasn't felt the bill inserted yet.
'I'm here because I have a right to walk the world,' she says. I have counted every gram of fat she has ever chewed. Refrained from pushing words into saliva. I don't move as she turns breakfast into bubbles that float her high above the jeering pricks of life. I am waiting with a nickel-plated needle. And she believes that she has rights.
'I have walked your mouth,' I say. She has sought shelter on the waffle banks above the seedy stream. Or lashed her gums on peanut brittle, depending on the fare.
'Just fuck off,' she says. 'I'll give you the money for the food.' The doughnuts nudge the table. She is reaching for her purse.
'When was the last time anybody wanted you?' I ask. I am twenty-nine. My father is loading wet socks down my throat because I am noisy and won't stop crying. He is burning my mother's pregnant stomach with cigarettes, drawing a picture of a chef with my older brother's foetus still inside. I can't breathe and my shirtsleeves are full of bread knives. There are dark-haired uniformed people in the background, sipping on Drano martinis. Laughing.
'You aren't the only one with pain,' I say. 'Heat rises.'
The steam unfolds my flesh. Every pore is open, suckling on her massive form. Fluids filling every vessel, soaking every crack. Eyes a blade to cut her face, if only she would look. Just a glimpse would do it. Enough to start the split. My fingerprints are screaming.
She is clutching at her bag. Scrambling like an egg to get away. I move to block her. She tries to shovel past. My hands move up, around her spongy stalk. I'm kneading hard. The batter slaps against the moderate oven door. It's a pleasing sound. She can't complain. Who else would squeeze her flavours with such passion?
MESSING WITH JACOB'S PARTICULARS
The recurring dream that Jacob is having about teeth crumbling and falling away is at the heart of his resistance. He checks the weekly magazines that say it is a sign of vulnerability, and agrees that this is probably true. But the words don't explain the aching gums or the bleeding tongue in the morning.
He runs to the medical centre after he spits the images into the steel sink and wipes the iron from his lips in exasperation.
The doctor is weary and desperate to write his memoirs in a sunny room. Impatient for his evening pipe and bridge game, the doctor is dismissive but adequately human.
'You're fine, Jacob. Just too much grinding and a touch of neuralgia. Common enough stress symptoms. Nothing to worry about. You could change your life and try to avoid oral sex. In the meantime, go home and relax.'
Jacob goes. The doctor knows nothing about life or change. Jacob is quietly furious with no time to waste. And the doctor has no fucking right to pretend everything is okay. Jacob knows he is a wreck. He thinks of drinking vinegar for relief, and by now his ears are pulsing.
Jacob moves down the steps of the ailment factory and feels he needs friendship to swab his mouth. He crosses the street, the railroad tracks, the timber yard and stops at the milk depot. The thought of refrigerated yoghurt is soothing to Jacob's tastebuds, and a culture he admires. He pulls the suctioned door at the side of the main building, and for a moment feels like God creating protein.
Boris and Ana Sinikoski are tinkering with the generator in the third cool room. They have been working since 3.00am. Milk is their life. They wouldn't have it any other way. They have always liked to contribute to bones and see it as a preserving act. They were Polish before milk, but too much brittleness and shrinkage of social order makes people think of other pastures. So they escaped on a cow's back, and they are happy. They have sidelined into vegetables and juices lately to compete with big business, but they remain sincere people who Jacob truly loves. And they love him.
Jacob follows the thrumming of the generators. Hears the echo of tinker and smiles, anticipating the pearling gestures of his friends. Boris and Ana hug him warmly, comment on his blanched complexion with utmost compassion, and usher him into the office.
These three understand each other. It is obvious in the affectionate tones and honest engagement. A friendship like cream that never goes rancid, Jacob pours himself into their ears. And they homogenize with care.
They know he wants to write, until he dies he will have stories. They know he worries everything is about himself, and words are maps to his missing pieces.
They also know that once he went three and a half weeks without speaking to anybody, not by choice. He hadn't avoided anything, he'd gone about his business as usual. He realised afterwards it just was. A little later the dream had started, with the teeth. And because of their belief in the goodness of milk, Boris and Ana are particularly concerned.
'How can I speak with my tongue so swollen? What value is there in thick sentences?' Jacob asks.
Boris looks at Jacob and says 'You eat pins, you will bleed,' and feels guilty for being direct. Ana is always more subtle, and not because she is female. 'Dreams are not kind to questions,' she says, and feels guilty for being oblique. Jacob is not sure they are right. He forgives their perspectives and they turn to dairy talk.
Boris wants Jacob to give up ideas and join Ana and himself at the depot. Ana sees Jacob reeling. She wants to say slow down, because his mind is fevered by the lure, and empty lines can strain the flesh and flood the heart.
Instead, Boris says that milk is upright.
Jacob would normally stay longer, but decides to leave so he can think. The three part with warm sadness, assuring each other they are there for themselves. As Jacob turns to go, Ana places a business card in his hand. 'Thresholds - Sandplay Studio for a Powerful Path to the Inner Self. Estelle D. Shepherd, PhD.' In the corner there is a logo of a butterfly emerging from a child's plastic bucket.
Jacob puts the card inside his pocket. Boris and Ana are decent people, but mis-en-scene is not the play. They can only relieve his bloodied mouth. So now Jacob feels guilty for making excuses and placing too much expectation upon friendship as a cure.
Jacob fingers the card that Ana slipped into his hand. He extracts it from his pocket and lingers on the imagery. He was not a child to pull the wings off insects. And he has never liked the beach. But the butterfly inside his bucket body is close to sinking to the bottom of his feet and rolling over, dead. So Jacob moves in marathon. He directs his cells to take the path across the synapse dunes to E. D. Shepherd. Jacob thinks that maybe she can put his teeth back where they belong. It would be nice to chew on life again. And for it not to chew on him.
Jacob knows his talent lives beyond his nerves, as he turns left, then right, then through the school, the park, the further on. Towards the leafy greens of lofts and private practice. The pain to make a sentence work insinuates exquisite scales, and Jacob weighs each letter gingerly, mindful of the balance. He sees himself in alchemy, with the potential of the perfect formula justifying anguish. But since the dream about the teeth, the triumph sinks from Jacob's lips. Assuming it was there at all.
It's been an hour now. Jacob notes the changes in the architecture. How knowledges and money expand the spaces people fill. Broader. Taller. Styled. Like permission to forget the stencilled cave. Jacob stands outside the number on the card. His tongue is aching, his head is numb, his body small and coarse. The butterfly is falling to his ankles.
Estelle D. Shepherd, PhD, is in the studio. Cleaning symbols. It's an important ritual after every client, wiping the energy off. The unconscious sticks like fingerprints, and clarity is hard enough to touch. She keeps it simple. Tepid water traced with salt, and a soft disposable cloth. She rakes the sand tray level and turns off the light, wiping the doorframe as she goes. Twenty years of sandplay leaves its mark, and Estelle D. Shepherd knows the walls between worlds are thin. Unblocking the depths of non-verbal potential is understandably draining, and sometimes she is frightened she will end up in the thinness, unable to talk herself. It's not as if she has never been hurt. Her therapist friends laugh and say she is balanced, and it would have happened by now anyway. But just in case, she takes a session with her consultant once a week to keep her plumbing clear.
Jacob is on the other side of Estelle's walls, trying to fend off the ether threatening his feet. Transfixed for the longest seconds, it is the Sinikoski faith in milk that finally propels him forward. Along with their upright compassion and his own desperation.
The concrete path falls away as Jacob purls towards the door like the graceless grub he feels. The doorbell rings and wall meets wall. Jacob and Estelle find themselves within the thinness. She sees, he needs. Pain has a way of direct introduction.
Jacob is escorted directly to the studio. He sits on a comfortable black sofa, with white scatter pillows tossed artfully about. Estelle suggests coffee before they talk, and when she leaves to make it, Jacob is free to look at what he's done. His eyes walk along the floor to the bookcase. Volumes on insecure attachments and Madonna symbolism. And an amazing array of miniature artefacts line customised cabinets. Whales. Moons. Eyes in hands. Then Estelle is back. He tells her about his dream, with the teeth. And about the words and ideas that torment his bloodied, swollen tongue.
'Jacob,' she says. 'Sandplay is about the between of the sleep and the wake.'
E. D. Shepherd moves towards one of the customised cupboards and returns with an object. Jacob sees a single tooth.
'Here is your dream. Your eyes are open. I have brought it to the surface and we can talk about what it means.'
Jacob peers into the clear grey eyes of the mind-comber.
'It is fraught with interpretation,' he says.
The Estelle in her wants to cradle Jacob's exhaustion; the PhD insists upon agreed symbolic meaning. So she invites Jacob to make two selections from any of the objects in the customised cupboards, to demonstrate that what is there is clear to both of them. And she hopes that he won't notice how much they speak of her.
Jacob is quick with his selection. Images grab at blood, and he is sitting in the blackness of the sofa promptly. He places them on a white scatter pillow for Estelle to view.
'The Cosmic Egg,' she says. 'Symbol of sun and re-birth. An eclipse of identity. A nourishing image.'
Jacob agrees. Then asks after the second.
'A gold nugget. Symbol of value and rarity. An image of self-belief.'
Jacob looks at the nugget. He had believed it to be a cornflake. He tells Estelle it is easy to argue that he simply hasn't eaten.
'Interpretation is fraught,' he says.
She massages the pen that wrote her dissertation, feeling somewhat fraught herself. They decide that his thinness is caught between walls that are thick, like his tongue. And that money and time will leave tracks on the beach. Eventually. Or sooner. They arrange for a session the next day, acknowledging the struggle for self. They shake hands, as much an exchange of energy as a binding symbol of the partnership. Firm. Connected. Sensing. Then Estelle D. Shepherd, PhD, wipes her hand along her leg, because twenty years of sandplay leaves its mark. Jacob sees the gesture. And knows the smear. He feels as if Estelle has knocked his teeth out. His open eyes are shut in reflex. Jacob is sick of empty mouths. He will never trust knowledge again. He thinks of putting the sandplay business card in his shoe, pissing in it, then putting it in Estelle's pocket. And watching. In stillness is dance, they say. And in darkness is light.
By now the uncomfortable architecture is a reflux of space. Jacob is crossing the park to the school. Maybe the butterfly inside his toe-ends is right: maybe he isn't worth the rescue. Just ahead he sees a vagrant, sitting on a grassy nub alone. Life has a way of sucking at rainbows leaving fleabites, and Jacob puts his head down to avoid the view he feels. The vagrant offers up a jagged homily, reminding Jacob of his dream:
'Don't put all of your eggs in one bucket, friend. Maybe they'll crack.' Jacob is startled by the flash of PhD. His head still lowered, he can only see the vagrant's feet. The shoes are blisters. From too much stillness, probably. Jacob wants to take a salty, tepid bath to cleanse the beading fingerprints. He needs some walls to light his way, but doesn't have the heels to hike back home.
The cabbie is a large man. The capillaries on his cheeks are from too many working class burgers washed down with Beam. He has the kids every second week, and won't admit he visits Lottah's Relaxation Centre for excitement. But he does. When the tension mounts he finds a vacant saddle helps. So between the bourbon, beef and banging, the cabbie squeezes work. And although the vinyl of the taxi seat makes him sweat and stick in summer, the cabbie knows it could be worse. His job is to drive along the intervals, and deliver lives safely to their chosen doors. He listens like a backstage pass and forces talk when necessary. He sees a fare hailing from the kerb, and idles in.
Jacob is sitting awkwardly in the back seat. He gives directions and the cabbie eases into drive.
'So you like the beach?' the cabbie asks the quiet rear-view mirror. Jacob thinks the cabbie may be over-reaching, and turns his head to look outside. The prospect of this conversation stings.
'Now me, I love the beach. That salty crunch. I'm building my own boat, you know. And when I retire, I'll get out of this bloody insect jar. And fly.' The cabbie elaborates heavily on the design and construction of his escape.
'I'm even doing my own wiring,' the cabbie continues.
'Stop,' says Jacob. 'This is far enough.'
The cabbie brakes and swings into the gutter. He asks no questions. Just accepts the fare produced, and the something for the inconvenience. Jacob opens up the door and puts one foot down on the pavement. The cabbie wants to thank him for the bonus.
'Hey,' the cabbie says. 'If you ever need to light your life, just say. I've got enough wire to string up a cow.'
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