NEW! Review of Mark Nowak

Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak. Coffee House Press, $20.

Reviewed by Brittany Taylor


The 2005 explosion at China’s Sunjiawan colliery killed 203 miners and injured nearly two dozen others. But it isn’t with the image of those trapped in the fatal shafts that poet and labor activist Mark Nowak opens his latest book. A woman, widowed at 40, is the first character sketched in Coal Mountain Elementary. She waits calmly in a room just 50 meters away from the mouth of the mine that swallowed her husband. She knew this day would come.

Though snapshots of the men—and, rarely, the women—who disappear in the mines are present and eventually overtake the story, Nowak’s opening focuses on the coal patch communities of families and friends that anxiously await the return of their men at shifts’ end, soot-covered but alive. Reflected and refracted continually, the image of the grieving widow, whether standing silent or ceremonially burning her missing husband’s possessions in fury, inserts the reader into a somber reality. As the pages turn and more lives are discovered lost, we, like the widow, know what is coming when news of yet another explosion is relayed. And we, like the widow, can only wish that there had been more time.

Coal Mountain Elementary isn’t the story of Pennsylvania or Wyoming. The focus is global, with news reports spanning the recent accident-ridden history of China’s coal industry and eyewitness accounts from the survivors of the Sago, WV, mine explosion—perhaps the most poignant tales to be found. The split focus on the two political giants of the modern world, the United States and China, highlights the enormity of the global problem of coal mining, making the reader wonder how, in the most developed country and the most quickly developing country in the world, we can allow such travesties to happen again and again to families that cannot otherwise support themselves.

Nowak emphasizes the absolute financial dependence of communities upon coal mines, many operated illegally in China. “They know the danger,” a newspaper article reports, “but still want to be coal miners because they cannot make a living on the land.” Many of the Chinese miners are illiterate peasants who receive little training, we are told. Often, they are taken into the mine the day they are recruited. While reading the excerpts from newspapers, we suddenly comprehend the push for the next generation of Chinese children to achieve higher education in order to escape the lifestyles of their forefathers. A 17-year-old girl who lost her father in a 2001 mine tragedy now fervently studies for her college entrance examinations. “My dad didn’t live a single day of a happy life,” she says, “but I will try hard to earn a happy life for my mother.” Another family has fallen to the same pressures. The father made 400 yuan a month as a security guard—not enough to send his daughter to secondary school, his wife said. As a miner, he could earn 1,000 yuan a month. “Otherwise, who would take such a job?” the woman’s sister said. “It is a job for living people working in hell.” Since undergoing this occupation change, he has been sacrificed to the pits of Sunjiawan.

Treading through woeful and desperate subject matter, Coal Mountain Elementary flows with the suspense of a narrative, each section of prose offering different pieces of information and points of view. We delve through alternating Chinese news reports and American eyewitness accounts, which make up the meat of the text. The framework of the book, however, is lessons derived from the title, a poetically divided series of activities taken from the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for schoolchildren. By using the curriculum as a framework for the book’s three sections, Nowak transforms us into students, allowing us to learn and grow, to follow along with the students’ texts and come to our own conclusions, as children do, rather than to take on the more apathetic response shared by many adults.

The lesson plan framework also establishes rhythmic repetition, the omnipresent echo of Nowak’s exposé-like intent, notably in the second section, which urges us to consider the “costs associated with coal mining” as we take in the lifeless body of a Mr. Helm at Sago, found feet-first. As a poetic device, the lesson plans underline the images and messages Nowak expresses through the arrangement of articles and accounts. But as poetry, they are not as effective, primarily because of the dull, often technical language in which they were originally composed. The line breaks offer little additional meaning, and while emphasis can and is instilled frequently through enjambment, such emphasis is evident in the context of the news reports and eyewitness accounts.

The juxtaposition of the curriculum activities with these reports and accounts creates a dual sense of an overarching course of action and a profound sense of the unknown. Curriculum discussion questions—“What do you know about crystals? Where have you seen them?”—are bookended by an account of the loss of all communication to the mines at Sago and an article reporting that no one knows whether the 51 men trapped by the underground blast at a Chenge coal mine are alive or not. A continuation of the coal flower experiment’s procedure tempers a harried, confused account from Sago on the facing page:

Well, I do remember the dispatcher saying we had an explosion. He repeated that out loud to himself and his face—his facial expression, he was real nervous and he was trying to figure out what was going on, what we needed to do and who we needed to call and—.

The longest excerpt in Coal Mountain Elementary is an account of a man’s frantic attempts to follow procedure and alert the authorities. He calls number after number, enlisting the assistance of his wife to find outdated contacts. No one answers. Phones are disconnected, answering machines are turned off. The man waits as ring after ring falls upon absent ears. Incompetence becomes Nowak’s buzzword, trotted out when quoted excerpts recount the numerous incidents in which help arrived too late. Paired with this is the assessment section of the first lesson, urging documentation: “Either photograph / the crystals / or have the students / draw them and explain / in their own words / how they made / the flowers. / They should describe / the process / as well as the changes / they noticed over time.” The contrast between the chaotic reality of the timeline of events at Sago and that of the experiment, so measured and neatly ordered, is stark and astounding.

Nowak’s triumph here in creating the affecting and distinct Coal Mountain Elementary is almost exclusively that of the designer. The photography is the only original work present in the book, and Nowak’s own photographs seem lackluster when compared to the vividness of photojournalist Ian Teh’s stills captured in Chinese collieries. The articles quoted are from China Daily, South China Morning Post, and other national papers, and the Sago accounts are verbatim excerpts taken from the over 6,300 pages of transcripts. The material does become repetitive, particularly where the news reports are concerned, as they become more of a tally of accidents and deaths, pulling back from the more individualized focus of the earlier excerpts. But this occurs in tandem with the increase of narrative in the Sago accounts, which hone in on the rescue of one man, Mr. McCloy, told from the perspectives of numerous fellow miners. This trade-off is understandable and well-planned, though the Chinese reports become tiresome as suspense builds at Sago. One of the book’s few flaws is this excess of information and emphasis.

As a labor activist, Nowak’s intentions are clear. He seeks to educate, as the title and framework suggests, but beyond that, he seeks change for these communities for which mining is the only way of life. By weaving a book that focuses not on one individual—the miner, or the widow, alone—but rather on the community—the lost miner, his grieving family, his church, and his comrades—Nowak shouts that this is not an individual’s problem. By using material from the East and the West, he points to the fact that this is an international tragedy that occurs with horrific frequency. It is not isolated and it is not a phenomenon. Though one widow says she has no language for her feelings, that “there’s no way anybody else can understand it,” to the outsider, Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary is a lesson that imparts the somber, shocking reality of coal country.

NEW! Review of Joanna Howard

On The Winding Stair by Joanna Howard. BOA Editions, $14.

Reviewed by Maria Ribas

Joanna Howard’s short stories flit about like phantoms--just as her characters are ethereal and haunting, her stories are framed by an aura of mystery and romance, with fleeting peaks of action. The 14 stories in On the Winding Stair range from a vignette of an encounter to a “novel in shorts” that encompasses several generations. Howard imbues all her tales with dream-like action and sidelong description, which creates a haze around the narrative that, rather than disorient, lulls the reader into her sometimes euphoric, sometimes tragic world. Her careful and practiced dismissal of the concrete allows the reader release from conventional concerns of plot and conflict, and ultimately celebrates the unknowable. Few of her stories have happy endings and none need them; they offer glimpses into reveries, into intrigue, into rediscovered pasts and unreadable futures that dispel our world and offer another. Unwinding it all is futile, and Howard poses the question in one of her stories: “Is there still the pale hope to unknot the bind? Again, I count out the factors, moving across the horizon, now, with bright allure. Forever vulnerable to the seduction of cool fingers and warning hands which announce, as though inked: Fictitious! This way does not go through to action.”

The fictions Howard inks often focus on the silvery shadows of the world rather than on the searing realities of existence. The collection opens with “Light Carried on Air Moves Less,” a tale of an unnamed pale beauty, alone in the cross section of a ramshackle farmhouse in the middle of a deserted plain, and her desperate affair with the powerful prairie wind. Watching her is a specter, who pumps a handcart along a dead-end strip of train track and wonders if it is possible “for a ghost to combust to light and ash from sheer will, just for the sake of finally being seen.” There is a scarcity of wind and, desperate to regain her lover, she strips to a chemise made of rainbow scarves and strikes seductive poses in the farmhouse turned stage. Tortured and desirous, the specter pumps his handcart ever harder until he is finally able to create an “elaborate fantastical cyclonic whirl” for the pale beauty.

The romantic, idyllic past in which many of the stories are situated is saved from garishness by a thread of the macabre that winds through the collection. Nieces dig graves for their recently murdered uncles; the body of a man swells in a canal; a Hungarian sailor poisons a gentleman and steals his daughter; the dead are ever abandoning the living, and yet their specters abound. In “Seascape,” a woman settles into the home of a dead sea captain and, even after the love between the woman and the ghost fades, still has the home: “I married the place. This was the more lasting of the two liaisons. Loving so solitary a horizon, when one has been abandoned, proves some compensation for absence.” The relations between the departed and the remaining, the sought and the searching, and the past and the present spur the charm and mystery behind these stories, which explore the intertwining of our world and a parallel mystical world.

Yet not all the stories are overtly cryptic. “In Guffy’s Plum Cricket” reveals the spiraling delirium of the narrator through a stream of consciousness, as he attacks his fellow diner, Marty, for not truly understanding the difference between the movies Guns of Navarone and Spellbound. It becomes an inner battle between Spellbound, “which marks well-reasoned, even-keeledness, understated good taste,” and Guns of Navarone, which is “hysteria and backwardness.” The narrator unwinds into insanity, ending his rant, “I know now I must be quiet if I want to move into Spellbound, a space where the bar is quite white and the floor below me is pitched and I am either scaling or slipping.” Iterations of a clash between normalcy and absurdity overflow in Howard’s prose, as it veers first to realism and simplism, then to florid fantasy.

Howard’s linguistic maneuvers are what primarily account for the vertiginous, sensory deluge of her prose. The words tumble forth, trumpeting their full sound and heralding attention: “Even Loba came down from the porch in sisal-soled slippers each spring to shake the tall branches of the mulberry tree so the dark berries would collect in the yard, so we could scoop them up in handfuls into stone bowls, our bare feet spotted bruise black with ripe mulberries.” Then each successive sentence adds to the onslaught, creating a surge of meaning, with few pauses: “Eyes like a name, her eyelids flicker. The iris capsizes. A murderer is rarely moved. Behind him, the trail of his reflection in shards. The pursuing inventors. Forward, the ruined beach.” Howard’s prose alternately whirls and unwinds, contributing to the overall aura of emotional catharsis and unrestraint.

While her words and sentences thatch together perfectly, her characters often fall to pieces, uncertain and broken. The femme fatale of “She Came From the East” views her own death in mirror shards, as a bullet rips through her body and into a funhouse mirror; the young girl of “Captive Girl for Cobbled Horsemen” wanders endlessly through a threatening wartime landscape, and the gourd farmer’s orphan ward in “The Scent of Apples” is just barely resuscitated by the neighborhood dandy. The girls, women, and phantom women of Howard’s work perpetually mourn a loss, whether it is of a lover, a family, a past, or a future. They are haunted and they haunt, flitting through the sometimes ethereal and sometimes all too real worlds of Howard’s creation. There is no end and no beginning for Howard’s stories, only a perpetual suspension in a gloaming.

NEW! Review of Zachary Schomburg

Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg. Black Ocean, $12.95

Reviewed by Timothy Henry

There is an index at the back of Zachary Schomburg's second book of poetry, Scary, No Scary. Many books of poetry contain an index, usually an alphabetical list of the poems' titles. Schomburg's index, however, lists 84 themes that appear throughout the poems; for instance, “Birthday, or the idea of apologizing for missing one's party” can be found on pages 24 and 62, poems about “Leaving (and never returning)” can be found on 10 different pages, while “Sawing in half, or the idea of division” can be found on 6 pages, though you might want to also look at the poems listed under “Part-species, or hybrid species (see also Sawing in half).” Schomburg's poems, gracefully arranged across 79 pages, are just as strange and unorthodox as the index of themes, but the book's uncanny beauty isn't limited to these numerical games: this is a cohesive and (successfully) daring collection of poems, often reading like the diary of a delusional child-prodigy, with an absurd yet compelling narrative strung throughout.

As the title suggests, Scary, No Scary attempts to find the thin line (if it even exists) between terror and pleasure. What better way to do this than by relying on an adolescent's perspective, albeit a highly intelligent, highly promiscuous youth, living in a seemingly post-apocalyptic universe. The landscape of Scary, No Scary is unchartered literary territory: chandeliers made from broken dishes, nameless men and women transforming into trees, boys becoming hummingbirds, and twins named “Invisible” and “Not Invisible.” As frightening as all this might sound, Schomburg’s tone remains hilarious throughout: “Either way, let’s not just stand here/with our fingers up our butts.”

If Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is this generation’s great somber novel about the post-apocalyptic world, Scary, No Scary makes the end of modern civilization look a bit more fun, and much more psychedelic. Like The Road, Schomburg’s future universe is devoid of personal identity: “Neither of us have names / especially you.” Life is rather abundant as well, especially trees. We can all rest assured that the youth of the post-world will still be afraid of entering the woods late at night, not fearful of wild animals or witches, but fearful of finding what is “half-buried” beneath dead leaves, be it a bodiless woman or one’s own beating heart. Becoming part of the woods, too, is of great concern:

Soon you’ll be
more tree
than person.

You’ll go camping in the woods
and never come back.

Animal life is also abundant, especially insects and hummingbirds, both of which humans can randomly turn into:

How do you tell someone
their family is
tiny insects?

How do you tell someone
their boy is
a hummingbird?

Jaguars, too: “You were becoming more and more jaguar.”

But even with all this anthropomorphic action, the post-apocalyptic teenager still retains teenage desires. Unlike today’s youths, who are really only concerned with accidental pregnancy and unwelcomed transmitted diseases (if they are concerned about anything), the sexually adventurous kids of Schomburg’s future have bigger concerns, such as choosing “between floating eternally in a buoyant cage of hummingbird bones down a river of lava or a river of blood.” Break-ups, too, will take on a different form, as seen in the prose poem “Goodbye Lessons”: “I have to say goodbye . . . I will know that goodbyes are when you eat yourself to death.” In The Road, we had to be concerned with cannibalistic wanderers eating our children; in Scary, No Scary, we need to be concerned about our kids eating themselves. All concerns aside, these kids are still looking for a good place to make out:

I know a place where we can escape the dead hummingbird
problem, a pond no one knows about, cold and clean. It is fed
by a mountain stream. We can take off all our clothes there and
maybe have sex.

Scary, No Scary is organized into four sections. The first is mainly comprised of short, wonderfully sonic lyrics, reminiscent of Robert Creeley (in the midst of a bad LSD trip) or, more recently, Graham Foust (if Foust was an evil clown). These poems introduce the narrator and his views on the scarce world in which he lives. The second section consists mainly of prose poems, surreal yet darkly beautiful, like a horror-core band (comprised of musicians who really know how to play their instruments) interpreting James Tate. The final two sections are sequences, the first being “The Histories” and the second “The Pond.” “The Histories” tells a story of the narrator in his dining room (which doesn’t actually exist) setting a table with dishes beneath a chandelier (none of which exist, either) in a dark, floorless and ceiling-less house. All that exists, it seems, is the narrator, who simply describes this non-existent scene. “The Pond” may be referring to the pond where the narrator takes his lover earlier in the book, but we will never know for sure, since the narrator is unsure of everything:

At the edge of the pond
someone who looks like me
is holding hands
with someone who looks like you.
I begin to wonder who I am
because I don’t look like me.

So what are we to make of Zachary Schomburg’s universe in Scary, No Scary? Should we be fearful of what is to come after the apocalypse? Of course, but instead of being afraid of cannibals and violence, we should be afraid of morphing into hummingbirds and having to apologize for missing a friend’s birthday party. Will the end of the world bring just the “scary” or the “no scary” as well? As far as we can tell, there will be a combination of both. One of the only moments where the narrator actually tells us he is fearful of something comes from “The Black Hole”: “I’m afraid of myself.” Considering this could be said about most people today, things might not be too different. Hopefully, each day that comes after the apocalypse will flow into the next as perfectly as the movements of these poems.

NEW! Poem by Tomaž Šalamun

Tomaž Šalamun


The Birth of the Poet


The warm calf’s belly is on his
forehead. Flies buzz and crawl
into his mouth. He closes
the powerplant. He intercepts

the raft with the oar. He hits
the cherries, prepares the sling. An ox
falls like a bronze, father doesn’t. Rice is
stuck on his neck, behind his forehead.

There are rings in the cement. Their soft
wood drowns into his flame. Muscle
destroys his face. It’s scribbled. It tortures

itself and stares. His entrails are spread
as if he knew where the birds would go.
The warm calf’s belly is ripe for command.


Translated from the Slovenian by the author and Michael Thomas Taren

Collaborative poems by Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert

Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert


THE ONE ABOUT NOSTALGIA

A psychic who's right 100% of the time walks into a bar. Rhetorical use of the present tense aside, I should mention this takes place in the past. All the women in the bar start talking at once. For some reason they have British accents. The places looks built to withstand a million earthquakes. "Fear of a million earthquakes" was a common affliction at the turn of the century. "Sweet are the uses of adversity" was a common saying.


THE ONE ABOUT THE UNHEIMLICH

My doppelganger walks into a bar. He has a nasty disposition, whereas I am merely having a bad day. Does he enjoy watching forest fires? Do the patrons think we're twins? Only a certain kind of man would identify the color as "cyan." Or announce that "Rippling abs don't just appear on your midsection; you have to sculpt them." A sudden sunshower. Now he is reenacting a classic tourist photo cliché. And now I am surprised to find myself weeping.


THE ONE ABOUT GENRE

Two drunks, evidently drunk, walk into a bar. Fact or fiction? We haven't progressed past Romanticism. The drunks read only professional literature & psychiatric case studies. You have to finesse the jargon. True or false? Would it be weird to say, there's no romance in this. Do you know the end of the story--they died.

NEW! Poem by Daniel Luévano

Daniel Luévano


The Arts, Part 3


Hope a day you break even.
Hope a day you break open.
For what cathedral do you weld
these spikes. For what praise
do you mangle these beams. What
ecstasy of origin. What crater
raised to a valley. The quick answer
is zero. Wrists at goodbye.
But to refuse as you do
the null set the straw fire
of real estate realism
don’t tremble
get under the blanket. Textile
subtexts I can’t afford
should make me a better person.
Hanging from a ceiling fan
what about you.

~

Guaranteed you won’t
go gracefully. As grace is impersonal
in dimension & valence
as far as the authorities are concerned
as art demands lightness & telescopic
density. Our interconnectedness
for granted, go light the task
is heavy. Don’t accept
the conditions again. Answer
before the question muddles.
These are his handwritten notes.

~

Articulated as Lucifer’s tail.
The empty thought the televised brain.
Sorry didn’t see you standing there.
But here I am may we have a word.
We need more day at both ends of night.
We need a pretty girl. A musical. A bitter
martini. Chunky salsa. A strapless dress.
So what’s your (dirty) answer.
More night both ends of day.
Can you sing. Then sing.

NEW! Poem by Daneen Bergland

Daneen Bergland


Fugue for Insects, Animals, and Vegetables

Animals live among us; they shit in our kitchens.
I find spiders asleep or dead in the mailbox.
They look like crossed out words.
In water, whales sink and arc beneath us,
their teeth could comb your hair and it’s rumored
a handful of their flesh feels just like a breast.
In the mirror when I touch one breast it is not the one
I try to touch. What is real is what I can imagine. I’m not sure
I deserve what I want. Better to expect the deficit
As if every disappointment buoys a delight.
Their heads in dirt sacks, the potatoes periscope.
The tomatoes slip glistening beads from wet purses.
And these gifts, what must I do to pay for these?
Have I suffered enough, roughed up by the cucurbits’ leaves?
Nothing I buy stops the cats from sleeping their lives away.
I spend so much time digging at the bottom of bags
and resent the squirrels plugging the dirt every year.
I keep a garden against chaos, each bush pruned back to its bones.
Still summer comes in one lump sum. Shiny things
work themselves out through the dirt like slivers.
Maybe it’s the crows. And each day I ask myself
will you be the pen or the scissors? And resolve:
to my cats on my hands to bring home the smell of other cats.
If I can have only one color of butterfly: yellow.
This isn’t a competition; who made me think so?
So, surrender, trust the windfall and marry the house.
But the animals are not enough. I want the freedom
to reach out and touch you with my blunt instrument.
While the slugs bullet hole the ranunculus buds,
the nightcricket plays his tiny violin and feels sorry.

Three poems by Milan Dobričić

Milan Dobričić


Amphisbaena

Icarus too up
Orpheus too down
Summer too hot
winter too cold
Day too bright
Night too dark
Hill too huge
Sea too wet
Yours I can when you can't
mine I can't when I can


Meteorgy

From sunrise to sunset
rain clear wind clouds rain wind hurricane
little then a lot of ice snow roar squeak whistle
sizzle tramp ripple
let’s not even mention the night


Belgrade

Linden scent
water tremble
sparrow jump
pigeon limp
boat train truck whistle
Contagious market chrism
Drunkenness
Tram midnight
Unsung


Translated from the Serbian by the author, originally published in Blessed Losers (Blagosloveni gubitnici)

NEW! Review of Novica Tadić

Dark Things by Novica Tadić, translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic. BOA Editions, $16.

Reviewed by Timothy Henry

In his introduction to Novica Tadić's Dark Things, Charles Simic suggests that the reader of this haunted collection is led by “a nameless recluse, mistrustful and fearful . . . surrounded on all sides by monsters and apparitions generated by his vivid, guilt-ridden imagination.” With the guidance of this recluse, we are taken on a full-frontal tour of the narrator’s neighborhood, where this brilliant, delicate elder has lived long enough to lose any hope for his land's salvation. A lifetime spent on these dreary streets takes its toll on the speaker’s own hope for salvation, which remains at stake throughout the book's 48 poems, and, like all of the troubles presented by Tadić, is left unresolved. Yet with a terrifying beauty, our guide still manages to fulfill his vocation: to endure this dark and dreadful world as both witness and poet, or, in Tadić's own words, as “God's messenger.”

The scene is Belgrade, Serbia's capital, where Tadić has lived for virtually all of his life. Born in 1949, he draws from nearly 60 years of violence and decay that ransacked Communist and post-Communist Yugoslavia as well as from the emergence of the nation now known as Serbia, complete with the subsequent terror that has plagued the young country. But Tadić's poems don't seem to describe a typical city or nation, establishments usually designed to unite and define a group of people dwelling in a geographical region. Rather, these poems seem to portray an isolated universe, often void of logic, always void of hope, where man, beast, and the supernatural live, suffer, and, most noticeably, die side-by-side. No one wants to claim ownership of this forsaken land, yet everyone seems to be responsible for its constant decay: “Poor us, we are all kings / when we gaze upon the starry sky,” Tadić states in the opening lines of “Night Passes.” Only when an inhabitant gazes into the unreachable outside, Tadić suggests, does he realize his own role in the darkness that consumes the stale, cold city.

The scent of death is apparent throughout all of these poems, sometimes from corpses left to rot or rabid animals dying in the vicinity, but most often this scent emerges from the terror lurking around every dark corner, in every abandoned hall, and in the unfamiliar faces of those who call this unfortunate neighborhood home, as in “About The Dead, Briefly”:

We sniffled and sniffled,
but nobody shed a tear.

May the earth be easy on him;
since it was only today that we noticed
he had been alive.

An immense amount of power lies in both the poems and their settings, but a stranger, stronger power seems to exist in the zombie-like surroundings of the town: “Amidst the noise, the moving crowd, the live maelstrom, / I know your powers, street.” This uncontrollable, unseen power has an enormous effect on our recluse-guide, whose poems show him crippled with paranoia (“My blood wouldn’t let me rest”) and utter fear (“Let's turn and lie on our backs forever”). Tadić’s strength lies not in his ability to depict the external evil that haunts this neighborhood, but rather in his ability to show how this external evil can infect itself inside the already hopeless human soul: “Evil spirits will rise out of the palm of your hand,” perhaps, even, through osmosis--“An ocean of hatred splashes over me everyday.”

The speaker is constantly concerned over his role in the deterioration of the land, and his inability to bring an end to the horrors creates a poignant guilt that radiates from these poems. A spiritual presence, too, is peppered throughout, though often in a futile tone: “Now, what will I cover myself with? Only with prayers,” and “I wandered everywhere / like a God's fool.” God is far from absent in these poems, as Tadić addresses God more than anyone or anything. However, the only thing worse for Tadić than an absent God, it seems, is an inactive God; the sheepish, poetic prayers of the recluse remain unanswered, the darkness and decay never cease.

Tadić's poems recall A.R. Ammons' statement that, “The end of the poem is to reconstruct silence . . .” Tadić has the ability to shatter silence each time he begins one of his beautifully haunted poems, yet his endings do what Ammons suggests: they bring the reader back to silence. These uncomfortable silences gradually become more familiar to the reader, as each poem concludes with a feeling more terrifying than what came before. Perhaps Tadić's most dreadful ending comes from the four-stanza “A Bird Started To Sing,” which concludes:

Wind lifted the ashes
and spread them
over other ashes.

Since most of these poems barely reach a page in length, Tadić works with diligence and speed, as if the scenery he is describing is so vile that he can only muster a few stanzas before the horror again breaks him. One may wonder why our recluse guide doesn't flee his current state for the hope of finding a brighter land, but, as Tadić shows, fleeing is an impossible task when one doesn't have his bearings: “I don't know where I've come from / nor where I'm going.” Again, credit must be given to the work of Simic, a master of diligence and stealth himself. A weaker translation would not have been capable of depicting the sudden silences of Tadić's nightmarish world to an English-speaking audience so effectively. Simic's own Serbia-influenced poems are drawn from childhood memory, often contorted, filtered, or presented with an admirable naïvete, sometimes even making light of atrocity. There is no lightness to be found in Novica Tadić's collection, only darkness. A crippling, ubiquitous darkness.

NEW! Review of Stephen Rodefer

Call It Thought: Selected Poems by Stephen Rodefer. Carcanet, £18.95.

Reviewed by Lindsay Kathleen Turner

Despite its handsome black-and-white cover, Stephen Rodefer’s new selected poems, Call It Thought reminds me of a beat-up old suitcase my boyfriend used to carry, which I hated: it was sloppy, fraying at the edges, overstuffed, unreliable, exotically stickered and tagged, ostentatiously unlike anything else, yet still suspiciously bland. Call It Thought is, luckily, not a suitcase and is thus relieved of such functional obligations: it is supposed to stand out and be provocative. Whether such provocation is appealing is a matter of taste; but whether or not one finds the poems sturdy enough to carry their content of inventions and jibes, Rodefer works thoroughly, intelligently, and—sometimes—intelligibly at a snarl of artistic and aesthetic queries.

Call It Thought begins with excerpts from Rodefer’s Four Lectures (1982), which according to Rod Mengham’s introduction “so exceeds conventional lineation and bibliographical form that only a few extracts could be included in this book.” This textual difficulty raises a first problem posed generally by Call It Thought: one wonders what, and where, the rest of the lectures might be. Given the sprawl of Rodefer’s work, its shifts in style and register, in the case of Four Lectures, and similarly for the book as a whole, the act of selecting does nothing to delineate the boundaries of Rodefer’s corpus or to sketch for us a general outline of his work—what’s included simply raises questions about what’s left out.

In any case, starting with Four Lectures—for the book does not follow the chronological order of Rodefer’s work—prepares us for the lexical inundation occasioned by the collection. Rodefer is well-schooled in the history of literature and poetry, as inclusive of the esoteric fact as he is of the poetic cliché, and everything in between: “As should a book be as deep as a museum and as wide as the world,” he concludes his preface to the lectures.

Indeed, the collections assembled in Call It Thought seem to represent not the continuity or arc of a poetic career but a gamut of voices, a virtuosic act of ventriloquism. Rodefer is, of course, often associated with Language poetry, but the intimacy and imagery of the Black Mountain poets is strongly present in some of the earlier work, such as One or Two Poems from the White World (1976). The voiced observation and introspection of the New York School marks later poems, especially those from Emergency Measures (1987), whose title points us immediately toward O’Hara, a frequent Rodefer evocation, and those from Left Under a Cloud (2000), which includes a literal translation of “The Day Lady Died” in French. In and among all this, Rodefer also calls to mind Lucretius, Sappho, Dante, Villon, the English Romantics, the Italian Futurists, and the entire tradition of the French poète maudit (Rodefer’s collaborations with Benjamin Friedlander and Chip Sullivan recall Apollinaire’s Calliagrams; Fleurs de Val translates, after a fashion, Baudelaire). Given this list—by no means exhaustive—it is hardly surprising, that, along with Charles Olson, who appears in a non-blurb on the back jacket of Call It Thought betting “anybody a lobster” that the poet could answer his question about Milton, we are left asking where, among the voices and evocations, is Rodefer, anyway?

*

As prolific and as innovative as he is provocative, Rodefer is more or less unknown in most American poetry circles. Indeed, most commentary seems directly focused on the problem of Rodefer’s ambiguous location; in the introduction to the 2008 issue of the Chicago Review dedicated to the poet, editors Joshua Kotin and Michael Kindellan note that “Rodefer’s affiliations are as much a sign of his poetic identity as of his perpetual homelessness.” Critical approaches to his work are, more often than not, the projects of British scholars, and it is in this context, paradoxically, that we find Rodefer referred to most decisively as an American poet; Mengham states that “of all the most intensely American of poets, Stephen Rodefer turns out to be the most European,” while Rodefer’s website bears a quotation from Simon Jarvis calling him “quite simply the most important living American poet.”

Stephen Rodefer lives in Paris. Even if he grew up as a person and poet in a solidly American milieu, and even if he alludes to New York and California as often as he does to the poets who populate these places, his work seems to describe a slow unmooring, a drift from the partisanships of American poetry schools into a world far more cosmopolitan, and also more amorphous: the last poems in the volume, from the unpublished collection How to Fall Off the Pony in New York, are as sprawling and varied in language as they are in form, peppered with names and phrases from, truly, all over the globe. (Take, for example, “Drinking Amongst the Wafering Drinkers”—yes, “wafering”—which bears the subtitles “after Mozart and before Nietzsche” and “On y va à le repaire du Bacchus / cher Ramses Tutankhamen,” and then begins, “Detroit too long des trop.”)

And yet Rodefer’s poems are often occasional, bearing the stamps of places and dates, dedicated to real people: it is ultimately clear that Rodefer does have a “here,” a genuine locus from around which his voices, concerns, and general overflow of words assemble. The poet Fanny Howe describes him as having the “aura of a pariah,” and his exclusion from American scholarship seems more or less standard—yet this general homelessness, finally, is the result of neither biographical nor textual confusion. Rather, it seems deliberately produced by the poems themselves; Rodefer rejects the confines of academia and of “home,” preferring instead, it seems, the freedom and energy he claims within this space of rejection.

*

Asking, “where is Rodefer,” then, may not be the most productive way of approaching Call It Thought. His is a poetics of rejection, a sort of authorly uncertainty principle by which, somewhat baffled and provoked, the inquiring reader finds only the continual assertion of where the poet is not. A favorite trope of Rodefer’s is the bastardization of a well-known line: “tenured is the night,” for example, or “[a]bout suffering we are always wrong.” These allusions are not particularly funny; they do not build on the poems from which they come nor even recall Keats or Yeats in a particularly interesting fashion. But even if the language discomfits, these garbled lines exemplify what, for Rodefer, is at the heart of his art: the act of creation is here constituted by the deliberate garbling of the standard signals of traditional form, voice, and allusion. It is fundamentally an act of resistance, of defiance of the norms of academia and the expectations created for readers of poetry by poetry itself; in Four Lectures, Rodefer writes:

But bent out of shape is also bent into shape. New replacements are expected, and they always come. We start to be fed things forcibly. We can throw up, not eat, or fold the spoon in half.

The metaphors are slippery, but the tone of obstinacy, at least, is unmistakable: Rodefer’s project is to bend tradition and form to his will, and his will is none other than the rejection, or at least the bending, of tradition and form.

Given this deliberate perversity, it seems obvious that reading Rodefer’s work is not a reliably pleasant experience. One has the impression, in the lines cited above and elsewhere, that the rejection of tradition entails a sort of deadening of the words, a weakening, a reversion; once evoked, Keats’ nightingale cannot but be missed. Perhaps this sense of loss motivates the concurrence of Rodefer criticism around the adjective “dreamy”; Friedlander characterizes Rodefer’s tone as one of “consistent dreamy innuendo,” while in her Rodefer: A Study, also from Chicago Review, Fanny Howe writes that Rodefer’s words “seek a new language that floats far above the borders of nation or sex or speech. His poetry is, in a word, dreamy.”

To me, “dreamy” seems at odds with Rodefer’s stream of puns and claims and exclamations, which range in tone from sly to trenchant to careless to absolutely overshrill. (“All talkative writers will prattle,” Rodefer writes in an interview with the editors of Chicago Review. Rodefer is a very talkative writer.) Regardless of whether one finds his logorrhea dreamy and evocative or grating and (to cite Friedlander again) manneristic, Call It Thought—in spite of Rodefer’s muddled reception, and his further attempts to muddle things in general—is a work with a definite, pointed, and meta-poetic bent. Reading Rodefer is an experience of provocation and of destabilization; again and again, the poems cue us toward history, toward elsewhere, only to jerk us rudely back:

[…] Paper
Is the surface, but there is nothing else. Improvisation is a tool
of refinement. The sentence is up for parole. I’m from there
but now I’m here. It happens to everyone. We are born two and we part one.
Your plane is here. Happy crowd. Some things are too loud to hear.

from Kazim Ali's Theory Whore (an essay a novel a spore)

Kazim Ali


The Perfect Painting



He thinks the sky is a living creature turning on its back.

Rain is the caress.

He is warned not to personify so much.

So bored by music.

Why always the same progressions, the same formulas, why only twelve tones?

Why not the shamelessness of Satie: but only those periods of silences in which there are no notes, only the piano strings reverberating.

Revertebrate.

Why not thick layers of static, with the slightest modulations at the level of microsound, shifting the way a person shifts in his chair, or in bed.

Why not tone changes so subtle a listener might not even know that a change has occurred.

Why music that depends so deeply on being consumed.

He looks up at the gray, cloudy sky and thinks:

“That’s the perfect painting”

Why, he wonders, does he love art like this?

Is it because he is emotionally dead.

Or scared.

Or unable to communicate.

OK, what do I love about it, he thinks, looking carefully at the sky two specks—birds flying across his field of vision a mile up.

It’s the gradations in color, so subtle.

The vast space, supposed formlessness.

But actually not.

Actually burgeoning.

Actual possibility.


The open space

Because suddenly there is not time at all.

“You really like this?” a disbelieving friend asks at the Agnes Martin exhibit.

He’s not paying attention.

He’s thinking of your hands leaving his back.

Thinking it felt like being brushed by birds’ wings.

The talks in the night after sex—when you realized you loved each other but weren’t fulfilling each other’s desire.

How does he work his way back from that?

Remember the scene in Four-Chambered Heart where Djuna burns all the books—because she realizes they can’t save her.

That’s what he thinks as he writes his novel into the notebook: “how will this save me?”

And what should we say to him?

No one will save you.

Don’t go back?

Be unsaved?


All those novels about eros or extremity end in either

silence
abandonment
or death.

Ether.

So how have you been helped.

As he’s driving, a huge—and it seems to him golden—bird flies low across the road.

Likely it’s a hawk but today he needs to believe in phoenixes.

Even this could be about anything.

The disbelieving friend.

The emotional distance.

Monochromatic.

Abandonment.
Silence.
Death.

Duras. Nin. Maso. He wants to lie down with them, flesh against flesh.

Where he’s gone.

Where he’s going.

“History Happened Here,” reads the cast iron sign at the thruway exit.

He always reads the signs.

Though, he thinks, history happens everywhere.

How do you go back and fix something?

It’s too late.

Nothing gets fixed.

Even this.

Could be about anything, about disbelief, could be the river surface, could be about what hasn’t been said yet,

could be just about the wind.

“Partially cloudy with a chance of showers.”

He thinks of leaving this morning.

“Fish fly through the ocean, men crawl along the bottom of the sky.”

If the sky is a living thing, filled with gas and vapor and water all undergoing perennial transformation, then raining is actually the sky falling down.

What open ended

“We picked mates out for you one from the other”

He always thought he would stay with the phoenix forever.

Separation from the phoenix—five empty years after that—then the raven.

What’s the use—he’s explained all this before

Tried to make you understand.

Even thought to himself, “he doesn’t make me burn like phoenix did—phoenix is fire; the raven is water.”

Like rain.

How do we travel our way out of this.

How about not having the answers.

Scattered thunder showers, possible storm warning.

He remembers going to see Ono’s film “Apotheosis.”

You know he loved the first part: the balloon getting higher and higher over the snowy fields.

Sounds from the English countryside below.

Gun shots, dogs barking, sounds getting fainter and fainter…

Landscape fading and fading into snowy gray and white.

Finally vanishes into the clouds.

Seven minutes of blank screen and the sound of the gentle gas flame holding the balloon aloft, sound of the wind against silk.

How many people viewing simply got up and walked out because there was “nothing” to “see.”

Look for the last one, in the back row, a young man in his thirties, bad haircut, a little horsey looking, but beautiful because his eyes are on the screen of snow, transfixed.

Then the balloon bursts through the top of the cloud cover into brilliant sunshine and blue blue sky.

Coming from winter.

What if this is what it’s like he prays.

Remembering the clarity of the outlines of objects the day after the storm.

But what if it isn’t like that.

What if we go through clouds and there isn’t anything after.

NEW! Poem by Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell


large glass


sky in the sky; bluebirds in my

eyes. the pantyhose sales-

man in a cage.

out‘foxed’.

whats behind the charge? (all the buckled wet books.) convents

have no modern equivalent.

let it affront, let it drink
THEY DONT HAVE TO TELL YOU WHAT THEY THINK
on the street, let it have

black

teeth. i dont rem-
STEAL THE SUNSHINE SET UP A CONCEPTUAL SCHEME
ember the emotion. [heaven knows.] [is the

theme.]

we already are

what we do: we dont need a

theory of recovery.

a sailboat sinks: your ‘italian’ dream
HELL HAS ICECREAM

"New Moon" by John Olson

John Olson

NEW MOON

On the morning of July 20th, 1969, I emerged from a house near Burien, Washington shortly after sunrise, and tilted my head back to look at the sky. My neck creaked. I had attended a party that had gone late into the night. It was a warm, bright morning and I could see the moon, phantasmal and splotchy against a China blue sky. It’s rare to see the moon during the day, and whenever I do, it seems oddly displaced, a prop from the theatre of the night someone forgot to bring in. On this occasion it smacked of significance. There were men walking on it. Or about to walk on it. I gazed at it as if I might actually see them hobbling about in the dust, the way you can sometimes see from a distance people scaling the side of a mountain.

My adolescence in the 60s had been witness to a long pageantry of lunar landing modules. My father worked at Boeing as an illustrator and engineer. I grew up in a house full of lunar landing modules, many of them constructed out of toothpicks and ping-pong balls. NASA’s coveted contract went to Grumman, rather than Boeing, so my father’s many illustrations and modules remained stillborn, although a few went on exhibit at the Smithsonian in the 1980s.

My parents were out of town that summer in ‘69. Home from California for a visit, I had the house to myself and watched the moon landing on TV. I saw Eagle land and Armstrong clamber down the ladder in his bulky space suit and put his foot on the surface of the moon and utter his famous words, “That is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Years later, circa the early 90s, Buzz Aldrin and my father had been invited to a dinner at someone’s house on Bainbridge Island and gotten lost. My father drove and Buzz navigated. Bainbridge Island is heavily wooded, which outer space is not, which provides at least one mitigating factor to this otherwise curious misadventure. If I remember my father’s story correctly, it had been a clear night, and Buzz had been able to use the stars to pinpoint their position using a declination formula based on spherical trigonometry. That, and a map spread out on the hood of my father’s Taurus, which they studied by flashlight.

Today the moon is a thin crescent that looks like a fingernail clipping hovering over the western horizon. There are no people flying around with jetpacks on their backs and living in homes that look like the Space Needle. The world is in crisis. Billions live in dire poverty. The poles and glaciers are melting. Millions in the U.S. believe that humans lived with dinosaurs and that evolution is a hoax. But Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins continue on tour, noticeably aged, but still smiling, still optimistic. I like to think that they know something that I don’t know.

NEW! Poem by Anne Shaw

Anne Shaw

Absence of Assignable

Listen: you are elsewhere
trined in a nest of names. Some
are yours, some perish

to begin. There is luck
and luck’s remission, freckled
hands on locks, vestiges

of kindness, wrists bent back.
There are rabbit’s feet and staples,
fava beans and phones. When

you turn, you are cinched and gathered.
When you turn, you are clocked
and spooled. Everything is audible

but not. Everything is politic
but not. And you, ramshackle penitent,
apply a weedy poultice

to your wound. How can I speak
when I cannot speak? you are thinking.
Mutable you. Or else, please buy

please bundle. Please do not
refute. Refuel. Refuse.

NEW! Poem by Noah Eli Gordon, Eric Baus & Sara Veglahn

Noah Eli Gordon, Eric Baus & Sara Veglahn


THIS IS THE UNIVERSAL SIGN FOR PART TWO


Among those studying the brook in the woods from a trail near the road is a woman. There is a tree with a long steel rod through its trunk. The situation is serious according to various bystanders. This is a real brook, she thinks, tossing a pebble into shallow water to test the thought, which destroys our photographic image. The photographer would like for you to do the opposite of reading. The bystanders think about their claims of having been elsewhere. Somewhere, someone plays the same two notes over and over and tries to equate them with language. This is artifice, thinks the woman, unaware of being watched. A door closes slowly. Is it right to say I hear a pause? Among those studying the rod in the tree just off the trail near the woman is a boy. I wish these were chandeliers, he thinks. The bystanders move in unison, mumbling. They feel a house inside their hands. In Part One, there is no applause. The curtain falls when the bystanders arrive later than expected. Later arrives.

NEW! Poem by Alexandria Peary

Alexandria Peary


SMALL BLUE HOUSE


This mighty bird house

is an A-frame, a letter

A hanging off a branch

from the previous poem

a move some readers don’t care for.

It’s insulated, with trinkets

that rattle when shaken

a king cake jesus, a rhine

stone mummy, a man

who spends more time at a desk

than a table with a candelabra of buds

and the house hangs off a birch

which is cold, zen, zebra-striped,

and papery.

NEW! Poem by Michael Farrell

Michael Farrell


confessional poem


“there was blood on the bumper officer,

i (had) just meant to go

on mowing; & then someone – wearing a clown

nose – came up & presented me

with a handful

of larkspur (that unfunny flower). did i ev-

er tell you

of that hovel i made out of the ironiest sand:

it was quasi-black
IT WAS LIKE A BARRACKS & PRODUCED ITS OWN FLAK
i thought id never get it in to austral-

ia? (they sell tiger shells in the

opshop – a fact that

gives me no satisfaction . . . i built my

own establishment by

this ‘sea’.)”

NEW! Poem by Joseph P. Wood

Joseph P. Wood

The Broken Body as Spectacle


Arch the back, the Romans do, then pierce the criminal with large rusty hooks, cruel fisherman angling out the condemned’s will like a bass in a raging, white stream. Finally, give or take twenty soldiers, hot & soiled, the monstrous gold helmets slipping over their eyes, each commissioned to shatter a segment of back so when the criminal is raised to the cross, they can slump him over a wooden arm, hang him upside down, & cinch the dangling hands & feet into a folded 180. Time will do the rest: each orifice to be picked so clean by crow or maggot or microbe that a year later, one could find the skull & firmly plant a votive candle in a socket. And say, at night, a holy man lit it? Would his audience, in their own idiosyncratic methods, strive toward a life as pure as a wind-swept cypress? If so, then why do the children spend their days in stealth & stuttering, as if some random madman would force a crown of decapitated rabbits? And why are the cathedral floors black & less black, as if they sucked the sun & spit back rotten teeth? It’s enough to throw oneself at the ocean, but the ocean just will bloat us: a walrus in place of a mother, coral in place of a God, sand in place of a law—this is how the Romans conquer.

NEW! Poem by Anne Shaw

Anne Shaw

unruly clock.

How strangely things unmoor themselves.
For instance, overhead: shadow of a bird
without a bird. As paint peels back
from the porch front, cloud-thread
raveled out against the blue. How my body
craves extinction. Yours, a tenderness.
On top of or below. As the preposition
wanders from its noun. The lip
and its restriction. You, the fricative angel
in my bed. How a bulb turns on
in the farmhouse: a private
radiance. And the body’s rapt attention,
apparent slips of tongue. Some truths
I kidnap back into the dark. My realm
of unbecoming, kingdom of shatter and thrust. Fields
in the side view plated now with water over loam.
The little clatter the mind makes, and each
peculiar crevice of a heart. Such beds of flood
and thistle: their many endings, turnings,
passings-through. Then all my slick retractions
flattering a passage through the skull. There is luck
and luck’s remission, there are freckled hands
on locks, tallow-meshes hanging in the trees. And the bees
relentless, hungry now, summer or its semblance
bent in sad arrival, creeping charlie tiny in the lawn--

NEW! Poem by Alexandria Peary

Alexandria Peary


TITLE WITH SHADOW


“ ” are put around a tree which is plaid but smells fruity

and then the white field slides to the right of the poem

in the awkward jump my Royal typewriter makes for a huge tab

to jut from the side as they walk to find the manager

while the whole 1/2 mile is reeled back in

though the walk back is pleasant, like chewing gum

or chewing on color. In Ugg boots, they traipse around

stepping over white shapes in the white, looking up from watching their feet

to discuss the title up at top which doesn’t help,

a group of charcoal letters with a steel shadow

ineffectual as a billboard in the middle of nowhere

(perhaps nowhere grew around it). Some people

may be discomforted by walking in a forest inside white

and not knowing which season it is, so an icon of a yellow leaf

falls. They walk by the trees they passed up—

the blaze orange one, “Garage Band,” smelling of Johnny Walker,

the one covered in American flags, others smelling like “grandma’s kitchen,”

“clean air,” and the tree that’s an open window which they almost took,

that row moving jerkily as though on a conveyor belt.

They reach the manager who grumbles about people ripping trees off

in middle of the night, he wants to install a surveillance camera

so sensitive it will respond to the wedge of moon and the most poetic moves of leaves

and, indeed, they had seen on their way down how instead

of stumps, there were little gashes in the cardboard

where the staples had been. Everyone needs a title,

for finished books and ones written only for the shelf in oneself.

A title is good for any car. It will make the ride smell better.

Quotation marks around a leaf make it ring like a bell

like this one outside the manager’s lean-to. Tired by now, they look back

in the middle of the lane, not having a thought,

The title with shadow— coneless original—

In the white lane, A figure made of sea glass,

Kelp moving in the shadow.

NEW! Poem by Adam Strauss

Adam Strauss


Labor


The shore
Ablution
Breaks at--
Where poor
Women sort
Shells as
The yen goes
Lower--
What's full store
When this is
The case?
Gulls
Dip and
Pivot; deer
Graze a steep
Hillside--
Across
The "sea"
In a cement
Shed green
Coffee beans sit:
A green
Snake sheds;
Its skin's unfit
For fashion: too
Narrow,
Brittle, not even
A watch.

NEW! Poem by Anne Shaw

Anne Shaw

Another Art House Movie

(homophonic translation of Verlaine)

A rule of sun falls inward across the table:
What craft in the ivory grapes, what ugly crap.
You are always already moving, whatever pants you wear:
Corduroy trousers, my poor pale friend, or simple water pooling in its glass.

Drink it. Close the door after. Aprons, pens, your voice,
And all the rest. It’s a malleable hour
In the middle of the day. An edgy lottery writhes your sleep,
A cicada creeps like an infant to its birth.

Meanwhile, your shadow elongates and slips through the summer grass.
The door of the boat house opens, the footsteps of a boy
Resonate at certain frequencies. Your room is a room
In shambles: a table set with stones, a steaming pan, a nail, a crust of bread;

His hand with tiny cuts; a boat, recurrent flower blooming in its thimble--

NEW! Poem by Leonard Gontarek

Leonard Gontarek


From Grace



I may force the soul into nakedness.

I may lead the soul around on a leash.

I may dress the soul in women’s underwear.

Which part don’t you understand?


I did not win the Hemingway look-alike contest again this year.


I could pass for the Polish President & Prime Minister, I think.


I’ve painted myself into a corner here, away from the cobalt galaxies.

For another, I’ve cut a door in the wrong wall to get away.

NEW! Poem by Alexandra Mattraw

Alexandra Mattraw

Summary Between Bodies

When we reach the summit, you tell of repetition. The way an orange unpeels itself in such heat. : All bruised skin wants to give way in the manner of water. We stop field center, but the green world sweats, thickens like hair. Each pasture clots a day’s naming. We share corner store bread : Fingers break the body in two. Darkness trembles light waning bees. My styrofoam anxiety a cup misplaced I bite into moons. Then print-crescents : Your foot on soil as proof of where sadness went. Why I didn’t have reason to change my mind, pick each wild iris apart : I see you not. Your foot shores my other. This pattern to sea pebbles larger notions of stability. Sodden bread spreads where we left it. Your arm confused with mine. The envy of sands, rocks war up waves to tell them.

NEW! Poem by Joseph P. Wood

Joseph P. Wood

Before Rublev Paints the Cathedral


A jester’s head is
knocked against

an oak, soldier
takes a peeling

knife, like a dead
mollusk, tongue

comes off clean.
Rublev stops

speaking mostly,
churches so torched

snow drifts down
on the altars. What

is a horse doing
thrashing the asp?

Who is that kid
building a bell

from mud, not
to be sodomized.

It tolls. Doves
flutter from belfry

to monk’s shoulder,
& the Steppe blank

canvas elsewhere.

NEW! Poem by Doug Ramspeck

Doug Ramspeck

Clairvoyant


The city fell asleep in my arms.

What is important here is the concept
of a pillow of streets.

It doesn’t matter what the dead believe,
their ontology of stillness.

It is enough that someone,
somewhere, cuts out his eyes and holds
them in his palms.

The work is never completed. We imagine
our lives as blood on the brain, as walking
through a warren of streets beneath
a naked eyeball of moon.

Skull moon, salt moon, prophecy moon.

It was Horace who described tossing aside
his shield and fleeing the Battle of Philippi,
which is one way to describe a life:

to imagine sitting tomorrow on a park bench
with a sack lunch perched in the lap.

The earth rotating more rapidly at the equator
than farther north or south,

and yet the sunlight strangely
incorporeal, as though it is dreaming us.

And the pigeons, too fat
for flight, pecking their way into tomorrow,
which is all we know to hope for or ask.

NEW! Poem by Nina Corwin

Nina Corwin

Interior With Artificial Leaves


What I meant to say, but the crop of false fruit kept intruding, is that
doorbells are not destiny. They have no teeth. Split infinities while
waiting for a ring.

When you come, you come without warning labels or guarantees
(black box from a bastion of caveat emptor). All I ask is the insider’s
peek.

___________________

The leaves have a theme song. It’s inspired by all those lullabies
with falling babies and broken branches. I’ll sing you a snatch before
the future explodes our foregone conclusion:

The heart is a minefield awaiting its moment. It bruises when served
open-faced. Parentheticals wipe their feet on every act of faith. Above
the sink, a cylinder of light winks like it’s in on the deal.

___________________

I got a call last month from a woman who uncorked a bottle of noxious
recollections. She asked if I could put them back.

I tried to tell her there’s always a stain that can’t be scrubbed, but my
tongue became a fountain spouting wishful thoughts. After that,
I planted my spleen beneath the bed to see if anything would grow.

Now, my duct work chokes with vines. Against the concrete tree,
woodpeckers beating their heads. Rakes are no match for the mess
that's spread between us.

___________________

I have a dangling proposition: part apostle in the garden, part storm
in your escape route. A dim bulb’s hope for harvesting sunrise from
shrapnel and sawdust –

Let’s say we blow up the second act and spatter gold paint on what’s
left. Send hope to the front lines to mop up the spills while we sleep.

Jason Whitmarsh poem, from the archives

Jason Whitmarsh


EACH SWITCHBACK THE LESS SECURE


You claimed a weathered antique in your chest
of possessions and gave me reason to believe

I one day would sail in it,
or at least set rudder by its burnished reflection.

You felt a bit of the bends in the up and coming
and wished my lead belt were more lead, less belt.

Dappled in the underneath, we once (arrayed
in wetsuits) sank too slow—a haberdashery cut

at the first sign of trouble, the profits invested
in the wherewithals, smitten and sartorial.

You claimed a bit of what I carried.
You made your case through the mail.


[originally published in Verse, 16.3/17.1]

NEW! Poem by Michaël Vandebril

Michaël Vandebril

AMOUR FOU

ook
dit
gaat
voor
bij
en
ook
dat
zal
voor
bij

*

this
too
is
short
lived
and
that
too
shall
be
short


Translated by Brian Doyle

Pierre Joris, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Pierre Joris

from meditations on the 40 stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj

29. Regrets for things lost (iftiqad)

but regret will not bring it back.
Nothing left to do but turn your

back on it. Tell yourself when you
know where something is

then it is not lost, even though
that something lie at the

bottom of the ocean. Nothing
ever is lost, & that may be

the only thing that is
real cause for regret.

Susan Stewart, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Susan Stewart

A LITTLE ROOM

If you want to kiss in an elevator
you have to know when to start.
You can’t begin to bend any later
than the third floor. Your heart
is pounding (and buttons are lighting,
which means someone’s waiting,
though not for you). There’ll be springing,
whistling, and sudden abating,
two, then one, then two. Intent, intended,
push > < and pull me into your arms,
close and closer, suspended
(the lock switched off alarm),
above is looming, below’s the abyss,
and meanwhile the 3 is the charm.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

from DRAFT 87: TRACE ELEMENTS

All serifs are seraphim: such is faith in the letter.
Such is the force of the word.
The faith is touching.
In every alphabet
in every technology of memory—
knots, rocks, dots, rhymes,
codes, rites,
monuments and books—
in that shockingly endless tower built
of the balances and loops of wire
ceramic shards set in cement, and mirrors, too,
extendable yet poised in mutual
enjambment—
oh.
There is no verb in this sentence.

The verb is diffuse
it is the feeling of Being
and Reflecting
inside the substance of language
and of time,
making the poem “embodied, embedded,
and extended mind.”

Lidija Dimkovska, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Lidija Dimkovska

MEMORY

My memory is a soldier’s tin of bully beef
with no best-before date. I return to places
I have trodden with only one tongue in my mouth
and beat egg yolks for the natives to give them a good voice.
In a snow of the whites Jesus lies crucified as if in jest.
It takes two tongues for a French kiss,
now that I have several I’m no longer a woman but a dragon.
Like St George, I never learned
to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, my nose being blocked for years
I myself only breathe through others’ nostrils, the EU’s paying.
Aha! There’s something fishy about you, something’s fishy here,
the little fallen angels
collecting old paper and plastic cry after me,
I love them best when they take their cots
out into the corridor to air the DNA
then A. and I sprawl out on them, a side each,
and in a carefully worked-out act of love
all our porcelain teeth chip off,
our gums turn into wide-open eyes, before which
our tongues in the darkness trip each other up,
growling, whimpering and moaning, and we
feel neither fear nor sorrow.
My memory is the black box from a crashed war-plane
with no best-before date. I return to places I trod
with only one blood under my skin,
I cross off fertile days for the natives on the calendars
with their name days and family feasts,
tame animals crave for the wild, the wild for the tame.
Like a Jewish couple during fasts and monthly periods,
so God and I have been sleeping in separate beds for years.


Translated from Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid

Garrett Caples, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)


Garrett Caples

MEMOIR OF THE GRADUATE POETICS PROGRAM

I was A’s third husband within the department. I’d come to study the poems of B with C, but C wasn’t there anymore and I had no intention of fucking D, so I had a lot of time on my hands. Sometimes the other husbands and I would go for walks, but it was cold, and I had little in common with any of them, except E, who was a tennis player, not a poet. (At least E drank!) I started hanging out with F, and we quickly became lovers even though I was already married. But her poetics were going nowhere, so I soon hitched my wagon to G, whose fellowship was the envy of everyone else. But he immediately left me for H, whose father had made it in raisins, and by now I’m like, I gotta get with one of the teachers if I’m ever going to make the big reading! But it was harder than I thought; I introduced me to J but we didn’t get along despite some regard for each other’s work. I began a flirtation with K, but K made considerably less than J—“just like the real world”—so she couldn’t really support me. Finally I settled on L, for, despite the fact no one liked his poems, L had position—meaning he could fuck—and he’d gotten tenure back when you could get it by mail. But M, my advisor, advised me against it, and instead hooked me up with N, who refused to return my calls after the first fuck, so I turned to O for solace, because, let’s face it, he’d fuck almost anyone, but he was already in bed with P by the time I got to his apartment. In despair, I called Q in Thailand and he convinced me to join him—“there’s plenty to fuck,” he said, “and you only write poems when you want to”—but I was waylaid en route to the airport by R, who offered me a teaching assistantship in exchange for sex, so we fucked until the add/drop period ended. That evening I fled in my nightshirt, only to get caught in S’s headlights. We’d read together once a long time ago, so she drove me to her house and gave me some clothes, but wouldn’t let me stay the night. I called T to come pick me up and, though he said he usually didn’t get down like this, since I was in a skirt he’d fuck me for one night and pretend to not know. The next morning, I was late for coffee with U, who I found at the café busily preparing a list of everyone he’d fucked in the program. I scanned its columns for ideas. Finally I settled on V because he was seated at the next table, but all V wanted was a handjob in the car while he drove to class, after which I was on my own again. W’s seminar was about to begin, but W wasn’t a poet, so fucking him was out of the question. X’s workshop was about to let out, but chances of hooking up were slim. Finally I saw Y heading across campus, but when I caught up to her, all she would offer was a golden shower under the footbridge. I couldn’t turn it down. By now my appearance was beginning to attract attention, and I’d already run through the most plausible faculty, so imagine my surprise when I bumped into Z of all people, who was desperate for a piss. Since there were no bathrooms on campus and I was already wet, I invited him under the footbridge, where he hosed me down like a burning building. “Nice work,” Z said, zipping up. “I expect I’ll see you at the big reading.” “What does this have to do with poetry?” I asked, but Z was either hard of hearing or had learned not to notice such questions in advance. “You’re going to be late,” he said.

Landis Everson, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Landis Everson

PRIVATIZATION

(A Poem For Laura Bush)


Privatization is me talking to you
about nobody listening in, about riding
at one end of a long car and you at the other,
about tinted windows and messages off a security phone.
I wear a pink-dyed sable, made up as a 60s lady
and a bug-proof hat that you look a long time at.

This is an act of being secret at the expense
of others, also closed from each other as
we won’t admit everything. Oh darling,
perhaps our contract is too secluded
and we should be released into cornfields. I try

to imagine Buck Rogers in a bunny suit.
But you sit tall and handsome ready to blast off.
As you streak toward the future, I drift into the past.
Oh Buck Rodgers you are reading poetry
by someone from the future I can’t compete with,
me studying Herodotus trying to avoid slip ups.

What goes on under our clothes
keeps the world away, that’s for sure, but
your private thoughts, my private wishes
are running askew lost on a crooked city avenue.
Privatization
may make us rich, like history, but secrecy
folds us up into maps hiding the direction children play in.

Bankruptcy could flatten the tires on our limousine.
Is it time to be apart like radiator ornaments
whose engines have vanished beneath their hearts?
Lift me off this hanger, I’m yesterday’s coat.
They say hangups talk. But I’m telling you they don’t.

Jennifer Moxley, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Jennifer Moxley

LOVING THINGS

We should get over it. If, that is, we are to unlock the mysteries of love. This must be done in the right order, by slow, steep, hierarchical steps. Or so Socrates claims the wise (and probably apocryphal) priestess Diotima told him.

To get over the love of beautiful things (and by extension, people) would be to free oneself of death and decay, of beauty’s transience and our covetous nature. We would fear no footprint. But in order to reach this state of tranquility we must discover the beauty that is “unmixed, not adulterated with human flesh and colors and much other mortal rubbish.” Such a beauty, as must be evident by now, could only be seen with the mind. It cannot be sensuous, it cannot engage touch, taste, smell, sound, or sight. It cannot, therefore, exist in the “things we live among.”

Yet, it is undeniable, much mortal rubbish and adulterated flesh strike us as very beautiful. If they are not actually beautiful, then why do they strike us so? Because they participate in what is so. It is as if there is a zone of rarefied air—Beauty itself—which they pass through, and while in its eternal particles are made to seem, temporarily, to be Beauty itself.

Strange how this air works differently on different matter. On flesh and bone it seems to rest but for a few brief years, before recoiling in horror. On “organized” things, as Emerson calls them—the beautiful results of man infusing form with imagination—this rarefied air seems to linger much longer, sometimes for many millennia. But it is still an illusion, for Beauty exists outside of these things and does not, and never will, belong to them.

He who sees this clearly, and learns to be indifferent to the mineral fact, “touches reality” (not its pale semblance). And it will be granted him “to be the friend of God, and immortal if any man ever is.” Here we have the origin of Western mysticism’s “wormhole” to God. No tedious rituals, trinkets, or icons, just a straight mental shot right to the source.

Bernadette Mayer, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Bernadette Mayer

CINEMA ALLEY

the sun is on the born-again paper
my name is still Bernadette Mayer
just as Spanish people have Irish names
as in “enter: Grace Murphy of Cordoba”

you’d shoot the beginning of the movie
in a bowling alley, setting the scene
middle supermarket, the development of love
the end a bakery window, pastries & reflections

critics would say “this movie’s a sonnet”
but unbeknownst to them a sestina’s structure
would lie beneath & airplanes fly by
whenever one of the end-words is said

     a secret cult classic
     the envy of every cinema buff

Ron Padgett, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Ron Padgett

HOW TO

When people ask me
if I write with a computer
or by hand I pause,
for it’s a question
I do not find interesting
anymore. Forty years ago
I saw how Ted’s old typewriter
fit his bricklike writing one
word-brick at a time, and how
my lightweight portable with French
keyboard let me whiz along
as if halfway in another language.
Now I write with words
that never were mine nor will
they ever be. A demon inside
says I do not write at all.

NEW! Poem by Michaël Vandebril

Michaël Vandebril

STARI BEOGRAD

one-stringed city that perpetually
severs my wrists

nothing to grieve about

I gorge on gluey blood

an army of young gents marches to a dogged beat
dancing across the water--fresh water dreams

like pigs drawn from the river

I look at your young breasts
while you give your mouth to another man

--like a drunken bird
its wings slithering along the bars--

you sing an ancient anthem of the city
and beograd sings softly with you

o white thighs of the balkans
on which I lay my greedy hands


Translated by Brian Doyle

NEW! Review of Baude, Ramos, Ross

The Flying House by Dawn-Michelle Baude. Parlor Press (Free Verse Editions), $14.

Please Do Not Feed the Ghost by Peter Ramos. BlazeVOX Books, $16.

Strata by Joe Ross. Dusie Books, $15.

Reviewed by Andy Frazee

In her endnotes, Dawn-Michelle Baude calls the poems of The Flying House “site-specific writing,” the core of which is “the idea that presence—of the writer, of the word, and of the subject—is intrinsic to the work of art.” She goes on to note how “the act of writing became for me an historical ‘site’ . . . Actual details, conditions and circumstances litter the poems with a story of their making.” With the exception of the staggering, fragmented prose poetry of “Postcards from Ir)Rational Lands,” the poems here are themselves “littered” (probably the better word is “positioned”) down the page; like archeological digs, these excavations work to reveal the intertwined strata of self, place, and language:

                            I was late, delayed

               by a ground fog
           a mistral, a heron
                   I found a piece
                         it was missing
             clung to the rock
the displaced plain
                     I found a number of mirrors

In the nine poems—mostly sequences—of the book, one, the “Fieldwork” series, reappears periodically throughout and serves as both structural principle and investigative model, developing the archeological-historical trope of “site-specific” in full. One is reminded of Emerson’s notion of language as “fossil poetry”—and here Baude’s use of the page, full of a syntactic tension derived from the Projectivist techniques of Olson and Duncan (Baude, in fact, studied with the latter), gives the “ruins . . . we’ve inherited” new life, as in “Fieldwork III”:

             excavated lines
         some spare misfortune at the extremity
                 of provenance          accumulations,

     signs of the imminent
             ruins      what we’ve inherited—

         meandering depictions          odd metaphors,
on the flickering screens
            of the unconscious self
                     thin and liminal

Implied in Baude’s notion of the site-specific, and in her loyalty to the historical and contextual, is a notion of witness. “The Beirut Poems” sequence in particular works to image the violence Baude saw during her time in Lebanon, deftly—through consideration of the teaching she did there—weaving in a discourse of poetry in tension with the destruction going on around her. In section V—a section beginning, “Because the wheelbarrow is red”—the poet juxtaposes the work of William Carlos Williams to the proximate turbulence, and meditates on what use poetry may have in such a world:

                 the rain glazes
       the object that’s attractive
but a friend is in excruciating pain
                   where the good doctor
         applies image to a wound
                     no medicine can ever
     heal.

While this witness isn’t completely divergent from “the poetry of witness” outlined in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting anthology and elsewhere, Baude’s witness implies an attention to the local that is always necessarily political, and is not limited to the singular, catastrophic event. In these poems, the process of the present becoming the past is itself an unending catastrophe of loss. One of the motifs of the book is that of the explosion, one both literal and metaphorical, and the history we are given is the post-detonation “history of gaps, disparity, lacunae” one must both attempt to understand and live within. While the notion of “post-detonation” may lead one to thoughts of “post-9/11,” it is important to recognize that here 9/11 is a recurrence, one catastrophe within many, if not infinitely many. Baude’s witness, thereby, is a kind of attention to the real, the present, the ongoingness of history—it is a mode of being in the world, of being responsible for what one sees and where one is, rather than a response to any particular event.

In this sense, Baude’s archeological-poetic investigation is necessarily also an investigation into the self, as we find it in the world and in language. On the page the “I” is itself figured as a kind of relic—or, more precisely, as a relic among relics; it is “a memory / (family) / (origin) / the artifact” lodged within “the context / of ages / the reliquary.” Ultimately, the book suggests, it is presence, this particular site-specificity in the world and on the page, that allows for the “I” to “orient the resonant fields of association,” thereby “constituting an artifact, its own, a document // in perpetual process and acts of formation.” Recognizing its own constitution as an artifact (though, importantly, as an artifact-in-process), the poem implies, allows the “I” a kind of awe, if not wisdom:

         to let the circle predominate

                 the fluent          the continuous

               no matter how deep

how very          high          overhead

With her concern with history, place, and formal experimentation, Baude positions herself firmly in the Pound-Williams-Olson tradition, and The Flying House extends that lineage nobly, giving us a vision not only of the world and of language, but also of our places in them—a vision not only historical but, as Baude suggests, urgent. “I detected letters in the profusion / a world of shadows // omissions,” the poet writes in “Fieldwork I.” “[H]ow else to know where we’re going // I pluck, gather, salvage what I can.”

*

In Please Do Not Feed the Ghost, Peter Ramos also performs a kind of historical investigation, though while Baude’s work feeds off that of Olson and Duncan, Ramos’s project is more in line with the Robert Lowell of Life Studies. Whatever lukewarm autobiographical verse Lowell’s work may have inadvertently unleashed on American poetry, Ramos takes up what continues to make Life Studies important: a recognition that selfhood is never self-contained, but is a performance that operates within, is even constructed by, the demands of family, desire, and national life—demands which in the work of both poets may take place years before their births.

Ramos’s subject in the most general sense is nostalgia, and the threat of the desire to indulge in it. Specifically, the book deals with the risk of not seeing the past as it needs to be seen, or in replacing the past with a myth that only serves to reinforce one’s illusions—personal or national—in the present. And in this sense the work is as much an exploration of the implications of the autobiographical or confessional mode as it is an example of it. Thus the book opens with the (aptly) quasi-autobiographical, quasi-dramatic delivery of “John Berryman in my Dreams,” where the speaker functions both as Berryman and as the poet dreaming of being Berryman:

Blacking out in some basement café, crowded
And alone in the sad mid century, I come back & go on
Hunting powder-puff angels, the pan-caked faces

Under bangs cut straight, the puckered mouths wet
With lipstick. Then do I move through night, glass
After each empty glass—am I all right?

In this mode of the late-night urban underbelly, the cover of the book, a video still, shows an update of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks—this time of two solitary figures inside a fluorescent-lit Laundromat. The window, as in the painting, puts us at a distance, in the role of voyeurs, with the figures inside like zoo animals. Ramos’s poems are filled with such ghosts of “the sad mid-century,” specters that waver between the worlds of objective presentation and the subjective “return of the repressed.” The former consideration takes into account the poet’s responsibility to the people he renders; “How will you speak for them?” the speaker of “The Put-Together Wedding Cake” asks, speaking, presumably, of his own newlywed parents:

The groom is learning the language, dull-eyed
for remembering what they said: “America the gold
and golden fleece!” The bride thinks of daffodils
which turn to kitchen gloves.

The latter consideration takes into account how those independent agents become figures in one’s own psychology, and of how one uses others in the construction of personality, if not neuroses. Not feeding the ghosts involves not transgressing the boundaries that define ghosts’ uncanny nature, lest they bring you back with them: “October, color gone from the wheat / and you straggle back,” begins the title poem,

your mouth
full of loam, jacket lined with rot, crazy
as the leaves.

Each time I try to sleep you off, hoping winter
will stamp its feet, sober you up.
But the hallways soften. You
stuff me full of mothballs.

But, as the poems indicate again and again, it is just this feeding of ghosts, this return to the sites of origination and loss, where historical and psychological understanding resides, despite the risks.

The poems here, while operating from an autobiographical center, consistently seek to enlarge the context of that core, often taking a genealogical tack in dramatizing the characters of Ramos’s family, as in “The Put-Together Wedding Cake” above. The poet further broadens the landscape in approaching various notions of “America,” as in the tarnished vision of consumerism in “Mid-Century Modern”:

They rust now in the innards,
in the plumbing’s guts. Under linoleum,
secret in dry-wall, torn paper, they
bloom beneath layers of paint.
They are jewels in pitch glue,
asleep in the bracebeams.

These concerns—the autobiographical-genealogical and the historical—come together in the long sequence “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock,” which takes cues from both Lowell and Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, giving us a familial mini-epic of pre- and post-war Americana. In this poem, as throughout the book, the threat of a utopian nostalgia is undercut by the self-destructive grotesquery of the American underbelly—we find late-night cocktail lounges, alcoholics, and “dye-job” blondes, which in other hands may have devolved into nth-generation rehashes of Bukowski. Ramos endows these images, however, with precise description and an undeniable authority of voice—and with turns toward the disquieting and peculiar too concretely imagined to be merely surreal: “We like things clean: the boat flag / snapping in the breeze, // the platinum bee hive / sipping gin from a bird bath.”

As a worthy heir to Lowell’s undiluted project, Ramos’s quirky and often unsettling poems, far from repeating the formula of languid confessionalism, focus our attention on the particulars of the past, and how those particulars form their own kind of personal and shared mythology—one tantalizing, worthy of critique, and, in its capacity to overwhelm the self, frightening. But, the book suggests, we have no choice but to confront it, and to be responsible in understanding our role within it: “The green glass / dust between and all around us / is also too brilliant”—and, Ramos writes, “too excruciating to overlook.”

*

In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams claims that the “difficulty” of poetry “is to catch the evasive life of the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield a moment of insight.” In Joe Ross’s Strata the difficulty the poet sets for himself is less in catching the evasive thing, than in catching evasiveness itself—and the insight is in discovering that the insightful moment is always already lost. The fifty-two short poems here are, in the best sense of the phrase, hard to grasp; they pointedly enact the slipperiness, the fleetingness—not only of the moment, of the real, but of the speech that attempts to convey that moment’s actuality, “[w]hen the / knot finally slips and the world comes back,

When tomorrow correctly takes its place as today.
We began to talk but quickly chased the words away.
We put in a symbol, let it be A. It
immediately left for Not A. How to address this.

Though their true forebear (if we are to choose only one) is more probably Robert Creeley, Strata’s poems, following Stevens, “resist the intelligence almost successfully” in their attempts to capture that gap in time between the thing, its perception, and one’s speaking of it. The moment (“let it be A”) is always infinitely displaced by the discourses of the just after (“Not A”), and the just after displaced into further Not A’s. In those lost moments, the uncanny gaps between the prior to, pregnant with what is the “now,” and the now itself, already displaced, Ross situates the poem as what transcribes A’s leaving for Not A—not the thing itself, not A, but the trace of its passage.

As what populates this gap, what signifies the absent, lost moment, the poem is also what transcends or trans-verses the in-between of otherness. It is, from the point of view of the reader, that there (the recording of someone else’s saying) that is always here (present and immediate in its physical manifestation on the page). “This place, place one puts,” the poet writes in “Here,” “is now, is ever.” In this sense, in Ross’s poems, as in Baude’s, “the act of writing [becomes] an historical ‘site.’” While both poets in this way transcribe the loss of the present-tense of writing into the past-tense of the written, it is Ross who dramatizes it most fully. On each level of the book, from the sequence of the discrete, titled lyrics, to the syntax of each poem’s phrases, Ross emphasizes this displacement of moments and the loss that displacement creates:

This perfect, an act.
Resplendent palm slight of –
Gone from view, those few
we seldom thought of for fear
or its lack. A sudden not speaking
where only yesterday teased into or away
from permanence.

Ross further dramatizes this movement in the ambiguity of how we see the book as a whole. Is it as a collection of discrete lyrics, as the individual titles suggest? Or are we to see it as a poetic sequence or series? The book’s epigraph—“52 is some kind of magic number, isn’t it?”—suggests the latter, positing that these poems are to be seen in the movement of the weeks of the year, each week, and each poem, displacing the one previous, with the previous still present (printed on the page) in a palimpsest of memory and history. The ambiguity seems intentional in that we are persistently made aware of the gaps between the poems, and of our attempts to draw a continuity among them. Coupled with the content of the poems, we are drawn to what is not said, to what happens in between the poems, even as the poems are pointing outside of themselves, to the prior to, to the margin. Each section is both its own center (emphasized by the titles) and, at the same time, peripheral to all the others, and this schema extrapolates into the political: “The shallows / collapse. What was built upon mere sticks or the backs / of the lesser. The coal of civilization about to be / forgotten.” And: “To take up / arms or to reach out.”

While undeniably engaged with philosophical and theoretical discourses, these poems are—equally undeniably—poems of a lyrical moment, suggesting, intriguingly, that the instance of critical inquiry is as worthy of the heightened language of lyrical artifice as any other. In tension with the relative tonal flatness and syntactic gaps reminiscent of Language poetics we also find in the book, the poems often enact their investigations through a palpable music and an elegiac mood:

The words won’t
come, or do and not connected to
memories severed link of an attachment
to all that was, all that was once
the person on the end of bed.

These, and other pleasures generally considered “traditional”—an attention to the natural world, a hint at the loss of love, to name two—make Strata’s complex epistemological considerations an engaging, if not exhilarating, read. “Looking out / into the next break, we pause. / Frozen into stare, the eye cannot help / see itself,” Ross writes in the last poem of the book—one titled, aptly, “Beauty.”

contents of new issue of Verse

Anselm Berrigan (excerpts from two long poems)

Garrett Caples (poems plus part of Philip Lamantia's Tau)

Lidija Dimkovska (novel excerpt plus poems)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (long poem)

Landis Everson (23 of his last poems)

Kathleen Fraser (nonfiction, poetry, letter, translations)

Pierre Joris (interview, poems, translations)

Gerard Mace (photographs, essay)

Nathaniel Mackey (poems)

Bernadette Mayer (poems)

Jennifer Moxley (essays)

Michael Palmer (essay)

Ron Padgett (poems)

Susan Stewart (poems)

Catherine Wagner (excerpt from verse drama)


456 pages / 15 contributors

$15 (postage paid)

Verse
English Department
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173