Archive for November, 2006

Forth a Raven

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

by Christina Davis
Alice James Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

4

Life as Inverted Journeywork

davis raven coverIt could be said after reading Christina Davis’s Forth a Raven that the poet has found her medium but not her form.

Now that that sentence has scared away any high-schoolers who wound up here accidentally while Googling sources for a Poe paper, I’ll note there’s a lot to like in this book, but that the raven she has sent forth will inhabit America’s favorite literary medium in a kind of a  bird-smacking-into-glass way rather than a sneak-in-through-the-window-and-prod-your-mania way.

Which isn’t really a criticism, because the window could just as easily have been open, and either way, the arrival of a noteworthy writer has been announced.

Forth a Raven is worth the read for a number of reasons, primarily the fact that the poems offer mystery, intelligence and wit that can’t be faked: “You learn to walk, which is done by walking. / You learn the past tense of have, which is hunger.” Davis’s lean lyrics also comprise a very lean book; at 49 pages (43 pages, once you remove the section dividers), she provides readers with a quick dip into contemplation and oft-earned romance.

So what’s the problem? The forms her poems inhabit are consistently out of sync with the content. Primarily built on trim couplets, tercets, and quatrains, her poems lean towards being clever thoughts rendered lyrically—the kind of things suitable for little conversational prose poems, not for the icy detachment you’ll feel she’s striving towards. The poems become estranged; the line breaks, in many cases, lend needless gravity to small metaphorical anecdotes:

Whereas I know a man
who saves the anonymous faces
sold with the frames

and props them against the wall (and, in his wallet,
folds them with his family) till the day

when each is recognized.    

In “Nostalgia for the Infinite,” Davis poses the question “Does anyone ever ask to return as himself again?” The answer is yes, because Louise Glück answers the question gorgeously in “Landscape,” the centerpiece in Averno. Glück is worth mentioning here because I think Davis takes a lot of her formal cues from Glück—namely Glück’s sledgehammer enjambments, and the ironclad detachment of her precise, barely-there lyrics. Only one other poet has pulled off that kind of detachment, and her name is Plath.

Davis is more conversationally inquisitive, more willing to be your friend. These kinds of enjambments and stanza breaks poeticize this good-natured curiosity. This is not always the case; take this nicely executed quatrain that opens “Last Words”:

My grandmother said precious little but merely breathed in and in
as if the back of her were open and we were no longer in
the presence of the front. Is it over?
someone asked, of the inverted journeywork.

Yet the more Glückian the italics and sparser the lines, the less compelling and more dramatic the notion of the poem. Here is “Dramatis Personae” in its entirety:

What is it you do, again?

What do you call a character
who is only put here
to foster an impenetrable plot?

A foil?

A human.

I guess the point is we’re all of us foils, but the microphone volume needs to come a down a couple of notches. A number of fun, occasional, “ooh that would make a good poem” poems are chased into similar patterns. She’s best when the “point” of the poem is buried in image, oddity, and playful artifice—the title poem is a good example, as is “Two Varieties of Passion Plays,” which concludes:

So what, if it took a year to make
a bass of that boy in the field,
so what, if the mothers must agree
to raise their girls as voices?

Ultimately, I think Forth a Raven introduces us to a head with a million important ideas. But the work itself would be stronger, and the voice would appear more genuine, if the poems exercised a bit less rigidity.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


A Useless Window

Monday, November 27th, 2006

by Carrie Olivia Adams
Black Ocean 2006
Reviewed by John Deming 

6_5stars_6 

 Beyond the White Sky

adams coverThe process of moving from one home to another is always awful, but it carries at least one benefit: you’re too busy to get weighed down by sentiment and nostalgia. The forward thinking involved in packing, labeling, organizing, and paying don’t allow for it. It’s there to some extent, outlining the walls, the floors, the objects that remain in an emptying room, pressing you with the inevitability of moving forward—nevertheless, you keep cataloging, organizing, junking.

So the business-like novelty of “Notes toward its beginning”—the “outline” poem that opens Carrie Olivia Adams’s chapbook A Useless Window—is forgivable. She has divided her move into five categories: “What will remain,” “To move,” “Things unlikely to fit through the door,” “To pack,” and “Forgotten Things.” Each category has numerous sub-categories except for the last one: by simply labeling the “forgotten things,” she’s able to precisely account for the sad fact of the many things that disappear from year to year. Sentiment is controlled, and thus, excised.

That brand of precision is characteristic of Adams’s work in this little book. Her spare lyrics emphasize the role of the individual surrounded with the ineffable qualities of silence and empty space: “If there is a footnote to absence,” she writes, “it is the beating heart.” A person is never absent from him- or herself seems the implication.

Adams is most distinctive when she assumes the perspective of silence itself. The words comprising her little fragments are surrounded by white space in the same way a person is surrounded by silence stretching as far as the nearest noise. Silence, interminable, implies the order of things as they stand:

…so that they would stay fixed
and knowable in their boxes and frames;

And us too, measurable,
the finite is not romantic, but required

of us.

Though an early attempt to define the term “surrealism” is superfluous, Adams also seems a natural born surrealist:

But the building bends under sleep.
The bed moves an inch closer to the window before morning.
Her body stretched between walnut doors and oak beams travels.

Sleep, it seems, is not necessarily rest: “She goes for a walk in the rain / …because dreams had become her sleep.” Like the outline that opens the book, Adams is able to control over-emotive romance by inhabiting a dreamlike world. She’d do best to stay there; once or twice she’s less effective because she slips into narrative-ish drib. These lines, for example, follow a conversation between two lovers:

And though that shouldn’t have satisfied him,
it did. Knowing her,
he knew there was no other answer.

Far more interesting is her childlike astonishment with the fact that she’s a living body that can move, do things, and be surrounded by things:

Yet, the room was small
in its emptiness. And I, in the middle,
reached out toward the walls.

In one poem, the narrator asks an unnamed “you” to look at her when her words “find” him: “If you could tell me / that they have arrived.” They have, and I think anyone who inhabits Adams’s Useless Window world will be interested in reading a full-length book. She’s honed her voice here, and a shift to something both brand new (not a full length that recycles this work) and longer will undoubtedly reveal a room worth inhabiting.

Tags: , ,
Posted in reviews


Grace

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

by John Hodgen
University of Pittsburgh Press 2006
Reviewed by Jason Bredle

4

Safe

hodgen cover

John Hodgen’s Grace is a fine selection for the AWP Award Series—a collection of well-crafted meditations on life for the conservative democratic demographic from the perspective of a Massachusetts adjunct professor of English. In short, poems from an All-American poet, your next door neighbor, a guy content to sit back and describe the world as happens somewhere out there, occasionally missing his father and longing for youth, a guy who dislikes war and racism. Could you really expect that much? But I *like* racism, you may be thinking. Then this book isn’t for you.

But this book is for you if you long for a childhood passed, sometimes miss your father, or ever feel alone in this mixed up world of ours. In fact, Hodgen strikes me as the type of guy with whom I could sit down and chit chat about life and walk away feeling pretty okay, which makes the poems in Grace all the more frustrating. I want to like them, I want to walk away feeling pretty okay, but ultimately, I walk away feeling completely gray, wishing more stimulating things would happen to the guy so that he could write more stimulating poems. 

But he doesn’t, so we have to work with what he’s given us: grace. What constitutes the idea of grace according to Hodgen? The dedication to Grace Taylor aside, the book’s opener, “Clay County,” presents it as lonely, like a “slender roan horse” in a “buckwheat field,” or a single black girl talking to a young man on a motorcycle in her driveway. In “This Moon, These Fifty Years,” grace is also a lonely soul, this time in the form of the speaker’s father, who arrives home from work each night to the delight of his sons only to sit in his car for a few moments before walking into the house. Hodgen’s grace also serves as prayer, coming to us “wordless, like stones.” In fact, one commendable aspect of the book is its ability to address the spiritual without delving into the religious: “I have seen this today,” writes Hodgen in “On a Wing,” “my makeshift prayer: a man in a torn serape/ who pumped my gas and looked like my long-lost brother.” Here and elsewhere, common, every day images and situations take on an aura of graceful spirituality without leaving the realm of observation and meditation.

And the poems are delivered ever so gracefully, each moment captured and extrapolated with only the utmost care, from the effortless falling in “For the Leapers” to the “schoolchildren alighting from their yellow ships” in the unfortunately titled “The Oldest Lie,” a contemplation of the violence and senselessness of the slave trade and perhaps the most powerful and vivid poem in the book due to its realism, darkness, and ultimate beauty.

Yet too often Hodgen over-saturates his work with “the poetic,” especially with regard to  metaphors. In “For Freedy, and for the Ohio Dragging Itself Dead,” for instance, death is likened to “a riderless horse, the last clown in the car,/ the 8 a.m. barber reading his paper alone in his silver gray chair,/ Lincoln locked up in the dark each night at the Lincoln Wax Museum” all in one small stanza. Too often Hodgen panders to his demographic, relying heavily on quirky names to provide the detail of his poems, to get a broad chuckle from his like-minded audience, as in the “Klip N’ Dip” and “Pitchkettle Road” of “Clay County” or the “jalopies” in “Lost Bird.” (I even counted two non-ironic uses of “jumpin’ jehosaphat”).  Occasionally, too, Hodgen takes the easy way out of a poem, going either for the evocation of his dead father, sitting in a “driveway up in heaven” or in the “tall grass in heaven,” or opting for a cute play on words, as with the supermarket cans of Goya in “Today.”

While one cannot question the care that went into these poems, one can’t help but feel unchallenged by the subject matter. Yes, Hispanics were undercounted in the census and that sucks; a Latin American man fell to his death attempting to enter the US from the wheel well of an airplane and that sucks even more; and thousands upon thousands of Africans were forced to drown and that’s just terrible, but so what? How does it affect the speaker? Well, he observes them, creates a broad generalization on the matter, then steps outside to mow the lawn before falling asleep in front of the television, most likely. His images are beautiful enough—but what now? Perhaps the challenge Hodgen had in mind was up to the readers, perhaps the challenge is to take these news clippings and think about their relationship to our daily lives, but if so, the challenge is garbled and lost amongst the metaphors and cute phrases, amongst the tragedy that Hodgen observes in the death of his friend’s daughter, the passing of his own father, the longing for his childhood—events that seem to only vaguely happen to the him as he floats gracefully through each day.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Man and Camel

Monday, November 20th, 2006

by Mark Strand
Knopf 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7

The Axiomatic Stargazer

Man and CamelBeing a Mark Strand fan means an indefinite suspension of disbelief. It means becoming disoriented, then refamiliarizing yourself with your environment so as to romantically abstract it. It undoubtedly means embracing surrealism. He’s got a new one; count me in.

72-year old Strand’s new collection, Man and Camel, offers, in typical Strand fashion, poems obsessed with the infinite. The opener, “The King,” provides a stellar invitation into his world. The poem is centered on a king, his empty kingdom, and the speaker, the king’s lone subject, who continuously summons him. The king is perhaps a stand-in for God in this case and he says, “‘I have lost my desire to rule’” The speaker tries to object but the king “entered his dream / like a mouse vanishing into its hole,” and we too vanish into this dream.

Mostly, the poems remain dreamy and astral throughout the book, though some, such as “I Had Been a Polar Explorer,” are more crepuscular with an ominous tone. “Polar Explorer” is composed of the cold, eerie imagery you might expect: “blank” places, “icebergs,” and “glaciers.” But the most ill-boding of these images is one you wouldn’t expect: “a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat.” The poem addresses the inevitable fading of desire and, though sad, suggests that the act of desiring is what sustains us. Axiomatically, all things must pass.

This passing is another of Strand’s fixations. In “2002” he personifies death. “Death” seems lonesome and states that he is “‘thinking of Strand.’” This depiction reduces mortality to something digestible, makes it friendlier than it is chilling. The speaker projects some of his own feelings on Death by the end of the poem; the last line, spoken by Death, is as follows: “O let it be soon. Let it be soon.” Death too wants companionship, and the speaker wants the wait for death to be over, implying the backwards wont of death implicit in us all.

As the book progresses we see a speaker increasingly baffled by his own longevity. In “2032,” he is still waiting, and so is Death. Death is older, less capable, but tirelessly waiting. What is most interesting about this characterization is that he is “in a limo with a blanket spread across his thighs.” A limo? He also has a long beard and is reminiscent of traditional renderings of God—an interesting connection yielding the idea that Death is very much like—and simultaneously the opposite of—God.

Strand deals with the subject of death in a variety of ways. In “Afterwords” the tone is unnerving: “…a river of cold people with canes and flashlights / were inching their way down through the dark to the sea.” Conversely “Elevator,” which comprises two stanzas, is comical. Here’s the first stanza:

The elevator went to the basement. The doors opened.
A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
‘I’m going down,’ I said. ‘I won’t be going up.’

Here’s the second:

The elevator went to the basement. The doors opened.
A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
‘I’m going down,’ I said. ‘I won’t be going up.’

The obvious antic here is the suggestion that the speaker will be going to hell rather than heaven. Perhaps the repeated stanza emphasizes time passing, the continual movement to the end, and the tendency for that feeling to be drawn out. So, the repetition demonstrates the aging process, the wait, but it seems that the poem on the page might fare just as well without it.

Repetition is one of Strand’s trademarks throughout Man and Camel. Sometimes it is more successful than other times. “Mother and Son” contains a beautiful and touching bit of repetition. A mother is on her deathbed and her son says goodbye: “what he longs to hear—that he is her boy, / always her boy.” Unfortunately the poem “Moon” doesn’t produce the same effect with “the moon, always the moon.” Eh.

It can’t be ignored that Mark Strand has been around for a long time and has penned many lyrics; it also can’t be ignored that he continues to maintain his ability to turn clichés into “ancient” beauties, timeless images. One example is “The Rose,” in which a rose standing among weeds dies. Mostly, I’m sick of the rose, but this rose is different. Some children are upset by the rose’s demise and are taken to a pond to look at their reflections (gasp). But the last three lines of the first stanza are unexpected and stunning:

    ‘Now do you see it,
its petals open, rising to the surface, turning into you?’
‘Oh no,’ they said. ‘We are what we are—nothing else.’

These lines are followed by a final line that comprises its own stanza: “How perfect. How ancient. How past repair.”

The only criticisms that would be fairly made of Man and Camel would be that sometimes Strand falls victim to common phrases (“Conversation” ends with a line that begins “all roads lead…”—I already don’t care) and perhaps to say that he has digressed a bit into his surrealist roots (see the title poem), though I’m not convinced that this is a criticism. He also falls victim to a number of what can only be called “Strandisms,” but what more could you expect from the man who once offered these lines:

He would look at the stars
and their distance confirmed what he felt.
If there was order, he was a part of it;
if there was chaos, it was not his fault.

It seems to me the less reality we have to hold on to as a stabilizer, the more we’re forced to submit to the demands, and often the charms, of the poem.

*

Tags: , ,
Posted in reviews


Rain

Friday, November 17th, 2006

by Jon Woodward
Wave Books 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

7.5 of 10 stars

Don’t Go Away

rainJon Woodward’s second book, Rain, comprises either six poems, sixty-one poems, or one poem. Though, either/or perhaps isn’t the most apt construction. Likely, an attentive reading will reveal that the book comprises not one of those options but all of them. There are six titled poems, each containing a number of poems (one per page) that
function both discretely and within the context of the larger poem/poems. Each line has five words, and each stanza has five lines. (There are a very, very few exceptions: a couple one-line stanzas, a few of those with fewer than five words.) The other major formal element: There is no punctuation in any of the poems, and only proper nouns are capitalized.

The stage set, let’s get to the action. Er, hold on. There’s not that much actually happening in these poems, which are, more or less (no, certainly more), ruminations on the day-to-dayness of daily life, or else enactments thereof. In one poem, he orders a cheeseburger; in another, he sees a movie. In others: buys fruit and finds a broken egg, sees two birds, thinks about masturbating, rides the bus, takes a shower.

But not so fast. There’s an arithmetic working in the book (that is, the poems are adding up to something), and, anyway, the poems are not all merely chewing the mundane. There’s something dark and huge lurking behind the second poem sequence, “Rain, Ocean” (and likely, in a more general sense, behind all of them). The poem is mainly about the speaker and his relationship with his friend Patrick, though, naturally, rain and the ocean also figure in. In the first poem in the sequence, he and Patrick are sitting at a bus stop, one presumes waiting for a bus. They

were talking about how some

things look like other things
it’s one of the seven
basic conversations then he said
a thing here reproduced what
a brutally fascinating world it

was stirring if a little
extrapolatory he could only have
been able to see a
tiny part of the world
from where we were sitting

From that pithy thesis on poetry/life/being, the poems recount different scenes with Patrick. (He’s absent from some poems in the sequence. Of these, we might just assume that Patrick has something to do with them or, rather, we might assume they have something to do with Patrick.) Anyway. There’s this idea that Patrick is dead or dying
that keeps recurring. One poem begins,

it’s not that he died
it’s that he won’t stop
dying and reemerging fully ordinarily
through ordinary doors saying in
his own voice hey brother

The same poem/door ends, “it won’t help / him untwist from his rope.” The next poem in the sequence begins with “don’t know why he keeps / dying.” Later in the sequence, “two / black dogs are staring at / me and Patrick is dead / again.” The reason Patrick keeps dying is that his death is being enacted and reenacted in these poems. The poem is an attempt to make sense of or at least to deal with his death and is a powerful portrait of a life stuck in grief. Both a Platonic-love poem and an elegy for Patrick, the poem ends on a lyrically tense note: “Sic / Transit Gloria Patrick goes Sic / Transit my Chowder Shitting Ass.”

Rain is fairly short for a collection, which seems to reflect Wave’s interest in publishing books of poems that work fully as books. The remainder of the book features the following poems: “Attempt” is a funny poem about relationships and sexual desire, full
of self-doubt and self-awareness (”in a terrible / accident I hope you’re not / in a coma at the / hospital hope you just blew / me off); “The Long Night of Ezekiel,” referencing, it would seem, Chris Elliot’s character in Scary Movie 4, takes more of a dreamy tack, perhaps appropriate to the poem’s ostensible point of focus (my late grandmother / sat on top of the / dam it would’ve been unsafe / for a person but she’d / come back a sunlight finch); “Leap,” rooted in the humdrum, is a fine little encapsulation of a slightly askew
personality (”I / wonder if all my currently / living grandparents are still alive”); and “Love Poems and Myopia” is a fitting title for the last sequence of poems.

From the quotations included above, it should be clear that the formal constraints add a certain kinetic energy to many of the line breaks, which in a nonformal poem would be, simply or not, self-conscious enjambments. As is often the case with formal constraints, here they’re not really constraints at all, but quite the opposite.

Though it rains throughout the book, the poems never really slip up. Their simple language captures what is beautiful about a life in which not much happens (most lives, by the way)—that is, we’re alive to see, and hear, and touch, and contemplate it, whatever it is. It’s not so much that there are things hidden in these poems that rereading will reveal but that there’s something so spot-on (and interesting and entertaining) about the personality and world the poems evince that rereading the collection illumines what it means to be human. At times, one has the feeling of reading a, say, somewhat inchoate Dream Songs. I’ve read the book through three times, and I see no reason to stop there.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Angle of Yaw

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

by Ben Lerner
Copper Canyon Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

9

“Ignorance that sees itself is elegy.”

lerner_angleofyawAs a culture, Ben Lerner offers, we are not over 9/11 because there is no such thing as being over it. It is, however, inherently American to try and patch things up as swiftly as possible: to find quick fixes, to feel better about things. A culture of half-assed patch-up jobs that suffice because they were swift in offering some form of satisfaction.

Perhaps what we need is a nod that in most cases—and especially with 9/11—there is only living with it: “the memorial will have to be continuous,” Lerner writes, flexing better rhetoric than Bush’s whole staff of manipulative windbags, while using all 115 pages of his astonishing second book to illustrate it’s not that simple—not by a long shot—but that it can be done.

Angle of Yaw, a series of prose poems interrupted by chiseled-to-perfection verse poems, is great for a number of reasons, particularly for the fact that it’s not explicitly a “9/11” book: it’s a book about culture, and finally a book that delineates better than nearly any other book printed this year the impossible struggle of—the American? The artist? The mourner? The human being.

I don’t mean to imply Lerner devalues the notion of 9/11 memorials. He doesn’t at all. What he’s interested in is avoiding the impulse to control events after they occur. 9/11 is flush with contemporary culture. But any culture, we’re reminded, is made up of individuals, and is thus built on the minutiae of daily life: 9/11 is a part of a person as much as mechanically separated chicken, shaving, the phrase “updates are ready to install” popping up on their computer monitor, political rhetoric, and the fact that “Big Bird towers over the human actors.” It is everyone’s struggle to keep up.

Lerner is deft at employing absurdist humor when need be. What, after all, is American culture if not humorous and absurd? His lean prose poems—divided among separate sections, both titled “Angle of Yaw”—recall Simic’s The World Doesn’t End, but with a contemporary flair:

LASER TECHNOLOGY has fulfilled our people’s ancient
dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts in half remains
standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move,
none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in
half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light.

This passage works to poke fun at the fear and paranoia that has gripped American culture. More than humorous, though, passages like this are incredibly insightful. Keep moving, Lerner suggests, however terrifying the notion that it might mean your head falling off.

The question is how to keep moving—and who is going to tell you how. One key to learning how is simple: do your best to avoid reading things presented in a vertical plane: “When the page is shifted to a vertical plane, it becomes an advertisement, decree, and/or image of a missing pet or child. We say that texts displayed vertically are addressed to the public, while in fact, by failing to teach us the humility a common life requires, they convene a narcissistic mass.” One need not cease looking for lost pets; but one should think individually about what kinds of messages are being broadcast for consumption by the masses.

Okay, so we already knew that. But there’s an important next step, and it goes beyond analysis—when you reach any kind of general understanding, it is vital that you do your best not to impose romantic meaning on your results, because that is merely a construction—a shoddy patch-up job to make yourself feel better. This brings me to the book’s best poem, one of the best I’ve read in some time, the seven-page tour-de-force “Didactic Elegy.” If you didn’t realize you still had the capacity to cry over 9/11, the poem reminds you—by avoiding every romantic construction you could imagine associating with the tragedy, while reminding you it was just that—a tragedy. Horror is as real as any scientific formulation, as real as studio managers and football games.

“Didactic Elegy” focuses on the notion of imposing meaning where there isn’t any, and uses a tasteful, simple, borderline absurd metaphor: a piece of abstract art comprising nothing more than “a bold, black line across an otherwise white field.” Anyone could produce such art; though once it’s been designated art, not anyone can see it as something absent of meaning:

It is easy to apply a continuous black mark to the
surface of a primed canvas.
It is difficult to perceive the marks without assigning
them value.
The critic argues that this difficulty itself is the
subject of the drawing.
Perhaps, but to speak here of a subject is to risk
affirming
intention, where there is none.

“Interpretation,” he notes, “is an open struggle.” He presents a world of artistic and critical analysis, so it’s hard not to shudder when he drops this bomb on us:

Events extraneous to the work, however, can unfix
the meaning of its figures,
thereby recharging it negatively. For example,
if airplanes crash into towers and those towers collapse,
there is an ensuing reassignation of value.
Those works of art enduringly susceptible to radical
revaluations are masterpieces.

It is human, and American, to revaluate things until they are masterpieces as a means of controlling them and purging them. Fuck purging, Lerner suggests; we’ve seen the image of the towers coming down a thousand times, “But as it is repeated, the power of an image diminishes,” because the viewer—critic—ascribes various metaphysical and romantic meanings to it. “The image of towers collapsing” is thus separated from the actual collapse of the towers: “Towers collapse didactically. / When a tower collapses in practice, it also collapses in theory.” We’ll be okay, Lerner seems to offer; just don’t diminish the event by trying to excise it:

Should we memorialize the towers or the towers’
collapse?
Can any memorial improve on the elegance of
absence?
Or perhaps, in memoriam, we should destroy something
else.

I think that we should draw a bold, black line across
an otherwise white field
and keep discussion of its meaning to a minimum.
If we can close the event from further interpretation
we can keep the collapse from becoming a masterpiece.

The key is to intend as little as possible in the act of
memorialization.
By intending as little as possible we refuse to assign
value where there is none.
Violence is not yet modern; it fails to acknowledge
the limitations of its medium.

That’s not to suggest a person shouldn’t fight back—only that a person should never pretend they’re fighting back. Iraq, anybody?

For struggling, beautiful, but ignorant creatures like humans, “Refusing to assign meaning to an event is to interpret it lovingly,” Lerner writes, and goes on to acknowledge that with his poem, he has constructed something that—however clinical and formulaic the language—is perhaps and attempt to excise the pain of 9/11. Perhaps the only real elegy, then, is to refuse to assign meaning, to acknowledge some horrors are beyond our ability to catalogue and formulate: “Ignorance that sees itself is elegy.”

Outside of “Didactic Elegy,” the poems in this book are a wonderful and sympathetic look at culture, at the ways it inevitably changes around us and the ways we take part in promoting that change. His wonderful prose poems continue to strike both the humorous (“WHEN WE FOUND EYES in the hospital Dumpster, we decided to build the most awesome snowman ever.”), the political (“AN INFINITE PROGRESSION OF FINAL FRONTIERS designed to distract the public from its chest wound”) and the impossible struggle of the unaware human grasping anything that resembles the divine: “The gavel fell on a percussion cap and now we’re holding candles, singing, My God, My God, show me what you’re working with.”).

Genuine love and sympathy emerge, the same way they do when you watch anyone doing humbly the work of their inconceivable lives. Remember the metaphor of the “blank white field?” It comes into play again as a real field, illustrating the American sports fan. The ultimate fan is in a stadium wearing a foam index finger—“a model of fanaticism”—and watches “the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV.” It could be labeled ignorant to ascribe your weekly happiness to the performance of athletes on a field, but this man—who then “initiates the wave that will consume him”—is present for meaning and significance so implicit that he gets swallowed up in the meaninglessness of it. The man has actualized, in a sense; because he’s now the star, being a sports fan is no longer a struggle for him; he is for a moment everything, and therefore nothing—ignorance that sees itself is elegy, indeed.

Such sympathy also extends to the long verse-poem that concludes the book, “Twenty-one Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan.” The title isn’t as sarcastic as you might think; political parties aside, we’re all of us citizens somewhere, and more than that, people. The poem calls upon apparently random images and ideas from contemporary culture, often regurgitating clichés that suit their own ends. In the end, he triples up the term “Oyez oyez, oyez.”—a classic cry of “order” from a court crier—before offering a piece of famous American rhetoric—“They slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God.”—and finally devaluating rhetoric itself—“Is this thing on?”

The term “angle of yaw”  refers to the angle between a vehicle’s current direction and the direction of its actual direction of travel—a 9/11 metaphor that will give you goose bumps, but inevitably, a note about our direction as a culture. If we allow ourselves still to feel 9/11 in our bones, hate it, and find ourselves willing still to love a multitude of other things, we’ll begin to define ourselves once again instead of allowing the powers that be to define us—a message that should resonate for  any culture for years, outside of the specifics of 9/11. Shantih shantih shantih.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Chromatic

Monday, November 13th, 2006

by H.L. Hix
Etruscan Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

5

Hix likes jogging. And music.

hix chromatic cover

In college I knew a music professor who had no idea who Philip Larkin was, but took it upon himself to criticize Larkin’s jazz criticism. He first condescended poet-reviewers in general: “sometimes they say things about music that Inever could’ve thought of.” Then he condescended Larkin: “But when a reviewer like this tries to criticize music from a technical standpoint, it really burns me up.” Not a critique of Larkin’s critique, but a critique of Larkin’s capacity as a reviewer. Sloppy, unimpressive thinking.

Hoping to avoid similar ad-hominizing, I’ll note that, apart from the chromatic bit, I have no clue what Hix does and doesn’t know about music theory (playing a chromatic scale means playing all twelve existing musical notes sequentially; this Hix knows). Nevertheless, fine romantic though he is, Hix’s attempt to fuse music with verse in Chromatic is underwhelming, done apparently for its own sake and not at all for ours. He’s taken upon himself to pattern his new book’s final section after Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” developing 24 “Prelude and Fugue” pieces that, apart from being in two parts, do little to justify the music metaphor. Once you get the gist, you might stop reading the titles all together—until you look up after a few pages, read the title “Prelude and Fugue No. 13 in F Sharp,” and laugh out loud that the author is taking himself so seriously.

So the closing section’s attempt to engage music leaves a lot to be desired. This catches me in a trap, because contending with desire is the crux of the whole book (if you found my music focus in the first half of this review distracting, good; it’ll give you a sense for how Hix will distract you with it here). Separate are the poems in the section—indeed, in the whole book—which engage the desire to leave or stay with a long-term lover. There’s infatuation with a new lover—one our sad-bastard narrator admits only to having “kissed”—and the pleasure he takes in the alleged sin. There’s also the fear and discomfort with the fact it brings about the demise of a long-standing relationship and, essentially, forces him to reinvent his life.

Sticking to the final series, I’ll say the poems are fast-paced, and in that regard, might remind you of some of the work C.K. Williams has done in recent years. On every page there are moments when if you slow down and unpack a line, you’ll find something deeply moving (“who would we love if not for ghosts”) and moments on every page where you’re turned away by the introverted wannabe-loneliness of it all (“if you were going to kiss her you should not have waited so long / if you were going to kiss her you should have fucked her”). As I said, the series goes on a little long, and is perhaps a little too obsessed with the internal (evidenced by the near-bragging of one jog-on-a-cool-morning metaphor) to be of as much use as it could be; nevertheless, Hix works his way to a fine conclusion:

I regret my past virtues I renounce them all though now it is too late
now I think always and only of my vices
you were one and I want more
I did not speak until you started listening
the others speak all the time but I have been waiting for you
speaking only to speak your name
your name that I say over and over
your name that I carry your name that carries me

Here at last we actually believe the fact that sin was perhaps something inevitable for our narrator all along. While we’re on the subject, let’s focus on where else Hix wins big: the beginning of the book. The first section—a long poem titled “Remarks on Color”—is so good that it’s at least partially responsible for the disappointment that comes later. Introducing us to the book-length predicament, we are offered a readability that never sacrifices intellect:

In bright life we surrender
to ravenous colors;
the oily sheen of beetles’ backs
leaving a deer’s eye sockets,
your aura when you touch 
the circle of darkened fur
outlining its open belly
and turn to look back at me.

Yes he used the word “aura,” and I’ll admit some of the poem’s romantic moments are a bit too flimsy to make it a slam-dunk-contest slam-dunk, but there’s a depth of metaphor and desire in this poem you’ll find in few other books this year. When longtime lovers part for good, the awful thud of “never again” is tough to capture in any medium. Color as his central metaphor, Hix pulls it off:

Hands that once called forth color
now tighten to a fetal fist.
Nor more cello, no more rocks
rounded by rivers, warmed by the sun,
no more tautening to the absolute,
touching one of your nipples
with my outstretched ring finger
and the other with my thumb.

An attempt to link the ending “Fugue” series with this poem’s notion of color is lackluster, as is the middle section—“Eighteen Maniacs”—which I haven’t mentioned thus far. It’s got some okay-but-not-Berryman attempts at summoning Uncle Tom: “Places I ain’t missed much but / seen no white squirrels like you got here.” This section is also a little long, and by and large, seems an experiment he could’ve shelved.

If you like the ravenous romance of Kinnell in The Book of Nightmares or the speed and diction of recent C.K.Williams, you’ll probably get into this book (though your money is probably better spent on Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]*). If you’re easily turned off by relationship-gone-wrong romance (“I was never who either of us thought I was”) stay as far away as possible. Either way, the whole naming poems after notes, chromatic scales, preludes and fugues indulgence has been taken care of now.

*

Tags: , , ,
Posted in reviews


Splay Anthem

Friday, November 10th, 2006

by Nathaniel Mackey
New Directions 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

8_5

Andoumboulosity Recursion

mackey coverTitle sound familiar?  More than vaguely P-Funk?  It should.  What’s new about Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem is that it’s P-Funk for Academe. What I see is an historic opportunity to heal the breach that has festered since 1967, when Le Roi Jones was arrested during the Newark riots on trumped-up weapons charges, and quickly sentenced after one of his poems was read as evidence.  After that, it’s not hard to understand that Jones might ditch his white friends, change his name and go home to the black nationalist ghetto, never to return: how a remedial action might become a long-term breach.

Part of what I think should be remembered about Jones is a book called Black Music, a collection of insistent, urgently vernacular reviews of Free-Jazzers.  His brilliant folk wisdom is marred by a despair that whites can’t understand this music, that white thinking is crabbed, top-down reasoning, while black thinking is body-wise and never the twain shall meet: all this even as Jones is exercising his own prodigious powers of logic and reason to build the wall.  I read such divisions with pain at the loss: even Olson was saying, Hey! Universities! You might be able to USE ‘em.

Nicole Terez, who came up through Cave Canem, a program for African-American writers, led me back to Baraka’s book.  She sees this musical tradition as speaking to America as a whole: no reason to dis Louis Armstrong as a sellout: it’s all good.  It’s not that she is blind to Baraka’s nationalism, but that she won’t throw out the good stuff, of which much remains.  She trusts the reader: and as noted by others, the threads, though braided, stand out as visibly wrong—a nod to the 9/11 poem he’d write suggesting the Jews were all conveniently evacuated, and that the attack was an inside job.  It’s tragic.  Baraka tends to bring down with him a tradition of amazing variety and life, the relevance of African tradition to America as a whole.

Nathaniel Mackey’s intro to Splay Anthem is a masterful naming and reclaiming: a jazz critic and poet healing the breach heralded in Black Music.  Other disciples of Olson address rifts in academia, but not the hyphen in African-American.  This is what Ralph Ellison was talking about for all those years, and getting called Uncle Tom and worse for his pains.  Reread Mackey’s introduction: it’s a pretzel, but keep at it: every one of the artists he mentions takes us right back to the mid-60’s moment when Le Roi was letting us in on some heavy shit, still on the same train with Olson and Creeley, Duncan Bending the Bow, and Ayler, Coltrane and Coleman blowing their hearts out (and minds) to tell us what was going down. And the poems—a weaving of two series that mark another chapter in a project that’s marked his career—are equally smart, rhythmic, and rewarding:

                                                    Death
Lake also there… Where we were rubbed    
    earth in our faces, a feeling we had
        for debris. Nub, no longer standing,
      filled the air, an exact powder, fell
                                                    as
      we ran through it, earth-sway swaddling
                                                    our
   feet

Up till now, the roadblock to reclaiming this tradition was partly a sense that avant-jazzers had left mind for moan, that tweeds couldn’t in good conscience cotton to tribal neoprimitivism: look at the sulfurous rifts widening beneath their feet.  Just as I can’t blame Baraka for taking his ball and going home, I can’t blame the tweeds for not committing suicide.  See how Mackey reclaims the vernacular bite for the brain: “the imperial flailing republic of the Nub the United States has become, the shrunken place the earth has become, planet Nub.  In a match that seems to have been made in hell, hijacked airliners echo and further entrench a hijacked election, cycles of recriminatory assault further confirming a regime of echo the recourse to echo would cure homeopathically if it could.” 

See if you don’t agree that since the midterm elections, that statement is now much more mainstream.  Baraka has been saying that for 40 years, but without the nod to ecology linking American crabbiness with planetary crabbiness.  The vicious circle of isms has been stretched by history into a spiral, a spring.  We are ready to reclaim and leap.  Tweeds can vote for Mackey, welcoming the cool music and deep cultural critique without fear, with a real need for common cause.  This is just the time to hear Mackey’s voice.  The healing he offers is real and relevant: which is why I think Splay Anthem is a contender.  Don’t miss Nathaniel Mackey’s anthology of jazz writing, either.

*

Tags: , ,
Posted in reviews


Official Versions

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

by Mark Pawlak
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

4

Relaxed Fit

pawlak coverThe centerpiece of Mark Pawlak’s Official Versions is a five-part poem called “Hart’s Neck Haibun,” a travelogue in prose and verse about vacationing in Tenant’s Harbor, Maine.  The poem combines found material and personal observations in ways that will appeal to fans of the New York and Black Mountain staples: it takes Ted Berrigan’s playful borrowing from fondly-remembered sources, blends some appropriately local found material with some precise natural observation, and seasons it with more than a dash of Blackburn’s wry wit.  Olson’s text map of the soundings in Gloucester Harbor is transformed into the names and positions of boats anchored in Tenants Harbor. Many passages I could cite show an appealing directness and humor.  Here’s the entry for August 4:

Additions to the catalog of breezes:
wrinkle-free breeze
relaxed fit breeze
permanent press breeze
wash-and-wear breeze
pressed & creased breeze.

Mark Pawlak’s work is as comfortable as broken-in denim.  We relate to the lobstermen firing up their motors at dawn, even if the noise wakes us up.  We can visit Elmer’s Barn, an eccentric antique store down by Cooper’s Mills.  The recipe is surprisingly easy, and the journey is so relaxing that I have to remind myself that Blackburn, Olson, and even Berrigan were more edgy than these fond, almost nostalgic tributes admit; once in a while though, everyone has to go on vacation.

Another sequence in the book exposes the continuing ironies of American foreign and domestic policy.  Pawlak’s “East West Dialogue 2002,” between a Russian and American worker concerning similarities between the perks of former Communist leaders and deposed corporate CEO’s, is dramatized in semi-vaudevillean fashion.  For the most part, he lets the constantly spun language of White House stage managers and newspaper reports reveal itself with a minimum of additional comment.  One of the best political poems in the book is “Capsule History of Herat, Afghanistan.” Each of the poem’s three stanzas describe another governmental takeover, and each ends with a variation on the women of Herat dressed in burkas, watching silently through narrow eye slits. “Historical Afterward” is a passage from T.E. Lawrence deploring the British administration of Iraq, each line of which is crossed out with a thin horizontal line. 

I found myself unable to argue with his tone and sentiments, pretty much throughout the whole book. In fact, I never got beyond vaguely annoyed.  I can’t help but think of this as a fault, knowing that I am rather politically complacent.  Pawlak dedicates poems to Boondocks’ creator Aaron McGruder, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, and visual artist Barbara Kruger. I find each of those artists more challenging in their chosen medium than Mark Pawlak.

*

Tags: , ,
Posted in reviews


Collage as Silkscreen

Monday, November 6th, 2006

by Ronald J. Goba
Quinton Publications 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

[editors note: given the nature of the poet's project, the reviewer has requested that we forego a star rating]

Soaked in Syrup & Autotelicism

goba coverYou won’t see Collage as Silkscreen unless you ask me for a copy.   The author has chosen not to publish his work, but to give the book out to whoever wants a copy. Since he retired from teaching in 1991, Ron Goba has dedicated his life to poetry.  It is a serious discipline for him, and though he occasionally gives rather impressive public readings at The Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, MA, he’s not doing it to impress you, to be cool, or to pad his credentials, as he already made his career teaching.  His motives are to be found elsewhere. 

This makes the reviewer’s task problematic. Even though poetry is only quasi-lucrative, incestuous cycles of friends blurbing each other’s work and judges awarding prizes to current and former students have diverted attention from poetry to product.  If a review proceeds mainly by name-dropping, and comparing “schools” of poetry, wouldn’t that encourage the reader’s prejudice more than her independence?  Even if self-directed readers already know when to use and when to ignore reviews, it still begs the question of the best way to encourage independent reading.

Ron is a process poet with tremendous discipline.  He reminds us of a basic value that most of us tend to forget:  “The work of art is not the artwork.”  Everything else flows from this, including a workable definition of community.  He always credits Friends of Poetry, his local weekly poetry workshop, for helping the revision process.  Ron’s book covers have been happily designed by members of his family. The collage done by Ron’s granddaughter is remarkably appropriate, and the cover is well designed.  Collage as Silkscreen approaches you as-is, complete with a formatting glitch that has inserted pages with orphaned lines.  But this impatience with proofreaders and book reviewers is all a piece.  Collage As Silkscreen enacts the definitions of the word autotelic: concerning the belief that the work of art (or any specified entity or event) is its own justification; and  something done for its own sake rather than to gain a material reward or avoid a punishment.”

Ron has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of literature: Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson, the high modernists, the New York School.  He also loves classical and jazz music, surrealist art and Dada.  Taking the great Jazzmen as models, his phrases are lightning riffs with endlessly surprising variations.  With the frenzy of a bebop solo, he takes phrases we all know, shreds them and pastes them into a dynamic sound collages. 

Though Ron’s work is hyper-literate, we don’t have a sense of a Nabokovian entity setting up a chess game rigged against us. Given the availability of the internet, the references are easy to look up.  The difficulties come in reading long poems word by word, as his constant punning forces us to do.  In his preface, Ron says, “If you decide to read a poem I suggest that you don’t ask first what it means, instead see if you care to go where it invites you, see if there’s any immediate value in being there, see if it makes you want to dig in for your self, play your world games with this word player.”  Ron has no symbolic mythology, ecology or cartography to sell you, only his own puzzling energy.  For Ron, words are energy. And energy is a puzzle that can be solved several different ways.  Proceeding with puns reminds us that language tends to mean something more or different than what we intend. It also reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously. 

I sometimes find Ron’s work more challenging to read than many surrealist or hermetically symbolic texts.  I also find Ron’s work as easy to read as Thomas Rockwell’s classic fourth-grade gross-out, How to Eat Fried Worms. His phrases are philosophical yet palpably wriggling: “thing as palpable paradox: A looseygoosey forged rashness.”  Sometimes you can almost taste them:

My small mind interprets transforms
to transcend.   Enticement smells so goofy
I can taste it.
—————————

Stack of lines
like pancakes
oozing syrup.

Single lines often cut through a lot of intellectual crap: “Perception: / Perceiver perceives perceived.”  “Self excessed / in self is cancer.” Or, in a less serious vein, “Abbey Lincoln declares, “You gotta pay the band.” Or: “I never lost adolescent narcissism.”

His continual, often scatological punning deliberately fails to mask a literary and philosophical seriousness. He scorns those who refuse to make space in their heads for uncertainty, contradiction and humor. The political statement he seems to be making is, “If I don’t create a system, I’ll be enslaved by one.”  Evidence for this abounds. As Ron found on a bathroom wall, “IT IS BETTER TO BE PISSED OFF THAN PISSED ON.”   

Ron is a skeptical optimist in the spirit Nietzsche called for in The Gay Science, questioning received truths while accepting the fact that many beliefs that we continue to hold are based in error. To me Ron’s, “God as is/ is not” is less a rejection of theism than an acknowledgment that statements of belief  are self-generated, and have no justification beyond themselves.  Ron knows that while the search for truth is narcissistic, that does not negate the search for truth. Any statement he makes leads him and the reader back to himself, but leaves the mysteries of Logos intact. 

Ron dislikes talking about his work in this way. We have already traveled far from the words on the page, as well as unnecessarily and incorrectly comparing his work to Nietzsche’s, which runs the risk of substituting my judgment of the text for the reader’s, especially if that reader loathes Nietzsche.  I can assure you that whether the reader or the author loathes Nietzsche, I make the comparison to locate the stakes involved, and suggest why Ron’s work stays with me in my most serious, skeptical and ambitious moods, as well as when I’m most loving and playful.

Ron knows his book is not for everyone, but he’s not worried about that.  He knows that his work will select its own company.  He does not need to surround it with flattering blurbs.  The reward we get when we step off the publishing bandwagon and the critical carousel is a renewed wonder that consciousness exists, and a renewed strength to grasp that consciousness.  Ron knows that playing the literary game makes us no happier if it does not make it easier to love ourselves and those closest to us.  Collage as Silkscreen gives us the rare privilege of following a cantankerous and playful mind being led word by word, and line by line into serious thought.

*

Tags: ,
Posted in reviews


« Older Entries