Archive for January, 2007

Hitler’s Mustache

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

by Peter Davis
Barnwood Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

4

Hitler’s Mustache: The Review

davis hitler coverWe can generally agree that even if Jason Lee (as Earl) brings the mustache back to the mainstream—if the mullet cascades its way back into our hearts, if modifications to jeans command perpetual flux—there’s one look that will take at least a few hundred more years to find its way back: the small, sub-nostril’d bar code stache.

I generally roll with the ethic that the imposition of Adolf Hitler on a work of art is a logical fallacy: the classic signifier that an artist is out of ideas and relying on Hitler’s evil to carry the workload.

But Adolf Hitler the man plays at most a bit-part in Peter Davis’s debut, Hitler’s Mustache. There’s no penetration of World War II or Nazism, just a lot of surface-level, large-scale metaphor on the part of Hitler’s famous fashion statement—the black square of hair itself and nothing more. Yet inevitably the very thought of Hitler ghosts the whole book—perhaps too much so, leading to the ever-lingering question: is he taking the issue too lightly?

I don’t think he is. That question, and the overall craziness of the concept, had an interesting effect on the online poetry world; people were at least a little stupefied by the book as chunks of it surfaced in nearly every online journal in the land. Read through it, though, and you’ll find Davis, in his own way, allows for the pang of murderous evil. However grave the tone of each poem, our narrator sees mustaches everywhere (even the mustache on the cover is represented as a barcode, for your metaphorical pleasure): “She ordered a cup of mustache from the mustache who worked behind the mustache.”

It is without question that Davis has bitten off more than he can chew, though of course the largesse of his topic was part of the point.  More a distraction than an obsession, the mustache stands in for anything unsettling or uncomfortable—and anything obsessed over to the point of mania and absurdity. Here’s one of my favorite passages, from the prose poem “Hitler’s Mustache: A Mustache Confession”:

I feel like a bad mustache a lot of the time. With
no friends, and for good reason, greedy and mean
and not worth the time…Who knows about masks?
Not me. I’m moving at the speed of light and the
occurrence of seeing light gets mustache, etc. I want
to tell something about myself, but, mustache.

Most of the book is at least as confounding as this passage, but that’s the trouble: it maintains one level and becomes repetitive. The word “mustache” is scattered across every poem, so repetitious it becomes vapid as a blank line in a Mad Lib. Apart from “mustache,” Davis peppers the almost pleasant poems with occasionally violent images, perhaps to justify the weight of relying on Hitler for a whole book (“lopping off lots of little fingers”, “pianos made of skin”).

There’s “Hitler’s Mustache: The Ode,” “Hitler’s Mustache: Frank ‘Mustache’ O’Hara,” “Hitler’s Mustache: The Sestina,” “Hitler’s Mustache: The Journey Tribute Band,” “Hitler’s Mustache: Mustache Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Mustachio.” The poet proves himself both clever and versatile. But rather than emerging as a rapt, engaging obsession, this mostly floats on top. Hitler’s mustache, rather than an embodiment of unease, starts to feel like an attempt to anchor a bunch of unrelated poems, like the obsessive need for direction alone.

On his blog, Davis describes Hitler’s mustache thusly: “an emblem of the complete folly of his ideas and an example of the anomaly that is seemingly always in our mist.” I’m okay with this, even though I didn’t need to be reminded of “the complete folly” of Hitler’s ideas. I also don’t mind this, from the book itself: “Hitler’s mustache is the comet that nobody sees because everyone is watching its furry tail.” Okay, let a vague sense of Hitler terror sweat through the walls of the book, fill the holes in your life—it’s an idea at least.

But idea-wise, Davis crosses the line here: “The Mystery of Hitler’s Must Ache.” Surely everyone has a “must ache,” right? In its sweetness, the metaphor suffocates.

Still, the fact he had the stamina to maintain his mustache-talk for 80 pages at least calls to mind Ashbery’s notion of “the perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose.” Hitler’s mustache was in there when this poet was writing this manuscript, and it wasn’t going to go anywhere until the manuscript was done. The mustache is a crutch, but not so much that it prevents all lyric moments from shining, as in these lines from “Hitler’s Mustache: The Basic Situation for the Clandestine Mustache”:

A grueling gargle gurgles up from
the lagoon mustache.
In your memory, the childhood
moment in which you discovered
a number of live frogs trapped
in a drainage thingy behind
a school. You lifted the metal grating
and pulled a few frogs out.

This is an aggressive first book project; any use of Hitler is a gamble, surely Davis knew this all along, and the result is a peculiarly obsessive book. I know this sounds like bullshit reviewer-speak, but now that this is out of the poet’s system, I’m very interested to see what he does next; he’s undoubtedly skilled enough to rely on tone as the anchor for a book rather than everyone’s preconceived notion of terror. The mustache just becomes too deeply symbolic and ultimately, a distraction. Whether he works best with series and obsession or with spontaneity remains to be seen, but some new poems he’s posted on his blog outrun pretty much everything in Hitler’s Mustache. Look at “How Today Becomes a Creepy Spider”—obsessive repetition flavors the poem. Davis presents a unique voice and perspective, and perhaps more importantly, a willingness to pursue some peculiar impulses.

*

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The Pajamaist

Monday, January 29th, 2007

by Matthew Zapruder
Copper Canyon Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7.5 of 10 stars

All That We See or Seem

the pajamistIf you’re wondering what a “pajamaist” is I can tell you for sure that it is a kind of grand metaphor; it has to be, as Matthew Zapruder makes the following important disclosure early on in the titular poem:

 

When I sleep I don’t wear pajamas. I prefer to sleep naked,
and thrash the bedsheets around until they wrap me in a
protective covering with only my head and feet exposed.

For Zapruder the entrance to a poem is never problematic. He knows how to engage—an essential poetic tool that even some “essential” writers lack. Zapruder knows how to get into a poem and to bring the reader with him.  The book title alone hooks the reader and we’re compelled to read on to find out more. While we’re not always rewarded with clear-cut answers, the first poem in the book, “Dream Job,” provides excellent opening lines that seem fitting for a pajamaist:

Today abstracted
as a glass of milk
forgotten by a kid who went
into this interminable
rain to play…

A dreamlike mood is set, already we’re mixed up in dreamlike imagery, an unstable world in which we can be sure of nothing but Zapruder’s  “interminable.” “The Pajamaist,” we learn later in the book, is the title of a novel the poet writes in a dream; the above lines are a perfect introduction to a book in which everyone suffers, in which dreaming, reality, and the imagination are the blurred antidote to that suffering.

Sometimes Zapruder engages by asking questions of the reader, and of a mysterious companion he is writing to or about. This tactic is employed throughout “Twenty Poems for Noelle,” a poem in twenty untitled sections that invoke “Noelle” as an anchor for the collection. Early in the book, “First Time, Long Time” begins:

Those big oily birds cleaning
their feathers on the roof,
what are they called?

I have no idea, but I sure as hell want to find out too. Again though, the poem becomes less about identifying a specific genus of bird; it presents a meditative, cautious narrator, perplexed by everything surrounding him. The poem seeks to formulate a new perspective, a dream-like lens through which to view the earth.

“Canada” provides yet another example of a poem successfully and beautifully launched. “By Canada I have always been fascinated. / All that snow and acquiescing.” The second line here is perhaps the most striking in the book and certainly my personal favorite, a perfect synthesis of sound and significance. Zapruder repeats the word Canada several times throughout the poem. Repetition can be a slippery slope that frustrates the reader with its sentimentality; Zapruder manages to romanticize it in a satisfying way:

In Canada the leaves are falling.
When they do each one rustles
maybe to the white-tailed deer
of sadness…

Zapruder has a way of working up to endings that are on the brink of falling victim to the trap of sentimentality, but rather achieve a small finality feeling more like an inevitability than an engineered tearjerker.

Parts two and three of the book—“Twenty Poems for Noelle” and “The Pajamaist,” respectively—focus on a universal cell of suffering. “Twenty Poems for Noelle” seems identifiable as a post 9-11 mindset. “The Pajamaist” is centered on a dream in which the narrator is writing a novel called “The Pajamaist.” In the novel, a cure for suffering has been discovered: displacing suffering, and hiring the pajamaist to suffer for you.

Though suffering is an obviously large and complex subject (one that some may deem cliché, especially when addressed within a poem) and a cure for suffering is an idealist notion even in a dream, Zapruder’s lengthy title poem is oddly entertaining and simultaneously melancholic. “We just think suffering hurts less in sleep because / we are sleeping.” In this highly imaginative poem there is a pajamaist who works as a “sufferer,” meaning that he lets others transfer their suffering to him using “pajama’s little helper” or a little blue pill so that they may suffer less.

Also there is an investigator that probes a case of odd spikes in suffering graphs that leads him to said pajamaist. I should remind you as well that all of this takes place in a dream that the narrator of the poem (also the pajamaist? Naked poet?) dreams. Ten different types of suffering are aptly identified for us as well, making sure not to leave out “the purely physical.” The notion of using a pill/person to limit suffering makes “The Pajamaist” reminiscent of Don Delillo’s novel White Noise, in which a pill is marketed as a cure for the fear of death; this was for me a positive association, especially when strange levels of government become involved.

Lots of “suffering.” Somehow though the book remains somber while never becoming maudlin. As Zapruder knows how to begin poems, he is also skilled at finishing them, often times on upbeat and inspiring notes. An example of such a brilliant ending is found in “Tonight You’ll Be Able”:

…Ask yourself
what would I do if I knew I could
not fail.

Sounds like fantastic advice, amplified by his pristine enjambment. Zapruder often leaves out many forms of punctuation in his poems which creates a natural feeling of necessity and immediacy. Moreover, Zapruder ends this collection with the idea of new beginnings, opportunities, and possibilities. The positive energy that ends the book is moving and makes clear that anything—a dream, a death, a vision of reality, a moment’s suffering—can be “both breakable and strong.”

*

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Telescope

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

by Sandy Florian
Action Books 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

5

Only Coming Through in Waves

florian coverOver the past few years, several small books in quasi-encyclopedic and dictionary-like formats, many written by women, including Haryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Jen Benka’s A Box of Longing with 50 Drawers and Marisol Martinez’s After You, Dearest Language, have helped prompt a rethinking of how books of poems are structured. Historically, encyclopedias and dictionaries have not been known to be the refuge of feminists. It’s perhaps too much to call this trend a movement, but these books give those musty formats a much-needed kick in the butt.

Sandy Florian’s first book, Telescope, is a collection of prose poems describing a carefully chosen set of objects and concepts in a near-alphabetical order that preserves both the arc from Abacus to Zero and the backwards stroke of the oars propelling us forward. A neat choice, it’s key to the flow of a collection that’s more interested in the dynamic of definition rather than the objects she describes.

Each three-or four-paragraph prose-poem presents first a dictionary-ish definition, a more encyclopedic definition and a poetic riff, using sentence fragments set off by periods and connectives such as a, but, and for, also set off by periods. These relentless ostinati can get annoying. The constant stops combined with the wall-like arrangement of the pieces make it hard for the lyric impulse to shine through. It’s as if song were forced to grow like moss between the bricks. Here’s one of my favorite moments from “umbrella”: “I am arching my back again. A shade before your bolded body. Or. A shell. Limpet-like, and marked by concentric lines. And. A furled fan.”

This kind of beauty seems to be extruded under intense pressure. In fact, the speaker seems generally oppressed by the power of definition. “Fact” is neutral until we get to “At length you commit a fact that accomplishes my annihilation.” The “you” could be culture, an abusive lover breaking her will, or worse. This piece starts with oppression, and ends with liberation:

For. You are the attorney of truth. The fact is. You stand on Buckingham. You walk across London Bridge. I, on the other hand, live in the world of windmills. And. I ask you to stop disproving my fictions. See. While you commit yourself to the harder science, I am truth-terrified. I skill myself instead the art of unmaking. For. To undo the deeds that have undone these dreams. Is the noblest of all metaphors.

Towards the beginning of Telescope, the “you” is a dominant force for precision, and the “I” is a force fighting for imprecision. Often, the precise “you” is depicted in a higher position looking down at the “I.” This tends to encourage a culturally gendered reading, yet there may not be sufficient artistic and political leverage to break through the wall. Looking back to the end of “fact”, the speaker seems less to escape an oppressive self-definition than to accede to a weary détente. In “bridge” the oppression is more religious in nature:

None but the Lord can bridge my days. And. I am trying hard to bridge the distance between us. Gestures bridge my way to spoken language. But I am as beside the bridge. Off track. I’ve gone astray. An attractive way of escape. These are the Gates of Hell. For. You have laid the bridge of silver for me, your flying enemy.

What started as an optimistic piece ends with the I/You pair as enemies. Another clue that the format doesn’t give the author quite enough room to breathe is found in “Factory”. At first bouncy, the tone is forced to modulate without any corresponding change in diction:

My unbeing. Factory of river. Factory of rain. Link in the Alps’ globe-girding chain.

A prison. A police station. A whorehouse. As. The lass I adore, the lass for me, is the lass in a female factory. But. The factory of manifold machines is a perpetuum mobile. These machines could produce forever. And. If the machines are in the production of your sense of forever, the magnitude of this great profit whets your appetite for more time. You endeavor to thoroughly exploit the sunny times of your first love by prolonging the unfixed day. The child, now five, works hours fifteen. While I. Under the burden of this rock, suffer its forever falling backwards. I am rheumatic. Paralytic. I am become stillborn.

A graveyard. A cemetery. A nuclear reactor. A concentration camp where prisoners are systematically murdered.

Some of that is amazingly awkward. The bounciness of “the Alps’ globe girding chain” could have turned into an ironic reference to The Sound of Music, but didn’t. In this example, the reader is not given enough cultural specificity to go there. This chain of meaning isn’t fertilized by the usual feverish and often self-undermining cross-references of an encyclopedia or dictionary entry. This could be attributed to the fact that the entry is about a factory, but the general effect is similar over diverse subjects. Florian’s speaker seems as oppressed by her self-chosen form as she might be by a culturally imposed form. Self-imposed walls can be the hardest to break; though as the book progresses, the poems speak to each other more easily.

Halfway through, the sense of an antagonistic, gendered reading modulates to a point where the “you” can be more easily read as God. It’s still an up/down relation, but the stage is set for a few poems where “I” comes out on top. The I/ you dynamic becomes less oppressive by the end— though “zero” predictably ends with the word “infinity.” This poetry struggles with culture, identity and belief. Brief moments of lyric beauty often seep through like moisture weeping through a wall. 

Speaking of walls, a few lines directly refer to Roger Waters lyrics: “My hands feel just like two balloons” “To go to the show,” and “This is Radio Chaos.” Sometimes her use of shards of biblical language reminds me of the parody of the 23rd psalm in Animals. Surprisingly, the parallels go deeper, given Florian’s concern about nuclear war and American militarism. This extends even to prosody: those unfunky, hammering semi-classical ostinati, and clunky lists that seem at times just to fill out Waters’ songs. I can almost hear Roger’s strained voice declaiming some of her lines, but Florian has none of his acid, humorless self-importance. She does display his touching, honest struggle for equality and peace in what seems to be a permanently Manichean, militaristic world. I don’t want to encumber Florian’s work with a strained analogy, but it’s the best explanation of both my affection for this book and the reason why I have to give it a five.

*

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For the Confederate Dead

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

by Kevin Young
Knopf 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

9

Sliding By

for the confederate deadIt’s been more than three years since Kevin Young was robbed for the National Book Award by an okay C.K. Williams book. But surely awards are really only a luxury that serve at best to point people in the direction of decent literature, and if nominating Young’s 190-page epic for the broken-hearted Jelly Roll: A Blues pointed readers in Young’s direction, then the literary dictators did something right. Jelly Roll is among the best books written this century (21st); it reminded us that our nation’s most organic art form (blues) means more than a 1-4-5 chord pattern: it means accessing a certain tone, means beating the things that are beating you, sometimes only by acknowledging you are being beaten—arguing as far as the 5-chord will take you, but maintaining a sense of self-deprecating humility:

When I said I didn’t mind
your leaving, I lied—
even the funny-lookingest kid
in class gets a valentine

and I hear now he’s got mine.

In 2005 Young published a bold sort of noir screenplay in verse, Black Maria, and his latest, For the Confederate Dead, shows the continued drive to make not only books, but large-scale masterpieces. At least one early review has labeled For the Confederate Dead less a unit than Young’s earlier books, the stacking of apparently unrelated sections. But the governing theme is deeper here, and the book is as cohesive as anything I’ve read in a while. Young demands more from his readers and the results are breathtaking.

Young’s work can seem at times a traditional look at self and society. There is the individual and there is society, and regardless of a person’s national, racial or familial allegiance, everyone is in the end on a solitary journey. Each person, Young reveals, constructs his or her private country out of people, places, experiences. The book opens with a one-poem section, a short elegy for the honorable Gwendolyn Brooks: “I tuck your voice, laced / tight, in these brown shoes.” Racial implications sure, but it’s a lot more than that: this is a narrator acknowledging his journey is his feet, wherever he’s taken or takes them. But rather than delving into a bluesy exploration of self à la Jelly Roll, the subsequent section digs into American history, opening things with the 19th century journey of a few freed slaves struggling for identity in the post-Civil War south.

The section, titled “Nicodemus,” follows a handful of characters through peril to the tiny, developing, all-black town of Nicodemus, Kansas. We meet several characters like Lucy, whose father Black Tom dies and is dug a shallow grave in mud alongside the trail. Tom “Saw the soil, / tasted it, & that was enough,” our surviving narrator offers, and keeps an eye on Lucy:

                                No Liberia here
for her Daddy Tom to return to, his body
must find its own precious way.

Liberia has virtually no chance of being a home country any longer, and why should it. America is truly born. Robert Hayden once commented that “a Negro poet [should not] be limited to racial utterance,” and that he wanted to be able to use black history without “narrow, racial, propagandistic implications.” His great poems “Witch Doctor” and “Middle Passage” were perhaps the best example of this doctrine, and in many ways, the early work in For the Confederate Dead picks up where “Middle Passage” left off. “Middle Passage”—the slave route from Africa to America—documents the famous revolt of the slaves aboard Amistad:

voyage through death
        to life upon these shores.

Young’s “Nicodemus” section felt like a searing follow-up on that voyage.

At this point you may or may not be wondering why I haven’t mentioned Robert Lowell. There’s Young’s autobiographical nugget: “No one, much less / my parents, can tell me why // my middle name is Lowell.” There’s also the fact Lowell was tight with his teacher Allen Tate, whose surname seems all but stripped these days by the superior Tate (James), and who published in 1928 his “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”  Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” offers contemplations in and around Boston Common, as the poet digresses on the bombing of Hiroshima and on the monument of Union Colonel Robert Shaw, famous for his leadership of a regiment of black troops. This poem was somewhat a response to Allen Tate’s poem. Young offers here his third chapter; the title poem is one of the best in the book, fixing its poet near a monument for the Confederate dead, and trailing into the apocalypse, which the weatherman perpetually predicts:

Forget the weatherman

whose maps move, blink,
but stay crossed
with lines none has seen. Race

instead against the almost
rain, digging beside the monument
(that giant anchor)

til we strike
water, sweat
fighting the sleepwalking air.

The enjambments—“race” with “lines none has seen,” for example—are precise and engage a multitude of meanings (Lowell always said he revised endlessly, who knows how effortless this is for Young); Young is bluesy til the end, and the poem covers every base. The dead themselves, especially some desperate escaped draftees—many of whom were slaves—have little to do with the cause itself, and from the Southern standpoint it was not a “Civil War,” Young reminds us, but a struggle for independence.

The book is the stuff of Americana through and through; as a country develops, its people watch it change. “Old Exit 9,” for example, has since become Exit 29:

Old Exit 9 can’t stand
        theater but loves drama—
Has been there
        but not done that.
Is gone, like Mama,
        bless her heart,
& ain’t comin back.

He twists clichés into slant rhymes and maintains impeccable rhythm. I could quote this book all over the place. There’s found poetry from the American landscape, there’s blues, a series on Jim Crow. And all the while whose country is whose—the notion of owning land—becomes pedestrian beside the notion of self-as-country, and the book, in the end, explores some of the inhabitants of Young’s country: Gwendolyn Brooks, Booker T. Washington, Lionel Hampton, James Hampton, Countee Cullen, “Mr. David King, who drove me all over Baltimore,” Allen Ginsberg, Bob Marley, Michael S. Harper, Walt Whitman, Garcia Lorca, and Young’s friend Philippe Wamba, who died in a tragic car accident in Kenya and is the subject of series of powerful elegies.

Following the reggae-rich sequence of elegies for Wamba, Young concludes where he started—with tribute to a female poet, this time in “Homage to Phyllis Wheatley,” whom Young notes was “the first black poet to publish a book in what would soon become the United States.” Wheatley is pictured on a boat from the United States to England—“At Sea which owns no country.”  It’s often said a person is owned by his or her possessions. If a nation of people is owned by the land it’s said to own, then the sea is unowned, and in turn owns nothing.  Here death too is a sea which owns no country: it is inevitable largesse with domination over everyone’s petty squabbling. There’s the sense—as Hayden illustrated in “Witch Doctor”—that eventually everything might be a con, but that that’s no reason for disbelief.

The blues, in the end, is about moving on. Where Jelly Roll seemed to emphasize moving on in life after a loss, For the Confederate Dead moves softly on into death, death as a fitting conclusion to any life:

        Death, dark mistress,
would come a-heralding silent
the streets,—no door to her closed.

But only to the extent that you finish the book and find yourself strangely yet fiercely independent and alive. Mid-January, and already the first essential title of 2007.

*

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Where X Marks the Spot

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

by Bill Zavatsky
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

six
The Unmuted Second-Stringer

where x marks the spotBill Zavatsky is an excellent bench player for the New York School, and one of the strong points of Hanging Loose’s team. Left-handed as that is, I mean it as a compliment.  Can we say for sure where the ’96 Yankees have wound up if Charlie Hayes had flubbed that ninth-inning pop-up? Where would Earl Weaver’s Orioles have been without John Lowenstein, or the mid-80’s Mets without Rusty Staub? OK, don’t answer that last one.  Zavatsky’s strength is the hard-earned knowledge of second-stringers gained from his ten years as a jazz pianist playing in obscure clubs.

Zavatsky published his first book of poems in 1975. By then, he had already worked as a jazz pianist and critic.  Since then, he has become known for his work with SUN press, and his award-winning translations of Andre Breton.  I am impressed by the variety of subject matter and tone in X Marks the Spot, and the appealing focus he has brought to thirty years of work.  Given Zavatsky’s love of the occasional and themed poem, he has recently been better represented in anthologies than his own books.  In certain circles, he has achieved an almost Gump-like ubiquity while killing the fewest trees.  Instead of stressing his surrealist credentials, his new book favors his disarmingly accessible take on confessional poetry (I’m convinced there’s no such thing as confessional poetry, but that’s another review).  He makes us look at his (and our) least flattering moments in a less psychologically claustrophobic, more humorous way than we might expect.  All this is welcome, even if Zavatsky is more comfortable than most at wearing his heart on his sleeve.  It depends on what you expect art to do. 

In his essay, “Civilization and its Opposite in the 1940’s,” Guy Davenport suggests a dichotomy that describes American art of the period: “muteness” and “song.” He suggests that “song” would be folkloric art, filled with stories and myth; and that “muteness” would “elegantly subjugate subject matter to (an abstract) style.”  Davenport then complains that muteness has been the rage: that too few appreciate the spiritual pulse of Charles Burchfield, for example, because it is almost too out in the open, somehow indecent in what it reveals, too individualistic to place in cold, neat categories that all the muteness-loving, professorial art critics prefer. 

Zavatsky will have none of this categorical crankiness.  Early on in the book, “Evita” neatly shows two characters on the subway, a silent black woman “whose face has been painted completely white,” and a man singing songs from the musical Evita in a Spanish accent.  The singer sees the woman, and doing “a perfect silent-movie double take,” he proceeds to sing the rest of his songs to her, dancing around the pole, becoming so absorbed with his song and dance that he fails to notice when she leaves the train.    When the doors open for Columbus Circle, he is blocked by a hesitant passenger, and instantly transforms into a real New Yorker: “Hey! C’monin or out!” flapping his hands, “I gotta get to work!” It is not a question of decency—though it turns out the two characters have nothing to say to each other, it is because both of them hide behind their memorable masks.

A standout pair of poems about Bill Evans makes a similar point concerning abstraction and emotion in art.  My favorite is the poem addressed to the audience heard on the historic recordings at the Village Vanguard in July, 1961.  The poem is not as much about what Evans was doing on stage, but what the audience was doing: chattering away, clinking dishes, ordering drinks.  He wonders if they now listen to the recording, point to their chattering voices, and say, “Hey, honey— that’s me“. Beyond these barbs, he wishes he could help them hear the miracle occurring right in front of them, to distract them from their distracted lives: 

I’ve wanted to see them stiffen and cry out,
“Oh, my God! You mean that, that was going on
across the room from my martini?”
“I missed the whole damn thing
for that worthless man I spent twenty
of the worst years of my life with!”

The poem ends: “Listen, I’m putting on the first track now. Hear it if you couldn’t hear it then, wherever you are, whoever you were that day.”

The other is an elegy originally printed in the liner notes for Evans’ last completed album, You Must Believe in Spring. The poem does not shy away from its birth as a liner note (The CD art also includes a reproduction of a “singing” Charles Burchfield painting, one of those spring ones where bare, March branches reach up to a radiant ball of light). The poem gracefully accepts its occasional nature, the river of its grief.  Together, these poems help us question the critical canard that Evans’ early, more abstract music was his only great work, and that late Evans was only drowning in his own tears.  Though he normally favors the expressive mode, Zavatsky knows the expressive and the mute are equally well masked; that it is a mistake to think of one mode as more artistically relevant.

This is the chief wisdom of Where X Marks the Spot.  There is no shying away from emotion, as well as the ways we use to hide from it.  In “My Uncle at the Wake” the speaker, trying to understand his childhood, obsessively asks his uncle about why he reached out to him all those years ago; only the final line reveals that the man lying in the coffin is the speaker’s father. 

One of the very few places in the book his balance falters though, is the eight-page poem “Beetle,” about his cat dying of cancer.  The poem wallows in Beetle’s pathetic last days in a desperate, clinging way.  There is a suggestion that the cat’s death is a stand-in for the death of his father, but this is weighted like the surprisingly feathery thing the dead cat becomes.  In contrast to the previous poem about his father, the suggestion of silent depth is not leveraged enough to balance the cloying sentimentality expressed on the surface.  My exemplar modern cat elegy is admittedly a leap, but I think Louis MacNeice’s “The Death of A Cat” (also fairly long), for all its obvious manner is a better poem partly because of its sprightly catalogue of cat-ness recalling Christopher Smart’s “For My Cat Jeoffry,” and partly because it is addressed to a second person rather than the cat.

Another high point is a poem about a greasy, grasping bandleader named Danny, who promotes an incompetent but gorgeous singer during the band’s gig at a Bridgeport, CT strip club, mostly to get her in bed. The poem turns on the speaker’s inability to reach out to the singer as she runs off stage, crying, knowing she has failed. The speaker realizes that he had been distracted by his own greasy fantasies about the stripper.  Another poem tells about Steve Royal, who could have been a major league pitcher, but had to stop because of a weak heart. Though Royal became an excellent saxophonist who had brief stints with famous bands, he ended up playing at high school dances.   Unlike Zavatsky and his other young friends, Steve was confident enough with his own life that he never felt cheated that he couldn’t leave his family and his roots behind for fame or art.

Zavatsky cites Harvey Shapiro as “mentor and friend.”  While he has Shapiro’s accessibility and self-deprecating humor, Zavatsky is miles away from Shapiro’s tense, gnomic wisdom, yet disarming enough (except for the cat poem) to nudge me off my critical high horse—perhaps the just-goofy-enough author photo helped my mood. I haven’t quoted many lines, but the humorous and touching surprises in these poems rarely turn on a dime—these poems are at their best read whole.  In X Marks the Spot, Bill Zavatsky puts his volubility in its best light.  He knows that despite our best intentions we probably can’t talk ourselves into wisdom; but he believes we might be able to talk ourselves into more toleration, compassion, and humor, towards ourselves and others.  And in the end, that’s pretty good.

*

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Year in Review 2006

Monday, January 1st, 2007

Best Book of New Poetry Published in 2006

Winner:
Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner

Other Nominees:
Shake, Joshua Beckman
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
Yes, Master, Michael Earl Craig
Averno, Louise Gluck
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey
Isa the Truck Named Isadore, Amanda Nadelberg
Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson
God’s Silence, Franz Wright

Best First Book
(So many first book prizes. And more. Award for greatness in a poet’s first full-length)

Winner:
Isa the Truck Named Isadore, Amanda Nadelberg

Other Nominees:
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
On the Side of the Crow, Christien Gholson
case sensitive, Kate Greenstreet
Who’s Who Vivid, Matt Hart 

Best Second Book
(Award for greatness in a second book; lots of good stuff this year)

Winner:
Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner

Other Nominees:
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
Yes, Master, Michael Earl Craig
My Psychic, James Kimbrell

Best New Collection by a Canonical Figure
(Award for the best book of all new poems by a poet whose place in the canon seems secure, for the time being)

Winner:
Averno, Louise Gluck

Other Nominees:
District and Circle, Seamus Heaney
Man and Camel, Mark Strand
Scar Tissue, Charles Wright
God’s Silence, Franz Wright

Best Selected/Collected
(More than run-of-the-mill Greatest Hits packages. Here are this year’s five most successful)

Winner:
I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
 

Other Nominees:
Collected Poems, Robert Creeley
White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Donald Hall
The Sights Along the Harbor, Harvey Shapiro
Collected Poems, C.K. Williams

Best Poem in a New Collection
(Award for best individual poem in an all new collection.)

Winner:
“Didactic Elegy”, Ben Lerner (from Angle of Yaw)

Other Nominees:
“This is what’s been done to flesh…”, Joshua Beckman (from Shake)
“Prayer”, Michael Earl Craig (from Yes, Master)
“Landscape”, Louise Gluck (from Averno)
“Four Darks in Red”, Aleda Shirley (from Dark Familiar)

Best Author Photo
(Award for greatness in the field of Lookism. Images forthcoming– um, that’s “Fair Use” right?)

Winner:
Bill Zavatsky, Where X Marks the Spot

Other Nominees:
Joshua Clover, The Totality for Kids
Mark Strand, Man and Camel
Henry Taylor, Crooked Run 
C.K. Williams, Collected Poems
 

Best Response to Coldfront
(Award for greatness in reacting to America’s favorite poetry review journal.  Nota: titles our own.)

Winner:
“You Must Not Know About my Masters Degree: A Letter to the Editors”, Matt Mason

“[T]he review seems to go out of its way to point out lines which remind the reviewer of bad emo lyrics… when those lines are obviously TRYING to sound like bad emo lyrics to make the point the poems go for (something caught, certainly, by Literal Latte magazine who awarded “I May Not Know…” a nice check and first place in a contest as well as the readers and teachers in my masters program (UC Davis)).”

Other Nominees:
“I Promised Myself I Wasn’t Going to Blog About This”, Steve Mueske

http://accordingtoess.blogspot.com/2006/08/see-theyre-not-all-good.html

“Deferring to Deming”, Kate Seferian, Verse Magazine Online

“In his review of Upon Arrival, John Deming notes that ‘the mania [Cisewski] is really indulging in . . . is an obsession with the notion of multifarious selves. Every person is burdened with an infinite number of conflicting impulses and emotions–indeed, of ways to finally envision oneself’.”

http://versemag.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-review-of-paula-cisewski.html

“Letter to the Editors Part 1: Reopening Old Wounds”, Franz Wright

“I’d like to straighten you out on those Poetry emails/letter–they were sent privately to the editor of the magazine in response to a private falling out we’d had. It was his decision to publish them, out of context, with the obvious intention of causing me to look like a lunatic and causing me to be ridiculed for about a year, and clearly he was quite successful.  The fact that you find those letters “hilarious” (and you are certainly not alone) is disturbing to me…  I’ve never, in public or private, attempted to defend myself or explain with regard to the Poetry humiliation–so this is my chance to get it out of my
system.”

“Letter to the Editors Part 2: Reconciliation”, Franz Wright

“[N]o one, absolutely no one–neither the sincere reviewers nor the witty and malicious assholes–has displayed anything remotely approaching your grasp of my intent in God’s Silence. It is no exaggeration to say that reading your review restored, for a moment, my faith that there has to be SOMEONE out there who notices what I was trying to do.  Rereading your review this morning nearly brought tears to my eyes.”

Best Overall 2006 Poetry Catalogue

Winner:
Copper Canyon

Other Nominees:
Farrar Strauss & Giroux
Fence Books
Knopf
Wave Books

Best Book Title

Winner:
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner

Other Nominees:
A Useless Window, Carrie Olivia Adams
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey
Dog Star Delicatessen, Mekeel McBride
Ooga-Booga, Frederick Seidel
Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Wayne Koestenbaum

Best Book Cover

Winner:
Yes, Master, Michael Earl Craig
A Jacques Tati photo? Good enough for me.
Other Nominees:
My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, Daisy Fried
Fur-eeky.
Green Squall, Jay Hopler (by Nancy Ovedovich)
Is it green, is it gray, who can tell. Understated and very cool.
The Pitch, Tom Thompson (by Emilie Clark, from the collection of the author)
Clap your hands! (But I feel so lonely)
Meteoric Flowers, Elizabeth Willis
Designed by Jeff Clark, who gets around—also designing covers this year for Brian Henry, Noelle Kocot, S.A. Stepanek, among others.

Best Long Poem
(Award for a new poem at least 5 pages in length)

Winner:
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, Nathaniel Mackey, from Splay Anthem

Other Nominees:
“Landscape”, Louise Gluck, from Averno
“Love Had a Thousand Shapes”, James Kimbrell, from My Psychic
“Poem for the End of Time”, Noelle Kocot, from Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems
“Didactic Elegy”, by Ben Lerner, from Angle of Yaw

 

Best Book-Length Poem

Winner:
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully

Other Nominees:
inbox, Noah Eli Gordon
Three, Breathing, S.A. Stepanek
Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Rain, JonWoodward

Best Opener
(Award for the best opening poem in a book)

Winner:
“Unslide the door,…” Joshua Beckman, from Shake

Other Nominees:
“This is How an Anvil Comes to You,” Michael Earl Craig, from Yes, Master
“In the Garden”, Jay Hopler, from Green Squall
“The Star’s Etruscan Argument”, Aleda Shirley, from Dark Familiar
“The Similitude of this Great Flower”, Elizabeth Willis, from Meteoric Flowers

Best Closer
(Award for the best closing poem in a book)

Winner:
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, Nathaniel Mackey, from Splay Anthem

Other Nominees:
“Prayer”, Michael Earl Craig, from Yes, Master
“Persephone the Wanderer”, Louise Gluck, from Averno
“The Blackbird of Glanmore”, Seamus Heaney, from District & Circle
“Feast of the Ascension, 2004. Planting Hibiscus”, Jay Hopler, from Green Squall
 

Best First Lines
(Award for greatness in apt, absorbing opening lines that have a way of informing the book’s greater good)

Winner:
from “Mimosa,” opening section of Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]*: 

She remembers the story he told her, about taking a walk with his former lover during one of the very first days of spring, a spring which soured then ripened then soured then ripened before beginning again, a spring which kept swelling out of winter in a way the Chaucer’s spring would never do.

Other Nominees:
from the untitled poem opening Joshua Beckman’s Shake:

Unslide the door,
uncap the lazy little coffee cup.
The pasty people must be part of the dinner.
And a city turns its incapacity in,
foolish city…

from “The Lightning”, opener for Linda Gregg’s In the Middle Distance: 

 

The bell ringing has been a great pleasure
for her during these months. But she
has been confused by the many secrets.
The fragments of stories between
upstairs and down. Like when the woman
dressed in such a beautiful white gown
with only one shoe. And that one with
no heel. And the other woman upstairs
and down. Fragments of stories.

from “Begetting Stadia, opener for Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw: 

Demands indefinitely specified,
demands incompatible with collective living

beget stadia
with indefinite seating
delicately tiered.

from “Appalachian Farewell”, opener for Charles Wright’s Scar Tissue: 

 

Sunset in Appalachia, bituminous bulwark
Against the western skydrop.
An Advent of gold and green, an Easter of Ashes.

Best Closing Lines
(Award for greatness in apt, absorbing closing lines that have a way of informing the book’s greater good)

Winner:
from “Prayer,” closer for Michael Earl Craig’s Yes, Master:

As I hold my head low
I see the many flecks of black pepper
on my placemat.
They look like horses
running away from me at a great distance.

Other Nominees:
from Daniel Brenner’s The Stupefying Flashbulbs: 

I’m afraid of looking around from the perspective of being chased
& doing whatever it is the perspective of being chased urges.

from “Persephone the Wanderer”, closer for Louise Gluck’s Averno:

And in the time between

you will forget everything:
those fields of ice will be
the meadows of Elysium.

from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, closer for Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem:

                                                        as
   we ran thru it, earth-sway swaddling
                                                          our
feet

from “The Hour of Blue Snow”, closer for David Young’s Black Lab:

Then I remember to breathe again,
and the blue snow shines inside me.

Technical Awards
(for innovation in the fields of):

Winner:
the self-writing book: inbox, Noah Eli Gordon

Other Nominees:
the footnote: [one love affair]*, Jenny Boully 

the subject index: The Totality for Kids, Joshua Clover   

the epigraph: Swallows, Martin Corless-Smith

liquid paper: A Little White Shadow,  Mary Ruefle

Best Thirteenth Poem

Frost said if he wrote a book of 12 poems then the 13th poem should be the book itself (or something like that). Here are some books whose small parts made a hell of a whole.

Winner:
The Totality for Kids, Joshua Clover

Other Nominees:
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
Swallows, Martin Corless-Smith
Whole Milk, Jim Goar
In the Middle Distance, Linda Gregg

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