Archive for February, 2007

Parallel Play

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

by Stephen Burt
Graywolf Press 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

6_5stars_6

Wildman

burt coverStephen Burt’s Parallel Play makes an impressive start with a poem called “Bluebells.” The final six lines are as follows:

Now that we’ve spent
a year on Fairmont Avenue, such heady sights remind
me less of balmy days in Central Park
and more of a rock star from Iceland, who lived in a tent
for a year in a climate-controlled New York apartment
in order to think of the wind, the cold, the wild.

Burt has a knack for spinning inspiration. Returning to “the wild” seems to account for a significant part of life and this stanza recognizes the possibility of a metaphorical return, a spiritual exercise in which “the wild” can be found amidst advanced civilization or one’s daily life.

A similarly vitalizing poem is “Tenth Avenue.” Again, the final lines are perhaps all we need to inhabit the poem’s sentiment.

…All your decisions
Are yours now, to be made over again.
No one will tell you when you get them right.

Somewhat more directive than “Bluebells,” “Tenth Avenue” challenges us to define success for ourselves. It echoes the idea that one must create happiness for one’s self. These enlivening poems highlight Burt’s talent to transform ordinary events into quests, pursuits, or the pursuit of primary quests. 

So, what is primary for Stephen Burt? He seems to enjoy order, symmetry and form. Parallel Play is broken into four sections, each ending with a short reworking of Callimachus, and comprising a bulk of sestinas, rhyme and meter. Burt’s punctilious and formalistic attention to sounds and control of language is often fruitful and results in astounding diction. In poems like “Postcard Sent on New Year’s Day” the alliteration produces a stunning musicality: “Ash in their air; / a quota of dead pigeons in our path.”  Each line of “Paysage Moralisé” ends with a form of the word place; there are thirty lines—ambitious and impressive. His sestina, “Six Kinds of Noodles,” contains many clever variations on end words such as a push from “menu” to “Men, you.”

Unfortunately, Burt’s obsessive wordplay is not always successful and often results in shoddy punning. One particularly unjustifiable pun appears in “Amaretto Sour (Drag Night at the Nines)”: “…the dawn / Breaks promises.” He also dips into the world of jejune pop culture, but if 90210 was your fave then perhaps “Scenes from Next Week’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer” might be of interest to you. It’s not my thing and I’m unable to judge whether the poem is poking fun at Buffy and the “vamps” or earnestly recounting precious scenes from the hit show. Either way, I’m bored.

Burt is best in poems like “A Long Walk on a Weekday Afternoon” and “‘What Else Should We See in San Francisco.’” Both poems are built on several small vignettes. Here’s one of the most notable:

Defunct refrigerators form a row
on the sunlit walks, their backs peeled
up and off like rusted tins of fish.

Here’s another:

Back and forth of prerecorded accordion,
back and forth with the inland-tending bay.
Sine and cosine. Red graph of the bridge.

“Parallel play” refers to the phenomenon of children who, when placed in the same room, play separately and don’t interact. The book, the publisher boasts, shows how people attempt “lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own self-awareness.” Burt’s preoccupations traverse the landscape of science and Americana as such until the end, when he he inevitably returns to the wild. Rather than taking us inside the tent of an Icelandic rock star, he tries his luck “At the Providence Zoo.” The speaker describes a man-made marsh constructed for the egret: “…the next / best thing to living out your wild life.”

*

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Whole Milk

Friday, February 9th, 2007

by Jim Goar
Effing Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

6_5stars_6

Buy the Cow

Goar CoverOne of my favorite things about Jim Goar’s book is that I feel like I’m 50-feet tall when I’m reading it. Until my girlfriend walks in the room and asks, “Could you be reading a daintier book?” But just hold it in one hand, flip pages with your thumb—you’ll be fine. “A tree sprouted from my penis,” will exclaim the first line of the strangest little book published in 2006, Goar’s 5¼” X 3¾” Whole Milk, a beautifully-designed series of small prose poems on unnumbered pages, published in 277 “collectible” copies and featuring unobtrusive section-splitting art by Josh Rios.

What made Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End great wasn’t just the fact that he was able to make tiny prose poems work where so many others had failed: the extent to which the poems were mysterious, alienating and precise—the most disarming yet engaging group of prose poems published to that point, perhaps ever.

More consciously arrogant and abrasive, Goar’s poems work in a way similar to Simic’s. Each line is a calculated punch, and nothing about the book—the use of art, the tiniest of prose poems—seem a contrived or desperate attempt. Goar dusts off surrealism and treats it with appropriate gravity. He’s also comfortable with the strengths and limitations of the prose poem in a way that so many others aren’t:

I open the refrigerator door. There is only one hot dog
left. I cut in two. It is filled with leaves. She says this
is common. When I hesitate, she eats both halves.

This is one poem in its entirety. Simic-like surrealism, in both its willingness to be forthright with the surreal, and the abruptness of its ending. Yet Goar has his own set of odd impulses to give in to, and he’s comfortable doing so. Nothing—not the talking bicycle tire, not the barbecued cloud, not the leaf-dog—seems out of place. The third section, “An Honest Woman,” ends with this two-sentence poem:

In parting she gives me her arm. This feels a bit dramatic,
so I hide it under my coat.

If ever plot enters, it is treated with defiance: this is, for example, the only book ever written in which a man cremates his dead horse, mixes the ashes with melted plastic, and makes a Frisbee that winds up stuck on the roof. Worth a read for that reason alone.

Naturally he doesn’t approach James Tate’s luminous insanity or Simic’s preposterous eloquence, but he does take an appropriate and capable seat in their office. It’s a charming little book, and at the very least, the tiny basement cult of Tate and Simic worshippers (I think the secret handshake involves a gritty and good-intentioned stray puppy) should budget it among its necessary titles from 2006.

*

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Goat Funeral

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

by Christopher Bakken
The Sheep Meadow Press 2006
Reviewed by David Sewell

7 of 10 stars

Suffer the Kids

bakken coverSmartly weaving archetypes into contemporary poems can result in all sorts of things—Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, getting a free pass on adorning your surname with an umlaut, hell, even interesting poems.    

Christopher Bakken (who, if Coldfront had a fact-checker, I would claim is of Greek heritage [Bakken is not of Greek heritage —Coldfront Fact-Checker]) lives, at least some of his life, in Pennsylvania. As crazy as that sounds, his imagination seems often to reside in another place entirely—the cradle of international dreamboat Yanni, Greece.

The titular poem in Goat Funeral, Bakken’s second book of original poems, is a good place to begin. The poem (“Eclogue 4: Goat Funeral”) is one of several poems set in the land of feta and foam parties.  For those of you who don’t know, an eclogue (derived from the Greek, by the way) is a poem in which shepherds (mostly) converse with each other or with the hills.

But your edification and my condescension aside, dear reader, we still have the poem to deal with. Formally introducing the goat, Bakken says, “The dead one was wreathed with olive leaves, / a pile of grain uneaten at the mouth.” Does Charon have an anti-goat policy on his ferry? Is the fare for passage a pile of grain? I don’t know. But that’s a wonderful image he’s sketched for us, and the poem is full of them. Here’s the opening:

I fled the tavern soaked with booze and gravitas,
stumbled into the scrub along the river,
cursing the whole crowd, their bouzouki kitsch,
the ardor of their mob confidence,
woke only when that shepherd Julianna
lit the pyre for her stillborn goat, wailed
against the spirit that claimed it too soon.

An auspicious start, no doubt. The funeral unfolds as we might expect a goat funeral to, including the entrance of the speaker’s characteristically human desire—lionized or, say, wolf-ified—near the end. It’s set in opposition to (and also co-opts) the bestial and the divine, thereby constituting the common classical trinity:

What choice did I have? The goat was dead,
the girl pretty, the river risen too high.
It was for her the animal inside me
rose from its lair, shook off its winter sleep,
and I took her in my arms, and stoked the fire,
and helped her burn—oh heartless god—the little beast.

Poets from Heaney to Pope to Spenser to Virgil have taken up the goatherd’s staff and loosed their yawps o’er grassy fields, and it’d be, perhaps, unfair and pointless to compare Bakken’s attempts with theirs, so I won’t. But Bakken’s eclogues, which comprise only one section (of five) in the book, are my favorites in the collection, and are a strong argument for poems (or their makers) booking passage on an Olympic Airlines flight ASAP. I myself would consider sacrificing a goat to Apollo, asking him to compel Bakken to write a full book of eclogues, but I’m a vegetarian, and it would be, no doubt, difficult to convince Hermes to visit the Keystone State, anyway.

It was perhaps misleading to imply that archetypes and things Greek are central to the book, for the majority of the book doesn’t actually reside there, and the Gods and their mortal minions don’t make all that many appearances—though the eclogues do seem to be rooted in another world/time. (That his cat is later referred to as a “Dionysian prowler” doesn’t really add much strength to the idea.) But Bakken seems to be strongest when he’s off in another world, dealing with all the problems of being human—full of desire and inertia, exposed often to the vicissitudes of Nature, spirits/gods, and other humans.    

“Purgatory, a Postcard” seconds that emotion. “I attend the hangings. The library / isn’t half bad. I try not to complain.” Especially admirable are the matter-of-factness and the vibrant and fresh imagery in the poem (“I ate octopus with a survivor tonight. / We slammed vodka, compared tattoos.”), which result in a wholly successful (and mesmerizing) sonnet. The final couplet couldn’t be cleaner: “Though it’s much colder here than one expects, / things are, I must say, awfully beautiful.” Bakken is a capable and compelling poet, and poems like “Purgatory” and the section that contains the eclogues prove it.   

The poems in this short collection (about 50 pages of poetry) never really fall flat, but some feel less capable of floating off to Olympus than others. With a handful of highly successful exceptions (“Ariadne [Postscript],” “Last Words from Elpenor,” and “Aegean: Flight 652” among them—all back in Greece, please note), most of the rest of the book consists of poems ekphrastically concerned with a “detail” from a painting or dedicated to channeling a dead writer or character (Pessoa, Milosz, Lawrence, William Matthews, Celan, Coleridge, and Quasimodo all have poems, often called “duets,” written for or about them). While Bakken’s talents are in strong supply here, too, I resent these poems—or their inclusion, at least—for making the book feel more scattershot than it might have felt had they been given harbor in another collection. Ditto the coming-of-age poem, the road poem, and the poem about the blue jay—not bad, just not as interesting, and perhaps a little rote.

There is the recurring theme of displacement, of wandering (and wondering), of traveling toward somewhere else—an unknown somewhere, perhaps—throughout most of the book that gives it a unified and captivating movement—“Always moving,” “Azaleas” begins. In the wonderful “First Objects,” he elaborates: “We might have stayed put, but couldn’t bear / the sense that we were rising, calm as geese / caught between the sights of a shogun.” If Bakken can, in the future, stay put in his resplendent Hellenic-inflected imagination for a good while, and avoid the art museum and his personal library, he may just write a book with the smell, taste, and texture of ambrosia. Goat Funeral isn’t quite that, but it’s not chopped liver, either.

*

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Sinners Welcome

Monday, February 5th, 2007

by Mary Karr
Harper Collins 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

4

Glancing Christwords

karr_sinnersThat’s two strikes for Harper Collins Publishers in 2006 after the less than impressive release of Forty-Five by Frieda Hughes and this underwhelming Mary Karr collection of often unnecessarily biblical poems. That said…

The essay that appears at the end of the book (a.k.a. the afterword), “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer”, helps resurrect Sinners Welcome. Karr discusses her turn to religion—more specifically Catholicism—in 1996, her battle with alcohol, and the similar strength she’s extracted from both poetry and prayer. She first outlines her early distaste for organized religion and prayer, which was replaced by her love for its superior, poetry:

Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its comforts were a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst—dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

Fair enough thus far and far be it for me to tell anyone what to believe in. Though Karr does seem to brag slightly throughout the essay, highlighting her apparently abnormal intelligence and instincts (“Even as a preschooler, I could recite the works of cummings and A.A. Milne”—note the annoying lack of capitalization of poor E.E. Cummings’s oft-brutalized name), she mostly constructs a powerful case for the many positive attributes of prayer and God.

It nevertheless feels peculiar that Karr goes head over heels into the Church—baptism, the other sacraments, the stuffy formalism of it all—when her case for Christianity relies largely on the peace of praying to God. It seems none of us are entirely godless; in fact, I would argue it is impossible to exist as such. Why then go on with the rituals of chanting, breaking the bread, etc. when it seems Karr is not entirely convinced of the purity of these sacred acts first seeing the church as “ideologically repugnant”? “It set my feminist spikes prickling.”

The majority of the poems in Sinners Welcome are melancholic and dark. Karr often describes herself and her writing, but more than a few handfuls of poems deal with overt Catholic dogma that at times is difficult to sit through if you don’t happen to be a devout Christian in awe of the striking similarity between the human body and a crucifix, “because the human frame / is a crucifix.” Well, there certainly is an undeniable resemblance, and pardon my sarcasm, I think it’s merely because the crucifix was created in the image of the body to suit its purpose. This is kind of like saying “because the dog’s frame / is a dog-jacket.”

Either way, Karr does make several other useful parallels. Placing the human body in the context of religion often provides insightful and sometimes chilling images. For instance, from “Revelations in the Key of K”:

…my being leans against my spinal K,
which props me up, broomstick straight,

a strong bone in the crypt of flesh I am.

One of the book’s more interesting moments occurs in “At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave a Message,” written for poet Franz Wright. It seems that Karr and Wright share similar pasts, troubled by bouts with ill-health and vice. Though the somewhat sweet poem does take the feared turn toward God, lines like “…this poet / who can crowbar open / the most sealed heart, make ash flower…” make the indulgences worth it.

Overall, it seems Karr is at her best when she doesn’t try so hard to concentrate or center her poetics on God, but rather lets herself be in awe of all of life’s pleasures and horrors. One particularly compelling example has to do with her son. The poem “Pluck” contains some of the most moving and perhaps intensely spiritual in the book, though the poet apparently takes the place of God: “my son led me down to a room / where crickets sang as if I were the sun.”

*

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