Archive for March, 2007

Key Bridge

Monday, March 26th, 2007

by Ken Rumble
Carolina Wren Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

5_5

Grinning Like Faith

key bridgeKey Bridge, which crosses the Potomac and connects Arlington, VA to Washington D.C. (more specifically, to Georgetown), is kind of an underwhelming bridge when compared to, say, the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridges. This adds a peculiar degree of levity to Key Bridge, Ken Rumble’s book-length abstract ode to the U.S. capitol.

When Hart Crane wrote his famous ode to the Brooklyn Bridge, he did so with authority—authority somehow in sync with the illusion of majesty the bridge itself commands—that the city commands, that a country commands. Less than a Ra Ra America poem, Crane’s ode had (has) a way of impressing empowerment from citizen to citizen. In Rumble’s poem there is little command over D.C.; the city, it seems, has its way with him and with everyone else. What Rumble has conceived of is a personal map of Washington D.C., as it pertains to his experiences, his memories, and his contradictions about the city’s contradictions. It’s an attempt to map out his psychic relationship with the city, if only to command some kind of meaning out of it in a time when D.C.’s shining symbolism feels more and more vapid.

The book takes the form of a journal. Each small section is given a date, beginning with 15.May.2000, and taking us (vaguely) through 9/11 and the Malvo sniper attacks. In any journal entry-style book, there are inevitably poems (sub-sections of a book-length poem, whatever) to cut—the trivial, the Poetic, the annoyingly fun, the sweet—and Key Bridge is no exception, though for the most part Rumble’s done his job. On April 1, 2001, he allows himself to be haunted by various ghosts:

Then they emerge all black & white
& glittering & I ignore them as they
stand in front of the TV
kiss me & wish me goodnight. MOVE
I say &
they’re gone.

Rumble, in these poignant lines, presents the conflict all people face when contending with the ghostliness of the dead. There’s more room for reflection in the open form Rumble’s created for himself; he remembers being younger in D.C.:

Summer nights the punks come here
    (& me when I was one
on hopes for unannounced Fugazi
shows…

But Rumbles after more than just surface-level reflection on the city. He is, for example, not afraid to tackle the race issue. Mapping the city and cataloging its racial divide seems of the utmost importance to young D.C. poets; I’m thinking specifically of Thomas Sayers Ellis, who organized his first book The Maverick Room according to the city’s quadrants. In Key Bridge D.C. is found

to have the first black majority
in a major U.S. city.
Chocolate city.
D. Chocolate City: the first one.

In addition to the race issue—which he pushes further than you may expect—Rumble’s idiosyncratic language and cut-and-paste abstraction evoke the image of a person astonished by the capitol city and at the same time, frightened by it; how, for example, does one quantify the fact that while America is involved in a dubious overseas war, there are people in the city willing to kill their own? The Malvo sniper attacks are apparently beyond reason and control, and the murderous pair behind them is likened to stars in the sky: “that they could be compared, the man & his boy— / his boy doing all the killing.” It’s all so complex that he’s helpless to avoid reducing it to a simple quandary:

It’s cold there today I know, cold all through
the Potomac like metal.

    (I put my thanks in Washington
    [D.C.: the ease of it all)

Unfortunately, you will from time to time find yourself distracted from lucid moments like this. Parentheses are slippery little fish and Rumble uses them with such freedom that you can’t help but think, at some point, that enough is enough (you’ll say, “that’s enough,” for example, when they are used to evoke “(d(i(s(t(a(n(c(e(”). Occasionally, especially towards the end, he’s too liberal with the word “love”:

There are places with many roads
to love near places with many trees
to love near many you
to love near many birds
to love near many me
to love near sounds like love
to love.

The point—that you can feel at once overwhelmed by love and confused the contradictions of the person/thing you love—is made too explicit here; instead of the vague, ghosted hints from the book’s better sections, I feel in these “love” lines like I’ve woken up inside an Easter basket. He almost ends the book with the enthralling image of Malvo “hung on the cover of Time” before giving in to the unfortunate impulse to comment again on the nature of love:

You are here

is always true

except in love.

A bit too much for the conclusion of the book; the D.C. obsession is far more interesting than the love obsession, entwined as they may be. Every now and then you’ll also come across a throwaway section as well; for example, when our poet is so hungover he could “eat a live cat.” But a crowd larger than that of the D.C.-philes will find a lot of pleasure in this narrator’s willingness to be aware of confusion, and to engage the capitol with an intelligent and discriminating eye: “Where am I? Where am I now?” And toward the end he does use the bridge and stake enough command over the capitol city to give you a chill:

Key Bridge in D.C. at night:
grey, blue & black—
the piers sweeping from the river
an arch as an afterthought

D.C. at Key Bridge with night:
the old bridge’s abutments grin like faith—
Whitehurst Freeway peels off the bridge early to drop
into Georgetown’s Foggy Bottom

The wordplay—Rumble’s a Steinian at heart—mixed with the domineering image of the less-than-domineering bridge gives you the sense that the poet is willing to control as much as he can while conceding most else to question and chance. The all-important word here is faith; and conflicted as he may be, it could be said that Rumble’s got enough of it to go around.

*

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Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
U. of Iowa Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

7.5 of 10 stars

Grackled Pane Pop-up Picture Book

lug your careless body out of the careful duskJoshua Marie Wilkinson’s new long poem makes me think of an efficient brown piano folded shut in the corner of a Kindergarten basement. Or the smell of dry-erase markers. I don’t know. Any other variation of the lateral sensation that the world is willing and affable—a sensation most grown-ups, pushing along, have difficulty maintaining.

The ability to “maintain” is also what separates the good from the bad in a book-length poem. What exactly constitutes a “book-length” poem these days? I’d say there is really no criterion apart from the designation given it by the poet or publisher; you call it a book-length poem rather than a bunch of little poems, and so it is.

Generally speaking it’s a poet willing to indulge a broader vision and often, it’s the attempt to find cohesion in a bunch of annoyingly disconnected fragments (“Hey man, what about The Waste Land?” seems the argument). But in successful cases—including that of Lug Your Careless Body—it has more to do with fusing a sustained inspiration with a trancelike appropriation of tone: both its consistency, and the control of its flux.

The best thing about Lug is that it is amazingly readable—a sort of surreal page-turner that gives you little ground but keeps you walking on it. It feels almost like an intellectual revision of the pop-up picture book; instead of illustrations or actual “pop-ups,” Wilkinson blends carefully sculpted imagery with sensible abstractions. What gets me the most is the childish playfulness of this, most humanized in one of my favorite passages:

Magpies fly out from the cartoon cat’s
slippery teeth, I feign exasperation

& the little girl on the sofa scoffs,
calling my bluff, & says,

Oh, yeah right—
    The best part with the cliff
    & the birdcage
& the rubber hose & that grumpy
old bulldog hasn’t even happened yet.

A sweet description of a cartoon and a child’s response to that cartoon; it is a good example of how this book is not sprawling, but careful. Small stanzas of varying lengths occur page after page, separated from each other at varying degrees by asterisks. There is no elaboration, no overwhelming sense of plot—just the chiseled fact of image and association. Sometimes it’s downright haunting:

Grackles of laughter.
A wet ghost sings her
widower’s body shakily
out of his shoes.

There’s a sense of gravity in such lines that appropriately weighs Lug down. Most every section is as charming and easy on the eyes. This is what I mean by page-turner; there’s no reason not to keep going, because the meditation is well-sustained and seldom overwrought. The consistency of tone is the all-important bottom, whether he’s positing rhetoric in one of a multitude of three-question tercets:

Couldn’t they fix you a pancake?
How did the mail arrive in the middle of the night?
Where didn’t they find the butterflies?

or tempting fate with his heavily guarded noir thread:

The thieves had lifted
themselves out of the tunnel
with such swiftness—

Thieves, butterflies, pancakes—the stuff of youthful adrenaline, if not for Wilkinson’s consistently grown-up dependence on evasiveness. The more glorious images pop off the page (“The boy arrived with a book of penguins”) and the questions find a cookies-and-milk way to apply reason to the hint that asking questions is vital, whether you figure things out or not. Along the way, the more spirited lines just plain sound good (“Ghost hole & a wooly rug slung out.”).

Once or twice, the aforementioned sweetness goes too far; here’s another depiction of a child, this time an apparently perfect young boy who frees a moth: “He has cats & sisters & confuses on purpose / their names.” You gotta go easy on the number innocent children you put in a book—limit it to one or none. But the fact he was able to access the sky-capped optimism they imply, then sustain it in amongst various other impulses serves as a great example of how a larger-scale project can be a success—and the title, at very least, has that motivational quality. This isn’t the cascading genius of Splay Anthem, but in its own pointed, tonal and majestic way stands out as one of the most readable, freeing and troubling books of 2006.

*

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Snip Snip!

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

by Tina Brown Celona
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

4_5

Cut Fastball

celona coverMy first thought: vasectomy. But that might only be because I just watched the Raymond episode in which Debra suggests Raymond “snip snip.”

Vasectomies are nowhere near Tina Brown Celona’s second book of poems, Snip Snip! There is, instead, a glorious poetry editing metaphor. The title appears near the end of the opening poem, “The Sewing Box”: “…Snip snip / Is what I do to my poems” and “I’m going to call my book / Snip snip! What do you think?” This poem deals with poems—the poems themselves and the writers that write them—and what’s frustrating about this subject is that it seems redundant. Write the poem and let me read it. I don’t care about much in between, so let go of my hand.

What does work about “The Sewing Box” is the tone, the rapidity of the lines, the energy. Celona can be very O’Haraesque—one of her poetry’s best qualities. Though I don’t think the poetry world needs nor wants another O’Hara, the enthusiasm for poems and the exclamation of “I feel terrific today” is attractive, not to mention addictive.

When I come to the second poem in the book I’m not sure what to expect. And what I find comes as a surprise. Here: “I even start to fart poems.” After reading Frederick Seidel’s latest, I’m a little tired of hearing about poets’ gastrointestinal workings. That’s not Celona’s fault, but truthfully, I never was particularly willing to hear about such things. Moving on…

A funnier, more successful—though still somewhat repulsive—poem is “Book Throw Up.” This poem maintains its sense of reality in that, of course, a book cannot really throw up, but can achieve balance with a sense of the fantastic and foul: “I hate the thought of birthing a book.” The verb “birthing” here is doing a considerable amount of work in a poem made up of only six lines. It completes the poem as a beast: an eating, breathing, depositing, reproducing animal.

Turning the page, I’m hoping for more nauseated book poems, or a poem whose title suggests something having to do with an animal, a tortoise in a shell maybe, or a cat-in-hat. Though there is a bumblebee in “Untitled (After Ceravolo),” my hopes are thwarted with the fourth poem, “Sunday Morning Cunt Poem.” Immediately, I think of the word “feminist,” which as I find out appears twice in the poem’s penultimate line.

There’s been much talk about “reclaiming” the word “cunt,” but whether or not this poem qualifies as an attempt at such is unclear to me. The word’s use here is simply a failed attempt at reclaiming an audience’s attention. Don’t worry though; the cunt has yet to make its featured appearance. It actually engages in a lengthy photo shoot in “I Threw Away My Gun and My Harness” with its friend, the “asshole.”

What helps the jarring and terribly blunt nature of the “cunt poems” is the small explanation offered in the longest poem in the book: “Highlights from the Permanent Collection.” I like this title because it implies that this is the serious stuff, the things about life that are immovable. This is an exciting and simultaneously terrifying notion. Here’s the thought behind these poems:

sullenly spitting out poems
the independent wife
censored her cunt poems
as if life
could be without poems
lacking strife.

Now, I don’t usually appreciate the explanation, the “here’s why I wrote this poem,” or the “just in case you didn’t get it…”; however, the contrast in tone between said cunt poems and this tidbit is satisfying because it is human. It’s revealing in a real way, in a way that is much more daring than talk of taking pictures of one’s sexual organ. In fact, it is somewhat of a confession as we see later in the poem with lines like “Angrily I dashed my child’s brains out against a rock.” Now surely the action wasn’t carried out in reality, but the sentiment is real, unforgivable, and revealed.

The writing in “Highlights from the Permanent Collection” takes over. It gathers momentum, builds life, and in a sense departs from the poet’s pen. To use an old cliché, it has life of its own, so much so in fact, that it can’t help itself but to stray from topic to topic. Whatever may be consuming the poet’s thoughts and energy, a cause of stress or a simple, fleeting thought are all subjects that are taken to the page. In a dismal political climate then, it becomes difficult not to eventually comment on the state of things. And Celona is no exception:

The third world is waiting around the corner and what are we doing?
    We’re trying to put carbon dioxide under the sea! George Bush wants to
        go to war and there’s no stopping him.      

Snip Snip! was released from Fence Books at the exact same time as another brutally direct book, Ariana Reines’s The Cow. But where Reines showed in all its stomach-turning real-realness “the other side of the beast,” Celona likes to say cunt again and again which hasn’t been revolutionary in some time; the word doesn’t need to be “reclaimed.” The book reads best when she’s funny or charming without the unnecessary attempt at desensitizing us to the “c” word. On that note I’ll leave you with the funniest part of Celona’s book, which comes nearing the end of the long poem:

A poetry joke: A Language Poet and a Black Mountain School Poet and a         
    Fence Poet are sitting around chewing the fat. What do we have in    
        common? asked the Language Poet. But the Black Mountain School Poet    
            was tired of stupid poetry jokes. He wanted to go to Asheville and smoke    
                pine needles.

*

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Embryoyo

Tuesday, March 20th, 2007

by Dean Young
Believer Books 2007
Reviewed by David Sewell

9

Walk the Dog

embryoyoIn the July/August ’05 issue of Poetry (nominally, at least, that year’s “humor” issue), Dean Young reviewed his latest book, Embryoyo, and nine others. Well, sort of. Here’s part of what he said: “But in Mr. Young’s what seems zillioneth slim volume of verse there is a seeming inability to take what is serious seriously, and let us not forget the enactment of the sacred is the enactment of separation. What abominable mixing we have in this monstrous tome, and one feels often like one is watching a clown burst into tears, a very uncomfortable, even traumatizing experience should it happen to a young mind.”

Poetry usually calls its omnibus reviews “Ten Takes”—or however many takes are present. Young calls his, a sort of satirical poem as review, “Ten Tokes.” I mention this only because if there’s anything worth regularly assailing in Young’s writing, it’s that his sense of humor has the tendency to go a bit too slack or wind up a bit too puerile, which that title is a decent enough example of.    

Young does manage to be regularly funny, though, and while his M.O. in Embryoyo is pretty much the same one he’s been running with for the last three or so books—mixing funny with serious—this time it seems he’s a bit more focused—here, on death (“So what is the cause of death?” begins “Inverness Grey”) and immutability in a life (“So much life we cannot have or / find or repeat yet so much we had and found,” from “Resignation Letter”). So it seems the jokey-jokes are not so important, or present, this time around.

A quick aside or two, though, before we really get going: In the June ’05 New Criterion, the critic William Logan said a number of bitchy things about Young’s previous book, Elegy on Toy Piano (which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a fact that is mentioned in four separate places in the otherwise toothsomely designed Embryoyo). Here’s one of the barbs from Logan’s review: “Elegy on Toy Piano shows what happens when a poet inherits a difficult, contradictory tradition (the uses of surrealism are almost as various as the use of lyric) and can make nothing out of it but trash.”

And, in response to “Ten Tokes,” someone calling himself Charles Douthat, whom Google advises is a lawyer in Connecticut, wrote in to Poetry with a knee-slapper of his own, implying, one, that Poetry has ethics and, two, that it is engaged in a journalistic endeavor. Here’s his opening salvo, which he somehow managed to get down on paper despite the state of shock he had been unwittingly dragged into: “I am shocked, reading the letters you elect to print, that not a single reader has complained about the extraordinary breach of journalistic ethics evidenced in the July/August issue.”

I mention these two responses because I think it’s worth noting that Young’s poems tend to radically polarize those who have been exposed to them (and they give “Ten Tokes” the perspective it deserves). That said, it seems that what Logan is up to is furthering his defense of an old guard that is not old as much as decrepit, and that Douthat, well, that Douthat just needs to chill out.

As I’ve mentioned, Embryoyo sees Young doing pretty much the same thing he’s been up to for a while. The usual wit and imagination are in as prodigious supply as ever. All of Young’s normal moves are in play—mixing of the high and low (“It is not that I love ottava rima less / now that I know it is a verse form / and not a Renaissance hooker,” from “Continuing Instruction”), rapid juxtapositions (Frankenstein appears later in the poem), the surreal (“It doesn’t hurt when the raven / puts its beak into my chest,” from “Mortal Coil”), the absurd (“It is now clear that eating your own brain / will make you mad,” from “House of Geodes”), and the just plain silly (“Bunny glimpsed by headlight: sailor’s / delight; bunny in the morning red: / might as well stay in bed,” from “Bunny Tract”).

In “Clam Ode,” he talks a bit about clams then makes a detour to talk about sucking jawbreakers on the Jersey Shore. Reflecting on this jawbreaker detour, he writes: “What does this have to do with clams? / A feeling.” Reading Young’s poems requires a sizeable amount of trust on the part of the reader, as it’s clear we’re going to be rapidly moved around to wherever Young’s feelings take him. This can be exciting, but also confusing, even, at times, exasperating. But, like it or not, this is the Dean Young engine.

Where Young has perhaps struggled most before has been in balancing the antic impulse with the need to leave the reader with something resonant. In Elegy, though the line between the two is often somewhat muddy, or even, at times, too stark, the poems still work, even if they aren’t always perfect creations. The poems in Embryoyo, for the most part—owing to the fact that Young is more focused or, perhaps, more singularly obsessed—strike a more satisfying balance. “No Forgiveness Ode,” a highly rewarding poem, begins like this:

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly
but nothing can be taken back

Young then goes on to list several examples of things that can’t be taken back—leaves, rain, ugly things said. Listing, or exemplifying, is a mode he falls into regularly, and this mode’s success depends on how interesting/fresh/moving the little lists are. The list in this poem is, I think, a good one, though it’s good mainly because it doesn’t try to be too cute or clever. The poem ends well, and the ending actually has a feeling of inevitability—it doesn’t seem to be just the sense-making cap on a madcapping poem. Here it is:

The heart needs its thorns
just as the rose its profligacy.
Just because you’ve had enough
doesn’t mean you wanted too much.

But here’s a beginning that doesn’t work quite as well, from “Glow Ode”:

My best idea so far had been
to take a girl to a half-built house
and feel her up but bras back then
allowed a woman to feel secure
knowing if she fell from an airplane
into the ocean and was snagged and dragged
through the water by 50 mph barracudas
her foundation would remain in place
so you think I’d be better prepared
but some experiences can only be true
if you’re not prepared.

Here’s another beginning, from “Sean Penn Anti-Ode”:

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face?

The first example reminds me of a Saturday Night Live sketch allowed to go on too long (though the poem recovers by the ending [“no one noticed / my new floor until I told them, / how it makes the whole kitchen glow / and one of the guys who laid it / only had one arm!”]); the second reminds me that different people find very different things funny. But there aren’t many major hiccups in the book, if hiccups these be. More often he hits his stride, doing the thing that only he seems able to do—riding his impish persona to illogical ends, making something out of an awful lot, combining all the disparate elements he fancies into one big jumble of a successful poem.

In “Leaves in a Dead Swimming Pool,” Young writes, “Theories about art aren’t art any / more than a description of an aphid is an aphid. A menu isn’t a meal. We’re trying to build birds, not birdhouses.” I like that as a shorthand poetics. And keeping that in mind, it’s hard to take too much issue with Young’s attempts at building birds, an ambitious undertaking, no doubt. Maybe some of his poems-cum-birds are a bit too big, maybe some deliver the same note too many times in succession. But like alchemy or astrology, what Young is up to is not science. We’d do well to remember that.

To touch briefly on Young’s self-review excerpted above, one problem he has is not that he can’t take the serious seriously—which, in Embryoyo, he does—but that, at times, he entrusts the not serious or not really interesting with a seriousness/prominence/presence it doesn’t really deserve (the bra and barracuda business, for example).

But at the center of all of Young’s pyrotechnics, the speaker so consistently (Young is consistent above all things) evinces such a bountiful amount of humanity (“I would rather spend an hour with a dying squirrel than tour a cathedral,” from “Paradise Poem”) that the resulting persona, which we already know is highly entertaining to listen to, is also quite likeable. Combine that with Young’s fecund imagination and his willingness to take grand risks, and the resulting poems are quite good.

As for our Connecticut lawyer, I think that his sense of humor could clearly use a bit of fresh air. And as for Logan, the adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure is never more relevant than when considering Young’s poems, or, for that matter, when considering Logan’s.

But Young’s idiosyncratic babel is not trash. It’s something else, something hard to put a finger on. The poems always seem to be flying away—from easy sense making, from themselves, from us. It’s almost as if they are birds. And, as birds, most of them soar well above the seed-pecked fields of contemporary poetry.

*

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Black Box

Monday, March 12th, 2007

by Erin Belieu
Copper Canyon Press 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

9

Nobody’s Monkey

belieu coverBlack Box is Erin Belieu’s third book.  In her previous books, Infanta and One Above & One Below, Belieu staked out a philosophical voice with a youthful concern: being fit for suitable company.  She also introduced the complex notion of the risk of being trapped in a cycle of replacement (Remember the 1967 British TV series “The Prisoner”?).  In both books, Belieu vacillated between the fearful valences of being inadequate and being blissfully whole and powerful beyond measure.  Kind of like playing the Lady or the Tiger…will matrimony bring no-holds-barred blissful integrity…or will it bring sorrow and grief?

Black Box is the next signpost in the journey. The collection begins with an epithalamion (a song at the bridal chamber).  The prize of the night is odd and disconcerting….an “upended bucket, chrome / trophy hiding its galaxy of holes.”  The birth of a child follows…but even here the new soul’s father is referred to as “grief’s tent-show wizard”:

I go to our Chinese takeaway,
where the place mats say I’m a snake
and you were my favorite pig, though
astrologically you were a wasting
disease and I’m the scales of justice. 

(In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral, #5)

Marital infidelity is serious moral mischief.  It engenders disappointment and sorrow; it triggers bitterness and anger.  So confronted with the disappointment and sorrow of mischief/tiger, Belieu’s poetry counters much like Jean Anouilh’s double-barrel enraged Medea, sans filicide––or in reference to poetry: think John Keats’s eloquence piping through the fury of Sylvia Plath. 

Think candy box turned coffin.  While Belieu is somebody’s mother, she is nobody’s monkey!  Think poetry as retribution:

My dear, even the worst despot in his leopard-skin fez
will tell you: the truth doesn’t win, but it makes an appearance,
though it’s a foreign cavalry famous for bad timing and
half-assed horsemanship.

On the unfaithful’s imagined grave, the betrayed howls her pagan revenge and magnifies the shame of their broken state:

I am undead and sulfurous. I stink like a tornado.
I lift my scarlet tail above your grave
and let the idiot villagers take me
in torchlight
one by one by one by one…
Your widowed Messalina, my soprano
cracks the glasses on the buffet at the after party.

(In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral, #2)

Belieu is not tepid.  Like Sara Nelson: “Take no prisoners, I told my warriors. They will only slow us down.”  Belieu is no Lady Macbeth; her bitter rage is always subjunctive to clear betrayal, devastating disappointment, a fundamental empathy for life and a belief in decency and fair play.

This review opened with allusions to Nelson Mandela: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”  But there is more to that quote:  “It is our light not our darkness that frightens us…. As we are liberated from our fears, our presence automatically liberates others.”

And oddly, there is Ralph Waldo Emerson:  “No evil is pure, no hell itself without its extreme satisfactions.”

Perhaps, in the end, Belieu’s Fury like her Love carries her forward.  Augustine of Hippo:  “Amore meus pondus meum eo feror quocunque feror.“ (Confessions, Book 13)  “My Love [or read, my Fury] is my burden, by it I am carried wherever I am carried.”

    But the day comes… when
the tea olive waving its arms
    over the back fence puts up

its white-flowered fuss again, arguing
        for sweetness.

(“At Last”)

Belieu is a worthwhile poet—not because she is sassy or subversive, though it is true that she is both.  Belieu’s poems are courageous, smart and artful. This book places her among the best poets writing today.  Nothing here not to love.

*

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Ooga-Booga

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

by Frederick Seidel
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

6stars_7

An Exopthalmic, Psychosexual Animal

ooga boogaAs if the photograph on the cover wasn’t enough to scare me, Seidel’s opening poem in his latest—Ooga-Booga­­—is titled “Kill Poem.” All right, my hopes weren’t high, but as I started to read the poem, I got into it. I’m a sucker for animals or “the animal,” which, I think, is a befitting title for Seidel, and “Kill Poem” is certainly packed with the animalistic: “of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.” So, it’s a hunting poem?

But, the title gives away the fact that there’s more to this poem than hunting foxes and deer. The poem quickly evolves into a political commentary: “Winter, spring, Baghdad, fall,” “I am in a killing field,” “I am civilized but / I see the silence.” By the end of the poem, I’m stunned, but left with the question, what exactly is poetry’s role in this killing? I never really found out.

Seidel shows in Ooga-Booga that he is a technical poet. Many of his lines are end-stopped and even when the thought hasn’t been completed the line is stopped with a period. The emphatic building this induces creates a certain tension in the poem that grows, but somehow never climaxes. The tension is a constant until the final, harrowing lines of the book: “Open the mummy case of this text respectfully. / You find no one inside.” And even then there is still the closing of the book followed by the final glare of the cover photograph.

Even when Seidel is at his most technical, stern, or shuddersome, he manages to find room for humor, as in “Fog”: “The Lord is my shepherd and the Director of Superbike Racing.” The obvious allusion to the 23rd psalm—which reappears in a later poem “East Hampton Airport”—combined with Seidel’s fanaticism for Superbike Racing makes this line fantastically funny. This is a common gimmick of Seidel’s—filching famed lines—and though his efforts are sometimes successful, too often they fall short as in “E-mail from an Owl” (which I think we can all agree is a damn good title). The poem is humorous as you might imagine and about half way through it invokes the Lord’s Prayer.  Discussing an irrigation system, said line reads, “Drip us this day our daily bread, or rather this night.” Get it? Drip? Yeah, anyway…

My other problem with Seidel’s sense of funny is his consistent reliance on gross-out jokes. These types of jokes stopped working on me around age 12, but maybe it’s different for men. The poem “Dick and Fred” has one line in particular that I can’t find justification for. Here it is: “Holofernes’ startled head farts blood.” Ugh… Holofernes is a figure from the deuterocanonical Book of Judith. As you probably guessed, he was beheaded (while drunk by the seductress Judith; shameful.). But still. Farts? Really? Not to mention the fact that the line “cunt with a dick” is repeated throughout the poem. Real classy. Perhaps a worse line appears in “Barbados.” “Diarrhea in a condom is the outcome.” Who is this guy?

If you haven’t heard of him, know he’s been in the game a long time, and has a reputation as sort of a New York City recluse. What I can say for him is that his wit is unique, often punny with lines like “cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel.” I agree; this is funny. Another example would be from “The Death of the Shah” in which Seidel writes, “I remember the Duck and Duckess of Windsor. / You could entertain them in your house.” Hilarity.  And if you find sexual imagery or graphic reference to the body interesting than this book is a must read. Also in “The Death of the Shah,” Seidel confesses “Here I am, not a practical man / …Seeking sexual pleasure above all else…” I believe that.

When not preoccupied with functions of the anus, Seidel’s explorations could be described as psychosexual (emphasis on psycho). He writes about a racer being a wonderful sexual partner with the exception of its lack of tits in “Dante’s Beatrice” and about his allegedly “dynamite penis” in “Climbing Everest.” And check out these lines from “Mother Nature”: “Mother nature went to China / China the vagina.” Okay, that’s enough.

Nevertheless, comedy or comedic attempts don’t dominate the book. And often the humor is a stab at reaching a far more serious sentiment. Perhaps anger or frustration. Ooga-Booga delves into the grave state of the nation. It makes repeated reference to the 9-11 attacks, the War in Iraq, and none of them taken lightly, but rather weighted with, from what I can gather, shame and opposition. The book even contains a poem titled “The Bush Administration.” The poem is in eight parts, maybe one for each dreadful year… But let’s not forget that when Seidel is funny, he’s the funniest. I’ll leave you with the whole of my favorite poem from Ooga-Booga:

I am Siam

I saw the moon in the sky at sunset over a river pink as a ham.
I am the governess imported from England by me,
The widowed King of Siam.
I drop down on one knee.
I want to marry me.
Where you are I am.
Là où tu es je suis. Où tu es je suis.
I drop down on one knee.
I want to marry me.
I do a saut de chat at sunset over a silver spoon of jam.
Jam for the royal children, Felicity
And Sam.
I am the English governess imported from England by me.
I am the widowed King of Siam! The widowed King of Siam!

*

 

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The Piercing

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

by Christine Garren
Louisiana State University Press 2006
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

7

Living Clarity

garren coverIn Christine Garren’s new book, The Piercing, you will encounter some traditionally “poetic” imagery: leaves, ponds, old lovers, bits of garbage.  Fortunately, Garren manages to make them her own in an impressively personal display.  It’s poetry that looks and feels exactly like poetry but still offers a genuine poetic experience. How rare.

The book begins almost mired in nostalgia but soon moves beyond that narrowly subjective condition to examine the condition itself.  The result is a set of small, sophisticated poems that exhibit that uncontrollable expansion and contraction of time in a person’s mind.  The duration of a longtime friendship is comparable to a boy jumping off of a pier; an afternoon is comparable to a romance.

An instantaneous, paramount present hinges upon the massive action of a past that is constantly fading, synthesizing, and reducing itself into the small packages of “feeling” we are left with.  “The Piercing”, which closes the book, emphasizes and solidifies this theme.  Garren equates the loss of a loved one with an ear piercing:

                        …this

millimeter’s-width opening is for a decade to fit through.

Look, there you go.  There I go—there our landscape goes as if

through a fantastical roof’s hole, the shingle pulled off, the nail off—

our death is

flying over the city.

Garren’s images are more traditionally associated with concepts of objectivism or those transcendent moments when a social or natural experience pulls the author outside of him- or herself.  She artfully confuses the moment and expansiveness of life:

                …I felt
an insect step across my hand, across a vein
while my body was still closer to its birth than to its death.

There is a recurring suggestion that experience is formed in memory more so than it exists as an entity in and of itself.  In “The Swimmers” Garren describes boys swimming off of a pier in early evening.  Somehow, “from so long ago, this / has gained such force inside me.” The past is always abstract and overwhelming, but Garren has used precision and poise to control the depth of a lifetime.

*

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