Archive for July, 2007

Human Scale

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

By Michael Kelleher
BlazeVOX [books] 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

6_5stars_6

But Mom, He Missed the Kyrie

kelleher_coverIn a recent email to Coldfront, Geoffrey Gatza , publisher of BlazeVox Books, took my anguished pan of what I felt was his overwrought book in fine spirit, and I thank him for that. The second BlazeVox entry I’m reviewing shows almost too neat contrasts with the first. Human Scaleby Michael Kelleher is a small book, measuring not quite 4X6. Its contents are pared almost to the point of minimalism, and its cover pictures a solitary figure standing on a ridge of ice, silhouetted against an immense, blue sky. Interior graphics are also pared down, consisting of high contrast monochromes of things like birds on streetlights, an osprey pole and buildings in Buffalo, NY, where Kelleher lives, and runs the “Olson Now” project. He does a good job of using the book’s small size to advantage. The content plays to the book’s disarming size in ways that are ingratiating more than cloying. It’s almost as if Kelleher wants to play the deliberate foil to Charles Olson’s giganticism. This can only be a good thing, as no one can outdo the master at Mythico-Zeusian bloviating, and I say this as a huge Olson fan.

Part of what Kelleher brings to the table is an appealing understatement. When one of my critically savvy friends picked up the book and turned right to “Seasonal Affect,” with its 18 nearly identical four-line two-word stanzas, there was a definite eye-rolling moment. I wanted to defend this book and this poem in context and in general, and I’ll use the opportunity here. The first stanza is:

Cold spring

Cherry blossom

Petals falling

Summer bloom

Since Kelleher wants to describe the unfolding of seasonal change, he starts with a simple two-word phrase, and runs through the permutations of changing one word at a time to a similar-sounding word (“cold” to “hold”, “cherry” to “apple”, “ blossom” to “picking”, “petals” to “nettles”, “falling” to “folding”, and “bloom” to “blue”), until the middle two stanzas are repeated, then changing each word back until the last stanza repeats the first. This stratagem might seem mechanical, but to me it emphasizes the continuity of the natural cycle, and the closeness of each word to its opposite.

Kelleher walks us through other similar changes in this book, more successfully in some than in others. “La Jetee” is a powerful but somewhat predictable permutation of the cycles of world violence. “A Passing Shadow” is a rather heavy-handed take on Plato’s allegory of the cave. More winning for me is “Mon Voyage Around the Lake”, a deliberately flat, macaronic travelogue, which, as Henri Bergson might say, humorously transposes the natural expression of an idea into another key: “Ensuite, je drove to Detroit. Je walked about. /Je looked at buildings. Je rode The People Mover around the eviscerated urban core.” This reminds me of a line in Wallace Stevens’ oft-collected December 2, 1920 letter to Harriet Monroe: “Je vous assure, madame, q’une promenade a travers the soot deposit qu’est Indianapolis est une chose veritablement estrange”, which still delights me, probably because I don’t know any French. My larger point is that this is the Wallace Stevens you want to invite to dinner, rather than the Olympian poet, or the dour insurance executive.

In “Nachtmusik”, Kelleher writes a miniature missal for the kind of ecological, spiritual poetics encouraged by Olson. The first stanza explains the title phrase:

Noir, noir,
The night has come,

The human scale
Is tipped, the rut,

The groove, the frame
Of mind forming

Out of themselves
Themselves.

This reads like a refrain. In fact, the poem will end with “What that love// Might mean, omen/ After omen, amen.” This prayer yearns for “Water, light, earth/ & stars” and a school where he can “learn/ /To read these/ Beautiful warnings.” The disarming sincerity displayed here is remarkable for its humility, and warms cobwebbed cockles in my heart that haven’t been swept since my Confirmation. Kelleher makes this risky move work because of the relative subtlety of the book’s My First Missal-like size and structure, the careful escalation of the explicitness of his refrains, and the correspondingly tough, semi-surrealistic takes on Cuba and Picasso’s Guernica that frame the collection, protecting it like the rind of a handmade cheese, making it suitable for export and rough handling. I should close on that note. Don’t let my liturgical nostalgia deter you from this book.

*

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The Man Suit

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

by Zachary Schomburg
Black Ocean 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

8

…Now Let’s Grenade the Owls

man suitWith the exception of some asshole who told me the other day that nobody reads James Tate anymore, I think we can generally agree that Tate’s in the handful of vital figureheads in American poetry. And it is also true that if you read the plethora of books that emerge from new writers each year, you’ll find Tate everywhere.

I bring up Tate in order to offer you my only criticism of Zachary Schomburg’s first book: Tate, one of his three blurbers, has wielded an extraordinary amount of influence here; the notion of setting up a narrative prose poem one way, then turning another way and maybe another before all is viciously surreal and the poem turns on its head (or elbow or cashew) is something that Tate has completely mastered. At times Schomburg’s poems take refuge here; on other occasions, he shows he’s capable of much more.

Because bland guesses at Schomburg’s giants notwithstanding, I should mention The Man Suit is the best first book I’ve read this year.

The Tate near-imitations are underwhelming and a handful could’ve been left on the cutting-room floor. Nevertheless, The Man Suit is a mystery; everything is connected and yet not, every character is suspect. You’ll make connections here and there, but plot is seldom the point. Schomburg’s surreal little world is bent on imagination as an escape from fear, and on his sky-capped romantic twitches. He’s also willing to make you chuckle. Take “A Band of Owls Moved Into Town.” In the beginning, we’re told that upon moving to town, owls simply “shopped for groceries and ran for office, that sort of thing.” Slowly, the owls take over—new construction until the town “developed a night life and the constant buzz of yellowish electricity.”

1984 fans won’t be surprised, then, that the poem’s narrator meets and falls for a woman named Julia. It’s them against the world:

She was incredible—the most amazing eyes. We stayed awake through most nights holding each other beneath the moonlit window. We talked about everything, but mostly our disdain for the construction and the flood of immigrant owls.

And because I can’t resist, I’ll ruin the conclusion for you:

I told her, We seem to be the only two who are concerned, who notice. The only two who want…

Who want a simpler life, she said. The only two who…who…

Forget that it’s a pun. It’s hilarious. Their transition from people to owl-folk is underway, and the sideways idea that carries the poem—owls taking over—is qualified by more than just the “nightlife” they imposed. Make metaphor of the owls if you will, but the romantic relationship is the most fascinating part, as it’s squared where all fascinating relationships are squared—in the midst of turmoil and change, however absurd. A cartoon Casablanca.

Elsewhere Schomburg continues his willfully mysterious world and his inclination toward spooky romance. He is deft at pulling off what actors are trained to pull off: being real in an imagined world. There’s vulnerability at the center of the book, accounted for by the straight face the poet holds when painting a surreal or absurd premise on a canvas of romantic largesse. Look at “The Lung and Haircut,” which opens: “At a Halloween party, a lung went as a haircut, and a haircut went as a lung.” Inevitably, the two meet and become inseparable. Any time two people/lungs/haircuts become inseparable, inevitability looms large—all of their time is spent together, and losing each other is a fate worse than genocide. Back to the moonlit bedroom:

Once, when the lung got sick and couldn’t go to work, the haircut stayed home too and they watched a half-dozen movies. They discussed their biggest fears one quiet night beneath a golden moon, black clouds shifting and giving chase, planes landing carefully in the distance, one right after the other, in perfect intervals. The haircut’s fear was to be eaten by a shark, but he was lying. The lung knew it. There was a long silence between them. The blinking lights of another plane slid across the black sky. The lung said timidly, losing you.

You could argue that simply labeling one party “lung” and the other “haircut” doesn’t necessarily justify the subsequent romantic clichés. Fair enough. But by the time this poem comes around, you’re so steeped in Schomburg’s world you’re willing to take it.

Because what drives this book, what it reminds me of anyway, is the ever-dominant presence of “inverse.” The inverse of being with someone is being without them. The inverse of being alive is being dead. To have things one way is to have them the other way eventually; everything will be reduced to sand. If you’re alive, you will die, and you know it; in this way you’re already dead, so put on your “man suit” and live out your days—life as essentially comic.

The character “Carlos” comes and goes, provides some fear and stasis, especially during the scary black-and-white telephone sequence; is he alive or dead, is the narrator Carlos, no he isn’t—which phone will kill you if you answer it, which will mean everlasting life—does either mean either, does anything mean anything—and where does “Marlene” fit in? You’ll want to reread this book, and the more you do, the more different pieces fit, while the puzzle itself has no clear margins.

The Man Suit is nevertheless the result of a singular vision. The quirky section “Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene” works on its own terms, for example, but the use of the character “M” keeps begging the question—is it Mary Todd, is it Marlene from elsewhere in the book, is it something entirely other. The Man Suit keeps us asking and keeps us pretending, and it never assumes itself an authority. To live in a world where people write and publish books of poetry is to mean the opposite eventually, is in fact to mean a planet with no people at all. Change, it seems, is what defines nature, nature is always in command, evidenced with jokey symbolism when a man has “chainsaws for arms” and when a girl opens her mouth and “crows and doves are making a nest in her throat.”

Vulnerability in the face of inevitability, and imaginative invention—which is keenly human—as the antidote: the sense that some kind of doom is impending, that “the things that surround us” may or may not mean to menace us, but will nevertheless equalize us in the end. To be romantic is to imagine; to impose thought on anything is to imagine. Do Jane and Winston stand a chance against the owls? Nope. But that’s not to say they shouldn’t do battle. The same can be said of the impetus for any poetic/artistic act. To be surreal, to invent new worlds, is (to borrow a Simic image) a way of threatening the stars with a wooden spoon, and to delight at the hilarity of the attempt. In The Man Suit, the reader is left to genuinely dissolve these matters, if only at the instant of a much-needed guffaw or at the soft transcendence of obeying Stevens and succumbing to our imaginative capacity as though it were a religion: “Tell me you hear laughter and the shuffling of feet as the townspeople dance in the street because of these notes and not in spite of them.” Indeed. Now get me a cup of coffee and a pen.

Of course, inverse being what it is, our narrator is so comfortable in his imagined world that he’s helpless to avoid leaving it in the end. He eats the apple, as it were, by blowing through a voice box that Carlos finds in the throat of a dead sheep: “[I take a shallow breath and blow]. I am dying, so cold without wool, and afraid.” Our poet has shed his wool, and now we can hope for something equally invigorating, even more detached and—ideally—fiercely original.

*

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The Book of Ocean

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

by Maryrose Larkin
i.e. Press 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

5_5

The Book of Books

larkin_bookofoceanThe themes in Maryrose Larkin’s The Book of Ocean are grand. The book is divided into six sections, each dedicated to a large idea, sometimes abstract, and each titled “The book of [insert profound variable].” She spends significant time with gods like gravity, time, history, and of course, ocean.

It is not surprising then that the opening poem is titled “Brief Gravity” and immediately marries the narrator to the cosmos: “I rhyme with the ground,” a stellar first line, I think, but perhaps what follows is too predictable: “and all at once it falls / apple  I am apple.” The biblical/Newtonian contexts are inevitable and yet Larkin pursues them explicitly: “apple severed from the tree / not the snake or the woman…” Gravity is indeed what grounds us, and is easily employed as a grand metaphor for the outcome of original sin and all subsequent disobedience. All of this seems obvious, though Larkin isn’t finished yet. She writes, “to be gravity is to be understood.” She embraces our fallen position and she uses it to her advantage. Even the “red dark unknown,” presumably the unrecognizable afterlife, the vague fear of death, is welcomed by Larkin. She moves full-force into the unknown and into the book: “throw me in the air / but don’t catch.”

The next poem continues in the same vein, discussing the unknown and the possibilities for combating the terror it produces. We can ponder and query, discuss and press on, but part of Larkin’s message seems to be that we cannot, must not, fall silent. If we merely accept the impenetrability of it all, it is then that true fear will set in. Paralysis is the only possible outcome of silence:

the discord
which        rises within silence
disorder.

Since only further disorder will arise from silence, it is necessary to communicate, or at least interact, with one’s surroundings. Certainly humans are not the only ones that struggle with the incomprehensible and as Larkin posits, we are not the only to fight it with communication, as even the stars carry on a “dialogue.”

Larkin repeatedly returns to the impasse of silence. For the narrator silence is deadly: “over silence / I cannot pass.” Often silence has positive connotations like thought, concentration or meditation; however, for Larkin if those thoughts are never vocalized, made public, released even, then they are swallowed up by the abyss:

In vacuums    a manifest destiny

Essentially, this is the poet’s manifesto, the very reason she values poetry and writing.

Larkin goes beyond abstract ideas in this collection. One of my favorite images comes from a poem called “Noah Variations”—again with the biblical references, though the image of which I’m speaking isn’t an ark. In fact, I can’t be sure what it is, but here are the lines: “rose blood / retina hung high above the sea.” My initial thought is of the sun and I like this comparison to the body, something fleshier perhaps would have also been nice. It establishes an identifiable connection between our own bodies and the body of the universe; we are made of similar parts. Several times Larkin likens portions of the cosmos or atmosphere to earthly or material objects with which we are familiar. As in “Sext”: “because the sky is a strange broken mirror”—a beautiful fragment to open the poem, the notion that what’s below is reflected above and is, in part, our body.

As the universe reflects portions of itself, humans mimic other forms of life. Larkin points out in “Alphabet Walking” the way we’ve constructed our alphabet, letters, and words: “the earliest of insect depictions / curve reflected in spine reflected in mind and on the page.” Strikingly true. Think of a praying mantis, the A-framed wings of a fly. She goes on in this manner in the following poem: “a sentence as a femur.” So letters are formed by small creatures such as insects; it takes a whole femur to indicate a sentence.

All in all, I’m impressed with and softened by Larkin’s beachside conjectures and interrogations. She raises many interesting observations, but I’d like to hear some of her conclusions or at least working answers to these mysteries of life. Larkin attempts closure, but at times fails due to cheesy technique as in “Pulse for Two Voices.” She aims to bookend the poem with two similar yet polar ideas. The poem begins with the phrase “the wait of expansion,” goes on for a while with an odd columnar list of everything from medical terms to tabby cats, and ends with the phrase “the wait of contraction.” No good. Also, it seems she is offering multiple meanings through her choice of preposition “of” versus “for.” Could “wait” also be read as “weight?” Either way…

The visual elements of Larkin’s poems can often be frustrating and seemingly uncalled for. A later poem called “Remedy” produces said effect. Some lines are in italics, some regular type, others appear centered and the indentations are off-set. The appearance of the poem is scattered. Perhaps the intended outcome was “funky”; that’s the only word that comes to mind. Italics offer the possibility of three poems, so again, we have options, but this is hardly a new technique and more interesting things have been done with structure to effectively alter rhythm and meaning.

In the end, what’s best about Larkin’s book is that it echoes many of the cosmic questions most people face over the course of a lifetime; it is constant affirmation that nobody knows, but at least we have ideas and can share them and continue to be lost together.

*

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Indeed I Was Pleased with the World

Monday, July 9th, 2007

by Mary Ruefle
Carnegie Mellon University Press 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

9

Critic’s Corner

pleased with the worldThe cover of Mary Ruefle’s 10th book of poems, Indeed I Was Pleased with the World, shows a detail from artist Zoe Leonard’s installation piece Strange Fruit—a work composed of the torn skins of various kinds of fruit, which are sloppily but beautifully sewn back together with needle and thread, then scattered about the space like so many damaged (if badly/weirdly, wonderfully) scarred survivors of gravity’s end-stop.  As a result, the work achieves a beaten up, desperate, and tragic presence, which somehow simultaneously gives off a vibe of deep and impossible monster marvelousness.  One might conclude that it draws its inspiration equally from Billy Holiday, Frankenstein, and The Sex Pistols.  All in all, the work is a vivid depiction of damaged goods in all their great sadness and fiery goodness. As such, it is easily (though interestingly) interpretable in terms of various aspects and avenues of our contemporary world (the casualties of war, plastic surgery disasters, reality television), as well as in terms of human life and existence generally (see GRAVITY above).

The detail in question on the cover of Ruefle’s book is of a single orange skin with one long vertical cut, which has been loosely sewn together with a single stitch.  The top of the orange has been completely capped (think of removing the top portion of someone’s skull for a brain surgery) and then sewn back in place in a dizzying off-center circle.  In addition, stitches also creep out from beneath the orange, alluding to other damage underneath and perhaps also around its back.  As a result of all its trauma and lack of substance—this is after all merely an orange’s skin, there’s no orange to be found—the orange is misshapen and lonely looking, though it does retain something of its lovely red-orange color as a reminder of its past natural beauty. Finally, the juxtaposition of the skin (how quickly things become ambiguous!) with the white thread and the still attached hanging needle gives the image an immediate, if in between, sort of glow—the image of a thing mended/on the mend—something fallen and put back together again—but only in terms of its surface; darkness peeking out from a depth-charged emptiness.

Looking at the image, I can’t help here but to be reminded of the fractured Humpty Dumpty and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men trying without success to put him back together…  How frustrating.  Standing back and looking at the fragments of something—something one knows used to be whole, and functional, and astonishingly alive, but is now just so many pieces of a once was…

*****

Enter Mary Ruefle and her magnificent book of poems in the face of what once was—as a skewed extension of it, or better, as an antidote to it!  Indeed I Was Pleased with the World suggests that there was a/the world (however pleasing it may have been), and now in its aftermath (which began the moment right after its math, “In the beginning…” etc.) there is its poetry—Ruefle’s poetry, which is often times both a resigned-to-it re-imagining or re-versioning of things as they were and also a high-stakes commentary on the everything-around-us state of creation this minute next week.  Take, for instance, these lines from her poem “Refrigerator”:

There is the sound of the refrigerator being on.
There is the sound of god beating inside my heart,
which is a strange sound since he does not exist.
There is the sound of a stone sent years ago
which was never answered.
There is the sound of handwriting on a human forehead.
There is the sound of forty-three ducks flying through glass.
There is the sound of a feather duster.
There is the sound of dust heard over the telephone.
There is the sound of a piano with a faint heart
coming from below, a hell where people are happy.

From the refrigerator to the outer limits to a hell of happy people, Ruefle’s poems relentlessly call into question what we know and what we expect, leaving in their wake a glimpse of the extraordinary impossible “without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”  Indeed, if there’s a poet writing today who has Negative Capability, its Ruefle, whose poems are elastic, fearless and open-ended.   But unlike that empty strange fruit—that globe of an orange skin that bedecks the cover of her book—Ruefle’s poems have a substance beyond the beyond and depths to match their surfaces.  As she writes in “Darke Body of Clowds,” “Sitting in this chair/ with sardines under my nails/ I could very well cloud my whole life/ and never untragic,/ a darke body of clowds/ hanging in the room, obscuring, my lunch…”  Here the sardines and clouds-of-self swirl with an/other metaphysical-ish 17th Century “darke body of clowds”—the speaker’s unspecified trajectory (tragic-story)—bringing the past present and future, as well as the personal and historical, into play all at once.  The poem is a sort of lyrical diary entry, which for all its “darke”ness moves with a weirdly wonderful lightness.  The end of the poem reads:

Darke body of clowds of fishes
Darke body of clowds of birds
Pity the poor proofreader
who thinks this darke body of clowds
was my life

The title “darke body of clowds” comes from a 1644 diary entry by the English gardener and diarist John Evelyn.  Thus, this “darke body of clowds” isn’t strictly speaking Ruefle’s.  But (strictly speaking) neither was it Evelyn’s.  Rather, it was part of a description of a landscape he entered into willingly—not something hanging over him, but a sort of allegorical passageway to Heaven.  Of course, the best play here is with the proofreader, a.k.a. the critic—the technician—who’s looking for “fatal” mistakes and finds so many “misspelled” words (not to mention inconsistent punctuation) in a poem of 23 lines.  To attribute these “problems” to the writer—which in this case is at least two people—would be both misguided and ridiculous, as it’s this occasion for misunderstanding (and mis-attribution) that makes the poem a delight to read.  In many ways “Darke Body of Clowds” is a poem that on multiple reads keeps shifting the weight of its meaning—cloud to clowd to fishes to birds to you—dear proofreader.   

To me one of the thing’s that’s so compelling about Ruefle’s poems in general is that they don’t exist in light of the facts, but in spite of them.  Her process seems to be one of discovery and nerve, ever and over diving headlong into new possible worlds: the Meadow AND the Void, the Everything AND the Nothing.  And this is precisely why her poems feel so full of capital-T Truth.  That is, they exist out on that edge of experience where there’s enough of a presence of the shadow of the Vast that the facts are the afterthought of meaning rather than its substance.  For example, in her poem “How I Became Impossible”—a sort of monologue wherein (among other things) the speaker remarks that she has always imagined polar bears and penguins “grew up together playing side by side”—but then encounters “facts” that fly in the face of her imagination:

   One day I read in a scientific journal:
there are no penguins at one pole, no bears
on the other.  These two, who were so long intimates
in my mind, began to drift apart, each on his own floe,
far out into the glacial seas.  I realized I was becoming
impossible, more and more impossible,
and that one day it really would be true.

Rather than allowing the facts to re-adjust her vision to fit the world, the speaker imagines harder and with even more resolve to make the world fit her vision.  The result, then, isn’t the conformity of the individual to the world but the world to the individual’s imaginative will.  This suggests perhaps that the only thing more incredible than leaping from pole to pole via ice floes is leaping from pole to poetry via the ice floes of the imagination, the self recast as both unfathomably adrift and transformatively visionary.  The last line’s knowledge that “one day it really would be true” runs contrary to all (and any) fact or reason, and yet nevertheless it’s convincing.  More so because “it” is ambiguous—polar bears and penguins side by side, the self imagining its impossible other.

*****

And speaking of impossible, here’s my Mary Ruefle anecdote.  In the Fall of 1999(?), I took a Greyhound bus from Cincinnati to Chicago to attend a reading by Kenneth Koch and Dean Young.  I arrived at the reading early—about 30 minutes before it was to begin (and as you know, those things never start on time), but the large ballroom was already packed with people talking and drinking.  It was a festive, even momentous occasion.  Koch was reading from New Addresses, which was just about to be published, and Young was as always reading never-before-seen new poems.  I was in my mid-twenties and knew no one, so milled around nervously looking at everyone and trying not to make eye contact.  Just the summer before I had met Dean Young briefly, and in the few minutes we talked he had recommended some books—among them Mary Ruefle’s Cold Pluto—which I immediately got hold of and loved for many of the same reasons I’ve discussed with regard to Indeed I Was Pleased with the World…  Anyway, looking around the room I suddenly noticed a tall woman with brilliantly deep red hair talking animatedly to a young couple, and it hit me suddenly that this was Mary Ruefle.  I recognized her from the author photo on the back of her book.  Immediately, I started trying to work up the courage to go over and say something (no doubt ridiculously awkward) about how much I appreciated her poems.  (Note: I realize that this may make me sound a wee bit neurotic and perhaps even a little strange.  I am the former, though not the latter.  What can I say?  To me, the poets I admire are rock stars, and I hope this is something I’ll never get over.  Nuff said, I hope.  Anyway, hang in there—this anecdote’s about Mary Ruefle, not me.)  Tick-tock, tick-tock… and Mary Ruefle dashes out of the ballroom down the stairs and out the door onto the street—I don’t know why—but there she went.  I followed about 20 seconds later, and she was nowhere to be seen.  I looked up and down the block, but she had vanished into thin air—probably down the street and around the corner—I didn’t go and look—just stood in the doorway alone, astonished and strangely happy.  To me, in that moment, it was as if she had de-materialized, gone to Borneo, or had been merely an apparition/hallucination—perhaps heat-lightning or a swan made of steam…  I never saw Mary Ruefle again that night (though I have been told by mutual friends that she was there), nor have I seen her since.  Still, somehow I was thunderstruck by not meeting her—or rather seeing only the electric animated version of her from afar.  In retrospect, this seems perfect.  Our paths have not crossed until right here in this review of Indeed I Was Pleased with the World.  Oh yes, this is still a review.

I lifted my long terrible arm
and turned on the water.
(from “Lines Written on a Blank Space”)

*****

Welcome to the Critic’s Corner.  To my mind Ruefle’s work is masterful, but I can imagine some people criticizing its emotional exuberance, as well as its deep on the sleeve melancholy (“I am going to make you a toy./When you play with it,/ in my heart I open my sad eyes/ and stare.”—from “Permanent Loan”) which at times gives the work an antique-y charm—largely Romantic in nature, but occasionally Baroque or Victorian, in its air—its “Darke Body of Clowds” notwithstanding.

There are also moments here where one feels that poems have been rather brutally truncated—chopped to their foundations at the expense of not having achieved a real sufficiency.  For example, here’s the poem “Me Too” in its entirety:

I will raise my right hand
and swear to tell the truth:
lovest thou me?  Lovest thou me?
Jesus said it seven times:
I counted.

Such poems can come off seeming slight or un/dis-crafted in light of the other work in the book.  And there are many other poems here that just END—in the sense that they seem to suddenly fall over a cliff never to be heard from again.  However, I might argue that such poems (and there are more than a handful here) are a lot like that orange on the cover of Ruefle’s book in that they point to a poem that was or could be—a shadow that Ruefle often does get right to, but which sometimes can’t, or perhaps shouldn’t always, be gotten to.  Sometimes it’s enough to know it’s there.  Sometimes to end significantly, one has to do it abruptly.  One has to (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus) “grind one’s teeth down to points” and fly in the face of expected good manners and decorum.

*****

Indeed I am pleased with the world of  Indeed I Was Pleased with the World.  Word to word, line to line, poem to poem—Ruefle’s work is consistently here (if at times dangerously) non-conformist, mysterious, romantic and bold.  When it comes to abiding by what’s given, no poet’s work that I know is more full of creative refusals and visionary re-invention in the face of what’s given. Working her magic (and it really is at times like a sort of sorcery—a non-linear, leaping confluence of will and idea with wildness and faith), Ruefle sees things no one else sees and knows things no one else knows—by which I mean her poems are mysterious and grand, and written just for all of us.  This is generous work, and nowhere is it more clearly so than in “Kiss of the Sun,” where Ruefle writes: “…at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry/ (and wheat and evil and insects and love) […]/ I will be standing at the edge/ of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you…”  And thus, I leave this off where it all started—though on a rather different note—in light of the orange in all its shining glory:

I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.

*

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New Poets | Short Books

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

Edited by Marvin Bell
Featuring Boyd Benson, Gwendolyn Cash & Lisa Galloway
Lost Horse Press 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

3_5

Getting There

bell coverLost Horse Press has a new annual series, each edition a book featuring three emerging northwestern poets chosen by the unflappable Marvin Bell. This review promises fun for all, because you get three reviews for the price of one.

Lost Horse’s no-frills packaging is welcome, particularly the lack of blurbs on the back. The short prose statements by the writers themselves do a good job of introducing their work. The implication is that these poets are writing for themselves, not for the trade, promising a freshness of outlook—as Bell puts it in his introduction, “the poetry in poetry.”

So if you remove the usual trappings and come-ons, what do you have left as a hook? Since all three poets are from the northwest, there is a tendency to downplay the 800-pound gorilla in the room. The regional poet label can all too easily limit the reception of a writer’s work; but at the same time geography, however personal, is a tremendous hook, especially if the poet is not well known. Yet even without editorial cartography, readers still have their own inscrutable quirks and expectations, and the more I think about it, the usual blurbage might serve the function of flattering the reader into putting aside their most peevish peeves, at least until they purchase the book.

Gwendolyn Cash’s long poem “Acts of Contrition” brought up a few of my own. One: made up words or variations of real ones that are too close to the actual word. We know what the word transcripted means, but what’s wrong with the actual word transcribed? If you are going to “ring your little prophecy by the neck,” I can’t help but suspect a typo, even if the word “jingle” is winking in the vicinity. That aside, the poem is a bitchy fairy tale about her mother; it’s filled with poisoned blood and devils, dreams of dead fathers and loaded guns, and it can’t quite decide whether it wants to be serious or not, while holding down several wonderful lines like, “conjure me a crypt, witch, and I will call it Forgiveness.”

Another one: the speaker confesses a habit of “breaking everything into pieces” and “carrying them in a velvet bag.” We can guess the intention, but the word “everything” creates unintended distractions, as it allows me to think of another poem in which a speaker going through a messy divorce says, “so you want half of everything: fine,” then takes a chain saw to the piano. That’s gotta be a really big velvet bag.

With all this nitpicking, I haven’t emphasized Cash’s “Bluegrass”, one of my favorites in the book. It evokes a landscape that is pastoral, casually ugly, and memorably real, like the economically depressed zones that often lie just outside the borders of showcase national parks—zones with junked cars and gas stations, with welfare offices right by the river, where one can easily find a thicket of blueberries and wildflowers.  It’s the usual river of life metaphor, but nicely done. Gwendolyn Cash’s introduction mentions Carolyn Forché, and she uses an epigraph from Richard Siken.  There’s a cool authorial blurb right there! It tells me that for this author, this is the company she’d like to keep.

Boyd Benson’s introduction mentions Emily “Dickenson” (unfortunately misspelled) as the company that “the little old lady” in his heart would like to keep.  The tenor of the note suggests that he appreciates her poems as surreal miniatures, parables of the contained wildness of (human) nature.  Benson’s poems are miniatures.  They want to have a very light touch, and repay a word-by-word reading, with their short lines and juxtaposition of childlike and adult details. Here’s the end of “The schoolyard”:

You carried a map
of yourself and pointed
shyly to each county line

coal mining country,
the backbone of industry,
and to the flashlight on your hat.

A mouse began to spin
from door to door
across the schoolyard

as we estimated how many
Toodaloos it might take
to get us somewhere.

That mouse could be doing so much more work here! I am left wondering about the effect of the word “toodaloos” in any poem. Could work, but doesn’t here. The balance of silly and magical would work better if the language took itself more seriously by being more closely pared.  In another poem, an interesting image is stranded by unnecessary vagueness:

There were many tall trees
and likewise crow obscenities
beneath them. I did not
stop.  They did not see me.

“Many” and “likewise” do nothing here. The “crow obscenities” need a stronger verb like “scrawled beneath them,” even at the risk of corniness; and did the trees not see the speaker or the crows? I’m not harping on grammar as much as asking which one would be more interesting. It’s not a matter of naturalistic fidelity, but of giving the metaphors the best chance to work.

Lisa Galloway admits in her introduction that she writes “ovaries out,” in quest of psychological shock.  Her work has the riskiest subject matter of the three. Her freewheeling rhythms can be exhilarating, partly because she’s likely to lead you to a dead end, something poets should not be afraid to do. A standout rhythmically is “Jam on the Exit Ramp”, which describes the speaker “driving away from but closer to” a lover. The poem is filled with starts and stops that risk being dead ends, and places where the comparisons are pushed too hard in context:

Right now, a flashing four way socks me
like the metaphor in your words:
The winter cap hanging on the coat-rack
at our diner looks like an unwrapped condom.

In the context, the strategy works, but warning signs abound. Later in the selection we get a sense that the speaker, while enjoying the ride, is struggling to find larger significances in her escapades.  The poem about the dildo doesn’t go much farther than slapstick humor. Certain tendencies give Galloway away. Describing the metallic taste of blood is an absolutely great and vivid detail, but when it is used multiple times in a short collection, it suggests that the writer is pressing this detail for more than it’s worth. I can’t give it the status of Proust’s madeleine or Richard Siken’s obsessions yet. Her craft needs more honing.

“Acquisition vs. Creation,” a poem about coming home for Christmas to her adoptive family is quieter but stronger than most. Galloway evokes the sense of outsideness felt by many adoptees: “I come home at Christmas to observe your religion.” The speaker is “paraded through the house” like she is her own third person until “ I confront an altar to myself./ Twenty… pictures perched on a chest of drawers/… a rite of passage… announcing/ only those who accept your daughter/ can pass”. The distance from her feelings is absolutely relevant, and more effective than if the emotional struggle were played up in her usual go-for-broke fashion.

Overall the collection plays well to the anti-New York buzz crowd, but has a ways to go to make anybody forget the passing of Poetry Northwest.

*

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