Archive for September, 2007

For Girls (& Others)

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

by Shanna Compton
Bloof Books 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

6_5stars_6

For Girls (We Do Have Some Idea)

compton coverIf you’ve seen the television series LOST, then “others” is a term that is shrouded in mystery, contempt and intrigue. It is easy to resent the others for their exclusive little island society, that sense of true belonging and ownership that is difficult to achieve in the “real” world; however, all television associations aside, “others” is a term that is most easily defined as different or separate from the masses. Shanna Compton’s latest title, then, initially gives the reader a distinct sense that “girls” are indeed a peculiar creature, a creature very unlike, even unequal to, the “others.”

The preface to For Girls & Others reads like a disclaimer: “THE author of this book lays no claim to originality of subject-matter. She has nothing new to say.” It’s true; much of what the poems distill is predictable given the title. The publisher permits some insight into her process, describing it as a “tour through works of advice for young women, including antique etiquette manuals, 19th-century sermons, pseudo-scientific physiology textbooks, newspaper clippings, and the internet.” One must begin reading this book with the understanding that there is nothing left to be uncovered; once this is digested, the book is gratifying. Some of the “familiarity” means a sacrifice of some of the cosmic spunkiness that made her 2005 debut Down Spooky so charming and re-readable, but some will certainly prefer the feminine thrust and cut-and-paste sampling of this gutsy second book.

The narrator’s self-awareness throughout the poems is refreshing, so much so that when the opening poem, “Opening Address,” begins, “We shall now begin / the study of girls,” the somewhat unnatural voice is not a deterrent. However, one of the truly disappointing poems in the collection is “The Wise Girl Will Prepare Herself as Well as She Can to Be Happy.” Here is the entire poem:

You are a bird
inside this cage
                                 Sing
Throw your body
into the air

The bird in a cage is such a cliché that no matter where it was found or what source it was taken from, it is unworthy of this collection.

Despite the poems “not revealing anything new,” they do chronicle some important changes in the history of femininity. At one point, a girl’s “biological clock” played a leading role in the young woman’s life. Major decisions were made by her body on her behalf. Compton writes:

a girlhood is an extreme gift
of boobies & hips
of blossom lips &
the good sense
not to use any of them.

The last two lines here suggest that the process has evolved; we now have a cultural timeline, or perhaps it’s even looser than that, maybe a timeline that can’t be called a timeline at all.

Inevitably, some things are the same. For instance, particularly throughout adolescence, girls have a certain indefinable disdain for one another that is evident in their catty and competitive behavior. This competitive nature translates to other areas of life as well, and as Compton indicates, everything is to be met with reservations when you’re a girl: “the world is like a girl / who rivals you in grace / & good looks.”

Some of the advice these poems communicate is relevant for “others” as well as girls. In “The Head Needs Rather to Be Kept Cool,” the narrator proposes that it is healthy to isolate oneself for the time of an hour and during this time to remain silent. This is good advice for anyone. Removing oneself from the company of others allows one to become an individual; spending time alone achieves a sense of balance that is difficult to strike when in a crowd of peers.

“The Fitness of the Soul” is another poem that has a lesson for everyone. The title grows on the reader. Someone once told me that large ideas in titles, for instance, the word “soul,” makes the poem come off as dramatic and overwrought. This title is an exception to that often true statement. Perhaps it is the word “fitness” that adds a necessary physical element to the intangible soul. The physical element eternally links the soul with the body, gives ownership of the soul back to the human.

Because the book takes so much from other older sources, it is tempting for the reader to form new connections with the material. This is notably appetizing in “Our Mission to the Race.” The first lines of the poem in conjunction with the title make ample interpretations available: “When you’re a girl / the moon belongs…” The race to the moon immediately comes to mind, and because women have an intrinsic connection to the moon, it can be said that women made it to the moon first, women were first to experience its elements. Traditionally, it is said that a woman’s menstrual cycle is regulated by the cycle of the moon and that ovulation takes place during the full moon. Of course, none of this is indicated in the poem, though it can be drawn out of the poem through the power of association.

What’s most interesting and enlightening in this collection are the endless possibilities for association. These possibilities, therefore, negate the assertion made at the start of the review that no new material can be found here. Incorrect. There is a multitude of new information to be “found” in this collection. It is dependent upon the reader’s ability to listen to these poems rather than to read them. Ultimately, the reader understands that Compton made the right choice in putting together these ideas in the manner that she did rather than keeping them in tact and challenging them. The forthright opposition would have come across as purely obnoxious “girl power.”

Finally, the book makes me question my own role as a woman. Many of Compton’s poems are satiric in nature. One that stands out is “Dear Bread & Butter,”. This poem imitates a “thank you” letter that a woman might send out after a social gathering. I am often a “bad” woman in the sense that I don’t fulfill these social obligations as a “proper” woman might. I have friends that are wives and soon-to-be wives who are always sure to send out Christmas cards; they make the sangria the night before a barbecue. They are always presentable and prepared. They are wonderful hostesses, and I love being their company, but they are reminders of how difficult it is to remember to buy the stamps to mail the Christmas cards, to learn to make sangria, to remember all the birthdays.

*

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The Scented Fox

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

by Laynie Browne
Wave Books 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7.5

Fit for Distraction

browne coverOften I look to poetry to offer me an alternate reality, something I can use to replace the things irking me at the moment, the laundry, the garbage, the mildew in the bathroom, and often, I am disappointed by what I find. However, when a poem surprises, when I find what I’m looking for, I’m still ultimately displeased. It hasn’t lasted long enough; the drug was weak. Perhaps these poems aren’t the most effectual or aren’t potent enough to endure the encroachment of daily life.

Well, Laynie Browne’s poems in The Scented Fox are Vicodin. The laundry is piling up, the mildew growing darker and more gruesome, the garbage steaming, but I’ve grown to not care; I’ve been persuaded by the poems’ psyches to lose myself, to forget the existence of anything outside the mind (because nothing external exists independent of our understanding that it exists anyway, right?), anything concrete enough to become a physical obstacle to stability, awareness, or wisdom. Laynie Browne is my new best friend.

What is most affecting in these poems is the fragmentation: the sense of confusion, or perhaps deep concentration that allows me to become entirely engulfed in the poem. I am not myself when I read these poems, but rather I am a creator of a separate reality. I can use any word to mean any thing. “Letter I.,” which begins “To a little croft,…” discards my sense of “real.” It states, “I am using the term ‘ritual’ to refer to the girl of wax.” Rituals we typically think of as ceremonial acts often related to religion, but Browne has defined ritual as “the girl of wax.” “Refer” creates an even more nebulous meaning for ritual. This is the consistency in The Scented Fox: options. Options allow for both disorientation and clarity.

The first poem in the collection is a stunning example of a consciousness that is teetering between perturbation and salience: “Though human / faces seem not to change while we are looking at them. For example, / the air around a cemetery is said to cause illness.” Are these thoughts related? Sure… the mind works by association and although I’m never sure what Browne is alluding to specifically, the concepts are vaguely familiar, as if I’ve had these same ponderings perhaps in sleep. Human faces may remain familiar over the years until their day of expiration, which brings us to the cemetery, a place cluttered with a fear of death and a somewhat blind respect for its authority in our lives. Such sensations are often the cause of nausea, anxiety, illness. In the second stanza: “Was there nowhere but here?” Here where? It’s unclear; however, what is understood is that the voice in this poem is alone; it is puzzled and working hard to attain answers. Again, the poem feels like home. So what we have here with The Scented Fox is a representation of a consciousness that is both preserved and sacrificed.

The book is reassuring in many ways. I can be lost for an entire poem, and suddenly I notice that perhaps I am intended to be lost. One line can then anchor me, as in “Wetted Nomenclature ( a prologue to tails)”; “Beholden she was to the myth / of blankness, to all forms which had passed beneathe her eyes and to / those which had not—” The universal experience of uncertainty and mistrust suddenly spawns faith, however fragile. Yes, we have all been met with a “blankness” or unknown which at times will debilitate. “She engulfed herself with such silence, such nothingness.” What is most important is that we accept this state when faced with it, wait it out. Brown is even more authoritative, however. “Wetted Nomenclature” begins: “I will now set out to disarrange myself.” She takes control of the situation before it arises, welcomes it, makes it her own. If this is happening, it is because I have willed it so. In other words, when life is confusing and f*ed up it’s because we like it that way. Yes, we’re sick, but if life isn’t challenging then wisdom cannot be authentic.

In accordance with the book’s sense of fragmentation are its sections. The Scented Fox contains no table of contents, so it is difficult to determine how many true “sections” there are. There seem to be three main books with one page starting a new section which is blank but for the ambiguous text “night, an interlude.” This page is followed by an untitled poem that ends: “The interrupted moment / returns, embeds itself in the skin.” This line break is impeccable and fascinating considering its placement in the book and the individual poem. It feels as though it is speaking to residual dream fragments left when we wake, or perhaps déjà vu: the things in life that we can’t let go of. The repetition of lines form threads throughout Scented Fox that feel similar to a recurring dream.

As we recede or proceed further into the mind’s seclusion or community, Browne’s concepts are further abstracted. The only unconvincing poems in the first section are those titled “The Traveling Crystal.” These poems travel too far into another world and become reminiscent of Jim Henson’s “The Dark Crystal.” Admittedly, my mind may be relying too heavily on association here; however, the mind is something I can readily believe in whereas a crystal that “wants to travel” and “appeared in the middle of the floor” is slightly more difficult to ruminate on; it is more an idea to noodle with. A similar feeling resonates after reading “Book Second Tales In Miniature” and “Book Third Festoon Dictionary.” The book is whole without these sections.

Ultimately, Browne has supplied us with a very malleable text, and therefore, a very successful text. In a poem titled “The Book of Slowly,” Browne contrasts the implications of words and pictures, however vaguely. This poem gives the sense that pictures are too final. They can be interpreted differently by viewers, but cannot carry the depth of a sentence which is continuously “tunneling.” “The sentence contains its onlooker.” The idea here is continued in a longer poem, “The Book of Spinning.” “Thought is that which cannot be parted from matter.” It sounds as though pictures are superfluous when one has words.

When one is dealing with such large concepts and such transcendental ones, it is difficult to avoid sentimentality and loftiness. Browne does not let this traverse deter her. I like this example from “Letter VI” which begins “To a lost scientist”: “The mosaic of hours pieced together by the generosity of / night falling kindly across anyone’s features.” In this poem, Browne discusses the “calamity of time,” an often unmanageable topic. The aforementioned lines flirt with sentimentality. They come just close enough to be felt, but they never cross the line. Browne keeps them in check with their anonymity: we’re dealing with “anyone’s” features. Again with time in “Letter VII”:

            The days in their sequential ceremony repeat

            themselves and I take care to bury them deeply, so that no animals or

            persons may come across them.

But does she? No, of course not. We’re unearthing them right now. This is the sacrifice the poet makes, making available the kernels of thought and emotion that we don’t really want to share face to face. They’re painful, ugly, and endless; but they are useful because they connect us internally apart from our meaningless interactions at work, in the bank, or at the supermarket.

*

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Black Diamond Golden Boy Takes Bull By Horns

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

by Geoffrey Gatza
BlazeVOX [books] 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

2

Never Can Tell

gatza coverI wanted to like this book. The set up is a recasting of Ezra Pound as Merlin enacting some kind of ritual self-sacrifice, killed by the irrelevance of his own magical poetic myths, and it contains interesting quotes from Buddha, Churchill and William Carlos Williams. The idea became less and less coherent as I read. In this book we do not care about Pound, Merlin, or the knights of the Round Table, or wonder at how magic persists without them. In the first section, there is much talk about food and the creativity of chefs, and if I had to choose, I’d rather eat than read poetry, but somehow with all this talk of food, I am never made hungry. It is one thing to try to cure yourself by glut, as was done so gamely in Fast Food Nation, but it is entirely another if you don’t like the taste of McDonald’s food in the first place. I am all for a reconsideration of our pieties, but this overwritten mess makes no sense.

Occasionally post-avant statements surface, purporting to be clear, such as “One cannot build a better poem without understanding / what is wrong with the present one,” and “literary anarchy seeks to unleash authority from authorship.” Do we need 160 unnumbered pages of bad poetry to prove it? Then a section on poetical anarchism is crossed out. That saves me from having to explain the idea. The evidence of the book suggests that a persistently incorrect use of the possessive apostrophe is involved, along with deliberately flaunting most of the homophones cited by grammarians.

If anyone is curious about anarchy in poetry, let them read the work of John Cage (and also Jackson MacLow). Anarchy does not involve suicide by glut, revolution by petty annoyance, pseudoliterary emetics or pretentious poses, whether ironic or not. It challenges us with unreadability, and the productive uses of boredom, but doesn’t need stagey histrionics. Though paradoxical, its emotional center is quite clear. It does involve saying a lot by staying silent, and saying little by talking constantly, but it also acknowledges at all points that there is no beginning and no end, and we can come and go as we like. It runs Thoreau through a blender, ignoring his embeddedness in the world of his time, while expanding his libertarian streak. Through the magic of clear thinking and the abiding discipline of silence, what is simple stays simple and what is complex becomes simple by becoming somehow different. It is also peace-loving, funny and oddly touching, whereas Gatza’s work tries to be but is not. Gatza’s idea of silence is the enforced crossing out of text, rather than a telling omission. His work tends to be busy and loud. Perhaps Gatza’s work is symptomatic of the mess we are in. I persist in the idea that if I am asked for bread I try not to give you a stone. Or maybe I sculpt a loaf of bread out of the stone, or plant a field of wheat. I proceed by offering a positive direction rather than proving how bad your current one is. The empty blab of the world tends to take care of itself. Even Zen Koans, so aggressive in their frustration of analysis have a bracingly spare humanity to them, and a subversive and sly sense of humor. Gatza’s work has none of these qualities. There is humor in the book, but it is not very sly. He persists in being a one man band playing on and on, interrupting himself, then playing the same thing in reverse, until you beg him to stop.

There is no idea that Gatza cannot talk to death. A potentially interesting section on Edward Hicks’ beloved proto-Hallmark Peacable Kingdom paintings is drained of its insouciance by the use of too many words. Many of the poems here seek simplicity but never stay quiet long enough to actually listen to the silence that persists. There is no easy conversational tone that cannot be rendered somehow strained, no tragic figure that Gatza cannot talk into irrelevance. The poem dedicated to Woody Guthrie does not mention music. Even the poem about Andy Dick manages to contain nothing engaging, even in the expected pop culture junkie sense, except the photo of Andy Dick, while somehow avoiding any mention of News Radio, acting, TV, or comedy. Of course, addictions such as Andy’s have a pointlessness to them that is not very appealing. If there is an emotional core to his work, it is probably in the poem “to be:”

I don’t know what to believe really.
I know how I feel and that’s one thing
and I know for a fact that what I believe
to be true and what is true cannot be

so what the fuck. I hate
well not really hate
so much as I am angered
by the calumny, but this

I mean fuck

Which is the funniest and most directly engaging poem by far, trust me, and I haven’t even read the whole book. I’m doing you a favor. This book is too pretentious to be seriously challenging, consistently funny, trashy bad or camp, if it’s trying for that. It’s often hard to tell. The last quarter of the book is taken up by “So This is What Happiness Is, (a poem marketed as a play)”, a burlesque of Arthurian characters and Jesus Christ, another potentially interesting idea that turns out to be curiously overstuffed, unfunny and pointless. Dada at its worst was more innovative, and better at offending artistic taste. This book vastly increased my respect for Duchamp’s urinal. If I’ve missed the point I don’t want to get it. The pictures and graphics, often busy and irrelevantly captioned, are a positive relief from the generally numbing text, and have increased my rating of the book by one-half star. Calgon, take me away!

*

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a half-red sea

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

by Evie Shockley
Carolina Wren Press 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

8

At Ease

red-seaEvie Shockley’s a half-red sea is a smart, eclectic collection.  She knows her literary history, as the book is framed by epigraphs by Phillis Wheatley and Lucille Clifton. A high point is reached when, in her wonderfully descriptive title, “wheatley and hemmings have drinks in the halls of the ancestors.”  The collection inhabits this massive sweep of history in multiple ways without being abstract or overly academic. You can get your American Studies groove on. It’s why you went to college in the first place.

The strengths and weaknesses of this approach are perhaps exemplified when the lyrics to Steely Dan’s “Peg” make an unexpected appearance near the end of a signature poem “a thousand words,” printed on a gatefold page literally framed by repetitions of the word torture. The poem works up a haunting and obsessive rhythm, while the increasing self-consciousness of the punning content both hints at and closes off some serious depth.  Then again, it would take the resources of Robert Hayden to write a long poem about torture at the highest, classical level of intensity. Shockley can reach that pitch but doesn’t insist on it, which is to say that she is willing to experiment with a variety of forms, voices and tones to make that history come to life. Which is also to say that she is willing to risk writing poems that might appear weaker in comparison to her best ones. Happily, this doesn’t happen often. Old slave narratives, film noir, the overcooked language of advertising, and the Anita Hill hearings are all used to good effect, because (forgive me) her emotional compass remains steady.

Her poems flash authentic grit: “Poems are bullshit unless they are trees a century old, sentries lining the streets of Senegal.” Or: “The spit of fifty foreign tongues / visa’d by Christ.”  Lyrics from Parliament and the Temptations mark key refrains, keeping us grounded through poems that might otherwise come across as exercises. “double bop for Ntozake Sange” is a member of the stalwart, usually boring genre of poems about poetry readings, but this one vividly evokes the simple physicality of being there rather than some vague, strained abstract of content or mood. 

you kept us waiting, sprawled across
the rigid network of seats like so much
spanish moss, a fungus of patience.

why you wanna treat me so bad

arriving, you staggered, no, tightroped
your way to the mic. your hollow apology
rang with the purity of a spoon tapped
against plastic. reading, your words poured
like oatmeal, clumped and milky, over your
red lips. what could (be) wrong (with) you?

At its most appealing, Shockley’s work delights in the permutations of words, but is more emotionally resonant, risky and revealing than Haryette Mulen’s canny but overly consistent punning in Sleeping With the Dictionary. “the ballad of anita hill” confronts this modern tragedy with all the vitriolic ambivalence it deserves:

bring your family (nuclear only). make
    sure they dress middle class and hug
you affectionately. be strong, or fake
    it, but in a womanly way. don’t be smug

or shy or prudish or loose, when testifying
    that he said “pussy” or “penis” on the job:
push the words out, as if they were defying
    gravity, then let them fly. weep. don’t sob.
exude celibacy—heterosexual style.
    sit up straight. smile. don’t smile.

The lack of capitals here reminds me of Cummings’ best satire in “next to god of course america, i” hitting perhaps harder because of the use of a specific, painful incident that is still available to memory even as we keep trying to forget it. The expected snideness is complicated by how the standard American script is thrown in our face, and brought into stark relief by Hill’s obvious integrity in the face of editorial onslaught. Both Hill’s and America’s character are revealed.

In contrast to the uncompromising “ballad of anita hill,” some of her more traditionally proper and reverential poems seem weaker, and not all of her experiments with layout and format are spot-on.  But these moments are easily outweighed by the stunning variety of mood and content she displays, in a time when the internal consistency of a collection builds barriers to interdisciplinary thought, as if each author has to decide that she is writing either short, pseudorealistic novels, artful unassailable abstractions, or practical political weapons. Shockley negotiates the musical, historical, artful, political, personal, abstract, concrete and experimental dimensions of language with an ease that remains firmly grounded in a historical consciousness, a faith in that elusive something that makes us American. Perhaps because it evokes that faith,  a half-red sea is not consistently cutting edge. If Shockley can be accused of being academic, she doesn’t neglect the sheer variety of words, the picture or the music, while insisting on readability throughout.  At its best, a half red sea is a richly polyphonic riff, evoking a wide variety of emotions and characters, the kind of longed-for, half-remembered, half dreamed, all-too-real America Ralph Ellison would recognize and appreciate.

*

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The Resurrection of the Body

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

by Michael Schmidt
The Sheep Meadow Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

5

A Pointed Purging

resurrection of the bodyMichael Schmidt lusts after the divine, but he caps that lust with humility; if the narrator in The Resurrection of the Body were more impulsive, were less intelligent, he might strip naked, run through high grass, drop to his knees and proclaim at the top of his lungs the divinity of Christ and the loving, complicated fusion of all things living and dead.

But no one wants that stuff rammed down their throats, and Schmidt—a profoundly academic and high-modern poet able to make the printed date “1 August, 2006” look a thousand years past—isn’t out to convert anybody to anything. His is a stern, lyrical, meditative exploration of spirituality. He is mysterious, humble, devotional, dead serious about the grunting heft of a real human body and the abstract spiritual body/bodies it implies. Call it Christ or what you will (any human might be “Christ himself,” as per the wisdom of Salinger): obsessive devotion is obsessive devotion and can be made metaphor for whatever one chooses, be it a romantic obsession, the ghastly indifference of the universe, or the teachings of Christ. That’s to say, you don’t have to be Christian to like this book.

So The Resurrection of the Body, you’ll find, can be filed under both Christianity and modernism—a fusion not without great precedent, and which in this attempt feels at turns dense and compelling, at turns beleaguered or contrived. Our speaker has a sizzling intellect and has probably read more books than there are dead seals in the sea, but some of the offerings here feel inevitably like poems for the sake of Poetry.

Resurrection opens with its enticing title poem. The first six lines, mysterious, set the scene:

The cellar floor is swept. Women are weeping
Like shadows in torchlight, around the straw pallet they hover,
The soon-to-be mourners, a dozen, discarding their shawls,
Unpinning their hair. It’s so hot in the cellar of death.
Professional, they know what’s to come:
She will shrug, shiver, jaw drop open, let go.

“Weeping” and “cellar of death” set of any number of drama alarms, but the austere, lapidary poesy is so willful and consistent in Resurrection that you begin to forgive. A poet taking his subject matter seriously in the age of incessant sarcastic skeptic-to-cynic blather is, ironically, a touch refreshing.

Before long we’re in familiar country, witnessing the awesome power of Christ as healer (the title poem is a lyrical rendering of the Gospel passage in which Christ raises Jairus’s daughter). Even for the couldn’t-be-further-from-Christian, it’s not as hard to stomach as you might imagine, because Schmidt isn’t pushy or one-dimensional. The poems are dense and open-ended; the best provide a rewarding re-readability. “Wanting to Think” might be the most darkly obsessive, best poem in the book:

Why, when I want to think of you, do I think of him?
He may be dead, and yet he still lies with you
Warming his calloused hand between your thighs.
He may still be alive, and his lips for ever
Puckered on your nipple, above your heart.

Who’s the “him”?—his wife’s ex-lover? Ex-husband? His wife’s forgiven infidelity? Could be Christ, for that matter, could be the abstract notion of Christ as the “other man.”  No doubt Schmidt has something specific in mind. Nevertheless it’s mysterious, corrupt, devotional, and in the end, rather pleasant. “Third Persons” also abuts infidelity, real or imagined, through the narrative of a would-be cuckold—“He gave her the benefit / of every single doubt”—and underscores the truly heartbreaking, vital thing present in Schmidt’s poetry, and present in Christ’s teachings: the tangibility of a quiet urge towards something empathetic, forgiving, honest—something impenetrable in its humility, even in its defeat.

Schmidt’s seriousness makes for some unfortunate slips into maudlin posturing. If your Christ-alarm starts to go off—I know mine is still buzzing—it might mean things are getting a little too religious for you. Conversely if Christianity is your bag, maybe there won’t be enough of it. Either way, you’ll be delighted to find he doesn’t ignore the butchery and horror present in the histories of assorted faiths, and swamps his poetry with enough deep-seeded intellectualism to maintain a dignified balance to any open-minded soul.

Still, I should mention again that the book is unfortunately peppered with unjustifiable poem-poems. A series of Ghazals is simply poetic—“If so, am I Persephone?”—and doesn’t move things forward. “Not Yet,” a rather nice vision of a father unsure how best to protect his family, feels a little too Gladiator at the end: “not yet, not yet.” Schmidt can also spoil a poem by over-stating things: “Out for the thrill of it, to learn the elements and be / Not like men but men indeed.”

Nevertheless I’m pulled to the core of this book—to the impenetrability of forgiveness and humility, and how it can give way to a fitting nobility and austerity. The voice in these poems seems to genuinely care about human bodies in all their sweaty, physical, organic repugnance, in their emotional landscapes, in their propensity, however slight, for salvation—“that grace which is rooted in muscle” and its omnipresence in the population. “A Meditation on Necessity” beautifully captures the voice of a seemingly random old woman who is moving into a new (her last?) home: “Will someone visit? Will I change? The cities I lived in / Fade in this sunlight” and “The houses I lived in in those fading cities / Have all been blighted.” Time equalizes people, levels us and gives us something in common, and you might suspect when reading Resurrection that it’s worth it, after all—the would-be childish notion that we should try and feel empathy for everyone experiencing everything.

“The Golden Dome” presents the need to build a place of worship: “Man honoured God by making / A second home for him.” There is equally the abstract notion of a house of words, of ideas, and at the risk of speaking for Christ, I’ll say this book is not Schmidt’s best, but that its insistence on forgiveness, humility and the divinity of human bodies provides a suitable habitat for the subject/s of his adoration.

*

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The Second Question

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

by Diana Der-Hovanessian
The Sheep Meadow Press 2007
Reviewed by Steven Karl

3_5

No Stick

der hov coverThe Second Question is preoccupied with identity, specifically Armenian identity. Here is the title poem:

Where are you,
where were your people from?
was the first question
our grandmothers asked
each other when they met.
The second question
was always How?
How did you escape
death?  Now
their children ask
only the first,
where in Turkish Armenia
were your people from?

The poem is an excellent representation of Diana Der-Hovanessian’s poetics—short and tightly wound, rather easy to access. “How did you escape / death?” begs the  question of survival from genocide and how that survival has shaped and transformed a culture and its people. 

But this narrative, recurrent throughout the book, isn’t explored as fully as it could be. Instead the poet spends her time on moves like capitalizing the “H” in “How?” Instead of trusting her readers, the poet instructs them on how to read the poem and what to take away from it, somehow avoiding the fact that the reader might be asking for something else entirely.

X.J. Kennedy’s blurb reads, “If you think you don’t like poetry, The Second Question will quickly change your mind…” Perhaps.  Diana Der-Hovanessian is an accomplished poet, instructor, and translator and I can’t help but wonder if this book was put together with the intent to appeal to—even teach—mainstream readers.  I put this question out there because for the most part, the book is, dare I say, too easy, and many of the poems too “clever.” Their cavalier accessibility detracts from a potentially engrossing personal study of identity, particularly the sense of identity one feels as the descendent of a nearly-obliterated culture.

The book is also distracted by a  peripheral focus on feminine identity which brings no new arguments. Here’s “Earmark”: “ In spite of dangles / hoops and spheres / men seldom notice / girls have ears.”  Strange, but in all my years, I never met a man who fancies a woman earless.  The Second Question contains more than a few poems that follow this formula: men are insensitive and aloof while women remain survivors of subjection; but we are told this and never tempted to explore the deeper machinations implicit to that subjection.   

“Cold Fire” offers a convenient example of clichéd femininity: “A fire once it’s dead stays dead / in women.  But in most men / cold fires can revive and spread.” (“What kind of fire are you?” the teacher seems to be asking). The fourth stanza continues, “A woman wants fire. That’s bred / into her bones, but when / the fire is dead it’s really dead…” I suppose the last thing I want in a collection of poetry is to be given a bland generalization.  And there is little room for penetrating or interpreting “a woman wants fire”; Plath stole away with that concept 40 years ago.

Alas, in the end, do the poems’ simplicities make it hard for the poet’s issues to stick? At first I thought the simplicity was indeed the culprit, a device that made the poems falter or fail to shine. But I’ve carried both Neruda’s Odes and Basho’s haikus with me for years; the real problem with D-Hova’s poems is that they are mostly surface.

Which brings me back to the question of audience: was this collection put together to serve as an introduction to poetry for those less aware?  In the issue of identity Suji-Kwok Kim’s A Divided Country, Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in the Imperial City, or Carly Sach’s the steam sequence all delve successfully into the complexity of straddling identity and/or maintaining an identity in the face of shifting politics or the erasure that progress/history creates. Der-Hovanessian’s knowledge, experience, and poetic expertise should make this collection one of significant weight and contemplation; unfortunately too many of the poems warrant little more than a passing glance, and the potentially invigorating study of her Armenian identity takes a disappointing back seat.

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