Archive for February, 2008

Blackbird and Wolf

Friday, February 29th, 2008

by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2007
Reviewed by Matthew Yeager

Life as Crucible, World as Church

colecover To put it simply, in Blackbird and Wolf, Henri Cole’s latest volume of poetry, we are encountering someone who is writing from the absolute center of himself. The aspect of intentionality – that puss of youth – feels entirely drained from these poems. The influence of other poems or poets likewise feels non-existent – like schoolteachers who’ve left the room, or clothing kicked off.

It’s not that Cole has cut off his lines to tradition. Blake is directly mentioned; Eliot’s “Waste Land” makes a secret cameo in the final line of the book; Marvell’s “The Garden” is referenced when Cole writes “a red thought in a red shade.” You’ll also find traces of his grapplings with Harold Bloom’s formulae. What’s happened, we must conclude, is that both tradition and the idea of tradition have been assimilated. Cole is impersonating no one; nor is he impersonating an earlier version of himself, wriggling around in a homemade box, pawning off a star-painted ceiling as the night sky. He is moving forward into a poetics that is entirely his own. Middle-Earth was a large step. Blackbird and Wolf is another.

Because the poems have that queer sense of purely existing, as leaves or flowers do, they can be somewhat evasive to talk about. William Logan said as much in regard to Cole’s previous volume Middle Earth – something like, “these poems escape all the praise I can heap upon them.” He’s very correct. Attempting to read Blackbird and Wolf with a “sentence-forming” mind is quite a bit like attempting to walk out across the surface of a pond. Immediately you sink in. On one hand this is frustrating. On the other it is such a pleasure, and it goes a long way towards revealing the nature of these poems. You could say that that they “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” but this notion tends to cast the poem as an infallible citadel, the intelligence as spear-chucking infantrymen. Blackbird and Wolf, in contrast, resists you by absorbing you.

The way that these newer Cole poems pull a reader in is by immediately establishing a situation and a setting. The work is swift, specific, and simple in a way that reveals it as an aesthetic choice. (Cole’s earlier poems are more ornate, more filigreed.) At most, a title and two lines are all he requires. Some scenes are commonplace, with a quiet sensuousness. “Haircut” begins: “I sit on the dock for a haircut.” Others are more traumatic. “Ambulance” starts off: “Gentleness had come a great distance to be there / as paramedics stanched the warm blood.” The deploying of simple language to produce a vivid, instantaneous image calls to mind prose writers like Hemingway or Richard Wright. In the context of Cole’s earlier work, it is an act of trust.

Once you’ve been through three or four, you find you can enter the next Cole poem as you can a pool once you’re acclimated to the water temperature. Rather, you enter like you do a favorite show with a through-running plot, a show that unfolds in installments. Like a TV character (and as one who counts the characters on The Wire among his friends, I’m speaking positively), Cole – the “being-in-the-world” that is his speaker – possesses a sense of being alive continuously, between poems, between his occasions for speech. Perhaps this is because the situations have a cumulative variety that, on the whole, replicates “life” as most of us know it. He writes well, for instance, of sickness. His speaker has headaches, fevers, colds that don’t necessarily debilitate him, but contribute to an overall mood.

One of the pleasures of reading James Schuyler is that the room he’s in almost always enters the poem, and it tends to resemble – in spirit, at least – the room that the reader is in. There are such precise little details: an apple core on his desk, a paperback on an end table fat from having absorbed a spill, a desire to unplug a ringing phone. Cole’s is a similar knack (there is such a moisture to his writing), but what’s truly remarkable is his ability to leap from these securely pinned-down commonplaces to a spiritual meditation with far-reaching implications. More impressive is that he does so without attempting to heap an artificial importance on minutiae. He’s honest. He doesn’t b.s. The happenings of life are rendered at their precise emotional size, and the world as a whole comes out feeling sanctified.

***

On an entirely different note, Blackbird and Wolf (like Middle Earth) is also one of the finest volumes in terms of layout that I can recall reading. The first thing you’ll notice, in picking it up and flipping through it, is that the poems are double-spaced. This suits them well. Moreover, the font size and margins of these double-spaced poems dictate that a title and exactly fourteen lines appear on a single page. As thirty-one of the thirty-eight poems in the volume are sonnet-length, the result is that the majority fit perfectly onto a single page, like cars into parking spaces. Although in the name of fourteen lines, he occasionally breaks off his poems too soon, on the whole it’s very gratifying aesthetically.

Of course, there is a basic – yet somehow mysterious – animal pleasure in a perfect fit. A toddler, seated at a primitive wooden puzzle, slipping a triangular block into a triangular hole, feels it. As does the fifth grader at his math test, right at the moment in the long division problem where he sees he’s going to be left with no remainder. Why is this, I wonder? Though a cigar is often simply a cigar, there’s an impulse to channel the inner Freudian and assume an inherent sexual aspect to all this – as if we are sexual creatures in all our interactions, not merely when we fantasize, fuck, or kiss. I am presently recalling the panic that swept through the bicycling community in New York City several years ago. It became known that the Kryptonite chain and lock, the industry standard, could be picked using the hollow tube of a Bic pen. I have little doubt the shit-storm of thefts and factory recalls could be traced to one bored man, alone in his apartment, who noticed a size/shape similarity between the opening of the pen and the circle-shaped key hole and, out of curiosity, just stuck it in there. A question: would he have were we not, at bedrock, sexual?

I wonder what Cole would say to that. Regardless of what he’s writing about, he writes a highly sexualized poem. He’s also unusually tuned into that aspect of animal comfort that comes when a body is right in its space. I simply find it interesting the way he is posed throughout his work. “Shaving” begins with “Outstretched in a tub, like a man in a tomb.” In another poem, he remarks: “and hunchbacked loons in flight, projecting / their feet out behind, like me in my twin bed.” (Out of curiosity, I substituted beds of various sizes into this poem (“like me in my double bed,” “like me in my queen-sized bed,” “like me in my California king-sized bed.” Try it: it’s dazzling how much if lost if the size of the bed is increased.)

Connections, connections, even more connections. A twin bed, a tomb, a bathtub: sleep, death, purity.

***

There is, as most would agree, a symbiotic relationship between a poet’s poems and his ideas regarding the making of poetry. Because the creative process is ineffable, we must find terms to express it, and whatever terms are set forth tend to constitute a blueprint, an instruction manual. What I mean is that if someone, drawing on his experiences of making, says, “Writing poetry for me is like pounding on a wall that, after a certain amount of thumps, transforms into a door that opens me into an unexpected place,” then chances are that the creative act will indeed be like that. That person will not make poems on the first try. If someone else says, “Poetry for me is a natural act like excretion: I ingest experience, I crap poems,” then his verse will tend to lean on his life, as upon a crutch. He’ll need to have experiences the way a car must have gas. It’s akin to the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Take a poet like Yeats. Yeats’ idea of a soul enlarging as a body decays, of vision clarifying as eyesight dims, proofs itself in a poetry that keeps improving and improving as he nears death. Witnessing his higher and higher and still higher flights, one secretly thinks, “Well that will be my idea too.” But the thing is, you can’t control your idea. It has you; you don’t get to have it. Cole says as much himself. In Dune, the volume’s best poem, he writes “[Poetry] is stronger / than I am and makes me do what it wants.”

In thinking about Blackbird and Wolf, particularly in light of Cole’s earlier work, you almost feel like the rituals of purification, which he enacts in individual poems, have occurred on a larger, macrocosmic scale. Purification is a process of subtraction, a removal of impurities in quest of an altered or ideal state. It involves suffering, and for many is the only logical way to process suffering. Undertaken actively, it has an end in mind. In a poem like “Gulls,” one of Cole’s best,a kind of clarified vision seems to be the aim. Like the view from any peak, vision is a temporary phenomenon, so it’s no wonder that so many of Cole’s poems follow a similar movement, that they scale the same proverbial hill. Here is the poem in full:

Naked, hairy, trembling, I dove into the green,

where I saw a form that was Mother

in her pink swimsuit, pushing out of water,

so I kicked deeper, beyond a sugar boat

and Blake’s Ulro and Beulah; beyond grief, fate,

fingers, toes, and skin; beyond speech,

plagues of the blood, and flowers thrown on a coffin;

beyond Eros and the disease of incompleteness;

and as I swam I saw myself against the sky

and against the light, a tiny human knot with eyes,

my numb hands and repeated motion, like the gulls aloft,

touching the transparent structure of the world,

and in that icy, green, silver frothing,

I was straightening all that I had made crooked.

Beautiful stuff, eh? When I read this poem a second time, it brought to mind a line from the book of Malachi:

“He [the Lord] will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.”

It’s one of the bible’s most beautiful similes, and also one of the most beguiling. Like many metals, silver is heated to remove imperfections. The process requires constant attention, as too long a subjection to the heat ruins it. So how does the refiner know when his silver is pure? It becomes suddenly reflective, a mirror; he can see his image in it.

What’s interesting is that, in this metaphorical terrain, after swimming past the pressures of literature, his own body (where he seats desire), diseases, recollections of funerals, Cole’s speaker sees himself as tiny – “a tiny human knot with eyes.” An experience of smallness is common to all experiences of mysteriumtremendum: the I shrinks, the not-I enlarges. Even colloquially, when we speak of “putting something in perspective,” we most always mean we understand something, or ourselves, to be of less consequence than we once did.

And what is this thing that he mentions, “the transparent structure of the world?” Whatever it is, it seems to connect to a belief, expressed throughout Blackbird and Wolf, that all on earth is molded from the same substance, cut from the same cloth. As a reader, you not only find it in the parallels Cole habitually draws between the human body and the animal body, but in his overall use of simile, which is now less logical, more freely associative, a merging of essences. “Trees, mammals, fire, snow – / they are like emotions.” As Cole is such a powerful poet, we believe him when he says things like this just as we believe Stevens when he says, “the deer and the dachsund are one.”

***

Forgive me for exploiting the fact that this is an internet review, with somewhat looser guidelines….

I actually paid (or rather, am slowly in the process of paying) $1,500 dollars for Blackbird and Wolf. Strange story. Originally I ordered it from a used bookseller on the Amazon network, but over a month passed without it arriving. I sent this seller a series of agitated emails. Nothing. After meeting a friend one evening, I poked my head into St. Marks bookshop, saw it on the shelf, and went through a few poems standing up. Though I was convinced that if I bought it, a manila package would materialize in my mailbox the following day, I went ahead. The clerk slipped it into a small plastic bag. Harlem, where I live, is about a forty-minute bicycle ride from the East Village, and for some reason I was riding without a pack that night. (Why this was, I don’t know. Riding without a pack makes me feel naked, a wrist without a watch.) Still, holding a “drugstore-style” plastic bag in one hand while steering a bicycle is simple. No more difficult than holding a cigarette while steering a car. After a few blocks, though, in an attempt to switch the bag from one hand to the other, I pitched over the handlebars.

I’m always amazed at the body, how it can remain quiet as to its true condition. My hand hurt, but not unbearably. Maybe I was simply embarrassed at having fallen and being asked by half-giggling, half-concerned people, “Are you alright? Are you okay?” (My bicycle is my nicest possession, and sprawled on the street, I felt a bit like a pool player who screws together a fancy, two-piece cue at a bar and then emphatically blunders.) The next morning, like an idiot, I went to the emergency room. NEVER GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM IF YOU CAN HELP IT. EVER. I was charged almost a thousand dollars to be told my wrist was broken, then sent to a hand doctor. Can you believe that? The equivalent would be crossing a street so as to ensure a confrontation with a group of young men with a “we’re going to mug you” vibe about them…..

Anyhow, the poetry world is small enough that of course I have imagined meeting Henri Cole and telling him about this (all as those behind me in line at a signing sigh and think, “Oh Jesus just get on with it.”) Or perhaps I’d make sure to get at the back of the line, as in a line at a water fountain. I’ve heard he’s a nice person, with a dry sense of humor. Perhaps he’d ask if I got my money’s worth. Truthfully, looking at my current bottom line, I’d have to say no. I’m just not doing very well right now. But that isn’t to say that Blackbird and Wolf isn’t one of the best books of verse to come out in quite some time. We should all be looking forward to what he comes out with next.

Tags: 9 stars, FSG, Henri Cole, Matthew Yeager
Posted in reviews

In Praise of the Unfinished

Friday, February 29th, 2008

by Julia Hartwig
Knopf 2008
Reviewed by Matthew Yeager

“Great indeed is our need to love”

hartwig cover One interesting aspect of current life in Manhattan – particularly Manhattan under 110^th St. – is that the sight of a boarded-up building has transformed from an eye-sore into a rare pleasure, like a four-leaf clover. There is a feeling of emptiness that accompanies completeness, a terror that comes when we see that potential has been 100% fulfilled. There will always be upheaval, wrecking balls and re-construction, but what the scenery more often communicates is that each square inch – practically each cubic inch – of space on this small island has been accounted for and utilized. Sitting at my desk, it makes me think of an abandoned mine, stripped of coal. Viewed from a plane window, it has reminded me of a littered coffee-table after a long night of drinking, smoking and talk.

If laws weren’t in place to protect it, I have an awful fantasy that Central Park would be gobbled up in a matter of months. And not even in the surreptitious way a child eats away at a square of cake left in a fridge (by reducing its perimeter sliver by sliver so as to preserve the original shape). In my fantasy it would be totally and unabashedly devoured. High rises would go up. Though citizens would complain, though every cough would be attributed to the loss of millions and millions of leaves (much as every unseasonably warm January day produces thousands of exchanges on global warming), people would move in. Of course this could never happen, but it’s still a fantasy.

I’m lucky enough to live on a block in Harlem (120^th St. betweeen Lenox and Adam Clayton Powell) where there are still three uninhabited brownstones. On Lenox Ave. itself, there are large beautiful empty buildings adorned with all the intricately carved, functionless ornamentation Bauhaus architects were in such an ideological fervor to strip away. I don’t know what these buildings originally housed, but I often I find myself daydreaming about sneaking up inside one of them and remaining for days. What I would do in there, I’m not sure. But as representations of remaining possibility and potential, these and other vacant buildings are weirdly heartening.

Daydream of untouched stores of forgotten treasure tend to be brought on when there is a fixed quantity of something that has become precious, which then becomes more precious as supplies dwindle. As a child, my single greatest fantasy was to find an unopened box of 1952 Topps baseball card wax-packs at the flea markets and rural garage-sales my father was always poking around in. (Incidentally, 1952 remains the first year I’d stop at if I were given a time machine and allowed to return.) I am also excited by the thought of “wine hunters” knocking down walls in French basements and uncovering caches of dusty bottles. Poetically, I think the nearest equivalent to such a thing must have been the trunk of Fernando Pessoa’s writings, although something of the treasure-hunter’s unflagging hope must carbonate the thoughts of every academic getting ready to pore over a dead writer’s papers. It’s easy to imagine John and Bogdana Carpenter having a similar excitement in bringing Julia Hartwig’s work, for the first time, into English.

After only a few pages of her selected poems In Praise of the Unfinished, a reader can’t help but wonder how this could be the first translation of her poetry. Actually, I was wondering this even before I opened it. On the cover of the uncorrected proofs I was given to review, we are told that Czeslaw Milosz has referred to her as “the grande dame of Polish poetry.” Could the delay have been born of the difficulty in translating her? Julia Hartwig was born in 1921. Wislava Szymborska, by comparison, was born in 1923. Hartwig has also lived for stretches of time in America, so it seems confounding that she could have flown for so long under so many translators’ radars. The quality of her verse, though I can only compare translations, seems every bit equal to Szymborska’s. Hartwig also possesses a similar gravity, a similar sense of priorities, and a similarly irrepressible affection for the world around her. There’s even a similar spunk. Maybe I’m alone in the dark here – it certainly wouldn’t be the first time – but to only now be getting wind of a poet this good (and nearly ninety years old!) makes me cautiously hope there are others like her.

It is easy to pick out the Hartwig poems that an anthologist would choose to represent her. Her poems about the experience of being a woman in Poland during and after World War II have a sincerity that one would imagine finding not in poetry – with the temptation it brings to raise one’s voice – but in a firsthand oral account or a letter to a far-off friend. As people, there is a strong desire to be a part of any collective shaping experience, and this can often results in testimonies that play up the magnitude of an individual’s personal involvement, testimonies that tap themselves on the chest: “I have seen this! I have seen that! This was my experience!” What comes through in Hartwig’s poems is actually a sense of exclusion. And this is what causes her accounts to ring with truth. Nearby front-line horrors have occurred that she can know about, read about, and endlessly imagine, but never truly know. “Separation,” for instance, begins:

Men do not tell women about war
They are silent when a woman’s hand touches their scars.

Note the quiet authority in these lines. She is speaking for more than herself, which isn’t her usual stance. You could almost say there is a “ghost” limb in this poem, an invisible opening couplet something like, “I have asked him, many times, to tell me what he saw / I have asked others if their husbands and lovers break their quiet, but….”

Surprisingly, WWII is the expressed subject in very few of these poems. (Hartwig’s fascinations include painting, nature, literature, and also America.) However, the re-prioritization that occurs as a result of such a reality as war – the “utter change,” to paraphrase Yeats – is present everywhere. We read her in light of war’s darkness. Take the short poem “A Sigh” as an example. Her subject here is her love of things she has deemed superfluous. The second of the two stanzas reads:

How I loved you things that are unnecessary
paintings words flowers and lovely faces
each blossoming meadow sunsets and dawns
how I loved you almost to excess
and how vexed I was that you are superfluous.

As we all know, an understanding of what is superfluous or extraneous results from a confrontation with what is absolutely essential. The stressed-out workaholic whose lifestyle brings on a near fatal heart attack will often emerge, pushed in a wheelchair out of a hospital, expressing a similar point of view. Call it a survivor’s stance. What is interesting, however, are the sorts of things that Hartwig deems “superfluous.” Paintings, sunsets, and words are unnecessary. As for dawns, lovely faces, and flowers, they too are lovely but not crucial, like snow on Christmas.

Yet aren’t these exactly the sorts of things you might expect the workaholic heart attack victim to vow to pay more attention to? It is rare that the examples a poet lists to back up a declaration make any contribution to the overall meaning of the poem. But here they open a door into her personality; they increase her. Glyn Maxwell (and I think he borrowed this from Auden) teaches poetry by dictating poems with blanks in them, almost like mad-libs. After taking a few minutes to fill in the blanks, students then compare their choices to what Edward Thomas or Philip Larkin did. Imagining “A Sigh” as such a mad-lib, it’s easy to picture students who have supplied “cigarettes or video games or fame” being startled at what an odd collection of nouns Hartwig has chosen. So what is not superfluous? Now we must set the book aside, stare at the wall above our desks, and ask ourselves. If a poem can make us do this, we know that it has done something.

Ultimately, it is impossible to refrain from loving what there is to be loved in this world. It is absolutely utterly and completely impossible. A chocolate-caramel will taste good to us no matter if it comes from a candy dish at a funeral home. And this is Hartwig’s message: what you find at the center of her. She even concludes one poem – and convincingly, I might add – “Great indeed is our need to love.” What a wonderful statement to walk around with in your head. But it is not a message that we’ll necessarily heed out of any mouth. As American readers, we are more inclined to listen to such truths when they’re uttered by “Greatest Generation” foreign poets, especially Eastern European poets.

One large reason for this is World War II. Though America fought, the war wasn’t on our soil, and thus there was economic boon. Instead of rebuilding, we had building. Henry Ford’s assembly-line techniques, honed in the war, were applied to home-manufacture (Levittown) and hamburgers (McDonalds). Powerful lobbying coalitions were formed among industries with common interests, and we experienced the cancerously-rapid growth of suburban America and all its defining features: automobiles, interstate systems, discount stores, single-family homes, fast food, vinyl-siding, cul-de-sacs, sports-obsessed dads, chain supermarkets, et al. While US suburbia is looked on most often with wariness and displeasure (it has encouraged obesity, environmental harm, cookie-cutter lifestyles, materialism, and the replacement of the skilled craftsman with the repetitive laborer – “America” basically), it’s hard to imagine that the average postwar European wouldn’t have preferred a 15 cent McDonalds hamburger or a washing machine on credit to the bomb-torn scenes out a glassless window.

When people are confronted with daily evidence, they are inclined not to forget. Thus, the war lingers through what we must assume are Hartwig’s formative poetic years. As in Milosz, when she expresses an appreciation for a minute facet of everyday life, the fact that we can’t help but appreciate becomes part of the subject matter of the poem. There are so many poems that enact this, but I was particularly moved by one called “Philemon and Baucis,” which I believe is a prose poem. The entire poem centers on the relief a man in bed feels at knowing the sounds of his companion in the next room haven’t been dreamt. “It is real! She really shuffles. So, they are still together. Grateful and reconciled, he falls back into his fragile sleep.”

***

Although this might be an over-attention to the superfluous, this volume is severely short-changed by its lack of an introductory essay and notes. To send this Selected into the world of American poetry without an introductory essay makes no sense, almost like sending a child off to school in January without a winter hat. (Perhaps a better analogy would be to say this book is like a major sporting event without a pre-game show.) What quality of music do these poems have in their native Polish? Are they free-verse in the original or free-verse adaptations of rhymed and metered poems? What sort of artistic milieu did they emerge from? Would someone group her with others into a school? What kinds of language-specific effects – puns, for instance – are left behind? Has she evolved stylistically over her career in ways that might not come across in translation? I can’t speak for every reader (and I can also understand the impulse to let the English language versions speak for themselves), but these are questions that I am curious about and embarrassingly will probably never be able to figure out for myself.

If the translators themselves weren’t up to it (they have certainly done their work), couldn’t Knopf have found a willing essayist? Personally, I would have nominated Robert Hass. His introductions to Mitchell’s Rilke translations and Tomaz Salamun’s Selected Poems made wonderful and illuminating companions. Plus, he has piles of experience with Polish poetry (and its untranslatable aspects) due to his long relationship with Czeslaw Milosz. Adam Zagajewski, in addition to being a Polish poet himself, is a fine essayist who also has an understanding of American readers. Edward Hirsch would have been good too; he knocks every introductory essay he writes straight out of the stadium. My point is simply that I’m sure they could have enlisted someone very capable.

I’d also like to know how the volume is arranged. I’d assume chronologically, but there is absolutely no way to be sure. There are nine roman-numerically numbered sections, but as we’re told in the short author bio that she has produced twelve volumes of poetry, we can’t assume each section corresponds to a book. There’s also no timeline. Did she publish her first book in 1942, as 21 year old, or did she labor for many years in anonymity? A poem that recollects WWII has a different ethos if we know it was written in 1970 as opposed to 1950.

All these things are a shame because the translations read so smoothly and possess such a clear, human voice. This can’t have been easy, as many of these poems – particularly the shorter ones – make meaning with subtle tonal shifts. Oddly enough, the only poem that I remember finding lacking was the four-line poem “Feeling the Way” that concluded the volume. I say “oddly enough” because the title of the collection is a riff on the poem’s first line. It reads in full:

The most beautiful is what is still unfinished
a sky filled with stars uncharted by astronomers
a sketch by Leonardo a song broken off from emotion
a pencil a brush suspended in the air

Though I get it that the poem itself is supposed to represent an unfinished thing, my chief problem with it is still that it is four lines long. It begins with an intriguing declaration, yet the lengthy meditation such a claim would logically necessitate (think of Keats’s opening to Endymion: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”) goes entirely unwritten. Reason alone can’t make a poem, just as spices alone can’t make a meal, but often certain meals depend on them. Here we have a situation that requires reasoning. The declaration, as it’s delivered at the outset, requires a series of diagnostic tests to be performed on it. The reader needs to have the poet prove it, or at least – as the opposite could also be said to be true – shown how she arrived at it. Did the sentiment come from the da Vinci sketch? If unprovoked, such blanket statements generally come together after a long and interesting series of thoughts, so she might have applied a basic film structure. I’m referencing how films often show a pivotal plot point as the first scene – say, a betrayal and murder – and then show the events that led up to it.

As for the second line, it is untrue: the stars in our sky have been charted. For astronomers, the celestial bodies visible to a naked eye must have been the equivalent of low-hanging fruit. (Indeed, science has long since moved on to galaxies of stars whose light will never reach us.) Now, will all stars ever be charted by astronomers? From what little I know, this seems unlikely, and obviously this is what the poem is trying to mean. But here the poet or translator should have had a second thought, scratched out the phrasing, and written a truer line. A line like the first, simple and declarative, would have worked:

The most beautiful is what is still unfinished.
There are stars that will never be charted by astronomers.

***

I am going to ask your forgiveness in advance for the following analogy. “Beer goggles” refer to those cases when a person, having consumed too much alcohol, finds himself or herself sexually attracted to people s/he wouldn’t find attractive in a sober state. Likewise, there are also “poetry goggles,” which cause us to find certain poems more attractive than we otherwise might. With “poetry goggles,” the distorting lens is typically 1.) the poet’s stature 2.) the fact the poem is from a different era 3.) the fact the poem has been translated. If I read a poem for the first time that I know is by T.S. Eliot or W.B. Yeats, I will be more eager to latch onto its virtues than its faults. If I don’t understand a line, my immediate thought won’t be that the poet has written unclearly, but that I am deficient as a reader. If I flat-out disagree with an assertion, I generally can’t even notice. I’m instantly too busy re-processing what I know of the world according to what has just been told to me, extruding all my experience, like raw pasta into intriguing shapes, through the device of the claim.

Although the lens is created in the first place by the poems, the thickness of it corresponds directly to a poet’s reknown. In most poetry workshops it’s pointed out that if “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” or some other agreed-upon masterpiece were brought in typed in Times New Roman and printed out on a sheet of computer paper, a student who had never seen it would un-cap his red pen and begin wreathing the poem with commentary. “I’d can the women talking about Michelangelo,” he’d jot. “Where is all this yellow smoke coming from?” This is simply because a poem on computer paper signals to a reader something different than the same words would were they printed in an anthology. “Change me,” the formatting says, “Read me as if to change me. I’m not done.” Reading this way (perhaps you couldn’t even call it “reading”) is like aiming a high-beam flashlight at a patch of dark yard: faults come wriggling out en masse. Poems are like people; when they’re new to the world, everyone has an opinion as to who or what they should grow up to be. When they’ve grown old and published, we allow them their quirks and compulsive tics. We even love them for it.

A poem’s age encourages us to put on a different set of “poetry goggles.” Time is the one editor that most readers instinctively trust, so antiquity automatically implies stature. The mere fact the poem has survived must make it worth our effort. But there also purely exists what has been called “the sheen of temporal distance.” This is the one aesthetic quality that an artist has almost no control over. As a work of art ages, it secretes something like a mist that hovers between, in this case, the reader and the poem and alters every aspect of what is read. To a young man encountering Frank O’Hara in the 21^st century, his poems, with their profusion of “period” details, will call to mind black-and-white movies of that same era. For now, this contributes an outstanding feeling, as fifty years ago has not disappeared from our collective rearview mirror. (Who isn’t charmed by those film images of crowded city sidewalks back when all men wore hats and read newspapers?) If a reader opens a book of ancient Greek lyric poetry, he’ll be dazzled by every emotion that he recognizes as familiar. “Amazing! This person two-plus centuries ago was feeling the same things I’m feeling,” he’ll think. What is communicated is a sense that little hasn’t changed about the basics of the human experience in 2,500 years. Archilochus or Sappho might have predicted as much, but it wasn’t what they set out to communicate.

As for foreign poets, I think Americans implicitly trust them for the same reasons that we trust people older than we are when they reflect on an age we haven’t yet arrived at. Their sense of history most often runs deeper. Or perhaps, we trust them for the reason that we tend to trust advice from friends’ fathers more than from our own fathers. Or perhaps we trust them because so many have proved to be trustworthy. It is true that if a translated poem compares a heart to a stone I will overlook the fact that it is a cliché much more readily than with an American poet.

I worry that I have ended this review on a sour note. If so, this wasn’t my attention at all. Hartwig writes with a compassion that is rare, and the translations read as excellent poems in English. I’d give this book 9 out of a 10 if there had been an essay and a note on arrangement. And who knows, perhaps these things were added after the uncorrected proofs, and you’ll be very confused if you pick it up and purchase it. Which I think that you should. (Pick it up I mean.) To encounter a world loved is a good step towards loving the world, and there is love in her work. Like Cavafy and Milosz and Rilke and Pessoa, Julia Hartwig is one of those poets who belongs on every poetry reader’s bookshelf. Hopefully In Praise of the Unfinished is the first step towards that.

Tags: 8 stars, Julia Hartwig, Knopf, Matthew Yeager
Posted in reviews

The Development of Aerial Militarism…

Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

by Paul Scheerbart
Ugly Duckling Presse 2007
Reviewed by Komo Andanda

The Ability to Bomb from Directly Above

development of aeiral militarism Paul Scheerbart is unlikely to be remembered in America for his poetry, if at all for any of his writing. However, in his satirical flyer The Development of Aerial Militarism and the Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets, Scheerbart writes with ambiguously sardonic and wry humor that speaks to anyone who’s watched for the last 100 years, addressing the omnipresence of and social malaise relative to technological development, specifically military development, that presses forward from generation to generation. He criticizes the arms race which took place before the start of World War I and predicts—unknowingly—what later was to be coined Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD.

The flyer is organized into 16 smaller essays concerning the point “Aerial Militarism is far stronger than ground forces, fortresses, and navel fleets.” Beginning with the first essay, “The Impossibility of a Land Battle when Air-Fleets are Involved,” Scheerbart presumes that two European powers possessing Air-fleets want war with one another. If such a war occurs, according to Scheerbart, Air-fleets would cause great and irreconcilable damage in attacks to military installations, parliaments, and palaces; it would happen so quickly that the troops would be “greeted with a hail of torpedoes,” rendering land troops “totally superfluous.”

In the second smaller essay, “The Impossibility of a Fortress War when air-fleets are Involved,” the author goes on to explain that “a fortress war is inconceivable no matter what, if air-fleets exist on both sides.” Scheerbart states that air-fleets simply aren’t bothered by forts, forts being the standard first line of defense against invading armies. Furthermore, air-fleets can fly with complete freedom and need not pay further attention to forts. He then concludes that forts are superfluous and should be converted for peaceful purposes, a notion rendered with marvelous humor.

Scheerbart’s logical, direct and deadpan humor laughs the reader into identifying with Scheerbart’s position—even if he has no clear “stance” other than the hint that it is careless to brainlessly praise technology for its own sake. You’ll laugh inaudibly at his absurd, yet almost conceivable logic: “many soldiers can hide in the forts. But if they come out, they’re exposed to air torpedoes. They might as well not come out. Now it’s obvious that soldiers who can’t put in an appearance in wartime are totally superfluous.” The irony speaks for itself; the future, and future technology, are incoherent, a little bit frightening and always based on something of a false premise.

A bit antique, Aerial Militarism might raise the “relevance” question at first. But good political satire is timeless; Scheerbart keeps a steady eye on the illogical and contradictory moves by Militarists, as well as their denial of the proliferation of god-knows-what new military technology as it “pursues its own steady progress without regard for humanity or civic sentiment” and “compels a dynamite war.” It also serves to remind us of the speed at which once-fascinating and unnerving technology can become commonplace as newer and more destructive ends are researched.

Figuratively, the flyer (pun intended, if you haven’t determined that yet) claims a war of terror and atrocity, which literally depends on dynamite. There have always been Rules of War, and there have always been people ordered to break them; nevertheless, the question of morality is raised: “in the future, even the dropping of explosive munitions on enemy ships will be possible so that, as in a land war, the battle will have to take another course, and at the very least leave a powerful moral impression.” In the end, Scheerbart strikes a profoundly relevant chord, asking Aerial militarists should “feel a moral lift when, with a couple of dynamite bombs, they succeed in sending a couple of thousand enemies to kingdom come? Indeed—I wouldn’t be surprised if they soon started talking about “holy” dynamite…” What’s more holy than victory?

Tags: 7 stars, Komo Ananda, Paul Scheerbart
Posted in reviews

Our Aperture

Friday, February 15th, 2008

by Ander Monson
New Michigan Press 2007
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

Heart-Shaped Book

monson cover

Ander Monson’s chapbook Our Aperture is 30 pages of poems that feel huge, but huge in the sort of referential way one wanders through subway stations and feels like s/he is seeing the whole shape of the moment, encapsulated and removed, a participant.

These poems revolve around and around the “I,” and gratefully the “I” is less of a judge and more of a participant. The concern or conceit of this “I” involves a genuine understanding of the way circumstance colors our situations and the way that something which is pushed responds by being moved: “What came after the world: / silence, lots of it.”

There are three poems in this chapbook with the title “Availability.” The subject matter of these poems is what one might expect: quasi-lists of things that are available and of ways to be available. But they also go further than that; much of the language is recycled and recontextualized in each poem. Even the forms change; some just pour down the page, and others are neatly tucked into in even stanzas.

Some begin like stories: “In the midst of darkness, this presence / is also always and it will be it…” Others start in medias res: “What is also is always.” But to look at the idea of availability from the point of view of someone who has occasionally been made available or who seeks availability calls into question just what it is one looks to be available for, and at last, the many methodical ways in which the concept itself can be deconstructed.

While all of these poems broke my heart, the one I marked up most was “Exhaust”:

streaming exhaust
out of a pip that leads to the heart of the world
where great things are constantly being created
from scratch

And:

Who
cares about now. Fuck the moment. I want the next
one, and the one after that: result, proceeding, the dark
heart of it out of reach of the streetlight, flashlight,
motion-detector floodlight you installed
to keep the world out of your heart.

The poignancy of this greed for more and more moments weighs heavy on the chest; the image of the floodlight as protector of the heart made me think of the way one might move around slowly late at night, understanding that the lights are motion detectors and that turning them on is a bad thing. The tender and careful feeling I get from this makes my own heart feel less exposed if only because I am reminded that there are other little hearts out there guarding themselves as well.

The title Our Aperture cleverly suggests joint ownership of the speaker’s split. It can be read as collective sigh and protection, or as instance of failure—of flaw or blip that is unfortunate but unavoidable, as many things turn out to be when reasoned enough. The last poem, “Any Vanishing Point is as Good as This,” reflects this:

half-hopes
of the family viewed only from above
from such a distance that love disappears.

Perhaps there is a limit to love’s extensions and perhaps the place where this is true is safer.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Ander Monson, Jackie Clark, New Michigan Press
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Ox

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008

by Christopher Patton
Vehicule Press 2007
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

The Willed Form of a Steady New Voice

Unlike many souped-up books where the language of the poems is over-modified for higher performance, Christopher Patton’s new book Ox is artful, intelligent and substantial. It is a refreshing and generous first book from a very steady-eyed, steady-handed, steady-minded new poet.

Though decorously undecorated, Patton’s poetry is carefully constructed. He begins with heaps of interesting, carefully selected images of the usual physical world. He then segues out into the realm of a zenful consideration. But the point of view here is substantial to the poems, not a mere stylistic decoration.

Poetry is the domain of transformation. In one valence, the Concrete world gets shifted into images and into the vowels and consonants of human speech. In one of Patton’s poems, red maple leaves become the residual red paper confetti of an inauguration; a weeping willow becomes anthropomorphized into a disheveled queen searching haltingly through her sorrows to tell her tale to her chastened, emerging buds.

In another valence, the Abstract world also gets shifted into the human abstraction of language.

Both the valences (the Concrete and the Abstract) undulating, separating, and braiding together make up poetry, a reflection of the broadband of human Reality. Patton does it very well:

                                          Guarding
                     the dull green bud
         that comes, father blares
blood-red alarms, though his war
            is over. Rose, a cousin,
            visits, but not often.
         After she has cleaned and cooked
for them, she spreads a lurid whorl,
         then full, seeding hips; when he invokes
            a military rationale,
            she slams her farewell.

                              …the heart
            that was hurt, will hurt.
                                                      (from “Hawthorne”)

Patton circles and hovers over the existential profundity of human passion. Abstract human emotions like Grief and Love exist in the moment, like the poison of a bee sting or the yellow streak of newly minted pollen. Abstract and concrete gestures are assembled; and, through thought and language, disassembled. The reverse is also true.

A singular bee is not merely gifted with venom as a defense mechanism.

In another scale, a bee is a poison-loaded predator who hurts and gathers game that her hive’s hexagons might be filled and the offspring there flourish. In time, her being, too, will be another desiccated corpse impassionately cleaned from the hive:

         A bee moves with a lone soul’s
ease: like a pendulum unhinged undulates
back to the hive. And it will hurt, as
         a flame hurts the edge of a chart
         of shoals, when one who was apart
            comes to fill his prison’s
            paper hexagons
                  with nectar the cells
                  will hold, though it kills.
                                          (from “Poisoned”)

The imprisonment (by paper, by geometry, by received forms), the burning hurt, the chart of shoals is rife ground for Zenful, poetic mediation.

Patton also visits the zen tropes of worms and oxen; lambs, lions, and eagles; gardens, fields, seeds, and weeds; wine; rivers; journeys, fences, and gates; flags and bells. In this sample, a spade striking a rock forms the bell:

      Death-knell in a hole-wall. Rang the spade bell, two,
      three, chring of rock in soil. Treeplanting.
      Levered load up and bore
      a bit to left; turned, heft fell.
      Knelt to sleuth for a lost self. No self. A worm-
      half laughed. Felt-soft burns in the leaf-halls. A form
      falls away in a spall
      of lame or will––I follow halting to––see it through––

(#21, “Weed, Flower, Mind”)

Ox is a first-rate first book from a steady-voiced, capable new poet.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Christopher Patton, Scott Hightower, Vehicule Press
Posted in reviews

Fragment of the Head of a Queen

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

by Cate Marvin
Sarabande Books 2006
Reviewed by Matthew Yeager*

“Anyway, Poets are Tough”

marvin cover

We all have pet scenarios we go to when we’re in need of a private chuckle. One of mine – for whatever reason – involves Marshall McLuhan and the seismic shift his career underwent following the publication of Understanding Media in the mid-1960s. One day the man was quietly grading literature papers in his office at the University of Toronto. The next, catapulted into the public consciousness (and still affecting a clip-on tie), he was delivering his beguiling, freely-associative lectures to the stupefied members of corporate boardrooms. Hailed as a genius (which he certainly was), McLuhan was viewed by industry moguls as a witch doctor, a man who stood alone on a previously undiscovered planet, an antennae-headed visitor from the future. “Can you help us?” they begged, and rummaged through his words, like raccoons through trash, looking for what might be of use.

No doubt the behaviors of CEOs had much to do with the boldness and suddenness of McLuhan’s declarations. He’d leapfrog from Joyce to Matthew Arnold to Toynbee to Shakespeare, then snap-cut to: “It is only today that industries have become aware of the various kinds of businesses in which they are engaged. When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision.”

Of course, like all authoritative statements with a theme of “once was lost, now am found,” the IBM quote possesses an innate attractiveness – perhaps especially for poets, who chronically suffer from feelings of being lost. It recalls a statement made by Ashbery in an interview many years back – something like: “Early on I used to think that I was writing about nothing; then I realized I was writing about Time.” As a poet, one reads such a quote and immediately begins thinking personally. “Well, if he’s writing about Time, then what am I writing about?” the poet asks of the nearest wall. “Could my true subject be different than what I think it is? Do I even HAVE a subject in the way Hopkins or Keats or Stevens did?”

Stevens tells us that the true subject of poetry is poetry. Easy enough. But his truer subject, the one that informs both his individual poems and his poetics as a whole, is the Imagination and its relationship to reality. At times it’s a lament at the fact that the imagination’s raw materials are innately limited (“The houses are haunted / By white night-gowns”). Most often it’s an expression of the imagination’s necessity in combating the fundamental poverty of existence, in making human life bearable. Keats writes primarily of the effect of art on himself – or more broadly, art on the self. As for Fr. Hopkins (the poet that Cate Marvin, perhaps even more than Baudelaire or Plath, most readily associates to), he had his subject as well. If one is dealing with an incarnate God, a perfected, sanctifying force that inheres in every thunderstorm and weed, in every cloud and crag, one must find the strength to comprehend and praise the horrible as a necessary feature of our world. Not praise the horrible as a catalyst for growth, or praise it as the foil-backing by which lovelier things can be known, but praise in itself.

Of course, it’s not every poet that has a single, identifiable preoccupation that necessitates, generates, and holds together the body of his/her work. It’s not like a nose that can be found protruding from the center of every face. For the most part, we find a major “subject” only in our best poets, and it only comes to light once you consider the role of form. Even then, it’s easier to sense than it is to compress into two or three sentences. And though all artists crave to navigate clearly, it’s probably not necessary for the poet him-/herself to know exactly what it is. Do we know what Hopkins thought he was writing about? Perhaps, as he never conducted an interview, he never had occasion to begin thinking along such lines. I’m sure I’m not the first to suggest it, but the situation of a person alone in his room at night is a suitable figure for the poet. If the light is on indoors, the world outside can see in, but the person cannot see out. Even if one succeeds in imaginatively assuming an exterior vantage point, perspective quickly returns to its nest.

—–

I say all of this as preface to the fact that Cate Marvin is, to my sense, one of the few poets going who does have a central, dynamic issue that informs nearly every poem. In Fragment of the Head of a Queen, her astonishingly well-made second volume of verse, this subject has begun to emerge into clarity. Just as Ashbery did when he said his poetry was about “time,” we could almost boil it down into a single word. Control. Her poetry is about control.

On a first reaction, this might sound like a trivial matter compared to “Death” or “Time’s Passage” or “God.” We imagine someone death-obsessed as a morose teenager wearing all black, someone god-obsessed as a monk alone in a tiny room, someone control-obsessed as a meddlesome boss or a neat-freak spouse. However, it is not. In the sense I mean it, “control” is one of life’s central conundrums. At the heart of it is the fact that the items we cannot influence far outstrip in number and importance the items that we can. You cannot control natural disasters, car accidents, who your parents are, whether an interviewer will understand your sense of humor, whether your face is naturally handsome or ugly, emotions in regard to love, the behavior of politicians, or what disease will come upon you in old age. Meanwhile, you can control that your face is clean-shaven, that you are on time, that you vote, that you are diligent at your job, that you put items back after you use them, and that you remember to carry an umbrella. If all this does not seem fair, this is because it isn’t. It stinks.

Among other things, such a discrepancy is what Rilke is writing about in “The Man Watching” when he exclaims: “What we choose to fight is so tiny / What rages against us is so great.” In the story of Jacob–which Rilke paraphrases–the collective “what we can’t control” assumes the form of the Angel. It descends without warning, is mightier than we are, and picks a fight. Jacob fights back. He fights with everything he has, but his effort is a futile one. His loss is inevitable, but we’re made to understand that the fact he’s fought is worth something. The story could not be more counter to the prevailing American myth, which would want to re-write Jacob as vanquishing the angel, as Rocky did Ivan Drago.

To become tuned into the discrepancy between what we can and can’t control–i.e. to evolve the order of knowledge from the nominal to the experiential–ordinarily requires a trauma or a series of traumas. While it’s possible that a person’s unique bent of mind could accomplish such a focus on its own, this seems unlikely to me. It requires encounters with the uncontrollable, usually in the form of sudden and powerful events, major shocks to the psyche. From here, keened in, a person can begin noticing all that truly is outside of his control, circulating as if with a sticker gun. Can I control this? “No.” Can I control that? “No.” He might even feel bits of luck mixed in with the general feeling of helplessness and fear. (You could feel lucky, for instance, that your parents used reasonably proper grammar in your household, and that because the speech you learned to mimic helped you all during school, your self-esteem wasn’t as low as it otherwise would have been).

There is also a psychological formula to control that all of us follow. Any lay shrink could deduce it, though I suppose I wasn’t aware of it until I saw it enacted in these poems. I imagine I first encountered it as a teenager, on those occasions when my father would pick me up from baseball practices. He was a sick man, and by the mid-1990s, a decades-long combination of alcohol and psychiatric medications had eroded him to the point where the illness was visible. When he and not my mother showed up (and there was about a fifty-fifty chance), my anxiety and shame, my shame at my shame, would translate into a suddenly intensified focus, a viciousness even. Suddenly, so much seemed to be riding on my ability to hit a baseball. And I’d grimly attend to my routine, knocking honeycombs of dirt from my cleats, adjusting my batting gloves, prepping my eye by staring into the insignia on the pitcher’s cap – a trick, incidentally, that he’d taught me. Control, control, control.

Such a response is natural. We don’t often get to have a direct wrestling match as Jacob did. When confronted with a force we cannot control (and through that, a sense of simply how much is beyond our control), we turn to what small things we can and then control them with a white-knuckled intensity.

——-

As a second volume, Fragment relates to Marvin’s first, World’s Tallest Disaster, in a way that makes a great deal of logical sense. Yet for some reason, I can’t think of a “first book-second book” relationship to which it’s exactly analogous. The reason for this would have to be the spiritual demands it places on the author.

Second books, in this day and age, seem to fall into one of several categories. Some read like seamless continuations of first books. In these cases, where the author has simply plowed ahead, the second book functions to establish that author’s particular poetics–almost in the way the second sentence of a “surreal” poem works to establish the rules of its world. (A dog is crawling across the ceiling. A woman tries knocking it down with the handle of her broom.)

Others, in the name of radical departure, attempt to throw off the approaches and mannerisms of their first effort. You see this response a lot of the time when a first volume is praised. It’s not necessarily that these approaches and mannerisms were a false direction, but the poet, craving the freedom of the undifferentiated cell (or at least the freedom he had before there was a document in the world out there representing him), needs to believe they are. Painters often burn their earlier paintings precisely because they are their earlier paintings. Down the road, this can pay dividends creatively. (We see this in Tennis Court Oath and, recently, though you can’t predict where he’ll go, in Dan Chiasson’s second book.)

Still other second volumes go the route of the “project” book. By this I mean that a decision is made at the outset that all the poems will be 20 lines long, or will center on a semi-pro football team from the year 1925 that a great-grandfather played on, or will be spoken by a fictionalized police chief. These books are sometimes wonderful and true to temperament, but in many cases you almost sense that the poet is avoiding something, as if he’s embarked on an extended cruise with his mistress and no telephones. Auden insinuates about Tennyson that some of his long “unreadable” narrative poems were manifestations of a subconscious desire to feel something other than the acute melancholy and desire for death that his lyric sensibility communicated to him. If so, you can’t blame Tennyson, not any more than you could for an occasional urge to remove his palm from a stove burner. But an analogy could be made to certain “project” books, which contain a generating device and can be made primarily with a poet’s craft and brains. Of course, all these varied reactions to the first book are precedent-setting for their makers.

What Marvin has done in Fragment of the Head of a Queen doesn’t exactly follow any of these patterns. She hasn’t repeated her first poems or dismissed them. Nor has she put her natural sensibility on hiatus. Rather, it’s almost as if she took the edge of her hand and used it to slide up every setting on a stereo’s equalizer. An overall sense of proportion remains, but all the qualities that defined World’s Tallest Disaster have been amplified. Her most frequent topic is still Eros (and with the Greek sense that love and madness are bedfellows very much intact), but here the content of the poems is darker, wilder, more violent. The situations are direr. To match and express this intensity, (to “reach and share” in Hart Crane’s sense), the language has become more elaborate, more sonically dense, almost Baroque in spots. The poems are also longer on the whole. And though it is her own, eccentric brand of strictness (her line breaks are visual, and her lines in a given poem openly aspire to the exact visual length on a page), the formal constraints she imposes are a certainly a good deal stricter. Thumbing through the volume rapidly, like a flipbook, and simply looking at the layout of the poems, you can’t help but be struck by how much order there is. It’s like a bird’s eye view of a gridded city.

Out of this interplay between content and form, a dialectic emerges. Imagine a person who can communicate both orally (content) and in sign language (form) simultaneously saying one thing with the mouth, the other with the hands. Or try to understand it like this: “a more out-of-control subject matter is counter-weighted by stricter formal control.” The net effect of all this reminds one that a scale will achieve balance so long as there is equal weight on each side. However, a scale with one hundred pounds on each side is quite a different matter than a scale with a metric ton on each side.

As you read through the book, there is an unusual feeling, not unlike coming upon the one building left standing after a city-leveling quake, that comes with finishing one of these poems–particularly those that seem more personal. This sense comes out of Marvin’s manipulation of the illusion of creative order, i.e. the illusion an experience drives the poet to the desk and shapes how the particular experience will be written about. The speaker is situated, again and again, in the aftermath of experiences that would seem to have mentally and physically destroyed her. She is subjected to sexual humiliation, physical assault, manipulation, the sudden death of a loved one, even the inability to express love at the funeral due to social restraints. Yet we see that her speaker hasn’t been destroyed. She is alive not only to write, but to write with a masterful control of the language. This is why the final line of “Muckracker,” which seems as destined for survival as any poem yet written by an American born after 1960, is so deceptive. “I have no loyalty and I have no pride,” says the speaker. Ostensibly, she is commenting on the tell-all nature of the poem’s content. Yet those who truly “have no loyalty and have no pride” do not carefully modulate internal rhymes, keep aloft multiple conceits, and craft stanzas as regular-sized as sidewalk blocks all while managing to tell a fully arcing tale. They don’t end up with poetry like:

Counterfeit! This is war; this is two spiders a child’s
dropped into a jar, scrabbling at the glass and flinging
their webs, each so intent on killing each other, the fact
that both are trapped has ceased to matter. O, blood,
blood, blood! Shall I, reader, be a tad more explicit?

They also, of course, don’t tend to quote Othello, come up with fitting metaphors that also make sense in terms of previously developed themes (the house the speaker and her partner share enters the poem throughout), then have audience-awareness to explicate their similes. Rather, they spew.

In an online interview with Redivider, when asked what this book was about, Marvin delivered a one-sentence answer: “It is largely about destruction of the self.” Theoretically, this is true. But what Fragment actually communicates is that there remains a part of the self, a kind of black box, that is essentially indestructible. Above all, this is trauma’s lesson. In practice, it can be a painful one, as the individual conscience secretly craves the self to be destroyed by what the conscience judges should reasonably destroy it. When a loved one dies–particularly suddenly and too young, against the natural order–a person often doesn’t want to heal, believing an inability to heal validates the love. Healing, on the other hand, represents a betrayal. The resulting shame is that the past, influential as it was, is not capable of continuing to overwhelm the present or the future. Emerson’s “Experience” is probably the great tract on this subject.

But strength is a virtue, the one necessary component of survival. As her speaker keeps emerging from the events to sing them in such exemplary verse, she wins our admiration. She also provides an example we might follow, an applicable model. Here it’s a confirmation of the logic “unless it kills me, it will only make me stronger.” This is a good saying. Of course, when an acquaintance has rattled it off to you in a time of true need, particularly without first framing it (“I know it’s a cliche, but…”), you’ve probably had an urge either to insult the person (if she’s a woman) or punch him (if he’s a man). But that is altogether beside the point. The stance toward experience the expression takes is one that can actually help us weather life’s difficulties. We so often forget–caught up in judging and comparing as we often are–that poetry can help us with this as well.

—–

It’s admittedly tempting to go through all of Marvin’s work, like a Google search with keywords “Marvin” and “Control,” and then make a gigantic fuss over every finding that pops up. (This was my chief strategy for writing essays in college. Maybe it was yours as well.) I won’t go that route here–I promise–but I would like to bring up three relevant items from that same Redivider interview, which was conducted several months before Fragment of the Head of a Queen came out. Regarding World’s Tallest Disaster:

KR: Relatedly, weather imagery tends to show up a great deal in these poems—what does this signify to you?

CM:The issue is control, as the speaker wishes to manipulate the elements (along with the fate she desires to share with the much loved/loathed addressee of the poems).

This is self-explanatory.

KR: You write, “I don’t drink whiskey to relax” in “I Live Where the Leaves Are Pointed.” There seems to be a fair amount of whiskey in your poems—why is this? And do you have a favorite brand?

CM: Whiskey is a trope in WTD, suggesting romantic intoxication, madness, loss of control, and the visionary experience of living one’s life inside a poem. Different drinks have different metaphorical weight. Wine’s heady, gin is poisonous, vodka’s cold, and beer is plain boring. In real life, I’m a big fan of boxed white wine, much to the dismay of my more refined friends.

I might, as a member of the service industry, disagree with some of her takes on alcoholic beverages. (Vodka, for instance, is truly the boring one. It’s also a marketing ploy. In more than a few New York City bars, a bar-back’s preparatory tasks actually include funneling Absolut from 1.75 liter jugs into empty bottles of Grey Goose, Belvedere, Chopin, Stolichnaya, Van Gogh, Ketel One, et al.) But what the quote highlights is that the speaker is a creation of the poet, a mask, whose characteristics have been assembled carefully, albeit intuitively, with an overall effect in mind. As Marvin’s “mask,” in the tradition of Confessional poetry, is a changing one, a tendency exists to mistake it not being a mask at all. In all likelihood, it is questions like this whisky question, along with more general reactions to her first book, that have impelled her in Fragment to widen the rift between author and speaker. She accomplishes this by weaving in dramatic monologues (“All My Wives”) and imaginative poems (The Gawain-ish “Lying My Head Off”). Poems like these de-stabilize the “I.”

Marvin’s penchant for strict control also likely has something to do with her attitude toward the lens through which she’s read. Specifically, it seems to reveal a desire to overturn some of the prevailing stereotypes that accompany Confessional poetry. She states:

For some [the term Confessional] labels poems that rely on sensationalistic experience or extremely explicit personal details to attract a readership; for others, it signals a loss of control in terms of craft.

Is Marvin a “Confessional (or Post-Confessional)” poet? Definition is a much more difficult enterprise than recognition, and I truthfully haven’t read enough definitions of the term to feel qualified to put forth one of my own and then she how she fits it. Nor do such definitions ultimately matter. (Can’t we just call her a poet?) Anyhow, what’s clear from the quote and her poems is that she sees enough of poetry’s big picture (i.e. its long roots) to understand that a lack of formal control is a reaction to formal control. Like all reactive gestures in the arts, it will lose strength and dissipate into blandness once time has distanced the readership from the context of its revolt. And as far as lineage goes, the fifteen-to-forty line, free verse, “autobiographical” poem so common today (with its telegraphed “experience-to-nugget-of-wisdom” movement from a personal adventure in a garden or hospital room to a small epiphany) seems to have descended stylistically from the great Confessional poets. It’s like the conservative child of hippie parents, a domesticated dog with wolf roots.

Forgive me if that sounds judgmental; except when it is, writing poetry is not easy. And how. Barry Bonds, the much-maligned all-time home run leader, is infamous for chiding fans and media members for criticizing players in the Major Leagues. To even connect with the ball frequently enough to earn even a .230 batting average, Bonds points out, is something very few men can do. I’ve always liked how he does this. Likewise, anyone capable of writing any poem at all deserves, at very least, a smattering of applause.

—–

I’d also like to point out how the dialectics of control enter into the content of the poems in Fragment. The issue is directly addressed, and frequently we see her speakers as openly struggling both against it and for it. Power is the ability to control. It is also the ability to be heard and not ignored. The powerful have podiums; the powerless have soapboxes and stumps. But also tricks.The speaker in “Muckracker,” wondering not only how to go about telling her tale but how to get us to pay attention, re-vests herself–in the post-Feminist tradition–with a form of classic feminine power. She assumes, in relationship to the reader, the role of the seductress:

How do I reply? And how shall I contend with
the fact, Reader, that this matter cannot mean
much to you, and that I, as author am required

to consider how to tell this tale in a manner that
will entertain you, despite having never met you
and having no way to know how to affect you,
get you to let me touch you all over, kiss your lips
then tongue your mouth open, move my mouth
down your neck to the valley of your chest, pluck
buttons off you with my teeth.

If this seems over the top–especially by the time the buttons begin being bitten off–it’s supposed to. Though she never attempts to carry a poem with humor, Marvin can be very funny. It’s not the kind of humor one finds in someone like James Tate, where laughter jumps out of you instantly as an airbag, but one that requires a moment of contemplation, one that creeps up. Here, reasoning pragmatically as an advertising exec, she’s poking fun at the fact that sex sells, and also showing how both sides are denigrated in the process. “Reader, I need you to listen,” she’s basically saying, “and I’m willing to do whatever I need to make it happen. But if I stoop, you better believe you’re going to stoop right with me.” Just think about this whole scenario: how is the reader, sans buttons, supposed to get home? Will the speaker deliver directions to the nearest Duane Reade where safety pins are sold, perhaps in a seductive purr, her face in the crack of her closing door?

In “Your Childhood,” the speaker is once again shown dealing with a force that is outside her influence. She is being stalked. Using personification, a rhetorical strategy most often trotted out these days to create publishable, Charmin-soft, idea-less poems (the wind begins rustling through my rough drafts; the wind takes long drags off my cigarette, that sort of fluff), Marvin manages to do something viable. Someone’s childhood–an ex-love’s, if we read contextual clues–is cast as a wandering, pan-handling low-life that tramps along after the speaker, accosting her, guilt-tripping her, and trying to fleece her of her money:

What’s next? Yesterday, the sign it lugged
begged for busfare. Today, it wears a cast fashioned
from newspaper. Tomorrow, it’ll ask if I have change
for a nickel.

The poem is also funny, particularly at the outset, but as it moves, it offers a serious and finally heartbreaking commentary on a phenomenon that anyone who’s ever been in a relationship will understand. When any two people meet, especially as adults, and grow close, a file entitled “Your Childhood” begins, then fattens. “My mother used to have a sewing machine just like this,” one remarks while at a yard sale. “I used to love to press the pedal. It used to enrage her; after awhile I used to do it to enrage her.” Conversations break out, lengthy revelations. With time, a partner’s upbringing, its dynamics and scenery, its shamed affluence or proud poverty, begin to exist for you. As memory is an imaginative faculty, it becomes nearly as real as your own.

Therein lies the intelligence; the personification is less a game of dress-up, more a statement on complexity. As a psychic phenomenon, personification is something that occurs without choice. Our most involved, complex relationships are with our fellow human beings; this is why when we deal with a copy machine that never behaves, a TV that must be slapped, a car that breaks down at the most inconvenient times, or a God who seems to have turned his back on it all; these relationships take on human terms. (Personally, I own two bicycles: one is 100% bike, the other–which is cranky and requires constant maintenance–is by now about 75% a person.) The speaker has a complex relationship with this man’s childhood; it becomes a person unto itself.

Of course, the poet can understand (and genuinely pity) the hatefulness and cruelty that this childhood displays. We learn these qualities have been hammered into it by a hateful mother. (And we might assume this mother got hers somewhere as well.) This logic of the crushed unable to avoid crushing, the oppressed unable to avoid oppressing, and the hated unable to stop hating is redolent of Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy’s narrator in the “Kneutzer Sonata. It contains an inherent question: can such behavior be stopped?

—–

In closing–or near closing–I’d like to briefly mention the book’s cover and the way it participates in the experience of reading. When I read a 19th century novel like Madam Bovary or Jane Eyre,I am always intrigued at how the face of the woman in the period painting on the cover becomes the face of the title character in my imagination. She will, in fact, be the only character whose facial features I can clearly picture. Turning the book around, I’ll find the painting often has a title like “Woman Standing Under a Tree” and am pleasurably dumbstruck by the arbitrariness of it all. The experience is perhaps more pronounced when you read a play that you have never seen performed. If an actor’s name from the original cast is familiar to you, it is impossible to keep this actor out of your reading. This happened to me recently when I read Neil Labute’sFat Pig and learned that Jeremy Piven starred. Hopefully I’m not on my own island here.

The image on the cover of Fragment of the Head of a Queen, which contemporary art fans may recognize, is a reproduction of Arturo Herrera’s Study for When Alone Again. Originally the piece was a wall painting that, despite standing nearly twenty feet tall, was made to last for the duration of a single show. That was part of its thrust. A marriage of two seemingly incongruous qualities–enormity and impermanence–the painting can be read formally as a metaphor for an extreme psychological state. Which is what it literalizes. As such, it’s a magical companion for the poems. The head of a woman from a fairy tale (read: a woman’s fairy tale) has exploded. Red is everywhere; birds and dwarves and God-knows what else are pouring out of it. Into the mess the woman holds her uplifted hands, either to try to catch and control the contents of the eruption, or to hold it up for view. Or rather, for both reasons: it’s a productive ambiguity.

Of course the parallels to Fragment are obvious: the poems are explosive and visceral; the book is pervaded by that magical darkness one finds in folk and fairy tales; Marvin’s speaker, save for one poem, is decidedly female; the final poem is actually entitled “You Cut Open.” What’s amazing, however, is that though the figure in the painting is far from realistic, she actually becomes the speaker of this book. She flashes across the mind. This is especially the case whenever the word “head” is mentioned. And there are isolated heads everywhere in the volume, upwards of twenty of them, like the yard decorations in a cannibal colony:

Here’s my head, in a dank corner of the yard.
I lied it off and so it rolled.

- “Lying My Head Off”

Knock down the tree your head is in. The ball of it
kicked too high, it rattles precarious, looks lodged

- “Catatonia”

Behold your head, a hive the bear’s pawed down
from its bough, smashed to ground for sweetness,
honey leaking yellow jasper. It’s furious center
dispelled, now all of you is leaving.

- “Fragment of the Head of a Queen”

I have de-contextualized these quotes, but in these and other examples, as in much great poetry, the reader discovers his faculty of Intelligence and his faculty of Imagination set at odds, at a tug-of-war. The faculty of Intelligence, recognizing repetition and seeking meaning, attempts to “read” these heads alternately as a figure for the mind (“she’s got a good head on her shoulders”), a figure for the climax of turmoil (“it came to a head”), or a figure for the loss or maintenance of composure (“I lost my head” or “I kept my head about me while others were losing theirs and blaming it on me”). The writing’s concreteness, however, activates the Imagination. The heads remain heads, and the reading experience is visionary. As neither the Intelligence nor Imagination is allowed to win out or be shut down, this is mastery of the medium. Keeping in mind the title, the prevailing themes, the interplay between form and content, even the choice of cover art, you cannot help but be struck by what complete and exacting work the poet has made. Fragment of the Head of a Queen is an accomplishment. It is art.

*Addendum: As several readers of this review might recognize my name, I’ll just say for the record that I know Cate Marvin personally. This book is great whether I know her or not.

Tags: 9 stars, Cate Marvin, Matthew Yeager, Sarabande Books
Posted in reviews

Simply Rocket

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

by Matt Hart
Lame House Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

hart rocket cover

I’d like, in death, to be able to say of myself that I spent more days feeling inspired than not. Certain great poets continually encourage and foster this need. For Guillaume Appolinaire (“At last I can hail I don’t know whom / They pass by me they gather out there”), for example, poetry is a place of worship and almost ceaseless inspiration. When he’s in a poem, he’s in it for everything; the common parts of the day are there provide more than enough dullness, sadness and horror. Yet even these sensations can be framed in language and divinity (“And their faces paled / And their sobs broke”). The very air around the poet’s head seems charged with static fuzz and unity.

Matt Hart is obsessed with the sky. In his first book, Who’s Who Vivid, it was everywhere. It was here: “Sometimes fluttering is all that’s required. / Or the air…” It was here: “O emerald, forgive me, / the sky.” It was here: “I was kept / in a blind spot, pinned to a sky by the house.” And it even closed out the book:

Write me
about anything.

The sky is full of words.

I am awaiting
your reply.

Hart writes about wings and about flying with ambition that reminds me of great French surrealists: the urge to escape is perhaps rooted in a kind of unaccountable sadness, and escaping into poetry is as close as one can come to escaping into the sky. Not dying: escaping into the sky (See: P-Funk).

Simply Rocket is the name of Matt Hart’s new chapbook. “Analysis is not all” he declares, and begins to develop a self-sustaining argument that a person shouldn’t seek truth in place of beauty, because truth is beauty—and that even if it is not, we ought to imagine it is anyway. Poetry becomes liberation; everything outside of one’s body is sky and escape.

Rocket is a rhythmic and urbane-antique progression of 14 (how apropos) sonnets. The repetition, the exuberance and the neatly-trimmed singsong of these poems will grab you right out of the gate. They rhyme sometimes, though the rhythm is what floats them beyond the stratosphere:

Or perhaps one discovers a wasp in one’s heart
or an astronaut listening intently to Venus,
then crying out with a dusting of crickets,
I think it not near far enough!

Beyond applauding Hart for his ability to land a sort of “ye olde” exclamation, you’ll also like his consistency; as these four lines conclude sonnet two, sonnet three begins: “Not nearly enough, but more anthemic than ever.”

The musicality is incredibly late 20^th/early 21^st century. His rhythms pause and loop, and he samples himself; the lines “Analysis is not,” “All manner of citrus” and “My little daughter demands it” are among many that pop up in a variety of places, as is the name Theodore Geisel, whom the poet “learned the love of repetition” from and reminds us in Notes at the end is more commonly known as Dr. Seuss. Repetition indeed. The title itself appears in another Hart poem, the peculiarly “autobiographical” poem “Black Box Cockpit Voice Recorder,” which appeared in Issue 5 of Parthenon West Review: “…without my glasses, I can’t see. So Daisy and I // simply rocket, bolt and breathe…”

Yet for all his musical enthusiasm, optimism and poem-chopping ambition, the poet likes to debate the issue of poetic form; he vaguely accuses himself of going standard, of following the traditional “verse/ chorus/ verse/ chorus/ solo/ chorus chorus” form as it pertains to poetry—that is, an overused form—the sonnet. Yet overplayed as the sonnet may be, Hart proves its place:

O super Frankenstein or a dog
named Dinosaur, kitchens filled with infants
and comets of rust sweet peas, mangoes,
silhouette aorta, today’s the day to sonnet—

Sometimes such willful ownership of the sonnet, of vaguely traditional meter, of French surrealist powers, and of, well, Dr. Seuss, will even make you laugh out loud:

What I learned from my wife—Cincinatti the poem
                     Hardhat the poem
My darling the boombox the cricket the poem
                     no irritable screeching
Kitchens filled with infants new dreaming of dust
Marimba the poem              Too drunk in the poem
Boomerang toomerang soomerang poem                Seriously
are you a bit overblown, poem?

This gets significantly funnier when you read the notes in the back: “‘Boomerang Toomerang Soomerang’ was the magic catch phrase used in conjunction with the boomerang of Lady Elaine Fairchilde, keeper of the Museum Go-Round in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The apparent childishness—Seuss, Rogers, ice cream, the perpetual, ironic doses of look at me, I’m writing a Poem—becomes rather liberating for the reader.

In “Black Box Cockpit Voice Recorder,” Hart declares, “It’s like I’m flying, / and I hate flying. But not this time, / and not this.” A boomerang, like a rocket (ideally), goes into the sky and comes back. Matt Hart has done that with the tastefuly tight and artfully crafted Simply Rocket; it’s secretly inspiring and one of the best sonnet sequences in recent memory.

Tags: 8 stars, John Deming, Lame House Press, Matt Hart
Posted in reviews

Poemes en Prose

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

by Pierre Reverdy, translated by Ron Padgett
Black Square Editions 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Pocketed

reverdy cover Not much is known about Pierre Reverdy. He was associated with the most important writers and artists of his generation, among them Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, and Guillaume Apollinaire. He loved the work of Juan Gris. He published a short-lived vastly influential journal called Nord-Sud. Andre Breton called him “the greatest poet of the time.” He spent large periods of his life in isolation, dedicating himself entirely to his writing. He spent the last portion of his life in a monastery. He also created a modest body of poetry that has withstood the test of more than 100 years.

Despite the little we know about Reverdy in the way of biographical details, his poems continue to be a source of inspiration to many contemporary poets. He has had his share of translators, each of them erudite, many poets themselves. Among the best have been John Ashbery and Kenneth Rexroth. Ashbery, who recently released a translation of Reverdy’s long poem “Haunted House,” (Black Square Editions and The Brooklyn Rail) has long been a proponent of the French poet. Ashbery’s translations are excellent, as one might expect; often sounding more than a little Ashberyesque, they capture the calculated, austere imagery characteristic of a Reverdy poem. Kenneth Rexroth’s translations are equally breathtaking and perhaps more open and readable than Ashbery’s pieces.

Ron Padgett’s translations of Reverdy’s “Prose Poems” seem to fall somewhere between Rexroth and Ashbery. “Prose Poems” was Reverdy’s first book. Reading the poems, one cannot help but look for the nascent aspects that manifest themselves in his later work. Padgett has done an admirable job of remaining transparent while allowing all the nuances characteristic of Reverdy to shine through. The lapidary, Magritte-like imagery of later lineated poems runs throughout these translations. If nothing else, this is proof of Padgett’s sensitivity and skill as a translator. In “At Dawn,” for example, Padgett captures all the Reverdy-like elements that one would expect to see in the poet’s early work:

In my dream the head of a child was in the center.
If the clouds gather on your roof and the rain spares you,
will you keep the secret of this double miracle?
But no voice calls you. If you get up barefoot, you’ll get
sick. Where would you go, anyway across these ravines of
light.

What draws me to Reverdy again and again is his ability to embody what Rexroth, in his essay “The Cubist Poetry of Pierre Reverdy,” calls “…simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction.” Take for example the sentence “In my dream the head of a child was in the center,” where precision and clarity of image coalesce with abstraction. What does the head of the child look like? What expression does it have? Why is it there? All these considerations are left to the reader of a Reverdy poem. No image is interpreted and the author’s opinion about his subject matter is never interjected (the imperative “If you get up barefoot, you’ll get sick,” is about as didactic as Reverdy ever gets). The effect achieved is one of a middle-distance, where images and ideas become preternaturally focused. A classic Reverdy image is one that cannot bear the weight of any more details than that of those which it has already been prescribed. Ornate description, didactic utterance, or further paring down would disrupt the grace and balance of the image. This quality makes each of Reverdy’s poems feel miraculous.

Beyond the phenomenal singularity of each individual image, Padgett’s translations also capture the intense architectural qualities of Reverdy’s work. In “The Cubist Poetry of Pierre Reverdy” Rexroth notes that in a Reverdy poem

…the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we assume to be the result of causal, or of what we have come to accept as logical sequence, and then an abnormally focused attention is invited to their apprehension, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. So isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an unanalyzable transcendental claim.

In this section of the poem “Fascinated” we find the intense recombination of the physical strata of the world into the “radically different” structure Rexroth mentions:

All the eyes turn toward this point, and the street seems to want to leap over the balcony. And nothing is protecting
the sidewalk. Behind the old man who is smoking, there
is a younger and far too pretty head.

The images in this section, from the “All the eyes,” to the “far too pretty head,” seem to proceed based on a secret logic. There is no apparent reason why “the eyes turn,” or how this causes the street to “want to leap over the balcony.” The overriding sense is that the poem very well may not be held together by the experience of the poem’s narrator. If we tell our friend that we saw an attractive person sitting behind a man smoking at a sidewalk café, our friend will most likely take our word for it. This is not quite the case for a Reverdy poem; the juxtaposition and recombination of images forces the reader to cipher and grasp the information being delivered by the poem on a level that is as mysterious and subjective as the poem itself. In a sense, a Reverdy poem forces us to question neither the validity of its narrator’s experience, but the validity and coherence of our own consciousness.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the book signing for both “Haunted House” and “Prose Poems,” held at the CUE gallery in Chelsea. As Ron Padget scribbled his signature into my copy of “Prose Poems” I mentioned I was disappointed not to hear him and John Ashbery read. All he said in reply was, “these speak for themselves,” which says a lot more than I ever could about the quality of these translations.

*

Tags: 8 stars, Ben Mirov, Pierre Reverdy, Ron Padgett, Small Press Distribution
Posted in reviews

Lucy

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

by Jean Valentine
Sarabande Books 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Making Bones

lucy In this diminutive chapbook (#8 in Sarabande’s Quarternote series), big fish Jean Valentine pays tribute to Lucy, the intact skeleton of the oldest known human ancestor. Lucy, the pith of Valentine’s poems, becomes a vehicle for the exploration of a series of universal unknowns including death, loss, and loneliness. Valentine interrogates death and its mysterious qualities. She writes, “I am close to death / and close to life.” In many ways, life and death are one, living and dying synonyms; they are inseparable and one gives value to the other. For Valentine, Lucy is a barometric tool with which we might gauge the common human experience.

But it is not exclusively human life that Valentine is interested in. Rather, all lives, and thereby all deaths, are exigent in Lucy. Valentine points to the life and death of a spider to demur the idea that one life or one death is more pervasive than another: “The spider / in her web three days / dead on the window Lucy.” Death is ubiquitous, and it is mitigating, rendering us equal. But there is much to be learned from any single death—in particular Lucy’s, as she is wholly lost, nothing but bones, as she is effectively anonymous, the lost soldier that all losses constitute when enough time has passed.

So generally, Lucy and her bones present a forum for exploring loss. Valentine writes, “when my scraped-out child died Lucy / you hold her, all the time.” Lucy as the mother of death, a keeper of souls. Though her life experience was surely nothing like the modern human’s, Lucy experienced death. If she is the first human death there is sufficient record of, she is an appropriate counterweight to all that are lost and forgotten, to all that is lost and forgotten.

Valentine places something like trust in Lucy, trust to keep, preserve, or at the very least represent those that our poet has lost and can no longer touch. Lucy is something of a treat from Valentine, a spare series of spare poems from a significant poet. More big fish should devolve into the chapbook form. Lucy’s bones, a mark of raw, if even bland humanness, are a quick idea, artfully rendered. They are emblematic of the emptiness everyone becomes, as Valentine indicates once—“I rush outdoors into the air you are” and again—“Your skeleton / standing about, like a wildflower…”

Tags: 7 stars, Jean Valentine, Melinda Wilson, Sarabande Books
Posted in reviews

Archive for February, 2008

Blackbird and Wolf

Life as Crucible, World as Church

In Praise of the Unfinished

“Great indeed is our need to love”

The Development of Aerial Militarism…

The Ability to Bomb from Directly Above

Our Aperture

Heart-Shaped Book

Ox

The Willed Form of a Steady New Voice

Fragment of the Head of a Queen

“Anyway, Poets are Tough”

Simply Rocket

Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Poemes en Prose

*

Lucy

Making Bones

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