Archive for March, 2008

In the Pines

Monday, March 31st, 2008

by Alice Notley
Penguin Books 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Whole Night Through

notley cover

Alice Notley’s In the Pines takes its title from a Leadbelly song of same name. The lyrics of the blues classic go like this:

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

My girl, my girl, where will you go
I’m going where the cold wind blows

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

My husband, was a hard working man
‘Til a mile and a half from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
(repeat)

The song is interesting because of the similarities in structure and tone it shares with Notley’s book (if you haven’t heard the tune before, it’s worth checking out on YouTube. Nirvana’s tremendous cover should also be mentioned). Composed of repeating questions and their answers, the structure relies on an interchange between two personas. The opening line, “My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me,” tells us the first persona claims some type of ownership and authority over the second, the “girl.” In the ensuing lines we learn that the girl has lost her husband and that her sadness and dispossession have driven her into exile.

The comparison between the girl and Notley is obvious. Notley survived the untimely death of her husband Ted Berrigan in 1983 and went on to expatriate to Paris in the early nineties. Although Berrigan’s death and Notley’s expatriation may only be indirectly related, unlike the girl in the Leadbellly’s song, the similarities lend insight into the overall tone of In the Pines. This is a book full of haunting lamentation. It is also a reply to the discourses of power that seek to control and paraphrase those emotions.

The structure of the Leadbelly song is also an impetus into the complexities of In the Pines. Two personas compose the dialog that gives the song its structure. The back and forth between these personas moves the song forward. This occurs in Notley’s book as well, where poems contain multiple voices. This section from the opening long poem, also titled “In the Pines,” functions in much the same way as the Leadbelly song:

If you detest everything about your society, you say,
why are you writing?
It is time to change writing completely.
You are not doing that.
Wait and see.

The back and forth between two personas propels this poem. Just as in the Leadbelly song, one persona questions while the other replies. The main difference is that Notley is explicit about her aim in using the technique. Unlike Leadbelly, she doesn’t intend to tell a story. Instead, she is concerned with “changing writing completely.”

Just as Leadbelly’s song gives form to the story of a young woman who has fallen on hard times, so does In the Pines seek to embody the voices of those who cannot speak for themselves. Like Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Notley contains “multitudes.” The difference is that her multitudes are specifically the disposed, forgotten, forsaken and often the dead, as in this section from “The Black Trailor (a noir fiction)”:

You say that you’re dead and it’s dead: can’t be pushed
back through a hole in timelessness?
You say that I can’t really get at you.
You’re not where you expected to be dead, I say.
Is this a system? you say.

In a sense, Notley is more medium than poet. The rendering of multiple personas in In the Pines reminds me of the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer’s analogy of “poet as radio.” Notley is not writing so much as she is ciphering information from various sources outside herself and placing it into a “system.” In a way she is more like a “machine” than a “writer.” In a reading at the Kelly Writers House on November 6, 2006 (available at PENN sound), Notley professed to being “high on interferon,” a drug used to treat hepatitis C, while composing In the Pines. At the same reading, Notley also told the audience she composed Mysteries of Small Houses, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in a “process of self-hypnosis.” Whether or not the drug affected her writing, or whether she actually writes in a trance, it is clear that being in an altered state is a key component of Notley’s writing process and one of the most arresting aspects of her as a contemporary writer.

Beginning with her formative years as a poet on the lower-east side of New York and continuing with her expatriation to Paris, Notley has always identified herself as an outsider. It’s a title she has earned throughout her career and why she is perhaps one of the only poets writing today who could have written a visionary book like In the Pines. Although it is laced with vitriol, desperation, tribulation, sadness and regret, In the Pines, is hopeful. As its dedication “For my sons and their friends” suggests, In the Pines is for younger generations of readers and writers. It is instructive in the sense that it attempts to show new writers how a poet can change poetry for the better of everyone, poets and non-poets alike.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Alice Notley, Ben Mirov, Penguin Books
Posted in reviews

The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

by Indran Amirthanayagam
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by J. Mae Barizo

Pictures of Grief

amirthan cover “I find it hard to write even today about this tremendous beast,” Indran Amirthanayagam writes in the preface to The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, referring to the 2004 natural disaster that took the lives of over 225,000 victims in southeast Asia. On December 26^,2004, the day that his country of birth, Sri Lanka, “lost half its face,” he was consumed by a desire to “write that face back.”

He is not the first writer faced with the urge to bear witness to calamity. Nelly Sachs survived the concentration camps of World War II, going on to write literature that would win her a Nobel prize in 1966; Gottfried Benn worked as an army physician for prostitutes during World War I, his poems from that period marked by their preoccupation with decay and the human body. More recently, there is Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy. There is also D. Nurkse’s Burnt Island, which contains a series of poems that are a homage to post 9/11 New York. Tragedy is difficult to chronicle for the same reason that it is difficult for a trauma patient to revamp his or her damaged psyche: the mind possesses an aggressive anathema towards healing.

Amirthanayagam displays that he is no stranger to the backdrop of the disaster. There is an inherent ease in the way that he describes the allure and the ferocity of the sea; one can almost smell the salt and feel the stickiness of the tropical fruit on the fingertips while reading his well-crafted verse. It is the emotional map of the poem that is less developed, but he does his best to transport the reader to the scenes of wreckage: fisherman’s shanties, village churches, holiday hotels along the gutted coast. In “Commandment,” he does a praiseworthy job of conjuring up the injured landscape:

…the sea drew back
exposing rocks
huge like elephants,

then catapulted,
bludgeoning beaches,
bodies roused out
of seething, headless water,

The five-hundred-mile-an-hour
funeral march;”

The writing is vivid; the lines are fluid; the narrative is propelled incessantly by loss. It is this omnipresent saturation with death and devastation, however, which tends to wear heavily on the reader. What is it that happens in the mind as it attempts to simultaneously delve into and skirt around catastrophe? Maurice Blachot, in his book, L’Ecriture du Desastre, writes: “it is not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster and knowledge disastrously — carries us…deports us (whom it smites and nonetheless leaves untouched), straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly.” The reader of The Splintered Face is constantly reminded of this endless cycle of remembering and forgetting as we become aware of Amirthanayagam’s writing processes. Again and again, we are given a glimpse of the Tsunami and its aftermath, while the author projects heartbreak, anger and futility onto the speechless victims in his poems. This transference suggests to me that the author has not fully internalized death, and in order to minimize his own vulnerability, transposes loss onto the various narrators of the poems.

Throughout the collection, Amirthanayagam often writes from the first-person viewpoints of survivors. In “Words and Orchids,” the narrator is a wife whose husband was washed away as “he sucked mangos with his hands.” “Faith” is told in the voice of a minister or priest of a congregation that “lost eighteen nuns that day.” “Wrecked: Coconuts” is a poem that tells the story of a fisherman who ate coconuts for twenty-five days until a ship found him, his wife and children swept away. The list goes on. This movable “I” of the collection, speaking from its numerous narrators, removes the author from the landscape of the poem, letting the victims speak for themselves.

This method is one that has been used before, notably by authors such as C.D. Wright and Bei Dao, and is successful when utilized tastefully. In The Splintered Face however, it contributed to my longing for a more unified continuum between thought and emotion, life and death. This use of multiple narrators, all infused with similar mournful inflections, prevented me from becoming vested in their stories, no matter how affecting they were. The well-crafted poems in this book are the ones that are committed to description, a type of lyrical yet informed journalistic cataloguing of events and characters which make sense of catastrophe from an appropriate emotional distance. Take for instance this terrific employment of description in “Order”:

:the past where we danced ballroom
while the children played carom, and mangos

stained our lapels, and today, hobbling,
scavenging in ash heaps, how easy

the arithmetic, day and night, two by two.
Bring on the mind workers.

Let a thousand doctors bloom.
I lived right here on the x, my name

is blue: sea green blue blue green…

The strongest poems in the collection, “Birds”, “Intruder:Mullaitivu”, “Teaching Noah”, and the stunning “Order” speak to the reader on a level which outstrips grief, approaching the disaster from a even-tempered place, rather than articulating from the seat of suffering. Writing from the experience, instead of about the actual event, allows the author to reject sensationalist methods of description, letting the poem transcend above disaster and all that the word demands.

Tags: 6 stars, Hanging Loose Press, Indran Amirthanayagam, J.Mae Barizo
Posted in reviews

Tongue and Groove

Monday, March 24th, 2008

by Stephen Cramer
U. of Illinois Press 2007
Reviewed by Hansa Bergwall

Born & Born Again

cramer cover Imagine a man in the subway who removes his shirt and starts picking a scab. Would you look the other way? I would, but I think Stephen Cramer would watch and find an uncomfortable beauty about the scene. He writes with uncommon courage. His new book Tongue & Groove has poems of the sublime and the ugly. This collection builds on his first book, Shiva’s Drum, but Cramer owns his style more boldly. This book distinguishes itself with an earnest voice. He approaches even unorthodox subjects with the mindfulness of a Buddhist monk.

Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong books, but a lot of poets writing today favor the ironic or cynical over the earnest. Few have the courage to write a love poem without hurt, or irony. Cramer’s “Glaciers” is a forthright celebration of love. He sets the scene as a hike over a landscape and comments on how an ice age has changed that landscape. With this long view of time and shape he cuts to a heady and thrilling sentiment of love:

before we begin, you must know:
                                    I’m awkward with a hammer
                & my right angles slope

even with a T-square, the level’s lime-
                                    green bubbles forever misaligned.
                 love, only now I’m learning

the ways of lasting construction:
                                    dovetail, double tongue & groove,
                  & you don’t need a hammer

to build what we’re building.
                                     What steers us, unseen
                  but solid as bedrock?

Let’s make our move
                                     now. In my chest I can feel
                  a billion trembling wings

veering at once.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up the first time I read this poem. He constructs his tingling moments out of a little wildness, philosophy, and narrative. He can be earnest because he is never cliché.

Cramer also chooses the subject of the outcast as his impetus to poetic realization in several poems. Even though these outcasts appear in public, his attentive description of them can feel voyeuristic. Doesn’t he know the polite thing to do is look away and ignore? His insistence that the reader look with him made me uncomfortable at times, but I was always grateful afterward. In “Strings” he chooses a crazy and dirty man who has a ukulele with no strings which he strums until his fingers bleed. Cramer uses this figure to reflect on Buddhist ideas of reincarnation:

…because on these streets

don’t even think about looking
for a next life—Sweetheart,
you ain’t gonna get it—

& all you can do is prepare
to be astonished out of your body
& into another’s, to feel your way

into something as remote
as the grayed & toiling flesh
still grinding away at that scored

& barren wood—phantom
strings & phantom resonance.

…

This rebirth through empathy re-imagines reincarnation and the Buddhist worldview. It makes the idea of becoming other more accessible to a skeptical 21^st century mind while honoring the idea of the sacred. The music of the language, the realist world and the imaginative philosophy come together elegantly. Poetry may not be a vehicle for rhetorical argument, but it can reveal an image of truth. This poem reveals a beautiful way of imagining empathy.

A current political world can be tricky to write about. Maybe that is because the liberal and conservative talking points frame our thinking so well that it is difficult to write a fresh view. When Cramer takes up the challenge in “Fuel,” he mostly succeeds. In the poem, he imagines a bus, with an eagle on its side that runs on blood, types O, A and B. The bus runs on newscasters, media, and 2 am knocks on the door. He makes our nation feel like a late-night rerun of the film “Speed,” where Keanu Reeves cannot slow the bus below 50 mph or it will explode. He ends it with a call to slow down:

… 12 ton bus
with an eagle on its side
& this isn’t my stop
but I’m getting off
because I don’t know about you
but I can walk from here.

Any political poem runs the risk of alienating a reader who disagrees. Yet as a caricature this poem reveals some truth by distorting it. The poem succeeds because the image rings true, even if the framing and proscription are debatable.

Cramer crafts his poetry well and a jazz sensibility goes from soft to brassy. He seems to intuitively arrive at insights through his work and he shares them. These insights always come from paying very close attention to the lover, to the homeless man, to war. He earns each big thought. His tone is earnest and appealing. I recommend reading this book.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Hansa Bergwall, Stephen Cramer, University of Illinois Press
Posted in reviews

Causeway

Friday, March 21st, 2008

by Elaine Sexton
New Issues 2008
Reviewed by Diane Shenker

Salted Ground

Elaine Sexton probably grew up around water—particularly coastal waters, salt water. There is much swimming and sailing in her second book, Causeway, and even “A Psalm Sung by a Fish.” Her familiarity with the element lets her refract her feelings through it, shining fresh light on the usual suspects: family history, relationships, loves, break-ups, death.

There are no new themes under the sun, but an artist’s particular angle of view can be more or less effective in shaking up our own perceptions. Causeway is full of strong, tactile values — there is light glaring off water, stiff salt breezes, smells of brine and rot, shivers that come from thinking you see something in the dark. Perhaps Sexton’s strongest suit is a refreshing understatement that lets the reader come away quietly moved, never hammered at.

The book is smartly structured. As in any good journey, there is variety—no ride through endless fields of corn or wheat. Although the sea imagery feels dominant, there is a healthy balance of city grit that enlivens the flow from poem to poem. Sexton anchors the beginning of her “causeway” in the heart of New York City with a couple of pointedly urban pieces. By the third poem, “Masonry,” bricks begins to yield the emotional geography of her sense of place:

Brick of my mother’s
Pittsburgh, . . .
of my father’s Boston . . .

the Federal brick
of Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
where I pined for a boy
at a brick ferry landing
and flirted
with sailors and prayer

but gave up
every brick
of every seaside city
I lived in,
so nearly the same:
Newport, New-

buryport. The whole
Eastern Seaboard’s
worn bricks
crumbled alike
in the sun.

Second in number to the sea poems are the “relationship” poems. All poets deal with love, but Sexton’s varied explorations are fresh and intelligent. Even when head over heels, the realist in the background remembers the gritchy bits. The title poem is a beautiful exploration of love’s scratchy ambiguity:

Walking the causeway,
I’m invisible, stirred
under the radar
of your thinking,
where I snag and catch myself
wanting to be
somewhere else,
not here, where
the marsh and bay
divide at our sides.

. . .
Below, scratching the sand,
even the tiniest crustacean
finds a place other than her skin
to retreat to. The hermit crab,
squeezed in a shell,

contorts her own body
to carry the weight
of a hard-won
scholarship on her back.

Amidst the weight of relationships and seascape are poems about the poet’s mother, which serve as an emotional anchor for the book. The link to parent feels deeper than the link to lover, or maybe it’s that the second can only happen in the shadow of the first. “A Bird in the House” deftly tells two simple stories about the poet and the poet’s mother, who is alive and still living alone. We feel the heartache as child begins to switch roles with parent. This has wide resonance for all of us dealing with parents getting older, yet the poem sidesteps cliché and delivers its message with mystery and surprise (hence no quote—the poem needs to be experienced whole).

Again, Sexton is expert at understatement; she lets us slide through the text and come out hands full of our own emotions and responses. Here is “Taken”:

This is the boat that took me
out of my marriage,
the painter said, then clicked

to the next slide. Here is the chair,
the spare table I pulled my grief
up to. Here is where the gash

of oil paint put me: behind
a door closed, thick green
strokes refusing to leave.

Sexton’s delicacy also pays off in a 9/11 poem; the tragedy is never mentioned, yet the reader is able to intuit a survivor’s tale. The poem packs a wallop it wouldn’t have if it had slid into more overt emotion. In most ways, Causeway is a quiet book, an astute book. It doesn’t rant, throw things at the wall or try to upstage or bamboozle. Its poems are elegant lessons in attention, quietly letting us know that even when things aren’t going so well (which may be most of the time), there is a great gift in just paying attention.

Tags: 7 stars, Diane Shenker, Elaine Sexton
Posted in reviews

Primitive Mentor

Monday, March 17th, 2008

by Dean Young
University of Pittsburgh Press 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Modern Disciple

primitive mentor Now nine books into his repertoire, Dean Young risks a number of easy criticisms. One of these is that his poems are simply permutations of themselves, that each maps the same territory as the last. Another more conspicuous concern with Young’s work is its extremity. Unabashedly surreal, his imagery and his narrative impulses can be dismissed as wacky and superfluous. More than any of his past books, Primitive Mentor squelches these concerns.

While maintaining his characteristically deep, impulsive humor and outlandish images, Young explores new dimensions while honing his more familiar instincts. Young is not an experimental poet in the traditional sense; he doesn’t try to reinvent his style with each book. Instead he is concerned with a “constant plumbing of the spirit – / Like living in a mine making a study / Of cave ins.” In his first book Design with X, Young staked out a small soul-sized plot which he “mines” again and again and for the most part, more deeply with each attempt. In Primitive Mentor, new vistas appear. Take for example the opening lines from the poem “Triage”:

Fatally, the boy picks up a what he thought
on the occupier/insurgent fractioned
road. Fatally, the man goes out for popsicles
in the storm not for himself for his two
days later from the mudslide pulled he’s
given a kind of super power, drive a nail
into his chest he won’t care or notice.

The chopped syntax is something Young has done before, but here it has been applied to different ends. Take for example the lines “In the storm not for himself for his two / days later from the mudslide pulled…” The altered syntax feels like a jump in time. We expect to see “not for himself for his two kids,” or “children” or “friends” and instead are given a jarring forward movement. It’s worth mentioning that triage is both an action that organizes according to quality as well as a medical term used to prioritize a large group of patients according to the urgency of their ailments and or wounds. In this light, the break not only conveys the sense of urgency of the subject via its form, but is also characteristic of Young’s deeply ironic humor. The break between “two” and “days” encapsulates the period of time “the man” is trapped beneath the mudslide and the moment he is pulled from it, thereby gaining “a kind of superpower.” Of course, this power can only be death, which might send one back to reexamine “the boy” from the first line who fatally picks up a “what he thought.”Ostensibly, what Young is doing in “Triage” is assigning degrees of urgency to a group of patients who are already dead. His touch with the subject is insightful, bathetic and funny as ever.

The “two,” “day” line break is indicative of the greater project of Primitive Mentor. For me, Young’s writing has never been about the impressive quality of his imagery or his wit, although those are definite bonuses. What I appreciate most about Young, and what strikes me most about Primitive Mentor, is the spaces between the words, the line breaks that take 180 degree turns, the tenuous blankness between stanzas and words, the often concealed darkness at the heart of his poems. It’s in these spaces that the unifying force of Young’s poetry and the depth and scope of Primitive Mentor can be found. Image and wit are little more than tools Young uses to enter into these unknown areas. They lead him into dangerous places that the conscious, logical mind can neither purposefully go to, nor operate near, areas where more is at risk because less is known by the poet. The result, for the reader as they enter into these dimensions, is confounding, hilarious, idiotic, melancholy, heartbreaking—and never boring.

One of the miraculous aspects of Young’s poetry is that despite his forays into seemingly unreal worlds of poetic experience, everything he writes is deeply connected to our reality. His poems are recombinations that assume each word refers to something other than itself and that that something is real. A rabbit is a rabbit. Granted, that rabbit might be placed within a hallucinatory context entirely unfamiliar to anyone; nevertheless “Force of Rabbit” is a force felt, and stands among the best poems of the year so far. All of Young’s poems are based on the assumption that the world preexists poetry, that it is there, absolutely, and that its purpose is to lead us into greater areas of consciousness. He’s not just fooling around for the sake of creating a impressive panoply of images. Take for example the title, Primitive Mentor. What exactly is this? What implications does it have for us? What are we to learn from this mentor? Is it simply a creation of Young’s overactive imagination?

It’s my feeling that the “primitive mentor” is as real as the brain inside out skull. It’s the mechanism buried deep within our animal mind that knows more than we know. It’s the part of Young’s mind that reaches out to us from the line breaks and logical leaps that just barely defy our understanding. In a sense, “primitive mentor” is more real than the chair we sit on or the coffee we drink. In fact it may be the only real thing, as it is what allows us to reconfigure our reality into a new more vital one, just as Dean Young does with startling consistency and increasingly refined artistry in each new book.

Tags: 9 stars, Ben Mirov, Dean Young, University of Pittsburgh Press
Posted in reviews

Four From Japan

Friday, March 14th, 2008

by Sawako Nakayasu
Litmus Press 2006
Reviewed by Steven Karl

A Loosening Inclination to Talk

nakayasu cover

For the most part, anthologies attempt to create a dialogue focused around a specialized niche. So it becomes difficult, if not tedious, to talk about an anthology without delving into a digressive conversation about inclusion/exclusion relative to an editor’s political or editorial ties. Four From Japan is refreshing, then, its genius lying in the fact that it offers a sample small and varied enough to eschew the problem completely.

Four From Japan is a studied glimpse into the writing of four contemporary Japanese women poets. It does not aspire or attempt to do the work of representing or encompassing contemporary Japanese (or Japanese women’s) poetry in its entirety. Instead, according to primary translator Sawako Nakayasu (Cole Swensen also has a cup of coffee as translator in the book), this is “a poetry by women that does not fit into a prescribed category of women’s writing.” She makes the distinction that these four women do not fit into what is considered the canon of Japanese literature; instead, what you get are four unique contemporary women outside the socio-historic normative of Japanese poetry.

These poets are Kiriu Minashita, Kyong-Mi Park, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and Takako Arai. The poems first appear in the English translation and are followed by their Japanese originals. Although I can’t read Japanese, it is beautiful to see the original architecture of these poems, how they adorn the page, how they breathe upon the page. We are further aided by essays by each poet published at the end of their respective sections; this is a rewarding decision because instead of having an editor attempt to explain (or explain away) what a poet’s impetus might have been, we hear it straight from the poet (albeit, in translation), which adds another way of prying into the poems.

The best of the essays, Kyong-Mi Park’s “My Asian Bones are Ringing,” has particularly worthwhile insights on language. While it takes great facility with English and Japanese to translate Gertrude Stein and discover the wisdom that “the act of using words is that of being possessed by the words of someone else,” Park is also able to conjure up her own experience walking around Manhattan in 1986 and struggling “with the language and with daily life.” Other poets in the collection similarly echo a sense of how transitory time and place can be. Take Kiriu Minashita’s “Intermezzo”:

Towards the water-soluble sky
The roadside trees showered with metal rain
Spit out drops of life at night
You walk in front of me

There is in these lines a vacillation of both the center and its margins; the distance of rain on trees from one’s own awareness of them and the poet’s obsession with “life” are nearly surrealistic, centered on an almost mysterious longing.

Park’s poem “Very” is made up of long, sprawling lines, functioning much like some of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s more recent poems. The opening line might be the best of all the poems in this book: “A loosening inclination to talk. Dangling a teabag. We’ve not spoken in a while. A brother-like person asks is this purple/flower a kind of primrose.” Not all poets who demonstrate an inclination to talk are able to inspire readers to listen. The translation is interesting here; brother-like, for example, is considerably more interesting than “brother” would have been, and the short, clipped sentences catch a staccato that non-Japanese speakers are helpless to avoid considering might be echoed in the poem’s native tongue.

Rounding out the collection are Ryoko Sekiguchi and Takako Arai. Sekiguchi writes succinct, sometimes pretty prose poems that are translated first by herself from Japanese to French, then by Cole Swensen from French to English (the poet currently lives in France, writing in both the Japanese and the French). Arai’s poems are probably the most experimental, playing and building off of repetition and Japanese mythology. Both poets are worth the price of admission. In the end, Four From Japan is a perfect place to investigate a variety of uses of language, reminding one that a common national identity is not a “style” in and of itself. The anthology works to get a pulse of contemporary Japanese writing (Sawako Nakayasu also edits Factorial, a journal dedicated to modern Japanese poetry) and to discover four talented and impressive poets.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Litmus Books, Sawako Nakayasu, Steven Karl
Posted in reviews

As if the World Really Mattered

Monday, March 10th, 2008

by Art Goodtimes
La Alameda Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

A-zazen

goodtimes cover I don’t trust all beards, but I trust Art Goodtimes’s. Here’s a Roland Barthes analysis of beards: “True, it can simply be the attribute of a free man, detached from the daily conventions of our world and who shrinks from wasting time in shaving.” Comedian George Carlin’s “Beard Poem” is also worth noting:

Here’s my beard
Ain’t it weird?
Don’t be sceered;
It’s just a beard.

The point then is that some people grow beards to say “I don’t have time for your status quo.” For others, beards are inevitable. As I said, I trust Art Goodtimes’s beard.

There’s little I can say about the poems, though, that they won’t say for themselves. Let’s take a walk through “To Shit Proper.” Watch where you step. The poem begins:

Draw a circle in the duff
with a walking stick
Kneel & scoop out
a little earth.
Sans pants, sans shoes,
squat & fire.
Bare butt, barefoot,
there’s so much to see.

Why draw the circle? Maybe it’s like “Anecdote of the Jar” only with a guy shitting in the woods. Before I continue with “To Shit Proper,” though, I owe you a little background. First, yes, that is our man on the book cover. And here’s his bio: “Poet, journalist and third-term Green county commissioner, Art Goodtimes is a former poetry editor for Earth First! Journal and Wild Earth. He served as poet-in-residence for the annual Telluride Mushroom Festival for 25 years and continues as founder/director of the annual Talking Gourds poetry gatherings.”

What is a poetry “gathering”? Why does he love mushrooms so much? What kinds of mushrooms are we talking about? Maybe the nostalgic “Passing the Acid Test, ” which recalls the poet’s years as a hitchhiker, can shed some light on that last question:

And the world
shot forward—rocketing me, my backpack and the beer
rapidly backwards in the wrong direction.

Does he often go backwards in the right direction? Forwards in the wrong direction? Sidewards in a tepid direction? A lot of Art Goodtimes’s sentences lack a sense of elementary logic; others are flat out poorly constructed. But I’m being a downer. Here’s the rest of “To Shit Proper”; bear in mind he’s squatting:

Pine martens scampering
In the windfall spruce.

Flowering tongues of lichen
eating their way into rock.

So much to hear.
The zazen whine of mosquitoes

& the electricity of flies
rushing to their life’s work

Wipe with a green leaf,
cover lightly & resume walking.

I take issue with cover “lightly” from a sanitary standpoint. From a lyric standpoint, the word “zazen” is wedged in with thoughtless abandon. Do wild animals listen and watch in this way when equally “busy” in the woods? Or is most of their effort focused on the task at hand?

I think these poems are some of the sloppiest, most annoyingly didactic poems I’ve ever seen. Yet somehow I can’t resist the impulse to tell everyone I know who reads poetry books that it is a must-own; the question is whether I mean it in a “everyone should own Touch Me: The Poems of Suzanne Somers” way or a “everyone should own a book of Far Side comics for the coffee table” way.

Either way, take another look at the book cover—a good look—and wonder how you could be without “Twisted” in your home. Here’s a sampling from the middle of the poem:

Eyes shut.
Floating on the rug of meditation
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
So what if you can skate Olympic arabesques in flawless tens?
Stop!
Break through the ice!
Jump into life & swim!
Houdini knew the secrets of setting free the self.
Be a grizzly!

I hope you took my advice and looked at the cover before reading the lines. Yes, that is a grizzly towering over our bard, who in wielding his mushroom staff and harnessing the secret of lightning appears to be “setting free the self.”

But there are questions, are there not? And they aren’t about whether or not the “rug of meditation” is metaphorical. Houdini is of the greatest interest, and in case you’re wondering, yes, the reference is entirely random; Houdini doesn’t come up anywhere else in the poem. My guess is the poet saw a special about Houdini on cable at a friend’s house the night before and started free-associating about it aloud until the friend could take it no more, and Goodtimes went home to write.

Why indict figure skaters? Did he get dumped by a figure skater when he started dropping acid in the seventies? Why is Houdini a model to be followed when a figure skater is not? If a person broke through the ice being skated on by an Olympic skater, wouldn’t there be cement underneath? And if they’re on a pond, wouldn’t they freeze to death in such swimmable “life”? The book offers a wealth of equally charming mixed metaphors:

Because Wall St. is a liar
with a tongue as slick as grease
& miles & miles of wheels
that only roll as long as you let it.

Take that, Wall Street.

To return to Barthes, though: a critic who merely professes he “doesn’t understand” what he is criticizing is not being humble; he is committing a self-aggrandizing fallacy: “All this means in fact is that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one’s own mind.”

Goodtimes does his part to clear things up—there is an “explanation paragraph” written for each poem and published at the back of the volume (as it happens, these are considerably more interesting than the poems). But the truth is, when he is being incomprehensible—“your’re [sic] just another / neopagan zenmother Buddhada”; when he is being fallacious—“be inspired / by what breathes / beneath your feet”; when he is being obvious—“Getting so lost / you find yourself,” you the reader or critic understand all too well: this half-baked wisdom is the best he could come up with:

No more manna from the mono.
Remember,
out of the mud grows the lotus.
That embodied heavenly now
where we too can embrace
the thousand-armed goddess.

Going back to the beard: I trust it. The other day on the subway I was bored and attempted to read over someone’s shoulder. The person noticed, and folded the newspaper to block my view. You can be confident Art Goodtimes would never do this; he would encourage you to read it, he would read it aloud to you in fact, then tap his mushroom staff twice on the floor and teleport the two of you to a mountaintop where you discuss the article and its relation to the divine.

In the end, I think poetry is simply too human an activity for this hairy animal, which is why the book almost defies our decorous and definitive rating system: you could see this getting either half a star or ten-and-a-half stars, something existing beyond a system’s own capacity to exist. It is disgusting to see someone defecating between cars on a New York street; somehow Goodtimes in the woods with his wretched green leaf seems at least slightly more natural, natural in a way that can’t and hasn’t been put into words. Let me affix the name “bard” in the stars above this man’s head and suggest you buy the book if you want a good laugh, if you want to cut off the cover and hang it on your wall. You too can embrace the thousand-armed goddess.

Tags: 0.5 stars, Art Goodtimes, John Deming
Posted in reviews

The Cow

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

by Ariana Reines
Fence Books December 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

The Hardness of the Frame

the cow OK, that is a slaughterhouse on the cover of The Cow, and those are dead cattle. Framed by the clinical language of a livestock manual, Ariana Reines’s first book runs language, culture and sex through a meat grinder, and the results are not pretty. Perhaps those who like poetry or sausage should not watch it being made. But as the Koran points out, “Do you then believe in a part of the book and disbelieve the other?” Reines insists on showing us “the other side of the animal.”

Consider vomit and velleity. It’s not a matter of whether one word is poetic, and the other not. It’s not just a matter of balancing diction so that the same poem can plausibly use both words—let alone the same poet. It’s a matter of using vomit to describe a real transaction between inside and outside, retaining all its disgust, the reflex of it, as a way to address ideas like cultural bulimia without hiding behind the adjective. In the same way, velleity needs a similar anchoring: used non-ironically, it can still compare the language of consciousness with the fingertip precision of sewing lace. In both cases, the feedback loop is profoundly physical. Unfortunately, both times “velleities” is used, it is misspelled. Either way, Reines’s relationship with language is fraught, ambivalent, and serious. The work contains quotes from Ashbery, Baudelaire, Burroughs, Proust, Rilke, Stein, and the Bible, among others.

Reines’s work is undeniably raw and powerful. Her verbal shredding has none of the clinical neatness of the computer algorithm, or the vaguely reassuring frisson of scissors on paper. The insistence on blood, shit, cum and guts within an experimental framework reminds me of Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, down to the use of a similar sans serif typeface, but it also sets up useful contrasts. While Schwerner’s sense of cultural transformations is similarly sexual and his body parts are similarly scaled, stacked and strewn, Reines will not let the aura of myth slur the body count. The cow is sacred, a mother, a lover—and equally, “murdered meat.”

Reines removes the scholarly mask and talks even more directly: the harshly clinical frame of the manual and the constant sense of the body as muscle, blood, and water make the possibility of rebirth or any meaningful myth much less luminous, and much filthier. She reminds us that the cultural construction of bulimia is not that different from putting a portal in the stomach of a cow so that the digestion process can be seen. The myths are real. It is the people, the bodies that are ruined, not the tablets or the statues. She writes, “We were the real’s dead mimes”. No warm nests to return to here. Only slits, gashes, and holes. Reines scolds us: “We are going to be smarter about these things from now on.”

In “Item,” Reines combines a discussion of feedlot/slaughterhouse practices, and the advent of mad cow disease with the story the speaker’s down-and-out mother, once a medical practitioner, walking downtown from Washington Heights to ask her for money for a steak. This wraps itself around a discussion of language and truth. After describing how cows cannot digest their forced diet of corn without massive doses of antibiotics, she writes: “A wimple fell over the real as if to protect it: a ruckus in the girl is artificial as anything, fortified by nutrients.” Despite the tone of this line, Reines often calls the ironist’s bluff by using language as literally as possible. She calls the cyberpoet’s bluff by calling our attention not only to shredded texts and the cultural commodification of desire, but actual holes in physical bodies. She might even call Beckett’s bluff: she is not convinced that language can’t describe real things, but the purgatory effort is just as bleak and wearying as anything Beckett’s characters confront.

What happens to the world when a body is a bag of stuff you can empty out of it.
Errors, musculatures.
Can I empty language out of me.
What difference does it make how a thing dies. Consciousness. Nobody knows
what that is.

Be warned: the obsession with bodily functions is pushed past the comfort zone, however sturdy your sealegs. Reines wants to make you sick, and shock you into a different place. The last stanza of “Advertisement” reads:

You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take. You have got to, absolutely got to put your face into the gash and sniff, and lick. You have got to learn to get sick. You have got to reestablish the integrity of your emotions so that their violence can become a health and so that you can keep on becoming. There is no sacrifice. You have got to want to live. You have got to force yourself to want to.

By any measure, this is hectoring, risky, and, in this case, not concerned with being good poetry. Reading this book may be a test of your masochism, but it just might change you. She’s aware of the risk. The book is peppered with such lines as: “Ailmenting the world perpetuates it,” and: “I will not train myself to love this shit.” With all the aggressiveness of Reines’s stance, it is unsettling to see the oddly beautiful spaces her work opens up on the killing floor. Look at the cover long enough and you may find an unsettling balance between beauty and horror, a sense that stays with you long after the book is closed.

The last quarter of the book does permit something approximating gentleness to appear. The poem “Rest” starts with “Hymns can make your forgetting happen.” and ends with “The mouth’s a haven for all an eye cannot disperse.” But in the context of such fraught, relentless hammering, such brief moments of beauty can risk seeming like desperately mimed cliches. Here’s a chunk of “You:”

I looked up and was assuaged.
I carried to my mouth the ointment of the cloud that had ceased to move,
That had ceased to pass over me.
I found a secret duct amid these floes of air and then they left off their coquetries,
their complications.
The beauty makes me feel it really happened
The sky had stars in it they glittered like calories upon the world

Whatever the state of poetry, words like “beautiful” and “lovely” should never be taboo, but it’s harder to earn the right to use them: the cost of beauty is greater today. Using such a vague word as beauty requires a corresponding concreteness. Vagueness gains its relevance by the hardness of the frame. Reines pushes this logic to a place it hasn’t been before, and doesn’t want to go, a place past politics, but profoundly informed by it; a craft that appropriates and shreds other texts, but which sometimes hides the theft; a search for beauty under piles of carcasses both metaphorical and real. At one point she asks, “how badly does narrative long to be beautiful?” Does Reines succeed? Given that all meters are in the red, and that the answer has to wait until the end of the book, “Afterward” sounds understandably weary, but oddly, cautiously hedged. Hope is hard, too.

Tags: 8 stars, Ariana Reines, Fence Books, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Special Orders

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

by Edward Hirsch
Knopf 2008
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Shelfer

hirschcover The title of Edward Hirsch’s new book Special Orders refers to his late father’s job of selling boxes, especially sizes made to order. If I say the title poem is flat, you might accuse me of a horrible pun or ask how a poem having to do with boxes can start out anything other than flat, given the exigencies of manufacturing them. If I say that Hirsch’s work feels underwrought, you might point out that a box is the simplest way to enclose any given contents in a square form.

Fair enough, but the work sometimes reads like off-the-shelf product rather than the special orders Hirsch emphasizes—which doesn’t bode well for those seeking tricornes, toruses and tubes. Things might be better if we had more of a sense that, if you brought his father a dachshund, he could make a box that gave the dog room to breathe, but also increased its dachshundness by elevating its inherent rectangularity to the level of art. But no, the job is a grind, the boxes are basically boxes, and the stress of it leads to his father’s grave. It is the grieving son who must find the power of “the secret torch that forever burns / inside us, a beacon no one can touch.”

A good Edward Hirsch poem is gently metaphorical, agnostic and searching, full of unaccountable moments of grief, humor, wonder, and joy. A bad Hirsch poem might have these qualities too, but the music flags. While most of his poems touch real emotions, the emotions are sometimes undercut by pat endings. In “I Wish I Could Paint You,” the book’s most unabashedly erotic poem, his Venus-like model steps out of the shower in the morning, evoking all of the speaker’s desires, but the poem ends with “your smile as wide as the sea / and your eyes that are deeper blue. / I wish I could paint you.” It’s supposed to be rueful and melancholy, but something about the closure undercuts the eroticism and gives me the sense of a high school senior rounding a period.

For all the brevity of Hirsch’s poems, I often find them going on a line or two longer than I’d like. His appealing directness is sometimes marred by rhetorical tags such as “It is true that.” A poem starting with “come with me” has already lost me. It’s not the tag by itself; Whitman’s “come with me”’s are wonderfully, absurdly expansive and exhilarating when not overwrought. It’s not the well-worn tropes of Hirsch’s poems that cause him to miss; something about the music flattens, doesn’t quite spark the thought it might.

When Hirsch hits, he brings us to a fondly remembered place enclosing a deep acceptance of solitary melancholy. “To DB” recalls an old friend’s apartment in the West Village. We don’t learn much about their relationship, but the speaker does say “If there is a West Village in the other world, … I’ll reach over / and hug you, which will make you uneasy.” Without noticing it, we have just stepped on the shyest of mushrooms, and released all the spores. It’s touches like these that let the poem get away with one of the oldest tricks in the book, the woman named Faith, who is “rustling around downstairs, / getting ready for work, unwilling to die.” “Man Without a Face” ends:

Now I am a man walking around
without a face to compose,
a skeleton, a stranger to myself,
an aching bone, a nerve exposed.

It’s another old trick, but it works: the final, almost full rhyme when the rest of the poem only suggests it.

The antepenultimate poem (forgive me) is “Green Couch.” Although the speaker’s abandoned his green couch, left it to molder only to have it rescued by a friend, he’s not looking for something to reupholster it, he’s carting it to the dump. He’s looking for a way to accept his grief, but he’s abandoned his religious faith. The poem ends:

Darlings, I remember everything.
But now I try to speak the language of
the unconscious and study the earth for secrets.

I go back and forth to work.
I walk in the botanical gardens on weekends.
and take a narrow green path to the clearing.

Despite (or because of) the (intentional?) echo of Zsa Zsa Gabor in Green Acres, it’s like a leftover cheeseburger becoming a feather: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Special Orders is similar in tone and content to Hirsch’s previous book, Lay Back the Darkness, down to the centrally located elegiac poem in shard-like fragmentary stanzas. What makes the latter better is that the framing structure of classical tropes buttressing memories of the Holocaust is more solidly and consistently present, giving him just the coat rack to hang his gentle, melancholy rhetoric on. The lighter touch in Special Orders sometimes leaves us floating. Given the subtle difference between Hirsch poems that work and those that don’t, each reader will probably be struck by a different poem in Special Orders, but I think it would be hard for any reader to like all of the poems here.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Edward Hirsch, Knopf, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Only the Senses Sleep

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

by Wayne Miller
New Issues 2006
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

…only the senses

On some level, the title of Wayne Miller’s book could point to themes worthy of “Solaris.” Only the senses sleep… while the poetic, imaginative life––the ever turning, mysterious, more fundamental, more volatile life of the poet––floats subliminally on and on into the vast space of the muse. Wayne Miller’s beautiful lyrics have nothing to do with science fiction. They have everything to do with light and dark, with floating below and floating above, with being in and out, with concrete and abstract language wrapping around itself like a barber’s pole… “winding up / the thread of all that names fail to say”:

And now I lift

myself into each day
as if into my body, go to work,

and then at night, my lit room
slips down into the glass.

The factories blow their smoke
up through the snow, the city

lifts our lights a little closer
to the sky….

Somewhere, folks are digging
a well, while elsewhere

the lit needles of gunshots
and fireflies––. I can assure you

that our lives keep fracturing
into notes, I can promise you

that a white fence without light
is like a sail without wind.

(“Dear Sappho,” –– Section I)

Miller’s lyric poems are some of the best this reviewer has read for some years. (And a first book at that.) The book is divided into three sections, each section having one poem addressed to Sappho, the classical lyric poet’s poet herself. But each section begins grounded in the props of a physical life; a world of wrap around porches, golf course sprinklers on timers, Presbyterian bell choirs, salted streets, lovers, lit rooms, books opening and closing like valves, icy basketball hoops hanging like chandeliers. Millers sensibility is complex: literally, a European eye for relationships; aesthetically, a mature love of sense; actually, a post-Enlightenment, optimistic, American assumption of possibility, decency, and fair play. Miller believes in the abstract and the concrete valences of his own reality and in the languages that he recognizes those valences have bestowed on him and in him. Miller believes in poetry.

Miller’s poems have shadows, long shadows. But they are not murderous shadows. Miller’s shadows are interior shadows:

The sunlight comes as if through a phonograph needle––
a robust chord of light that’s somehow thin at the heart
of how it says what it has to say. Still, the walls
are soothed, long shadows stretching westward
from the hanging signs and the squat fireplug,
not-quite-vestigial tails of the street’s unnamed life.

(“Rounding the Corner into ‘Early Sunday Morning’”)

The zone of no-sleep is also on the inside:

sleep is a poor proof of an emptiness
inside us––sleep turns the body into world.

Yet, sometimes I’m stunned by the light
of the fridge when I finally open my eyes;

(“Dear Sappho,” –– Section II)

The interior space of no sleep does not mean interior emptiness. It is the landscape of the interplay of interior light and dark, of interior pause and sound. Fundamentally, while not as harrowing (one could even evoke Dante here), Miller is Blakian; the Spirit of Prophecy dwells on the inside:

we are in this continuousness––our lives
dissolved in the channels of written lines––
every word I’ve read was in me before I read it.

They’re pulled from me like seconds
from the cistern of an unfinished life. Love’s
endless weathering moves the body

of our words: we read to understand
we’re not alone in it––we carry one another,
assuredly––
though we do this alone.

(“Reading Sonnevi on a Tuesday Night)

Miller’s book, it should be noted, begins with an epigraph from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” a poem about the metaphysics of knowledge being drawn from the physical experience of the senses.

In “Only the Senses Sleep,” Miller’s ambition is artfully actualized at every turn. And a huge ambition it is. This is not the ambition of noble, inflated lyrics, but the ambition of striking into the bedrock of the fundamental, essence of poetry itself. Miller finds the systolic and diastolic pulses of poetic belief:

At any one point in time, half the world’s
rocking in the other half’s shadow,

as we are now. Each soul’s wrapped
in a name’s slick membrane, each image
enters through the liquid coating our eyes.

Each moment’s a bailed teaspoon of water.
Nonetheless, the city’s deadbolts
wind and unwind the gears of our living watch,
the books open and close like valves.

My neighbors’ breathing holds me
because it continues to move. Unwavering

light under the door like a sheet of paper––
thinning now, as the city’s tesserae
take the day’s first pale sips,

as the street presses its bell to the window,
as our shared water begins dividing
across our dream-cold bodies.

What remains for us has always been
what’s arriving. We know this,

dearest belief––we know you each second,
only the senses sleep.

(“Sunrise Study”)

Tags: 9 stars, New Issues, Scott Hightower, Wayne Miller
Posted in reviews