Archive for March, 2009

All-American Poem

Monday, March 30th, 2009

by Matthew Dickman
The American Poetry Review Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

5

Tell-Tale Heart

                                              1.

dickman matthew coverThe rumor mills are churning! Why, last week at a party, I heard that All-American poet Matthew Dickman and his newly-minted arch-nemesis Michael Schiavo once were roommates at the…Breadloaf Conference—that the two were friends, or friendly, and that Schiavo made it his business to help less-than-impressive “Dickman 2” fit in with loads of discriminating loafers*. It’s a valuable and meaningful development, punctuated by an *outrageous* comment that “Dickman 1” has apparently made on Schiavo’s blog:

Hello All,

Michael, you owe me around $50 dollars from when you stayed with Matthew in Austin, and never seemed to have money for tacos or beer. I still have receipts. Oh those were the days. Poems and Led Zep! I hope you’re well. Maybe next time Hoagland will pick your book. Are you still writing sonnets?

Yours,

Michael Dickman

In case you didn’t know, there are two Dickmans. They are twins, and both of their names begin with “M,” and they stick up for each other, which I like. Both have published poems in The New Yorker within the last year or so, and first books have emerged from each: Michael’s The End of the West will be published next month (and reviewed on coldfront this Wednesday), and Matthew’s All-American Poem, selected by Tony Hoagland as winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, was published last September. All of this is important, as important as the fact that Matthew Dickman loves his brother. Or, from what I can tell you, *the speaker in Matthew Dickman’s poems* loves some kind of metaphysical brother.

                                                          2.

And bang, these poems exist in the metaphysical too. Weird. That makes me feel weird. Let’s talk about that…and then get to the embarrassing pictures, big-time magazines and good old bad blood.

Yes, this is the voice of an openly conversational, emotionally available, not-quite-angsty young glasses-wearer who loves his brother; he openly admits to a sense of competition with him (“I feel like a dog sniffing another dog’s ass”), but generally chooses to emphasize their meaningful bond. I mean, their dance:

 The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
 before they turn three. Like being held in the arms
 of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
 Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
 one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
 and when he turns to dip me
 or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
 I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.

Children aren’t especially kind at age three. Here we have the worst and best of Matthew Dickman; an easy, underwhelming “child” simile leading to a boring “dance” metaphor but arriving at a moment of sincerity and mortal clarity.

Think of it as chicken soup for the poet’s soul. Our poet has a recipe; he begins with some particular fact, anecdote or idea, then associates his way into stories, recollections, names of bands and poets, and whatever “ideas” these kinds of things imply. Matthew Dickman is a spinner of tales, a would-be sad bastard sifting the fragments of teenagehood-cum-adulthood to write and write his way to meaning. Sometimes, he knows what to do when he finds it; other times, it is corrupted by toss-me-the-megaphone “Poetic” attacks: in the words of Elaine Benes, big budget movies with plots that go nowhere.

Take for example the book’s first poem, “The Mysterious Human Heart.” I am interested in the heart as a muscle of mine that I’ll never get to see or hold, so I’m rolling with him when he mentions his heart is inside him, “mysterious, / something [he] will never get to hold.” But sure enough, the heart becomes a stand-in for “Desire,” and suddenly I feel like I’m playing a family round of Parker Brothers’ Poetryland: and TGIF is on in the corner, and Domino’s pizza is on the way.

Another poem, “Love,” begins with a list of places where people fall in love;  falling in love means more time together, and breeds familiarity: “…we can’t keep our hands off each other / until we can— / so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs, falling in love again.” One of Dickman’s regular tools is flagrant sexuality (this isn’t the only reference to S&M), and here, it is surprising, a weird peek into the things people do in order to feel in control of their lives. As we proceed, Dickman merges this with another of his staples, the pop culture reference:

 We go to movies and sit in the air-conditioned dark
 with strangers who are in love
 with heroes like Peter Parker
 who loves a girl he can’t have
 because he loves saving the world in red and blue tights
 more than he would love to have her ankles wrapped around
 his waist or his tongue between her legs.

Suggesting that these are two different kinds of passion, or beginning a line of questioning as to whether one is sexual love and the other love of duty (does he want to make the world better because he loves her?), might be taking this metaphor, and Spider Man, too seriously. The whole passage skims across the surface, a means to the next end: the next line, idea, example. He moves from an ill-fitting royal “we” to a deeply personal “I,” and the poem is tempted to devolve into juvenilia:

 I was living there with a girl who loved to say the word
 shuttlecock. She would call
 me at work and whisper shuttlecock
 into my ear which loved it! The blastoff
 of the first word sending the penis into space.
 Not that I ever imagined
 my cock being a spaceship,
 though sometimes men are like astronauts, orbiting
 the hot planets of women,
 amazed that they have traveled so far, wanting
 to land, wanting to document the first walk,
 the first moan,
 but never truly understanding what
 has moved them.

The pathetic fallacy (an ear that loves) is distracting, and each in his series of associations—shuttlecock to cock spaceship to men being like “astronauts, orbiting / the hot planets of women”—seems more shoe-horned than the last (I mean, I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that this poet doesn’t “understand” women here are lines from another poem:

Maybe she wants to be measured beyond
the teaspoon shadow of the anus
and the sweet mollusk of the tongue,
beyond the equation of limbs and seen
as a complete absolute.

Yes, women are more than the teaspoon shadow of…what was it again? Matthew Dickman has the soul of a Poet, absolutely). But awkward or forced as much of this feels (the title poem makes mention of every U.S. state, and reads like a poem that tries to include every U.S. state), there’s something to be said for being conversational and clear—for “pitying” the reader (Vonnegut’s term) rather than attempting to impose upon him/her one’s private, inscrutable intellect. There is at times an authentic longing for human connection here, an occasionally charming urge towards empathy, particularly when he concludes “Love”: “I hope / you do not suffer.”

                                                              3.

So, there’s nothing to be too worried or offended about here: just some sentences broken into lines, some sexual fantasies, some funny and sad fables that might serve as useful first-person NPR editorials (which I intend as praise). At worst, there’s the sense that the urge to be poetic outstrips the urge to be imaginative: that the poet finds a flat rock in the mud, skips it clean from one side to the other, and walks away with his eyes fixed on his shoes. He is flighty and quick, talkative and oh-so-emo, only barely plumbing the depths of sex and mortality like he might, resolving instead to be The Poet Writing The Poem, trying hard, sometimes too hard, to bring it all in.
 
As for the real-life storytelling and skull-swatting, well, god bless this mess. Did Hoagland read some of this stuff before Dickman submitted it for consideration? I’ve heard so, and have it in me to hope not, though success will arrive on nebulous terms from now til the end of days, and none of this means Dickman won’t develop into a stronger and stronger poet. The Hoagland thing, if true, seems about the only ethical breach we can divine in relation to these poets. Otherwise, that they have cracked the code and broken at a young age into The New Yorker, that they were in Minority Report, are nothing but successes built into a sideshow. It is bizarre that these guys have become such a big deal, as surely they did not see it coming either; there are far better poets, and phonomenally worse poets. Perhaps American poetry is hard up for heroes or hard up for controversy. 

Great to have something to talk about, though, to have those conversations that inevitably end with the sense that these battles take places on shelves of rock in the belly of a sleeping volcano, the rest of civilization functioning just fine without us in the stretches beyond. It’ll be something if soon, we find someone worthy of a collective eruption. In the meantime, I hope the Dickmans and their detractors view all of the insular contention as a good thing, or at least a neutral one, even a cute one.

* June 09 UPDATE! Further milling suggests the two were waiters at the conference, and were friendly, but were not roommates

*

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Reading Novalis in Montana

Monday, March 16th, 2009

by Melissa Kwasny
Milkweed Editions 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7.5

That Which Haunts

kwasnyThe work and studies of late 18th century German poet and philosopher Georg Philipp Freidrich von Hardenburg, or Novalis, set a complex backdrop for Melissa Kwasny’s latest book. However, Kwasny’s poems never slip into the pedantic as one might expect. The poems remain plastic and, at times, Spartan, and while the landscape itself often feels cold and phlegmatic (“The dirt road is frozen.”), the speaker in the poems is never so: “I hear the geese first in my lungs.”

Novalis has great influence here. One of his most salient concepts is the continual striving of humanity towards the Golden Age. This ideal of harmony between man and nature is echoed throughout Kwasny’s writing. The first line in the title poem—“I hear the geese first in my lungs”—demonstrates a clear and powerful connection between man and nature. Both Novalis and Kwasny insist that sentience of all that surrounds humankind is central to a full existence, that everything observed “is a message.” As the poet investigates these messages, she continually encounters feelings of being lost, haunted, and abandoned.

A sense of abandonment is evident very early on. In “Redpolls,” the second poem in the book, Kwasny compares the syncopated migratory patterns of redpolls to the loss of her grandmother. She writes, “they won’t be back / next year or next, like my grandmother, for instance. / So, after work, I make popcorn, fill her green bowl / take it out to the creek where she might find it.” Though her grandmother is gone, dead it can be presumed, our poet still waits for a return, or imagines a presence, imparting that all of us are “surrounded by a bevy of ghosts.”

As the metaphysical informs these poems, so too does the physical. Kwasny consistently relies on the marriage of man and nature to inform her understanding of existence. In “Mule Deer,” she explores the lives of mule deers and the fact that their fate is similar to every living creature’s: “absence will replace them.” Later, in “Common Blue,” ants function similarly, and in their curious, transient diligence, lead the poet to lament the loss of the body at death: “The body, it is so sad what happens to it. / If you fell, you would dry up instantly.”

In contrast to the body’s flaws and weaknesses, Kwasny emphasizes the power of individual consciousness. She states, “When I am alone, I am godly.” She posits that our collective sense of abandonment stems from an incomplete notion of the self. If the self could be whole and trusted, perhaps there would be no need for gods. In part five of “The Waterfall,” Kwasny recounts the prayer of an old Cree man, and notes that “He was afraid of what he prayed to.” Prayer should be a more self-reflective process than it often is, and since fear often stems from that which is not fully understood, here the Cree man fears what is supposed to supply him with solace and trust.

In part six of the same poem, Kwasny states, “A baby is crying / but the sprig of snowberry we hang over the crib is said / to ward off ghosts.” The implication here is that the baby is crying because of ghosts, inexplicable presences that haunt. She also states that “The dark soil of each season is indicative of the veils / we kick through”; little about one’s surroundings is known or understood, yet one cleaves one’s way through the days anyway, for better or worse. Kwasny’s message is one of perseverance against the unknown, an insistence upon meaningful interpretation, if only for its own sake.

In addition to Novalis, Kwasny finds wisdom in Pound and Emerson. “It was Emerson who said the universe / is an externization of the soul.” It is difficult not to fall in love with such a grand idea, one that puts each individual in the driver’s seat, and Kwasny makes it even more irresistible by coupling Emerson’s notion with her immediate mention of a waterfall, an outpouring of that which is within, a blending of the physical and metaphysical. Accordingly, Kwasny, like many, also sees fit to interrogate the creator. In her long poem “The Directions,” which ends part three, she writes, “We are constantly translating Lord to / spirit.” It’s an incredibly apt observation; where “Lord” is representative of power and authority, “spirit” is more akin to something seraphic, a zephyr.

As experience mounts, interpretations change. In “Soul,” part two of “The Directions,” Kwasny notes that “Everything…divides itself.” Perceptions and understanding change. She lists images that she once found ugly and therefore hurtful: “a bar, an alley, a tar roof.” However, it is often these edgy, interesting, and ugly images that take on beauty as one ages. They indicate turmoil, but ultimately, metaphysical triumph in the ultimate defeat of the body.

Which is why it is notable that Kwasny decides, early on, to riff off one Novalis’s most famous conceits: that the slaying of oneself is the only true philosophical act. As she notes later in the book, “All are candidates / and all, of course, will die.” It is important to remember this, but in the meantime death is seen as a return, “the myth that we can go back again.” Does the urge to die stem from despair, from the overwhelming urge to know, or from the urge to fuse oneself with the universal mind? Could it be any combination of these? Is such a notion quantifiable at all? Of course, Kwasny comes to no perfect solutions or explanations, but she offers some key questions, arriving most convincingly at a blend of man (as animal), mind and nature: “When I broke with the earth, in grief, the animals still gathered.” Comforting. Sagacious.

*

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Breakfast with Thom Gunn

Monday, March 9th, 2009

by Randall Mann
University of Chicago Press 2009
Reviewed by Stephen Fellner

7.5

Dear Randall Mann,

mann cover

When I finished your book of poems Breakfast with Thom Gunn, my competing reactions were these: I was bummed it was over (it felt way too short), while at the same time, I knew if the book were any longer it would hurt your project.  Let me explain: I see you as one of our most successful practitioners of Light Verse, an undervalued and underexplored poetry genre these days.  How could one not feel excited with such nifty, short, rhyming triumphs like “Ovid in San Francisco,” “Ganymede on Polk Street,” and “Modern Art”?  To add more poems to your brief volume would take away the strategic effect of offering us quick, endless punchlines and surprises.

One of the wonderful aspects of Light Verse is it (deceptively) seems as easy as a dumb, faithless fuck. It can leave the mind as quickly, too.  But you can’t stop wanting more.  Almost every one of your poems is a trick, vanishing at the point of climax.  They don’t weigh me down with needless talk, don’t overstay their welcome. They lead to awesome exits.

Take the final two stanzas of the ostensibly benignly titled “Song”:

(One time, I swear to God,
I fucked for weeks and weeks.)
These queens arrive, all prim,
And talk about antiques

and art, boring stuff.
But when they snort the best
crystal money can buy?
They beg to sit on my fist.

Yes, it seems that an aspect of your poetic project is to offer a contemporary rewrite of Thom Gunn’s work, giving it a bit more of a self-consciously daring spin.  And these days we undoubtedly need that.  With Proposition 8 in the foreground of our queer consciousnesses, some of us queers too often fall into self-consciousness, overdeterminedly falling into the pitfalls of self-censorship.  (If I see one more gay male movie [or gay male himself] prodding us to get married and adopt a brat, I’ll ruin the relationship and sell the runt to the black-market.)  Do we need any more desexualized, dull queers?  I wanted to hang out with the unapologetically shameless narrator in “Career” who seduces a respected poet for help with his book.  Here’s the inspired opening: 

A younger poet wrote to ask
an older for a blurb.
The older poet said Perhaps,
which meant Do Not Disturb.

But when the older poet saw
a photo of the lad,
the older man dipped his pen
and wrote that he’d be glad

to offer up the richest praise…

As you confirm in “Fetish,”  “Beauty, our politics, is local.”  In “Election Day,” you contradict yourself with a paradox that—paradoxically—can be easily explained:

…Tired
of the age of irony, everything
a gesture; tired of the word gesture,
the day ends

as the world will end:…

The final line  of that poem shows us an image of our sad political state with “uncounted ballots floating in the bay.”  Definitely one of my favorites.

There are a few missteps, such as the title poem, “Breakfast with Thom Gunn.”  Do gay men do breakfast?  (Your narrator seems like the type who’d do brunch, after waking up too late from a night of screwing.)  I wish the speaker had a more idiosyncratic relationship with Gunn and his body (of work).  The narrator “gushes” here but not much else. Also, as in some of Gunn’s weaker literary moments, from time to time, the characters in a few of the poems devolve into uninspired self-pity. For instance, here’s from the poem “Ruin”:

I had a birthday yesterday. It’s mine:
perversion, self-deceit, nostalgia, rain.
(My stop. I’ll brush against a dozen men
before I disembark into the rain
an older, rumpled man, If life is ruin,
then let it burn like Rome, like Dante’s ruin).

Or the perfunctory, pithy closure to “Last Call”:

Now the queen has gone,
gone again
in search of love,
in search of sin.

It’s closing time.
You were not at fault.
I drain my glass
and lick the salt.

But all books have disappointments.  This is a substantial improvement over your first book, which relied much more on these moves.  Your current book is a lot of fun and almost never dull.  (Mark Doty could learn a lot from you these days.  I found myself wishing he’d had a place at the Inauguration, that is, as long as he avoided talking about dogs and middle-class excursions to Provincetown.  But what happened to the days of his wonderful “Atlantis,” an inevitable tome for any gay poet?)

Ican’t help share a few more of your best verses:

I know that love is more than leather,
a tight white shirt, a good stink-
tonight, I am a fetish. I am canonical.
(“Fetish”)

I want to leave this place
demeaned. It ought to leave a welt or rash.
Tonight, the corridors smell of bleach,
cherry air-freshener, and far too much
ambition.
(“Intimacy”)

And I believe in any successful letter, the writer needs to offer a specific remembrance of the receiver.  So: here’s one more solid excerpt of your work that, appropriately, leaves me smiling and content just as this letter reaches the moment of its disappearance:

Off in the trees-that’s high silviculture
The slug in the yard has its desired effect;
love becomes a fritillary. Lucky thing we bought a day-pass
before everything went dolally…
(“Poetry”)

Much respect,
Stephen Fellner

*

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Human Dark With Sugar

Friday, March 6th, 2009

by Brenda Shaughnessy
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Cate Peebles

8_5

Fast Into You

Human Dark with sugarIn the poem “Replaceable Until You’re Not,” Brenda Shaughnessy writes, “You are not broken. You break again / and again because // that’s what breaking means / To be whole…I am yours. I am still I.” Throughout Human Dark With Sugar, her long-anticipated second collection of poems, we meet with an assertive but vulnerable speaker. This is a book of many sections, subsections, titles and subtitles, all held in place by a spine and a name. To be human is to be a whole mess all bound by flesh and etcetera into a freakish, thinking, feeling thing — one that relentlessly, joyfully, picks itself apart. Shaughnessy draws attention to the contradiction of being made up of so many parts while appearing to be one single body. 

The book is divided into three sections: Anodyne, Ambrosia, and Astrolabe. And within these sections, the poems are further divided into parts—couplets, tercets, numerical sections, and named numerical sections. For example, “This Loved Body” is divided into 20 parts. But the writing in no way feels calculated or stilted by the breaks. The movement from part to part, poem to poem, is seamless. The poems explore these typographical divisions lyrically, with an intensely self-aware speaker; take these lines in “Why Is the Color of Snow?”:

Melt yourself to make yourself more clear
to the next observer.
I could barely see you anyway.

A blizzard I understand better,
the secrets of many revealed as one,
becoming another on my only head.

…

What is constant is white…

Because snow reflects only itself,
self upon self upon self…                                   

 What is constant here is the insistence in the speaker’s voice. She consistently craves a closer look at the transient moment and the individual’s–her–passage through it. 

The joy in these poems is found in their humor, and there is humor everywhere. Shaughnessy is clever without being obnoxious about it and her wit keeps the poems moving. In “Breasted Landscape” she describes Autumn as “scrambled math and nipples.” And in an anti-ode to the moon called “I’m Over the Moon,” she writes, 

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone.

She doesn’t shy away from raunchy either, as in the next lines:

I’m going to write hard
and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand…

I won’t give away any more, but it gets even dirtier. It’s this mix of humor and directness that keeps the writing from ever slipping into the ho-hum. Shaughnessy hits many notes, from angry to horny to wistful. Reading these poems you run an emotional gamut, but you do so with someone who doesn’t sink and drag. 

I’ve heard many of these poems read aloud on several occasions, and I have now read the book about three times, and I still find it moving, erotic and intellectually engaging. If you get a chance to hear Brenda Shaughnessy read, you should go. Of course, if you are unable, the book itself stands up to multiple reads and does not fall flat. It’s the kind of book you might want to read when you’re in a sulky mood, because you can identify with the longing and pain and then laugh at yourself and long some more. The sugar and the darkness are inseparable.

*

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Parish Krewes

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

by Micah Ballard
Bootstrap Press 2009
Reviewed by Ben Mirov 

7.5 of 10 stars

“I will not rise / to receive their grievances / nor their praise…”

ballard coverPublishing almost exclusively in small press chapbooks, Micah Ballard has led a career that has been an homage to an era of poetry beginning during the San Francisco Renaissance and continuing on into the 1960s and 70s when poets like Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson and Philip Whalen were considered an older generation of masters and younger poets like Joanne Kyger, Tom Clark, Ann Waldman, Bill Berkson and Lewis Warsh (to name a few) were forming tight knit groups, and publishing communities.

Many of the small press projects Ballard is involved in still produce chaps that reference this period when publications were mostly produced in an 8 1/2′ by 11′ format on mimeograph machines or made by hand. Ballard’s new collection, Parish Krewes, is mostly a selection from a number of small press publications, printed by friends and circulated within select communities. Many of the poems are dedications and their language reflects the intimacy and idiosyncrasy of these friendships (see: “Purification,” dedicated to the poet Partrick Dunagan, and “All Saints Day,” for Ballard’s wife and fellow poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux).

Much of Parish Krewes owes its stylistic nuances to poets of this era such as David Meltzer (one of Meltzer’s collages graces the cover), and Joann Kyger, but perhaps Ballard’s most significant predecessor is the poet John Wieners. Closely associated with SF renaissance poets like Duncan, Spicer and Robin Blazer, Wieners was widely read and known in the poetry scenes of his time. Despite being lauded by Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, Wieners remains a poet who never enjoyed the success of his peers. A large number of Weiners’s poems condense a sense of longing and loss into elegant, seemingly effortless poems. Often, his language runs into the dark, recounting moments of solitude and destitution, drug addiction, and love loss. If you are lucky to find a copy of his rare chapbook The Hotel Wentley Poems, you will find a tonality and diction much like Ballard’s work in Parish Krewes. Take for example Ballard’s poem “Queens Tunnel to Lexington”:

Not enough
sleep
dreams where the real
life is lived
Surrendered realms
which initiate
the inner workings of deals
left undone.
Until there are none to be done.
Only the premonition
of where we’ll be when they arrive
what’s next
after they’re gone.
It all returns. But is it morning
or am I still here from yesterday?
Blood rushes below. Rain
seeps through windowpanes
the bell rings. Stop. I will not rise
to receive their grievances
nor their praise, false ambitions
material poetry.
There is another communion to tune in with
Something more immediate than flesh.

Throughout Parish Krewes there is the strong sense that each poem is resisting “false ambitions” and “material poetry.” All of the poems in Ballard’s collection maintain their integrity by refusing to participate in “Surrendered realms / which initiate / the inner workings of deals / left undone.” It is not made explicitly clear what these realms are, except that they promise the unsatisfying “…premonition / of where we’ll be when they arrive / & what’s next / after they’re gone.” This sort of explicitly opaque language is employed throughout Parish Krewes in order to create space that is both esoteric and open. The dedications to close friends, the idiosyncratic diction, the dark, private tone of the poems all function towards this end. My favorite poems in Parish Krewes inhabit an otherworld. They incrementally build themselves into a dimension where the poem hangs in the ether like a ghost, waiting to be recognized and listened to. Even the more esoteric moments shimmer with obsidian intensity.

*

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Archicembalo

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

by G.C. Waldrep
Tupelo Press 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

8

Dad, Who is Benjamin Britten?

archicembalo“What does it mean to listen to poems the way poems listen to paintings?”  Thus spoke G.C. Waldrep when I recently interviewed him.  That is also the statement (as he called it) or question he put to the bobble-heads at Tupelo Press as to what the in-betweens and leg-rooms of his new book Archicembalo represent.  There is nary a question mark in the entire book, which is the invisible omission of the human beings all the questions are put to – as in the book’s primary poem “Who Is Josquin Des Prez” – as Waldrep skips and sings, “How do you do. How does one do. A snowdrop reminds.” 

The poems are prose blocks.  Some are sweet and succinct, others are dark and lengthy.  All of the titles are questions involving their selves in a tetherball game of poetic call-and-response.  Of note is the notion that questions are sentences, which begs the impulse that all that has gone underground or died is to the left of the question word itself – as in, “Who is Benjamin Britten.” might as well be, “Dad, Who is Benjamin Britten?” 

In a word, Waldrep is a cantonment; in the very same way he claims that a “hymn” is for “one certain culture.”  A “hymn” can also “be heard across the river” and/or is “an obstruction in a winter park.”
In another word, Waldrep is a gamut.  A gamut is an entire series of hexachords.  Excerpts of the poem “What Is a Hexachord” highlight:  “I sing as I walk when I have breath which is not always.”…(and at the end of a page and a half) . . . “And so the music makes me.” 

The glass feels tough to break, hammer or not.  The wood is dense, full of knots.  The brain is thick, unlike a dinosaur’s and rolling on its own intellectual river.  The only balance to this lowered teeter-totter plunges itself deep inside the reader’s psyche as utterly lightweight gasping and laughing.  Waldrep seems to be laughing at himself, dark enough to slide his body into a dead opera, yet fluorescent enough to go “wicked wicket into the wide wide world” and allow his heart to become a third arm.  Ironical enough, Wittgenstein assumed the art is just another limb.  Organs are things for production, and what does the heart produce but a reaching.

Humor bounces along like a rubber girl on a lunar hopscotch court.  Take the poem, “What Is a Tenor” (one of the few pithy poems):  “If astonishment then replica.  If porcelain than mourning.  If hero then metamorphosis.  If abstinence then flight. // Very well thank you.  If yucca then savvy then delight.”

In fact, the witty and drolling poems that Waldrep conjures later conceal any presupposition that he is an Amish man.  You forget you are dealing with a professor, a man who possesses strange talents that none of us would even consider, a man who has an alternative poetic background.  While these poems would ideally be fun to sip a scotch around and hear your friends read out loud, they are difficult to puncture without a Wikipedia or (as old-school as it might seem) an actual encyclopedia at hand. Yet, Archicembalo slides and skills enough to be its own Google-fun search.  And do not forget that even a piano, to Mr. Waldrep, is a prism inhabited by a small bird, a wren, maybe.

Captivatingly, in our interview, Waldrep listed Arvo Part as one of his top five favorite recording artists.  Part composed a minimal piece titled “Spiegel Im Spiegel” (“Mirror In the Mirror” in German) in 1978 about departure.  The piece sounds like it’s mourning, yet like it is gripping two eye-droppers of hope.  This is Archicembalo’s methodology as well – that the opera of life is death and joy.

*

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