by Frank Giampetro
Alice James Books 2008 Reviewed by PJ Gallo
Frankly
Frank Giampietro’s Begin Anywhere is, above all, an exercise in self-consciousness, self-interest, self-indulgence and a number of other self-nouns sprung from the same sort of goofy egotism allowed in children. That said, his poems can be compelling insofar as they remain wide-eyed explorations of their invariable and stylized subject, Frank Giampietro. When Giampietro resists indulging in his persona, his speakers’ self-interest can be an effective representation of the way the self splinters among the various parts of our daily lives. More often, though, he just seems like he can’t help himself.
On one hand, an uncharacteristically rhymed sonnet like “Frankstory” (sidenote: other titles that include the poet’s first name are “Frank Giampietro, Poet,” “Frankie the Haggler,” and “Anti-Ekfrankcis”) takes on an interesting conceptual structure wherein one man’s sense of his own history is placed in the context of global history which is then placed inside another man’s sense of his own history. The result is three historical moments presented like a set of Matryoshka dolls, and it is unclear whether the speaker’s personal history is to be thought the most important or the least. The method borders selflessness but implies that history cannot exist if not for its iteration in the minds of living people. On the other hand, a poem like “Me Spy with My Little Eye” might more accurately represent the collection’s single-faceted obsession with the self—all while chanting a childlike me, me, me:
Me and no more fifty-gallon fish tank.
Me in my new hundred-dollar shoes
and my, if me don’t cut my hair just so
my head looks huge.
Me, my head is huge.
Everything exists in the poem because of the speaker, which makes some obvious philosophical sense. Giampietro wisely avoids philosophy, but still, his hybrid baby-talk and the afterthought “you” introduced in the final three lines of the poem amount to a silly sort of manipulation—the kind used to uphold rules in a children’s game. Giampietro concludes, “You’re so smart / and so cool, but I freakin’ spy you.”
Most of the poems in the collection are not so syntactically inventive or formally organized—most are colloquial and observational. The connection is strong, and one of Giampietro’s more derivative modes is to present a series of invariably self-referential statements tied together with an ambiguous title such as “Another Poem Scoring 4.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test” or “Confessional Poem #783.” The first few lines of the latter poem test the limits of the style with representative humor:
I have dried my hands on my dog.
I have stolen the first line of this poem
from a TV commercial
for beer. I have used a cock ring.
I fear the art teacher at the school where I work
will use this knowledge against me someday.
The poem ends strongly, with the speaker’s opinion of himself projected imaginatively through his son. The final lines, “if my heart doesn’t give out too soon / my boy will pity me,” deflate the supposed importance of what comes before and subtly recognize a sad quietness in the gaps between the speaker’s yells. Nevertheless, these poems rely on their becoming fresher and fresher with each incoming line—a technique that, even when done successfully, can feel like a tedious, meandering search for the next great self-oriented shock.
Evident in those same early lines of “Confessional Poem #783” is another of Giampietro’s methods, namely a persistent self-consciousness. “Dear J, I Patched This up Instead of That One I Promised About Simone Weil” is the most obvious of such poems, and Giampietro doesn’t stop with the title. In it, he writes, “‘After Eating an Apple Core and All, While Riding in my Car’ / is what this poem was going to be called.” Of course, the poem does end up largely about Simone Weil, highlighting the one-dimensional strangeness of being told what not to expect but expecting it anyway. To say a poem would have been about Simone Weil or could have been a villanelle or hasn’t fulfilled any number of alternate possibilities is to be bland and obvious, but also means a recognition that circumstances necessarily external to the poem have interfered with its purpose—and that the self or the speaker or Frank Giampietro, despite the precedence any of them takes, does not exist without something gleaned from the rest of the world.
The title poem may be the best of such poems. The poem reveals the physical and emotional history of a woman’s death, but it does so in very distinct, well-paced steps. Halfway through the poem, after the speaker’s father has mysteriously thrown a shotgun into a lake, Giampietro reveals the cause of death, and his speaker begins his appropriate unraveling:
Or I could begin after the splash, with the ducks
flying back to the bread. Or ten minutes earlier
with my father not consoling, but wanting to console
my half-sister as she stands there, a shadow’s length
from the doorway watching him hold
what’s left of his first wife. Of course I could begin
with his wife shooting herself
in my half-sister’s abandoned playhouse.
The poem begins again several times before and after these lines, and it works largely because it reluctantly backgrounds its self-consciousness in the face of a visceral, emotionally-charged incident. It also works because the poem’s self-conscious refrain and the inherent emotionality of the subject meld successfully into a sad stutter, as if the speaker must continue to begin the story because he is afraid the end of his story will really be the end.
Such human moments make it difficult to take a hard line on Begin Anywhere. It would be easy to find fault with the overstated, colloquial comedy of many of Frank Giampietro’s poems, but there is an endearing clumsiness about his speakers, as if they are forever under threat of tripping on their shoelaces or drinking too much wine at their in-laws’. Still, Giampietro gives himself a starring role in the collection, and like most character actors, his better work is done in bit parts.
Edited by Andrea Hollander Budy
Autumn House Press 2009 Reviewed by Rachel Mennies
Balancing Acts
“The paradox in American letters is that it has always been easier for a woman to write and for a man to be published.”
—Paul Theroux, on the social and professional acceptance of writers in “Being a Man”
In 1973, Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, preoccupied by the dearth of anthologized women poets, created the groundbreaking women’s poetry anthology No More Masks! Howe, commemorating the occasion in the collection’s introduction, writes of its exigent formation: “The most important reason for this volume to exist is an ideological one: a belief in the uniqueness of women.” Unique and underrepresented, the eighty-seven original contributors revealed, through their poems, their preoccupation with the politics of the moment.
The collection caused quite a stir in the poetry community—Elizabeth Bishop famously declined to contribute, noting what she perceived as the “segregation” inherent in the collection’s intentional exclusion of any male writers. Others criticized its politics-heavy momentum. But regardless of its reception, No More Masks! gave women writers an invaluable gift, setting the precedent for the existence of all-women’s poetry anthologies; the tradition has continued with a re-issue of No More Masks! and several new women’s anthologies, including Columbia University Press’s The Extraordinary Tide. Here to contribute vibrantly to this tradition comes When She Named Fire, the new all-women contemporary poetry anthology from Autumn House Press.
Born between 1925 and 1976, the writers included in When She Named Fire comprise the heavyweights of American women poets; current United States Poet Laureate Kay Ryan has a section, as do former Poet LaureateRita Dove and literary luminaries Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, and Maxine Kumin, the sole poet appearing in both anthologies. With ninety-six poets overall, the tag “American women poets” allows for great variegation of voice, culture, and style, and editor Andrea Hollander Budy takes care to cultivate this diversity.
Though diverse, the poets’ gender unites them, and a study of what it means to be a woman graces the pages with insight and clear focus. The poets here write about loss and birth, the changing of the seasons and the changing of a tire with an eye for new exploration. Political exigency, though present at spare moments, largely steps back to make way for more complicated, contemporary examinations of a woman’s world. And while some contributors rely heavily on expected tropes and thus contribute weaker poems, overall When She Named Fire examines women’s lives with a marked consistency of skill.
In an anthology with such well-loved contributors, isolating individual achievers proves a difficult task. As a whole, however, this collection serves as a study of what preoccupies women writers in 2009, and illness rates high among these preoccupations. Deborah Bruce writes deftly in “Prognosis” of the anxiety grown from waiting for a diagnosis: “But what I’m searching for is what I’ve left/behind—the snug, sunlit privilege/of making plans with when instead of if.”
HIV/AIDS also figures as subject in several contributors’ poems. Marilyn Hacker, who makes brilliant use here of the ghazal and glose (historic Spanish) forms, links the making of “easy” art to the contraction of AIDS. In “Ghazal: min al-hobbi ma khatal,” she writes,
The all-night dancer, the mother of four, the tired young doctor
all contracted HIV from the love that kills.
There is pleasure, too, in writing easy, dishonest verses.
Nothing protects your poetry from the love that kills.
An examination of AIDS also appears in the poetry of Marie Howe, whose brother John died of the disease in 1989; she takes John as subject in her masterful poem “What The Living Do.” Perhaps no contributor writes more hauntingly of disease than Kenyon, who passed away in 1995 of leukemia. “I got out of bed/”, she writes in her staple, “Otherwise,” “on two strong legs./It might have been/otherwise.”
Spiritual concerns also consume contributors’ attention. Chana Bloch, poet and translator, writes of the experience of keeping a kosher household in “‘And the darkness he called night:’”
I was trying to keep things neat and shiny.
I had two sets of dishes—one for love,
one for hate. I kept them in separate cupboards.
For Bloch, the rituals of Judaism mystify even as they compel, and her poems focus beautifully on this contrast. For poet Naomi Shihab Nye, interfaith struggles serve as subject in “Half-and-Half:”
You can’t be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can’t love
anyone else. Says he.
Here, Nye studies the challenges borne from interfaith unions, an issue of crucial relevance in today’s mixed-religious society. Judeo-Christian archetypes also figure prominently in the collection, with Biblical allusions appearing throughout. For numerous contributors, faith both limits and liberates, carrying undeniable importance.
If No More Masks! provides a retrospective history of women writers in the twentieth century, When She Named Fire aptly looks forward, ringing in the 21st with some of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated voices. Whether curious readers pick up the collection for its striking female assemblage or to unlock current concerns of the larger contemporary poetry movement, they will find satisfaction in the collection’s examination of women’s issues. No More Masks!, in its 1993 reissuance, successfully expanded its contributors from eighty-seven to one hundred and four; When She Named Fire adds 95 poets to the list, making the number of anthologized women poets both vast and accessible to any reader.
No longer must women like Howe and Bass worry about the historical future of women writers—here, in a collection as strong as When She Named Fire, they will surely last, and continue their canonization in anthologies to come. Utterly of-the-moment and thoroughly inclusive, When She Named Fire, in step with this historical importance, will hold the attention of even the most well read of interested poetry connoisseurs: even those already well-acquainted with women writers in particular. Bishop might be correct that to distinguish by gender is to emphasize separation. But I’d contend it is equally true that to assemble work that updates us on the state of a historically under-represented group in American letters is a valuable, leveling, enterprise, lest we take several decades of progress for granted.
by Amy England
Tupelo Press 2007 Reviewed by Steven Karl
History Experiment
Have you ever seen the movie, The Saddest Music in the World? When it first hit the big screen in 2003 people either raved about its “magic-realism,” its “odd-ball vaudeville sense of humor,” its “cinephilic allusions,” and its “visual inventiveness,” or they felt that all these “bells and whistles” were a cover-up for a weak script and a lack of clear vision. One particularly vivid scene is when the amputee, Lady Port-Huntly, removes her glass leg and fills it with beer for her lover to drink. By this point in the film, my girlfriend (at the time) became fed up and decided she had better ways to occupy her day. The point is that you either go in for this sort of stuff or you don’t. Unfortunately I feel that Amy England’s book has plenty of bells and whistles, but lacks anything of lasting depth.
Although the book contains separate poems, it is holistically linked under the exploration of archeological reports inspired by the “excavation of the temples to the great gods of Samothrace.” So what England’s collection aims to do is transport the reader back to the ancient civilization of the cult of Demeter and Persephone. The first section is entitled “Sacrificing All To Science,” and here’s a portion of the first poem:
Corn wants things that I do not.
We are a dull sort of enemies,
hirsute, tenuous, difficult to see.
More counting.
A kind of grass. There are numbers
set in it as spokes.
The section after this poem consists of an essay/poem repeating many key words: corn, snake, dull sort of enemies, hirsute, dent corn, cattle and others. England attempts to build layers or strip away meaning, but she falls short, partly because the images are not compelling. I mean that “We are a dull sort of enemies” does not make me want to know more about the enemies, and I don’t really comprehend how dullness matches up with “hirsute” or “tenuous”—the words are more decorative than applicable, and the book feels like overwrought “project” poetry. Here’s part of another poem entitled, “This Is Built Of Simile,”
phallus as snake
phallus as fish
winnow as arena
hive as seed
“Phallus as snake” is predictable. Intentionally so? A springboard to ostensibly more surprising similes? Either way, “a dull sort.”
England employs poems, prose poems, essays, collage, and creative non-fiction to tackle her immense subject. She has recreated a complex society and tries to articulate it by any means necessary. The book is well-plotted, but the writing never brings to life this society in a way that a reader might attach guts or emotions to. It is too long, with too much scatter and fancy; as a result, it is constricted and stifled. The techniques she begs to push the book onward ultimately strip it of poeticness.
by Hilda Raz
Wesleyan University Press 2008 Reviewed by Daniel Story
Domestic Deaths
“A lot of what I thought was magic / is habit,” says the speaker’s son Aaron in the early poem “He Graduates from Clown School.” He gives away both the secret to performance and the secret to this luminous new collection, in which Hilda Raz (Trans, Divine Honors) creates moments of complex beauty from simple, methodical sentences and images.
The book opens with birth, considered from many angles. “Nothing odd about it” says a delivery room nurse in the title poem. But in “Son,”
The problem is birth.
What an opera,
the lights, the dais,
the cast of characters wearing
the same gown.
Here, commonalities in childbirth cause concern instead of reassurance. Raz grapples with her concerns when the discussion of reproduction includes her transgendered son, Aaron Raz Link (co-author of the memoir What Becomes You). Later, Aaron serves as catalyst for meditations and a quiet return to daily life, as in “Suite,” in which he reminds the speaker, “Mom, plants heal.”
Birth gives way to death. Aaron changes from infant to grown daughter and then grown son; suitcases and birdbaths fill and empty. Raz’s verse, reminiscent of Charles Simic’s, “retains” simplicity of language and image as she moves through these moments. In another section of “Suite,” subtitled “Her Dying,” the speaker reflects on a friend:
You will die soon. We all die.
We all go out from our houses.
My house, for example, is Willow Grove.
Your house—you still have one—is Garland Place.
The roofs are yellow, a tile called Cyon Picaresque.
The monosyllabic declarations of the first line lead the reader into the unassuming metaphor of the “house” of the body; then, that figurative house suddenly emerges as real. This shift locates the mystery of death and tragedy of loss in two named, usually comforting places. Thus, the “houses” themselves stand as places we must leave and the attachments to which we cling.
Raz primarily writes in free verse, but finds appropriate places for form. She makes use of the pantoum (“Diaspora” and “Love This”) and villanelle (“Flight”), as well as hexameter quatrains (“Childhood”) and a sestina-like nonce form (“Dante’s Words”). These sometimes-complicated forms succeed with her deceptively uncomplicated language. “Diaspora,” for example, begins and ends with “The gates were closing and the time was late”. The first appearance invokes impending departure, the second impending closure. These instances of form punctuate the collection at intervals and showcase, once more, Raz’s ability to transform something seen before into something new.
All Odd and Splendid offers accessible poems on subjects as domestic as the Fourth of July and as mystical as Norse Gods. Raz, like an illusionist, makes shapely, mysterious spectacles from unassuming objects—objects that, just a moment ago, drew no attention to themselves. She performs these transformations with smooth, almost casual grace, rising out of the realm of tricks into real magic.
The first I heard of the Fleet Foxes was through an email from my sister, Miranda, who is currently living across the ocean in England. One morning last November, I woke up to find that she had taken advantage of the not-so-newfangled but newfangled-to-me gift feature on iTunes to send me their year old first album, not for my birthday or any special occasion except her own enthusiasm. Simply having music ping around the globe to show up in my email inbox was a memorable novelty in itself, but I felt far more arrested by the language that my sister was using to describe this music she was recommending to me. Miranda is given a bit to hyperbole (“The best Indian food I’ve ever tasted!”). Even so, her praise for the Fleet Foxes stood out as an arresting and unconventional bit of music criticism: “The singer Robin Pecknold has the best intonation I’ve ever heard.”
Intonation is one of those terms you seldom hear used to describe singers of popular music, because so often they are thought to be at the opposite end of the spectrum: untrained, raw, ecstatic, chthonic, sui generis, raggedy and impromptu. The most famous—certainly, most of my favorite—singers leverage personality, mood and style more than expertise or orthodoxy. Pop singers who are lauded for their pristine voices often seem a little ridiculous for their perfection, emotive past the point of bathetic. I think of the punchy tenor of Steve Perry from Journey, who I’ve read several times described unironically as the most flawless voice in rock music, ever. The search for the perfect pop sound even sometimes becomes a Faustian cautionary tale of the ego-mad rock star dumping a fortune into hi-fi microphones and Pro Tools setups as they keep trying to get the music clean enough or lush enough or glacial enough. It may be a function of anxiety as much as opportunity: for instance, Lindsay Buckingham dumping literally millions of dollars into a studio—and surely depleting the band’s energy—to produce Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.
Intonation seems like a danger zone for pop music; slews of great singers prefer to feint and sidle alongside the shadows of notes, doing folky-croaky like Bob Dylan or Joanna Newsom or name your favorite bluesman, whinging, rasping, murmuring. Then there are wonderful singers who go beyond perfect into a weird personal space on the other side, like Freddie Mercury clambering up into his vibrato or David Sylvian easing down for some serious basso profundo. I was in a band a few years ago in which the singer had a charismatic way of hiding behind his Gibson guitar onstage like he was scared of the audience, and a talent for witty Morrissey-esque come-on/I-hate-you lines, but honestly he could not hit the notes. Off key almost worked as an aesthetic until we were in the studio and trying to layer harmony parts. We started fussing with auto-tune and it started sounding like our singer was having his windpipe squeezed painfully into pitch. Now it was correctly intoned, I suppose, but it gave me a headache. (The band broke up not long after we finished this round in the studio.)
So I probably was approaching Fleet Foxes with some caution and some curiosity in thinking of them as paragons of intonation. Intonation is a pretty ambiguous term: half “intoning” – which suggests drones and monotones and monks and rituals – and half “in tone” – all math and empyrean perfection, round edgeless sounds fulfilling themselves. Intonation can be full of emotion and abandon, the quasi-spiritual ecstasy of music bypassing language to infiltrate lonelier corners of the brain. Or it can be the over-emoting of the rock god, clobbering notes into submission. It’s also a strangely classical term, as if a band were impersonating chamber musicians in a string quartet. Besides obsessional fussiness, there’s also a yearning hint in intonation of the enfant terrible, the genius who hits notes perfectly without even trying. In any case, I love that my sister used it, for all its complicatedness; it is suggestive of the extent to which music can be as ambitious as its players, and the way that limits of genre are more a way of talking about music than actually composing it.
Whenever I start thinking we’re in a dry period for music, I usually question whether I’m just not listening hard enough, or whether these trends actually are cyclical, a few years of excitement in one city, then a waning into doldrums, then a flare-up in another. Still, at least in my listening experience, it felt like we have been coming off a period of retrenchment in music for the last few years, after most strands of good ‘80s rock had been plundered and reinvented—post punk like early XTC, new wave, no wave, name your poison—and the tastes slowly were moving in more and more obscure, experimental and acoustic directions. For my part, I’d been excited about this folky turn, but mostly for the rediscoveries of lost-in-the-bins 1960s and 1970s bands and singers coming back into availability. I was thrilled by Linda Perhacs, for instance, a Bay Area dental hygienist who cleaned the teeth of a mid-tier music producer in 1973 and ended up cutting a sole, wonderfully involuted and abstract folk album called Parallelograms before going back to her day job.
These kind of records seemed to my ongoing delight to be emerging by the bushel, perhaps a function of the Internet offering a way for obscurantist mini-labels to track down forgotten singers and bands of the past, such as the Numero Group label on their fantastic album of post-Joni Mitchell folk records, Ladies of the Canyon.
When I listened to the Fleet Foxes, I felt like I was hearing this music renovated and transfigured, the raw delicacy of the ramshackle and the contingent being digested, drawn back into the central stream of rock music. I felt myself reaching, like my sister, for hyperbole. The band harmonizes on many of the tracks, but not the way that harmonies often sound on records, with a clean overdubbing of one singer, hitting pretty thirds to fill out the melody on certain notes of a chorus. What you hear, curiously, on the Fleet Foxes album, are distinct but modest voices making chords together, often open chords, with a lot of parallel motion and stacked fourths and fifths that make the voices sound lush and empty at the same time. The voices have a flute-like quality of artlessness; they tend to use inverted chords with parallel motions that sometimes break the music theory rules for four-part harmony. I think of bands of the 1970s like Crosby, Stills & Nash or America, that greedy honeyed sound made out of pop harmonies, the sound of bonding that is also the sound of guys sitting on stools or maybe wicker chairs. Listening to these old songs in the light of the Fleet Foxes’ reinvention made me hear new qualities: the way, for instance, that Crosby, Stills & Nash retain personality inside a chord in spite of a flat uniform volume that hovers above the instrumentation. The voices in the Fleet Foxes sit further back in the mix but they have a bit more edge to them, exploring the prettier, flutier areas of their falsettos. The melodies tend to use more scales for their hooks, so the chords move up and down together in little eddies. Instead of the living room and back porch vibe of the 1970s bands that they and I admire, the Fleet Foxes’ voices sound like they are singing at the other end of a barn or a cathedral, a large space they expand into without ever filling.
In fact, I think it’s this quality that Miranda was hitting on when she used that strange word, intonation. As the voices of the Fleet Foxes enter, practically on each note, you can hear an incredible control of volume, as each note floats in gently and then swells in a crescendo that seems to happen not inside the lungs or the throat but in the air, the note not stagnating but expanding somehow into its fruition. The harmonies, which often sound more madrigal than doo-wop or folk, reinforce this quality of spaciousness of a thin thing becoming a wide thing, becoming enormous. The effect is to make each note seem certain, and reassured, and reassuring.
2. FLEET and Fleet Foxes
As I ponder this quality of the notes in the Fleet Foxes’ harmonies, the name of the band comes to the forefront of my mind. It’s a satisfying bit of sweet-on-the-tongue consonance, suggesting a pastoral scene of foxes dashing over rolling terrain, either themselves hunting smaller beasts or else outrunning the hounds hunting them. These are the kind of quick, possibly brown foxes that can jump over lazy dogs and get away with it; the “fleet” of the moniker, though, improves on “quick” with its confident swagger and slight oddness. Foxes are slightly odd, marvelous creatures after all, splitting the difference between dog and cat while remaining mercurial and wild.
I think there’s something fleet about the kind of vocal intonation that makes the Fleet Foxes so fun to listen to. The notes of the harmonies and of the lead singer’s vocals swell to maturity, and then they cut out, ruthlessly—they aren’t symmetrical with equal waxings and wanings. There’s something very truthful and poignant about this feature, these little half-dome arcs that come in slow and quit fast. They are, in a word, fleeting.
One of the most unusual aspects of the production on the Fleet Foxes album is the similarly resolute way that each song fades out, very abruptly, not waiting until it starts to repeat a closing gesture or savor a last note. Instead, a rough turn of the (digital) knob and it’s on to the next song. It’s an interesting choice, and suggests a kind of decisiveness that is unusual and almost dreamlike in its jagged stopping. This isn’t to say that the songs are unresolved when they close, but that they don’t linger.
Fleetness suggests a motion and a motility that also manifests in the structures of the songs, which are usually more ambitious and experimental than mere verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, instead opting for actual turns and linear progressions, pieces and ideas sutured next to each other seamlessly but not necessarily safely. Pecknold, who supposedly conceives the songs and writes the lyrics, has described the album in interviews as a first step on an artistic journey that has not yet come to fruition. He refers to Joanna Newsom’s puckish album Ys as an example of the dense, sequential, composed long-form music that he hopes to craft, someday.
For now, the incredibly lush, clean and confident sound production disguises the boldness of some of the moves that the Fleet Foxes are already making.
It’s easier to hear how strange and edgy the songwriting is out of context. Trolling YouTube for music videos of the band, I found a clip of two Swedish teenage sisters sitting in the woods and covering the Fleet Foxes’ song “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song.” Calling themselves First Aid Kit, the sisters sit beneath a canopy of trees; they are appealingly clumsy in front of the camera until one gently plucks at an acoustic guitar and they start to sing. The girls sway back and forth and the music lilts along, a sinuous melody over a 1-2-3 waltz beat that gives the song a tender, courtly feel. Then, suddenly, the rhythm and the playing stop short. Vocally alone, and all of a sudden scary and loud, the singers keen, “I don’t know what I have done, I’m turning myself into a demon.” This coda’s melody is ungainly, hitting a static, dark-sounding minor third. The song has gone off a cliff, and it won’t come back.
More evidence of the Fleet Foxes making radical and “fleet” compositional choices comes through a bonus track available on a special edition of the CD, an older, rawer cut of a song called “Mykonos” that was later recorded (after the album had already been completed) on an EP called with characteristic panache, Sun Giant. On this “alternate take” the song opens with a plodding two-step, piano chords punctuated by tambourines on the backbeat; the music builds to crashing cymbals and guitars over a chorus then comes down, rebuilds to a second climax, then takes its time as it fades.
On the finished version, instead, the song begins with a rolling, plucked minor-key guitar line vaguely reminiscent of “Greensleeves” in its modal motion; the song doesn’t so much build as accrete details: a descending guitar line, a bass drum’s clomp, a wordlessly sung melody that sounds like Ennio Morricone could have written it. After a while the song crests and then goes into a lull around the same place in the song as in the alternative version. Here, though, rather than going temporarily to a major key for an instrumental solo, the instruments drop out and the voices continue. Suddenly a cappella, the tone becomes strangely distant, almost medieval, as if they were in a mystery play pageant that was now rolling off toward the next farming town. Then, as the drums cue an energetic return, the song shifts course like a poetic turn and suddenly the tempo has changed, a new melody asserts itself, and a lyric celebrates a tautological, almost existential freedom: “you go wherever you go today.” There is this fleetness of movement again and also the fleetingness of it, the evanescence. The song never comes back to the earlier sound. It’s finished.
3. DONKEY BAY and Fleet Foxes
This way of conceptualizing a song structure, full of moments that can happen and not return, reminds me of the enjoyment I felt when I saw the German band, the Notwist, play a live show at the Knitting Factory several years ago.
Although bound by a verse-chorus structure, the Notwist nevertheless featured certain elements that couldn’t be taken for granted. Halfway through their song “Pilot,” I remember them deploying a catchy sample of a record scratch over the transition to the chorus, just once, even though the same transition reoccurred several times. I would listen for it to happen again, and then its absence would remind me of the way that songs don’t necessarily have to feel in control, that they can change. I also think of the Notwist in relation to the Fleet Foxes for another quality of the singing, having to do with articulation and words. After the break-up of the band with the Morrissey acolyte, I played in another group, with a singer who strove to make his voice, like the Notwist, foreign to himself; very perceptively, he celebrated “the sound of English sung by someone who doesn’t necessarily speak English.” He sought this effect of foreignness, of words losing their sense and becoming elusive. For him, this meant singing through a sighing breath, his murmurs enveloped in an enormous blanket of textured instrumentation.
The Fleet Foxes’ way of arriving at this same place is not to hide the vocals in the mix, but rather to prioritize intonation over pronunciation. A lot of this work is done by vowels, allowing a sustained O in a single word like “no” to migrate from an “ah” to an “oh” to an “ooh” over the course of several notes or even a single saturated note becoming its own epic narrative. Breathing through long melodic lines also creates interesting fissures in the sentences, as when Pecknold sings, “Pull the wool over your eyes (breath) for a week or (breath) more,” and the second, syncopated breath orphans and abstracts the end of sentence. A daring ostinato in the beginning of “White Winter Hymnal” in which the words “I was the following the…” is repeated over and over out of context makes the words quiver with uncertainty (“I was following the eye?”) as voices stack up over a tambourine beat before continuing headlong into the sentence.
Often one wonders how the singers arrive at the felicitous garble of their articulations, “benefit” rendered as the rounder, more warbly and countryfied “bannerfidd” or “been” elastically stretched into a nearly three-syllable “bee-yuh-enn” through the magic of confident intonation. What all of these vocal quirks do is to suggest that the song lyrics are less important for what they have to say, what they mean, than how they sound as a preverbal style, a pretext, an ambiance, an aesthetic.
There’s something almost medieval about this approach, like the idea of religion as a body of arcane knowledge whose meaning can be appreciated without necessarily needing to be understood. The old Latin mass, for instance, was likely to sound like nonsense to most parishioners who, illiterate, would have responded more to the emotional weight of the ceremony and the hint of supernatural fantasy filigreeing its edges. Fleet Foxes is decorated with a dense and colorful detail from an Old Master Dutch painting by Peter Breughel the Elder called “The Topsy-Turvy World.”
It depicts a teeming village scene in which each character embodies a proverb—at first it merely seems a record of busy village life but, looking closer, there is a man toppling from an ox onto an ass, another pissing at the moon, a third spread-eagled between two loaves of bread. A jester plays cards, an outhouse hovers over a ditch, and a man stabs a pig in the belly as bears dance on the seashore. Many of the proverbs are defunct; I find myself peering at the image and guessing my own meanings. There’s so much life and so much mystery and you can make of it whatever you want.
Driving with my girlfriend Farrah through the Sierra Nevadas in California over New Year’s, the two of us found ourselves at the edge of a snowstorm in the mountains with no place to stay. Our hotel had cancelled our reservation and night was falling and “NO VACANCY” was blearing in the windows of every roadside motel. Looking for some way not to worry, shivering up into the Donner Pass, we put the Fleet Foxes into the car stereo. As we trundled toward Lake Tahoe, the lively song “Quiet Houses” came on, a simple, stomping beat with intricate guitar playing and a wall-of-sound harmony of voices singing simple declarative sentences repeated over and over, “Lay me down,” “Come to me,” etc. Halfway through, we found ourselves both singing along with the voices, “Donkey bay!” “Donkey bay,” Farrah and I sang, again and again, becoming much less worried about finding a bed somewhere beyond the snow.
Later, safely checked in at a threadbare but comfortable casino hotel on the Nevada border, we looked online and read unsurprisingly that this was not the official lyric (which was “don’t give in”). I stand by the fun of “donkey bay,” though. It’s a reasonable mishearing as mondegreens go, since the Fleet Foxes bury the “t” in “don’t” and soften the “v” in “give.” This strikes me as the right decision, choosing pretty sounds over precise ones. I’ve sometimes heard the argument that pop songs offer first the shallow pleasure of musical transport that is immediately engaging, followed by the deeper pleasure of lyrical content which has to be deciphered. I’ve certainly spent plenty of time figuring out the lyrics in a song I love, for instance, parsing the desert sky imagery in Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” and its evocatively vague relationship to the love talk on the other side of the turn in the song.
Thinking about what Joni Mitchell was saying was a way of prolonging my instinctive pleasure at the ambiance of the song, of approaching it, structuring it. But it was also, I think, a way of rationalizing it, of rationalizing a feeling that isn’t really rational. I think the Fleet Foxes get this, the way in which words in songs are delivery devices for feelings, feelings that inhere in the vowels and the consonants, in the mechanics of speaking and singing, in the open throat and in the breath moving in and out of the body.
4. BROTHER and Fleet Foxes
One word, though, echoes through the lyrics of many songs of the Fleet Foxes, translating into a kind of makeshift theme for the band, the idea of brotherhood. Pecknold most frequently sings the word “brother” in the possessive as “my brother.” There’s an aspirational, utopian quality to the term and the way people use it, slangily, to declare a common heritage, to turn strangers into an oversized family. It fits into my idea of the cultural space that the Fleet Foxes inhabit, wearing their scruffy Pacific Northwest beards and exuding a kind of smart dude, vegan pacifist warmth. The creative energies of a band can often lead to fractures, and it’s interesting that the Fleet Foxes is kind of a mini Seattle supergroup, with players on drums and bass and keyboards who are graduates of other, older bands. The singer and the lead guitarist are apparently friends from high school not many years ago. According to the press materials online, they are respectively the extrovert and the introvert, having bonded over their funny Scandinavian names and heritage, and over a love of good music that ran in both their families. (An article last summer in the Independent of London points out what a family business Fleet Foxes is, with the singer’s mother doing the band’s accounting, his sister managing, and his brother filming music videos.)
There’s a very endearing clip online of the Fleet Foxes in Austin at the South by Southwest festival, preparing for a show in the gulch behind the clubs on Red River Street. They stand in a half circle, doing vocal warm-ups, making their voices find the right pitch to sync up into chords. Apparently they enact this ritual before every show, a means of fostering connections between the musicians—mystically, one might say, making the band into a band.
The theme of brotherhood is an unusual, generous ground for pop songs, usually more concerned with romance than agapē love. In my favorite track on the Fleet Foxes record, “Blue Ridge Mountains,” the lyrics address the singer’s actual brother Sean, inviting him on an impromptu road trip to Tennessee for carefree adventures. The chorus invokes the spirit of the singer’s Norwegian grandfather (the song was originally named after him) and insists, in an earnest moment where the tempo momentary slows, “I love you, I love you, oh brother of mine.” Then, the music rushes forward with energetic strums as a plucked electric guitar starts picking out a pentatonic melodic hook, joyfully jangly.
Brotherhood is a troubling word at the same time, a word riven with undertones of competitiveness and conflict, Cain and Abel. A brotherhood of mankind sounds idealistic but the language betrays its lack of universality, its exclusionary power to set limits, putting women outside or including them only by denying their specificity. Further, fraternity doesn’t come free, and when someone calls you “brother” on the street, it may be that they want some kind of favor. Bands are funny, unstable entities, prone to clashes over creativity from within and ambivalence from without. What I remember from going on the road with a band is the sense of excitement but also the loneliness of this mitigated brotherhood—adventures faraway from home are also faraway from home. In my experience, when bands I was in broke up, it happened quietly, with a force of entropy heretofore invisible or unacknowledged suddenly revealing itself as critical and real.
Making music, especially music with other people, works against this entropy, the chaos of disordered activity and sound. A favorite musical memory of mine occurred when I visited my friend Ben for his birthday when he was in grad school for orchestra conducting in the Midwest and found myself surrounded by musicians in an echoing alleyway in downtown Ann Arbor, intoning a kind of impromptu, microtonal threnody of sustained “ooohs,” harmonizing with a pack of near-strangers. Our music just started to happen, with no one conducting or talking about it. It was a moment we built together.
One of the most brittle and yet most satisfying thoughts that occur to me when I listen to the Fleet Foxes is that their music represents the possibility of teleology. They seem so syncretic, gathering their sound from such a wide variety of sources: baroque melodies, modal chant harmonies, a hint of the British folk rock of the sixties that was itself a melding of British invasion electric guitars with the English folk ballad tradition, the lush vocals of 1970s California soft rock, the jammy, jangly guitar sound of the 1980s and 1990s, the barny rural experimentalism of recent musicians like Midlake(their album “The Trials of Van Occupanther” is on constant loop in our house these days) or Bonnie “Prince” Billy or Joanna Newsom. It seems as if the Fleet Foxes are incorporating all of this history, blending it together, and coming up with something new that feels like an honest improvement on its predecessors, a bigger, nicer version of the big, nice rock band. Where the British folk rock could get too conservative or corny, the Fleet Foxes comes off inventive and serious. Where soft rock goes sappy or gooey, the Fleet Foxes sound tight, clean and engaged. I hear the Fleet Foxes and I start to think: we can learn from the past, we can ingest it and produce something genuinely new, a step forward, progress! I start to imagine the next generation hearing the Fleet Foxes and finding new angles to improve on this, and folk rock ascending to greater and greater ambitions.
Teleology, maybe like intonation as pertains to pop music, is a dangerous thing to believe in. Teleological stories of art seem built out of exclusions: the critic saying, “this is what I like and nothing else matters.” Or, “turn the page on the past, the future will magically improve.” It’s a kind of arrogance because so much of the time it isn’t true, and stories of progress become distortions of a chaotic record of conflict in which the past is never past and things don’t get better, they just change.
The Fleet Foxes make me want to believe, more than anything then, in belief. One quality of the experience of art is this wonder at numinous virtuosity, the sense that, if one can be surprised by the gorgeousness of one made thing, then maybe the whole universe can be surprising. Of course I know that one person’s progress is another’s disaster, and even my own tastes shift from year to year. The Fleet Foxes are what I’m listening to right now and loving, and five years from now I’ll probably be listening to and loving something else, something not necessarily built on this foundation. Even the Fleet Foxes are already moving on from their success of last year, living apparently abroad in England, across the ocean, listening to old music and writing songs for what’s next. They’re very young—astonishingly young really, to be so capable. But then, we’re all young really, and capable. We just forget, and need to be reminded.
A Thousand Thousand
Doom is happening and stuck with playwright language
The bible unduly stacks. Instead of prices the tags repeat
How the spines are and in every respect it is not a story
Murmured down the well the child fell into, can’t be helped,
More will die in the rescue attempt. Please don’t be offended
To be muse not museum. Because of the noise it would make
I can’t wipe this look off my face so quickly. As a wheel rotates
I lower myself into a darkness in which there are so many
It’s all too easy to filter. Affix names to mysterious objects
While they are sleeping. Boredom means only mustaches
Will appear in situ versus on the outcropping of women artists.
A consequence of illnesses and escapades. Outside the window
I have drawn a picture of a believable inside. Real smoke rises
From a chimney over the stagehands lounge. Other actual joy
I smothered in extra joy, wondering what is motivation.
Does anyone have rope because the thing is I am a spelunker
Of some facility. That too could be fodder for feedstock
In the farmyard. Block, tackle, etcetera. I need everyone
To grapple at the exact same moment with the exact same thing.
Alien this sort of systemic failure I imagined. You don’t know.
You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child. The trouble
Is that people share so many characteristics. The other thing
Is the same thing blown up past all recognition and mangled
By the insane desire to get it perfect inside the cylinder.
But more to the point it is rude, making observations about
The faculty. Of course governance is limited. Of course
The argument makes a wetness. A well can’t very well
Draw on itself and even if it could we’d worry insects
Are such viable alternatives. She is unrecognizable now
Because of all the darknesses she traveled through. To speak
Is to be historical. A form of surrender, going back to x.
The ranger guide doesn’t apply to actual situations. Unclear
What sort of grief follows such cruelty. But what else but.
Jared White grew up in Massachusetts and lives in Brooklyn. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals like Cannibal, Coconut, Fulcrum, Harp & Altar, Inscape, The Modern Review, Sorry 4 Snake, and Verse. He has published essays in Harp & Altar and Open Letters, and a chapbook entitled Yellowcake was included in the recent hand-sewn anthology Narwhal from Cannibal Books. From time to time, he blogs at jaredswhite.blogspot.com and plays the piano.
by Christopher Schmidt
Slope Editions 2008 Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman
The End of Possibility
You should probably judge Christopher Schmidt’s first book by its cover. It’s a friendly blue-grey, not too flashy or eye-piercing, but it stands out. The text elements are well balanced, the framing lines bringing a sense of order and balance. There’s a black and white photograph by John Coplans that at first seems to be an obscenely aged body, shown from the waist down—hairy, wrinkled, bunchy, strutting—but then it resolves into two fingers, poised for walking, Yellow-Pages-style. It’s clever and shocking, an intimately coy visual pun. It retains its eroticism and appeal even after surrendering to your realization of what it is, because you can still see what it looks like. In other words, when you go to the bar that is a bookstore, Schmidt’s the keeper you want to take home. The cover is a perfect flirtation, a come on—it’s a promise, and Schmidt delivers.
***
It’s easiest to start by describing the pleasure of the most obviously conceptual poems, the poems which are most clearly driven by a conceit. “Top/Butt” tells the story of an erotic outing without the use of the vowels “a” “e” or “i”. (“Soon Luc spots humongous chub on pup slut Todd.”) “Block Text” lists words that include “black” or “block” but reverses them to give us new formations that are deracinated (“Block Panther”), funny (“Cockblacker”), or topical (“Jenny from the Black”) while keeping the eroticism of the words/work in place.
The vision of the erotic that Schmidt offers is surprisingly friendly, and refreshingly playful. Throughout the poems, sex is not tortured or punished, but social and inventive, bringing back the best of the sexual ethos of a magazine like Gay Sunshine, while abandoning any self-righteousness. Timothy Liu, who selected the volume for Slope, is right to compare the work to Barthes. Schmidt is a master of that untranslatable jouissance that Barthes prized: Schmidt offered up to us as a pleasure. Who would think that avoiding vowels could make sex talk fun? Schmidt takes Kafka for an outing to a Bathhouse and the Black Party, though Franz seems to have less fun than Schmidt does (poor Franz). It’s also a decidedly gay book, unapologetically invoking Polari (a British gay slang that went out of style with stonewall), Fire Island, bathhouses, and Kiki DuRane (Justin Bond’s character in the duo “Kiki & Herb”). But it’s gay the way that Erasure is gay. You don’t have to like the boys to dance to it. It’s all right with Schmidt if you don’t speak Polari. After all, no one does.
Schmidt’s touch is so light, it feels like he’s rediscovered the harpsichord in a time of Thelonius Monk imitators. In some ways, it’s that generous trust that the reader understands that makes the book move so trippingly forward. But Schmidt’s irresistible charm is underwritten by an enormous intellect and a genuine concern for the reader. If this book were a one night stand, it would not only care about your orgasm, it would make you pancakes in the morning, and from a recipe in an obscure French cookbook you’d spend the rest of your life trying to track down.
***
Schmidt has a wonderful ear for casual speech, and for internal rhymes that come back quickly on themselves. His engagement with the banal continually elevates the mundane into a tight sonic playing field. From “Go Lightly,” a sonnet early in the book:
Helen chooses beans and egg whites. June:
yoghurt, prunes. “Starch can line a skin like stress,”
says Helen. June: “I bloat a tide full moon.”
Sugar is not a vegetable, “ought” a thing to obsess
Just as he settles into a perfect iambic pentameter, he disrupts it, and he distracts from the rhymes by overloading the lines with the same sounds. Prosodically, the poems are tight and smart, but they always insist on remaining a field of play. These poems are masterful in that the know all the rules, but more importantly, know why those rules were made in the first place. Lines like “Those who know, don’t. Those who care, scare” (39) and “Thin, skin so uninteresting” (57) pepper the collection. Unpack this one: “Queensburying (like bunbuyring, like Ashberying)” (39). Working from the template of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Invitation to Marianne Moore,” Schmidt wrests the wry “Invitation to Ms. Kiki Durane,” (appropriately) an altered Sapphic.
***
In a long poem about a (possibly seductive) student, Schmidt explores the parallels between teaching and prostitution. The boy finally reveals that he has tiny vestigal fingers growing out of his pinkies. It’s a moment of amazing intimacy and confusion. The relationship has reached the end of possibility—and it’s beautiful, in part because Schmidt is so good at calibrating those moments where there’s no where else to go. In these ways and more, Schmidt’s debut collection is a remarkable accomplishment—clever, smart, and emotionally satisfying.
by Tod Marshall
Canarium Books 2009 Reviewed by Mike McDonough
What More Can I Say
As James Wright struggled towards the loosening of the tight iambics which had brought him to notice in the first place, he seems to have struggled with the difference between emotional honesty and the traditional demands of form. I go back to his classic poem depicting emotional bankruptcy, “Saint Judas,” which culminates in a memorable oxymoronic tableau of Judas recalling Mary in the Pieta, holding a beaten man in his arms: “Flayed, without hope,/ I held the man for nothing in my arms.” The tone is masterful, and perhaps succeeds all too neatly at making failure seem all too easy to redeem. In “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave,” Wright would berate his own iambic mastery: “I croon my tears at 50 cents a line.” How do we find a craft worthy of the depiction of failure? Todd Marshall solves the problem of succeeding too easily by being willing to fail. I’m giving the book a 6.5 not because of lack of craft or ambition, but because his 10 so tightly embraces his 3.
Take the idea of the first poem, “Describe KFC to Icarus.” The pop irony of the title and the cheesy flatness of “Admit the labyrinth, accept / chicken bones / piling up in the kitchen” is undermined by the traditional uplift of the ending: “the climbing with a song towards sun.” No tone is allowed to
predominate. The next poem is a fevered lament “Describe Wildflowers to Ethics” which earned a marginal comment of “GAG!” for its displaced desperation, including the description of his son’s toy “erection,” with the bracelet with “What Would Jesus Do” printed on it, culminating in a remarkably futile listing of botanical names:
…Try again,
write scribbles of smoke against the sky—
fillyum, trilliom birdfoot, violet blueflag,
Try paintbrush, buttercup, try please. Try
fire and tears. Try greeny green green.
Taken separately the initial poems in The Tangled Line present a series of poetic ideas that often function as dead ends, labyrinthine blind alleys, a car crash of tones, themes and forms. The fascination of the first three sections is one of finding the fly in the soup or the feather in the KFC bucket. There are three abortive sequences with pointed titles: “Describe (X) to (Y);” “Admit (X) to (Y);”, and several poems titled “Meanwhile.” In the same abortive vein, any poem titled “The Reader is Urged to Not Read This Poem” is a cheap joke or a deliberate failure until proven otherwise.
We learn that the speaker is describing the fraught territory of his divorce and losing custody of his son in terms of the myth of Icarus, from Daedalus’s point of view, the guilty father lamenting the loss of his son. The cheese factor of a modern-day myth is played up to different degrees in the first two sections. Using myth and history in a deliberately shallow way is a risky business, especially in a poem titled “Describe Turner to MLK.” The apposite Turner is JMW, and the poem describes the famous picture of the slave ship throwing the bodies overboard. Without the command of Robert Hayden, the poem threatens to become a futile undergraduate joke, and given inevitable associations with Nat Turner, there is nothing the speaker can say to MLK that can render the poem a traditional rhetorical success. Marshal braves these waters in an interesting way.
The Tangled Line makes me think of those psychological tests where you have to decide whether the face depicted is expressing laughter, anger or pain. Maybe you’ve had that moment where either you couldn’t tell which was which, or you knew the answer was supposed to be laughter, but looking at a face so unnaturally frozen caused a nearly overwhelming, irresistable feeling of despair, of hopeless emotional bankruptcy. Or you might realize, as Robyn Schiff’s blurb points out, that “here…turning towards anything for comfort, respite, or just because its irresistible is doomed.”
Emotions are often ironic guises, with slight cover provided by deliberately cheesy titles, or presented as too much or too little, futile. The speaker is unmoored in different contexts, and no poem is permitted to rise quite to the redemptive tone of Wright’s “St Judas.” With an emotion fraught beyond self-deprecation, or the boozy companionship of Richard Hugo, Marshall describes his separation from his son. In “What the Age Demanded,” recalling Pound’s scathing “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley,” Marshall writes:
…the boy was a necessary loss
what happens when you fly,
expendable. O Daedalus,
don’t try to hide in a sigh.
Your legacy’s ensured: maze maker,
inventor’s patron, you cad,
No one will mistake you for father,
no one will call you dad.
The reader might not be sure at first that whether Marshall is trying to find that redemptive note and failing, or has chosen to stay safely hidden behind ironic poems quite successful without needing the emotional frame of the speaker’s divorce, such as “Describe Book Blurbs to Nationalism,” Meanwhile, the range of emotional responses piles up impressively. As Robin Schiff’s blurb reads, “Full articulation flies maddeningly towards lamentation as these poems steer between narrative and lyric expression.” I’d change “steer” to “veer,” and define lamentation as the shirt-rending tone found in the biblical Book of Lamentations. The variety of tones from flat to feverish is matched by an impressive array of modern American poetic tropes, such as the all time winner of the “Drunk Dad Takes Son Fishing” category, “Admit Possession to Rent,” with a gruesomely telegraphed payoff which rated the marginal comment “OMFG!” There is an excellent entry in the “Boy Bonds With Fucked up Older Male Relative/ Friend” genre, “No Nightingales in Kansas,” which is balanced by an inspired entry in the ironic “Still-Life With Livestock” genre, as well as an entry in the “Life Lessons of Fishing” category which I’ll quote in its entirety to show you that Marshall’s treatment of these forms is not usually parodic:
HATCH
Mayflies—
tiny white smudges
above blue sky
reflected in the creek
until wings get wet
and useless
except
to flutter recklessly
and attract
the attention of teeth.
Marshall’s command in poems like these and several others assure us that a game is in progress, that he is deliberately taking the reader much farther down formal and tonal dead ends than less confident poets care to go. “Loam” replaces Saint Paul’s well-known homily on love: “Love is patient, love is kind,” with a deliberately clunky, “Love is peasant. Love is find. It lends me, it is unlike toast, it is prow.” The poem searches for a tone it’s not going to find. When the next poem starts with, “You are not lost. I know where you eat and sleep,” we feel we are finally coming close to a solid core where emotional complexities exist as paradoxical, yet emotionally complete wholes. The emotion is adequate to the subject matter and form.
The 10-part final poem, “The Book of Failed Descriptions,” puts all the cards on the table, and attempts to unify all the deliberately overwrought stances and variety of forms, themes, and sequences. The stakes are high, and the father/son relationship as well as the themes of Icarus falling from the sky and the father’s culpability are resolved in a touching , unforced way (“he looks at me with worry, and I know that the game is on break, that this is real”) which I want to quote in its entirety, but I hate to deprive you of the pleasure of finally getting there yourself. Quoted by itself, it might look a little flat: it takes reading the whole book to get the full effect. In The ABC of Reading Pound wrote, “Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.” The fascination in The Tangled Line is the unlikely, and surprisingly honest way that the emotional check is ultimately made good.
by Aase Berg (translation by Johannes Göransson)
Black Ocean 2009 Reviewed by Rick Marlatt
Gnawing Intellectual Animals
Swedish poet, author and literary critic Aase Berg has risen to the upper tiers of her native country’s contemporary poetry and surrealist art worlds. She has published five full-length collections and throngs of innovative fiction, as well as writings on surrealism, popular culture and artistic theory. Her first book, Hos rådjur (With Deer), was initially published in Sweden by Bonnier in 1996; a new translation by Johannes Göransson, Berg’s first into English, was released last month by Black Ocean.
With a few exceptions, Berg’s poetry is composed in prose-block formatting with which she attempts holistic movements and interpretations through repeated words, forms and sounds. The result is a book-long, desentisizing plunge into the “water bottoms” of the underworld, a place she knows all too well. With Deer allows English readers to witness firsthand the impetus of a brilliant career while validating the tremendous praise Berg has garnered and so clearly deserves. Operating thematically social taboos such as witchcraft, cannibalism, and necrophilia, Berg’s poems comprise six sections of nightmarish fugues narrated by characters with distorted consciousnesses and reflected in settings that celebrate the brutality of nature.
1.
In the first section, “In the Guinea Pig Cave,” Berg snatches at the “black vein” of consciousness; the opener, “Still,” pulls us into her cavernous world. We are forced to be still and to focus on the repetition of lines in pieces like “Water Bottoms,” where Berg works cyclically with birth, life and decay, portraying these processes through the lens of a forest marsh scene. After setting up the environment with roots, trunks, snakes, water, and insects, Berg employs language that is haunting and fresh:
The sweet stalk will bend backwards toward the pain.
And here a feather moves toward the river surface, as she who
loves water sinks back through the bottoms of light.
Though her fluency in biologic vernacular is impressive, Berg’s narration is not the voice of a scientist, nor is it merely an objective portrayal of nature’s dark side. The final two poems describe a visceral attraction not only to human corpses, but to animal remains. Berg expounds on a peculiar spiritual fulfillment in a wicked form of transubstantiation, yet she is never quite disgusting, never shocks for the sake of shock; she is instead surreal, mystical and otherwordly, channeling a voice that is not quite human, each description perfectly articulated, each image stamped with the clear and memorable print of a true poet.
2.
“Fox” initiates the second section (brutally titled “Flesh-Shedding Time”) and is one of the first narrative poems in the collection. In a beautiful conglomeration of emotion, animal paramour Berg presents the violent imagery of animal mutilation as the initial stimuli, and she responds with a calculated and detailed human fluid secretion. The repetition of particular words and phrases such as “monstrosity” is particularly powerful, especially when we consider that it is the male human being referred to amidst this plethora of external grotesqueness. With Berg, all emotions, expressions, and memories are expressed not through conventional explanation and nuance, but through poetically-direct descriptions of anatomical functions and processes.
As our poet moves more overtly into the realm of sexuality in pieces such as “Gristle Day,” she provides a chilling account of a squirrel’s demise; an unspeakable ecstasy in the animal’s death culminates when “the squirrel screams.” This practically orgasmic catharsis—extreme, unspeakable—isn’t unlike the conclusions of many of her sensually explicit pieces such as “The Red Kiss,” “Mass” and “Mastiff.” “Fox Heart” is a playful allegory in which she redefines the processes of stimulation, erection, fellatio, ejaculation, and as always with Berg, the aftermath. These poems reiterate her fascination with the unsightly, unsanctioned desires of humanity. She not only reveals them for our inspection, she screams them out, obliterating the masks they hide behind, peeling up rocks, shoveling aside brush, digging deeper, showing us what we are, at our core, intellectual animals.
3.
Section III, “Seal Bound,” evolves into dream sequences in which the poet is inspired by palpable tragedy to express orchestrations of hallucinatory removal. Berg utilizes recurring phrases and images with great effectiveness, expounding on various interpretations of the ideas of flesh, dough, heat, and blood. Indeed, these are not only the primary components in the world Berg creates, they are the tools Berg uses to whittle away at our perceptions of reality.
In “Seal Mutilation” (more ironic than brutal), the naturally occurring processes of birth, feeding, living, and dying are severely distorted, while the sentences themselves are distorted. There is feeding through vomiting, living through decaying, drought through rain, and birth through death, as exemplified in pictures like: “miscarriage river.”
4.
“Breast Horses” anchors the fourth section of With Deer and includes great emphasis on lungs, breasts, and eyes, particularly, the eyes of the other character in the poem, an image which is repeated to conclude each line. Berg employs electrifying grammar in which adjectives interchange with nouns and replace one another throughout. Her composition maneuvers itself in a highly tense, tightly-spun structure.
“Harpy” and “Wroth Snakewrought” round out this section and serve as great examples of why its far more constructive to talk about the sounds and feelings created in Berg’s syntax and diction than it is to dwell on the multiplicity of metaphorical implications in her poetry. Berg is unique and exploratory. In these poems, particularly in the final stanzas, we get an amazing musicality which taps outward from the darkness, a dream-like echoing that is distant and beautiful (a musicality maintained with apparent ease by translator Göransson). Berg (and Göransson) spin sounds fiddlers, creating a riddle-like, nursery rhyme effect which culminates with multiplication and constant perversion of patterns in the natural world.
5.
Section V, “Inside the Deer,” includes ghostly renditions such as “Shard,” “Deep Inside the Rock” and “Doll Doll” in which our poet portrays a post-apocalyptic environment perfect for the passionate contemplation of her simultaneous, combative roles of passive observer and active healer. In “Jam,” she returns to her fascination with the paradoxes of feeding through killing, discharge through intake, and living through dying. In a meaningful conclusion, the animals get revenge on their human tormentors as the asp bites the speaker, and she overboils a dragon fly. Yes? Yes.
“Song Lake” contains beautiful language while conveying stark scenes of decay. The poetry is so majestically musical, the reader has no choice but to give in to Berg’s eloquence and become completely entranced:
She lies leaned back across the stone at a strange angle, as if her
backbone was broken. The white bones glimmer through the
veil of water, and at times there is glittering from glass shrimp
and mantle animals, from the scales of mother-of-pearl fish.
By this point in the text, we have been sufficiently exposed to the shock of Berg’s subject matter (the broken backbone is a clean, almost pedestrian description, not shocking or frightening), and the revolving images of life and decay that she portrays are no longer alarming, but are indescribably moving and memorable. Appropriately, Berg concludes the poem with the lasting image of an “almost inhuman smile.”
6.
“Iron-healed” begins the final section, “September of Glass.” This poem represents the closest Berg comes to a shift in tone, expressing a kind of a prayer that acknowledges the brevity and shortsightedness of physical reality and asks for a release of pain brought on by difficult choices in human integration. “I Walked Out in the North” continues this progression towards self-examination. It concludes, “I walked out in the North / toward the torment, followed by the heavy fragrance through / midnight. And there even I at last, dark with sap, allowed / myself to be touched.”
While the book’s last installment is comfortably occupied by the delightfully horrific perversity that oozes from the lines in the previous poems with pieces such as “The Hypotenuse” and “We Thread up Lizards,” a genuine attempt at forgiveness for humanity on the part of the poet cannot be overlooked. In the final work of the collection, “Logging Time,” Berg juxtaposes the need to survive and the need to destroy before concluding her meditation with hopefulness:
Now it is time for the cutting
to slowly start to heal.
Alone, the words are plain. In context, they are a gut-punch. If one attempts to find meaning by reducing the world and its things to their impenetrable cores, one finds patterns, even beauty; there is, then, an indelible contrast between dissection and mutilation, between curiosity and fury, between fusion and separation.
***
Berg’s poems are equivocal in meaning and evasive in interpretation. They generate tremendous discussion and stirring within the reader: something ancient about the human intellect, something integral to our desire and need for poetry, or the process of describing and detailing surreal emotions and strains of the human existence that result from angst and brutality. This is what Berg does best, and she accomplishes this by detaching herself from predictable human intellect. Her voice is a hybrid of biologist, tribal woman and philosopher-poet, while her poems are dreamy, hallucinatory and ever-moving. Berg’s work gnaws slowly at the surface of the psyche, opening it up to a sublime rarely experienced in post-post-modern literature. Goransson’s translation is both clever and transparent, Berg’s images are rapturous and With Deer is a harrowing symphony.
by Ellie Ga
Ugly Duckling Presse 2009 Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II
Beneath Our Feet
Drawing upon the trappings of rigorous, scientific research – data logging paper, rigid categorization systems and stark photographs – Ellie Ga gives an air of legitimacy to a landscape of historical records beneath our feet. Classification of a Spit Stain examines the amalgam of chewing gum, urine and deteriorated concrete common to urban streets and sidewalks and finds not only depth, but beauty.
Although the press release proclaims Ga as a photographer by trade, the opening images do little to boost this reputation. The photographs are reproduced with little contrast in a violet-blue ink atop a reproduction of found scientific notebook paper, providing an output similar to that of the old duplicating machines once favored by schoolteachers. Despite lacking in quality, the images nonetheless offer a practical reference point for the descriptive text woven in the pages between.
The textual portion of the book, written to resemble the specific and formulaic phrasing of a geology textbook, manages to accomplish this with a vaguely poetic cadence. The first page stumbles to describe a spit stain (“The spit stain is a / The spit stain is a natural / The spit stain is a natural occurr”), retaining all of Ga’s restarts and handwritten revisions to produce a text that evolves naturally into its conclusions. By continuing this organic voice throughout the book, Ga invites the reader to explore this world with her in a way that embodies the scientific method.
***
True to its title, much of Classification of a Spit Stain focuses on the characteristics of varying stains, resembling in many ways a field manual for the identification of birds or exotic insects. The reader is introduced to round raised stains produced by gum, free-form stains from urine or gasoline and “other categories of underfoot materialization,” including sidewalk cracks and graffiti, which Ga misspells as “graphitti” on one occasion. What initially seems an unmerited investigation of the mundane transforms into an exciting scavenger hunt. The low quality of the images is rendered moot because Ga has provided the readers with the tools to find and classify on their own.
In addition to her foray into garbology, Ga offers some insightful observations about the sociological implications of her two years of sidewalk stain research. Round raised spit stains, she tells us, “tend to form clusters of polk-a-dot patterns around doorways and bus stops since the tendency to discard increases where people exit, enter and wait.” The further tendency of unsuspecting pedestrians to scrape gum from their shoes yields the “thin, wirey offshoots” found in some stains. Of all of the forms of underfoot materialization, only “decorative elements,” such as graffiti and litter, serve as an “unequivocal sign of human presence and intervention.” Again, Ga provides a detailed framework not only for interpreting her work, but for drawing one’s own conclusions from local stains.
Ga’s creative acuity shines towards the latter half of the book. She manages to find beauty even in “the piss stain” which “if they are discovered within minutes of inception…will glisten and form a variety of curvilinear shapes.” Perhaps her greatest strength lies in her ability to detach herself from the origins and composition of her subject, using a photographer’s eye to focus solely on visual elements.
***
After amassing her descriptions of the many and varied stain types, Ga turns her attention to contextualizing these disparate sidewalk droppings into what she refers to as “the stained landscape.” A spit stain, she tells the reader, “does not always exist independently from its cement host.” To prove this point, she presents a sort of grand unifying theory of stains, positing that the uniqueness of paved surfaces is as much defined by “uneven applications of cements or the pedestrian disturbance of drying cement” as by those elements which collect upon them.
With the introduction of this theory, the pictures take on a more surreal and intriguing quality. In lieu of dark violet dots on a slightly lighter violet background, Ga offers expressively detailed photographs such as figure #9, which in its richer contrast and combination of visual elements creates a portrait of the stained landscape which resembles an overhead image of a jagged coastline. The individual stains which previously seemed so meaningless are now essential elements to a vast visual ecosystem.
And so it is with Ga’s work itself. Fleshed out by a detailed appendix, rife with even clearer images of the stained landscape, Classification of a Spit Stain exceeds its original vision by becoming something greater than a collection of annotated photographs. Instead, it proves that the standard of useful research is determined by its ability to contribute to our understanding of our environment. In crafting this work, Ellie Ga has substantially expanded our view of the world by pointing to the exciting narratives hidden beneath our feet and explaining how to read them.
by Katie Cappello
Elixir Press 2009 Reviewed by PJ Gallo
Creeping
Katie Cappello’s debut, Perpetual Care, is lit in hard light and shot with a high-contrast filter. Her book arrives out of a long tradition of painting the south grotesque—wherein darks are very dark, and lights are mostly overwhelmed—all of which might be tedious and disheartening if not for the arresting importance Cappello grants her poetry’s ugliness. Still, defying the tropes of the grotesque as it applies to the American south can be impossible without the exclusion of obvious symbols, particularly in a book with such necessarily regional scope.
Cappello’s poems take place across the deep, gulf coastal south, and on the interstates and rails that connect those varying places, but they mostly take place in a New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and in slow repair. Cappello signifies her book’s cultural and geographical locale through readymade signifiers—magnolias, bottle trees, Dixie beer, etc. —that establish both the speaker and reader as observers who notice the same glimmer of novelty in an alien landscape and bestow a mythical quality upon it. But Cappello transcends the myth of the south by decorating her poems ornately enough with image to turn her signifiers into side notes.
These poems do not escape their region, but they do wish to reorganize it a bit, so Cappello paints surreal colors over and around her more obvious evocations of the south. The effect is largely positive and reminiscent of the hypnotizing images of clowns and walruses drawn over live action dancers in Max Fleischer’s Talkartoons (see one dancing walrus here at 4:30); something familiar wears a very strange mask in these poems, but great presentation overpowers the urge to expose. One haunting image in the poem “Crescent Express” illustrates this technique, contorting what might be familiar:
This child, the size of a fist,
is covered in black grit.
I clean him off. He’s hungry.
I wrap him carefully in a clean shirt.
I’m sure there are others here—
these tired, dusty passengers—
wonder why I take such care
with such a dirty little thing—
they don’t know how long
I’ve carried him, his black head
a hole between by breasts.
The child in the first two lines of this stanza introduces one of the recurring images in Perpetual Care, a dirty baby or, extrapolated, innocence gone awry. If such images are themselves heavy-handed or obvious, they are excellently executed. The baby in this poem feels pulled directly from our stock of horrid images of childhood starvation and squalor, photographs like Kevin Carter’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner. The poems don’t have the same emotional heft as such a photograph, but the speaker’s mothering is a response to such brutal imagery. The stanza exemplifies the way Cappello’s poems can operate with a sporadic knowledge of what they conjure. The first poem in the collection, “Twentieth Century Genesis,” starts the book equally unsubtly, but with its obviousness Cappello turns the key to the rest of the collection. Midway through the poem, a girl gives birth to an unmistakably phallic monster:
The snake slid out, pale pink
like the insides of organs.
When she put her legs together
she counted fifty tiny razors
cutting her fifty times.
While the birth of her pink snake alludes to a violence perhaps inherent in sexual connection, it also conjures intestines or other viscera, or because at this point in the poem the girl has been impregnated by space aliens (amidst the darkness of Cappello’s universe, there is a welcome trace of dark humor), and the pink snake may simply be one of the aliens in its larval stage. Neither gender conflict nor violent space alien births are particularly fresh ideas, but from the contorted pairing of their corresponding images emerges a skin-crawling resonance, and in the obvious correlative ways, ugliness becomes as important as beauty.
With this first poem, Cappello opens the door to her world of creeping, crawling things—locusts, bats, cockroaches, silverfish, mealworms, snakes—by birthing them literally from her initial poem, and from this creation her poems develop into their sprawling, grotesque province. At times, Cappello relies too heavily on her images, and they can overshadow her poetry. In “Lament for a Wart,” one of a series of laments in the book’s final section, she begins, “When you left, a wart appeared / wrapped in pubic hair.” The vulgarity of this original image sets a precedent for the poem that is never realized. Still, these laments are some of the strongest poems in the batch. They are appropriately darkened by the helplessness her speakers feel, and they are less forthright and accusatory than we might expect a series of explicitly post-Katrina poems to be. Instead, these laments express a familiarity with what once existed and the eeriness of remembering what was never supposed to disappear.
One of the most interesting of the book’s preoccupations is travel. There is a preponderance of movement, primarily by car, that imparts her speakers’ desire for travel but also the impotence of geographical escape. Her speakers can presumably move freely around the country, but Cappello fixes them to their region. In the pairing of the aforementioned “Crescent Express” and the poem that follows, “Cabin Swimming,” she draws a subtle parallel between driving and swimming. Though “Cabin Swimming” is not explicitly about swimming, it invokes the entrapment necessary to swimming—more clearly, the necessity of water, or sweat in this poem’s case, to the existence of a swimmer. In the preceding poem “Crescent Express,” which places its speaker on the train of its title, is more explicit about the impossibility of genuine escape:
The Express
is merciless, will leave me
if I disembark—no chance
to re-board down the line.
The pairing of “Crescent Express” and “Cabin Swimming” is indicative of the rare cohesion Cappello creates even between the most disparate poems which, to be less reductive, stir forays to Coachella and the Philippines into the Creole she cooks up. Her laments are a compelling capstone to the collection, treating the irreversibility of the destruction of New Orleans with subtlety and astonishment. Her poems are collectively enchanted and haunted by tangible ghosts, but thankfully she doesn’t make the easy mistake of treating the south as America’s backwoods haunted house. She turns an ordinary gothic representation of the region into a smoky, whiskey-breathed realm full of requisite danger, but also full of magic.
Frank Giampietro’s Begin Anywhere is, above all, an exercise in self-consciousness, self-interest, self-indulgence and a number of other self-nouns sprung from the same sort of goofy egotism allowed in children. That said, his poems can be compelling insofar as they remain wide-eyed explorations of their invariable and stylized subject, Frank Giampietro. When Giampietro resists indulging in his persona, his speakers’ self-interest can be an effective representation of the way the self splinters among the various parts of our daily lives. More often, though, he just seems like he can’t help himself.
“The paradox in American letters is that it has always been easier for a woman to write and for a man to be published.”
Have you ever seen the movie, 
“A lot of what I thought was magic / is habit,” says the speaker’s son Aaron in the early poem “He Graduates from Clown School.” He gives away both the secret to performance and the secret to this luminous new collection, in which Hilda Raz (Trans, Divine Honors) creates moments of complex beauty from simple, methodical sentences and images.
You should probably judge Christopher Schmidt’s first book by its 
Swedish poet, author and literary critic Aase Berg has risen to the upper tiers of her native country’s contemporary poetry and surrealist art worlds. She has published five full-length collections and throngs of innovative fiction, as well as writings on surrealism, popular culture and artistic theory. Her first book, Hos rådjur (With Deer), was initially published in Sweden by Bonnier in 1996; a new translation by Johannes Göransson, Berg’s first into English, was released last month by Black Ocean.
Drawing upon the trappings of rigorous, scientific research – data logging paper, rigid categorization systems and stark photographs – Ellie Ga gives an air of legitimacy to a landscape of historical records beneath our feet. Classification of a Spit Stain examines the amalgam of chewing gum, urine and deteriorated concrete common to urban streets and sidewalks and finds not only depth, but beauty. 
Katie Cappello’s debut, Perpetual Care, is lit in hard light and shot with a high-contrast filter. Her book arrives out of a long tradition of painting the south grotesque—wherein darks are very dark, and lights are mostly overwhelmed—all of which might be tedious and disheartening if not for the arresting importance Cappello grants her poetry’s ugliness. Still, defying the tropes of the grotesque as it applies to the American south can be impossible without the exclusion of obvious symbols, particularly in a book with such necessarily regional scope. 
