Archive for May, 2009

Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

by Keith Newton
Cannibal Books 2009
Reviewed by Mathias Svalina

6_5stars_6

…The Map Will Never Be Made

newton cover

Fragments, in poetry, collude. A lens flare fractures, sunlight knifes from distant windows: together they conspire toward guidance. Fragments tell us that something is waiting around the corner, when there is nothing waiting, & there is no corner. But when we turn the corner no one can see what happens to us.

Keith Newton’s chapbook-length poem Sent Forth to Die in a Happy City is a series of fragments broken into four sections. Most of the stanzas consist of a single line & all but one is a single-sentence. The fragments do not accrete. They don’t form into a stable narrative by the end. Our questions are not answered. Instead, the poem functions in blink-length memories. We find ourselves beneath the poem’s tangly sheets, entwined into memories & ideation.

It is one text, so it may be safe to say that all the memories originate from the same blinker. I blink. Do you blink? Perhaps the poem in fragments is the writer blinking the reader’s eyes.

The poem opens in an estate: “Garden, vestibule, corridor, asylum. / A definite capacity in the black pines.” This estate or house is a center point for the poem, but through its fragmented descriptions it does not exert gravity. It has capacity but no actuality. We pass by the house. We enter it & exit it but we are not drawn back. We learn that it is “A house under a spell. // A word to enter, a former name.” Instead of a blueprint, we are left with a series of doorways & details.

When we are in the poem we are in a city. There is an occupying force. Everyone is in trouble, in danger. There are traitors & agents, but they never quite enact themselves, instead their actions are cut off by syntax:

Suspect of a foreign attachment, 
the procedures are autonomous.

…

The questioner and the occupant at the front door.

The poem as an accumulation refuses to remember what befalls the occupant at the hands of the questioner. Corporeal subjects are rarely allowed to complete their actions in this poem. Newton reserves complete sentences for either the hallucinatory, “Against an impasse of the shades, / where the light is blocked, / the fever is the same,” or the simple declarative non sequitur: “The backdrop is missing”; “The focus is adjusted”; “They can pretend if they want.”

I do not know who we are as readers. I know I am not merely an observer. To invest oneself in the fragmented rhetoric of this poem is to blinkingly enter this city. I’m tempted to take the easy way out & say the reader is both the victim & the oppressor combined. No single viewpoint gives us this world. We are, at best, as the poem says, “The surveyor in pursuit of fragments.”

This Happy City has an atmosphere of noir, but lacking the kitsch. No glib speech or cleverness, but retaining the atmosphere of impending, fearful potential – an atmosphere I associate with the threatening fog of Carné’s Port of Shadows. It reads like the scraps of a shredded confession, rich with the imagistic anguish of betrayal. As I read it I keep wondering who has been exiled. Who has been sent forth & by whom?

The controlling agent that keeps the physical subjects from completing actions is, perhaps, the same agent that provides a stable interpretation. So then we’re back to wondering what is intended in the construction of fragments & what can be gained by surveying (ostensibly a controlling map) & what is it to survey in pursuit of fragments. The map will never be made & can only exist in the process of attempting itself. The victim hidden in this shadowy city will always lack motive, means & resolution. 

What keeps this potentially alienating poem from pushing me out is the stately grace of its lines’ progression & the regular interruption of the text by a scrawled line drawing that perhaps shows a skyline or a treeline or a series of codes. Newton’s terse yet deliberate sentences balance against oblique sentence fragments such as “At the hollowing of the patrol.” & “Crouched for the harvesting of objects.” The stateliness moves us smoothly through the language, so that no matter how odd the statement is, it arrives with calm. To spend time inside this poem is to be always looking for the hiding place, the tic of the face that reveals the lie.

So much of our daily experience is a filtration of experience & sense. It is lucky that the horrible bulk of our memory does not press down on us. We are lucky that our minds inure us to the constant sensation of being alive. To remain sane & secluded & safe we have to live inside of constructed worlds within the world we live in.  What makes a home? Is it a certain smell? The sound of the third stair creaking?

This poem a deep & velvety bag full of ominous trinkets & with each line I dip my hand back in & pull something new & disconcerting out. The fragments we seek in the attempt to survey do not complete the experience & likewise this poem does not end. The closing stanzas are “A flowering city from the decks. // A converted city out of reach.” It focuses itself at the end of the poem, but continues to push us past the cohering function of the text on the page. This is a quietly mysterious work that compels me to continue my mapping.

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Flying for the Window

Monday, May 25th, 2009

by Charles Coté
Finishing Line Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming and Deiandra Hermosillo

6_5stars_6

Breaking Through

coteIn his first published chapbook, Flying for the Window, Charles Coté chronicles with small, digestible poems his son Charlie’s losing battle with cancer.  Coté takes us from the discovery of his son’s disease, to the treatments that don’t work, to Charlie’s premature death (he was only 18) and finally to the mourning and grief of the poet and his wife. With each page, it is near impossible to miss a the poet’s kicked-in-the-gut grief. The death has damaged his marriage, and forces him into an emotional neutrality which begs toward a hopefulness that never quite lands. Yet all the while, the poet is careful to keep the lens on Charlie, not on himself, and the result is earnest celebration of the boy’s brief but meaningful life.

There are things to smile about in Flying for the Window. In the poem “Giving Notice,” Coté remembers the moment when he and his son drank a beer together, a familiar right of passage he knew better than to take for granted:

Yesterday those blossoms, we sat
underneath the cool pink shade.
We sat out back with him and drank
beer, something I’d always hoped we’d do.

Their “first beer” bonding would be predictable if the circumstances weren’t so severe. Sad the beer was not the first of many. This mundane triumph demonstrates a father who has a stake in his fatherhood, and his commitment to his son thickens his grief and adds weight to the book. Yet his grief is soft-spoken, understated; Coté is careful to avoid spelling out the emotional quantities of the experience of losing a son—to avoid squaring his elegies on his own despair. He is not maudlin. He is irreparably damaged, but has the presence of mind to craft a fitting tribute that cares enough not to gush.

The poet’s feelings about his son are beyond pride, closer to admiration. He marvels, for example, at the fact that Charlie was the singer in a high school band, “Fivestar Riot,” and hoped to study music in college. There is an emphasis on the qualities Charlie possessed when he lived; the physical changes that emerged as the cancer took hold are peripheral, and don’t define the poet’s son. For example, in “Sitting in His Empty Room,” the poet remembers the night Charlie was crowned Homecoming King:

Still, he lit up a room with that smile, and dark
brown eyes, eyes like no one else in the family.
Picture a high school gym filled with classmates,
a red carpet, his girlfriend holding his right arm,
black velvet crown on is bald head…

“He lit up a room with that smile” is not an original turn of phrase, and while it’s one of only two or three statement clichés, generally, there’s nothing in this short read that demonstrates particular inventiveness on the poet’s part. But that’s not the point. The book honors a life; the title, for example, came from young Charlie’s journal: 

I am the songbirdand I am flying for the window. I know it’s closed but I plan on breaking through.

That he titled the book from his son’s words is another indication that Coté steps beyond himself in Flying for the Window. He is calm and deliberate. The point is that Charlie didn’t need cancer to be special, and that under the weight of his loss, a father knows his son led a life worthy of celebration—the only problem is, he can’t conceive of what to do with himself now that Charlie is gone. Flying for the Window is a good start.

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Selected Poems

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

by Thom Gunn
Farrar Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

7.5

Frequencies

gunn selected cover

Music and Verve

In his introduction to his new selection of Thom Gunn’s poetry, August Kleinzahler notes that in an interview with James Campbell, Gunn once stated the following: “I distrust myself with rhetoric.” Yet as Gunn largely eschews emotive abstractions and sentimentality in his poems, he is somehow very personal; the specific poems that Kleinzahler chose for this collection combine to form a speaker that is all at once subtle, expressive and intensely human. The result is this diminutive collection’s triumph.

Gunn’s anonymous yet universal speaker deals with strong and severe subjects such as drugs, AIDS and deaths (including his own mother’s suicide). He harnesses the emotional charge of such topics through his strict use of form, almost always relying on rhyme and meter as a means to synthesis. His often laconic verse achieves immaculate control throughout difficult themes. The only criticism of this collection that is fair is that it is, perhaps, too sparse, including too little. However, the brevity of the book underscores the verve of these particular poems.

Selected covers Gunn’s early work, but emphasizes poems from My Sad Captains, Moly and The Man with Night Sweats. Although a much later collection, The Man with Night Sweats is an integral component of Gunn’s lifework; it addresses the complex and harsh realities of lives affected by AIDS. Gunn explores the ways in which people come to terms with death. Poems like “Lament” and “Still Life,” which appear consecutively in this collection, are able to find the universal humanity in all deaths, the “difficult, tedious, painful enterprise” that it is.

 

All Everybody Dead and Dying

Even Gunn’s early work addressed the dilemma we face when we encounter loss. In early poems such as “Tamer and Hawk,” the speaker is reflective but destructive. He unexpectedly takes on the point of view of the hawk: “Through having only eyes / For you I fear to lose, / I lose to keep, and choose / Tamer as prey.” The concept here is applicable to any situation in which one feels as though control has been lost. In order to feel in command of one’s own fate when something must be lost, one often takes it upon him- or herself to destroy that which he or she fears losing, even if that means the destruction of one’s own body or life.

Later in “My Sad Captains,” a balance of the emotive and the brusque is flawlessly achieved. Again, Gunn addresses the obstacles that must be overcome in the face of bereavement. A poem that recalls old friends that have passed has the potential to become an overwrought, schmaltzy disaster, but not for Gunn. The remembered friends become “disinterested / hard energy, like the stars.” Just as they are “distant now,” Gunn is able to maintain a somewhat distant or removed tone which allows us to respond with unpolluted emotion; dead doesn’t mean gone, it means reconstituted.

It is the same sense of detachment that allows Gunn to be one of the best romantic poets of the last five decades. Poems like “Touch,” “Three” and “The Bed” examine the ways, both physical and non-physical, in which two individuals can come together to cast off the cold, the darkness, the unknown. From “Touch”:

  the ferment of your whole
  body that in darkness beneath
  the cover is stealing
  bit by bit to break
  down that chill.

Gunn asserts that human connections, relationships, are the real matter of our lives, that within a simple touch we can find the ability to “walk with everyone.”

 

Acid Test

Amid Kleinzahler’s nearly ideal choices for this collection lies one significant failure. “Listening to Jefferson Airplane” is a two-line poem: “The music comes and goes on the wind, / Comes and goes on the brain.” It is a nice thought, and under the influence of LSD, or if I’d seen Jefferson Airplane live at the Fillmore East (remember the lights?), it might resonate more. The poem is flinty and takes up a full page in a firmly-controlled Selected. I don’t blame Gunn for having written the poem, but rather I blame Kleinzahler for choosing to include it.

In contrast to “Listening to Jefferson Airplane,” Kleinzahler includes poems like “At the Centre,” which emerged from Gunn’s use of LSD and are much more insightful and weighty than the former. The speaker of this poem is hyperaware of his surroundings, and at the end of the poem he describes the room filled with his friends: “The faces are as bright now as fresh snow.” Though some might describe the line as sentimental, nostalgic, it renders the faces a mere component of the speaker’s environment. It vivifies the emotional quantities of a singular, responsive mind; it implies a ceaseless blending of things and of persons, and it gives all of it value.

 

Because We Separate

Gunn writes a lot about his friends. In “To a Friend in Time of Trouble,” he comments on destructive relationships by describing a bird scooping up its prey. Then he writes, “You know / It is not cruel, it is not human.”  He suggests that in order for an action to be cruel, the actor must be aware of the cruelty. The bird, however, is acting out of necessity; it follows a natural instinct within itself to survive, whereas humans often act out of self-importance. On some level, it is true that the human animal (and whatever we think we know about its ability to cognize) should not be held to a higher standard than other animals, but it seems that understanding natural elements of balance within our environment can often help us deal with “grief and rage,” and the speaker sees his friend benefiting in this way.

Most struggle to understand the elements of the natural world, the balancing act that it is. We particularly struggle to understand the process of death, and many rage against its onset in their lives; however, in “Death’s Door,” Gunn takes a more level-headed approach to the unknown. While some mourn for their loved ones, Gunn chooses to reflect on the fact that they “can feel nothing”; “they unlearned their pain so sprucely” in death.. It is almost as if Gunn doesn’t have the adverse reaction to death that many do, but instead accepts it as an inevitable open ending. For example, he begins the poem with the following two lines: “Of course the dead outnumber us / —How their recruiting armies grow!” Perhaps it won’t be such a bad thing to be “recruited.”

Gunn continues to take a unique look at death. His mother committed suicide, and he didn’t publish a poem on the subject until Boss Cupid in 2000, but in the poem “The Gas-poker,” his attitude regarding death is the same as in his earlier work despite the fact that his own mother is the one that has been “recruited.” As difficult as a death can be for those that are left behind, Gunn’s speaker musters the strength to acknowledge the ways in which death may have been something positive for his mother: decompression. He calls the room in which she met her end the “room of her release.” The poem is straightforward, and does not carry the overbearing emotions that many poems on this topic might.

Which could be said of most of these poems. The poet writes about people; he loves them and cares about them and seeing them die and disappear is a scandal—but a scandal that follows plain logic, that makes sense, as things are wont to blend. Gunn is a master of subtlety, and his ability to write about such distressing subjects in “plain style” is ultimately what makes them moving.

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Speak Low

Monday, May 18th, 2009

by Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

8

Melancholy, Baby

phillips cover

There is a change in Carl Phillips’s work that began in 2006’s Riding Westward and that continues in this year’s Speak Low.  The syntax is less pyrotechnic and disorienting.  There are fewer of those brilliant sentences that won’t reveal who or what was being discussed until they’ve already ended.  The bodies and the selves are more clearly defined.  In his first seven or so books of poems, there was a sense that every speaker, character, body, image could be as easily or as vicariously inhabited by Phillips as he was by the reader, and that there were no boundaries to anything.  But now there’s a sense of settling in, of stability.  In some ways, it’s more erotic now that bodies are more bounded, less likely to shift into each other—although with clearer boundaries, it’s precisely the limned border between them that he explores.  In the opening poem, “Speak Low,” Phillips begins by looking at how two things might touch:

The wind stirred—the water beneath it stirred accordingly…
The wind’s pattern was its own, and the water’s also.  The
water in that sense was the wind’s reflection.  

The water and the air are neither interchangeable nor permeable, and yet the sight of one is only allowed by the other.  The next poem begins with the speaker waking, “still on top of him,” and moves through a sequence of observations and questions about eroticism and affection—but the template is in place—the lover’s body is revealed against the lover—the boundaries that the pornographic imagination can never place on screen are evoked, the chest of the lover against the back. 

Phillips is a master at depicting a melancholic sex that never erases the desire that led to it—or rather, Phillips is a master of the melancholic moments after sex, without ever needing to reject sex itself for the sad commitments it can bring.  He never chooses between moralism and desire; the poem finally comes to a question about the relationship of the ocean to the sea, questioning the definitions, “I think the sea must be, / to the ocean, as disappointment is to sorrow…”.  At the conclusion of the poem, the boundaries are stretched, but intact:

When I woke, I was still on top of him—still inside him.
The sea isn’t far from us, it can’t be, I remember thinking:
through the dark, I could smell the sea.  It isn’t ocean, at all.

As it has been through much of Phillips’s work, erotic play in Speak Low is always in flux with intellectual examination—though in this volume, the bodies are more literal and physical.  In a meditation on drooping peonies, he writes

                                   …I even think they look, more
than a little bit, like rough sex once it’s gone where, of
course, it had to—do you know what I mean, his smell
on you after, like those parts of the gutted deer that
the men bring home with them, fresh from the hunt…

before contemplating Augustine’s ideas on passion, hunger and habit.  But Phillips is a consummate master of combining lyric leap with direct address.  He hooks the reader in at that “do you know what I mean” (and I’ve had more than one student who would respond, “I certainly do not!”) and implicates the reader in the desire and the image.  The poem concludes masterfully, urging the reader’s complicity:

           …Don’t go.  Let me show you what it looks like
when surrender, and an instinct not to, run side by side.

Elsewhere, when Phillips speaks of “humiliation’s / not-so-strange allure,” it’s not an offhanded comment.  It’s well-reasoned ars poetica.
 

Phillips works frequently through short lyrics in this book.  “A Little Moonlight,” a sequence of three thirteen line sonnets, was one of my favorites.  In such small space, his vision is focused, even as the subject keeps turning away.  The second poem begins in the middle of a thought—

Suspecting, even then,
that the best way to avoid being
broken by flaw would be to shape my life
around it—

—and the final poem ends with a question about why sadness would come to one who wanted sadness: “Tell me why, when what I loved / from the start was how eventually each leaf must go.”  The smaller form increases some of the velocity of his shifts, and the poems pull into wonderfully tight conclusions.

Phillips is a master of what one might call the “concrete abstraction.”  Even as he works in the broad or general world of philosophical truth, the reader never loses sight of the bodies or objects in question.  Other attempts to name what it is that makes him so essentially appealing might include “melancholy logic” or “erotic reasoning.”  His carefully pitched poems keep turning the subjects in front of them, examining and re-examining, finding compelling conclusions or beautiful rules.  To enter a Phillips poem is to lose one’s bearing, to wait for the image to focus.  You trust that when the image becomes clear you’ll want to look.  But you also trust that you’ll want to look away.

*

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Elvis Caught My Soul in the Air Like a Rose Between His Teeth

Friday, May 15th, 2009

by CAConrad

pop logoMina Loy once said, “If you are very frank with yourself and don’t mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction.” Music is part of my everyday poetry experiments, especially with the study of Ernst Chladni‘s discoveries that music has physical form, OF HOW music has physical form.

Music takes shape in us. Crop collectors are my favorite beetles and bees and I’ve spent time sitting very still in patches of daffodils in hopes of being pollinated TO NO AVAIL! Music though! At this very moment I am listening to two different CDs at once, Portishead’s latest triumph, THIRD, and the soundtrack to VIVA LAS VEGAS.

 

 

Elvis is immersion for all of these tines of the comb raking across the groin. Degeneration essentials.

Elvis is He is He. Peanuts taste like Him, tubs of margarine taste like Him, my boyfriend’s cum tastes like Him, you can tell this truth or not, but it still tastes like Him. Enter into this a bastard loving the crotch-al swing of it. Elvis enchants the new chakra the external chakra for our poisonous drainage.

I MEAN HEAPS AND HEAPS OF US AT IT! Oh no, Oh my, I make sense every time I try not to make sense on Him. Elvis is He is He. Those of us born in the last half century heard Him in the womb at some point, on Momma’s record player while she softly rubbed us through her belly. Or from a passing car. THE LUCKIEST OF US WERE CONCEIVED WHILE MOMMA AND PAPA FUCKED TO ELVIS PUMPING OUT OF THE RECORD PLAYER OUT OF THE WALLS OUT OF THE FUCKING LEAVES OF PLANTS ON THE SILL AN ENTIRE ELECTRICAL PULSE FOR SPERM TO FIND EGG THE EGG SPLITTING OVUM SEND US INTO LIGHT.

elvis dances and sings

In Graceland We Trust. The American poet Karen Weiser wrote in the introduction to her newest set of poems, “When I became pregnant I felt like my brain and body were filled with static. This static was less a sound than a sense that the flickering of snow on a TV screen had been made into liquid and pumped into my veins. This made it hard to think, hard to do anything. After a while I realized that it was her signal. I couldn’t hear my own ways of thinking or feeling with this other person’s atoms multiplying inside of me. It was the sound of the big bang, and my own radio brain was tuned in.” (from To Light Out, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse). It’s so beautiful to KNOW THIS TRUTH from a trusting poet! The beauty of it opens everything wide open in so many ways!

Sex between consensual adults and pregnancy cannot be separated. The sex of the pregnancy must be as cherished as the pregnancy, and THIS is where Elvis enters our new domain. For too many years now pregnancy was without ROCK AND ROLL and the sex of the pregnancy not spoken of, and the women made to BE CAREFUL about everything they said, did, thought about the sex of the pregnancy. Made to feel rude. Made to feel cheap and grotesque for liking sex. ROCK AND ROLL SAVED OUR SOULS BY SAVING OUR BODIES! ELVIS WAS the gateway for PUNK ROCK AND ALL THE AMAZING WOMEN WHO FOUND THEIR VOICES AS WELL AS THEIR BODIES IN THE MUSIC!

Picture 1

As I point out in my new book advanced ELVIS course it’s true IT’S TRUE that He came back for us. In a past life He led a pagan tribe conquered by nay-saying Christian fanatics. As St. Patrick DROVE the snakes out of Ireland to destroy THE WILL of desire, SO ELVIS brings those snakes back HOME TO US! ROCK AND ROLL TAKES THE SNAKES BACK INSIDE AND GIVES US THE PLEASURE OF LOVING OUR BODIES AND LOVING HOW THEY LOVE ONE ANOTHER. ROCK AND ROLL DEFIES THE SHAME OF OUR LIVES AND OUR DESIRES WE HAVE LIVED WITH THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS OF GUILT AND DISGUST FOR OUR BEAUTIFUL HUMAN BODIES!

WE ARE TRULY SAVED when we LOVE OURSELVES FIRST! THAT is the message of Elvis. THANK YOU ELVIS THANK YOU! Below is an interview I did with myself for advanced ELVIS course and it was almost a channeled experience, the interview. IT CAME OUT OF ME. Yes, the ideas had been cooking in me, but SUDDENLY and I do mean SUDDENLY this poured out of me, nearly no editing later. It was difficult at first trying to convince me to interview me. I was quite resistant to allow me to interview me. But a trust started to develop in me for what I knew to be beautiful, AND LOVING facts about Elvis, so I finally convinced me to let me interview on Him.

I’m very happy that Soft Skull Press is publishing advanced ELVIS course in June of this year. http://ADVANCEDELVIS.blogspot.com

advanced elvis course

Interview with the author of Advanced ELVIS Course

ME: Have you ever jerked off while fantasizing about Elvis?

ME: I don’t jerk off.

ME: Yeah, right. Well, have you ever fantasized about Elvis while making love to someone?

ME: Not “to” someone, it’s “with.” And there’s no need to fantasize. Ever since Elvis took the stage in the late 1950s, every man has genetically enterprised in actual time/flesh, different aspects of Elvis to profit from the enormous burden of attraction he instilled upon the species. Elvis is always in bed with you, even in most cases of lesbian sex.

ME: What about Norberto?

ME: The reason my relationship with Norberto has lasted as long as it has is due to the enormous number of attributes of Elvis he has absorbed.

ME: Does he know this?

ME: No, most men have absorbed these qualities on a subconscious level. It’s those who are aware of the Elvis they have adopted in their love-making that have a particular flair for the type of sexual spontaneity which will ultimately move that soul forward to a higher frequency.

ME: How do we discover a lover’s Elvis aspects, and how do we let them know?

ME: Well, telling them about it runs the risk of sounding insane. What I’ve done to move forward spiritually with my lover—because that is, hopefully, the goal—is play Elvis music while we’re in bed. What this does is connect his absorbed Elvis aspects with the vibration of Elvis’s actual vibrato which put those absorbed aspects in him in the first place. Almost instantly you will notice a connection, a heightened awareness in the various movements to the opera of your love-making.

ME: What songs do you recommend?

ME: It’s good to experiment. Each soul has fused with a different combination of Elvis aspects which best aids their awareness and eventual progression. I’ve found Norberto and I move forward as bonded souls with such songs as “Kentucky Rain,” “All Shook Up,” “Surrender,” and particularly the entire soundtrack to Viva Las Vegas. Norberto has the largest variety of Elvis aspects of any man I’ve ever known. He’s an advanced soul who is allowing himself to press forward faster with me.

ME: Even though he’s married already?

ME: His wife is not aware of his Elvis aspects. It’s clear he experiences a different state of consciousness when he’s with me. And besides, Norberto and I have much karma to run our fingers through by aligning our Elvis aspects.

ME: What about the songs? Is it the words?

ME: The surface content of the songs has some effect, yes, but it’s really the actual sound wave itself, still hidden to the optic nerve of the human eye in our present state of physical evolution on earth. The sound waves of Elvis carry deeply buried, deeply important signals which adjust, readjust, align, and ultimately raise the source of light in the tissue, fusing the purpose of the tissue with the purpose of the soul, which came to earth encoded for the journey of a life.

ME: Does the orgasm play a role in the sexual/spiritual process?

ME: The orgasm is a reward on the physical plane only. The orgasm does interrupt, and often undo much of the Elvis aspect alignment, which means prolonged love-making is much preferred to ensure that a new level of raised frequency and light is reached. I find if it’s too quick, an orgasm can actually reverse the achieved levels of previous Elvis aspect love-making. But then again, we can’t spend all day in bed.

ME: The world would probably be a better place though.

ME: Oh yes, I’m convinced the rhythm of worldwide love-making for a solid 24 hours would shudder the planet to its core, causing a planetary orgasm which would connect us with our true Elvis aspects right off the physical plane for good.

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caconradCAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He escaped to Philadelphia where he lives and writes with the PhillySound poets. His latest book The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009) received THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD. He is also the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX Press, 2008), and two forthcoming books, advanced ELVIS course (Soft Skull Press, June 2009), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Press, 2010). He invites you to visit him online at www.CAConrad.blogspot.com.

photo by Janet Mason (http://amusejanetmason.com)

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Shuffle and Breakdown

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

by Cody Walker
Waywiser Press 2008
Reviewed by Rick Marlatt

6_5stars_6

The Blood Bank

shuffle and breakdownCody Walker’s debut collection, Shuffle and Breakdown, is a compilation of assorted reflections broken into five well-conceived segments. Walker draws inspiration from a wealth of diverse sources including history, literature, philosophy, social commentary, pop culture, political commentary and world news both major and bizarre. Through his playful use of rhyme and metaphor and his imaginative twists on traditional lullaby, Walker’s poems assert that he is an artist as vivacious as he is talented, and he channels a voice in these poems that is simultaneously aware and appreciative of his influences. Many of Walker’s poems such as “Scripture” and “Our Love and Woe Show” are meticulous, sophisticated practices in form and structure, while others like “Blind Date” and “Near Nude: Two Sketches” are brief fragments of thought which often reveal the inherent comedy of human existence.  Shuffle and Breakdown exudes a tremendous accessibility with its wide range of themes and styles.     

In “Don’t Let Worries Kill You Let The Church Help” (the title taken from a real church bulletin), Walker explores religion and what it means to be a person of faith. Following two tightly-packed stanzas in which he articulates a prayer with explosive, musical phrases such as “Diviner of Blackjack, of Blowgun” and “Landlord of Long Toms, of scimitars,” Walker demonstrates his unique sensibility with four entertaining, yet profound final lines:

Blessed is the man whose hopes exceed his reach,
Blessed is the woman who mixes gin and bleach,
Blessed is the child who feels that he can fly,
Blessed is the steeple on which the sparrows die.

Marked by a keen attention to rhythm and rhyme, Walker creates an incantatory movement in which the broad spectrum of humanity is celebrated.   

“My Mother and Steven Seagal Share the Same Birthday” is another quirky, memorable piece in which Walker makes vivid connections between his own life and that of the actor. By initiating a litany of catch phrases quipped by Seagal throughout his…classic?…Hard to Kill, Walker creates an innovative exchange of consciousness for the reader to witness. After countering each Seagal remark with the notion that he would never catch his mother mimicking such banter, Walker notes:

                                                                    And my mother
would never suddenly remember that this candidate had years
ago orchestrated a hit on her, had nearly killed her, and probably
thought he had killed her. And my mother’s eyes would never
narrow, and she would not then say (she would never say), I’ll
take you to the bank, Senator–the blood bank.

The “connection” existing between the poet’s mother and Steven Seagal–their shared birthday–lies dormant, but is nonetheless real. Likewise, Walker explores art within art, creating intriguing layers of prosody which examine life with a fresh eye. With other gems in the first four sections such as “Gamesmanship,” “I Tell This With a Shrug,” and “Song for the Song-Maker,” Walker continually displays his vast knowledge of formalism along with a stunning imagination which mutates those traditions to match his own artistic flairs.

The fifth and final section of the book transitions into a heavier tone. Through a series of letters titled after various cities and dates and signed by a narrator named “Caleb,” these nostalgic musings are deeply emotional and leave the reader with yet another avenue of Walker’s versatility. In “Chicago / June 1891” and “Natchez / December 1889,” Walker uses literary history as a vehicle to channel voices from the past and investigate the vastness of their contemporary legacies. “St. Louis / January 1891” comprises a dreary summation of current conditions in post-war America; the speaker closes out the letter: “Zanna and I take our meals on bare carpets. / We eat dust and splinters and drink our own blood. / Saint, vampire, old at twenty-six, / Caleb.” Such serious sentiment is melodramatic, but conceivably serves as a contrast to the lighter verse from earlier in the text; the power of Walker’s paradoxes and juxtaposition of concepts remains promising. 

Always attentive and truth-seeking, Walker’s voice is vibrant with musicality and tones of hope. He shuffles between serious play and serious drama, and shows his best stuff when he merges the two; he is as likely to reference Whitman (the book title) as he is to to reference Richard Pryor (the epigraph), always building bridges, always seeing patterns. The world from Walker’s perspective is endearing and poignant, yet humorous and promising. Shuffle and Breakdown exhibits a poet who is not only in tune with what works in contemporary poetics, but who is actively exploring the possibilities of the craft.

*

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Ace

Monday, May 4th, 2009

By Richard Carr
The Word Works Press 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

3_5

Beepp Beepp

carr coverTime is the seeming culprit for the process of letting go, especially for mortals.  All cultural historic epics explain this – Orpheus and Eurydice, Homer, even the wrapped pharaohs archaeologists continue to find and preserve.  While space and its subordinates play a role, time is the ultimate gatekeeper of forgetfulness and nostalgia.  While it takes a human being to forget his or her self, it also takes a human being to forget something else – woman, book, album, vacation, even a car.  

Richard Carr (!) was last year’s Washington Prize winner for the book Ace, an interesting four-part compilation of 14-line (non-sonnet) poems which places a broken family through each member’s window of perspective (Ace, Carol, Little Ace and Ms. Princess).  By the end, it is likely a reader will discover that the book’s situational humanizing of poverty, romantic love, melancholic reminiscence, etc. is possibly done by cars, not people.  It’s a Sixth Sense type of hidden-surprise sentiment without the strength of that film’s awareness or seriousness.  The confusion is not entertaining, intellectual or fun; it’s just confusion.

And what is more striking is the phenomenon occurring right now in the arts that carries a wistful umbrella for the automobile.  Neil Young released an album this week that is themed for the great American car.  Fast and Furious is still selling box office tickets.  Considering how green the landscape is supposed to be turning, perhaps it is our nighttime sunglass wearing that blinds us.  Richard Carr’s vehicles are more or less cubed piles of trash eeking out the possibility of another chance, or the ontological construction act of smashing beauty into the grimy.  Although, you have to look twice at that hammer.  Carr asks readers to envision the “low coupe of classic Detroit.”

Check these lines from the collection’s best poem, “Dark Thorn” – “losing my daughter’s hand /momentarily in a crowd at the mall /misplacing her again and again /and one day finding only a hair on her pillow.”  This poem suitcases the strength of screwing up (see Mickey Rourke’s performance in The Wrestler) better than any other poem in the book but also falls into the same gutty canyon the other poems do – cliché.  Concepts like “heavenly neon” or “it kills me.”  Most poems carry on just long enough with an unopened packet of Kool-Aid boredom. 

Of the two split-up parents, Ace is held metaphysically closer to the actual poet; of the two disappeared children, “Miss Princess” is the wiser, the more bright-eyed.  The form is the same throughout – fourteen-line poems, no exact syllable count, a long breath/short breath rhythm between lines (where some lines may have ten to eleven words, and then there are the obvious one-word lines).  The problem with the form is that all four characters are clearly atypical.  In that sense, Carol (the mother/bartender) should likely get a Creeley-esque lightweight line of quietude, while Little Ace would probably look and sound like a Mayakovsky or Damal.  And the lack of all punctuation does not coexist peacefully with a strict narrative.  (Ex:  “I’m so lonely” versus the opportunity to be simpler and write, “So lonely” instead.)  At times, it works, but it feels accidental.

While Carr has entered his self into this current phenomenon of beginning to let go of the car, it gets lost just like his novel-in-verse’s characters do in their meta-reality.  The plus side here is we get to see the forgotten angle of reality; downside – the guy writing it executes his words and phrasings as if he has no idea what bars, cars, ill-fated parenting, stripping and junk yards are all about.  This is the problem with a book that scaffolds more care into its concepts and overarching metaphors.  The single poems are the victims.

*

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