Archive for June, 2009

wing’d

Friday, June 26th, 2009

by Kyle Simonsen
Blood Pudding Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Bells and Whistles

wing'd I’ll begin with the external. When I first picked up wing’d, a limited edition chapbook from Blood Pudding Press (ick), I knew it would be a strange journey. It’s a beautifully crafted little artifact with intriguing cover art by Cat Rocketship (a wild and coy white cat batters and ingests what seems to be a human heart), but the intrigue evaporated when I read the poet’s bio. I quote: “Kyle Simonsen has no tentacles.” Great. No tentacles. Me too. I hate bio blurbs that attempt to give some kind of view of the poet’s personality, especially when they read like a weak attempt to frame the way one read’s the poet’s poems.

At this point, I’m not impressed. So, I move on to find out a bit more about Blood Pudding Press. “Interests of the press include horrific confection, provocative frisson, and ribbon bindery.” All bells and whistles. This type of overwrought, flamboyant self-presentation takes away from the art and makes a show of itself in its feeble attempt to be different. All I can hope is that a similar “artistry” isn’t involved in the poems. Perhaps my annoyance is a mere product of my faulty process, reading the bio and press info before entering and engaging with the poems.

The first poem in the book is “Classification of Affected Fauna.” It’s a charming title and sets expectations high. The poem turns out to be a table of contents; each line lists the title of the next poem in the collection. It seems Simonsen’s hope is that “Classification of Affected Fauna” will work on more than one level. This is not the case as none of the titles cohere into anything more than nonsense, but perhaps this is the point. As Donald Hall has noted, “Even when words make nonsense, their disconnection from sense is a statement.” Right?

Let me try again. The first poem in the book is “the ghost in Stafford’s machine.” It’s a charming title and sets expectations high. The poem turns out to be…boring. Not funny. Not witty. Not surprising. In this poem, Simonsen borrows some of William Stafford’s lines from “Traveling through the Dark.” This is not the problem. In fact, the borrowing is nicely done. “Traveling through the Dark” is an excellent poem and is probably a source of inspiration for many writers. Simonsen does something interesting here. He changes small things about Stafford’s lines, prepositions mostly, to create new meaning. “traveling into the dark i came upon a doe.” Nice. I’m there. “with Kevin Federline in her mouth, flopping.” No good. Turn back. Pop culture references can be well-made; however, making fun of Kevin Federline was boring even before it was a cliché (for the few of you that can’t be bothered with TMZ, K-Fed is Britney Spears’ former flame and Baby Daddy).

There are many references in this poem (Jane Goodall, Jay Leno) and some work better than others, but there is so much else to comment on. In the subsequent poem, “canyons flood,” Simonsen makes an interesting linguistic choice. He writes, “most of what comes between me and she / is mud.” The poet’s choice here is to be “poetic.” The pronoun “she” is in the subjective case when grammatically it should be in the objective case since it follows a preposition. I’m not a grammar stickler, but I do champion the idea that we should make choices and our reasons should be somewhat self-evident. The only reasoning that I can pull from this choice is the small and fleeting forced rhyme of “me and she,” which hardly warrants the choice. In retrospect, this seems hardly worth mentioning. A more worthy aberration from “said the machine to the poet:”: “i likes to proclaim myself luminous, and / manage to make myself so.” Too much of the book is Poetry or play to no end: “cleverness” that suffers from not being clever at all. Another example from “snakes are just like humans”: “they must have erogenous zones too”. I don’t know. Look it up.

Let me be careful to point out, however, the very redeeming and quality theme of self in this collection. It begins to take shape in “canyons flood” and continues to build throughout the remaining poems. From “canyons flood”: “rising above, moving beyond, / these imply an otherness, an else, / an idealistic self-flattery.” The composition of self is perhaps life’s largest complexity. Simonsen is also schooled in the art of the image. Take the following example:

                                 [she…] stood /
  clutching the drapery and gazing into
  the distant eyes of a slobbering hyena
  rabid from the god up

These lines are effectual and moving. “She,” however unidentified, represents fear of the unknown, fear of the self, and internal turmoil. The phrase “from the god up” is also particularly vital to the theme as we all begin with “god,” with creation. Then we are faced with the task of continuing to create, of self-creation which is our life’s work, to develop a self that we may be comfortable with. There are many hang-ups and setbacks along the way, as we encounter in “often have they built their own windmills.” Simonsen writes, “the narcissist engages in self-destructive / and self-defeating behaviors.” These behaviors sometimes force us to become something other than our self, sometimes a monster with “sixteen arms / and four tentacles,” fighting to reemerge as something better.

Tags: 2 stars, Blood Pudding Press, Kyle Simonsen, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

Tuned Droves

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

by Eric Baus
Octopus Books 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

“Is there a second singer?”

baus cover Droves fill Yankee Stadium and offer their own witnessing abilities to the ubermensch of a caped, steroided maniac. Droves also disfigure harmonies on their accumulating lawn mowers, in their exhausting automobiles. Droves squeak their wet boots in and out of every subway car. Deep inside the liver of this mass of beings in motion, there is a churning to tune, to bring the blur into focus. And, oddly enough, a mason uses a “drove chisel” for dressing up the tops of stones and rocks toward a more “approximately true surface.” So says the dictionary.

Eric Baus’s new book reminds one of the really droning portions of non-narrative films like The Man With the Movie Camera or Koyaanisqatsi, and it is not even in the same league with Baraka, but it is large-to-miniscule in its scope. Most actualized objects (even spasms) in the book seem to be relegated to Baus’s world of “whatever there is” or “It”. In fact, the “It” may appear more than any character (if you can call them that); a weighty pronoun use bases itself on the shoulders of weak characters sometimes called “the woman” or “a man.” Actual names or more direct placements may assist the direction of what otherwise makes most of the poems stand still, not knowing which is Eighth Avenue and which is 8 Ave.

There are eight sections of the book, which also contain individual poems, although, that too is difficult to discern. Perhaps that is the point of Tuned Droves though—to produce an ineffability of distinguishing what from whom, and in that, a globalized (not like capitalism, like nebula) correlation is made.

A constant confusion makes use of itself as to what actually constitutes a Baus poem. Readers will most likely feel their limbs shaken in a plastic bag and their boredom washed in birdbath water. Make no mistake—this is sentence salad. A few, core, indefinable concepts (tree, boy, sun, bus) make a strained bone-growth to try and connect the entire universe. Though, if Baus is at least attempting to “tune” the “drove,” he is failing at bringing a blur into perfect pitch and tonal focus. The narrative (sometimes in prose block, even) smudgings act more like ink blot tests than lessons on humanity’s place and purpose in a swirling vast unbounded immensity of language:

“The letter said the letter was looking for another address.”

Or, “A tree did nothing today.”

It would be proper to place these phrasings inside of entire quotations of whole poems, but that is impossible as these sentences and statements could be placed into any other poem in the book.

A strength of the book is the overarching, mystical power of the mother figure that shadows and shines from the first poem (“The Sudden Sun”) on. She walks boys to water, gives birth, processes birth, names children, forms flowers, and folds “her arms to make a mirage, touching the snow in a sentence.” Baus definitely has a muscle for the unique imperative. However, he takes it way too far and carries it on longer than he should. He does not just climb the mountain, he goes around the range. Look, here, at the last line of the whole book, from “They Showed a Film of Walking to Water”: “Inside any good song is a small piece of snow is the one I am listening for.” He should have cut off the statement at “snow.”

The collection’s strongest poem, clearly, is “Inside Any Good Song Someone is Lost”:

There is a splash. There is another splash. There is another. There is a man a man two women a boy and a boy. Something else. Someone else. I can’t see past the wheat and birds I can’t see. There is a singer. Is there a second singer? There is. That is, you can record yourself from the center of a parade. The clouds are large. You are little and the clouds are so large.

Baus is impersonating Gertrude Stein, but his version of Tender Buttons would be a nameless, faceless, Sunday comic strip that the entire reading family could absorb over a bowl of Trix. Oddly enough, Baus also writes, “It is unlikely it is precise.” While poetry is not a chef’s meticulousness or a chemist’s exactitude, tuning the masses is, and should be.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Eric Baus, Ken L. Walker, Octopus Books
Posted in reviews

The Turning and It is Daylight

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

by Maxine Chernoff & Arda Collins, respectively
Apogee Press 2009 / Yale University Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

A God Playing the Fool

chernoff cover collins daylight cover I know it’s cheap to use Louise Glück’s expected introductory praise to bash Arda Collins’s first collection It Is Daylight, but this is all part of the System, and I find it symptomatic; Glück is the judge of the Yale Younger Poets Series, after all. I will try to balance my initial misgivings by making this review a 2-fer with Maxine Chernoff’s The Turning, as both poets mine similar territory using different methods.

It seems commonplace that the contemporary poetic speaker is by definition marginal or isolated. Glück’s sharp reference to Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood skits on Saturday Night Live indicates what we are getting into:

Mr. Rogers’ soothing chatter mutated on late night TV into Mr. Robinson’s paranoid ramblings: Mr. Robinson was unwelcome, but Mr. Robinson, for the benefit of all us former children too hooked or wired to go to sleep, Mr. Robinson was digging his heels in and, crouched under the window, ready to talk, even if talking meant talking to a void.

Glück points out that both Collins and Murphy are inventing personae in “a master performance conducted in a deliberately isolated space, as though isolation were a form of control that promoted fluency.” Okay, the marginalized Invisible Man or Woman often speaks to us this way. Glück makes a deeper point when she compares the Skinner box of television to the Skinner box of the self, citing Collins’s sense of “metaphysical claustrophobia: the bleak fate of being always one person.”

I remember being visited by this feeling most intensely on insomniac prepubescent nights when I was tortured by all my mistakes and wondered “why am I me?” with no way to think myself out of it. Here’s Collins gamely failing to think her way out of it, nearly throughout the whole book. In order for Collins to stay in this sleepless, solipsistic mode, it requires that she maintain the same powerless paralysis that tortured me at 12. It requires that she not turn on the light, not read her favorite book, not talk to anyone (except, as Glück points out, the figure of god), not be in love or even pet her cat or dog. There are hints of an original trauma, as Collins frames the book with images of a mother screaming that her children have been kidnapped, but she doesn’t get caught up in actual narrative events. More than enough material comes through on the TV every day to create sufficient trauma out of thin air:

I was getting hungry but I felt afraid
of seeing the refrigerator light go on.
Then I would have to turn on other lights,
and then what would I do?

The Middle School answer is to get a life. One of Maxine Chernoff’s titles seems to work better for Collins’s book: “One Hundred Years of Solipsism,” but Glück is right on when she points out that what Collins really accomplishes is stopping time: “Because the self doesn’t change, because it is exposed to nothing that would change it, time seems not to pass.” The adult life and passion that the speaker is avoiding by this willful magic is partly revealed through the dark mist, but the effect is dependent on the reader’s ability to tolerate passages like:

I don’t think the sun will come up
unless it’s possible
for the day to clear a path.
I think the best thing would be
for someone to beat me,
maybe with a stick,
until I say, “Day is night! Day is night!”

If I were someone else (a typical evasion in It Is Daylight), I would call this caustic irony as opposed to plain old masochism. Franz Wright, for example, performs this kind of trick all the time, but the depths he finds there are truly frightening, mostly because of his mastery of the lonely image, the image captured by a voyeur at the end of his rope (I refer you to DJ Dolack’s recent Dickman review in Coldfront for examples of Wright’s mastery of this kind of imagery). Collins is at her best in passages like this, imagining someone

who has never seen a phone, and says blah blah blah
to the dial tone. The silence that once existed
in the dark cold universe: translated, the empty sound
is a place—the inside of a phone. Infinity,
I say, there it is.
This is where we all go to
when we touch each other;
this is what supernatural is.

This lacks Wright’s efficiency. The line breaks function largely to drag us back into dreamland, avoiding any sort of overly rhetorical epiphany that might wake the speaker up before she is ready. Glück aptly describes Collins as “hopeless on principle,” and cites her skill with camera work with keeping the reader awake. The variety of jump cuts needed to sustain these metaphysical Skinner boxes can indeed become fascinating. Here is an example of the approach:

I think I am going to stop
eating bits of paper
that don’t say anything on them—
that don’t even say anything on them
I know I should do something
as they say, for “the snows of embarrassment”
like a day in March when the blood is closer,
day singing for the loss of its whip.
Closer, I say, closer.
Or maybe I’ll arrange to have you run over by horses
unexpectedly.

Any individual passage like this is inventive, vivid, caustic, funny, claustrophobic and readable. The rhetorical fillip of repeating the line in italics could easily be a trapdoor to another plane, or at least to effective action in life. However, the note of Plathian, transformative power is undercut throughout the book by appealingly mundane double takes:

a dead person with a tan is worrisome:
had she
gone to hell?
That’s impossible, I thought. Genocide?
Farina?
Doesn’t she automatically get her ticket punched?
And that’s assuming hell is anywhere.
This is so stupid, I think,
This isn’t—
—what?
This isn’t what?

In a 1962 BBC interview, Sylvia Plath famously stated that she couldn’t bear to put toothbrushes in her poems. Collins is under no such restriction, suggesting the exciting possibility that she can say anything. Ultimately, though, Plath plus silliness equals what? The speaker never quite gets anywhere, we don’t care about the dead woman with the tan, and the reader is in danger of becoming bored. The juxtaposition of genocide and farina is not a stirring example of the liberating contradictions championed by Whitman and Emerson. It’s pointless, but that’s part of Collins’s point.

“Parts of An Argument,” one of my favorite pieces in the book, begins to herald the subtle change in the speaker that Glück helpfully alerts us to at the beginning. It starts: “I didn’t know I had god until god was gradually not there over time. I don’t feel abandoned. It is part of taking things as they come.” The speaker explains her (non) sense of god, as if he “gave me a microwave oven, but I never took it out of the box because I was grateful and never touched it.” OK, the speaker is just not going to touch this oven: “It sounds simple and fun but it is still not a big deal to use pots on the stove.” She wonders if this gift means “god thinks that I should bear many children.” The ensuing complications, elaborations, and evasions are ironic and funny. The unlined prose poem finally releases a pseudo-reasonable facsimile of a believable voice, making the speaker’s evasions seem more natural, and highlighting Collins’s warped humor. It Is Daylight is not a clinical exploration of shame, history, or original sin, but something more consistently ironic and personal about our ridiculous metaphysical position: “Since there is no god, you have to be both you and god.” So there you are, assembling the miserable “components of your dinner” from the freezer while god and his guys are off somewhere having “pear clafoutis behind a velvet curtain and driv[ing] their skulls into the center of a diamond.”

In her most recent work, The Turning, Maxine Chernoff is also concerned with the moment when “the god image / enters the man image,” but she explicitly invokes Emerson in order to Americanize the idea. Where Collins tends to fold any sense of history, politics, or literature into the solipsistic chaos of seemingly random, pointless emotions, Chernoff uses words as rocks, bricks—solid objects with the power to build or destroy. Where Collins uses rambling line breaks to evade responsibility, Chernoff cuts her lines with a razor, emphasizing the potential and actual moral “turning” of each phrase. Here are four non-consecutive stanzas from “Sensorium”:

Obsessed by prepubescent girls
the luminosity of angels
the Bible bound in shiny fish skin
………………………………….
Obsessed by pleasing objects
a sexual trauma
the Virgin on the altar
………………………………….
Obsessed by the danger of drowning
the perfection of philosophical dogma
the meaning of cool
…………………………………
Obsessed by all variety of bird
universal male suffrage
the contingent world.

Several poems ring changes like these on repeated parallel phrases. Throughout The Turning, Chernoff allows a kaleidoscopic array of historical and literary references to have a disorderly but pointed conversation, both professorial and personal. Her use of contemporary references and current events lends urgency. In a poem written for the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, she asks:

how to make a poem
out of so many terrible facts
how to re-embed sympathy and truth.

This won’t happen if we retreat into political buzzwords or high-toned aesthetic theories. Chernoff cites Emerson acknowledging that reading can easily become a substitute for living. She warns that “read as parable/ history vanishes,” and, later in the poem, “silence will out.” For the last decade of his life, Emerson slowly lost his memory, and Chernoff associates this fact with a kind of American cultural dementia. Though Emerson forgot his own words, he knew that what he said remains said: “Nothing will remain / without being spoken.” Yet, by a kind of “double logic of narrative,” Chernoff also says of Virginia Woolf, “for all she remembered more was forgotten // until the narration // closed its eyes.” In Chernoff’s universe, as well as Emerson’s, paradoxes exist as energy sources to tap into rather than walls to bang your head against.

Both Chernoff and Collins explore the slippery terrain between dementia and remembering, and they navigate the counterclaims of history and art, using puppets, pie, god, and religious imagery as props. Chernoff’s sense of history and art has an adult solidity to it, even as she removes it from its godlike chronological and narrative throne. In a standout piece, “Scenes From Ordinary Life,” Chernoff imagines a oddly touching puppet show starring two intellectual giants of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. By contrast, Collins’s efforts to stop time are more those of a child playing alone in her sandbox. Since Chernoff is not limited to depicting a consistent persona, she doesn’t gesture as wildly as Collins, but relentlessly re-imagines and deconstructs the master narratives of history and literature without neglecting the private transformations of art. She searches for the paradoxical hope that the blank page can serve as the stage for an adequate and effective response to “the contingent world.”

Though I greatly prefer the adult solidity of Chernoff’s historical and literary references, I’m willing to admit that Collins takes more risks and mines deeper territory. But talk is cheap. Let’s set up a poetic smackdown to decide! I’ll make up a Maxine Chernoff poem by taking food-related snippets from unrelated poems, and Arda Collins will get a chance to respond:

She spoke of taking pains to
be a good host. But what do cyborgs eat?
she asked the panel on Non-food Cuisine.

the surrogate ate the frozen peas
frozen. Heat makes us human

the history of dementia
recorded by Solon
(5000 BC)
(they die of starvation)

Emerson asking
“Mr. _______,
what is pie for?”

She was able to pry it out:
it was a frozen slug.

She held a big box of pastries in her hands.
“Put this on,” she said.

She brought preference to history.

From one little room an everywhere

And now for Arda Collins. To make it a fair fight, I won’t even bring in the untouched microwave. Since I’m getting ready to hightail it out of Dodge, I’ll call it a draw and leave the scoring up to you:

The components of your dinner are waiting for you downstairs.

There is something in the freezer
marked “vanilla.” I tasted it.
It was like ice cream, or like whipped cream.
But I became suddenly afraid
that it wasn’t food, but poison
for the garden.

I’m coming up the street
in the middle of the day,
coming somewhere
with a can of food
and a kitchen in my heart
thinking
the heart
can love anything,
cannot love anything.

You have a heat source in your chest,
and an electric space heater for office use only.

You ask god if god
is hungry, and god is. You ask god
what you should do
for dinner and god reminds you
that you have turkey burgers
in the freezer, and some broccoli. You’ll
go take the burgers out
and separate them with a knife.
They’ll be slippery and frozen, and
you’ll think of driving on
an icy road; and then
you’ll put them in foil under
the broiler and start the water
for the broccoli, and take out
a plate for yourself, and get
the salt and pepper, and by
that time god will have left.

*

Tags: 7 stars, Apogee Press, Arda Collins, Maxine Chernoff, Mike McDonough, Yale University Press
Posted in reviews

Sleeping With Houdini

Friday, June 19th, 2009

by Nin Andrews
BOA Editions 2007
Reviewed by Molly Sutton Kiefer

Fearless Falling

andrews cover Nin Andrews’s prose poems are parachutes–little pockets of experience descending upon the reader–fanning out into imaginings and empty rooms, multiple selves and disappearing acts. The poems in Sleeping With Houdini are concerned with a myriad of subjects: the down-to-earth (the body, communication, puberty and sensuality, the ordinary) to the miraculous (angels, ghosts, multiple selves, reflections and refractions), and the ways in which those play off one another (rooms and capacity, world of the familiar versus the world of fantasy). Andrews is interested in both the relics of childhood and the elements of the fantastic. These components collide as she explores the experience of dreaming, the blending of magic, all with urgency.

The opening poem, “Falling” introduces us to “a girl” who, in some variation, carries us through many poems in the book. This girl introduces the concept of innocence–allowing a common experience (a dream of falling, in this particular poem) and setting it in “one world, one town, one farmhouse with yellow curtains, bees circling the ceiling.” We are experiencing the general world, a globe above the earth, something we all see in the cross-hatch of farmland and ridged mountains on any plane ride cross-country, and Andrews then narrows into specific, but still universal or natural details, bees. This familiarity allows the closing of the poem to be more devastating: “… she feels the world drift through her like tiny glass splinters. It is only by lying that she can stay alive.”

This vulnerability of girlhood (and later ties to sensuality, a nod to her previous volume, The Book of Orgasms, as well as Midlife Crisis With Dick and Jane, both full of the body’s experiences and the unexpected) is a huge theme in the book’s early poems, from the (possibly accidental) overdose in “Aspirin” to the experience of first menstruation in “Young Ladies” and “Menses.” These poems in the first section are littered with bric-a-brac meant to ground the reader in childhood: pop bead necklaces, sweet tarts, apples, gum ball machines, with sudden contrasts, such as orange aspirin and teddies as gifts to young girls. This is a childhood fraught with adult issues, the kind where innocence is left to spoil.

Perhaps because of this, Sleeping With Houdini is lined with the motif of escape. There is the obvious, in the third poem, “Houdini”: “But what if he escaped, the girl asked, What if he slipped out of the water when no one was looking? He became an invisible man and is now living his invisible life in the invisible world happily ever after…” But escape takes on a more complex meaning, particularly within the exploration of space. In “Making the Sun Rise,” Andrews writes of the girl whose days are spent with the sun’s “white heat beneath her skin as an electric current” and we find “she was reduced to cinders, slowly climbing the air.” This girl’s life is clearly laden with the ordinary–her mother calls to her daughter’s bedroom–and balanced with the fantastic (drawing up the sun) until finally, “The girl never answered. Instead, she felt all the empty rooms inside her and someone hiding in every one.”

This ending, the sort that prompts the drawing of a little gasp, is typical of a Nin Andrews prose poem. (At the Palm Beach Poetry Festival in 2008, poet Kim Addonizio spoke of the sound of a gerbil orgasm, that gasp, or sigh, we have at the end of a particularly well finished poem–I have a feeling Andrews would appreciate such a comparison.) Her poem “The Game” reflects on the retreat of a young girl: “He wanted to send me back to where I came from, but my mother wouldn’t allow it. My shrieks, he said, could wake the dead. Nothing would calm me. Then one night I went quiet. By morning I had turned into another girl.” This ending, the change of the girl, is not a mere escape, but a kind of violent act, a self preservation, which ties together that precarious balance of burdened reality with the magic of…Houdini.

The book continues on, a narrator grown, facing the gorgeousness and cruelty of adulthood, but maintaining a fascination with the paranormal. In the poem “Crossing,” Andrews begins, “Suppose the dead can’t help looking back, pressing their wings against the glass like giant moths as if they don’t get it, that the flesh is a cell, the light a 50-watt bulb.” Death becomes an object of beauty, with angel-wings and the power of flight, and in the title poem, She ends, “The problem is, everyone falls in love with death. Death is the most seductive lover. Everything a person wants, death has.”
Andrews’s strongest poems are those that focus on the resurrection of childhood and the exploration of multiple or alternate selves. She wonders what her life might have been like had she been named Elizabeth, and the poem opens, “Names, I discovered, have power.” The poem takes on the selection of fruit, the heady scent tucked behind ears and hair bleached in the summer sun; these images of innocence allow the reader to recall similar experiences. In transformation, the poem ends, “And now Elizabeth was living my life, dreaming my dreams, wearing my things.” Again, that violent shift, the ownership of self shifting, being given over, allowing that punchy fate more control.

Tags: 7.5 stars, BOA Editions, Molly Sutton Kiefer, Nin Andrews
Posted in reviews

El P.E.

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

by Thibault Raoult
Projective Industries 2008
Reviewed by Rick Marlatt

Everything Slurred

el pe Printed in a July 2008 edition of only 100 copies, El P.E. is a 24-page collection of twelve often inscrutable collage-like meditations. Anchored by “Handle on Creatureoreure,” a mysterious, innovative shake at memory, mythology and sensory detail, El P.E. blends metaphorical reflections and picturesque motions with an uncompromising urge to strip language to its barest parts, demonstrating with letters the craft of a real visual artist.

“I’m inclined” explores the connection between personal, cultural and natural elements in the poet’s world:

I’m inclined to say there should be funk
In the constitution.

You have an accent
Of fennel.

Neonates in spring have one thing on us—
Neonates.

After teasing us with the concrete notion of politics (see Parliament, Chocolate City), Raoult backs off into an equivocal yet profound reaction to human relations, before culminating with an indirectly related reflection on arbitrary stimuli. Though brief and driven by flashes, this piece is a wonderful showcase of Raoult’s ability to generate deep and varied meaning in limited space. His couplets are blips, or distant transmissions.

Raoult’s work is about triggering emotional and cognitive responses to unique combinations and translations of words and sounds. “Mal de Mar” is a first person riddle that simultaneously pursues earnest self-examination and parodies true confession:

I am for Damoclean dalles.
I am for RIND
I love three things.

And night comes first.
And rip places second.
I am to return.

Into muntin with my moue.
And bis is third.
I am due bittern.

While readers can easily lose themselves in El P.E.’s sensory, linguistic magic, Raoult’s collection is far more than a compilation of moving sounds and images; it’s a text full of symbols. It reminds that letters are symbols only (words larger ones), and reads with the meticulous, illuminating pace of an ancient religious text. The speaker hides behind his symbols, but also clings to them for life. Beautiful pieces such as “Pretty Reason Extensions [She]” are constructed with multiple brackets, arrows, parentheses and codes which add additional breadth to the reader’s experience. “PRENUP.EDU” applies resonances of E.E. Cummings and demonstrates a fusion of word, symbol and cryptogram:

Clotting, clotting
DIVESTED
PRESENT
s’merVanna

but the seeds, how they blink:

gainsaid [as silk?] – > un-well

and somewhere calm branch
grows mien-madia

unaba unafa-
LEADING

Dadew-beasts toward
Those (londons)

who balloon who
emphasize not a soul
dances anymore
manually, sugars.

Immediately, the way lines are formatted take focus in this piece. Unique choices in punctuation, capitalization, and overall structure precede the final four lines which attempt to creatively smooth out a cluster of almost obscene signs and movements. Yet his progression throughout is elegant, and undeniably musical. His commitment to a lack of clarity is alluring, a distrust of clarity or the notion that language can affirm anything for sure. Raoult employs a variety of symbols, fonts and visual indicators; in many, one can observe the hesitations, gestures, and private emotions which accompany all human communication, and reaffirm that all communication is fragmented, suggestive of meaning (however consciously fictive) and capable of music.

Tags: 7 stars, Projective Industries, Rick Marlatt, Thibault Raoult
Posted in reviews

Ginnungagap

Monday, June 15th, 2009

by Lightsey Darst
Red Dragonfly Press 2009
Reviewed by Hansa Bergwall

Toward a Supreme Fiction

darst cover In Lightsey Darst’s dark chapbook Ginnungagap, she plays at the perpetual cross-section of time, belief and suffering. The chapbook takes its name from a term in Norse mythology referring to the magical void before creation. The author does not have a consistent cosmology, but all across Ginnungagap, religious or spiritual conceits inform and infuse delicate, modern poems of pain and joy.

Sometimes “God” is capitalized, but this is not an indication that s/he is to be revered. For example, in “Miscarriage,” Darst likens spooning scallops from a shell to her sister’s tragic miscarriage:

the raw body of my
unmade sister,
God ate that, beating,
cracking the top of her egg, bending
to scoop with his fingers and suck
what was to be

Nowhere in this chapbook is the divine to be comforting. God is more likely to be a callous tyrant. In “Dog Days,” god is lowercase; god is a small, annoying pest:

When I was little I broke open
the house with its screens
of dying ﬂies. And god

burst in through the crack
I made, buzzing like a wasp.

Both cases evoke a divine with the capacity to hurt. In one, God is a disinterested tyrant who shucks fetuses like they are shellfish. In the next, god is a bug to wave away and a sting to avoid. In other poems, she professes to hate the God of high places and love the gods who are made of twigs and mud and hang around the neck like a primitive talisman. The sum of these gods might be the large God she fears, so perhaps what we have, for whatever reason, is a stated preference for the small comforts of the micro over the inconquerable largesse of the macro. It is a familiar war, rendered here with a careful eye and ear.

In her best poems, Darst presents common scenes packed with the presence of something otherworldly, of indefinable mystery, only vaguely a “God” or “god.” “Blueberry-picking” is a particularly well-crafted example of this:

which fat fruit would come free
from the twigs, I picked a pint,
we picked two, we talked
between the bushes and twice

we heard a train come like
a little relief, or a little reminder,
its shuddering track somewhere by,

behind the empty tobacco barn,
but not so close,
and not so far.

Pleasantly, among friends, life goes on, but is rocked by the shudder of passing trains. No one is quite sure where it comes from. This is the feeling of spirit that Darst consistently invokes: the way moments of religious experience can slip into life unexpected like a wasp, or overwhelm in a moment of grief. Darst imagines and examines each phenomenon in her poetry. She reminds her readers that the ghost of the divine is inextricable from daily life, but never purports to have answers beyond this. These poems feel good to inhabit because of that spark, and her predilection to present the divine without benevolence complicates and undercuts the warm feeling usually associated with divine presence.

After reading Lightsey Darst’s chapbook, I have no idea what her beliefs are beyond the fact that she finds it valuable to ardently to engage with belief and spirit—with the magical void that her title speaks to. It is a rich vein and this little chapbook has some real gems.

Tags: 6 stars, Hansa Bergwall, Lightsey Darst, Red Dragonfly Press
Posted in reviews

A Million in Prizes and Voir Dire

Friday, June 12th, 2009

by Justin Marks
New Issues 2009/Rope-a-Dope Press 2009
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

High Hopes

marks cover marks vd cover

In his essay “Writing,” W.H. Auden puts forth some observations about what a writer is. One observation is that one should be able to arrange a writer’s work in chronological order from oldest to newest just by reading it. Auden writes, “Every work of a writer should be a first step, but this will be a false step unless, whether or not he realize it at the time, it is also a further step.” Each poem a poet writes should help the poet arrive at the next poem. I’ve thought about this a hundred, thousand times, mostly in relation to my own work, but also in relation to the work of others, and have marveled at how different the poems I was writing five years ago are from the poems I was writing last month. Though, on a greater level, we can know that change in oneself and one’s writing will always take place; seeing its delicate augmentation take place on the page is something of a wonder. This type of progression is apparent in Justin Marks’s book A Million in Prizes and chapbook Voir Dire.

Justin Marks’s first book of poems, A Million in Prizes, chosen by Carl Phillips as winner of the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize, is an earnest gem of self-consciousness and naïve wonder. The first two couplets in the first poem of the book state:

I wanted to create the ocean, the sky
the intricate structure of a leaf

and thought by now
I’d have come close.

While these lines are painstakingly sincere, there are also riotously funny. To not only want to create something as vast as the ocean, but to think that one would have “been closer by now” speaks to many complex layers of narcissism and naïveté and proves the expectation to be hilarious in its acknowledgement. This is what most of the poems in this book are doing: declaring the infinite and learning the possible. It’s like that New Yorker cartoon where the guy sitting at the bar, clearly looking tormented, says to the bartender, “I know I’m nothing, and yet I’m all I can think about.” It’s that morbidly framed humor we eventually find behind immature uncertainties—hopefully, that is. And yet, we marvel at its discovery every time.

The poems in the first section of A Million in Prizes, called “Life is Elsewhere,” concern themselves with past selves and childhood: the poet reflecting on who he has been, who he thinks he will be, etc. And while they feel very young, there are moments throughout this section when the poet betrays his own naïveté and writes aphorisitc lines like “now that no one will ever love or hate you as much as you already do.” This feels almost wise, something that only a very brave person would be able to tell his-/herself. Or in the poem “Childhood,” when the poet writes:

I hated
being a child. My shame
is having been one at all.

This is a succinct gesture toward owning past embarrassments. A necessary declaration to get oneself past childish hang-ups and to prepare oneself for life after adolescences and adolescent psychosis.

The poems in the section “[Summer insular]” catalog just what you would expect them to, the events and surroundings of the poet during one encapsulated summer. These poems are sometimes mundane, sometimes obvious, which I guess is a lot of what life is most of the time. Certain poems act as a journal, a way of capturing even the most uneventful days:

Rain Not much
Not for long

Technically
according to the calendar

it’s still spring
May.

These poems don’t necessarily push any boundaries but are a result of a common impetus: I am here, I am real, and things are happening. As often happens when working through the day-to-day, a sort of wisdom bleeds through if you keep paying attention. Marks arrives at the ability to say what he really means at many instances in this section, specifically because he’s paying attention:

And what is there
to love about each other

but our stories
the ones we’ve made

might make
what we’ve left to imagine.

This is a very real conclusion to arrive at after being alone long enough with your thoughts. These poems are the result of accumulated thought, thoughts one returns to again and again while alone in an apartment, watching a bustling city through the window. A likeable and genuine persona becomes more apparent during this section, for instance, when the poet writes: “I’ve written out that Roethke poem, folded it and placed it in my pocket. Should I die, it will be found on me, and that, aside from the fact that I will be dead, might mean something.” The conviction behind such an earnest desire for personal meaning is both comforting and slightly embarrassing. Not embarrassing in a pejorative way, but in a very vulnerable way; it is these moments of vulnerability in the text that are worth waiting for.

The poems in the third and final section of this book, “The Voice Inside the Cheerleader’s Megaphone,” are very clear and direct. While still self-conscious, they are delivered in a less apologetic way. It could be because they are more or less prose poems and that the rhythm and pace of the lines steer the poems forward with force. These poems hint at the type of poet Marks becomes with the publication of his chapbook Voir Dire from Rope-A-Dope Press. Voir Dire is more experienced, more mature. For example, the poet writes in “Lives of the Young and the Tragic,” “I was unpracticed, and I guess a nice enough person, indiscriminating professing my love for people and thing of which I knew nothing.” This voice sounds realistic and unabashed and this serves as a likeable arc for a first book, when the book begins in one place, written in one voice, and ends with a more mature narrator. The poet is getting on with saying real, true things learned through experience and observation, perhaps having only been able to arrive at the real, true things by writing the other poems first. Hence we return to Auden and his idea of the logical progression of an artist; these poems are often self-assesments, moving from surprise to reconciliation at the poet/person’s own limitations.

Voir Dire, which is essentially one long poem, exists because A Million in Prizes exists, and is all the better because of it. The poem rambles and moves forward with an ADD-like quality, but it is the sheer amount of life surrounding the poet and the desire to take it all in, that gives this poem its energy. At some points the poet speaks with obvious affection for his wife:

I share a pizza
and movie with my wife.
She is like a carrot
and I’m a little rabbit.
Our babies will be orange.

At other points the poet wanders into thoughts like:

In a different life
I’d like to have been
a B-movie star.

In each of these instances humor is coupled with seriousness, with sincere commitment to the life he is living and the person he has manufactured. The poem still retains a certain type of narcissism—“The immense joy I receive / when reading my sent emails”—but this is a friendly narcissist. A voice that ultimately wishes you well as much as it wishes itself well. The poem returns to memories from childhood, but does not do so in a longing or scarred way as it does in A Million in Prizes. The poet reasons that:

…Most
of my good fortune
is a fluke.
The bad as well.

The poet’s lack of personal accountability is alarming, but the conclusion is comfortable; I don’t think that the poet who wrote A Million in Prizes would be able to arrive at such a conclusion without needing to know what it means. Not that the voice in Voir Dire doesn’t want meaning, but that it just has a better sense of how the world out there can operate without a hint of concern for you. And it’s not a bad thing to learn. At the beginning of Voir Dire Marks writes, “It’s good to feel good,” and I’d have to agree. Here’s to everyone that for at least one moment they get to experience that feeling. Voir Dire is a manifesto to that.

Tags: 6 stars, 7 stars, Justin Marks, New Issues, Rope-a-Dope Press
Posted in reviews

Warsaw Bikini

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

by Sandra Simonds
Bloof Books 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

Avec Papiers

warsaw bikini A friend of mine used to go out with a bipolar guy, and she would get really frustrated at how much people would encourage the early stages of his manic episodes. She’d come home and find her friends covered with post-it notes, all of them chuckling about what a goof he was, making them all wear post-it notes. No matter how hard she tried, they could never quite get it through their heads that these events weren’t wacky fun, but warning signs—and of course, they all got to go retreat to their own spaces as his madcap fun escalated to full-on scary. Sandra Simonds pitches her work to that very narrow line between zany-fun and scary-crazy, always trying to push the language to the place just before it falls apart or attacks. She’s looking for that moment just before the poem stops being a good dinner guest and starts breaking the china.

At her best, Simonds plays with the making of meaning, slipping around in the language until you both see how language can’t not mean, even though those unavoidable meanings are deeply unstable. The first poem is called “I Serengeti You,” setting up precisely the kind of play she intends to engage in. And who doesn’t want to be Serengeti-ed? It sounds exotic and dangerous and intimate. A quick review of the poem’s titles make the books feel a bit like “Graduate School Confidential”: “These Days are Malthusian Foonotes”, “The Truth About the Pills I Took,” “I Don’t Deserve Your Riesling,” and “Ponce de León as Floridaphile” are a few of my favorites. Her sense of humor is on display in almost all of the poems. As she says, “There is teaching / and the taut.”

The poems tend not to move forward as meditations or narratives, but rather as accumulations of affect. Simonds’s work often feels like a playfully angry refusal to divide the intellectual and the emotional. The body and its demands are often pushed into and out of the brain and its thoughts. “Bon Voyage” begins with something like an erotic journey:

The path from the throat
to the nipple is too long

a journey to take without
handkerchief and water

But it quickly moves into the associational, before returning to the body:

so goodbye
bulky red

train—pulse sack of meat,
metal and nail

because my flesh is an artificial
field of feel where each cell

is a different
explanation…

For Simonds, the body is an intellectual question, the intellect a bodily one. Simonds’s work has a kind of ferocity that barrels each poem forward of its own accord, never quite allowing the reader to find clear footing. Perhaps a better description is that the poems are seeking a reader who’d rather have the footing shift. She addresses this concern in “The America You Learn From (A Poem for Grocery Workers)” as she enters the second section: “Enough! / What am I talking about? I have no house.” But the poem ends in perhaps the most metrically perfect evocation of the last eight years that I’ve seen so far: “Hey Missy England, it’s all the rage and/ —thumbs up, Abu Ghraib.” It captures a near decade of flippancy, distance and horror in one quick couplet.

In some ways I feel that our current “book culture”—by which I mean the pressure for the book to be the basic unit of poetry’s circulation, and for that book to have an arc that carries the reader through a unified experience—seems an ill fit for Simonds’ work. At times, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the poems would be happier in magazines, chapbooks, or broadsides. The work is so frothy, rich and dense that the poems in sequence don’t really carry the reader through an emotional arc across the manuscript. It’s all desert; there’s no main course. The poems in sequence repeat themes and double back on themselves and the experience of reading the poems is fairly stable. The development that does occur across the book is mostly formal. Watching Simonds play with the varieties of lines and stanzas is quite remarkable. She has a strong sense of the page as a field of play, and the multiple ways that the poems play out are accomplishments in their own right.

Simonds is brilliant at capturing the shallow and casual patterns of contemporary American speech and thought, putting pressure on them and presenting them back to us. But when she tries for a clearer emotional directness, it often gets lost in her style. “Tokyo Elegy for Zach Over Okonimyaki” can never quite confront the loss that motivates the poem—though it begins to emerge in the details of his space. At those moments where sincerity might be welcome alongside specificity, she pulls back, staying in her perfected space of the detached. The book is primarily social—the relationships and concerns are nation-sized—but it leaves the personal poems feeling unfinished.

Warsaw Bikini may be notable for having the strangest blurbs I’ve ever seen. Cal Bedient references the author’s “terrific nihilistic dislike of herself and others,” not even pretending to assess a difference between speaker and author. Since Simonds has her BA from UCLA, it seems a good bet that Professor Bedient has first hand knowledge. R. M. Berry’s comment that “Every outset projects a lack the sequence must undo, overturning postponement our wanting’s askance with preposterous now,” seems so to convolute his suggestion of how to read her more that it offers an endorsement. And why would Barbara Hamby call her “La belle dame sans papiers”? Yes, it’s the title of one of the poems in the collection, and the reference to Keats is funny and accurate—Simonds indeed seems merciless—but “without paper?” She just wrote a book. But it is unfair for me to focus only on the weird. Hamby does say that her poems “are hyperactive conduits into the chaos of our lost-at-sea moment in time,” and Bedient compares her to Plath before saying that her subject is one “that only a brilliant talent could turn into a field of triumphantly exhibited power.”

Tags: 5 stars, Bloof Books, Jason Schneiderman, Sandra Simonds
Posted in reviews

Winners Have Yet To Be Announced: A Song For Donny Hathaway

Monday, June 8th, 2009

by Ed Pavlic
University of Georgia Press 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

“…They don’t trust themselves alone in the dark.”

A singer uses vowels.

Poetry deals in freaks, whether the poets themselves or their pseudo-creations and characterizations. A true weirdo would have to begin the rented space by falling in the window backwards, as in a reversal from the possibility of continually becoming gravity’s victim. “Laughing and singing, “Only way to enter a room full of friends, fall in backward thru the window.””

There never can be an honest account of the reasons an artist (human being, for that matter) would take his or her own life. Do not wade into the murk of Camus’s or Pollock’s car wrecks. And make sure not to high dive into the mind of Jimi Hendrix’s or Elliot Smith’s manic depression. If so, wear a flotation device, night goggles, and a strong will to remain in sanity’s house of mirrors.

This must have been the task Ed Pavlic prepared for when writing his 2008 collection of poems, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: a Song for Donny Hathaway. Perhaps Pavlic and many other poets feel a version of what Hathaway is put on display for, something like this:

And, I want to talk, man, bad. Hand over all my records for one conversation. Hand over all my—well, half my money . . . Serious. Simple things. Sit and talk and be there, man. Hold hands and talk. Talk, hear me, let the roof come in. Hand over a shoulder. Let the fucking doors freeze shut. With anyone.

The poet here rises to a skyscraping task of recreating the ethereal and concrete landscape that an inventively driven genius-musician succumbs to when the old, reluctantly forgotten bright beacons come back to blind. There is rarely a moment when Pavlic makes a hero out of Hathaway. But, you will never forget the multiplicity of voices flying all around your reader head like a Charles Dickens metropolis. A reader might drift over the canyons of the difficulties of genius, of artistry, of depression, et cetera. Pavlic leads in this direction, however:

Fewer, however, have come to account for how very difficult it is to be, you know, a person.

Check Woolf, Camus, Nietzsche and many U.S. troops (oh, and that one math dude that Russell Crowe played) in the coat room because you have heard of them. And because they are white. It is the rarest of occasions to have to lift your own (white) veil of invisibility and understand that depression can come from various acute and obtuse angles. The acute, in the case of the observing poet as well as the musician (Pavlic/Hathaway) is the madness, the misunderstandings, the little addings-up which rarely fade. The obtuse—American Racism. Pavlic never comes out and says it in its black/white form because his subtlety hides in the various file cabinets of paintings and songs being discussed. But the big cotton and tobacco plantation demon is there. Look at this line from a prose block where Hathaway is telling a lost man from the East St. Louis projects how audiences can be:

They don’t even give you a chance. They don’t trust themselves alone in the dark.

All the poems swim in their own prose block; there is the rare occasion of the usual, left-margin, line-break poem. They seem and look, at their shell, as normal as Robert Bly or Richard Hugo; but, in fact, they are as experimental, Freudian, and even Deleuzeian as a poem can get. There truly is not a better poetic medium for these slightly-real documentarian, authenticating statements that Pavlic allows a breath more like a quiet, influenza cough. His poems don’t dance; they stomp out a blues diction and exist on the very border he creates; which, is also the border where all things real occur—the backslash between happy/sad. Think of Golden Gates and Brooklyn Bridges.

The book is brilliant, not hipster or on the cusp like flarf but it possesses a conceptualism of process, of tiny details and necessary magnifying glasses.

Readers go backward (like the man falling in the window) through time and then forward again. Hathaway’s timeline is incredibly interesting, as it is. He put out his first solo recordings in early 1970, gained fame from his proximal amity with Roberta Flack (the woman who first sang that one song that Lauryn Hill got limelight for), wrote three film scores (one with Quincy Jones) and checked himself in and out of madhouses a few more times. He studied classical music on his own, scored off-the-chains on two different IQ tests, and held a couple summer-long Brooklyn arts camps for underprivileged children. Ruben Studdard can’t touch him; Justin Timberlake claims he is his own biggest influence; Common says he’d be on a lost path without the earthly/wraithlike presence of Hathaway. And innumerable electronic/hip-hop producers sample his sound. Pavlic/the poet’s best summation of all this legend-quintessence happens here:

They’ll say they come to hear you sing to forget their troubles. And then there’ll be you, in a room that moves when you move, with a voice that’s a search from the next open opening inside of all the will and won’t and will and won’t want and won’t and won’t will and need and don’t want and need and can’t have. And need and can’t have. And need and can’t have [. . .] Need. Should have to have a permit just to use that word.

If we are to believe anything in Pavlic’s Real World-esque recreations, Hathaway (like many poets, musicians and artists) despised and loved his audience while simultaneously using that phenomenon to understand his-self and his World. This is non-fiction poetry couched in a metaphysical dream coated in a tincture of madness. A reader cannot make it thru the tunnel of Winners Have Yet to Be Announced without losing sight of light at the end while also becoming a little mad his- or herself. When Pavlic writes: “All the time his eyes on you like they’re staring through barbed wire,” he is not playing. Readers will be schooled on the nuances between quietude, silence, noise, and schizoid-paranoia—“A sound like a conversation between face-down cards” or “Like in the silent way your body learns a song.” One can only imagine the kind of mad-trip Pavlic must have taken his own self on in order to write this thing.

Flaubert said that the life of a poet is a dog’s life. Pavlic (in this book, at least) then becomes a Siberian husky, multi-hued eyes and all. Hathaway, no doubt, heard voices; Pavlic channels them through crystal or a ham radio—something that he must have thought all of humanity (at least those who read in English) could relate to in a personal space. And if James Dickey was right when he said, “Poets are not trying to tell the truth, are they? They are trying to show God a few things he maybe didn’t think of,” then Pavlic hoists Hathaway on his shoulders and casts off any misgivings that the true human being, the true freak and weirdo camp out on the state line between mortal and immortal. Let Pavlic’s statement display that very notion: “You wake me up in the midnight hour and I’ll tell you how I feel.”

Tags: 9 stars, Ed Pavlic, Ken L. Walker, University of Georgia Press
Posted in reviews

The Book of Props

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

by Wayne Miller
Milkweed Editions 2009
Reviewed by John Deming

What Will Suffice

miller props cover 1.

It is impossible to imagine an empty room. Your bedroom is strange when there’s nobody home. All the stranger at the end of the day when you open the door and walk inside.

Beyond strange are guest rooms in the houses of friends and relatives. A first-person narrator in Wayne Miller’s poem “Sleep Suite,” the first poem in his second collection, The Book of Props, makes acquaintance with such a room while preparing to sleep inside it. He describes the view from his borrowed bed:

…A streetlamp

pressed the shadow of a tree
to the window screen, the same shadow

also on the bedside wall.
They rocked with the wind in tandem,

myself wedged between them
in that spare room I returned to

and then returned in the morning.

An empty room is pressed with stillness. There is motion here—the movement of shadows—but it has nothing to do with human cognition, and is likely there on nights when the room is absent a living person.

The speaker here is calm and intellectual, but doesn’t lack the terror of a child kept awake in the night by shadows. Maybe a child is right to be afraid when “wedged” into such overwhelming nothingness. Yet the speaker is careful to note that the room is his to “return” in the morning—for if he sleeps in the room, he becomes unconscious, and ceases to impose his own thoughts or imagination on it; he becomes as much a part of its landscape as the bed, the screen, the shadows.

Humans can’t comprehend stillness. If we flatline, we’re dead. In a living heart, mind, or set of eyes, lives a constant repumping and resetting. Sleep is similar to stillness—it fuses the sleeper with a room’s own blankness, and “gives the body back its mouth”—but really stillness, nothingness, can only be achieved in death.

So there is terror in Miller. But also logic: whatever stillness is, it is as likely to be nightmarish as it is to be calming, or as it is to be completely neutral, rounded in all aspects. The only real tension that exists is the tension between the way things are now and the way they will be moments from now: the problem of constant change.

This is exemplified in one the book’s best poems, “Nude Asleep in the Tub.” The title smacks of stillness, sounds in fact like the title of a painting (though a few moments’ turned up nothing definite). At the start of the poem, we find a nude woman, asleep in a tub:

As if she were something opened—
like a pocket watch—her body

slipped beneath a surface
peeled back to reveal its surface—

drops of air clinging to her thighs
like roe. Outside, the snow…

There is a peculiar mathematics to this image: she is covered by water, but also opened by it: clarified, defined. The image is static and silent, an antidote to the problem of time, until shockingly, she wakes and walks out:

—as if

the room’s edges radiated
from her, as if I were inside

her thought. But then,
before any of this could register,

the clothesline creaked
and the wind picked up,

and she stirred, so the water
broke from her into water.

She ought to have stayed in there forever. But the still life had to end. The moment is extreme, like a “touch” in Whitman. The human urge to freeze time, or to preserve certain satisfactions, can be in found in all artistic mediums. The passage of time is an abstraction, maybe gravity’s work against the stasis of spacetime. One feels time passing—now—but the sum of all time passed and to pass is impossibly constant. And governed by light.

There is in people the urge to “pin it down”—to find satisfaction, to arrive. But time keeps passing, and nothing can hold. If the passage of time is our abstraction and our problem, it is useful to consider the things that people do to get by, or the things we use to prop ourselves up: to use a Stevens phrase, to find “what will suffice.” As Stevens explained, and as Miller demonstrates, our general response is to impose imagination on the world:

…The glasses
left out on the brownstone

stoop caught light
as we passed by, and so

we gave them great
significance…

If the glasses are indeed watching the poet and his companion, then Miller is in part surrealist; yet always the logician, he is sure to point out that this is the imposition of human imagination. The glasses possess a reasoned otherness; their strangeness is isolated and real. To consider them at all is to imagine them, to divine a prop. To view a pair of glasses is to project an image of them in your brain. To imagine them. The flare of light, light a speed but a mysterious constant, enhances the sensation.

Yet eating means more eating. Needs mean more of themselves. For every satisfaction, there is greater need, until death. In “Still Lifes and ______scapes”, a man who has loved Rembrandt’s Danaё his whole life sees the painting in person for the first time and “doesn’t see much // more than he did on the page”, yet he “fears losing it // the moment he turns away.” And at the close of the title poem, a couple in the back of a cab is breathless in its attempt to be satisfied:

—Those poor lovers
drifting sexward in a river

of lights: now even
their kiss has become

another object pressed
between them.

The urge to blend makes sense when recalling the “Sleep Suite” narrator, the man who sleeps in the spare room. In sleep, this person became a part of something that had seemed alien, or separate, only moments before. So perhaps the human problem isn’t simply a problem of time or of change, but of a separation from things and from one another. It is the fact that once people are finally able to blend, they aren’t there to experience it, because they’re either dead or sleeping. Our minds are what make us want to blend, and our minds are the very thing that prevent us from doing so. To bother another phrase from Stevens: “It is the human that is the alien.”

Miller has his own props in this book, the most obvious of which are Justine, Andy and Clarence, the characters from peculiar Section III, titled “What Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse).” The section would be ill-fitting if the rest of The Book of Props failed blend so seamlessly in tone and delivery. Yet it is inarguably different from Sections I, II and IV, employing a cast of characters in place of a first person narrator, and envisioning itself with an omniscent moviemaker’s eye: “We’ll hold // on these flakes of light”.

In any story, we come to value characters based on decisions that they make. The strange thing about Section III is that there is no real plot to the “film in verse,” or no crucial decisions being made. It is in most places a catalogue of each character’s abstract observations during moments of pause and reflection. In the fifth poem in the section, “Justine’s Childhood (Abroad),” we see Justine on a sailboat, watching the shadow of the sail on the water:

…The rippling chop

enhances the shadow’s
illusion of fluttering. Though,

It’s only the sail that flutters,
Justine says to herself—

the shadow’s untouched
by the wind that propels it.

The shadow is propelled by wind it never touches. It’s an interesting idea and savory image, but why it has to be attributed to some abstract “Justine” rather than the first person narrator we’ve come to know in Sections I and II is unclear, beyond the fact that his poem is in the “film in verse” section. In “The Tightrope Walker,” Clarence, ostensibly Justine’s “lover,” talks to her on the phone about a tightrope walker’s chances of falling:

…Perhaps two lovers

—like us—talking across the country, will hear
a trembling in their voices,
as the quivering wire upsets the birds—

It’s hard to hear Clarence refer to his lover as his “lover,” the word even more dramatic here than it was with the lovers in the cab. Again, the conversation arrives without context; we are only just meeting “Clarence,” so it’s hard to find justification for this melodrama, even given that this is a “film.”

But proceeding through their world, it is easy to become absorbed; the characters are anybody’s characters. They provide pattern and multiplicity to what might have been a limited perspective. The details of their stories are scattered, but each is humanized by an ability to perceive. Consider the thoughts of Andy, a drawbridge operator, watching a game at a bar during “Andy’s Monologue”:

…What we’ve done
becomes us—I know this—: exercise
becomes muscles, and, bless it,
touching a woman sometimes becomes
feelings. [He points to an instant

replay above him on the screen.]
See how he holds onto it?—that’s
perfection. And I say thank God for it—
for those men who stay in motion above us
each Sunday, while we get good

and drunk.

These kinds of details, then, become most important. Where some stories are built to show a character persevering, or experiencing or achieving something unusual or extraordinary, this series of poems is important because it takes us inside the mind. We see moments of reflection that are often unheralded and that vanish a moment after they take place. We watch people with props, people finding what will suffice while they can. Perhaps, ultimately, that will be our story.

It is impossible to imagine an empty room because once the room has been imagined, it has been fused with something. Miller’s world involves the stillness of empty rooms, involves generally the struggle of cognition against the absence of cognition. Humans are a part of things, but also are dramatically removed. In “Landing,” part of the “film in verse,” Justine and Clarence see the city from above:

This city
like a nickel of light
dropped in a field

It brings to mind Stevens and “Anecdote of the Jar.” The field imposes itself on the city as much as the city takes dominion over the field. Miller is calm in between, and provides greater illumination the more that you read him. He has the stuff of an outstanding poet. He has a mind bred from Stevens and an eye bred from Williams, synthesizing them with a flare for passionate romance that, in its most effective applications, allows for humans as a part of the world—in part for our ability to control light as survival against darkness. At the close of the book, we are back in a dark room:

…that spring-pale

leaf remains pressed
to the window, all day lit up

with sunlight, then at night,
lit by whoever

inhabits the room—

There is stillness but constant motion, the most important of which might belong to light, measured in some platforms as a constant. Amid constant motion, there are hints at stillness, and stillness implies eternity. We are still, but constantly moving—not back to front like in a movie, but with lateral shifts, like the surface of water.

Tags: 9 stars, John Deming, Milkweed Editions, Wayne Miller
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