Archive for June, 2010

spotlight: Lisa Olstein

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Interview by Melinda Wilson

Lisa OlsteinLost Alphabet is a collection of prose poems. What appeals to you about prose poems?

The prose poem as a contemporary form certainly has particular charms (often relating to expectation, juxtaposition, tone, etc.), but I have to admit that these were not what informed my decision to write the poems in Lost Alphabet as prose poems. I was searching for a form that expressed the naturalist’s notebook sensibility of the work—the poems were written, and I hope they read, more like the speaker’s entries in a strange self-chronicle of internal and external experience and study, something between a diary and record, one devoted somewhat obsessively to intense observation. In this context, with this voice and its journeying, line breaks seemed too self-conscious both in the writing process and later in evaluating the final form of the work. This is funny for me to say, because I actually worship line breaks and their many nearly magical powers. Probably this devotion to them informed my decision not to use them in Lost Alphabet. I was searching for the most straightforward, unmediated means of letting the voice speak, because, for this particular project, the voice unselfconsciously revealing itself as it wandered into stranger and stranger territory was paramount.

The speaker in Lost Alphabet lives among and studies moths and butterflies. She becomes consumed by them, saying “When not studying specimens, I see their features everywhere.”  Does the speaker’s obsession with her subjects affect her ability to care for them? In other words, can a “specimen” or subject of examination also be the recipient of one’s affections?

This confusion of category and intention is at the crux of what the speaker experiences, and of the narrative arc of the book. Obsession leads to new clarities and much blurring. Observation transforms expectation and interpretation. Experience replaces assumption. The speaker’s relationship to the moths moves from one defined by scientific distance—within which the moths are specimens to be collected, manipulated, killed—to one defined by intense empathy and closeness—within which the moths are individual beings to be discovered and interacted with, to be cherished and cared for. Affection is a key part of it, reached via fascination and also personal dislocation, a loosening of the boundaries and categories and definitions that previously shaped self and reality. It’s an incremental evolution, but in the end, affection does obliterate the possibility of the moths remaining specimens. The identities of the speaker and of the moths evolve away from their original manifestations.

The speaker in Lost Alphabet also deals with some type of painful affliction, but it is unclear what exactly ails her. Can you comment on the significance of this pain?

The pain is a part of the speaker’s general undoing. I leave it vague not to be tricky but to inhabit in my imagination the reality of the character. The speaker doesn’t know what the pain’s significance (or cause) is; the speaker experiences the pain directly and deals with the consequences. It’s a part of what makes up the shifting physical, emotional, and psychic terrain the speaker inhabits. It opens certain doors and shuts others. There isn’t a back-story that I bring to the situation but withhold from the character or from the reader, rather I know what the speaker knows—when the pain hits, how it affects things. A parallel to this is the way I approached the possibility of research while writing this book. Although studying images and seeking out language related to moths was key inspiration and fodder, I didn’t want to become an “expert” and then pick and choose what to let the speaker know—I sought external material only in support of the work of imagining through the speaker. That said, the element of affliction experienced by the speaker is certainly influenced by and infused with my own experience with chronic migraines. There was no master plan—the whole project was determined by a process of discovery-along-the-way—but once it presented itself, I was intrigued by the opportunity to put some of that lived strangeness and difficulty into a completely different context and see how it behaved there.

Can you further describe the relationship between the speaker and Ilya? Who is Ilya and what is her role in the speaker’s studies or observations? To what extent does Ilya’s character function metaphorically?

Ilya is someone from the village who becomes a companion to the speaker much like the speaker becomes an inhabitant of the village—proximity and happenstance coupled with a perceived but muted necessity, some mysterious and persistent compulsion. The speaker’s affliction and need coupled with the culture’s set of social obligations instigate the situation: “Slowly, the absence of pain arrives like snow falling. It was on a day like this, when, visiting, Ilya decided to stay. At least, never left. It is customary here to accompany the wounded. Whoever is able, and near.” The relationship is one of both closeness and distance, willingness and unwillingness, as I hope the poems describe: in some ways the two become partners in the work, in the life; in other ways Ilya stays very much outside of the speaker’s inward journey but witnesses it and sometimes assists, sometimes refuses to assist.

Much like I didn’t become an expert about moths and then pick and choose what the speaker would know, I didn’t develop but choose not to disclose a full back-story for Ilya. In the writing, I inhabited the subject position of the speaker, and so, as for the speaker, Ilya arrives in my imagination as an individual read through what is done, what is said. Stepping back just a little, of course, Ilya is a bridge: to another human being, to the human world that the speaker is losing grip of, to the culture of the foreign place where the speaker has landed. I was aware of and interested in historical, cultural, and literary clichés surrounding ideas of “noble savages” and  “native wisdom”—both the terrible falseness and exploitation at the heart of these constructions and their pull on our sentiments and imaginations. In Ilya, I tried to move in and around this territory a little bit, to explore and subvert some of these tropes. In retrospect, I think the relationship serves as a microcosm for the issues of knowing/not knowing, foreignness/familiarity, discovery/limitation and overall paradox that inform the speaker’s relationship to the moths and to the world.

In addition to moths and butterflies, there are a lot of birds in this collection. What is the significance of winged creatures for the speaker?

The speaker here collects and studies moths specifically and devotedly. Over the course of the book, this fairly straightforward intention and practice sort of evolves/devolves into something different, something transformed by obsession and a shifting sense of reality. Birds function as another observable element of the landscape, along with horses, dogs, people, the river, the weather. They’re most comparable to the moths, though, in that along with insects, they’re the wild animals most available to us. Like any of us, the speaker comes in contact with domesticated (i.e. highly mediated) animals pretty regularly, and occasionally enters into proximity with the odd undomesticated animal. Birds are wild but all around, flitting in and out of natural and constructed landscapes. In this way, they’re a kind of link between worlds.

The speaker often poses questions related to identity. She asks in “[master thunder],” “Who am I here in this village? Who am I anywhere?” How might the speaker’s relationship with the moths and butterflies help her to answer these larger questions?

Rather than helping to answer them, the speaker’s relationship with the moths leads to more of these questions and makes answers to them harder and harder to find. Myopic and hypnotic study, isolation and outsider-ness, illness and the body’s heightened sensations, all of these lead to a destabilization of self and of identity. Conventional wisdom increasingly seems not to apply. Received notions of who one is and how things work, particularly the hierarchies of meaning and value we inherit so seamlessly, begin to unravel.

Could you explain the significance of the title Lost Alphabet?

It’s taken from one of the poems late in the book: “The wind wakes them; they wake me. Like a lost alphabet, they await decipherment. I read in them what I desire, what I bring to the silence like a meal.” Uncovering something that was always there but that remains inaccessible is emblematic, I think, of the speaker’s experience. So too the building block nature of an alphabet—individual letters are language at its most elemental. Fluency and all its implications are incipient, but not yet achieved. This is in keeping with the way perception and meaning—that is to say the speaker’s reality—are deconstructed down the bare bones, to elemental units.

In your previous collection Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, each section of the book begins with one of Sappho’s fragments. What made the Sappho fragments a good fit for the book? Do you have a particular affinity for Sappho?

I’ve read and enjoyed Sappho for years and I fell in love with Anne Carson’s new translations in If Not, Winter. Having read different translations over the years was also part of the draw. By virtue of their inevitable variability, translations point in their way to the slippery nature of seemingly static things—words, images, memories, etc.—and this is something the poems in the collection explore. I also like the strange power of the fragments, how they speak vividly to absence and rupture while at the same time evoking something newly affecting and whole. The fact that I lived in Greece for several years and that some of the poems in the collection refer to images and ideas gained there made using Sappho a personal treat, as well.

Are you working on anything new?

I’m in the midst of finishing a new collection of poems, so my brain is deep in final revisions and questions of order. That and learning how to be a mother to an almost two-year old amidst all the usual joys and challenges of a busy life.

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[This interview was conducted via e-mail in April 2010]

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Lisa Olstein is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press 2006), winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, and Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press 2009), named one of the nine best poetry books of 2009 by Library Journal. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Centrum. Her work has appeared recently in jubilat, GlitterPony, Indiana Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere.

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How to Live on Bread and Music

Monday, June 28th, 2010

by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Perugia Press 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

8

“the world is possible / and beyond human”

Sweeney Cover

Lyrical, autobiographical poetry sometimes takes a beating from the critics—or maybe that’s just my defensive assumption, as I tend to write and admire lyrical and autobiographical poetry. The unassuming poetic voice of How to Live on Bread and Music, mixed with occasional references to her life as a daughter, wife, and teacher, could invite Jennifer Sweeney’s Laughlin Award-winning second book to such criticism. If so, the criticism would be unjust. Lucid, fluid, and lovely, How to Live on Bread and Music is a compendium of experiments in advancing the imagination.

Far from being “emotion recollected in tranquility,” in Wordsworth’s formulation, Sweeney’s poems originate in memory, but advance through hypothesis. “Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don’t. / That’s the choice we are always making,” the opening poem asserts, urging the reader to look (or listen) beyond the surface. Divided into five sections, the book progresses from realism to abstraction. Sweeney makes short work of childhood, giving readers just enough to ground us through her later, more fanciful, forays. Featuring functional poem titles such as “Adolescence,” only the most productive reminiscences are put to work, as in the story of a student who jumps from a second story window and walks away:

At 22, I accepted a job teaching junior high.
Not far enough away from the hollow years
of my own shifting body, the seventh and eighth-grade girls,
slight and doe-sprung, drifted down wide industrial
hallways, bones jutting sideways from their skin.
One girl chose my second-story classroom
from where we’d see her fall past the window. . . .

Notions of the body inform this volume, not simply as a container for the spirit, but as the shifting surface of things, our transitive nature, and our inability to fully read the world at any given time.

Poems such as “Ballad for the Daily Condition” could be seen as list poems, as static catalogs of quotidian observations. For those who listen harder, they reveal themselves as successive waves of discovery, resurgent efforts to reach new territory, despite our inherent containment:

That mostly we do our living in houses,
rooms inside houses within rows of houses
and everyone is a supporting character in the story
of your life and the story is an unevenly written mystery
with unearned existential leanings,
dreams clinging to you until dinnertime
eclipses the afternoon.

Seemingly an adult recapitulation of Margaret Wise Brown’s Good Night Moon, these lines attempt to mediate the self and the world by both separating and joining container and thing contained. The poem proceeds through other available image banks—including train trips, a recurring motif—in an active inquiry into the human condition. Sweeney uses similar approaches in “Fragments for the End of the Year,” and “In Praise and Apology” to good effect.

Set off in its own section, the poem “The Listeners” is a mélange of song lyrics, a meditation on music, and a tribute to the poet’s father. This poem is remarkable for juxtaposing the Jackson 5 with Beethoven, Madonna with Dylan, without evoking camp. The desultory approach of discrete sections in seemingly random order belies the investigative nature that drives the poem. Sweeney’s gift for selection is evident in this poem, particularly in her retelling of the story of a record player her father bought from two brothers in Australia, brothers who “devoted their lives / to perfecting the art of playing a record.”

Their turntable was a bed of thick felt over glass,
the needle, platinum sharpened to an eyelash
then wrapped in cat intestines. . . .
The day #38 arrived at our house,
my father unpacked the turntable
and as the needle barely skimmed,
Donna Summer sang a note so perfect
it was turquoise.

A bittersweet tale of craftsmen who can only imagine perfection within the confines of current technology, this poem repeats the motif of the smallness of the human mind in the moment befuddled by the world’s expansive future.

Poem titles echoing the book’s title also recur throughout the book, such as “How to Uproot a Tree,” “How to Grow a Mushroom” and “How to Make a Game of Waiting,” adding unity to the collection. “How to Feed an Orchid,” for instance, includes the lovely, abstract lines:

Like your thoughts without television,
the columns will harness the underestimated air
into calyx and corolla.

A pleasant strain of the subjunctive floats through this book, adding a distinctly Romantic note.  I admire Sweeney’s deftness with syntax, as in these lines from “Erie Central Station”:

I’d like to think every night contains a fissure
where a couple of strangers are cast
in the grand light of an approaching train,
not the station where the train stops
but the station where the station stops,
and they choose something for which
they are completely unprepared.

“I, scientist of not-much-data,” Sweeney describes herself in “The Listeners,” and in fact her approach is empirical, constructing experiments on the fly, recording the results, and moving on to the next. If lyric verse is sometimes saddled with the burdens of commemoration, observation, and aphorism, How to Live on Bread and Music is a marvelous corrective, for those who choose to listen.

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Flood Songs

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

by Sherwin Bitsui
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Vernon Lallman

7.5

“its owner — a leash without a hand — “

bitsui coverSherwin Bitsui’s collection Flood Songs is the kind of book one carries in a picnic basket to Central Park on a tranquil summer afternoon before beginning to negotiate a seeming balance between the natural world and the human-constructed world.  Bitsui is originally from a Navajo reservation in White Pine, Arizona, and his elegant poetry compares and contrasts his native Navajo myths, customs and traditions with urban American life. The poet creates a diverse and rich poetic landscape by interweaving open imagery, time and thought, as in these lines:

You trace deboned wings of ospreys with hawk talons
in the grocery line where the Navajo name for Pheiades
          is pinched and shredded,
and we dart away thinking: This is escape, it’ll be over soon,
we have never bothered to grieve, over… soon…

(51)

The speaker alludes to the fact that a culture is losing its identity to modern American life. Now the tribe goes to the supermarket to buy “deboned wings of ospreys with hawk talons” instead of hunting for it themselves. Yet the grocery line isn’t entirely villainized; the individual is as culpable.

Flood Songs is a series of untitled poems. Each page contains an independent poem. The poems vary from just one to more than 20 lines per page. There are a few blank pages throughout; as Bitui writes: “I bite my eye shut between these songs” (4).  Yet the book progresses with the inevitability of the wind and time it depicts. Its iconography ranges from alarm clocks, corn and bluebirds, to red-tail hawks paired with gasoline. In addition, the poet’s use of native language (in this passage, “Dinetah,” the native homeland) contributes to an open, chant-like rhythm:

Dinetah—scratched out
from the eye with juniper bark—
hunches with engine sweat
curling out of its collar,
its owner—a leash without a hand—
bleeds gasoline
            when lathered with a blur of red bricks.

(59)

The narrator speaks with much sincerity about the implications of modern life on his culture; however, his imagery — skies, birds, development – is his hopeful origin. He suggets an abstract loyalty in his last line: “The [grocery] line was busy when I picked that ax and chose the first tree to chop down” (71). Generally, his metaphorical birds, open cliffs and broad vision of human destruction leave the reader in a state of serenity.

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Whitman’s “meteor procession” identified

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

the meteor of 1860Astonomers have identified the “strange huge meteor procession” that Walt Whitman describes in his Leaves of Grass poem “Year of the Meteor, 1859 ’60″ as an Earth-grazing meteor that the poet would have seen around 9:49 pm on July 20, 1860.

The phenomenon — which happens to be known as a “meteor procession” — is incredibly rare; only four have been documented since the 18th century, according to a Los Angeles Times report, and the 1860 incident had largely been forgotten since the mid-20th century.

Astronomers were able to identify the incident with the help of a painting by American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church titled “The Meteor of 1860.” The poem also mentions a comet that is easily identifiable at The Great Comet of 1860, but scholars have long-debated what if any astronomical event Whitman describes: ”A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads, / Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone”.

Notably, the astronomical events in the poem seem to serve as omens of Civil War; Whitman is said to have hoped that his first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) would work to bridge the gap between an increasingly divided nation. His great late poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” elegizes President Abraham Lincoln, whom he admired, and who won “the contest for the 19th Presidentiad.” Here is the full poem, “Year of the Meteor, 1859 ’60″:

Year of the Meteor, 1859 ’60

YEAR of meteors! brooding year!
I would bind in words retrospective, some of your deeds and signs;
I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad;
I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia;
(I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I watch’d;
I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indifferent, but trembling
with age and your unheal’d wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)
—I would sing in my copious song your census returns of The States,
The tables of population and products—I would sing of your ships and their
          cargoes,
The proud black ships of Manhattan, arriving, some fill’d with immigrants, some
          from the isthmus with cargoes of gold;
Songs thereof would I sing—to all that hitherward comes would I welcome give;
And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, sweet boy
          of England!
Remember you surging Manhattan’s crowds, as you pass’d with your cortege
          of nobles?
There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;
I know not why, but I loved you… (and so go forth little song,
Far over sea speed like an arrow, carrying my love all folded,
And find in his palace the youth I love, and drop these lines at his feet;)
—Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,
Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was 600
          feet long,
Her, moving swiftly, surrounded by myriads of small craft, I forget not to sing;
—Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven;
Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over
          our heads,
(A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearthly light over our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)
—Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from them would I gleam
          and patch these chants;
Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good! year of forebodings!
          year of the youth I love!
Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!—lo! even here, one equally
          transient and strange!
As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this book,
What am I myself but one of your meteors?

–John Deming

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Christopher Sunset

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

 by Geoffrey Nutter
Wave Books 2010
Reviewed by Kate Angus

9

“with ever-growing care, and interest”

nutter cover 2

Christopher Sunset, Geoffrey Nutter’s most recent collection, is a book that sails forward into a world of transformations and immense possibility. In it, one might buy “watermelon / sold from a blue shack, or a shark,” and Nutter’s openness to the potential inherent within that tiny consonant-shift allows him to present a world where “If shark, the fruit / has quills, exquisite” and, by the poem’s end, “banished from the abstract,” readers finds themselves somewhere with “all doors ajar” (“Prospectus”).

The verb “sails” is an appropriate one for Christopher Sunset, not only because some of Nutter’s most frequently occurring images are of boats and the sea (as he himself makes note of with his announcement of “Nautical imagery” in “The Sea and the Bells”), but also because the movement of many of these poems is like that of sailing — the way a boat propelled by the wind and tides may suddenly yet seamlessly shift its trajectory. Nutter is a poet whose hand rests on the rudder, but who is also confident enough to let his poem-ships follow the current underneath. It’s a movement similar to the way dreams progress (dreams and sleep are two other motifs in this collection) where the propulsive force of associative imagery leads each poem forward down the page.

This is not to say, however, that the book is abstract or unfocused; rather, Christopher Sunset presents poems where concrete images allow both contemplation and an acknowledgement of the almost numinous possibilities inherent in the world. Because anything can happen, everything can happen, and we all–even the poems themselves–want to know what the future holds. In the book’s opening poem, “The Strawberry,”  Nutter’s description of a “pale yellow strawberry” leads us to the shadow of the pavilion where it grows, and that in turn allows us to “play in its beginning / the way children played in this pavilion,” and soon the poet asks us “What happens next?”, a question that he follows with images of the somewhat ominous night where “the city lurches forward with its white eye” and the information that “something, in these leaves, is watching us.” There is an immense strength in Nutter’s willingness to be ambiguous here. That observant presence could just as easily be a predator as a protector as it watches “with ever-growing care, and interest”; the “care,” after all, could be concern about us as much as concern for us. Still, the overall sense in both this poem and the book as a whole is that whatever is watching us is doing so with solicitude, that it is paying us the same kind of serious attention that this poet asks us to pay to both the external and internal world. There’s a sense of connection or camaraderie that prevails: whatever is in the leaves “wants to see what will happen next, too.”

 Nutter’s vision is a remarkably positive one–his is not the elegiac voice nor does he croon with dark hipster cynicism. Instead, this is a book full of yeses and metamorphoses: the pink carnation heads that become bells or small busts of deceased Spanish philosophers or lamps or heads that “nod yes, nod yes” (“Miguel de Unamuno”) or the way that a Max Ernst painting resurfaces as a “prayer book / called Children Menaced by a Nightingale” that will fill us with tenderness (“Bedtime Stories”). These are generous poems, full of the impulse both to pay attention to things as they are and to allow them to become whatever other things their deeper selves contain or lead to. It is, again, the sort of generosity that comes to most of us in dreams where we too, as in this book’s final echo of the Song of Songs, might say, “I sleep…but my heart is awake” (“Je Dors, Main Mon Coeur Veille”).

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Let’s Go Away for Awhile by Jennifer L. Knox

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

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Day 29.

Yesterday, on one of his long walks along the beach, Brian found a conch shell and named it Shelby. As the studio executives selected this island specifically for its lack of sharp objects, I’ve already planned to hide it from him the first chance I get. But he carries it everywhere, offered it spoonfuls of his Lucky Charms at breakfast, and slept with it under his toga last night. I dread the stomach-churning, wounded moose-like cry Brian’s going to wail when he discovers Shelby’s gone—he’s so terribly lonely, after all—but he could do a ton of damage with that thing. He’s not even allowed to have shoe laces, for Christ’s sake.

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[Let's Go Away For Awhile]

Day 30.

Tonight, Brian set Shelby down next to him on a stool as the sun was setting, and picked up his bass guitar. Carl perked up like a deer, dropped his metal detector in the sand, quietly walked over, and strapped on his 12-string. Dennis exhaled a large bong hit, calmly stood up, and slid in behind the drum kit. Mike strolled over to the Theramin with his head down, looking more like a shoplifter, and flipped the ON switch. Al strapped on his guitar, and I turned on the tape recorder. We stood in readied silence. Brian diddled absently on the bass. Soon a melody began taking shape within the random notes he was plucking. A bouncy ditty that reminded me of Oklahoma. Perhaps we were witnessing an evolution, a departure from the young genius’ increasingly downbeat, minor-chord melancholia. If I could bring back twelve singles good-to-go for radio, they’d probably make me Vice President or something—at least get me a date with Nancy Sinatra. The melody bopped along happily. With his brow knit in concentration, Dennis raised his sticks, but Carl shook his head. Brian continued to noodle, and finally bellowed operatically, “Oooooooh the wheels on the bus go meow-meow-meow, meow-meow-meow, meow-meow-meow…” Dennis whipped his sticks into the serene, blue sea, and I switch the recorder off.

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[On A Holiday]

Day 31.

Movie night. The only thing Brian will allow us to watch is Brigadoon, because, he says, he likes watching Gene Kelly sing at cows. “Gene Kelly would sing into a tube if the other end was up his ass, and so would you,” Mike barks, and staggers off into the darkness. The boys have been hitting the bottle harder in the last few days. We watch the movie on a bed sheet hung between two palm trees. As Gene whirls and twirls around the cardboard glen, Brian begins to giggle. I look at him. “You can see his underpants!” he says, in a voice as high as a little girl’s. He holds Shelby up for a better view of the screen, and whispers to it, giggling.

imgBrian Wilson2

Day 32.

Brian emerges from his hut wearing his underpants over his toga, leaping around like he’s having a seizure. It’s not pretty. For some reason, the inside of his mouth is bright blue. He must have been eating candy all night. “You think your studio big shots can afford to buy my brother a clean pair of drawers?” Dennis asks me quietly under his beard. “I mean, come on, man—that’s disgusting.” “Dennis, I brought a whole carton of underwear for him! He won’t put on a new pair!” “Where’d he get blue candy?” Al asks. “I have no idea,” I say. “I want some blue candy,” Al says.

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[In Blue Hawaii]

Day 33.

While eating an entire birthday cake at lunch, Brian says, “I’m writing an album of songs played on nothing but dog whistles—ones that are too high to be heard by the human ear.” “You are so fucking crazy, I don’t even know how you keep on breathing,” Al says, his angry eyes on the horizon.  Brian doesn’t hear him. “And I’m gonna call the album, Farty-Fart-Shitty-Shit-Dumpy-Dump.” The collapse of the sessions seemed to be taking the greatest toll on Al, who’s been jogging in circles around the tiny island screaming, “Fuck!” Al says, “How ‘bout callin’ it Crackers, Fruitcake, Screwballs and Nuts?” “Shhhhh,” Brian says with one hand in the air, “can you hear that?” No one speaks. “Neither can I,” Brian says, shaking his head, as a single tear slides down his cheek.

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[I Just Wasn't Made For These Times]

Day 34.

Sometime in the middle of the night, Peter O’Toole showed up, drunker than I’d ever seen any human being, ferried by a heavily-tattooed native man in a canoe. How they had found us, I would never know. O’Toole’s could barely stand and his speech was incomprehensible. He tried to bugger me in my hammock, but I fended him off with a badminton racket. Suddenly Brian was standing in the door of the hut, naked, covered in something sticky that smelled like cling peach syrup, with his own name written across his chest in toothpaste. In his left hand, he was holding Shelby; in his right, his bass guitar. “Mother!” he shouted, and embraced the crumpled thespian with all 283 pounds of his mighty, insane, sticky nudeness. “Let’s make some magic!” he whooped, and dragged O’Toole out of the hut by one arm, leaving a deep rut in the sand.

Day 36.

Recording for 48-hours straight. Everything from spectacularly weird, complex masterpieces to a a three hour-long version of “Go Tell Aunt Rhodie.” O’Toole tried swimming away several times, but Brian finally tied him to a tree, leaving one of O’Toole’s hands free into which he placed an uncapped bottle of bourbon, said, “Happy Mother’s Day,” and kissed the old man on the mouth. O’Toole actually seemed to be enjoying himself after awhile, and even requested “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Ol’ Kit Bag.” By my calculations, we have just enough booze to keep O’Toole alive, and way more than enough jars of Goober Grape to get this sucker in the can by Christmas.

mrbrianwilson

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[Good Vibrations]

~~~

I Led the Horse to Water

because it said it was really thirsty. “Water’s
right there—go for it, horsey,” I said. “I’m not
gonna drink from that puddle of bilge,” it said
disgustedly, then again, “but I’m really, really
thirsty.” I looked around. The nearest thing
I could see that wasn’t a bush or a mountain
was a gas station, maybe about 10 miles away
through a curtain of the wavy heat lines coming
off the desert. I could probably get there and
back before the meaner, wilder animals came out
from under their rocks to howl and hunt. I explained
what I had in mind, expecting a whinny or nuzzle
in gratitude. It was a really long walk—I could
die! “I wasn’t talking to you,” said the horse staring
off in the other direction, “I was talking to no one,
to myself maybe, to the mysterious force that led
me here.” “Uh, I led you here, you idiot. This is
my puddle,” I gestured to the little wooden sign
that read, “Jen’s Puddle” in crudely carved letters.
“And you could at least thank me, you big jerk.”
The horse gestured to a littler sign next to it
that read, “Do Not Drink. Poison.” He raised
his eyebrows and waited. “Well…you
get me all nervous!”

26396_438316916520_784391520_5260770_5273075_n

Jennifer L. Knox’s new book of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, will be published by Bloof Books this fall. Her work has appeared three times in the Best American Poetry series, and in publications such as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares and others.  She wants you to know that she no longer absolutely hates The Beach Boys.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.  Check out previous POP essays here: http://pop.coldfrontmag.com/

Posted in poets off poetry


Donnelly, Nutter, Rohrer, Zucker in Chelsea

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

rachel zuckertimothy donnelly

Boog City‘s reading series d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegrades press featured Wave Books authors Timothy Donnelly, Geoffrey Nutter, Matthew Rohrer and Rachel Zucker on Tuesday, May 25th at ACA Galleries in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Zucker featured new poems (including one pre-recorded piece) and poems from her National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated Museum of Accidents. Donnelly read the title poem and other poems from The Cloud Corporation (forthcoming 2010). Rohrer read poems from Rise Up, A Plate of Chicken, A Green Light and Satellite along with some newer poems. Nutter read from Christopher Sunset (forthcoming 2010) among other titles. 

–photos Joanne Deming

Posted in news


spotlight: Joshua Poteat

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Poteat

Just over six months ago, a book refreshed my consistent need to electro-shock great Emersonian ideals, be it a squirrel trying its hand at evolution in Prospect Park or a cardinal singing at dawn in Alaska. Joshua Poteat’s Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World (2009, VQR Series, University of Georgia Press) does precisely that. Its pastoral qualities somehow awaken and enliven a spiritual fiber but not an evangelical abhorrence or a treehugger-boredom (and this, in an era of poetry where “pastoral” or “agrarian” are dirty words). The book sings a necessary tone in a world that speeds up transactions with inconvenient truths. I decided to (electronically) sit down with Mr. Poteat and ask him a bundle of questions.

— Ken L. Walker
———————————-

Do you draw, sketch, paint or make use of any artistic medium other than poetry?

Not exactly. I don’t quite have the talent…but I do make light boxes, which are mostly just any sort of box (metal/wood/etc.) that I hinge on a glass panel with a collaged image and backlight it with a bulb. I’ve sold a few on Etsy, at a few shows around Richmond, a few are in “private collections” (which means “sitting on my grandfather’s sideboard”), nothing fancy. However, last year my good friend Roberto Ventura and I concocted an installation proposal for a light-based art show called InLight here in Richmond. Rob is a designer/architect and we both know a couple of things about light/art/text, so we thought we could collaborate and make something reasonably viewable. We didn’t realize the show attracted a lot of national video/installation/light-based artists of great talent (we’re not trained artists), but we got in.

Our goal, beyond anything else, was to bring attention to the unmarked slave cemetery that lies under a downtown Virginia Commonwealth University parking lot by honoring those interred there, including Gabriel, the man who led the failed Richmond slave rebellion in 1800 and who was executed and buried along with 26 other slaves. So, in a huge, vacant, crumbling building, we built a temporary memorial with 13 concrete columns that contained two illuminated images each; 3 huge screens of burlap onto which we projected text from my poems about Gabriel/Richmond; various bird-oriented images of historic weight; a lovely, abstract video by Elizabeth Reinkordt of light through trees; and a large, spot-lit bird’s nest of sorts made from metal and sticks at the far end of the room. All of this was self-contained within a crumbling store. No one was allowed to enter. It was viewable only through the glass windows of the storefront. Outside, we set up speakers that played a loop of ambient, crackling voices from slave narratives recorded in the 1920s. The recordings were made on wax cylinders that had been digitized, so the voices themselves were crumbling and could not be understood. For a one-night-only show, it was tons of work, but we pulled it off. The main juror of the show, a curator from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, awarded us Best in Show.

Forgive the long explanation! This was so outside my normal process of creating, that it doesn’t feel like a part of me…thus I can ramble on and brag about it. All for Gabriel. Two white dudes coming together in the former capital of the slave trade and making a place for ghosts to relax.

Here are some photographs of our piece, taken by the wonderful Heidi Hess.

Tell me at least five of your favorite films . . .

Here are five randoms that I love:

George Washington/David Gordon Green

My Winnipeg/Guy Maddin

After Life/Hirokazu Kore-eda

My Life to Live/Godard

Days of Heaven/Terrance Malick

And likewise for musicians, bands, performers . . .

I played drums in assorted punk/hardcore bands over the years, then gradually as I got older was influenced by mellower and quieter folks, so quiet, in fact, that I have completely stopped playing drums. Bands I like range from Rites of Spring to The Smiths to Dananananaykroyd to Fionn Regan to Land of Talk to Jawbreaker to Maps and Atlases to Laura Gibson.

Where is your ideal place to live?

I’m extremely attracted to bleak landscapes…so probably Iceland (not as cold as you think) which contains many different versions of bleakness…or somewhere outside of Tucson…Bisbee, maybe (the cutest little town in Arizona). Or in any lighthouse.

I saw you read in Louisville, Kentucky as part of the Sarabande series and you read a poem about an abolitionist which I remember being very moved by. The man you wrote away from, about, evinced a feeling of John Brown.

I think you’re talking about my Gabriel poems. No John Brown poems for me, but they do share many characteristics. John Brown was born in 1800, the year that Gabriel attempted the slave rebellion in Richmond. Not sure if everyone knows Gabriel’s story, but if he and his group would have succeeded, it would have changed everything for the south…60 years sooner. He was planning to take the governor’s mansion, then the city, then the state. A huge storm came in the night of the rebellion and washed away roads and bridges, which slowed their progress, then some got cold feet, started to talk, told their “masters” and that was it.

I’ve always thought that Gabriel’s spirit was somehow passed to Brown. If not, Brown surely was inspired by Gabriel, due to his similar rebellion in 1859. These guys were not fucking around. Brown reportedly said, when referring to the pacifist movement against slavery at the time, “These men are all talk. What we need is action — action!” Some people still think of him as a terrorist. WWJBD? is a good question to ask yourself every now and then.

Not that you asked, but I wanted to mention Gabriel and how unbelievable it is to me that there is a parking lot a mere 8 blocks from where I type this…actual bodies underneath the asphalt…med school students driving their Mini Coopers over the graves…prescription pain medication spilling from their pockets…and no one with any power is doing anything about making this right. Richmond is full of endless layers of pain and history and blood and rage. The South is still not dead here. Drive down Monument Avenue and you’ll see it. Robert E. Lee is on his horse, facing south, along with J.E.B. Stuart, Jackson, and the rest of them. On Martin Luther King Day, which is called Lee-Jackson-King Day in Virginia, a group of Civil War re-enactors “guard” the Lee monument in honor of him. One day I will rent some Union uniforms and attack them and send them back to whatever time machine brought them here.

My next manuscript attempts to deal with all of this. Gabriel, the city, my own family’s history of slave ownership. Have I mentioned that one yet? It’s a sad road to travel, believe me. How do I write about the horrific nature of slavery from the “oppressor’s” point of view without stripping the dead of the dignity they deserve and without valorizing the crime itself…about history without merely using it for the sake of a poem…about suffering without simply using it as a subject for art…and attempt to treat suffering, and ultimately death, in a way that presents it honestly and with proper respect, while moving toward an understanding, a statement of what that death means, of why we should remember it? I have no idea.

You’re obviously influenced (and I hope inspired) by Larry Levis (as am I). How did you meet his work and why did you take so much away with you?

Larry is my guy. He always has been, even now. I had the chance to work with him at VCU. He’s the reason I came to Richmond, and maybe he’s the reason I’ve stayed. I think I was too young to really know what I was doing in grad school. I was 23, a little shy, from a small southern town, and mostly nervous, especially around Larry, who was brilliant and hilarious and beyond anything I could ever be as a poet. Now that I know he was working on the poems that became Elegy, I feel guilty for taking up his time.

He died my second year of school. A few of my classmates and I helped to clean out his house. It was strange for all of us. I wore a pair of his jeans for a few years. I still have his framed Albers poster…from a show at the Guggenheim in ‘88, and an old snare drum that had knife slits stabbed through the head. I was going through a box of random papers of his that day and found a checkbook. On the back of it, Larry had written, “the more you are, the cheaper death seems.” We took most of his stuff in my truck down the street to a Salvation Army. There are people all over Richmond that have Larry’s pants, shirts, pots, chairs. Who are those people?

I also had the chance to help put together Elegy. Well, by help I mean I photocopied his handwritten drafts to send to Phil Levine and David St. John. I stood over the English department copier weeping and reading those poems, trying to see through his horrible handwriting, because there was nothing else I could do.

Around the same time Larry died, both my father and my grandfather died. It wasn’t a good time for me. I graduated and didn’t write for a few years. Why should I? I worked extremely lame temp jobs…one at Philip Morris, the cigarette company (during Richmond summers, if we get a nice wind from the south, we can smell the sickly sweetness of tobacco being processed). I worked for a horrible man who had Crohn’s disease and loved model trains. Or maybe it was that he loved Crohn’s and had a model train disease. I forget. I created endless PowerPoint presentations for him. There is a small circle of hell waiting for me as I speak. After a few years of this, I picked up Larry’s The Dollmaker’s Ghost, then Winter Stars, then Elegy, and they brought me back to poems. Larry saved me.

And Mary Ruefle.

Mary Ruefle is a mostly new influence compared to Larry. My wife, Allison Titus (who is a better poet than I), got to work with Mary at Vermont College. She would send Allison wonderful letters and envelopes filled with dried flowers and acorns and seeds. I never met her, but found her work incredible. She pushes through to a new kind of lyric, irreverent and otherworldly. Her book of erasures, A Little White Shadow, suddenly brought me back to surrealist tricks at their best, and I used the same technique in my new book (in the first appendix). It’s nothing new, but it’s enjoyable, you know? At least for me. I need more joy in my life.

What are some of your rules for these three different forms (staggered line breaks, prose blocks, sparse spacing)?

I started working with a four-line stanza with certain indentations while finishing up Ornithologies, and it carried through to the new book. There’s no other explanation than aesthetics, how the lines look on the page. It just felt right. The placement. The space to breathe. The degeneration.

The prose blocks in Illustrating the Machine… are for my wife. She was getting tired of all the indents in the other poems, and thought I should switch it up a little. I’m not exactly happy with them. They don’t feel quite right to me, but the wife likes them.

As for the sparse spacing, those are the erasure poems! Surprise! They’re what I like to call the ruins of poems that appear earlier in the book. As if the poems had aged many years and this is what is left of them. A shell of sorts. Some may call it “editing,” but I ignore those people. The sparseness comes from cutting away parts of text to get at the text beneath it. Ted Genoways, the editor of the series, wanted me to lose that section, as does a lady in Tampa Bay who left a review of the book on Amazon. For the record, I don’t mean for these erasures to be seen as the final section of the book. It’s an appendix, similar to ones found in old science books. An addendum of sorts, set apart from the rest of the poems. As are the plates in the second appendix. They exist for reference only. The plates have nothing to do with the poems, really. It’s kind of nice that people care (well, two people), but what does it matter, when it comes down to it, that there’s a weirdo appendix with erasure poems in my silly little book? It can’t matter that much in the scheme of things. I mean, how many people are actually going to read this thing?! So it was nice of Ted to let me have my way. It’s how the book formed itself, and I wanted to stay true to it. Sorry, lady in Tampa Bay. Take heart, though, my dear, because we all lose in the end.

Did you have a particular audience in mind as you were compiling and sequencing Illustrating the Machine?

I’m not sure I ever think in terms of audience, at least not for this book. I had a feeling that some folks may take this as my “experimental” book (whatever that means), due to it veering away from the straight narratives of Ornithologies. It’s not, really. It’s stranger and maybe not as accessible, but it still has hints of my Levis fascination, and Charles Wright rip-offs. I see it as one long poem, but don’t tell anyone else that. What happened was…I found this book of scientific engravings, assembled by a German man named J.G. Heck in 1851, who died a few years after assembling the book. The engravings themselves are fine accomplishments, but the titles of the engravings are what got me, and this became my project. Writing poems to go with the titles. And imagining a voice for this anonymous J.G. Heck, who I could find out literally nothing about, and combining that imagined voice with my own. So the audience was me, is what I’m trying to say. And a lady in Tampa Bay.  

Do you honestly think a machine “makes the world”?

Nah, ain’t no machine gonna make this place. But if you’ve seen the sculpture that the title is based on, The Machine That Makes The World, by Alice Aycock, you would think it could be true. She is absolutely wonderful.

Aycock is wonderful. Her work at the Storm King outdoor sculpture museum is pretty breath-taking. Her sculptures somehow remind me that the universe and/or cosmos is interconnected in the sense that nature, human beings, god, and whatever, are entwined in one entire system. But, is that true, or are all these things separate entities?

Oh boy. I have no freaking idea. I believe in very little, despite all the mentions of God in that book of mine. It would be nice if it was all connected, but I seriously doubt it. We’ve just invented lots of things to keep us occupied while we’re here, so we don’t notice that we’re not connected to anything at all. Like writing poems, for example. And sports. Soccer is my favorite distraction. It should be for everyone, as it is obviously the superior sport.

Would you (Facebook-wise) BECOME A FAN of American Transcendentalism if, in fact, you’re not already?

I’m not a current fan, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t be. The forced spiritualness of it all throws me off a little, but I like Thoreau. “To be awake is to be alive.”  He’s hard not to like. Emerson, too.

I always feel unsure (which is what makes it such a transcendental notion) exactly what the term twilight means or refers to, aside from terribly-played vampires? What do you personally think of as twilight?

There are scientific explanations for everything, including twilight. There’s a strange little diagram/engraving in Heck’s book, entitled Illustrating the Theory of Twilight. Believe me, the title is better than the engraving. For me, it is the most beautiful time of day. I could live inside that color blue. That’s all I need to know.

 

You’re at a café with J.G. Heck . . . what the heck do you ask him?

First I would need to take German lessons. After that, I would ask him my favorite question to ask people: “How dare you?!” Actually, I’ve never really pictured him as anything human. I like to think of him as just a voice, behind the years and the machines and the bones and the bread.

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Posted in features


Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Jennifer L. Knox at The New Yorker

Posted in this morning


Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

by Joshua Poteat
University of Georgia Press 2010
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

7.5
” the wild / horses / guts spread / across the field “

poteat coverIn 1979, Alice Aycock designed a sculpture that resembles the foundation of a peculiar west coast house, or simply like a boat stuck in time.  The sculpture is the size of two apartments—thirty eight feet long, eight feet high—and puts the uncomplicated tool list of steel, wood, pulleys and a revolving drum on display.  The Machine That Makes the World floats in the Sheldon Gallery at the University of Nebraska; it is also the title of Joshua Poteat’s newest book, which transmogrifies J.G. Heck’s 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science into poems.

The book opens with an epigraph from Fernando Pessoa:  “Science is nothing more than a children’s game at dusk, / a desire to catch the shadows of birds and stop / the shadows of grass in the wind.”  A gear right-away leaps into the prologue-esque poem, “Illustrating the Illustrators,” where Poteat’s protagonist (perhaps Heck, perhaps the lyrical poet his self) claims that the “pencil” is “a machine,” as the last line seizes the reader’s shirt with a carcass grip: “We said, If death is like this, then give us more.”

A close spot later, “Illustrating the Seventeenth Century” (interestingly following in the footsteps of the hyper-realist Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal) begins in a day’s residue:  “Evening comes, black wig of roots after the storm // Dandelions cataract the ditches, deserted as stars.” Later in the poem, the question “What is suffering?” gets retorted in this way “. . . It just means too much rain / can make a weed drunk with courage [. . . ] Given’s as good as gone.”

Each poem in the primary sections gracefully appraises one of Heck’s “plates,” (illustrations, basically)—black and white shaded diagrams of hand skeletons, open doors, light-ray angles, planetary orbits, bridges, telescopes, et cetera.  Some “plates” reappear in facsimile form as an appendix to Poteat’s book. Heck’s quite the wormhole, having no Wikipedia page, while basically being historically evaporated; he thus emerges as an extremely interesting choice for Poteat in the sense that the emotional spectrum Heck’s “plates” conjure are not bright or flowery but perversely ornate, very similar to an Aycock sculpture.

A majority of the “Illustrating . . .” (as almost all are titled) poems reek of the cow-patch where Nietzsche and Emerson possibly stomped and danced together, seldom if at all tiring of the surrounding landscape’s guts.  Poteat rarely desists from disgustingly direct truth-telling, posing as a borrower, not a manipulator and putting things back in their heavily original places while subtly juxtaposing them from the changes they’ve endured over time.  This kind of licensed pilfering remains an inward act but also shares the American purpose to bastardize the outdoors and, simultaneously, forget that farms are being turned into bleak gray laboratories.

There is also a lyrical scrupulousness throughout, best exemplified in the poem “Illustrating the Thirteen Transits of Mercury in the Nineteenth Century.”  This is a long, sequenced split-series prose poem dealing with Heck’s drawing of Mercury’s annual solar angles. One portion of the sequence looks like this:

Mercury asleep under the translator’s wife

I’ve never been alive. I mean fully, as a barn
becomes itself as it burns. I’ve been trying to see
how long I could keep a thing like that forgotten.
It wouldn’t be right to give it away now.

The conceptual framework continually stays in tact, in part because of the primary setup (Heck, Aycock), but also because the alteration of poetic form and content is parcel to what David Wojahn pointed out to be a “Cabinet of Wonders.”  That cabinet contains intestines, moths, slugs, footprints, grass blades, gnats, briars, pigs, puffbirds, moorcocks, wrens, fireflies, squirrels, and a “fat ale-wife”.  It’s an insane, boiling soup that never seems to violently erupt.  One of the better perusals of that cabinet appears in “Illustrating an Answer to a Question Through the Order in Which a Bird Reveals Letters by Eating the Grains Set on Top of Them.”

I do not need muffins. The simple things most please me:
                                    six wrens climb their grass ladders each evening

before gnats gather, the goat rakes out a place to sleep

                among the pines, pink moths chew wool scraps,

and the gypsy boys piss into canoes at the bridge
                                If you are the Lord then we are equally men.

Here, Poteat exhibits a gristled care similar to Larry Levis, Charles Wright, or even Etheridge Knight yet completely separates his self from that vein of conciliatory conscience-analysis and draws attention to the nominal nature that throbs right outside the front room’s window. The surrounding creatures are, for the most part, commonplace organisms that have evolved alongside human beings, and thus, have evolved with the machine. They beg us to concentrate on that very notion.

Poteat does get some things wrong, especially when he tows the perforation of meaning/non-meaning. In that sense, he periodically implements a questionable sentimentality that lazily pours a varnish over clichés.  Examples: “for what can one do but let the world happen?” and “Our god then was not the same god now.” and “all I could give, I gave.” and “Always keep the brightest for last.”

Some folks may also find trouble with the variance in form; he moves from indented choreographic tabular line breaks to prose blocks to (it’s true) sparsely spaced erasures.  Poteat presents an appendix which acts as the final section of poetry which also erases many of the poems which appeared earlier on in the book.  It’s a fascinating experiment that also permits a new reading of the preceding poems while training the normally-prepped reader for a fresh language world.  Look here, at “the      ebb”:

I              had enough of
                         the evening
the wild
                                               horse’s
                guts            spread
    across the                                      field
        saying,             here,
                                       love  ,          here.

The breathing room that the stringing of poems into sections and appendices allows makes reading the entire book in one sitting much simpler, compartmentalized as it may appear.  Yet, also, one could read a single section per day.  If the entire book were to be in prose block format or set as the above erasures sans segments, it would possess nowhere near the same lively affectations that it does as it is in its full form.

I recently interviewed Joshua Poteat, an incredibly modest man that seemed to see things in a realistically uncomplicated sort of way.  He also seemed to treat the non-popularity of poetry with a healthy, gray practicality.  The greatest triumph of his book as an objet d’art is its delicate recognition of Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “the only horrible thing in the world is ennui.” Perhaps the gnats and the fireflies are full of more crazed existence than most of us.

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Posted in reviews