reviews

by Ander Monson
Sarabande Books 2010
Reviewed by Clay Matthews

“…even that was gone.”

It’s tough to imagine what Icarus might have felt when he realized his wings were gone. Fear? Regret? Or was the beauty of flying and being so close to the sun enough to keep a smile on his face on the way down, plunging into the vast water below. I’ve always been a fan of the elegy in poetry and in life for its ambivalent circumnavigation of what’s gone, what’s been lost. In Ander Monson’s new book, The Available World, we find a loose retelling of the Icarus story, and a speaker who’s trying to come to terms with a technological world where nearly everything is ephemeral except for the constants of human emotion and questions about our interaction with the world.

Brian Mchale wrote that the shift from modernism to postmodernism is best characterized as a shift from epistemology to ontology—from questions about knowledge to questions about being. I’ve never been that good with philosophy or theory, and for me, it’s tough to draw a line in the sand between the two -ologies. The ocean always comes back to wash it all away. In this book, Monson finds a way to bridge the questions and apprehensions that a technological world presents to an individual—questions about self, what’s real, what we can or should hang on to when everything seems to eventually wind up in code or buried under re-runs and Wal-Mart bags. In the poem “Sometimes the Air Surrounding Me Is Sudden with Flowers,” we find a speaker waiting with others in an emergency room watching E.R. What saves this poem, and the book, from falling into some ironical gesture toward an absolute hyper-reality, though, is Ander’s attention to the details of the other people in the room, and the circumstances of a tough world:

We are surrounded by: black eyes,
blood blisters, broken legs,
bruises in the shapes of circus animals,
a variety of burns.

The list goes on, and grows more strange and brutal, until the final couplet of the poem: “It’s as if I’ve never seen / the world in which I live before.”

There’s often a moment of awareness in these poems that shakes the speaker into interaction. This book is filled with sermons—“Sermon in Ribbons,” “Maybe Visionary Sermon,” “Work-Related Injury Sermon,” “Sermon for the Day After the Last Missed Apocalypse Prediction,” and so on. The sermon form here, though, is not didactic or easily described, much like Ander’s treatment of the elegy and the apocalypse. There are no easy answers, only the brief moments in life we find ourselves comfortable in—in laughter, love, sex, etc. Even Icarus can’t help out, come back from the dead (though never really gone) in “Slow Dance with Icarus,” as he states “This is not a lesson, / and I don’t know and haven’t learned or stayed / in school no more than him or you.”

Monson carries out a dappled narrative of a family in this book—traumatized by catastrophe, frequented by a brother with no arms and Star Trek and Stand By Me actor Wil Wheaton. There are plenty of laughs here, tragedy, and gizmos that scoop us up and spit us out as random digits; in short, you’ll find a buffet of the available world here: Suave, Chevies, zombies and getting hitched in Vegas, to name a few. This world presents itself in moments, and then those moments vanish, as in the final lines of the book, Monson writes: 

Did I say sorry for the house? I think
it had collapsed already. There was a zero
there last time I saw it: then even that was gone.

But, I’m usually an optimist, so I see those things living on in memory—whether that memory is a hard drive, a mind, or some deeper collective memory of the world. That’s my take on it, though, and like Icarus, I don’t have any good answers as to whether or not that’s right. So buy this book. Find out for yourself.

*

by Dorothea Lasky
Ugly Duckling Presse 2010
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

“…from the earth into the brain”

When I agreed to review this chapbook, I had no idea quite what I was in for. The book is very small—a single pamphlet stitched signature—and the entire text only takes about twenty minutes to read. But I’ve found the text to be significantly more compelling than its tiny size might suggest. I have been working and reworking this review, and it’s ultimately split me into two reviewers. The curmudgeon in me feels compelled to respond to the argument, to dissect it, locate it and respond to it. The poet in me feels compelled to point out the pleasures of the text, to celebrate them. I’ve tried to do both at once, and I seem unable. So here I am as two reviewers. Perhaps you can put both of me back together. But order the book. Share it with your friends. Teach it to your students. Show it to your teachers. You won’t be sorry.

The Curmudgeon’s Review:

Poetry seems so frequently in need of rescuing that one might be forgiven for thinking of Poetry as a damsel in eternal distress, a sort of Nell Fenwick forever being tied to the railroad tracks by an endless parade of Snidely Whiplashes. Dorothea Lasky is the latest Dudley Do-Right to come to Poetry’s rescue. This time the evil villain is “projects”—both the poets who write poetic projects and the readers who think of poetry in terms of projects.

The argument of Lasky’s manifesto is two-fold, and fairly straightforward: 1) We’ve come to conceive of poetry as something to discuss and contemplate, rather than something to do or love. 2) Poetry is defined by the experience of uncertainty and non-linearity, and since a “project” is linear and certain, a “project” is anti-poetic. If the first part of this argument sounds familiar, it’s because it’s fairly close to the case Susan Sontag put forward in “Against Interpretation.” The word “project” for Lasky functions as an analog to Sontag’s “interpretation.” Talking about the thing is no substitute for the thing itself. I think that Lasky would solidly endorse Sontag’s conclusion: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Lasky is diagnosing a slightly different malaise than Sontag, though unlike Sontag she puts herself in the position of having to define the art she defends. Still, the conclusion is the same: learn to love the poem (artwork) itself.

Lasky’s prose is lucid and chatty, and with the exception of a footnoted reference to Vygotsky, never explicitly theoretical or erudite—despite the clear intellectual underpinnings of her thought. It is refreshing to see such friendly and smart prose that makes moves indebted to the last forty years of literary theory without ever having to weigh down the prose with that history. But I found the conversational tone cloying. From the first page:

I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain. I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a “project.” I don’t know. That seems wrong, too. Poets and scientists are very similar in a lot of ways.

I greatly enjoy Lasky’s prose style, but her insistence that we’re watching an unrevised monologue in process (“I don’t know. That seems wrong, too”) irks me. It suggests a blurring of the poet and essayist’s tools, and that might make sense if she weren’t at work distinguishing poetry from not-poetry. She seems to stylistically pop her gum because she wants her audience to underestimate her. Lasky is incredibly gifted, but I could never fully settle into the charm of her prose without disregarding the thread of her argument. And I could never fully embrace the argument—despite the fact that I agree with its conclusion.

Lasky identifies two senses of the word “project.” The first sense is to understand poems as having goals or effects that we name as the poem’s “project.” While it is true that to speak of Emily Dickinson’s “project” might be to reduce her work to a single goal, that goal is not exclusive. Should one really not read Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson because she seems concerned with a particular “project” of Dickinson’s? How different is “project” from “lens of analysis”? It is true that in the last century, critical texts have often come to vie with the texts they analyze for primacy—but does anyone really think Eve Sedgwick has more readers than Herman Melville? Usually, primary and secondary works exist in symbiosis. Yes, bad criticism is reductive, but to isolate a single goal within a poetic body of work for analysis hardly seems unfair or undesirable. Sedgwick sends you back to Melville, and Melville sends you back to Sedgwick. You don’t suffer a loss with each analysis—you enrich your experience. Thinking of a work as a project doesn’t limit you from seeing it as a different project (or a multiplicity of projects) later. And I suspect that I’m not the only reader who has been sent to a primary text in order to understand a secondary text—at which point the secondary text does the primary text a great service. Identifying a project can be a way of finding readers for the poem itself.

The second sense of the word “project” is as a generative method for poets. In the example she gives of a project, a poet friend of hers goes to an art museum every day for a month and writes about one artwork per visit. At a reading, she hears him read the poems and they are bad poems. But he writes an essay about the project, and the essay is a good essay. Lasky is frustrated that after the reading the poet is congratulated for his essay and for his project, while the poems go undiscussed. “No one talked to him about his poems,” Lasky writes, “His poems were not important to his project. His project was important to his project.” But here the problem is bad poems, interesting essays and the economy of attention. The project is the symptom, not the disease, though I share Lasky’s frustration. Lasky even goes on to name poets and movements whose projects have yielded poems she loves. Her assertion, “just because you have constructed a project does not mean you have written a poem,” seems unassailable to me. But Lasky has now put herself in the position of having to define capital P poetry in order to distinguish between the good results of fertile projects and the sterile projects that yield nothing in the way of real poems.

The argument for “real poetry” ultimately falls flat as well because Lasky insists on the attention of the reader—and poetry, as James Longenbach reminds us, cannot be judged by the number of readers. It also undermines her book. If, as Lasky assures us, “Real poetry is a party,” she bears the burden of demonstrating why the essay or the project is not a party. In her anecdote about the art museum project, she has perhaps turned up at the wrong party, but everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves. In her anecdote, she alone seems to be concerned that the poems are bad. Why can’t a project be a party? Why can’t talking about a project be a party? If the joy in poetry is the pleasure of the reader, why deny that pleasure to the audience for an essay?

She’s on sturdier ground with her argument that “Poetry has everything to do with existing in a realm of uncertainty.” But will this exclusively define poetry? Many memoirs vividly evoke the uncertainty that the author experiences concerning his or her own life. Lasky later narrows her definition, insisting on the non-linear and uncertainty of poetry as its defining features, but as is always the case when pinning down the “poem”—which is perhaps the obligation of anyone who chooses to confidently speak of “Real Poetry”—this may be more definitional of lyric. And after at least a decade of the “lyric essay,” it’s hard to reserve those qualities for poems. And once she gets to the idea that, in real poetry, “the issues of the self become one with the universal” she has lost me. Certainly this idea of the “universal” is appealing and commonplace, but it’s ultimately an empty term. It simply means that it’s supposed to have a widespread appeal, and we return to the economy of attention. I understand the appeal of the word “universal” but it always feels like a way to expel the people who don’t like what you like from the universe. It’s a mystification. And again, assuming that the “universal” is indeed an useful category, wouldn’t memoir also be a place where the issues of the self become one with the universal? You can say that a poem should not mean, but be, to quote a similar formulation against the project-ization of poetry, but there’s not a lot to say after that. It’s the end of a conversation, not the beginning.

Lasky does acknowledge that there are projects that have yielded results she adores. She calls on Flarf as an example of good poems in and of themselves. Flarf began as an attempt to create the worst poetry the poet could generate. It was a hoax to reveal the editorial absence at the center of a crooked poetry contest. Necessary to the pleasure of lines like “Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true / big birds make / big doo!” is the recognition that this is terrible poetry—that this could never ever be mistaken for “real poetry.” K. Silem Mohammad’s “Sought Poems,” something of Apologia for Flarf (or the strain of Flarf based on Google searches), makes the same point as Lasky. As Mohammad demonstrates the process of refining a search into a poem, he is clear that the poem does matter; the poem is the end result.

Lasky is continually appealing to a certain kind of common sense that feels too easy to me. If reading the poem is degree zero, and discussing (or reading about) the poem is degree one, then you can praise pleasures of reading at degree zero, but I would hope not at the expense of degree one. Lasky kept reminding of me students who keep wanting to know why they can’t just enjoy the poems. Well, you can, but you didn’t need to come to class for that. And if the existence of secondary texts destroys your enjoyment of primary texts, it’s within your rights to ignore them; it’s not within your rights to call for their destruction or arrest.

The Poet’s Review:

In identifying something of a malaise among contemporary poets, Lasky insists on the fecund pleasures of poetry, and pushes back against the way in which poets seem to think in terms of grant applications rather than poems. As Lasky points out, once the poem is not the primary unit of value, the “project” is a dead letter, the skin that covers a rotting corpse. As you might guess from this metaphor, the poem is suffocated by the project. Once you talk about the poems instead of reading them, the poem starts to die.

Lasky’s lyric essay blurs the lines between the poetry and prose, allowing herself to think out loud, retrace her thoughts, hedge her conclusions and generally play around with the ideas. Lasky’s prose is lucid and chatty, and by bringing in a poet’s tools, she undoes much of the division that she seems to be setting up. From the first page:

I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain, rather than things that are planted within the earth by the brain. I think a poet intuits a poem and a scientist conducts a “project.” I don’t know. That seems wrong, too. Poets and scientists are very similar in a lot of ways.

Lasky—like William Carlos William’s in Spring and All—sets out to find the boundaries between poetry and prose, but ultimately finds that line impossible to trace. It’s not a line at all, but almost a no-man’s-land or demilitarized zone that one can enter but at great risk. Lasky never calls out for help; a single reference to Vygotsky indicates the erudition at work in her thinking. Like a poet, she metabolizes the thought of others, rather than directly citing it or quoting it. Like a poet, she foregrounds persona and monologue, collapsing the division between thought and emotion, between argument and monologue. Like a poet, her writing embodies (rather than expresses) her concerns, showing that prose and poetry have fuzzy boundaries, finding herself in the poetic terrain of uncertainty even as we watch the persona struggle toward a conclusion.

Lasky considers the project as a double dilemma. The first part of the problem is that people replace the poem with interpretations of the poem. As everyone knows, this is a problem. Having someone recount the plot of The Merchant of Venice is not watching The Merchant of Venice. Discussing Elizabethan thoughts on Italian communities built on same sex desire and their representation in The Merchant of Venice is also not watching The Merchant of Venice. Fair enough. This is old hat. But, the second part is far more interesting—the current vogue among poets for writing “projects.” But Lasky never gets specific. She never delves into the poets one might accuse of writing projects (Anne Carson’s Nox? Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris? Jeffrey Conway, Lynn Crosbie and David Trinidad’s Phoebe 2002?) because she’s only really concerned with bad poems. She only offers an anecdote about bad poems that come from a good project because she’s not interested in naming names. She knows that if you’ve picked up this little chapbook, you’re probably already a poet, you probably already have standards. The point is not that you shouldn’t have a project, the point is that you shouldn’t let a project fool you into forgetting your standards for a poem. Lasky even goes so far as include Flarf as an example of a project that has yielded poems she loves, which further undercuts the possibility of ever really defining poetry. The genius of Flarf is that you can’t really tell in advance what’s a cheap joke and what’s a lasting poem. Gary Sullivan’s “Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true / big birds make / big doo!” is so satisfying because we get to congratulate ourselves on being able to tell good from bad. We know that it’s bad, and yet it’s so gloriously bad, we can’t stop going back to it. It reminds us that sometimes the scale of good to bad is structured like Pac Man’s maze—sometimes you go off one edge to find yourself on the other side.

Lasky’s speaker maintains that her primary allegience is to the uncertainty of poetry, and by playing out that uncertainty in the prose, it’s fairly clear that this work is a prose poem itself. The drawings that accompany the prose seem to be from a children’s book and show melancholy children in what seems to be a summer camp, until you realize that they’re chowing down on a recently killed buffalo, hyena style, and carrying around knives. The pictures heighten the sense of play, and warn the reader to enjoy the essay, and not to get overly concerned with the argument. After all, a curmudgeonly reader could spend weeks and weeks writing a ridiculously long essay trying to figure out what distresses him about an argument that ultimately tells him what everyone already knows: Poetry is not a project. Poetry is about pleasure. A poem is a poem… what else is there to say?

*

by Nate Pritts
Cooper Dillon Books 2009
Reviewed by Steven Karl

“this rigid world”

What to make of Nate Pritts’ The Wonderfull Yeare?  The book is unabashedly informed by Romance poetics, especially the pastoral, yet the collection feels completely modern. The Wonderfull Yeare is divided into sections that mirror a shepherd’s calendar; appropriately, its shepherd suffers a terminal detachment from the very landscape in which he plants his feet. The book starts with a Spring Psalter.  “ Tulips- An invocation” begins, “Every year it’s the same damn thing, / a constant red ache.”  Thus our psalm for spring begins with an invocation, which nods to Plath’s wiry angst. Later in the poem, Pritts writes:

if my heart had knees those knees would fold.
A flimsy curtain separates Memory from

Imagination. Do I remember a better life than this?

Here we find a shepherd, tasked with the caretaking of both sheep and land, yet is a little lost in the care-taking of self. The “flimsy curtain” hangs throughout the poems, sometimes casting shadows of doubt upon the life being lived, always dividing our speaker from his landscape. It is this tension between the exterior duties and the interior questions collapsing into one that makes this book such a success. Pritts sculpts coteries of words that add and subtract in images and idea, balances limned in the space between action and imagination, which might be called the space of wisdom. From “Spring Psalter,”

Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming
twig half-sunk in spring mud & the Nature that allows
such delicate & lasting atrocity.

Darling, darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach.

“Darling,” becomes the hinge-word for supplication. Later in this long poem we get, “Sunlight through branch-bone, the cool of night & pink.” The price of accessing beauty is possessing knowledge of the extent to which beauty does not consider you in turn:

& the landscape doesn’t care about me at all. Fifteen ants

just beyond my backyard fence…

Is there a better life than this?

…

… so many elements
of this landscape don’t care about me at all. Fifteen ants
crawl all over the mint plant…

As reader we are drawn into the season, the near-comic expression of the shepherd’s lament, the atrocity that life blooms and continues. The ants continue to work, the mint grows, the poet needs nature, but nature doesn’t need the poet.  Closer to the end of this cycle he writes, “It was the spring of getting-by, of starting up, purged bodies/ transient, changing, always holding on & then the summer & then…” “Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming/ Darling, even in this are indicative things. Proclaim with me, /”

Although the “darling” never blooms, the speaker tinged with melancholy clings and invites, even invokes her. The hope is that she will “proclaim” a way in which two voices can be combined in melody, ushered into the world, and in their song, become as elemental and transcendent as any portion of nature. Insistently, the shepherd looks for a space to join in the “constant” ebb that is the seasons and cycle of life.

The second cycle is “Endless Summer.”  If Spring Psalter found Pritts channeling John Clare’s alienated and unstable self via the language of the Romantics, then the second cycle propels Pritts into the verve of rock n roll angst.  “Endless Summer” begins,

It was the summer I fucked up     the summer    fucked up me
fucked up     a fuck-up in the summer     & I spent time laying under stars
too much     time I wasted the stars…

If “darling” was a form of supplication in the first section, then fuck (& it variations) begins the heart’s riot in the second.  Through the use of serial prose poems, Pritts manages to beautifully capture disappointments and failures.

Pritts is one of several contemporary poets, among them Lynn Xu and Laynie Brown, writing some of the most compelling sonnets of our generation. He shows off his chops in the next section, “(sonnets for the fall),” which consists of fourteen sonnets:

VIII

& me                & you naming everything
all those complications growing              darker

the last fall leaves

Here we find the two again in unison in the act of naming— a necessity to partake in creation and in the intimacy of personal language. Naming is a way of interacting with and understanding nature, if only a self-satisfying way:

the whole world brand new again

chill in the air & it’s making me
one cloud            this one bird

darker gaps against

& me slipping
from me

The world continues to recreate itself, “brand new again.” He slips from himself, perhaps achieving transcendence — losing a separatist notion of “identity” and becoming a part of the natural landscape. Yet darkness remains a gap, and the speaker struggles to watch the world begin again. Perhaps he isn’t transcending; perhaps he is merely escaping. Maybe both. It’s a subtle shift, and it is indicative of the poems in this section and the final section, “Winter Constellation.”  While the calendar continues to reveal the pastoral changes of nature, the Shepherd is also transforming. But it is necessarily a slow and incomplete transformation, much more complicated than cataloging the reoccurrence of 15 ants.  The last poem in the collection, “the stars within reach,” concludes the cycle as such:

(xv)

Sunlight falls sharply,
hidden light beneath so much rock;
your skin brightens as you move in my chest.

Startled by desire’s inflexibility,
this rigid world.

(xvi)

Of pure night, of rush. Outside,
the blue night rains down.

& then afterward

The afterward is continuation literally of the cycle, the Shepherd’s negotiation of place in one’s reality and imagination and the space, the prayer, the song of that other, that darling that remains even after the darling has left. This is exactly what these poems will do, they will remain in your chest, they will curtain-dance the branch-bone bathed in the sunlight of your imagination.  These poems will become you and you will become these poems & the ants will notice — none of it.

*

by Catherine Wagner
Fence Books 2009
Reviewed by Jacquelyn Davis

“Impression of a deluxe life.”

Both a public document and a relaxed collection of intimate poetry fusing arguments, personal writing exercises, confusions, clarifications and candid declarations, Catherine Wagner’s My New Job wears many faces: a seductive smile, a snide sideways glare, a big-toothed grin, a downward glance, an open-jawed stare:

 

Just in every rathole, just trying to learn everything at once
I was learning everything at once

The poet–sometimes sexual and raw, occasionally impotent and anti-social–shares her moods without regret. Feelings are recognized, made fun of, accepted and even resented. Bittersweet yet rich, this job is one that is fulfilling and yet doesn’t bring on the guilt that comes with eating too much or talking out of turn.

There is something ineffable that occurs when you discover poetry that makes you realize that you as a self, you as part of an unspoken or spoken multitude of men and women, that you are a fragile yet colossal creature in a world of creatures—either known or unknown—somehow capable and strong enough to continue. This is how Wagner affects her readers.

I remember reading her second book Macular Hole (2004) in my early twenties and then later being pushed to locate her first collection, Miss America (2001). I remember thinking that I had never read a book of contemporary poetry like Macular Hole ever, dissecting bold lines like:

Hatred and doom

Took it torquing jealous into my gut. I flamed
& I came kindness.
I hoped I was kind and good and fretted
my tongue with pink & raw serrations.
I imitated nobody in
my hate.
I was alone.

Or:

I dream of an end like a fount to this night
Run thinner and thinner and then it’s all light
Macerated in signal

I admit that Macular Hole remains my all-time-favorite by Wagner. Re-reading Wagner’s texts reminds me that I, too, still possess my own odd set of lusts, loves and aversions—some readily justified, some embarrassingly far from explicable. For me, Catherine Wagner did not exist before Macular Hole, for this book was the way in which she entered my life as a wide-eyed college grad, giving NYC a spin, gathering impressions in search of my own.

Wagner hardly ever relays identical feelings; across her oeuvre, the poet’s mood courageously morphs, though her books unconsciously refer to one another in an obscure conversation. For example, her fixations and connections between holes and voids and sex and natural life cycles (e.g. Macular Hole, sections from My New Job entitled “Hole in the Ground” and “Roaring Spring,” poems with titles such as “I’m total I’m all I’m absorbed in this meatcake,” “I don’t believe in bodiless” and “Big Bang”). Her tactics careen between trench warfare and cosmic bliss—she links life and death, absence and presence, speech and living in multiple sweeps.

So, let’s discuss fucking—or love-making, or sex, or whatever explicative phrase some might use in reference to the act. My New Job, like its poetic predecessors, does not shy away from the visceral and physical aspects of sexuality. Wagner writes in Miss America:

Scout and Rumor suck me off
We will flower inside you like a dog at your trails
I am sorry
Just a gigolo
Friendly and forsaken
It is hotter to wear a bra
Or let my boobs stick to my chest
Melanin, melatonin, metonym, melanoma

Or in Macular Hole:

I have recently masturbated and hair-sparklings
descend before me to reward me

Or in My New Job:

Fallacious = fellatio + delicious

but is delicious
cut grass and oysters

Beachy head,            if unpleasant

against the rear throat

the gag reflex you learn to control
in high school

Terrify all comers.

But even as Wagner writes in My New Job, “The fucking isn’t interesting / The fucking is friction / The friction is two surfaces in contact and moving.” My New Job continues to investigate the poet’s rapport with the act. Though we might be able to fool ourselves into thinking that we do not care about this act, that we have more pressing issues on our plate, it is this act that keeps many of us ticking. In My New Job, Wagner equates oral sex on a man as something between an ocean-inspired fantasy, the feeling of ingesting an aphrodisiac-laced spread of hearty meats and the wholesomeness of “the girl next door” actualized as otherwise (”cut grass” being an image, perhaps, from a middle class family’s preened yard or from a haphazard sex scene). For this “girl next door” symbolizes a woman’s journey and investigation into her own needs — experience by experience she conquers, eventually overtaking future lovers with honed expertise. Yet, by making a connection between the word “fallacious” and “fellatio,” Wagner hints that this act can be deceptive; it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Pleasure and self-fulfillment are reliable friends, there to help us overcome whatever malaise we battle. Wagner embraces this “fucking territory,” well-aware of its increasing weight and our unbridled interest in how it affects our respective realities. She writes:

Part of the poem includes:
fucking the penis from
behind it, the point of view of the “man”
his body fucks it, it’s split off from him
around it the woman

My New Job is separated into five diverse sections: “Exercises,” “Hole in the Ground,” “Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large,” “Roaring Spring” and “My New Job.” The first section is exactly what it claims to be: writing exercises (ranging anywhere from the # 1 to #45), but not in any chronological order. “Hole in the Ground” begins with an excerpt from an unnamed folksong:

Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down
I wish I was a mole in the ground

This section is the most sexually charged.  “Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large” is analytical, including grid-like rationale, sharing observations between the poet and other forces: the poet as poet, the poet as lover and the poet as mother. Wagner shares  sentiments that accompany motherhood:

I’ve made myself a recognizable woman
and I bred so:
belly and breasts jut out extraordinary from my ordinary
frame, which does not change, and I am
complimented on this, on my same
sprouting forth, and the excrescence
“lovely excrescence” snipped off to
walk around

Or about knowledge:

My understanding is quite limited.

“Roaring Spring” includes 28 sections, which is also the number of days between menstruation periods; one immediately feels a build-up leading up to an unavoidable eruption. The numbered poem takes a brief pause, and an embedded sub-poem, entitled “Roaring Spring,” interrupts between poem #9 and #10 in the sequence. The presence of this sub-poem introduces itself at one of the most sexually potent periods in a woman’s cycle, just days before ovulation. This sub-poem “Roaring Spring” is unlike its numerical counterparts; it directly approaches the subject vs. object relationship in a given heterosexual partnership:

If I am the author of my intentions
For your objecthood
And receiver of
What you mean to me

If you try to get through to me
Who launched your objecthood
Your cock bumps against my cervix
Slow out, slow out, make a vacuum
My pocket
Pulls towards you

Yet as the poet vocalizes obsessions and writes her mission, it is clear that writing is her mission; she is documenting her search, rarely interested in the same subject matter twice, and if so, not from a copycat perspective. It can be gathered that Wagner’s speaker finds solace or some necessary escape via her specific process. Macular Hole reads:

So I write a moralizing poem
so a poem to feel better.
Do what I want to it.

And:

I knew I would scream if I didn’t write it down because I needed
to be alone reproducing.

The reader senses her attachment to the craft, even if this rare feeling originates from self-love. Someone else’s narcissism often brings bees to the honey, if they aren’t already drowning in their own emissions. Wagner has a specific way of speaking; she breaks down and ultimately responds to her desires and demands—like an eager child arguing to get what she wants without caring about established social dictations. Except: imagine what the world would be like if we listened more to what our children say. Over time, it becomes easier to mute certain voices, and it can be an even more specific talent or misfortune to ignore one’s own voice. Wagner’s speech is free, uninhibited yet aware—she does not ignore but instead breaks down our giant world into digestible figments. Miss America reads:

Shine and shine and shine and shine

[flicker]

where the salt is, which drawer the spoons are in

BLAT!

I am tired of this ugly language

I am tired of this ugly language. If anything, her fatigue with the confines of the English language repeats itself. Wagner adopts the responsibility of unleashing complex word equations, and like a thin balloon almost holding its maximum capacity for air, she pushes and pulls syntax, hoping for a record of expansion and release. Wagner’s thoughts are not easily confined to conventional words and definitions; it seems that the “job” of My New Job is both to bluntly eradicate archaic notions of the woman’s societal role, as well as to give credit where credit is due to significant facets that still hold merit: the awestruck mother, complicated lover, analytical examiner of the unfolding day.

My New Job concludes with its reflective title poem. It is an airy poem, and the reader is given direct entrance into Wagner’s world. Again, her magnetic vortex appears, if only for a short spell, cajoling you, hoping that you will find what you need, enter and remain:

Disappear into a hole

Into Mama

       but come back out.

Go in, boys.

Go in and stay there.

*

by Edward Sanders
Coffee  House Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

“O beautiful for an end to war”

If anyone doubts the impact Charles Olson had, look no further than the prolific and varied career of Ed Sanders, one of the chief chroniclers of his generation, and in a fair way to be the Carl Sandburg of our era. While editing Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts out of the Peace Eye Book Store, the legendary Lower East Side gathering place for poets and radicals, Sanders fomented the mimeograph revolution, America’s answer to the Samizdat. Founding The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg in 1965, he virtually invented folk rock. Today, he creates unique musical instruments such as the electric necktie and the pulse lyre. He also writes a 9-volume populist history of America in poetry, invigorating both history and poetry with a sense of performance, music and myth.

Here’s an introduction to the Fugs for their foreign tour in 1968, complete with what one imagines to be hilarious Danish subtitles attempting to translate Ed’s impromptu comic book psychosexual romp introducing his concept of goofitude:

It is also worthing checking out The Fugs official site, where Ed’s goofy outrageousness is toned down into a politically engaged, historic camaraderie. Sanders’s work is so congenial by now that it takes historical perspective to remember how subversive and necessary his elm fuck poem was:

fuck till the come drift
down through the bark furrows
        fuck thru the warm afternoon
        sperm steams in the sun

such care and kindness
—as when a rabbit nose snoozles a carrot—
                     but give it thrill jabs,
                     give it to her

a tree-twat is as good as
a buttock
& the elm branch is the dryad’s breast

So joyously in your face. What might have once seemed gratuitous and shocking now seems almost environmentally sincere, if a bit goofy.

Knowing what I do about Sanders’s place in history, I wanted to get a little more excited about the 2 volume career-spanning retrospective put out so professionally by Coffee House Press. Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century is his collected poems from 1961-1985, and Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War covers a similar span of years from 1986-2009. In addition to including some of his song lyrics for The Fugs, Sanders taps into the tradition of the illuminated manuscript, freely incorporating his own glyphs and illustrations. Poems such as “Sun Arms” reproduce the original Courier typeface, and the glyphs surround the poem like a pair of arms. Glyphs like “The Celestial Golf Game” arrange hieroglyphs that indeed look like a golf course mapped from space, or chart “Paths Through the Data-Clusters in the Search for Brilliant Verse.” The quest here is to unify an entire body of work in various media by squeezing it all into print.

Problems arise with the inevitable leveling of print, and the use of a standard typeface and page size. Even though Ed’s handwritten glyphs and illustrations are beautifully reproduced, the print and the drawings don’t mingle as promiscuously as you’d expect, sometimes feeling more like illustration than a Blakean marriage of poem and art. A hip primer is still a primer. A picture of the pulse lyre seems only to point out the lack of actual sound. Life defies our attempts to trap it within the covers of a book. Sanders’s work should be distributed on broadsides and in stapled mimeographed editions; it should be written on the inside of toilet paper rolls and cigarette packs and smuggled out of jail in your shoes, as was his first major effort, “Poem from Jail,” after his arrest for trying to swim aboard a Polaris nuclear submarine.

Sanders keeps you reading with fond recollections of Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats. Most of this reminiscence doesn’t come across as self-indulgent, partly because the incipient nostalgia is tamed by Ed’s sense of gratitude at the community they created, and his sense that the work of the beats is still ongoing, which shows up clearly in “A Visit to Jack’s Memorial Park,” a poem also interrupted by a somewhat gratuitous photo of the skateboarding kids of today:

“Life spills out”, as Olson says
and so it does as the boys skrunk happily
among your tall shiny stones, o Jack Kerouac

where I catch in a blaze your sense of
being part of eternity
staring at your writings carved in the shiny

I am feeling the awe of the Loner commingling
so Newly
amidst all the conservatism

O Jack phantom of the Lonely Dream
Daimon of the skrunks!

The experience of writing The Family, a book about the Charles Manson cult killings that once ranked a close second to In Cold Blood in the previously nonexistent “True Crime” genre, led to Sanders’s practice of investigative poetry, perhaps the true fruit of Olson’s anguished efforts to be both a poet and a historian. For both Olson and Sanders, polis is eyes, and every citizen must investigate for themselves: “know the new facts early! And do not back away one micro unit because some CIA weirdomorph whose control agents never ended WWII invades your life with a mouthful of curdled exudate.”

Sanders is more interested in the cosmic story than the ideology: we easily forgive the occasional gratuitous asides, because his storytelling ability is in no way limited to personal anecdotes or political sloganeering. Through scholarly backtracking he traces his rebellious spirits to Sappho and the Egyptian slaves forced to build the tombs of the Pharaohs. He mingles ancient tales with stories adapted from Anton Chekov. He takes us easily from ancient Egypt to the depths of outer space.

But unlike his mentor, you don’t get a sense of mythic massiveness as much as a sense of event, of reportage. The mythic element is much lighter, and more digestible. Sanders’s work dreams big, but does not totter under its own weight. One senses immediately that Sanders is a happier man. The older I get, the more I feel that should count for something.

Sanders is a sincere idealist, reminding us as Emerson had it in his essay “Politics” that:

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case; that they are all imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.

Whatever your politics, this is a much needed message of hope. One need to look no further than “Further Verses for ‘America the Beautiful.’”

O beautiful for an end to war
An end to class and strife
Bring Freedom Rides where no one hides
The truth in every life!
        America! America
Come sing your song of grace
For every hue beneath the blue
And every creed and race!

*