Posts Tagged ‘3.5 stars’

during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present

Friday, July 17th, 2009

by Brandon Scott Gorrell
Muumuu House 2009
Reviewed by John Deming

Kind of Not Sarcastic

gorrell “Sarcasm is the refuge of losers,” declares Greg Kinnear as loser motivational spokesman Richard Hoover in Little Miss Sunshine, Hoover the finest role Kinnear has played since he was a loser art dealer in As Good As It Gets. Sometimes sarcasm is useful, or even necessary. But Hoover’s probably referring to people who fall back on sarcasm always. It’s not hard to find fault with the world. To quip about it sometimes helps, but one can only speak between finger-quotes for so long before nobody wants to listen anymore.

Tao Lin has navigated this territory in poetry over the last few years, annoying many, but also making some valuable observations about that strange social turn where internet identity began replacing physical identity: self esteem measured according to blogs, instant messages and Facebook friends, all in the silence of one’s bedroom. Now Tao Lin has a disciple, Brandon Scott Gorrell. Gorrell spends a lot of time on the internet too, apparently, but his first book, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present, is so derivative of Tao Lin that it is hard to find much use for it. The poet is moody, sure, but his cracks at absurdity, or interesting repetitions, just totally smack of effort, man.

When Gorrel finds the line between sarcasm and irony, then the line between cynicism and skepticism, he proceeds to bust back and forth through both like a kid that summer camp counselors feel bad for in an afternoon round of Red Rover. The result is a string of purposefully immature free associations that never veer from a self-loathing so aware of itself it forgets that it might have been justified in the first place.The poems in during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present are, at best, funny, in the way that the Ninja Website is funny: they parade around their ignorant posturing with pride, so we are comfortable laughing down at them. They satisfy the need to feel juvenile, to pout, to say “as if I would really say that” after every thing you say. But this book is never really elevated to the level of satire; lines like “every high-level american politician is a rich, corrupt piece of shit” will never go beyond college freshman coffee shop banter. Lin, and even the guys at the Ninja site, have an air of curious menace about them; Gorrell, showing flares of talent, too often reads like he is trying to think of things to say, and that anything will do.

The first poem is a list poem called “potential poem titles”; some of them are charming (“i want to turn into wild grass and get eaten by a soft moose”), but most are painfully boring whims (“i’m going to take a bath in 13 gallons of warm coffee”). Most of the poems in the book work as such: lists of random urges toward predictable satisfactions. Take these lines from “i feel kind of alienated somebody teleport me to tokyo”:

not looking stupid is one of the primary factors that guide my behavior

i’m staring at the computer screen waiting for something to happen

my life is on the internet completely

‘fuck life’

i was kind of not sarcastic when i said i wanted to stab your face off

i keep thinking about fractions and percentages

the idea of fractions and percentages is my favorite idea in the world

He likes fractions and percentages? He must be pretty smart. Maybe this will get him girls or something. But let’s focus on the face-stabbing instead. Because for whatever reason, violence is his trusty fallback all throughout this book. Everywhere, people and animals are threatened with stabbings or with (and this might be my favorite new word of the year) getting “chainsawed.” The book jacket, designed by the author, boasts his narrator’s “low self-confidence,” “anxiety” and “alienation.” Self-loathing has its place in great art (see: Robert Lowell, Biggie Smalls, Kurt Cobain), but the troubling—troubling? No, annoying—thing here is the author’s need to project his violent impulses outward as much as inward. This book is like a diary that high school counselors would claim ad hoc presented an “obvious warning sign.” It isn’t long before you realize that his isn’t self-loathing at all. It is egotism in its highest form.

But now I’m getting all serious, right? He’s just kidding? Sadly, you’re probably right: this book is just that boring. Consider these “thoughts” from “i’ve been looking at the screen for a long time”:

there is nothing in my reality that I want enough to try getting
this is causing immense feelings of anxiety

Okay. But I am not your therapist. There is still no context for this suffering, or at least no interesting level of context. I’d much prefer self-loathing that wonders at itself, as in the lyrics of Lowell (“I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell / as if my hand were at its throat….”) and Cobain (“I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned. Daddy’s little girl ain’t a girl no more”), or computer-age alienation that steps outside of itself, like in the lyrics of Thom Yorke (“transport / motorways and tramlines / starting and then stopping / taking off and landing / the emptiest of feelings”). But Gorrell’s book is too pouty and repetitive, mired in insularity that refuses to go inside.

The venerable Ben Mirov says that the ostensible “badness” of these poems is an entry point. Mirov says that “At worst these aspects are sophomoric attempts to gain attention. At best they are Warhol-like mechanisms that force the reader to examine their preconceptions about poetry.” This is true, though I might contend that Tao Lin already accomplished that in this mode. Sometimes a creative curiosity shows through in Gorrell (“i think i only / care about myself how can / it be different”); and sometimes, even, originality (“you are a soft brown bear and i will hold you / and you will bite me”); but more often than not, he moves you about as much as the guy walking down the street in a black t-shirt that says, “I see stupid people.”

Sure, the poet of during my nervous breakdown is not alienated; he’s “alienated.” But weed through the layers of sarcasm, and you’re left at plain old alienation. Regular anxiety. Mirov says that “beneath everything, there’s a genuine emotional core, that is humanistic and empathetic.” I don’t disagree; the poet wants to say something, but doesn’t know what to say, so he tries to make the “not knowing what to say” his subject. He can do better. I think this poet has talent (see the “moose” line), and is best when he is unnerved, rather than trying to write poems that look like they do not try. I would like to see this poet invent his way into his next book. Because I’m just not convinced that repeating the words “there is nothing in my reality that I want enough to try getting” for two full pages makes this speaker’s suffering any more interesting, valuable or worth reading about than anyone else’s. (But that’s the point, man.) Yes. Everyone’s anxious. Everyone suffers. Report back something new, and keep the whining to a minimum.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Brandon Scott Gorrell, John Deming, Muumuu House
Posted in reviews

Getting Lost in a City Like This

Friday, July 10th, 2009

by Jack Anderson
Hanging Loose Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Loved and Lost

Jack Anderson’s new collection Getting Lost in A City Like This is an unpretentious collection of light prose poems, many of which are odd love letters to New York City. Disdaining the urbane humor of the New York School, they assert an innocence that sometimes suggests William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, but more often suggests milk left too long in the fridge. Certainly, innocence should take unexpected left turns to avoid being cloying, but Anderson’s work tends to protest too much. It’s one thing to recall a young man taking off his clothes in the London Underground, perhaps on a dare, his relaxed, innocent manner causing people to smile and become his friends and “friends of one another,” and another thing to conclude, “while he was naked / we were joined together / in sweet solidarity: / it was all so innocent, / so civilized, / so good.” Can I take this, straight or twisted? Where are you Walt Whitman? Let nakedness stand on its own bare feet. Here the innocence begins to stink.

I know Anderson wants to keep things light-hearted yet lurid, and to avoid the “humorless profundities” Edward Field cites in his blurb. It’s a tough balance, though, and Anderson’s childish mask would be more effective if his speaker were less like a self-conscious Forrest Gump: “I am hungry, happy, // lean with desire, / I want to fatten on life, // for the world is one big Chinese restaurant…” Gump is fine, Gumpness pushed one step too far equals curdled milk:

yes I want to roam through your city exploring and delving
deeper and deeper into locales districts quarters and neighborhoods
the working class ones as well as the ritzy
and I pray they all have their own special dignity
yes I want to see what there is where you are
so invite me invite me oh please invite me

It can be disappointing when Anderson uses this strangely insistent, cloying tone while invoking a New York not deep enough to be dreamlike. It undermines the bite needed when Anderson later explores the bitter humor inherent in aging, and writes towards the end, “Only danger is real.” Italo Calvino got much more mileage in Invisible Cities by waiting until mid-book for Kublai Khan to challenge Polo by suggesting that all the cities he describes are variants of his native Venice, and taking care to construct a chessboard of alternating chapters integrating Polo’s breathless descriptions of imagined cities and his direct and disillusioned discourse with Khan on the inevitability of his empire’s decline.

Admittedly, Anderson never takes himself that seriously: “Dogged Love,” the story of a gay couple that stays together in a dead relationship for the sake of their dogs is lighthearted and fun, with a sting at the end. Other pieces are simply weird, like “Indulgence and Restraint, A Moral Lesson,” where the speaker eats his toes, which taste “good. Quite Good. Something like a cruller.” These are hit or miss, and uniquely odd. You might like them. You might laugh out loud. “Hitler’s Daughter” does a better job of anchoring Anderson’s sometimes creepy humor in a situation that repays some additional thought.

One fully integrated success is the delightfully nasty “The Schattners Are Coming,” which takes on the old time conventions of rural hospitality in properly cracked fashion. The Schattners, of course, are relatives from hell. “On certain Sundays, Gramma would get this hunch: / “The Schattners are coming. I feel it in my bones.” / (And she was usually right.)” The only way to avoid their visits was to pretend that you were not home. The Schattners, of course, would persist banging at the front door, and sneaking around the back until someone inside was unlucky enough to betray their presence by moving. The thinly-veiled mutual social destruction then escalates to a Hatfield/McCoy level of insanity.

Other successes such as “Who Are the Rich and Where Do They Live,” or the Calvinoesque “Three Museums,” occur when Anderson drops most of the wry commentary and even mutes his sense of humor, allowing his appealingly simple, direct, uniquely ironic observations to freely combine nostalgia and innocence, letting them dance and deepen into more complex emotions. For the most part though, the imagined city Anderson is getting lost in could use a deeper, more intriguingly structured invisibility.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Hanging Loose Press, Jack Anderson, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Ace

Monday, May 4th, 2009

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

Beepp Beepp

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: 3.5 stars, Ken L. Walker, Richard Carr, The Word Works Press
Posted in reviews

God Bless

Friday, September 12th, 2008

by H.L. Hix
Hanging Loose Press 2009
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II

Voicing

hix god cover Rather than describe his latest collection as mere poetry, H.L. Hix positions God Bless as a “political/poetic discourse,” of which he serves as mediator. Such a context, though tinged with hubris, allows Hix to explore a fascinating question: what if George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden engaged in an ongoing public correspondence. Hix melds together an assortment of press releases, executive orders and other public statements into month-specific blocks of fervent, presidential verse. Select lines from the public statements of bin Laden mix with Hix’s own attempts at bin Laden’s stylized form to serve as rebuttals in a series of interleaves.

In execution, the resulting poems are at times smooth-flowing and conversational or disjointed and contrived—sometimes all of the above within a single poem. Hix notes in his brief prologue that “no attempt is made to signal where one quoted passage [of Bush’s] joins another.” This technique yields some rewarding juxtapositions, as in the first poem entitled “January 2001”:

The dogs seem to have adjusted. I worry:
one year, you may test and everything is fine.
I’m going to protect that privilege.
Every child must be taught these principles:
we will build our defenses beyond challenge,
we’ll see how that affects possible arms talks.
In four years, you measure again,
and all of a sudden something isn’t fine.

The capricious range of topics convincingly suggests that Bush has picked up the direct line to the Al Qaeda caves and embarked on a casual conversation with their leader. The resulting effect manages to provoke thought in an unsettling manner without taking itself too seriously. Unfortunately, Hix sheds this carefree approach in later poems, exchanging a successful literary device for hyperfocused propagandizing. In “July 2001,” each stanza ends with the refrain “we’re going to keep the pressure on Iraq,” yielding a disjointed, repetitive verse with a bluntly forced agenda.

Hix further jeopardizes this enterprise in his approach to bin Laden’s responses. The verse from Hix’s own hand often fails to fully engage with the italicized direct quotations used to frame it. While the interleaf following “April 2002” effectively captures the tone of bin Laden’s own speech (“Khaled al-Sa’id, Abd al-Aziz, / Maslah al-Shamrani, Riyadh al-Hajiri: theirs / is the honor the rest of us missed, / to die for following God’s decrees, killing Crusaders.”), others rely upon the quotations as a mere prop, allowing the poet to vent his own political disturbance through a borrowed mouthpiece. The interleaf following “July 2003” particularly falls into this trap, ascribing to bin Laden idioms and ideas that fail to ring true:

But Bush put his own private interests
ahead of American public interest,

paying himself and his administration
with no-bid contracts to Halliburton…

Al-Qaeda spent five hundred thousand on
what cost America five hundred billion;

Bush and his cronies continue to siphon
billions into pointless occupation.

Hix allows his anger to cloud his judgment in these poems, shifting bin Laden’s voice into the voice of a predictable American anti-war activist. Worse, he ignores the premise of this collection, trading a personable dialogue for a didactic diatribe. As the collection progresses, the poems devolve further and further into mishmash of phrases from Bush and unconvincing vitriol from bin Laden.

Despite these flaws, several poems manage to shine. “October 2003” marks a return to thoughtful simplicity and conversational form, noting that “nearly every day / we’re launching swift precision / raids against the enemies of peace.” So too does the interleaf following “November 2001” serve to bolster the collection as a realistic discourse (“Again and again he claims to know our reason, / and tells you we attacked because we hate freedom. / Perhaps he can tell us why we did not attack Sweden.”) Unfortunately for God Bless, such poems are the exceptions that prove the tremendous lost potential of the concept.

Such concerns are foreign neither to Hix nor the reader, however, because the ending pages of the collection make public the pre-publication dialogue between the poet, publisher and others asked to critique the book. The publication of often scathing criticism and counterargument is a groundbreaking concept and redeems some of the flawed execution of the poet’s other grand experiment. Readers become privy not only to criticism from author Robert Mooney that “worse, though, is not just the sense but the absolute certainty on the part of any given reader that language is being manipulated in God Bless to serve a passionately held pre-scribed idea and ideology,” but also the author’s rejected (and not replaced) preface, which claims that the poetry “needs to be justified because it is transparent.”

While it would be relatively simple to castigate God Bless as a failed experiment, it serves a much more useful purpose as a case study on the expansion of not only the poetic form, but on the idea of a text itself. One wishes not, as Mooney suggested, that Hix had been dissuaded from publishing this collection, but rather that he’d taken to heart the very criticism that he saw fit to publish along with it, transforming a first draft with great potential into the great final draft that it potentially could have become.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Bryan Stokes II, H.L. Hix, Hanging Loose Press
Posted in reviews

To Frankenstein, My Father

Monday, September 1st, 2008

by Cody Todd
Proem Press 2007
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

Cody Todd’s Monster

To Frankenstein, My Father In summer 2008 (remember the days?), The Atlantic Monthly ran a cover story investigating whether or not Google is, in tandem with the superficialities of intelligence, making us stupid. In the article, Nicholas Carr took the approach that authenticity, even intelligence, come from growth and actual human effort. The argument’s endpoint established the importance of being human and not mechanical. Agreement, in full.

Cody Todd, an MFA graduate of Western Michigan University and current PhD fellow at Virginia Middleton, risks mechanism in his new chapbook, To Frankenstein, My Father. That’s the title. The opening epigraph is from Sylvia Plath, and the primary poem is titled “Narcissus,” providing a pseudo-subliminal warning that the approaching pile of brick is not out to mime or joke, let alone entertain. It is suffering that is conscious of its own boredom, its own monotonous predictability. Not that poetry has to be a Jerry Bruckheimer production. But it is not a slight bit pleasurable to read a man’s portentous anguish couched in the fashion of “I-care-just-enough.”

There are unsullied flashes: “the plight of a pugilist;/ swearing that I knew you,/I’d known you all along. . .” (“Broken Syntax for the Streets of Economy”) and “Like the nation, the three a.m. bus is split:/two parts of the same arm.” (“Tupac Shakur”). Oddly, the Tupac poem may be the best of all his selections. When Todd throws his heart down enough to step back from it, he sinks into a shiny speakeasy, but when he just stays in his bedroom and listens to NPR and dreams of Orpheus and Eurydice, he is mere mechanic, using only the tools from that red box the university passed out at MFA orientation. Note: use all your tools—especially your late father. Just don’t call him “Frankenstein.”

Tags: 3.5 stars, Cody Todd, Ken L. Walker, Proem Press
Posted in reviews

Red Sugar

Monday, July 7th, 2008

by Jan Beatty
University of Pittsburgh Press 2008
Reviewed by Michael Rymer

The Real Cameron Poe

beatty cover In one poem in her new book, Jan Beatty imagines taking a “vacation” from her own body: “Just give me a wife/ beater & an AK-47 & I’ll be Nic Cage/ bustin up Con-Air, fuckin A,” she writes. Beatty doesn’t attempt to develop this scene. She writes in the next lines of a “theoryhead” she knew in graduate school and a friend named Aaron who chants, “panties, panties, panties” when he’s “irritated.” Yet we linger there with her – or her and Nicholas Cage.

The Nicholas Cage character in “Con Air” is not a bad cinematic analogue for Beatty’s poetic persona, especially as it’s expressed in the many brash sexual poems in this collection. (A frat boy dressed as, or quoting from, that character would also work, as would a muscle-bound hip-hop artist doing the same.) Take these lines from the taunting poem, “Skinning It”:

I was fucking every man who crossed my path,
random fucking him or him, no difference &
I couldn’t tell the one about the other – but

Nicholas Cage wouldn’t say this, but Sharon Stone might. The poem concludes with the narrator’s crude retort to anyone who would criticize her desires:

When’s the last time you skinned it hard?
I’d say quiet, polite = not quite
big enough.

Is this poetry, or billboard copy from a debased future?

There is nothing wrong with simple, bluff language – language that verges on grunts – but Beatty hasn’t found a way to use it to capture the physical urgency she seeks to describe. Here is a passage from “Prison Sex,” a prose poem that describes a woman’s perspective on her midday sexual encounter with a man who was just released from prison, after serving an eleven-year sentence for murder: “I’m on my stomach in tees-shirt for pajamas & we’re rolling/slapping/scratching/your hands on my wrists loud your o deep o like the fucking home-run fuck like your fucking-a-teenager-first-time fuck & no time for happy to be out?” “Rolling” and “Slapping” and “Scratching” are beautiful words, but they don’t in themselves evoke a scene.

An even more violent prose poem, “Shooter,” an extended fantasy of killing one’s enemies that begins, “I shoot the man who followed my 11-yr-old body on Smithfield St” and ends, “I shoot all the men I’ve left off the list, so I don’t have to worry my pretty little head about it.” None of the lines in the middle sound much different than these. This poem is more boring than any poem about killing people ever deserves to be.

Red Sugar does contain milder work - a poem about the 1917 Speculator Mine Disaster, a poem about caring for an elderly parent, two poems about electric guitars. The problem is that the loud, foul-mouthed poems overwhelm everything else. Reading “Procession,” a tender poem about burying a small wren the narrator finds dead under her desk, after slogging through poems such as “Skinning It,” “Prison Sex” and “Shooter” is like being stroked on a cheek that’s still smarting from a slap. The book opens with “I Saw One of Blake’s Angels,” which describes a peep-show performer, “her legs spread wide to pink” and “pinching her nipples,” as seen through “cum-smeared plexiglass.” In this book there is something smeared on the glass dividing reader and poet, too.

Beatty has a capacity for wistfulness. In “In Helena,” a green-eyed “bag boy at Albertson’s,” noticing the narrator’s “shaved blond head,” asks her, “You like Eminem?” She watches as he “punched / the air from the bag’s body,” but says “See ya later!” after he announces, “I get off at 9pm.” The poem ends with these lines:

& he popped
up beside me

so I could hear him breathe:
you don’t know what you’re missing

I kept walking,
yeah I do, and it’s good.

She has a sense of humor, too. In “The Phenomenology of Sex,” the narrator recalls for a friend the lines she used to break up with a professor of phenomology:

I tell her how, in Pittsburgh, he tried
to teach me how to drive my own car.
How I said to him: if this car crashed in a forest,
you couldn’t hear it, but I would

In these poems about erotic disappointment, which are both in the book’s third section, Beatty seems more herself.

“The Day I Stripped,” the best poem in Red Sugar (it’s also in the third section) begins with a description of a gynecologist who stuck his “wormy” tongue in the narrator’s throat, but moves to Joey Carbone’s Cocktail Lounge, a strip club where the narrator stops on her way home to “pee” and is asked “You the new dancer?” In these lines that fall between that question and the narrator’s response, we understand her simultaneous feelings of pleasure and disgust:

& for a second I was that wild & flexible &
could she see the stripper in me? The doctor’s squirmy tongue
was still
licking.

The poem concludes with the narrator’s recollection of the time she passed Joey Carbone’s Cocktail Lounge “years later,” when:

workers were stripping the paint from the joint’s marquee – &
quit one day after half
the name & for 24 magnificent hours, the building existed as
“Joey Carbone’s Cock”
& not cocktail lounge & it was withered, flaky, but big –
for the first time, as big as he said it was

This is a penis joke, but it’s not a bad one, and it reaches for something else.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Jan Beatty, Michael Rymer, University of Pittsburgh Press
Posted in reviews

The Long Fault

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

by Jay Rogoff
Louisiana State University Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Good Title

rogoff cover

I’ve been putting off writing this review because I kept holding out hope that I’d find something to say that wouldn’t sound unfounded and embittered. The Long Fault pulls out all the old goodies: Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Tristan & Isolde, Helen of Troy, Virgil, Freud, Donne, Shelley, Milton, Einstein, Pynchon. The list is long as it is predictable. Relying so heavily on referencing biblical, historical, and literary figures to induce interest is something I’ve always been wary of as it often distracts from the real substance. Unfortunately, Rogoff’s poems are no exception.

The first poem, “Cain’s Gift” has poignant opening and closing lines, but there is little in between. “The blood cried up from the ground…” Blood gurgling below the earth’s surface is an image that recalls any act of physical force that has created fear and suffering. In today’s world it may be the Iraq war, 9-11, Sean Bell, a child being beaten in the Bronx, a young woman raped in DUMBO, Michael Vick putting a bullet in the back of a pitbull’s skull. It’s meaningful and universal. Blood is universal.

The final line of the poem—“out to beget the world”—gives the impression that the reader is about to embark upon a journey that will lead someplace specific, someplace ultimately knowable, that will reduce the suffering to something that can be understood, something that we can envelope despite our smallness. Not so. But in this way, it is at least realistic.

Though blood provides a reliable thread throughout the first half of the book, it gradually disappears, abandons the reader in dark, threatening territory. That’s what was so frustrating about the collection: themes that materialize and vanish without warning just when we begin to trust and rely on their presence. But we are not left without hope. Often Rogoff supplies us with the necessary motivation to continue, as in “Sublimated.” The narrator of this poem is very much alone. He pontificates on how he would like to die. Not that he would take his own life—if he were possible to choose his end without inflicting it. Engrossing oneself in thoughts of one’s own death is perhaps the most solitary experience that can be achieved but for death itself. However, there is light at the end of this tunnel: “some human element survives.”

So, what does survive? In “Aspirations” we see a deep appreciation for the physical body that transports us through this “journey.” The narrator affectionately exclaims, “I rose to an unpinioned aspiration: / to keep intact my bundle of meat and blood.” The body must survive until its time comes, but during this time it is easy to let such a durable, trustworthy part of oneself go unappreciated, be taken for granted, be abused. This is some of the better stuff in the book.

From there, Rogoff takes off into the world of photography. In Rogoff, real life is more interesting. “In Camera” is the most successful of these photography poems. It gets really good when it gets real and phorgets the photograph. The final lines read:

Neither gin nor
               formaldehyde, not even
      the polished, hand-joined oak
coffin’s casement window
      from which you cast your
                 frozen last look,
                 could put the trick
                       across, the bright illusion
you were at rest, or warm.

Sad, but real. Other than these nice, neat moments The Long Fault doesn’t seem to form a whole, and the lack of consistency or movement becomes an obstacle for the reader and often disables them from connecting with the poems.

When Rogoff gets dense and wordy, I suggest reading the poems in a British accent. It livens things up: “no goony bird hovers.” Try it. Rogoff also makes an attempt to startle the reader, though I’m afraid it falls flat. In “Just Say the Word,” Rogoff’s smart language is suggestive and provocative: “pious girls spread throughout the church.” Maybe I’m just sick, but when I read that, the phrase “pious girls spread” just leaps off the page. It’s among the few moments that do.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Jay Rogoff, Louisiana State University Press, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

The Second Question

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

by Diana Der-Hovanessian
The Sheep Meadow Press 2007
Reviewed by Steven Karl

No Stick

The Second Question is preoccupied with identity, specifically Armenian identity. Here is the title poem:

Where are you,
where were your people from?
was the first question
our grandmothers asked
each other when they met.
The second question
was always How?
How did you escape
death? Now
their children ask
only the first,
where in Turkish Armenia
were your people from?

The poem is an excellent representation of Diana Der-Hovanessian’s poetics—short and tightly wound, rather easy to access. “How did you escape / death?” begs the question of survival from genocide and how that survival has shaped and transformed a culture and its people.

But this narrative, recurrent throughout the book, isn’t explored as fully as it could be. Instead the poet spends her time on moves like capitalizing the “H” in “How?” Instead of trusting her readers, the poet instructs them on how to read the poem and what to take away from it, somehow avoiding the fact that the reader might be asking for something else entirely.

X.J. Kennedy’s blurb reads, “If you think you don’t like poetry, The Second Question will quickly change your mind…” Perhaps. Diana Der-Hovanessian is an accomplished poet, instructor, and translator and I can’t help but wonder if this book was put together with the intent to appeal to—even teach—mainstream readers. I put this question out there because for the most part, the book is, dare I say, too easy, and many of the poems too “clever.” Their cavalier accessibility detracts from a potentially engrossing personal study of identity, particularly the sense of identity one feels as the descendent of a nearly-obliterated culture.

The book is also distracted by a peripheral focus on feminine identity which brings no new arguments. Here’s “Earmark”: “ In spite of dangles / hoops and spheres / men seldom notice / girls have ears.” Strange, but in all my years, I never met a man who fancies a woman earless. The Second Question contains more than a few poems that follow this formula: men are insensitive and aloof while women remain survivors of subjection; but we are told this and never tempted to explore the deeper machinations implicit to that subjection.

“Cold Fire” offers a convenient example of clichéd femininity: “A fire once it’s dead stays dead / in women. But in most men / cold fires can revive and spread.” (“What kind of fire are you?” the teacher seems to be asking). The fourth stanza continues, “A woman wants fire. That’s bred / into her bones, but when / the fire is dead it’s really dead…” I suppose the last thing I want in a collection of poetry is to be given a bland generalization. And there is little room for penetrating or interpreting “a woman wants fire”; Plath stole away with that concept 40 years ago.

Alas, in the end, do the poems’ simplicities make it hard for the poet’s issues to stick? At first I thought the simplicity was indeed the culprit, a device that made the poems falter or fail to shine. But I’ve carried both Neruda’s Odes and Basho’s haikus with me for years; the real problem with D-Hova’s poems is that they are mostly surface.

Which brings me back to the question of audience: was this collection put together to serve as an introduction to poetry for those less aware? In the issue of identity Suji-Kwok Kim’s A Divided Country, Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in the Imperial City, or Carly Sach’s the steam sequence all delve successfully into the complexity of straddling identity and/or maintaining an identity in the face of shifting politics or the erasure that progress/history creates. Der-Hovanessian’s knowledge, experience, and poetic expertise should make this collection one of significant weight and contemplation; unfortunately too many of the poems warrant little more than a passing glance, and the potentially invigorating study of her Armenian identity takes a disappointing back seat.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Diana Der-Hovanessian, Steven Karl, The Sheep Meadow Press
Posted in reviews

New Poets | Short Books

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

Edited by Marvin Bell
Featuring Boyd Benson, Gwendolyn Cash & Lisa Galloway
Lost Horse Press 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Getting There

bell cover Lost Horse Press has a new annual series, each edition a book featuring three emerging northwestern poets chosen by the unflappable Marvin Bell. This review promises fun for all, because you get three reviews for the price of one.

Lost Horse’s no-frills packaging is welcome, particularly the lack of blurbs on the back. The short prose statements by the writers themselves do a good job of introducing their work. The implication is that these poets are writing for themselves, not for the trade, promising a freshness of outlook—as Bell puts it in his introduction, “the poetry in poetry.”

So if you remove the usual trappings and come-ons, what do you have left as a hook? Since all three poets are from the northwest, there is a tendency to downplay the 800-pound gorilla in the room. The regional poet label can all too easily limit the reception of a writer’s work; but at the same time geography, however personal, is a tremendous hook, especially if the poet is not well known. Yet even without editorial cartography, readers still have their own inscrutable quirks and expectations, and the more I think about it, the usual blurbage might serve the function of flattering the reader into putting aside their most peevish peeves, at least until they purchase the book.

Gwendolyn Cash’s long poem “Acts of Contrition” brought up a few of my own. One: made up words or variations of real ones that are too close to the actual word. We know what the word transcripted means, but what’s wrong with the actual word transcribed? If you are going to “ring your little prophecy by the neck,” I can’t help but suspect a typo, even if the word “jingle” is winking in the vicinity. That aside, the poem is a bitchy fairy tale about her mother; it’s filled with poisoned blood and devils, dreams of dead fathers and loaded guns, and it can’t quite decide whether it wants to be serious or not, while holding down several wonderful lines like, “conjure me a crypt, witch, and I will call it Forgiveness.”

Another one: the speaker confesses a habit of “breaking everything into pieces” and “carrying them in a velvet bag.” We can guess the intention, but the word “everything” creates unintended distractions, as it allows me to think of another poem in which a speaker going through a messy divorce says, “so you want half of everything: fine,” then takes a chain saw to the piano. That’s gotta be a really big velvet bag.

With all this nitpicking, I haven’t emphasized Cash’s “Bluegrass”, one of my favorites in the book. It evokes a landscape that is pastoral, casually ugly, and memorably real, like the economically depressed zones that often lie just outside the borders of showcase national parks—zones with junked cars and gas stations, with welfare offices right by the river, where one can easily find a thicket of blueberries and wildflowers. It’s the usual river of life metaphor, but nicely done. Gwendolyn Cash’s introduction mentions Carolyn Forché, and she uses an epigraph from Richard Siken. There’s a cool authorial blurb right there! It tells me that for this author, this is the company she’d like to keep.

Boyd Benson’s introduction mentions Emily “Dickenson” (unfortunately misspelled) as the company that “the little old lady” in his heart would like to keep. The tenor of the note suggests that he appreciates her poems as surreal miniatures, parables of the contained wildness of (human) nature. Benson’s poems are miniatures. They want to have a very light touch, and repay a word-by-word reading, with their short lines and juxtaposition of childlike and adult details. Here’s the end of “The schoolyard”:

You carried a map
of yourself and pointed
shyly to each county line

coal mining country,
the backbone of industry,
and to the flashlight on your hat.

A mouse began to spin
from door to door
across the schoolyard

as we estimated how many
Toodaloos it might take
to get us somewhere.

That mouse could be doing so much more work here! I am left wondering about the effect of the word “toodaloos” in any poem. Could work, but doesn’t here. The balance of silly and magical would work better if the language took itself more seriously by being more closely pared. In another poem, an interesting image is stranded by unnecessary vagueness:

There were many tall trees
and likewise crow obscenities
beneath them. I did not
stop. They did not see me.

“Many” and “likewise” do nothing here. The “crow obscenities” need a stronger verb like “scrawled beneath them,” even at the risk of corniness; and did the trees not see the speaker or the crows? I’m not harping on grammar as much as asking which one would be more interesting. It’s not a matter of naturalistic fidelity, but of giving the metaphors the best chance to work.

Lisa Galloway admits in her introduction that she writes “ovaries out,” in quest of psychological shock. Her work has the riskiest subject matter of the three. Her freewheeling rhythms can be exhilarating, partly because she’s likely to lead you to a dead end, something poets should not be afraid to do. A standout rhythmically is “Jam on the Exit Ramp”, which describes the speaker “driving away from but closer to” a lover. The poem is filled with starts and stops that risk being dead ends, and places where the comparisons are pushed too hard in context:

Right now, a flashing four way socks me
like the metaphor in your words:
The winter cap hanging on the coat-rack
at our diner looks like an unwrapped condom.

In the context, the strategy works, but warning signs abound. Later in the selection we get a sense that the speaker, while enjoying the ride, is struggling to find larger significances in her escapades. The poem about the dildo doesn’t go much farther than slapstick humor. Certain tendencies give Galloway away. Describing the metallic taste of blood is an absolutely great and vivid detail, but when it is used multiple times in a short collection, it suggests that the writer is pressing this detail for more than it’s worth. I can’t give it the status of Proust’s madeleine or Richard Siken’s obsessions yet. Her craft needs more honing.

“Acquisition vs. Creation,” a poem about coming home for Christmas to her adoptive family is quieter but stronger than most. Galloway evokes the sense of outsideness felt by many adoptees: “I come home at Christmas to observe your religion.” The speaker is “paraded through the house” like she is her own third person until “ I confront an altar to myself./ Twenty… pictures perched on a chest of drawers/… a rite of passage… announcing/ only those who accept your daughter/ can pass”. The distance from her feelings is absolutely relevant, and more effective than if the emotional struggle were played up in her usual go-for-broke fashion.

Overall the collection plays well to the anti-New York buzz crowd, but has a ways to go to make anybody forget the passing of Poetry Northwest.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Boyd Benson, Gwendolyn Cash, Lisa Galloway, Marvin Bell, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Dear Ghosts,

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

by Tess Gallagher
Graywolf Press 2007
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Back Inaction

gallagher cover If there are two hyphenated words to describe Tess Gallagher’s new collection, they are long-awaited and long-winded. Despite the fact that Dear Ghosts, is Gallagher’s first book of exclusively new poems in 13 years and undoubtedly much—worthy of the poet’s pen—has happened in those years, the book should have been at least 50 pages shorter. It crawls on for 140 pages and the last line of the book, though oddly comforting, is not without the sense that Gallagher would have liked to indulge in another twenty pages or so: “And all goes on—.”

For Gallagher, death is a constant. Her husband Raymond Carver passed away in 1988 and later Gallagher found herself diagnosed with cancer and fighting for her own life. The tragedy of 9/11 presents yet another Herculean subject that she tackles, for example, in poems like “Sayonara Baby.” Though she is able to address this subject without causing immediate abhorrence, she causes it eventually with lines like “Being born American stains, sustains me.” There is nothing worse than manifest word play. But, for the most part, Gallagher does death well; she remains sweet about it, giving it a sort of desirable effect that many other poets are unable (or unwilling) to provide. But unfortunately Gallagher is nostalgic about nearly every subject, and nostalgia—though sometimes satisfying—can spread like an virus.

Other poems, such as “The Dogs of Bucharest,” also deal with the state of the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks. Gallagher aptly points out that fear dictates:

…black shovels full of earth tossed
into an open grave that is everywhere
when fear is the predominant language.

The poem grapples with communication and language, trying to manipulate “one heart’s currency to another / without spiritual loss.” The poem’s first and third sections are successful. But there seems an epidemic of poetry as the subject for poetry and Gallagher falls victim to this in the second section of the poem. Writing about poetry is in many cases an indication that the poet has little else to talk about, and in these cases nothing is sacrificed in merely cutting the “we are drunk on poetry” drivel. In a subsequent poem Gallagher hits us with her working definition of poetry as though she is trying to affirm that this is why poetry should be written: “it is beautifully made for exploring the miraculous / ordinary event.” Okay, thanks. Frankly, I don’t care why anyone writes poetry; why I read their poetry seems far more crucial.

Beyond death Gallagher has other, often insightful obsessions. Birds offer a sort of spiritual perspective without being overbearing. However, even when birds are the subject, they are usually dead, as in “Not a Sparrow,” a poem primarily about escape. Yet it is still clear the book is about the fact that death is drawing closer. “Sky House” seems a recognition of this, and perhaps an acceptance of it, a reconciliation. The poem is momentarily reminiscent of Plath’s “Mirror.” Offering both wit and strong image, Gallagher writes, “I rise / into the day like a fish.” Very similar are Plath’s final lines in “Mirror” which also deal with aging and the approach of death: “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Any conjuring of Plath is mostly good. Though Plath does it better.

While verbose, Dear Ghosts, does present a worthwhile arc. If you focus on her shinier, transcendent-without-knowing-they’re-transcendent moments, you’ll find courage and wisdom that’s nothing short of empowering. I’ll save you the trouble; read these excellent poems: “Not a Sparrow,” “Brushing Fate,” “Offering,” “What the New Day is For,” “Dear Ghosts,” and “Death’s Ink.” It’s kind of like the prop comic Gallagher: a little goes a long way. If you feel like hammering through all 140 pages, though, I’ll leave you to it.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Graywolf Press, Melinda Wilson, Tess Gallagher
Posted in reviews