Posts Tagged ‘4 stars’

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

by Randall Maggs
Brick Books 2008
Reviewed by Dan Magers

“Lure the son of a bitch with an open lane.”

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Canadian poet Randall Maggs is nearly 200 pages long. Whenever a volume of poetry defies the 40-80 page fiefdom, it is worth taking note. This one is about Terry Sawchuk, NHL’s greatest goalie. Maggs has an easy way with meter, and his interest in Irish poetry suggests he has given considerable thought to conceiving of lines of plain-spoken eloquence. Lines move in and out of meter with little interest in overall form or structure. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Here, the narrative drives the poems rather than the language itself. That is not to say that the lines are slack, but that they lack tension and torque. A typical passage reads:

He falls down twice on his way to the net. I sense
the crowd lean forward, ready to leap. What’s that about?
Is this what it all comes down to after Detroit, a little goalie show
for the fans? Waiting at center ice to take their shots, his team-mates
circle nervously, flipping snow at friends in the stands.
What wouldn’t they give to put one past me,
here in front of the home crowd.

The narrative will be familiar to anyone with passing knowledge of the trajectory of our sports greats: childhood-marring family death (“and smiling, cocked / his head to make a final point (they said), / half rose, and then pitched forward on his face.”); constant touring (“Traveling east, the stubble fields gave way / to endless trees. Bored, I’d shouldered past the blast / between the cars”); glories of victory (“The gods lean out / below the smoky beams and cheer the circling / goalie hoisted high.”); greedy owners (“While Jack across the river/ signed a check and closed his door.”); constant physical pain (“Darkest night of his life, once the morphine / seeped away. He wept and prayed.”); all topped off with a generous helping of nostalgia (“’That one’s him in Detroit in ’52. What he did in the playoffs that year will never be done again.”).

The book does a lot of things right, using the poems the way a traditional biography might use chapters, giving us an anecdote, a reflection, a new prism in which we can uncover Sawchuk the man. It is well-researched, with a bibliography a journalist or academic would envy. The book seems to be written with a wider audience in mind than the average poetry book. There are even pictures, including a rather ghastly one of Sawchuk’s face that is somewhat well-known.

A few multi-page prose poems throughout the book are so successful, they inadvertently demonstrate the limits of the competent quasi-iambic narrative in the rest of the book. Simply put, the book is way too long, and the material is not enlivened by the use of verse. I struggled with the pervasive sense that my enjoyment of the book depended on me knowing each wing forward blasting shots at Sawchuk’s un-masked face. And yet, one knows where the book is headed with its combination of braggadocio and sentimentality. Individual lines, and even poems, do not stand out. The integrity of the work is in the book, not the lines, not the poems. In that sense, it is more like prose. While Night Work gleefully exceeds the regular poetry book length, the 200 pages of poetry do not exceed the emotional and thematic dynamic of the regular sports biography, whether found in prose or on ESPN Classic, begging the question, why not just write a prose bio? It is one medium clamoring after the virtues of another.

There are some exceptions. For example, the droll, Frederick Seidel-like mashup of plain-talk and metrical and rhythmical ingenuity:

And doubled up all night, my Christ,
what a life. Like Pompeii’s dead, my arse in the air,
bare. I don’t care.

A more sustained success can be found in the poem “Colour in this Country” which describes Sawchuk’s team watching its opponents (possibly amateur, as was typical of the era) coming out of the bar,

Talking together and joking, they passed
in front of our bus like young men at the front, their days
reduced to frivolity and disaster.

The poignant banality of this bunch, along with Sawchuk’s wearied and dispirited voice, joins into a meditation on the landscape they are living and playing in:

You sensed a sparing use
of colour in this country. You’d get a splotch of it here and there,
a memorable blouse in a lounge, a clock promoting rum,
the local team in its colours taking the ice.

The poem ends with a further removal, the just-described scene revealed as a memory:

My own mood was darkening.
Everything seemed to be splitting away.
In the photograph, all you could really see were shapes
curving darkly into a white that might have been
the page’s nothingness.

A shorter book of more of these moments would have greatly enhanced the work overall. That said, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems gets an extra star if you read the Wikipedia entry on Sawchuk. Two stars if you love narrative poetry. Hockey fans, take heed; Terry Sawchuk fans, go nuts.

Tags: 4 stars, Brick Books, Dan Magers, Randall Maggs
Posted in reviews

Shadow Architect

Monday, January 26th, 2009

by Emily Warn
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

No Code

This book is meant to be read slowly, and I think that Copper Canyon does it a disservice by not making it glossier and more visually pleasing. It’s divided into 22 sections, one for each letter of the alef-beit (the Hebrew Alphabet), and then there are three larger divisions. In the introduction, Warn describes the genesis (the Bereshit?) of the project as a collaboration with the visual artist Dennis Evans. His work for the letter Pei is on the cover, and it’s gorgeous. Think of a Cornell box with mezuzahs and circuits. I think that the book would make more sense—and be more sensual—were Evan’s visuals to work in conjunction with Warn’s text. Considering that each section has a full page introduction reproducing each Hebrew letter alongside its mystical significance (yud: The hand of god; Nun: the shadow architect), the book is already leaning in the direction of coffee-table-art-book.

Each of the 22 sections ends with three quotations. These act as brakes on the trajectory of the book. Warn is clear that her approach was deliberative: “I studied the letters in the same way I study Zen koans” (xiii). So it’s not surprising that each section ends with paradoxes for contemplation such as, “The glory of God is to conceal things” (83) or “The final end of knowledge is not to know” (117). If one has to thrice pause and consider after each section (3 quotes per section x 22 sections=66 contemplations in all), it would make sense to have something nice to look at during the pauses. The slowness and fragmentary nature of the book seems betrayed by it’s familiar form.

The poems themselves tend toward a celebration of the natural world with a mystic bent:

To invent the alef-beit,
decipher the language of crows,
read a tangle of bare branches
with vowels of the last leaves
scrawling their jittery speech
on the sky’s pale page
(7)

The general theme of the book is that the incomprehension we face in nature (what’s that crow saying?) is the paradigm by which all human incomprehension can be understood. The poems repeatedly raise epistemological concerns, only to abandon them to the phenomenological experience of nature:

How you lived not knowing you lived.
How you postponed this reckoning

believing you lacked a desire to know.
Yet here you are listening to a leaf

scrape air, your hands smeared with mud.
(13)

Nature tends to stand in for the divine, though at times cloyingly so. In a poem called “The Sabbath Queen”:

Knit your soul to hers
as pine needles knit stars.
(42)

Do pine needles knit stars? Warn’s Surrealist bent is stronger and interests me more than her return to Deep Image. She clearly has a talent for juxtaposing images that sound compelling together. At the end of “The House of Fluency”:

You follow blind fish, find a violin with missing strings,
a glass float, a mouth harp.
(82)

I’m not a mystic, and for the most part, the Jewish liturgy bores me. My first objection is that it’s incredibly repetitive. I get it. You’re our king, we’re your subjects; you’re our shepherd, we’re your sheep, yadda yadda yadda. My second objection is that the insights feel so true as to be axiomatic (we all die), or entirely false (everything turns out OK in the end). Warn avoids most of those pitfalls. She uses only one extensive list, and though at times she tells an axiomatic truth, poets must be allowed axiomatic truths, as long as they are beautifully told. Warn makes it clear in the introduction that her major intellectual commitment is to postmodernism, not Judaism: “Whereas religious Jewish thinkers believe the Hebrew Alphabet is a code that reveals divine intention, I came to see it as a code that reveals the limits and generative power of language” (xiii). Unfortunately, I never saw those limits being explored—I kept hoping to find myself somewhere unfamiliar, but I kept coming back to well-worn territory.

Tags: 4 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Emily Warn, Jason Schneiderman
Posted in reviews

The Selected Poems of Hamster

Monday, December 1st, 2008

by Carlos Blackburn
Ugly Duckling Presse 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

In a Cage, on Antibiotics

blackburn cover In 1973, in a series of lectures entitled “Society Must Be Defended,” Michel Foucault drew (verbally) his philosophical graph which would lead him to the acceptance of the state always being racist. Racism (in the non-American context) was the sub-note. The over-arching highlight was that power had transformed and transferred arteries but remained flowing in a similar body. What once was sovereign was now biological. Human beings lived as systematically as seventeenth century Franciscans, gardening and cleaning and caring for their bodies.

Routine and cage are the names of the game (see also Radiohead’s OK Computer, and note that Thom Yorke apparently gave a shout out to Foucault’s idea of sovereignty at a Paris show). This, too, is the stratagem behind Carlos Blackburn’s Selected Poems of Hamster, fresh off the produce shelves of Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse.

Blackburn writes: “Up against the glass / looking over the vista / stereo, books. / Something, rain / beyond the window.”

It’s lovely. It’s also laced and will thus shape-shift your possible poetic high into a lulled bout of madness. Hamster behavior is redundant. And if Foucault were reading this work, he might nod his head while scratching one of the itchy bald spots; but, what he may dislike is the existential meaning which is contrived and artificial here, that worth and merit in existence are rare as the Hamster’s good moments.

The chapbook rolls around in its own shit, revels in the mundane which, in turn, offers the gorgeousness of the uninteresting and tedious a more than commonplace locale in the world. “A plant has started / to peek at us / from around a / corner.” This is a lovely, temporarily halting Williams-esque fragment. Wheelbarrows and rain are flipped to the urban apartment interior. The bad splinters are plentiful and not worth mentioning.

Both Stevens and MacLeish discussed human behavior as being in a state of normal-abnormality in their poetry – that in the future (the 21st) we would need to freeze our little transcendental moments and hold them in sculpture form to make sure they do not instantaneously fleet off. Blackburn may be trying this but he is only disturbing the realm of imagism while attempting to say (with domestic pet wit) what has been said over and over again since the late 1970s by all of Foucault’s little hamster-like followers.

Tags: 4 stars, Carlos Blackburn, Ken L. Walker, Ugly Duckling Presse
Posted in reviews

Spring

Monday, October 20th, 2008

by Oni Buchanan
University of Illinois Press 2008
Reviewed by DJ Dolack

And All And All

buchanan cover I’ve read it upwards of ten times. I’ve spent hours with it, sat down with it in my apartment at various times of day and night, carried it on the subway to and from work, and tucked it away for a few long train rides. I can say that I’ve tried, and then tried again. But after all the self-conscious worry about missing something here, about Doty’s name somehow giving it validation, I simply cannot subscribe.

Oni Buchanan’s second collection, and winner of the National Poetry Series, takes some serious chances with language and — for lack of a better term — experimental poetry, but ultimately it’s a collection that mires in process rather than delivering a substantial or exciting result. Though there are some beautiful moments of bitter honesty and truly well-written, encompassing verse (more on that later), what keeps coming back is the lack of cohesiveness and fundamental aim. The book’s style changes drastically with each section (there are five) and sometimes between lines and stanzas themselves. From the start, I’m not sure what the collection is reaching for, or what the poems are asking me to do, besides hack through what seems to be mostly laborious free-writing, broken into lines and vaguely arranged around some unsavory gimmicks and the theme of (surprise) the life cycle of nature in all its forms.

I suppose this bulkiness of language should have been apparent from the anonymous copy on the back cover, which begins by describing Spring with perhaps the most overused and meaningless cliché still somehow tucked away in the blurb-writer’s quiver: “a tour de force.” But at first I was fooled, excited for what venture could lay inside. I thought Lance Armstrong; I thought Infinite Jest, but by the end of the fist section, I was terribly bored, left to wonder why an author would hold out a closed fist for so long, taking huge pains to describe what could possibly be inside, and then reveal little more than a few disparate seeds. My mind starts out on its course to take in the language, to get the poem, but inevitably I wander, or am driven away by the obfuscation and seemingly endless, unnecessarily imaginative interruptions.

Take the opening stanza of “The Floor-Creatures Begin,” which is filled with fleshy colors and imagery, but really leaves me grasping for an image to take hold:

The skin was stretched tauter, fastened
through the metal hoop — membrane of sky over the earth’s
frame — and the sun struck its last hour
with a mallet wrapped in violet yarn,
tones that rose to the surface, the red swirls
deepening to violet (the disturbed blood darkening)
and outward in shade to the boundaries
(a deep tumultuous sleep)
until the skein grew dark to its edges
(a consuming sleep of coughs).

There is so much going on here it’s just tough to make sense. I want to take some things literally, some are obviously purely figurative, but between the parentheticals, three different colors and a “mallet wrapped in violet yarn,” I’m only guessing. Nothing here really sticks, or even stands out. Pile six stanzas of this very same language on top of one another and you have the opening poem. Pile ten of these poems on top of one another and you have the first section of the book, a terribly frustrating group to enjoy and connect with because of its deliberate arms-length mysticism:

The gray wears a gray scarf, knitted, about its throat,
or seeps from itself, evaporating into gray, a mist, heapings of
            insulation,
the itch
of material, gray swathe, stiff canvas of filament — and above,
outside the hallways (rectangular prisms of gray) (two telescopes
            of gray
capped on either end):
the dull stars stuck over the earth like buttons in a dust
            upholstery.

Section two brings some respite, and some pictures — literally. The poems have suddenly (mercifully) been trimmed and whittled down so that the language can breathe. There are moments of solidly brilliant and stark writing that chooses its image and trusts it will bring across the sentiment. In “Envelopes of Sky,” Buchanan gives us

…the coins of rain
through the gutter grates,
the cold clean
hint of the moon,
like water, a wetness
of half-sharp blades,

which does more in six lines than some entire poems in the collection. In “Solstice,” she even gets a bit playful:

An exceptional calculation of berries per starling.
A startling concentration of exhumations per buried.
And marks on the skin

where the electric spine lay underneath.

There are, however, still some ideas here that are not so much ill-conceived as unsuccessful. “Or Portals to Another World” is a ten page dirge and rebirth whose form goes from double-spaced lines centered down the first page, to two — then three — different strings of thought entwined, finally closing with a full page of words scatter-shot across the white space. The piece seems to follow some kind of military bombing campaign by describing the pilots and soldiers, as well as a multitude of animals and crawlers that inhabit the battered earth. (Destruction begets destruction begets life, etc. etc.) An interesting format, I guess, but one that never proves worthwhile because its images are often too vague, and the language sometimes shoots blanks. While describing a pilot taking flight for another round of bombing, Buchanan can only muster what reads like a voice-over in a Ken Burns documentary:

…each pilot plunges direct
into adrenaline, and from
his cramped cockpit,
from his helmet humid
with his quickened breath,
flies high enough above
that the target grows surreal
and still,

…

and feels again
his heart, deafening inside
his chest, his lungs now breathless
with the deed, his senses sharpened
to a super-human sharp,…

This is followed up on the next page with three photographs of an origami bird (plane?) from different angles, each revealing a series of mostly unintelligible words scrawled on its wings and body. This interesting little tangent repeats twice more with a polyhedric shape and square box before the poem and section end. The images add yet another layer to the elusiveness of the collection, and really, I’m too concerned with figuring out what I’m supposed to get from the words to graduate and place some meaning on paper figures too. I have no problem working for a meaning, or with an author teaching me how to read her work, but at this point, Spring is a frustrating puree of styles, voices, tones and images, and try as I might there is very little to which I can grasp. That is, of course, until the next section, a lively and succinct look at the human condition.

Each poem in section three (other than the first) is titled “Dear Lonely Animal,” and it’s here that Buchanan is at her best and, to me, most authentic. She plays nice with the language, and the tercets she chooses to house her lines keep her from straying into the (as Doty puts it) “wildly inventive” areas of the book. It feels as though she is much more comfortable here and not pushing something on us. I follow her through each of these ‘letters’ taking stock of how disgustingly banal and similar humans are to each other, and to more primitive creatures. Buchanan fills us in with such an earnest but amused voice, it’s easy to wish the entire book sported this posture.

Section four brings us back to spotty verse, but it seems Buchanan is at least having a bit of fun with the language. The gimmicky “Text Message” and “Maroon Canoe” take the old assonance and alliteration stand-by’s and wax Heidi Peppermint (whoops, I meant Lynn Staples) on form. Though there are moments of engrossing story, such as in “The Practice” when the speaker slices a man open and empties his body “like a laundry sack, like a complicated // wineskin, like a pig bladder” and proceeds to don his skin (face and all) and kiss her husband. Thankfully, this is in a dream, but it still held me to the page. The thriller quickly ends though, and brings us back to some weak, tiresome language. As the speaker (most likely Buchanan) walks through her piano studio on her way to practice, she takes a moment to flimsily describe the light:

Rainbows shoot in sun rays from a crystal on the window
and burst on the white walls. I step through some rainbows.

Some show on my t-shirt and some on my skin, like beauty
I like to think. I love it here, in the sunny room with rainbows.

It’s moments like this one that appear too frequently in the poems and really take away from the overall effectiveness of the collection. I repeatedly ask myself why Buchanan chooses to stay with some stanzas when it’s quite obvious removing them would shape and tighten. This idea of extraneousness is truly what impairs the experience of reading Spring. It’s almost as if Buchanan underestimates her readers, not quite giving us enough credit to understand the ideas she is creating here, and wanting to overfeed us adjectives and adverbs, redundant imagery, and as many tricks as she can plausibly fit into a book of poetry. The next section both supports and contradicts that very idea.

The Mandrake Vehicles

Before even reading the poems, one notices the book comes with a CD (attached inside the back cover) that contains flash-animated productions of the work. I’m always interested in seeing what people are doing with new media these days, especially in an art so sacredly attached to its pulp and ink. Just flipping through the back section of the book got me excited to see what Buchanan was going to do, and I’m about to give a little bit of the idea, but I’m not going to try and describe it in detail.

The section in the book itself begins with a “Note on the Mandrake Form,” which describes the “Paper version” of these “kinetic poems,” each meant to be viewed in motion on the disc and are simply presented in the book as still frames. We are told that each vehicle “is in constant motion” and are brought through a three page instruction and information session about how to ‘read’ the poems as well as how they were conceived and physically created.

As for the frames in the book, at first the reader is introduced to a huge block of prose, which seems to be right out of a free-write journal: at times maddeningly unintelligible and at others filled with a Beckett-like interest that ultimately leads nowhere — words upon words, seemingly endless, an image here, a lead there, but more like excerpts from a surrealist novel. But, as Buchanan writes, “each text block also conceals a depth of two additional ‘secret’ poems that can be distilled from the top layer.”

A flip of the page reveals white-spaced gaps between and within words where “lighter” letters (in a not-so-random order, as the info tells us) have floated “off the surface of the vehicle and the ‘heavier’ letters remain anchored to the page.” The lost letters (I think) then form random words at the bottom of the next page. The original block of text then squeezes its remaining letters together, which plugs up those initial holes, to form new words and consequently a new poem. This whole process then happens again to create yet more holes, more random words and yes, another “secret” poem. Did you get all that?

I’ve got to admit, it’s kind of fun and a bit fascinating to watch as these letters move and disappear all over the page through flash animation, but I really have trouble understanding why they’re printed in the book. It’s surely an interesting endeavor, and one that has plenty of thought and theory behind it, but again the process takes center stage here, and the poems these Mandrakes emit are experimental at best, barely coherent surrealist exercises at their worst. Here are a few lines from the final version of the first Mandrake:

Winnowing heart
(stolen tundra
sorting empathies),
agree that a
martyr stoned
seeds tombs, altars:
a vise intact.

and from the second:

Thin paeans rust
sedges. Zithers
hunger for attar:
a heroine sweet …
sheltered … in
orange alluring …
Wheels tally codes.

Again, there isn’t much to hold on to, but perhaps it’s an inventive look at the craft and process of editing. What I find most interesting about the Mandrakes is that they go through the process of getting a “core poem” while the rest of the collection drives against that very idea. Buchanan makes a point of showing the actual whittling of image and superfluous language, especially with the action of visually shedding words and letters, “eventually forming detritus words which accumulate in a heap,” but when held within the same collection as parts one and two of this book, we get an assembly of poems that constantly shuns cohesiveness and leaves us with a what seems more like selected work from a thirty year career.

Buchanan travels a long way in a hundred pages of poetry, and though I respect her writing, as well as the sheer audacity she shows by attempting to join these poems, I’m not going to say this was an enjoyable or exciting read. The gimmicks and whistles were at times too distracting to let the poems themselves take root and breathe, and often I wondered why some poems seemed simply abandoned when they could have used a bit more one on one attention. Regardless, I think the collection may make us ask some important questions about what’s possible in this tiny world of poetry, and perhaps how we’d like to go about approaching the thought of new media. It’s quite obvious we need to embrace it in some way, especially in a period when the genre’s impact and visibility are weakening with each passing year, but we’ve also got to be weary of new media’s contributions. I think this collection will show that no matter what, effectiveness and poignancy are going to come directly back to the writing itself, and the vehicle for that writing will continue to be an insignificant influence. Spring gives us its tricks and devices through which we can view the work, but these things never really add up to any sort of valuable looking glass. They obscure rather than focus, and many of these poems would have a difficult time standing without their crutches.

Tags: 4 stars, DJ Dolack, Oni Buchanan, University of Illinois Press
Posted in reviews

On Spec

Monday, April 14th, 2008

by Tyrone Williams
Omnidawn 2008
Reviewed by Hansa Bergwall

(Puzz[u..]la)r

on spec My mother once gave me a Hallmark card that was both sappy and vaguely offensive. It said, “I am a pearl, in an oyster, under the sand, at the bottom of the Ocean. If you loved me, you would find me.” What gleams in Tyrone Williams’s poems in On Spec proves just as difficult to find. I will grudgingly admit that I found a couple of pearls. Be warned though, this book is cryptic and often seems deliberately designed to confuse and obfuscate. If Williams were in the business of making crossword puzzles, I suspect he would incorrectly number the clues out of spite.

If punctuation were salt for words, Williams has unscrewed the shaker. His periods, dashes and ellipsis heap up on the words that would have anyone brave enough to recite these poems stuttering. I suspect much of his extraneous marks are mere visual adornment. He is also fond of cerebral punning he will use parentheses to fit two words in the space of one: “lo(f)ts,” for example. It’s all very distracting. It either hides what is good in the poems, or hides that there is nothing good in the poem. Here is an example of the latter:

Deventure
                                    (R-Steve Portman, Ohio)
The throne behind the throne—
                 pseud/ascepter—
his mommy (some mammy) [ H.
                 R.40] railroad(s) Freedom—
center(s) liberte
                 fixe—
                                credit deferred
(Portman-/portwoman-/{portar}-/
portress-/carriage-house-/{slave}-
quarters/cabin-(et te) Bush…

I sense this poem vaguely criticizes Republicans. The nature of the complaint is about as clear as someone mumbling, lips barely parted, clearly angry but not yet with enough courage to speak. Much of the book reads like this poem.

Several times in the book, Williams writes something as clear, bright and fresh as anything being written today. With subtle brilliance he delivers on his themes of the African American experience, gang violence, political suppression, a broken incarceration system. These moments, though rare, are exceptional. In “Descant,” a ghost runs from his newly slain body:

Descant
I left my heart in the teeth of jumper-cables—
black tongue, superfluous nipples…

By the time I hit the yellow tape—
it was already turning red…

Of my fair and alabaster love?
My redundant chains drawn in chalk?

Halfway to the stars I stopped—
turned, spat—it’s too late baby…

The poem inhabits its space of a crime scene although the voice rings from beyond life. The heart gripped in jumper cables is as arresting an image as they come. The regret in the voice, of a life wasted hits upon the tragic and expansive. At the same time, the body is fenced off in yellow tape and white chalk. The punctuation clearly aids the rhythm of the voice. If a majority of the poems in On Spec, read like this one I would give it rave reviews.

But more often, Williams banishes his readers into labyrinths of abstraction and theory. The style of these abstract musings varies wildly but it isn’t pleasant in any form:

qua tertium
quid—qua
“natural equivalence”

qua “the unity
of analogy”—qua
The Great Chain

Of Being—qua

It is tedium I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It is particularly disappointing for a poet who shows such raw talent in the rare poems like “Descant.” Line after line of academic theory references will go by without one rhythm or image to bring the reader back to something bodily, sensual, or engaging.

The themes Williams espouses about identity, imprisonment, slavery and prejudice come through on occasion with brilliance. I wish he more consistently brought his language down to earthly sounds and images so that the brilliant ideas ran throughout. But Williams chose the cryptic and cerebral route most often and it proves tedious. I do not recommend this book.

Tags: 4 stars, Hansa Bergwall, Omnidawn, Tyrone Williams
Posted in reviews

A Pure Bowl of Nothing

Saturday, June 30th, 2007

by Mary Kasimor
BlazeVOX [books] 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

The Walrus-Price of Go(l)d

A Pure Bowl of Nothing is an odd book from start to finish. Its physical presence efficiently represents the diverse body of poems found between its covers. There’s no author photo, no information about the author at all, no table of contents. Very few poems have titles. There are no clues for the reader, nothing from which to form any preconceived notions. The poems themselves are all one has to work with for better or worse, an admirable move in my eyes.

But as one begins to read, it becomes evident that the title of the book hardly does the book justice. A more appropriate and equally predictable title, I think, might have been A Mixed Can of Nuts. Each poem seems entirely separate from those that surround it. I also would approve of employing the first line of the poem “Price of Muse” as the title of the collection: Pricey the Walrus. But, if we must stick with the “bowl” image even “a bowl of beans” from a later poem would have been an improvement or at least more accurate.

Title aside, the poems in Kasimor’s spacey collection allude to a certain chaos or detachment from anything that has roots or stability. There’s nothing to orbit and nowhere to land; in some cases, this will leave readers frustrated and unable to connect with the words on the page. The large amount of white space throughout the book and the gaps between words and lines, caesuras for instance, contribute to this experience of free-floating. Though Kasimor does have a few repeated images and ideas that she works with, these consistencies are hardly enough to thread this mish-mash.

For example, the odd and perhaps mysterious repetition of a poem titled “deceptive personals.” The poem first appears early in the collection on page 14 and then reappears verbatim on page 28. The repetition seems unnecessary, possibly a mistake? Could be a vague philosophical notion I guess, but difficult to justify in such a long book, which weighs, in by the way, at a whopping 126 pages.

Kasimor consistently works to be philosophical throughout the book—and when she’s successful at it, her poems shine. One of my favorite examples comes from a poem early on in the collection which offers a repeated theme for Kasimor. She deconstructs the human body and all bodies for that matter: “a sleeping bag / a dog in the river / belly up in the water / our bodies don’t need bones.” This array of images subtly makes available the likeness of all bodily forms from sleeping bags, dogs and rivers, to the human form. This is not the last we hear of bones either. Kasimor repeatedly employs bones and their purpose, the idea that though bones are what physically allow our frames to stand erect, to be in motion, in the end, we don’t need them. What is most important is the non-physical. Though it may be an obvious idea that brainpower is more valuable than physical prowess, Kasimor’s rendering is like hearing it for the first time:

the brain spoke to

itself…

my brain swelled and then I became more of myself

Impressive because the brain recognizes itself as a part of a larger being but also as being separate from that being. It is powerful enough to see itself as one and yet two individuals that sometimes contradict one another, disagree, and face endless division until the day it stops.

As for Kasimor’s other tactics, she likes the clichéd inverse cliché, or the attempt to give life to a long dead image. I am not convinced of her ability to do so. Take the first poem in the book as an example. There are two instances in just the one poem in which Kasimor tries to revitalize a tired image. The first reads: “organic coffee swan shaped origami.” Now, I’ve never actually counted how many times origami has shown up in poems that I’ve read; a lot, but still I’d be willing to accept the ancient art if not for the fact that the swan is hardly impressive. I don’t know anyone who can fold origami into any other shape. My guess is that Kasimor tried to refresh the swan using a visually based technique rather than focusing on the content of her words. The words “organic” and “origami” share five of the same characters appearing very similar on the page, creating something like bookends for the line, a nice thought that hardly warrants the result.

The second example appears near the end of the poem. Check it out: “(another tip of the iceberg.” So, can an iceberg technically have more than one tip? I don’t think so, and even if it were possible, simply adding the word “another” doesn’t even come close to making over the image or saying. She would have done better to relay some interesting fact about icebergs; perhaps that some of the glacial ice that forms icebergs is thought to be over 15,000 years old. Unfortunately, Kasimor also ends a poem “and he lived / almost happily / ever after.” Again, adding one word doesn’t do it.

Perhaps her most severe offense in the book is “the moon’s sultry ass.” Many poets attempt to use the moon as a major image in their work and regrettably I am allowing Kasimor to take the heat for them all here. Oh well. But let’s face it, the moon has been a fingernail, a hunk of cheese, a fair porcelain cheek, and finally, an ass…whatever. All I get from this is a somewhat fond memory of Nicholas Cage and Cher’s ridiculously dramatic roles in Moonstruck, a good movie by the way.

There’s a striking contrast between the length of Kasimor’s book and her other more minimalist tendencies. It takes quite a while to accustom one’s self to her use of punctuation, which is erratic and often missing altogether. For Kasimor this seems to be yet another visual convention, one that I find is often successful, unpredictable as it may be. Ideally, poetry should strike a balance between the familiar and the unknown. By removing conventions, the reader is forced to adapt to a new and unfamiliar environment and movement of words, a life skill that is worth mimicking in poetry. However, that cannot be the only strategy at work.
In an untitled poem Kasimor again uses odd punctuation to produce a striking visual effect, but this time the visuals are applied in part to achieve a deeper or alternative meaning for the poem. I’ll quote:

it / is an exact dignity

found deep within the cracks

of the ass the earth’s manure

is worth more than

go(l)d

Okay, several things at play here. First, the line breaks imply duality for context and meaning. Also, there’s the contrast between dignity and ass cracks, and finally those damn parentheses. What are they doing? If we were to read the final word accordingly then it would be “god.” If we read it as though the parentheses did not exist then we get “gold.” And of course since Kasimor loves to be visual, we can’t help but see the butt crack glaring at us from the page. I applaud the author for providing us with options, and for being perhaps the first poet to “moon” her readers, but none of the options are all that appealing.

Okay, so it’s obvious at this point I didn’t love the book. But here, you judge:

if you’re a womb a fruit falls

off close to the tree

do you hear the noise

of death?

I don’t know…why? Do you? Scary stuff.

Kasimor reaches her peak in an untitled poem on page 55. Let’s keep in mind that page 55 is not even halfway through this book. As interrelated as everything is and as separate as it all may seem in life, what it really comes down to is where we are by the end of our allotted time and, as the saying goes, we all die alone. Unless, as Kasimor suggests, we find some way to avoid death:

the sculpture at the museum makes atoms alternating other forms

you only need to believe in it and you’ll

never die

Yeah, I like this. So again it comes down to what we’re able to get our minds to believe and what our minds can convince us of. Everything recycles, and the fear of death clouds our reasoning to the point that we are oblivious to the second life and the third life or the next stage or just the mere continuation of the beginning, the first.

Kasimor really has me convinced for the first half of the book. The final forty pages however don’t cohere; they move away, break apart and maybe that’s the point: unity and division, cycles, but in order for the cycle to continue I would have to go back to the first poem in the book and begin again and I’m afraid that this book is not one I would return to, at least not in this lifetime.

Tags: 4 stars, BlazeVOX Books, Mary Kasimor, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

Citizen of…

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

by Christian Hawkey
Wave Books 2007
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

“There were no stars”

hawkey cover

Christian Hawkey is clearly a genius. Try this:

         The code word, he whispered, just before
            letting go, was code word. Asshole,
            I thought, watching his head
            get smaller and smaller until it ended
            in a puff of dust.

Or this:

We exchanged looks—all three of us—
& mine was totally better: it had rose-colored sequins
glued along the hemlines & the word sneezeweed
in one pocket…

He has the perfect hipster sense of language, the way to turn the phrase and turn the image so that it continually unfolds along its opposite edge, bringing the idea back onto itself before moving forward again. He can flip his tonal register at any moment by sliding quickly along a new linguistic thread. His writing is not narrative or linear, but rather (dare I say it), rhizomatic—each phrase, clause and word offering a new branch of exploration. Of course he can start talking about his look as though it were a garment—that little pronoun “mine” is the chute shooting off—and aren’t you glad he did? The poems have the ability to continually revise themselves, and it’s fun, playful. This is what the New York School was all about, right? Being able to engage in meaningful play—and it’s not all surface. Try this one:

When I touched you
you crumbled

into a mound
of soft, cold bees. There

was a hole in the roof.
There was no roof.

It’s stunning. This sense of the body’s collapsible boundaries and modular pieces forms the most exciting component of Hawkey’s work—he’s able to use the body as its own landscape, pulling it apart across his canvases before putting it back in compelling new arrangements.

So why four stars? In large part, because the vast majority of the poems do not to live up to their initial promise. What starts out as a compelling reversal is repeated and turns sour in its repetition—it becomes a device or an engine, rather than a necessity or a virtuosic turn. It begins to feel narcissistic and formulaic, and it becomes harder and harder to see the gems for the rough. Immediately following “there was no roof”:

I saw something flit
between two stars.

There were no stars.

Hawkey’s press release comes with praise from John Ashbery: “What emerges is a portrait of a medium like the one we live in, with all its unexpectedness.” And I will say that my experience of the poems changed dramatically when I read them on the subway. They were in fact the perfect counterpoint to a loud subway preacher, the screeching of the tracks, a couple of breakdancers, and the guys selling bootleg DVDs in English, French and Spanish. But do I really want poems that don’t want my full attention? The lines do come wonderfully in isolation in the midst of distractions—it’s a bit like flipping through film stills rather than watching a film.

The bulk of the poems seem curiously self absorbed, and I say “curiously” because the poems seem generally opposed to the idea of a coherent self (there’s even an epigraph from Foucault: “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.”). One of the most charming quotes of the book: “Gender: pending.” The self is never whole or stable or even reliably human. “I was on mute,” begins one poem. The first quarter of the book features a number of transformations into birds.

The one explicitly political poem, “Birth of a Nation” begins with an epigraph from NPR about East Timor, but the poem begins by taking the word “birth” literally, and then enters into surreal questions about the place—the fact that East Timor is a real place seems entirely unimportant, or at the very least uninteresting. The poem is made entirely of questions:

Do they speak in clicks & soft exploding accents?
Do they sound, at large gatherings, like a popcorn machine?
Do they communicate with their strangely powerful shoulders?
Do their articulate panic by squeezing air
through their tear ducts? Does this cleanse their
national language?

Is this a meditation on American self absorption—the inability to know the other? Or is this a demonstration of American self absorption—the preference for one’s own fantasy over research or encounter. Similarly, I find it odd that the film “Birth of a Nation” finds no traction in the poem. It’s almost like the moment when Liza Minelli refers to finding the “final solution” for getting people to pronounce her name properly in her introduction to “Liza with a Z.” Does she not know what that means? Or does she just not care?

Tags: 4 stars, Christian Hawkey, Jason Schneiderman, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

Sinners Welcome

Monday, February 5th, 2007

by Mary Karr
Harper Collins 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Glancing Christwords

karr_sinners That’s two strikes for Harper Collins Publishers in 2006 after the less than impressive release of Forty-Five by Frieda Hughes and this underwhelming Mary Karr collection of often unnecessarily biblical poems. That said…

The essay that appears at the end of the book (a.k.a. the afterword), “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer”, helps resurrect Sinners Welcome. Karr discusses her turn to religion—more specifically Catholicism—in 1996, her battle with alcohol, and the similar strength she’s extracted from both poetry and prayer. She first outlines her early distaste for organized religion and prayer, which was replaced by her love for its superior, poetry:

Poetry never left me stranded, and as an atheist most of my life, I presumed its comforts were a highbrow, intellectual version of what religion did for those more gullible believers in my midst—dumb bunnies to a one, the faithful seemed to me, till I became one.

Fair enough thus far and far be it for me to tell anyone what to believe in. Though Karr does seem to brag slightly throughout the essay, highlighting her apparently abnormal intelligence and instincts (“Even as a preschooler, I could recite the works of cummings and A.A. Milne”—note the annoying lack of capitalization of poor E.E. Cummings’s oft-brutalized name), she mostly constructs a powerful case for the many positive attributes of prayer and God.

It nevertheless feels peculiar that Karr goes head over heels into the Church—baptism, the other sacraments, the stuffy formalism of it all—when her case for Christianity relies largely on the peace of praying to God. It seems none of us are entirely godless; in fact, I would argue it is impossible to exist as such. Why then go on with the rituals of chanting, breaking the bread, etc. when it seems Karr is not entirely convinced of the purity of these sacred acts first seeing the church as “ideologically repugnant”? “It set my feminist spikes prickling.”

The majority of the poems in Sinners Welcome are melancholic and dark. Karr often describes herself and her writing, but more than a few handfuls of poems deal with overt Catholic dogma that at times is difficult to sit through if you don’t happen to be a devout Christian in awe of the striking similarity between the human body and a crucifix, “because the human frame / is a crucifix.” Well, there certainly is an undeniable resemblance, and pardon my sarcasm, I think it’s merely because the crucifix was created in the image of the body to suit its purpose. This is kind of like saying “because the dog’s frame / is a dog-jacket.”

Either way, Karr does make several other useful parallels. Placing the human body in the context of religion often provides insightful and sometimes chilling images. For instance, from “Revelations in the Key of K”:

…my being leans against my spinal K,
which props me up, broomstick straight,

a strong bone in the crypt of flesh I am.

One of the book’s more interesting moments occurs in “At the Sound of the Gunshot, Leave a Message,” written for poet Franz Wright. It seems that Karr and Wright share similar pasts, troubled by bouts with ill-health and vice. Though the somewhat sweet poem does take the feared turn toward God, lines like “…this poet / who can crowbar open / the most sealed heart, make ash flower…” make the indulgences worth it.

Overall, it seems Karr is at her best when she doesn’t try so hard to concentrate or center her poetics on God, but rather lets herself be in awe of all of life’s pleasures and horrors. One particularly compelling example has to do with her son. The poem “Pluck” contains some of the most moving and perhaps intensely spiritual in the book, though the poet apparently takes the place of God: “my son led me down to a room / where crickets sang as if I were the sun.”

Tags: 4 stars, Mary Karr, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

Hitler’s Mustache

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

by Peter Davis
Barnwood Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Hitler’s Mustache: The Review

davis hitler cover We can generally agree that even if Jason Lee (as Earl) brings the mustache back to the mainstream—if the mullet cascades its way back into our hearts, if modifications to jeans command perpetual flux—there’s one look that will take at least a few hundred more years to find its way back: the small, sub-nostril’d bar code stache.

I generally roll with the ethic that the imposition of Adolf Hitler on a work of art is a logical fallacy: the classic signifier that an artist is out of ideas and relying on Hitler’s evil to carry the workload.

But Adolf Hitler the man plays at most a bit-part in Peter Davis’s debut, Hitler’s Mustache. There’s no penetration of World War II or Nazism, just a lot of surface-level, large-scale metaphor on the part of Hitler’s famous fashion statement—the black square of hair itself and nothing more. Yet inevitably the very thought of Hitler ghosts the whole book—perhaps too much so, leading to the ever-lingering question: is he taking the issue too lightly?

I don’t think he is. That question, and the overall craziness of the concept, had an interesting effect on the online poetry world; people were at least a little stupefied by the book as chunks of it surfaced in nearly every online journal in the land. Read through it, though, and you’ll find Davis, in his own way, allows for the pang of murderous evil. However grave the tone of each poem, our narrator sees mustaches everywhere (even the mustache on the cover is represented as a barcode, for your metaphorical pleasure): “She ordered a cup of mustache from the mustache who worked behind the mustache.”

It is without question that Davis has bitten off more than he can chew, though of course the largesse of his topic was part of the point. More a distraction than an obsession, the mustache stands in for anything unsettling or uncomfortable—and anything obsessed over to the point of mania and absurdity. Here’s one of my favorite passages, from the prose poem “Hitler’s Mustache: A Mustache Confession”:

I feel like a bad mustache a lot of the time. With
no friends, and for good reason, greedy and mean
and not worth the time…Who knows about masks?
Not me. I’m moving at the speed of light and the
occurrence of seeing light gets mustache, etc. I want
to tell something about myself, but, mustache.

Most of the book is at least as confounding as this passage, but that’s the trouble: it maintains one level and becomes repetitive. The word “mustache” is scattered across every poem, so repetitious it becomes vapid as a blank line in a Mad Lib. Apart from “mustache,” Davis peppers the almost pleasant poems with occasionally violent images, perhaps to justify the weight of relying on Hitler for a whole book (“lopping off lots of little fingers”, “pianos made of skin”).

There’s “Hitler’s Mustache: The Ode,” “Hitler’s Mustache: Frank ‘Mustache’ O’Hara,” “Hitler’s Mustache: The Sestina,” “Hitler’s Mustache: The Journey Tribute Band,” “Hitler’s Mustache: Mustache Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Mustachio.” The poet proves himself both clever and versatile. But rather than emerging as a rapt, engaging obsession, this mostly floats on top. Hitler’s mustache, rather than an embodiment of unease, starts to feel like an attempt to anchor a bunch of unrelated poems, like the obsessive need for direction alone.

On his blog, Davis describes Hitler’s mustache thusly: “an emblem of the complete folly of his ideas and an example of the anomaly that is seemingly always in our mist.” I’m okay with this, even though I didn’t need to be reminded of “the complete folly” of Hitler’s ideas. I also don’t mind this, from the book itself: “Hitler’s mustache is the comet that nobody sees because everyone is watching its furry tail.” Okay, let a vague sense of Hitler terror sweat through the walls of the book, fill the holes in your life—it’s an idea at least.

But idea-wise, Davis crosses the line here: “The Mystery of Hitler’s Must Ache.” Surely everyone has a “must ache,” right? In its sweetness, the metaphor suffocates.

Still, the fact he had the stamina to maintain his mustache-talk for 80 pages at least calls to mind Ashbery’s notion of “the perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose.” Hitler’s mustache was in there when this poet was writing this manuscript, and it wasn’t going to go anywhere until the manuscript was done. The mustache is a crutch, but not so much that it prevents all lyric moments from shining, as in these lines from “Hitler’s Mustache: The Basic Situation for the Clandestine Mustache”:

A grueling gargle gurgles up from
the lagoon mustache.
In your memory, the childhood
moment in which you discovered
a number of live frogs trapped
in a drainage thingy behind
a school. You lifted the metal grating
and pulled a few frogs out.

This is an aggressive first book project; any use of Hitler is a gamble, surely Davis knew this all along, and the result is a peculiarly obsessive book. I know this sounds like bullshit reviewer-speak, but now that this is out of the poet’s system, I’m very interested to see what he does next; he’s undoubtedly skilled enough to rely on tone as the anchor for a book rather than everyone’s preconceived notion of terror. The mustache just becomes too deeply symbolic and ultimately, a distraction. Whether he works best with series and obsession or with spontaneity remains to be seen, but some new poems he’s posted on his blog outrun pretty much everything in Hitler’s Mustache. Look at “How Today Becomes a Creepy Spider”—obsessive repetition flavors the poem. Davis presents a unique voice and perspective, and perhaps more importantly, a willingness to pursue some peculiar impulses.

Tags: 4 stars, John Deming, Peter Davis
Posted in reviews

Forth a Raven

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

by Christina Davis
Alice James Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Life as Inverted Journeywork

davis raven cover It could be said after reading Christina Davis’s Forth a Raven that the poet has found her medium but not her form.

Now that that sentence has scared away any high-schoolers who wound up here accidentally while Googling sources for a Poe paper, I’ll note there’s a lot to like in this book, but that the raven she has sent forth will inhabit America’s favorite literary medium in a kind of a bird-smacking-into-glass way rather than a sneak-in-through-the-window-and-prod-your-mania way.

Which isn’t really a criticism, because the window could just as easily have been open, and either way, the arrival of a noteworthy writer has been announced.

Forth a Raven is worth the read for a number of reasons, primarily the fact that the poems offer mystery, intelligence and wit that can’t be faked: “You learn to walk, which is done by walking. / You learn the past tense of have, which is hunger.” Davis’s lean lyrics also comprise a very lean book; at 49 pages (43 pages, once you remove the section dividers), she provides readers with a quick dip into contemplation and oft-earned romance.

So what’s the problem? The forms her poems inhabit are consistently out of sync with the content. Primarily built on trim couplets, tercets, and quatrains, her poems lean towards being clever thoughts rendered lyrically—the kind of things suitable for little conversational prose poems, not for the icy detachment you’ll feel she’s striving towards. The poems become estranged; the line breaks, in many cases, lend needless gravity to small metaphorical anecdotes:

Whereas I know a man
who saves the anonymous faces
sold with the frames

and props them against the wall (and, in his wallet,
folds them with his family) till the day

when each is recognized.

In “Nostalgia for the Infinite,” Davis poses the question “Does anyone ever ask to return as himself again?” The answer is yes, because Louise Glück answers the question gorgeously in “Landscape,” the centerpiece in Averno. Glück is worth mentioning here because I think Davis takes a lot of her formal cues from Glück—namely Glück’s sledgehammer enjambments, and the ironclad detachment of her precise, barely-there lyrics. Only one other poet has pulled off that kind of detachment, and her name is Plath.

Davis is more conversationally inquisitive, more willing to be your friend. These kinds of enjambments and stanza breaks poeticize this good-natured curiosity. This is not always the case; take this nicely executed quatrain that opens “Last Words”:

My grandmother said precious little but merely breathed in and in
as if the back of her were open and we were no longer in
the presence of the front. Is it over?
someone asked, of the inverted journeywork.

Yet the more Glückian the italics and sparser the lines, the less compelling and more dramatic the notion of the poem. Here is “Dramatis Personae” in its entirety:

What is it you do, again?

What do you call a character
who is only put here
to foster an impenetrable plot?

A foil?

A human.

I guess the point is we’re all of us foils, but the microphone volume needs to come a down a couple of notches. A number of fun, occasional, “ooh that would make a good poem” poems are chased into similar patterns. She’s best when the “point” of the poem is buried in image, oddity, and playful artifice—the title poem is a good example, as is “Two Varieties of Passion Plays,” which concludes:

So what, if it took a year to make
a bass of that boy in the field,
so what, if the mothers must agree
to raise their girls as voices?

Ultimately, I think Forth a Raven introduces us to a head with a million important ideas. But the work itself would be stronger, and the voice would appear more genuine, if the poems exercised a bit less rigidity.

Tags: 4 stars, Alice James Books, Christina Davis, John Deming
Posted in reviews