Posts Tagged ‘5.5 stars’

The Hunger Season

Monday, February 21st, 2011

by William Taylor Jr.
SunnyOutside 2009
Reviewed by Kimberly Steele

“…and god is the darkness”

The streets of San Francisco, those filthy, eerie and teeming with life, provide the setting for William Taylor Jr.’s reverie on urban rhythm and pulse in The Hunger Season. Nothing surprises Taylor’s speaker, who is so intimately connected with the taverns and subways of Larkin and Polk Streets that he bleeds into them, thriving on all the things he also loathes about his city. He seems resigned to this fate, as though his mixed feelings are the inevitable result of a unique kinship and exclusive insight. The insights, not the city, become the focus.

Taylor starts off with an uncharacteristically short piece that brings the starkness of his subject matter to the forefront. “A Frida Kahlo Kind of Day” aptly represents the larger work, treating painful and ugly subject matter with a tone of unimpressed nonchalance. The poem invokes twentieth century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, who broke her back as a teenager and spent her adult life in chronic pain. She famously tried to capture her suffering with visual representation; her works depict colorful scenes of intense, expressionless agony. Taylor tries the same with his poems, minus the vibrant colors. These poems are gray, black, white, and sometimes brown—the hues of the overcast and filthy, the ghostly and absent. Taylor revels in slow, excruciating torment:

a sky of broken Christs
hung from rusty nails;

songs of ruined lovers
borne upon the wind.

There is nothing tepid about this scene—it is utterly “broken” and “ruined.” Innocence is sabotaged. At the same time, the “universe,” which “embraces and devours,” is still “blessed” by the mangled Christs who oversee, but who mostly neglect. Neglect is an essential component of divinity, and Taylor likes to give the downtrodden and the neglected their share of righteousness. Using this motif of religious imagery in “The Same Fire,” Taylor emphasizes that

The thing to understand is:
every moment

we are the lion
eating the lamb

and the lamb
being eaten by the lion ….

The lion and the lamb are fairly tired religious images, but Taylor’s point is clear, and it is spare. Everything around us, including ourselves, is equally worthy of salvation and damnation. In “When She Lights a Cigarette and Asks,” the speaker clarifies this belief that “God is every splinter of light / in between all the darkness // and god is the darkness.” Every moment of life – good or bad, meaningful or pointless – constitutes a religious experience, which presents a problem: if everything is as valuable as everything else, everything loses meaning. His bewilderment is understandable when a companion “asks why I never / go to church.” The speaker is left to “only wonder where it is / she thinks we are.”

Generally, The Hunger Season is more like a black-and-white photograph than a Kahlo oil painting: always over- or underexposed. Despite some persuasive images, resonant language and an honest tone, Taylor’s message does not feel entirely fresh, and his insights fail to achieve revelatory philosophical depth. He sometimes captures the precise emotional effect he seeks with simple descriptions, as when he talks about “hope” being “cast aside / … // like Christmas trees / on January streets” or compares people in a crowd to “animals / but without / the grace.” But his perpetual focus on the same topic and unvaried poetic style make his message feel labored. He has a tendency to carry on too long, and to indulge in familiar, oversimplified sentiments. Many of the poems beg to be shorter, to finish stronger. I frequently had a feeling of completion before realizing that the poem continues onto the next page. Precisely what makes “A Frida Kahlo Kind of Day” stand out is its limited scope and ability to quit while it’s ahead.

But The Hunger Season is memorable as a an earnest celebration of life as a contradiction. With characteristic empathy, Taylor tries to provide a safe place for us to experience what he celebrates, which is

… to be content
in finding a place where time

moves slowly
for a little while ….

(from “The Next Song on the Jukebox”)

And in “At the Center of Us All,” he divulges a philosophy on life, which is “to forgive / as much and as often / as possible.” The obviously Christian sentiment sounds nice in the key of obsessed atheist.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Kimberly Steele, SunnyOutside, William Taylor Jr.
Posted in reviews

O Holy Cow!: The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto

Friday, November 6th, 2009

by Phil Rizzuto
Edited by Tom Peyer and Hart Seeley
First Edition: The Ecco Press 1993
Reviewed by John Deming

“Very Confusing…”

rizzuto cover It is true that, by their nature, organized sports serve as a constant assertion that there is a very real difference between winning and losing. It is true that there are those who take this lesson too seriously. But sports, especially professional sports, can also provide what the arts can provide: the absence of confusion, the presence of order. Each game represents, to borrow a line from John Ashbery, “the perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose”: the game will be played to its conclusion. Somebody will win. At season’s end, somebody will win it all.

It is transitory order, but order all the same. Over a period of three or four hours, the sports fan lives a whole life: there is success, there is failure, there is the always mutating ratio of ability to effort to luck – and in the end, there is a clear determination as to whether you, the follower, are damned or redeemed. The first pitch in a baseball game, then, is the enactment of form against time; something has to happen by the end. Oceanic swells of calm and chaos ensue, and a viewer feels, to quote a B.H. Fairchild poem, “the wide wings of the present tense.” Sports broadcasters – with their excruciating know-it-allism, insularity and bugaboo lexicon – are charged with stitching order throughout the affair, and negotiating a truce between the game and the outside world.

Enter Phil Rizzuto, nickname Scooter, who played shortstop for the New York Yankees from 1941 to 1956. He won seven World Series titles in his tenure, and never played for any other team. He became a broadcaster fairly quickly upon leaving the Yankees, and kept it up for four decades. He was quaint, quirky and likeable. His catch phrase was “holy cow”; players who disappointed him were “huckleberries.” He unabashedly rooted for the home team, and invented the scoring notation “WW” for “wasn’t watching.” Rizzuto was a character who misread Teleprompters, who reportedly left games early when he heard thunder because he had a tremendous phobia about lightning.

All the while, it seems he lived in the game as equally as he lived in the abstractions he perceived around it and around him. Holy Cow!: the Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto demonstrates a broadcaster who speaks from the very center of the present tense. The “verses,” if you’ll call them that, are comments that Rizzuto made to fellow broadcasters during games. They are “found” poems, in this sense, and are broken into lines and titled by editors Tom Peyer and Hart Seeley. Here is “Doom Balloon” in its entirety:

Another balloon coming our way,
Seaver.
Must be a downdraft
Right here.
Pink balloon.
THAT SON OF GUN’S COMING RIGHT—

Rizzuto uttered these words on August 14, 1992 at Chicago with Alex Hernandez pitching to Charlie Hayes in the third inning, two outs, bases empty, White Sox leading 1-0. I know this because each verse is fitted at the end with a game-time scenario indicating what was happening while it was spoken. Reading one of these game-time scenarios is something like looking at a photo from your third grade best friend’s birthday party – it mattered then. But each also has the potential to equalize past and present with the sudden reminder that every game will vanish as such. The balloon is coincidental, but it also an invasion. Somewhere beyond the confines of the game, there is menace – there is doom, there is the absolute certainty of death and suffering. But now, there is the game, which means the perpetuation of possibility.

So, clearly Rizzuto’s is a baseball-centered universe. The game is constant, like light. Rizzuto focuses on literal events as they take place, but also uses the game’s continuity as a platform for distraction. Baseball is a game of tempered and immediate rhythm; the stasis it provides is a given, so Rizzuto is free to think aloud – to associate stored bits of thought and experience, and allow them to float above the game itself, much in the way that characters in a novel begin to float above an entire ocean as one reads on the beach.

It is as though the occurrence of thought during a game is in the same arena, and is a serviceable a matter to discuss as an event in the game itself, because each takes place within the same dimension. No topic is off limits, because it blossomed from the static unfolding of the game; “Very Frustrated” is about fast food:

I tell ya,
I tried that new McLean burger.
Very good.

Of course,
my cholesterol is very high.
Very high.

That his McLean burger couldn’t possibly have been good, let alone very good, is beside the point. The atmosphere permits the confession about his cholesterol; the thought could’ve been internalized, but is externalized, because – why not. In the verse “Concord,” the Yankees are “at Boston” in September 1991. Rizzuto riffs on local culture, specifically Henry David Thoreau’s old town, Concord, MA:

Everything is named Walden up there.
Yeah.
Great great poet.
Another one . . .
Uh.
I gotta think of the other one up the –
Another great poet that they . . .
It really is beautiful country.
I could very easily move up there.

Thoreau, the author of Walden, was a terrific essayist and mediocre poet. But the point is that Rizzuto shows no need to internalize any thought. Everything is relevant; the game has ripened time, made it lateral and encouraged the swift blossom of association. It doesn’t matter that a moment later, Rizzuto realizes that the other “great poet” he had been thinking of is actually from Greenwich, CT, not Concord: “But I don’t have enough money / To move up to Greenwich. / So I might move up to Concord.” Phil, we all know you aren’t moving anywhere.

Sometimes, he doesn’t know why he’s saying what he’s saying; in “Hall and Nokes,” – a reference to Yankees Mel Hall and Matt Nokes – he says the names paired sound “like a good rock group.” He’s reminded that there is a group with that kind of name, and that the group is called “Hall and Oates.” He replies, “Oh yeah? / That’s one I missed. / I’ll have to go out and buy some of their records tonight.” Why?

Sometimes he loses track of what he’s saying. He begins “Go Ahead, Seaver” with a story: “You know, / Some kid wrote me a letter.” He gets distracted; the verse finishes, “I was gonna tell you something, / But I forgot what it was. / Go ahead.” The initial thought evaporates, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not his thought right now.

In truth, much of this book reads like sports broadcasting; to that end, the line breaks often dramatize what amount to fairly benign observations. But plenty of these verses proffer the same ball field tranquility that rallies millions around the game. By tranquility, I mean a resetting of value that exists between the first pitch and final out. I realize that many sports fans are far from “tranquil” in their actions during games, and that a game can at times become a bizarre forum for misplaced anger in the way that, for Rizzuto, it becomes a bizarre forum for misplaced wonder.

But maybe that anger has more to do with the misplaced concept that the world will be worse – unfair, even – if the team loses. It is true that in sports, winning is essential and provides a necessary premise for the game to exist at all (it had to be for something, right?). I attended 11 New York Yankees games this year; if I weren’t working further uptown today, I would have gone down to the ticker tape parade up Broadway. But what’s nice about the game-time scenarios at the bottom of each Rizzuto verse – and about the verses themselves – is that they emphasize process: the communal process of the game, not its necessary end. The presence of one’s life being lived, not constant terror at things that might go wrong as you press towards an inevitable, and likely painful, death, as well as those of everyone you care about. The game itself is ecstasy; winning is merely a waking dream. Things fall apart, and this year, like the last, and the one before that, will end, Rizzuto laments in a verse named for a line by Yeats, “Mere Anarchy in Loosed Upon the World”:

I tell ya.
Before long,
Football starts.
This weekend
In seriousness.
And pretty soon
It’ll be hockey
And then basketball.
And then baseball
Will still
Be going on.
And it’ll be
Very confusing,
Very confusing.

Everyone manufactures methods for measuring time. The easiest way to dismiss sports, or any measure of devotion to them, is to regard that the sense of “order” I’ve described is wholly imagined. That if one does not play for the New York Yankees, hinging any measure of one’s mood on them barely short of stupid, and that the whole thing is a charade: the players, even the owners, are seldom natives of that town. But the important thing to consider is not that the sense of order a ballgame provides is diminished by the fact that it is manufactured; it’s that any measure of order exists because of our ability to manufacture it.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Ecco Press, Hart Seeley, John Deming, Phil Rizzuto, Tom Peyer
Posted in reviews

The Continual Condition

Friday, October 16th, 2009

by Charles Bukowski
Ecco Press 2009
Reviewed by Joseph Goosey

“drinking. yeh.”

bukowski cover I am often among the first to hop on the wagon and buy a new Charles Bukowski collection. On whole, I have looked forward to and more or less enjoyed even the posthumous collections many Bukowski fans rail against. So naturally, I’ve been waiting around for the release of The Continual Condition for awhile.

First time through, I consumed the entire 127-page collection – a group of “never-before-collected,” and mostly later pieces constructed of sparse, one- or two-word lines – in the amount of time it took to drink five Budweiser American Ales. Some poems reward scrutiny; the vast majority are depressingly interchangeable. Bukowski essentially summarizes the collection with four words in the almost memorable “my soul is gone”: “screenplay, horses, drinking. yeh.”

While it’s true that these themes would be expected (perhaps even relished) by readers familiar with Bukowski, they come across as flabby and repetitive in The Continual Condition. Generally, his insights edge dangerously toward platitude; in “died 9 april 1553,” our poet declares:

life is not what
we think it
is, it’s only what we
imagine it to
be
and for us
what we imagine
becomes
mostly so.

This borderline greeting card-verse represents neither the hard-luck wisdom of Bukowski’s best work nor an insight we can’t get from NYC Transit’s “Train of Thought” series (the series, which consists of literary quotations posted in subway cars, recently offered this pearl from Schopenhauer’s “Studies in Pessimism: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”) Bukowski’s spare lines dramatize what is a fairly predictable conceit.

There is some return on this $27 hardcover investment. Upon finishing my fifth beer, I arrived easily and indifferently to the end of the collection – and suddenly it was as though the editor (or the book itself) knew that I’d be clamoring for something that would last. The final poem, “bayonets in candlelight,” is electric, filled with absurd, desperate energy that shucks mortality:

you can take my bones and paint them green
and hang them out the window like letters from Spain
but
I will be running down the hall of your granite heart
for years

Do what you like to him. The poet is dead, yes, but he stops somewhere waiting for you. The only question is what he’s going to do with you when you get there; if “to kiss her long dark hair” serves as any indication, perhaps he’s not the type that means to inflict harm. At least, not to abstract things:

I don’t want to murder art.

He didn’t, and hasn’t here. Some say Bukowski slipped in his old age. Maybe. But a book like this might also have to do with corporate common sense: spread every ounce of work by a popular name to as much of the public as possible. It’s a slippery slope, but it has yet to murder art, and in this case, certainly won’t afflict Bukowksi’s legacy.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Charles Bukowski, Ecco Press, Joseph Goosey
Posted in reviews

Begin Anywhere

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

by Frank Giampetro
Alice James Books 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

Frankly

giampetro cover Frank Giampietro’s Begin Anywhere is, above all, an exercise in self-consciousness, self-interest, self-indulgence and a number of other self-nouns sprung from the same sort of goofy egotism allowed in children. That said, his poems can be compelling insofar as they remain wide-eyed explorations of their invariable and stylized subject, Frank Giampietro. When Giampietro resists indulging in his persona, his speakers’ self-interest can be an effective representation of the way the self splinters among the various parts of our daily lives. More often, though, he just seems like he can’t help himself.

On one hand, an uncharacteristically rhymed sonnet like “Frankstory” (sidenote: other titles that include the poet’s first name are “Frank Giampietro, Poet,” “Frankie the Haggler,” and “Anti-Ekfrankcis”) takes on an interesting conceptual structure wherein one man’s sense of his own history is placed in the context of global history which is then placed inside another man’s sense of his own history. The result is three historical moments presented like a set of Matryoshka dolls, and it is unclear whether the speaker’s personal history is to be thought the most important or the least. The method borders selflessness but implies that history cannot exist if not for its iteration in the minds of living people. On the other hand, a poem like “Me Spy with My Little Eye” might more accurately represent the collection’s single-faceted obsession with the self—all while chanting a childlike me, me, me:

Me and no more fifty-gallon fish tank.
Me in my new hundred-dollar shoes
and my, if me don’t cut my hair just so
my head looks huge.
Me, my head is huge.

Everything exists in the poem because of the speaker, which makes some obvious philosophical sense. Giampietro wisely avoids philosophy, but still, his hybrid baby-talk and the afterthought “you” introduced in the final three lines of the poem amount to a silly sort of manipulation—the kind used to uphold rules in a children’s game. Giampietro concludes, “You’re so smart / and so cool, but I freakin’ spy you.”

Most of the poems in the collection are not so syntactically inventive or formally organized—most are colloquial and observational. The connection is strong, and one of Giampietro’s more derivative modes is to present a series of invariably self-referential statements tied together with an ambiguous title such as “Another Poem Scoring 4.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test” or “Confessional Poem #783.” The first few lines of the latter poem test the limits of the style with representative humor:

I have dried my hands on my dog.
I have stolen the first line of this poem
from a TV commercial
for beer. I have used a cock ring.
I fear the art teacher at the school where I work
will use this knowledge against me someday.

The poem ends strongly, with the speaker’s opinion of himself projected imaginatively through his son. The final lines, “if my heart doesn’t give out too soon / my boy will pity me,” deflate the supposed importance of what comes before and subtly recognize a sad quietness in the gaps between the speaker’s yells. Nevertheless, these poems rely on their becoming fresher and fresher with each incoming line—a technique that, even when done successfully, can feel like a tedious, meandering search for the next great self-oriented shock.

Evident in those same early lines of “Confessional Poem #783” is another of Giampietro’s methods, namely a persistent self-consciousness. “Dear J, I Patched This up Instead of That One I Promised About Simone Weil” is the most obvious of such poems, and Giampietro doesn’t stop with the title. In it, he writes, “‘After Eating an Apple Core and All, While Riding in my Car’ / is what this poem was going to be called.” Of course, the poem does end up largely about Simone Weil, highlighting the one-dimensional strangeness of being told what not to expect but expecting it anyway. To say a poem would have been about Simone Weil or could have been a villanelle or hasn’t fulfilled any number of alternate possibilities is to be bland and obvious, but also means a recognition that circumstances necessarily external to the poem have interfered with its purpose—and that the self or the speaker or Frank Giampietro, despite the precedence any of them takes, does not exist without something gleaned from the rest of the world.

The title poem may be the best of such poems. The poem reveals the physical and emotional history of a woman’s death, but it does so in very distinct, well-paced steps. Halfway through the poem, after the speaker’s father has mysteriously thrown a shotgun into a lake, Giampietro reveals the cause of death, and his speaker begins his appropriate unraveling:

Or I could begin after the splash, with the ducks
flying back to the bread. Or ten minutes earlier
with my father not consoling, but wanting to console
my half-sister as she stands there, a shadow’s length
from the doorway watching him hold
what’s left of his first wife. Of course I could begin
with his wife shooting herself
in my half-sister’s abandoned playhouse.

The poem begins again several times before and after these lines, and it works largely because it reluctantly backgrounds its self-consciousness in the face of a visceral, emotionally-charged incident. It also works because the poem’s self-conscious refrain and the inherent emotionality of the subject meld successfully into a sad stutter, as if the speaker must continue to begin the story because he is afraid the end of his story will really be the end.

Such human moments make it difficult to take a hard line on Begin Anywhere. It would be easy to find fault with the overstated, colloquial comedy of many of Frank Giampietro’s poems, but there is an endearing clumsiness about his speakers, as if they are forever under threat of tripping on their shoelaces or drinking too much wine at their in-laws’. Still, Giampietro gives himself a starring role in the collection, and like most character actors, his better work is done in bit parts.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Alice James Books, Frank Giampetro, PJ Gallo
Posted in reviews

Ballistics

Monday, October 27th, 2008

by Billy Collins
Random House 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

Ahh..the Name is Billy, Baby

collins ballistics cover Ahh…Billy. Billy, Billy, Billy. Billy. Billy Collins is used to being condescended to, and that makes sense. He’s popular. Poetry’s Mitch Albom. Poetry’s Dan Brown. Poetry’s American Idol. You can find his new book, Ballistics, in the “New Fiction” (yes, fiction) section at the Union Square Barnes and Noble—so naturally, Billy Collins is suspect.

I, for example, suspect he would’ve been less successful if he’d made a choice early on to go by “William” instead of “Billy.” But none of that has anything to do with the quality of his poems, about which it can be said that the best shine like angels, and the worst revolt like a dandelion sandwich.

Most Collins poems begin with a getting-to-know-you. Our poet loves to talk about poetry, loves tercets, and spends the bulk of his time sitting home, sipping tea, gazing out the window and reminding himself how simple life is. His most fully-imagined poems crystallize at unexpected moments; “January in Paris” riffs on Paul Valery’s famous proclamation that “poems are never completed—they are only abandoned.” Our poet finds himself in Valery’s Paris, where he seduces and then “finishes” a Valery poem, likened to a young girl:

Never mind how I got her out of the café,
past the concierge and up the flight of stairs—
remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.

And never mind the holding and the pressing.
It is enough to know that I moved my pen
in such a way as to bring her to completion,

a simple, final stanza, which ended,
as this poem will, with the image
of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,
her large eyes closed,
a painting of cows in a valley over her head,

and off to the side, me in a window seat,
blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

This is a charming, somehow lonely stretch, a G-rated self-important fantasy with a duality that hits the mark. Lesser poems, though, there are. “This Little Piggy Went to Market” picks up where the title leaves of: “is the usual thing to say when you begin / pulling on the toes of a small child…” At the end, he’s too cute, too freakin’ merry:

I don’t want to be the one to ruin the children’s party
by asking unnecessary questions about Puss in Boots
or, again, the implications of a pig eating beef.
By the way, I am completely down with going
“Wee wee wee” all the way home,
having done that many times and knowing exactly how it feels.

I wish the sweetness here were at least Garrison Keillor granddad sweetness, but it seems closer to a single Dad trying to dazzle a single Mom during Story Time at the local library.

Connecting with others, though, is important in this book. However “famous” a poet our speaker is, he is distanced from his readers. “August in Paris” plays whimsically on the reader/writer relationship; however often a person talks to the poet about his book, the transmission of poem to head takes place always elsewhere and in silence, in the mysterious space where poems live—Collins’s best poems, and the poems he loves so much and can’t stop referencing (you should know there is a poem called “The Idea of Natural History at Key West”). Collins lets us access this place with alarming graciousness, and the openness of his voice probably helps account for his popularity; as he points out in “Hippos on Holiday,” “Only a mean-spirited reviewer/would ask on holiday from what?” Collins falls so naturally into his comfort zone that he makes it look easy; none of his copycats have come close.

The only other William Collins I’ve heard of also went by a moniker—Bootsy Collins, of P-Funk and Rubber Band fame. If it’s only the blissfully cartoonish name you’re chasing, buy the 1977 funk classic Ahh…the Name is Bootsy Baby, as it is a vastly superior creative effort. But if you’re out for American poetry’s feel-good hit of the year, give Ballistics a shot.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Billy Collins, John Deming, Random House
Posted in reviews

Bill’s Formal Complaint

Monday, September 29th, 2008

by Dan Kaplan
The National Poetry Review Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

Kill Bill Vol. 2 (see Vol. 1)

kaplan A couple of weeks ago, Matt Soucy reviewed a book called Bill. That book follows an everyman character called Bill, and is written by a man named Bill. The book I’m reviewing, Bill’s Formal Complaint, is also about a Bill. Except it’s written by Dan.

Bill and Bill’s Formal Complaint both sustain a generic character called Bill—so immediately, each book compromises the other’s potential for originality. But the existence of both titles also proves each author’s thesis, in a sense; Bill is common. Says Dan Kaplan in his book’s opening poem: “The question is: who doesn’t know a Bill?”

True. Here’s a Bill:

billclinton

Here’s another Bill:

billcosby

And here’s another Bill:

billmurray

In Kaplan, we develop again the sense that the name Bill, in its commonality, belies any single person’s capacity to possess it. Bill is a stick figure, a flipbook animation—the idea that all humans are related by the simple fact that they live life and have experiences. The notion of the generic everyman is also counterbalanced by the essential fact that an “everyman” doesn’t exist. He is imaginary; the world is made up instead of individuals with individual cells and individual struggles. What would Bill Clinton, Bill Murray, and Bill Cosby talk about if they sat around the dinner table together? They would tell each other great new things, sure. For that matter, throw in Bill Walker, that big aquarium-owner who used to live across the hall from me.

Though he constantly undercuts his “generic Bill” idea (“There’s Pecos Bill, / Big Bill Broonzy, Bill Bixby…”), Kaplan’s Bill is a bit much. For starters, he’s in too many poem titles. There’s “Hammocked, Bill,” “Bill’s Dream,” “Bill Translates Swedish,” “Bill Translates English,” “The Love Life of Bill,” to name a handful. In a number of these, Bill is mentioned only in the title, not in the body of the poem. They don’t need him. The best of these, the book’s namesake, “Bill’s Formal Complaint” begins:

If mother hadn’t fed me with that busted
spoon, I’d be hilarious now. And given
proper chance, I could cleanly shuck
the sharkskin pants off a runway model…

We don’t need “Bill” to intuit it is a cultural universal, or perhaps an American universal, to apply blame when things ain’t right. These lines demonstrate some of Kaplan’s greatest strengths: using outlandish ideas or examples to reinvigorate common concepts. One could easily “blame Mom” in a variety of familiar ways—that boring “my parents screwed me up” argument. But Kaplan’s Bill places value on being “hilarious” and on “shucking” the pants off a model. The sentences are stated simply, the voice of an everyman, but the absurdity also deprecates the principle at hand; blaming others for one’s own unfulfilled ambitions is really just denial—and to commit this kind of denial is the real absurdity.

But again, most of the poems with “Bill” suffer as a result. They are trying to do something, and appear desperate to fulfill a heavy-handed concept. I got sick of reading his name. The concept doesn’t work; I’ve read better books by lesser poets this year. With Bill nowhere in sight, Kaplan shines brightest (the “concept” might imply that Bill is in these poems too; believe me, he’s not). Read gems like “Question #2” and “Today #2” and you’ll see my point. There is something crazed in Kaplan:

Sunlight clamps the grayish buildings,
swells their height. Note to self: tweak wiring
behind the cloudless backdrop, watch
as needled skyline pricks the sun with dark.

He writes poems that stand alone and don’t need a concept, or a name, imposed upon them. I’ve seen too many books lately that rely on one repeated “name” throughout to serve as an everyman, as a metaphor for everything and nothing: Bill, Victor, Roger, even Hitler. The “one great metaphor that encompasses everything” idea is too simple. The heavy-handedness might be “the point,” but even when Kaplan surprises us with his own name (“Dan”) in the final poem, we’re reminded what a boring device everything-and-nothing name repetition is. In fact, the worst poem in the book (titled simply “Bill”) is little more than an attempt to fulfill this concept: Bill this, Bill that, Bill doing this, Bill doing that. The only line that sticks out it is “Bill giving a last over-the-shoulder look.” Goodbye, Bill. Hello, Dan.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Dan Kaplan, John Deming, The National Poetry Review Press
Posted in reviews

The House of Marriage

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

by Erin Hanusa
Louisiana State University Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

Quiet Riot

hanusa cover

American poets often teeter over a fine line between individualism and egotism. On the one hand, such poets have a responsibility to exemplify and elucidate their uniquely American philosophical perspectives—perspectives that likely include some affinity for Emersonian self-reliance and individualism. On the other hand, personal experience and so-called self-expression are too commonly mistaken for valuable, and the ideal of the self as a vessel for poetic experience is reduced to self-centeredness and artistic tackiness. Erin Hanusa’s debut, The House of Marriage, wobbles across the aforementioned fine line, sometimes devolving into tedious moments of self-interest and, thankfully, sometimes exploding the self into something larger and more striking.

Throughout the book, Hanusa has a good eye for description and an excellent feel for great words in good places. In “Beachgrass” for instance, she describes the titular subject: “The backyard sand loomed ineluctably / lunar: nightscape transformed / into a glowing undulation of white.” Her voice, unmistakably feminine in perspective and subject, moves steadily through each of the book’s four sections and returns repeatedly to motherhood, fatherhood, birth, and the relationships that develop out of each. Despite these consistencies, there is sometimes an aversive smallness about The House of Marriage that proffers an indifference to the speaker’s assorted and very specific situations.

Where Hanusa’s debut feels like a welcome relief to the ironic, lexical babble that sometimes seems to dominate contemporary poetry, it is often equally self-interested. Hanusa sometimes mistakes trivial personal moments for moments of broad poignancy. In “A Bridge Building Competition” for instance, she sandwiches an ambiguous and unconnected stanza about a speaker’s father and sister between two stanzas about a sixth-grade science project. The transition between the final two stanzas is a good example of Hanusa’s heavy-handedness:

…To list
the things I remember about her
would be to act like she’s dead,
but that would be mistaking her for me.

The weight the teacher loaded on
collapsed my bridge easily.

Veiled by her appealing and sporadic sense of rhythm and rhyme, the emphasis Hanusa places on this blaring temporal leap is obvious and damaging. Not only is the literal situation of the poem unclear (is the sister dead? is the speaker dead?), but the method of connection through disconnection that occurs between the two stanzas is overused and undeveloped. Such moments, while uncommon in the book, are unsustainable fabrications, and the strained severity with which she treats this colloquial occurrence undermines the speaker’s obvious sincerity.

A majority of the poems in the book revolve around colloquial experience, and most of them treat such experience effectively and with great sincerity. The short final poem of the book, “Conception,” is one such poem, and although its lyric voice strays a bit from that of its preceding poems, it is one of the best in the book and one of the better poems published recently by any press. Earlier in the book, it seems Hanusa’s more structurally consistent poems are also her most syntactically and thematically consistent. Her poems of couplets and tercets are often her best, if only because they add a sense of visual formality to her overwhelmingly viscous voice. For instance “My Father’s Fruit Trees,” a beautiful poem of nostalgia, ends with a touching and comical moment between a father and daughter:

And one morning
he squeezed them, still green,
grunting, forcing resistant

bodies onto the juicer’s spike
spilling pale fluid and seeds.
We drank silently then, waiting

to see who would admit first
the sting of unripe lemon,
not orange, burning in our throats.

Here, in the father and daughter’s collective mistake, emerges a palpable moment of silent awareness between the two characters. Hanusa’s poems are interested, perhaps primarily, in uncovering and understanding moments of silence as they pervade common life and personal experience. Hanusa’s speakers are often silent observers of nature or people, and even when they are participants in the goings-on of their own poems, they seem to reflect silently after the fact.

If the individual poems in Hanusa’s book are sometimes inconsistent, the book is held together tightly by its common thematic threads and its strong voice. The consistency of these commonalities edges toward monotony, but this is also in part because Hanusa furnishes her speakers with a deliberate and linguistically extravagant sense of the world. It isn’t without a few standout rough patches, but The House of Marriage is a capable debut, and while Hanusa’s mode of quiet contemplation may have a relatively specific contemporary audience, her intelligence is obvious and praiseworthy.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Erin Hanusa, Louisiana State University Press, PJ Gallo
Posted in reviews

Quaker Guns

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

by Caroline Knox
Wave Books 2008
Reviewed by Richard Scheiwe

Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses

“You’re the elastic limit,” we were told,
and with reason. Hooke’s Law
states that within the limit,
strain is proportional to stress.
from “Hooke’s Law”

The poems in Caroline Knox’s sixth collection, Quaker Guns, embody the dichotomies and disparities of American poetry: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Neo-Formalism, everything under and in between. Hooke’s Law is an apt metaphor for Quaker Guns, the Law stating, “as the extension, so the force”; something can only be pulled apart in perfect proportion to the strength of force being applied.

From “Hooke’s Law” onward, voices and forms and styles pull the collection apart, rendering it consistently difficult to decode: too many voices giving way to too much “flotsam.” But even if Quaker Guns proves unstable overall, Knox’s daring competence of pastiche and tangential movement might leave you anticipating a subsequent, or previous, volume.

This isn’t a Book of Forms, per se, but Knox provides supplies a directory anyway. From the sixth section of “Hooke’s Law,” her intentions are made plain:

The book you are reading,
Quaker Guns, contains the
sequence you are reading,
two sonnets, two haiku,
a sestina, an homage
to George Herbert, some tercets,
a masque, two translations,
two erasure poems, an elegy,
recipe, a song, an ABC,
an eclogue, a canzone,
a group of rubayyat, and other poems.

Formal variety, sure; what Knox doesn’t explicitly acknowledge are the disparities in voice. One could as easily generate a “voice” catalogue relative to their own associations: “A Dance” with Susan Howe, “Dove” with Ted Hughes, “We Beheld Two Nebulas” with Robert Pinsky and “Oldest Dog” with Stanley Kunitz.

In “A Dance,” the voice is firmly controlled: complacent but not absent authority:

Bouki fait gumbo
Lapin mangé li.

Bouki • Wolof for hyena;
Verbs are French: fait, mange.

And later: “Compare Aesop fait (get Greek word for “tale”) / Compare LaFontaine fait fable. / God gives but, but He does not share.” Yet things change in the next poem, “We Beheld Two Nebulas:”; we’re confronted with a newfound cosmic fluidity:

first, the nebula Midges, a diffuse
nebula, and like all diffuse
nebulas, a luging blob

wheeling light, the starry map
of cells which die every day,
a seed-shaped clay molecules…

This wavering between associative logic and a more narrative logic is the consistency of Quaker Guns, for better or worse, as Knox augments this ir/resolution with rhyme, dialogue, surrealism, repetition, catalogue, and persona, keeping us off balance, uncertain.

Knox also builds an occasionally-lovely barrier with her peculiar dependence on self-referentiality. As already evidenced with the sixth section from “Hooke’s Law,” her formal poems are unnecessarily conscious of themselves. In the sonnet “Scenery” from the long poem “Face-Masque,” she writes:

popping with rhetorical questions, afloat
in blancmange literally, or sinking in it, says:
The wrong sestet hooked up with the right octave?
Would I swallow that, hook line and sinker?

And in “Coordinates,” a poem written in tercets: “Here is something you can substantiate: / these are nonce tercets; every line / rhymes with another somewhere or other.” Finally, she offers a poem whose subject is self-referentiality itself; the title (“The Title”) appears in the middle of two sestets, and states, partially quoted:

The poem begins all wrong in medias res
so it looks like a fragment, a throwaway,
something that goes nowhere—

…

But still

THE TITLE

was and is here, down in the middle of the
poem, halfway down the page…

The charm of “The Title” is that the act of reading the poem is the point; self-referentiality is the point. Self-referentiality also works in “Line Poem,” composed of long lines. Instead of acknowledging itself in the meat of these lines, the poem relies on the objective correlative, connecting the physical properties of the poem to an exteriority only hinted at by the title:

Long jetty, shell-racked jetty, cracked warped planks.

…

A twill tape measure, an audiotape cassette unspoiled and puckered, shining.

A bike chain and a bungee chord. A möbius strip and a broccoli elastic.

Split vanilla pod inset with paltry-looking flat oily brown seeds.

Authority develops because of her faith in the energy of her accumulating imagery. “The Title” and “Line Poem” are top-notch self-referential poems. But over the course of Quaker Guns, her self-references are so many that they begin to occlude the overall goal of such a task.

In the title poem, Knox explores the idea of Quaker guns, a term for fake guns used to trick enemies in battle:

But these aren’t worth the powder
it takes to blow them to hell.

…

They’re Quaker guns, a creative ruse, the kind you couldn’t and wouldn’t
fire: they’re flotsam, jetsam, or any old trees, ships’ logs.
They’re broken masts. They’re Friends of the Friends.

Along with Hooke’s Law, the book title is a natural metaphor for these poems; are these poems, in their variety, designed as self-conscious stand-ins? Toys built so well they come to life? When you have a sampler of everything, it’s an easy wonder if any are the genuine article. In Quaker Guns, some are, some aren’t.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Caroline Knox, Richard Scheiwe, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

Special Orders

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

by Edward Hirsch
Knopf 2008
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Shelfer

hirschcover The title of Edward Hirsch’s new book Special Orders refers to his late father’s job of selling boxes, especially sizes made to order. If I say the title poem is flat, you might accuse me of a horrible pun or ask how a poem having to do with boxes can start out anything other than flat, given the exigencies of manufacturing them. If I say that Hirsch’s work feels underwrought, you might point out that a box is the simplest way to enclose any given contents in a square form.

Fair enough, but the work sometimes reads like off-the-shelf product rather than the special orders Hirsch emphasizes—which doesn’t bode well for those seeking tricornes, toruses and tubes. Things might be better if we had more of a sense that, if you brought his father a dachshund, he could make a box that gave the dog room to breathe, but also increased its dachshundness by elevating its inherent rectangularity to the level of art. But no, the job is a grind, the boxes are basically boxes, and the stress of it leads to his father’s grave. It is the grieving son who must find the power of “the secret torch that forever burns / inside us, a beacon no one can touch.”

A good Edward Hirsch poem is gently metaphorical, agnostic and searching, full of unaccountable moments of grief, humor, wonder, and joy. A bad Hirsch poem might have these qualities too, but the music flags. While most of his poems touch real emotions, the emotions are sometimes undercut by pat endings. In “I Wish I Could Paint You,” the book’s most unabashedly erotic poem, his Venus-like model steps out of the shower in the morning, evoking all of the speaker’s desires, but the poem ends with “your smile as wide as the sea / and your eyes that are deeper blue. / I wish I could paint you.” It’s supposed to be rueful and melancholy, but something about the closure undercuts the eroticism and gives me the sense of a high school senior rounding a period.

For all the brevity of Hirsch’s poems, I often find them going on a line or two longer than I’d like. His appealing directness is sometimes marred by rhetorical tags such as “It is true that.” A poem starting with “come with me” has already lost me. It’s not the tag by itself; Whitman’s “come with me”’s are wonderfully, absurdly expansive and exhilarating when not overwrought. It’s not the well-worn tropes of Hirsch’s poems that cause him to miss; something about the music flattens, doesn’t quite spark the thought it might.

When Hirsch hits, he brings us to a fondly remembered place enclosing a deep acceptance of solitary melancholy. “To DB” recalls an old friend’s apartment in the West Village. We don’t learn much about their relationship, but the speaker does say “If there is a West Village in the other world, … I’ll reach over / and hug you, which will make you uneasy.” Without noticing it, we have just stepped on the shyest of mushrooms, and released all the spores. It’s touches like these that let the poem get away with one of the oldest tricks in the book, the woman named Faith, who is “rustling around downstairs, / getting ready for work, unwilling to die.” “Man Without a Face” ends:

Now I am a man walking around
without a face to compose,
a skeleton, a stranger to myself,
an aching bone, a nerve exposed.

It’s another old trick, but it works: the final, almost full rhyme when the rest of the poem only suggests it.

The antepenultimate poem (forgive me) is “Green Couch.” Although the speaker’s abandoned his green couch, left it to molder only to have it rescued by a friend, he’s not looking for something to reupholster it, he’s carting it to the dump. He’s looking for a way to accept his grief, but he’s abandoned his religious faith. The poem ends:

Darlings, I remember everything.
But now I try to speak the language of
the unconscious and study the earth for secrets.

I go back and forth to work.
I walk in the botanical gardens on weekends.
and take a narrow green path to the clearing.

Despite (or because of) the (intentional?) echo of Zsa Zsa Gabor in Green Acres, it’s like a leftover cheeseburger becoming a feather: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Special Orders is similar in tone and content to Hirsch’s previous book, Lay Back the Darkness, down to the centrally located elegiac poem in shard-like fragmentary stanzas. What makes the latter better is that the framing structure of classical tropes buttressing memories of the Holocaust is more solidly and consistently present, giving him just the coat rack to hang his gentle, melancholy rhetoric on. The lighter touch in Special Orders sometimes leaves us floating. Given the subtle difference between Hirsch poems that work and those that don’t, each reader will probably be struck by a different poem in Special Orders, but I think it would be hard for any reader to like all of the poems here.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Edward Hirsch, Knopf, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

by David Kirby
Louisiana State University Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

“There’s got to be more to life than this”

kirby_3 David Kirby only does one thing in his poems, and sometimes does it well; he finds a starting point, usually “autobiographical,” and then allows his poetic “mind” to wander in and out of adjacent memories, his surroundings at the time of the narration, relevant literary references, foreign languages, small wonders and humorous “observations” about modern life.

When he does it well, its emotional resonance is undeniable; when he doesn’t, it feels like a botched Seinfeld routine (incidentally, the New York Times Book Review termed him a “brainy stand-up comedian.” Not a difficult deduction).

The House on Boulevard St. is an artfully crafted New and Selected. Poems are grouped according to theme, not chronology. Because all of his work is so similar, this actually gives the book a slick readability. It’s an easy read, and charming at times; in “My Dead Dad,” he imagines a “little service technician” living inside his hot water heater:

…I wonder if he
is not a relative of the equally little man
in the refrigerator whose job it was, according to my dad,

to turn the light on whenever anyone opened the refrigerator
door and off when they closed it
and who, in my child’s mind, bore a striking resemblance
to my dad not only in appearance
but also in patience and love of word games and other nonsense.

The poem turns in to a sentimental-but-probably-not-too elegy for the poet’s father. Generally speaking the poet is in good spirits, even when approaching the most dismal of subjects (happiness is the only emotion that makes sense, he imparts). Sometimes he can be truly funny, as in the title poem:

As for learning from my peers, well! There was Melvin,
who’d fallen in love with a girl at camp when he was 14
and written her a letter he’d signed “Screwingly yours, Melvin,”

And again in the opening poem “Stairway to Heaven” after bringing up Isaac Newton: “Not that I’m like Isaac—more like Wayne Newton, say. // Or a Fig Newton.” The pair of poems “I Think Satan Done It” and “I Think Stan Done It” are kind of chucklable in concept alone.

The pleasures in these poems are what I’ll call small pleasures: cheerful, thoughtful sentiments from a cheerful, thoughtful poet who likes to chop prose into “fixed-length stanzas and a sawtooth margin” as he explains in a Preface. Despite the delights, you’ll likely find yourself saying time to time, “no Kirby, not this time.” “Strip Poker” ends, “deep down, Ava darling, we’re all pretty superficial, / and beautiful, too, in or out of our clothes.” The notion that we’re all beautiful deep down, whatever spin he spins on it, is too well-rehearsed. Likewise for the conclusion to “The Afterlife”:

…And this is just the type
of thing you want to happen when nothing
is fun anymore and you know you have
to make a change but you don’t know how
and you can’t help thinking,
There’s got to be more to life than this.

Afterlife. Tee-hee. Some of these poems are memorable in the way they map a mind in motion—the runniness of C.K. Williams hitting the conversational charm of Billy Collins, with a start-with-one-train-of-thought-and-see-where-it-goes thing you’ve seen all over. But speaking of Seinfeld, I’m reminded of an episode in which Jerry pretends to be dull and miserable in front of George’s girlfriend in order to make George look funny by comparison. Jerry tells her, “there are so many people deprived and unhappy, it doesn’t seem right to be cheerful.”

And that’s where I’m left with Kirby. Does his cheerful demeanor show detachment from the very real horrors of the world, or is his willingness to be cheerful in spite of it all a kind of backhanded heroism? Sometimes one, sometimes the other.

Tags: 5.5 stars, David Kirby, John Deming
Posted in reviews