Posts Tagged ‘6.5 stars’

The Return of the Native

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

by Kate Colby
Ugly Duckling Presse 2011
Reviewed by Wendy S. Walters

“…and shrink with me”

Kate Colby’s The Return of the Native draws several of its poem titles from Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel of same name, which explored gender politics and foiled ambitions at the beginning of the modern era. The novel’s frank portrayal of a shifting mindset about religion and new ways of thinking about the role of women in English society was ahead of its time. Hardy’s detailed realism inspired empathy for his female characters especially, without the veil of romance to distract attention from their choices and faults. Colby, in her work, seems less interested in generating strong feelings for a character than she does in evoking the world that makes a character’s invention possible. Because of this, the relationship between the two texts appears to be more atmospheric than literal.

The two works do intersect in Colby’s intent to represent “a synopsis and historical context” that illuminates the threshold of a changing social landscape. Colby’s aesthetic is wrought from scraps of icons, clichés, advertising slogans, and folklore, which resist the comfort that narrative provides in moments of discord. These fragments manifest as multiple instances of disconnection that form a “crafty sampler of secretly/discontinuous, tied-off threads.” Many of the poems showcase extended metaphors that, in juxtaposition with other brief allegories, mimic the postmodern experience of constant interruption. Throughout the work, the divergent narrative threads do seem to lean towards each other, if never succumbing to unity. These intentional disconnections both satisfy and annoy at unexpected moments.

“A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion,” one of the more direct pieces in the book, draws on lines we know. Each one aims to confirm some underlying disappointment: “Home is where/ the head is/ taken”; “now back to the technocolonial/ color of my youth” and “Over title I’d take the chain on my stopper,/ my own corroding string of beads and couplings/ and what goes out with the bathwater.” Colby’s innovations on clichés provoke good feelings, despite the seriousness expressed by them. Some of the most resonant moments in the work as a whole are meditations on growing smaller. The poem “Through the Moonlight” points to the origins of introversion in the “architecture of the body:

Living in cities,
when you become the space
that the body contains
—feel the physics—
and shrink with me
under my para-
pluie of bent tines.

The speaker’s consciousness is informed by the space under the umbrella, but the desire for smallness also has implications for the intimate relationship. When she invites the reader to “shrink with me,” it is implied that presence is also the manifestation of ego. The speaker’s desire for smallness is also a desire for greater connection through the compression of the self.

Consider a few lines from the poem “An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated” as another laud of the virtues of being contained, this time in the form of an object or artifact:

To climb inside the vitrine
gather together the glass
flowers I want to break
between my teeth, hear
shatter in my head—

How will it end?
With neither a bang nor a whimper
but a weary,
insistent
banging.

Inside the vitrine, the speaker becomes capable of irrevocable change. Her expression of desire introduces the question of how one lasts when one is considered precious. In the end, the weary banging manifests only in the speaker’s mind, but still does not cease. Every “end” serves as a beginning, an endless set of starting points. This idea is emphasized in the final image of the poem:

My tiny plot
I hoe and harrow
again and again
to see each time
what I might grow there.

The emotional core of the book is comprised of competing desires: to acknowledge there is no ending to any story and to manufacture a resolution when it is not possible to have one.

An intellectual intensity drives most of the poems in the collection, though the few overtly lyrical moments in the work are striking. In the poem “Through the Moonlight,” an unexpected turn towards overtly romantic language and a direct plea for longing stun with their sweetness: “Let us always be about/ to be leaving/ one another for the evening.” Later in the poem, we witness the sticky weight of intoxication in this lovely image: “Sluggish bees in late season/ suckle empty soda cans,” which suggests that when we become like the bee and seek fulfillment from beyond the context of predictable associations, desire appears to be unending.

As the book attempts to map the collision of personal, political and literary accounts that define an individual, we are reminded that whatever we observe is likely to be affected by our own meddling in the “drama”:

a long walk
on a short
fourth wall

Colby offers a smart and provocative counterpoint to “the romance of recorded history” through her confident embrace of the narrative fragment. The Return of the Native orchestrates a dynamic between broad cultural influences and sentiment but with little transparency about who is at the center of these perceptions. Perhaps Colby does not want us to know. Or maybe she is making the case that character was never that discrete, singular, or of certifiable provenance. In either instance, it is not entirely clear how she interprets the relationship between conceptual argument and aesthetic experiment. Maybe this kind confusion is the inevitable outcome of attempting to blend histories that otherwise would not intersect.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Kate Colby, The Return of the Native, Ugly Duckling Presse, Wendy S. Walters
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Pink & Hot Pink Habitat

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

by Natalie Lyalin
Coconut Books 2009
Reviewed by Christine Kanownik

Behind every poem in Natalie Lyalin’s Pink & Hot Habitat, there is a questioning suggestive of a latent trauma that is simultaneously brilliant and painful. “A) Geography,” a poem written as a test you might receive during a nightmare in which you realize you aren’t wearing any pants and your teacher is a giant alligator in glasses, exposes Lyalin’s preoccupation with the horrors of adolescence. There are no questions on the test, merely absurd options, A) and B) repeated maddeningly. A few poems are almost entirely composed of rhetorical questions. “Whatever happened at prom?” and “Why don’t you birth something?” are haunting and demanding questions that I hope never to be asked.

Another poem, “No One is Brunswick Turbulon,” describes dressing up for Halloween in the most terrifying and unsettling way. It starts with an unhappy mother who “holds someone and says Cranberry Pain” and ends with two kids holding hands in gym class. Despite everything else that happens in the poem, those furtive and painful moments are the most important things to remember. Everything else is a disguise used to cover-up the truth. The speaker’s friends may be named “Clump Mudface” and “Homo Hope,” but it is only to distract from the fact that they are vulnerable teenagers.

These high-school poems make me uncomfortable, which I at first thought was a detriment to Lyalin’s poetry. After reading the poems several times, though, I now believe that they would be problematic if they didn’t make the reader uncomfortable. Pink & Hot Pink Habitat points toward a discomfort with the world and a desire to make something new, something much more extraordinary. The book works through the dark places and times in life, and it still has its demons.

There are moments, however, when Lyalin bounces too far to the edge of absurdity, as if the poem were simply a list of weird and unrelated things. Such is the case in the delightfully named, “Super Dolphin (Super Skin).” The reference to memory foam in the first line is a distracting pun and the ensuing series of images and places doesn’t form a cohesive poem. There is a “magenta outline,” a “fur feather,” and a fireman, all of which are interesting and wonderful images, but the combination proves unsatisfactory. “A hidden clue speaks through wire,” but it doesn’t speak clearly enough to put all the pieces together.

Out of Lyalin’s controlled chaos, a shadowy character emerges. His name is Otto. He works at Macy’s and is a young immigrant who drinks too much and eats lobster while wearing a bib. He is petulant, extravagant and belligerent. “Otto Frank in Macy’s” presents his life in a series of images showing Otto completing such disparate tasks as riding a wooden roller coaster and changing a flat tire. The reader begins to feel affection for this “lovely languid Otto,” but our love is generously mixed with both pity and scorn.

Suddenly we are with Otto at the moment of his conception, “before heartbeat, being human.” We see Otto post-birth but pre-personhood. Then once again we speed through images of his youth before the poem explodes. This poem, like many in the book, reverberates with brilliant life and energy. And like many poems in the collection it also reflects sadness. It shows an entire life in a strange montage that could go on repeating in a loop, and I am sure it is no accident that our protagonist’s name is a palindrome.

Lyalin’s poems are earnest and occasionally beautiful. Their charm and overwhelming intensity are remarkable. Readers find themselves inhabiting the poems and their bizarre and captivating environments, but the terrain is shaky, and nothing is what it pretends to be.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Christine Kanownik, Coconut Books, Natalie Lyalin
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Catch Light

Monday, February 28th, 2011

by Sarah O’Brien
Coffee House Press 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

“…a little pop, the dark going out”

Perhaps predictably, a book informed by elements of photography begins with the concept of the blank canvas: “Once, white paint was thrown out across the city, from the roofs of apartment buildings and the tops of trees.” Reimagining Genesis, the poem proceeds by complicating these lines. The people in the poem are covered in paint and apply color to everything they touch, all taking part in the creation of their environment. She concludes, “…they said, look, holding up a palm, this is a tree, this is a window, this is the sky.”

One of five winners of the 2008 National Poetry Series, Sarah O’Brien’s Catch Light is rife with creativity and imagination. O’Brien bends language like light. Here is some smart repetition and alliteration: “The density of light is a lumen, the density of a hand / is a lantern.” But back to imagination. From “Observatory”: “The heart of the blue whale is as big as a room. You could stand up in it suddenly; you could stay.” I’m helpless to avoid the mental image of Job inside a whale, or for that matter, Pinnocchio and Gepetto lighting the inside of Monstro the Whale. The fact that it is a heart amplifies both the warmth and the isolation. She concludes, “In a heart where it’s dark and unwindowed, and sounds like this, and this, and this.”

Darkness is, of course, essential when developing photographs in a darkroom. In Catch Light, the process of developing a photograph becomes a symbol for the developing or changing world, and the negatives of a photograph seem vulnerable or interior like a human spinal cord or perhaps even ghostly like a ribcage in an X-ray. Nearing the end of the first section of the book, “Light Matters,” O’Brien writes, “The world showing its negative. Held to / the light disappears or becomes more distinct.” Light allows for visibility and transparency: “Something when you come home and flick the switch / and see the room all at once, a little pop, the dark going out.” Light reveals the world, and here as well as in the title of the book, O’Brien and her speaker acknowledge its energy and influence, its illusions.

An integral factor in photography, light dominates the narrator’s attention in many of these poems. She considers its presence and absence:

                                                                           …One girl I know

             made shadow puppets in front of a projector all winter
of the birds coming back, slept
                          silhouetted against the screen, fingers splaying into trees.

(from “Light Matters”)

Often synonymous with life, light, particularly sunlight, obviously affects life cycles beyond those of photographs. With the onset of the dark season, birds migrate, other creatures hibernate, and to varying extents, people suffer from seasonal affective disorder. O’Brien’s narrator is in awe of light and its positive and negative powers: “Light where there shouldn’t be light. And then you’re blind.”

The narrator’s interest in light is captivating; however, rubber stamp phrases (i.e. “Seeing is believing”) often distract. And vague assertions, while sometimes intriguing, do little to anchor these poems. They are missed opportunities to more deeply explore. Take this provocative line for instance, which closes “Chapter 6: The Negative”: “In some cultures, photographs are terrifying.” It is an interesting idea, but with no elaboration, occludes rather than suggests meaning. In the third section of the book, “Captions,” O’Brien writes short poems as “captions” to empty, differently-sized squares and rectangles. The concept is somewhat labored and reads like little more than device.

But Catch Light is ultimately a unique first collection. Readers particularly interested in artistic process should pick up this book, and we should all look for a second collection from O’Brien.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Coffee House Press, Melinda Wilson, Sarah O'Brien
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chap nook 2: Durbin, Crill, Stucky

Monday, January 31st, 2011

Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot, Kate Durbin (Dancing Girl Press 2009)

Dancing Girl Press has done an admirable job with the neat and attractive publication of Kate Durbin’s chapbook Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot. The title of the work refers to a recent development in the mystery of aviator Amelia Earhart’s 1937 disappearance during an attempted transpacific flight—though this is not made immediately apparent to readers not well versed in Earhart’s history. Earhart is the voice for each poem, narrating the events leading up to her premature death.

Durbin favors prose poems and writes in a sparse language full of bold colors and immediate emotion. Durbin uses some of Earhart’s own words as found in the aviator’s 1937 collection of writings Last Flight, which was compiled posthumously by her widower, George Putnam. She often rephrases them, as in her various “Red” poems: “What did that little plane try to tell me as it swished by?”

Earhart’s thoughts achieve a beautiful, contemplative poetry through Durbin. Some of the earlier poems reflect on Earhart’s domestic situation and her womanhood. For instance, in “Ink” she muses, “Fear of woman’s blood too long has bound us to burning at high stakes.” But this fate is not for Durbin’s Earhart, who finds release in “the indefinite sky” and imagines that these “papers” will be found after her imminent death, affording her forgiveness from her husband and “grace for a woman who fell from the sky.”

–Erin Lynn

The Upstairs Hammer, Hildred Crill (Argos Books 2010)

Hildred Crill’s The Upstairs Hammer forms an awkward marriage of the abstract and the trite. The opening poem, “Document,” provides a tonal preview for what’s to come. It is vague, yet gripping:

I was a hedged bet, just one
of the holes a rat found
and possessed, a last gulp
from the welling cup.

Crill’s ability to manipulate sound (i.e. gulp/cup) is one of her greatest strengths. Both rhythmically pleasing and full of dark intrigue, “To the Original Tower” provides an exemplary moment:

Unfinished is only completed
as ruins. The task
is neglect. The pause,
oblivion.

However, Crill’s poems are sometimes handicapped by sentimentality. One such poem, “Twofold Tale: Troll With the Cap of Invisibility” is a mythical mini-story, as the title implies:

I believed you unwelcome me

                People think people
                don’t like them
                but it’s themselves
                they dwell on
                and won’t love

But you said nothing
as if layered in shale

                 When people aren’t seen
                 they witness more

Oh, the wisdom of trolls. These tidbits of knowledge from the troll read a little bit like a quote-a-day calendar. The most interesting parts of this poem come from the narrator, but the italicized Troll-speak ultimately dominates.

While parts of The Upstairs Hammer can be overdramatic, the majority of the book offers a musicality and controlled rhythm that makes it a worthwhile read.

–Joanne C. Wood

Your Name is the Only Freedom, Janaka Stucky (Brave Men Press 2009)

“Destroy Song” is the name given to four poems in Janaka Stucky’s Your Name is the Only Freedom. In combination with cover art suggestive of hell and constant talk of destruction, the opening lines of “Hopeful in Spite of Legion” are indicative of the book’s overall mood:

Of beasts, of blood
of devils; of horrid hell

of appetites & passions

Stucky’s language is colloquial and direct– “Buck like fuck as I press / My hands between your breasts.”–but he is able to maintain a light tone in the presence of dark themes. For example, “My broken neck singing / A holocaust of seahorses.”

Certain lines are cliche, and a few lines are extraneous and affected: “Children play with matches / Planes about to crash.” These lines have little impact amidst images of flames and witches. In a similar fashion, images of locks of hair and honey are juxtaposed with images of beasts and blood.

The Hindu goddess Kali appears in several poems throughout the collection, and the leaflet preceding the title page is stenciled with an image of a dancing creature with four arms and a necklace of what appear to be human skulls. The symbolism Stucky is conjuring is unclear, but the Hindu text, Kalika Purana, depicts Kali as a four-armed figure, albeit beautiful and brave, which is perhaps the duality at which Stucky drives.

–Ivana Kilibarda

***

Tags: 6.5 stars, 8 stars, Argos Books, Brave Men Press, Dancing Girl Press, Erin Lynn, Hildred Crill, Ivana Kilibarda, Janaka Stucky, Joanne C. Wood, Kate Durbin
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A New Quarantine Will Take My Place

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

by Johannes Göransson
Apostrophe Books 2007
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“If you want to get rid of me / you’re out of luck”

There is a strong cycling of images in Johannes Göransson’s A New Quarantine Will Take My Place. Sustained images set up a dense and tightly-wound set of poems, or, as it intended, a single poem broken up by titled sections. Nearly every poem ends in an incomplete phrase that is completed in the next poem and then turned in a new direction. The convention is not just clever exhibition; piling his poems on top of one another, Göransson provides a sense of anxiety and quarantine.

The voice in “The Seminal Union of Carvers” is striking and strong but also hints that its air of strength and control is at least partially ironic. True to the book’s title, Göransson opens with images of Vietnam, of Peace vs. War, of guards vs. inmates. The book continues in a balance between big picture commentary and personal feeling and experience.

“Shotgun Wedding in the Ribcage of the Bourgeoisie” has a gaudy moment of referring to how poetry teachers would critique the speaker’s work. He seems to be saying, “What are you going to do about it?” This second poem smacks of hubris, if not monomania, and even though the images are culturally broad, they are all blatantly reflected through Göransson. In the end, the provocative and brutal images are taken as personal affronts to be dealt with through violence, humor or poetry.

In “Obscenity Can Be a Form of Asceticism,” he writes, “I’m the son of a liar,” and the poem does actually feel like a lie, pushing the reader away. But there are welcome images which provide solidarity – for example, referring to the glitterati as animals. (The narrator abuses a captive Shirley Temple intermittently throughout the book.) Göransson’s use of animals is one of most interesting parts of the book. He does not stretch very far and pulls generic images (pig = excess, lamb = sacrifice, horse = fear and fragility, bird = beauty and metaphorical flight) but combines and recombines them throughout the book so they actually become more interesting – not an easy feat.

Throughout, humans are animals. That is one reason that genocide/quarantine has happened and will happen again. The poet seems to feel as if he’s living in a genocide. Instead of emulating the epic pieces of traditional literature that pull the greatness of humanity from those experiences, Göransson accepts a nihilism that surges not from humanity but from his own abused perspective. So, though the set-up for the book seems large-scale, the most compelling work comes from the poet’s experience, particularly with abortion.

The narrator in A New Quarantine refers to personal experience which has made him pro-life and seemingly misogynistic. In the aptly titled “We Will Use Clothes Hangers Next Time” and “This Silence Would Be More Pedagogical In A Meatpacking Plant,” Göransson fills the page with images of pigs (fetal and non-), sharks and lambs. “I’m talking you, about filthy girls have no right to call / yourself strippers”…“If you’re a cheerleader don’t / forget the vermin in your outfits…” In “Two Poems,” Goransson writes:

I only learned three things from those years:
If you want to get rid of a baby throw out the bath
        water.
If you want to get rid of a shivering lamb toss it into a
        room full
Of starving dogs. If you want to get rid of me, you’re
       out of luck
I’ve tried my whole life. We must be twins

Two criticisms are that the use and reuse of images can lead to sometimes tiresome redundancies and repetitions, and that the whole book as a continuous poem can lead to a page-turner effect a la The DaVinci Code where the reader is coerced, rather than compelled, to keep reading. Importantly, Johannes Göransson keeps you reading.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Apostrophe Books, Johannes Goransson, Matt Soucy
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Selected Poems (Vol. 1 & 2)

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

by Edward Sanders
Coffee House Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

“O beautiful for an end to war”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: 6.5 stars, Coffee House Press, Edward Sanders, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Marginal Road

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

by Rachel M. Simon
Hollyridge Press 2009
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

“no word, wetted memory”

simon cover The chapbook, a focused creature, often shows a reader the author’s preoccupations or fixations: what she’s metabolized lately, or what’s she’s turning over in her mind. Rachel M. Simon — author of the full-length book Theory of Orange — gives her full attention to a contemporary cultural realm of television and food, relatives and celebrities, in her chapbook Marginal Road. Compact, evocative lyricism moves us between ketchup bottles and Hilary Clinton, or STDs and Julius Caesar. The poems are densely packed and sparsely adorned with punctuation, building momentum with enjambment and wry, humorous, wild imagery that concerns itself with the amassed memories of a particular perspective within a vast, undependable American landscape.

“Build your memory directory with this,” commands the speaker in “Game One of the World Series with Your Father.” Inside the “directory” of this particular poem, we find “The racial insensitivity of scalpers / and Wahoo cut by mid-memorabilia,” “[t]he testosterone thick / for levitation and towel swinging.” Far from an American baseball pastoral, “Game One…” hunts down the specific and the strange, and the poem stands instead for a postmodern America, one where seams and artifice are a suddenly visible component of a polished front. A similarly disillusioned look at memory-making comes in “Late November,” a poem examining the days after Thanksgiving:

Every lunch sack contains a turkey sandwich
the Monday after Thanksgiving.
United: poultry, potatoey, we trudge back
to desks and jackhammers. Parts of our day
resemble standardized tests.

Here, we eat the same food at the same time, performing jobs with the same rote affect and a “standardized test”-like robotic mindset. United by the American holiday, we’re also united in its drudging aftermath. And, of course, the day has its penalties: “the cost of seeing your childhood roof, / the place you learned to inhale a cigarette,” has left us “nostalgia fluffing on the company dime.” Remembrance in “Late November” becomes indulgent, a distraction we shouldn’t be taking from the task at hand — and an unbreakable element of contemporary American anxiety.

Simon has an impressive pop cultural memory, and in her examinations of contemporary moments, her chapbook’s dark, impressive humor comes to the foreground. “America’s Next Top Poet” skewers fluff reality TV shows, with the poem’s speaker directing a second-person “you” to do various tasks in her new elected position: “Your first challenge,” orders the speaker, “is to sleep in the home / of a famous dead poet evading security / mimic the ghost’s style without mocking. / Hidden cameras will asses your breaking / and entering, poetic posture, line breaks, / and attention to historical hairstyle.”

Like the bizarre activities contestants must endure on America’s Next Top Model — recent memory, I admit, recalls a circuitous New York City scavenger hunt — Simon’s Top Poet must travel the country performing absurd acts, only to “return / to adjunct salary and piles / of student poems.” As the poem ends, and as we laugh at the strange idea of a Top Poet TV show, Simon portrays the strange reality we welcome into our daily lives with the same attention. She shows us the writing world’s absurdities; we are all jumping through narrow hoops, “smelling of underachievement.”

Simon favors enjambment over end-stopped lines. In short, dense poems like “In the Aftermath,” each line has its own small life, heightened by the sparse use of punctuation:

wall of water drapes your town
wind is named by alphabet
now a ‘copter overhead

sea wall, inlet, undertoe
grey demolished house on stilts
no word, wetted memory

These seven-syllable, generally trochaic lines conjure a post-hurricane town through images as particular as they are gripping, revealing both man-made (“wind is named by alphabet”) and natural (“wall of water drapes your town”) forces at work in the days after disaster. Here, too, we see a compelling example of Simon’s memory-based examination — in this poem, the work of the past is “wetted,” inevitably also damaged in the storm’s aftermath.

At times, the poetic line in Marginal Road becomes so discrete that it requires a new form to realize its full expressive potential. “Postmark from the Transition” — an almost-sonneted fifteen-line numbered list — turns the line into a labeled unit:

…4. costumes of our drama
5. soup stock of animal and bone
6. thigh, syringe
7. non-ninety degree staircase…

Readers glean only snippets of plot (a gender transition?) through this list, and the image juxtapositions, weird and peculiar, at times evade understanding. By making a list, Simon seems to suggest that each line asserts its own story. This technique risks obfuscating a reader, but it also mimics the flashes that memory often grants: sometimes associative, sometimes elusive.

It could be said that Simon relies on artifice a bit too much — the list, the reality TV gimmick, may turn off certain readers who won’t necessarily find their way back via her less accessible material — but perhaps the same reliance on artifice could be attributed to the culture that Simon depicts. If a chapbook grants a brief peek into a writer’s preoccupations, Marginal Road reveals a universe fit to burst with images and sounds, memories and found objects. Simon strips her poems of nearly all else, privileging the sharp image over the traditional stanza or line. By doing so, she makes a world that’s spectacularly hers.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Hollyridge Press, Rachel M. Simon, Rachel Mennies
Posted in reviews

Necropolis

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

by Jill Alexander Essbaum
neoNUMA Arts 2008
Reviewed by Rick Marlatt

Jesus is a Metaphor

essbaum cover Known for their remarkable mix of eroticism and religiosity, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s poems vibrate with well-proportioned rhymes, unforgettable imagery and a unique realization of form. For those fortunate enough to have experienced her previous books (Heaven and Harlot) or her electrifying live performances, Essbaum’s courageous examinations of death and spirituality in her new book, Necropolis, will be all the more impressive.

Necropolis is divided into three sections, which correspond to the three days that Christ reportedly spent in his tomb. Essbaum intersperses epigraphs from scripture, and the book unabashedly confronts the most paradoxical arguments within the Christian religion: infinite love, resurrection, afterlife and belief in original sin. Essbaum grapples with these difficult aspects of human need with humility; she illuminates the functions and powers of faith, as well as art’s role in exploring and defining that faith.

The first section, “The First Day,” opens with “On the First Day,” which details Christ’s initial postmortem hours. Essbaum displays in this poem a picturesque depiction of biblical images, simultaneously orchestrating an original narrative structure to support her own unique reflections:

They put him in the ground as if hiding
a great treasure. An ox-sized boulder marked
the spot of it, and a crown of thistle.
Women shined their faces with tears. Friday
grew colder than ever it was meant for.
Peter suggested it was time to leave,
and many of the people left. Some stayed
to pray and to mourn. Others watched the sky
for a sign like a star. Day dimmed nightly,
and the moon showed herself on the tomb’s roof
dancing like Bathsheba, naked and round,
full as a living body. Dreams survived
the watchers through those hard hours, foretelling
calm and its calamity. Jesus slept.

What begins as a rather traditional retelling of scripture quickly takes the form of a poetic transformation from grief into hope. Key phrases such as “sign like a star,” “dancing,” “dreams survived” and “foretelling calm” breathe a life of steadfast devotion into the scene, softening the horror that preceded it. Essbaum’s block structure makes the poem lucid and consistent. Fittingly, at the conclusion of the piece, the poet leaves us with the anticipation of resurrection.

“What We Didn’t,” “The Lord Summons His Regret” and “New Jerusalem” anchor “On the Second Day,” the middle section of the collection. Here, the poet internalizes much of the external stimuli from the previous section and corroborates it with the losses she’s endured in her own life, including the death of her mother, and ultimately, her own inevitable demise. In “A Funerary Catechism,” Essbaum combines relentless spiritual questioning with an easy ear: “Who is God? Somebody, somewhere / Where does He live? Not here / And what is the sum of dead and forever? / It’s never.” (44)

In “A Little Song,” the speaker embodies death itself and renders an unmistakable haunting:

Prayers might succor the dead,
but gifts laid at the gravehead

will go to vultures blunt and blackheart
enough to fathom that they aren’t

on their ways to dying, too.
So smirks me, from this tiny, pine room.

The moods of the poems in Necropolis fluctuate in correlation with the highs and lows of faith, namely, faith’s relationship with the intellect. Here, Essbaum smacks the reader with a jolt of realism, a vivid reminder that death touches everything. Yet, while the piece speaks to the finality and inclusivity of death, its deepest reflections are the product of a living, eternal thought process, which necessitates an existence after death. Further, this poem accentuates the many contradictory paradigms that Essbaum examines throughout the collection, and it does so with ghostly, addictive enchantment.

The concluding section of Necropolis begins with “On The Third Day,” which opens, “He rose again. His face was black and bruised.” (51) Using the resurrection as a springboard into further investigation of the afterlife, the final poems examine the universe by comparing life as humanity knows it with the future as Christian belief defines it. Integral to this framework are “If We Meet Again,” “The Naming of Things” and “Last Day,” genuine poems which neatly unite science and spirituality.

Jill Alexander Essbaum takes her craft to new levels in Necropolis. She asserts herself as a spiritual seeker, an imaginative seer with audio-emotive intuition. Essbaum displays amazing restraint and mechanical craft in these poems. Necropolis is a pilgrimage, a journey of existence, faith, and understanding. Though the realms she encounters in these dark spaces are often lonely and terrifying, Essbaum is consciously leading us toward the light. And she offers her art as a way for readers to channel this discovery through faith in the hopes of strengthening our collective soul, and as she states in “Oh Afterwards: A Benediction,” “turn to gold.”

Tags: 6.5 stars, Jill Alexander Essbaum, neoNUMA Arts, Rick Marlatt
Posted in reviews

Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

by Ernesto Cardenal (edited by Jonathan Cohen)
New Directions 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

The Bleak Duplicate

cardenal cover The public “we” voice and claim a la Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Wakoski has a history of being misunderstood, but a strong history, nevertheless. Defining “I” has been a long tradition in poetry without, of course, an authoritative solution. Speaking for others is incredibly thorny and should be trotted with caution. It requires one of two things—appointment/election or selfish egomania.

Ernesto Cardenal is a key example of the “we” voice, of the candle by which all vigils are held, at least the vigils in and around his Nicaraguan cipher (including parts of Kentucky, New York City, and some of Japan). New Directions recently released Pluriverse: New and Selected Poems and featured Jonathan Cohen (a lifelong Cardenal translator) as the editor along with Coney Island stroller Lawrence Ferlinghetti (on the foreword) in January of this year—a star studded cast for a not so well known Latin American poet.

Sure, folks have heard of Neruda and Lorca, barely Machado or Dario, but Ernesto Cardenal? Ernesto Cardenal is a strange bird but nowhere near as full of himself as the repeatedly egomaniacal Pablo Neruda. The two are associated all too often for their subversive stances as well as their romantic orbital patterns; but they are not in the same galaxy; that is to say, perhaps the common denominator is derived from a public of ignorance, a reading public that has no idea of the process of translation and how large corporate publishers pay for quick translations so they can make a buck or because they think the faster the better. (See: Roberto Bolaño’s Romantic Dogs, one of the weakest Spanish translations in recent years.)

Pluriverse, however, has no Spanish language (original) versions present, easily the most disappointing facet of the book. The song of the open mouth (Español) has been closed. The bulks of Spanish words, when pronounced properly, end with the mouth in an open position; the preponderance of English words keep the user’s lips sealed. Not having at least a typeface facsimile of the original is insulting to readers and detrimental as to whether or not the translation—in this case, the entire poem—can be judged at all. Whatever word would put pity to shame is what I am looking for. Commiseration. Grief.

The twelve-page poem “Epigrams,” Cardenal’s dedication to Catullus, is a superb example, a carousel of wit—vignette little lime chunks that possess extremely witty concept-reversals which becomes darkly comedic.

2

Be careful, Claudia, when you’re with me,
because the slightest gesture, any word, a sigh
of Claudia, the slightest slip,
perhaps one day scholars will examine it,
and this dance of Claudia’s will be remembered for centuries.
I’ve warned you, Claudia.

It’s not nearly as raunchy as Catullus but nowhere close to overt sentimentality and Cardenal, in this case, keeps with the tradition of remaining metaphysically-layered—of being the poet discursive with time, history, the current and lover.

And in traditional Sandinista fashion:

14

You’ve worked twenty years
to pile up twenty million pesos,
but we’d give twenty million pesos
not to have to work the way you’ve worked.

There are many other parts to these epigrams that coerce smirks, laughter, raised fists, and may even break a tear or two; but it is a shame that the Spanish is absent as the desk of a student who committed suicide. With translation (and this comes from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, among others), the original text should always be displayed because without it, readers may think they are receiving the truth and they are getting bleak duplicate. Thus, the translation can not only be emotionally read and felt but the translation as its own gray entity can be intellectually absorbed as well as sonically heard (at least when read aloud). The original presentation is the only necessity, its own card deck of subtlety. Without it, a reader may be left to wander an unidentified wilderness, not knowing the primordial song, sound, cadence, manifestations, emergences, and narrative. The collection performs a damaging disservice here to Cardenal veterans and rookies alike. One cannot blame the poet. And the translators can only be blamed for their under-pronounced lack of effort.

Luckily, Cardenal has close ties to the United States and American thought and poetry—through the editor Cohen along with his old friend and teacher Thomas Merton, the Kentucky Trappist monk who sojourned at the Abbey of Gethsemani and brought the Dalai Lama to the U.S. on two different occasions. Liberals, libertarians and activist-hippies alike will love this poetry, especially the long, misleadingly manageable “Zero Hour”. It begins:

Tropical nights in Central America,
with moonlit lagoons and volcanoes
and lights from presidential palaces,
barracks and sad curfew warnings.

And ends, after seventeen full pages of slightly surrealistic narrative poetry like so:

But the hero is born when he dies
and green grass is born from the ashes.

“Zero Hour” was what a couple of E.C.’s friends called underground poetry (poesía de la bajo tierra) and could only be read aloud at rebel campfires, or passed by way of shredded paper notes. The poem plucks a hefty majority of its content from the April Rebellion, an aggressive act of defense directed at the brutal Somoza and his Presidential Palace. The rebellion failed. Many of the April Rebellion leaders were bitter with each other which, in the end, did not matter because Somoza either tortured or killed all of them. The book’s introduction tells readers that Cardenal was “lucky to avoid arrest.”

The poetry, over a span of fifty six years, does not differentiate from its form; at times, Cardenal experiments with line breaks and placement of next line—particular poems (“Managua 6:30”, “Coplas on the Death of Merton”, “New Ecology”, etc. . . ) look on the page like choreographed tango sequences. The earlier work hugs the left margin. The later work swirls and dances, many lines beginning with “and” or “the” (i.e. y o el/la). E.C.’s plural, radical-flag-waving first person sometimes beautifies an imperative; other times, it cultivates an opaque screen of who specifically the “we” (nos) is. Nicaraguans? Oppressed Latinos continually having to (as an Other) respond to imperialist racism? Liberation Theologists? The proletarian in general?

In “Coplas on The Death of Merton,” he writes, “And we are alone/immortal grains of wheat that do not die, we are alone.” Is that “we” (nos): Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal, spiritual advisors, or every human individual? Then, in “In The Half-Light,” the we amends itself into a smooth lyricism, directly romantic and sharply clever:

Irene moves among the tables
and we walk together, reclining,
until midnight, beneath the orange torches
what am I saying? until the Sunday dawns.

A model example of his beguiling drollness, from the “Coplas . . .”

Time? IS money
it’s Time, it’s shit, it’s nothing
it’s Time with a celebrity on the cover

It could either go in a direction of Lord of the Flies or trek on a pathway of serious attentiveness. That is the usual with Cardenal—once out of the consistent rejection, a reader will make plenty of realizations, come across epiphanies. His often childish word play shows readers the buried semantics a culture of consumption wants to forget rather than to dig up—slogans are seized and accessibility becomes a misnomer. The three best poems (outside his multi-paged carry-on narratives) are: “The Lost Cities,” “In The Half-Light,” and “Managua 6:30 PM”. The swirling lines, sparsely minute descriptions, liberal politics, and buzzing heart that thump in those are swelteringly nuclear.

Walter Benjamin is posthumously present to remind us that it is the translator’s mandate to “liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own language.” If that is found true, this edition has failed the greatness of Ernesto Cardenal by leaving out the original and including many lackluster, decaying translations. However, reading Cardenal in English (esp. from US publishers) has thus far been impossible. The book’s epigraph comes from Cardenal his self: “I have tried, above all, to write poetry that can be understood.” That, he did. But, he also wrote gorgeously alive minimal lyricism that necessitates a bit more energy, oomph and demand.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Ernesto Cardenal, Ken L. Walker, New Directions
Posted in reviews

Tuned Droves

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

by Eric Baus
Octopus Books 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

“Is there a second singer?”

baus cover Droves fill Yankee Stadium and offer their own witnessing abilities to the ubermensch of a caped, steroided maniac. Droves also disfigure harmonies on their accumulating lawn mowers, in their exhausting automobiles. Droves squeak their wet boots in and out of every subway car. Deep inside the liver of this mass of beings in motion, there is a churning to tune, to bring the blur into focus. And, oddly enough, a mason uses a “drove chisel” for dressing up the tops of stones and rocks toward a more “approximately true surface.” So says the dictionary.

Eric Baus’s new book reminds one of the really droning portions of non-narrative films like The Man With the Movie Camera or Koyaanisqatsi, and it is not even in the same league with Baraka, but it is large-to-miniscule in its scope. Most actualized objects (even spasms) in the book seem to be relegated to Baus’s world of “whatever there is” or “It”. In fact, the “It” may appear more than any character (if you can call them that); a weighty pronoun use bases itself on the shoulders of weak characters sometimes called “the woman” or “a man.” Actual names or more direct placements may assist the direction of what otherwise makes most of the poems stand still, not knowing which is Eighth Avenue and which is 8 Ave.

There are eight sections of the book, which also contain individual poems, although, that too is difficult to discern. Perhaps that is the point of Tuned Droves though—to produce an ineffability of distinguishing what from whom, and in that, a globalized (not like capitalism, like nebula) correlation is made.

A constant confusion makes use of itself as to what actually constitutes a Baus poem. Readers will most likely feel their limbs shaken in a plastic bag and their boredom washed in birdbath water. Make no mistake—this is sentence salad. A few, core, indefinable concepts (tree, boy, sun, bus) make a strained bone-growth to try and connect the entire universe. Though, if Baus is at least attempting to “tune” the “drove,” he is failing at bringing a blur into perfect pitch and tonal focus. The narrative (sometimes in prose block, even) smudgings act more like ink blot tests than lessons on humanity’s place and purpose in a swirling vast unbounded immensity of language:

“The letter said the letter was looking for another address.”

Or, “A tree did nothing today.”

It would be proper to place these phrasings inside of entire quotations of whole poems, but that is impossible as these sentences and statements could be placed into any other poem in the book.

A strength of the book is the overarching, mystical power of the mother figure that shadows and shines from the first poem (“The Sudden Sun”) on. She walks boys to water, gives birth, processes birth, names children, forms flowers, and folds “her arms to make a mirage, touching the snow in a sentence.” Baus definitely has a muscle for the unique imperative. However, he takes it way too far and carries it on longer than he should. He does not just climb the mountain, he goes around the range. Look, here, at the last line of the whole book, from “They Showed a Film of Walking to Water”: “Inside any good song is a small piece of snow is the one I am listening for.” He should have cut off the statement at “snow.”

The collection’s strongest poem, clearly, is “Inside Any Good Song Someone is Lost”:

There is a splash. There is another splash. There is another. There is a man a man two women a boy and a boy. Something else. Someone else. I can’t see past the wheat and birds I can’t see. There is a singer. Is there a second singer? There is. That is, you can record yourself from the center of a parade. The clouds are large. You are little and the clouds are so large.

Baus is impersonating Gertrude Stein, but his version of Tender Buttons would be a nameless, faceless, Sunday comic strip that the entire reading family could absorb over a bowl of Trix. Oddly enough, Baus also writes, “It is unlikely it is precise.” While poetry is not a chef’s meticulousness or a chemist’s exactitude, tuning the masses is, and should be.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Eric Baus, Ken L. Walker, Octopus Books
Posted in reviews