Posts Tagged ‘6 stars’

chap nook 6: Pritts, Dhompa, Herzer

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Sentimental Spectacular, Nate Pritts (Mondo Bummer, 2010)

Nate Pritts’ chapbook Sentimental Spectacular contains five poems, a short collection, even for a chapbook. Though slight, Sentimental Spectacular mines the sentimental for careful, specific image and sound, crafting a work that’s, yes, deeply sentimental, but one willing both to celebrate its sentimentality and to search for a major key of resonance in its reader. “Darling, darling, darling,” reads the title poem, “there’s something sensational in the way / my heart takes on different forms.” (It is probably worth noting that the poet has also published a book called Sensational Spectacular.) We encounter the speaker’s heart—large, lush, loudly beating—in each of these image-rich poems.

Pritts engages with other poets in Sentimental Spectacular, including Frost in his poem “Frost at Midmorning”: “…me, a proud honorary / astronaut sent out as a lover of uncontained / & immortal beauty but, O, just a chump in love / with the ground…Frost in autumn, frost at midnight, / Frost on a hotel bed, telescoping from mountains to buzzsaws…” Here, we find a wisp of a reference to Frost’s “Out, Out–”, an arguably unsentimental tale of a young boy’s lost hand, as well as ever-sentimental Whitman, with his exultant and emotional O’s and preoccupations with lovelorn “chumps.”

In the final poem “Inarticulate Bird in Befuddled Blooming Bafflement,” Pritts upends his moment-driven sentimental explorations, challenging memory and nostalgia as stable vehicles of sentimentality. “You can’t bring [this poem],” states the speaker, “to the waterfall you made up, // you can’t show it to the rainbow you see when you / close your eyes.” Where imagination and desire intersect with memory, Pritts shows, sentiment becomes longing, and Sentimental Spectacular veers in an unexpected direction, as startling as it is beautiful. “Some handy flower to dip into,” the speaker calls this shadowy memory, this longing for a past self that did or didn’t exist, “a struggle to remember the sweetness.”

–Rachel Mennies

selvage: for country, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa (Belladonna, 2011)

The title of this chapbook from the Belladonna Chaplet series sets a complex backdrop for the poems within. The word selvage refers to the edge of a woven fabric that keeps the fabric from unraveling. The word selvage also calls to mind the word salvage. A selvage salvages the unity or wholeness of the fabric; it preserves the individuality of something, keeps it from blending in with the rest of the world and becoming invisible in the chaos.

In these poems, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s speaker seems to be struggling to preserve identity, control and hope. For instance, in the first poem, the speaker proposes that “Perhaps it is no longer necessary to hope” and asks, “Does it matter how I feel?” The first poem establishes a general sense of giving oneself over to the powers that be. And all that is left is hope as can be seen at the end of the second poem: “And if I think with all my heart / and if I listen with rituals and codes in place, / maybe it will come to pass.” There exists, within these lines, the possibility for sarcasm, though. The phrase “with all my heart” is clichéd and obvious, suggesting a speaker that is, in fact, no longer hopeful. A sarcastic moment here would indicate that hope does not have the power to revise.

Hope plays a substantial part in these fifteen pages of poetry. A poem on page 13 ends, “everything balances on hope.” Although hope becomes central to these poems, there are multiple forces working against it. The concept of free will also shows up often in Dhompa’s collection, but almost always, it is rejected: “As though / the plants on my kitchen window have free will” and “No point bringing up free will.” Dhompa’s poems expound the internal human struggle to understand and control one’s life.

Some of the poems, however, become too abstracted and limit the reader’s ability to connect with the speaker. Take the following lines for example, “Not error but irony / of displacement gives tyranny / degrees of exception.” The piggybacked prepositional phrases and abstract nouns—“of displacement” and “of exception”—push the reader farther from the poem’s core. But nonetheless, readers are left with a beautifully confusing and hopeful moment: “I leave / today and will / see you yesterday.” Yes, see you then.

–Melinda Kaye Wilson

i wanted to be a pirate, Christine Herzer (H_NGM_N, 2010)

By design, Christine Herzer’s chapbook i wanted to be a pirate is an uneven and unpolished read. A visual artist, Herzer has scattered text, handwriting, scribbles, and blacked-out lines highlighting text in white. The poems are more successful in their telling rather showing, but Herzer mitigates that success by trying to maintain a distance from her poems and characters. She has several recurring characters, (‘surfer boy,’ Pan Tau, family members, and more), but none of them move beyond stereotype. There is very little personal connection here either between the reader and the poems or the speaker and the poems. Herzer writes, “I remember sister getting lost.” There is no article or possessive pronoun affixed to ‘sister,’ creating a colloquial, dramatic dissociation, which is soon contradicted. Other character-relation instances in the book feel similarly detached, emotional but partially insincere.

Though many whole poems don’t quite connect, there are many stand-out lines within them. The most simple and direct lines are the strongest: “the party, us arriving together / & leaving together, I liked it,” “where would i go if i had to be there / who would you call before the plane crashes.” Strong lines frame the poems but the attempted stories/emotions put to those lines are too expected. For example, the eponymous line, “we have so much love to do” is obscured in the poem, relying too heavily on butterfly sentiment (“it is a delicate process / branding wings, numbering wings”). While it’s unfair/unreasonable to expect narrative from poetry, “i wanted to be a pirate” is more notable for stand-out lines than its overall direction or impression.

–Matt Soucy

***

Tags: 5 stars, 6 stars, 7.5 stars, Belladonna, Christine Herzer, H_NGM_N, Matt Soucy, Melinda Wilson, Mondo Bummer, Nate Pritts, Rachel Mennies, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
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Pima Road Notebook

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

by Keith Ekiss
New Issues 2010
Reviewed by Emily Anderson

“adobe on sky”

Keith Ekiss focuses intently on the American Southwest in Pima Road Notebook. The physical landscape provides an underpinning for poems that move through personal memory, historical research, and commentary on contemporary culture. In “The Desert,” for example, Ekiss juxtaposes desert images a reader might expect (rattlesnakes, scorpions, saguaros) with a critical vision of modern development. After describing some of the dangers of the landscape, he concludes: “What threatens will disappear. // Hurry home, the future all fairway and green, / targeted with ribbons and stakes.”

Throughout the book, Ekiss writes about southwestern housing developments with a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness, obsessed with their newness and transient qualities. While occasionally repetitive, the many poems about “Unfinished Houses” in which “Plywood and stucco weren’t permanent” make a convincing argument for the desert as a more powerful force than the buildings. In “Petrified Forest,” the speaker describes “[his] favorite color: / adobe on sky. The human trail ends.” The scale of human activity against the vast desert colors the book’s depiction of physical spaces of home as well as emotional relationships within the speaker’s family.

While several poems explore the history of the Sonora Desert and the Pima people who lived there before European settlement, more of them explore the speaker’s family history. In the first of five poems with the title “Pima Road Notebook,” the speaker talks about his childhood, merging images of people with images of the desert. The poem opens, “My mother’s voice echoed me nearer toward home. / Sad quail in the brush, searching for her children,” and ends, “Coyotes gathered and chattered in guttural moans. / All night she thought the howls were only dogs.” If the mother figure appears “sad,” even deluded, the father flashes violently in and out of focus. He “takes a chainsaw to the limbs” of a cactus in the backyard in “Landscape with Saguaros”; in other poems he appears “self-made” or “clean-shaven” and receives blame for bringing his family to the desert or getting them stranded in a storm on Lake Powell. The speaker’s general comments on fathers assume an even more critical tone: “Fathers just leave—isn’t that what fathers do?” (in the third “Pima Road Notebook”) and “No one trusts other fathers” (in “Pictures of Houses”). Throughout the sometimes labored book, the isolation of the desert effectively mirrors the speaker’s emotional isolation.

Tags: 6 stars, Emily Anderson, Keith Ekiss, New Issues, Pima Road Notebook
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In Search of Small Gods

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

by Jim Harrison
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Storied

In Search of Small Gods smells like a book from the Fremont Public Library, but admittedly this has nothing to do with the author or his skills. It’s simply a friendly reminiscence, a nice connotation I have with the book, and perhaps with the Fremont Public Library which was a tiny, one-room schoolhouse type building with a small desk in a dingy corner. The librarian’s name was Mrs. Bassett. Or perhaps she was the third grade teacher at the public school which I went to only for a day. Enough, though.

Jim Harrison’s most recent of around 30 books is packed with melancholy parables and fireside reminiscences. It opens with a translated passage from Antonio Machado’s “Proverbs and Songs #29.” Machado is a Spanish poet of the 20^th Century and the passage contains both English and Spanish versions. It depicts a traveler warned by Machado’s speaker that the road is not pre-existent, but rather is created by the act of walking. The passage ends with the following lines, perhaps more beautiful than any in the actual Harrison book: “Walker, there is no road / only foam trails on the sea.” Foam trails disappear, and in other words, there is nothing in human life but that which is crafted. Its meaning is cheesy, yes, but its implications of self-exploration and discovery of the world first through the self are significant and threaded throughout Harrison’s work.

There is a lot of threading in the book, especially with the titular “small gods.” The first poem, whose title comes from the religious notion of faith and belief, ends with the following lines: “the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see / from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling / to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.” We see several themes here. First, there are the gods and faith. Next, there is the walker suffocating the gods “underfoot”—the world is constant grinding and change, is a billion small gods suffocating a billion others. There are social implications, perhaps—we’re a largely disaffected society—but to that end, the poem just throws its punch and runs away.

How else can a list poem end, though? “I Believe” is most certainly a list poem, as are at least five others in this long, laborious collection. There is nothing inherently bad about list poems; every poet writes at least one. But rarely are they capable of conjuring much than the sense that a writer has checked thoughts and images of the metaphysical checklist. Yet another list poem, “Larson’s Holstein Bull,” is probably the finest poem in Harrison’s book. The first four lines begin with the word “death,” and the poem proceeds to tell the story of a farm girl with limited mental capabilities who was killed by a bull. The poem is memorable, but spoiled by its final threading: “Death steals everything except our stories.” Harrison’s poem is strong, but smudged by his urge to tell us its “point.”

A finer idea that consistently comes up in Harrison’s book is one that first appears in a poem called “Hard Times.” The idea first presented itself to me through a friend who once told me that after his death, he hopes his ashes will be eaten by birds. Then he (as a part of a larger more complex consciousness) will experience (or fuel) flight, something he will never otherwise experience (see also Mary Oliver’s “Vultures). Harrison’s version reads: “within the bodies / of birds. I’ll be a simple crow / who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.” The entire poem, the man tries to reach the top of this butte, so his perceived ability to reach it at the end is a victory; however, this ability comes through something like reincarnation instead of something rooted in his own human experience. The obsession with birds carries through the ensuing poem, titled “Age Sixty-nine”: “I hope one day to be a spiral / but to the birds I’m a circle.” Harrison reaches out to touch mortality, and finds that it touches back.

Another area of Harrison’s work that consistently impresses is his flare for the natural. In a longer poem, “The Golden Window,” he writes:

I continued west toward the snake den to try to catch
the spirit of the place when it’s asleep, the sheer otherness
of hundreds of rattlesnakes sleeping in a big ball
deep in the rocky earth beneath my feet.

This passage does two things that I admire. It captures the natural world, the rattlesnakes underground, and it discusses a sense of “otherness” that we feel about nature, perhaps the very reason why some hunt. Harrison is able to form a connection with this sensation—an impossible blend of fusion with nature and separation from it—that is often difficult to form on one’s own.

Clichéd ideas and awkward levels of reminiscent melodrama become problems in many of these poems. For instance, in “Hard Times” Harrison writes, “my mind begins to learn / my heart’s language.” Harrison also refers to “a compass without a needle.” Overdone. Reading these poems helped me to develop the “Harrison Test.” I read the poems in a pretentious tone and see what happens. Try it. Here’s the start of a poem from In Search of Small Gods called “Cow Meditation”: “Whenever I’m on the verge of a book tour…” Nevermind.

Finally, I’d like to comment on one other facet of Jim Harrison’s work… “The World’s Fastest White Woman” first appeared in Playboy.

Tags: 6 stars, Houghton Mifflin, Jim Harrison, Melinda Wilson
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How Beautiful the Beloved

Friday, July 24th, 2009

by Gregory Orr
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Jason Bredle

“Crammed with astute observations about anatomy in action!”

How Beautiful the Beloved by Gregory Orr Gregory Orr follows 2005’s Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved with this collection, How Beautiful the Beloved, a further examination of the beloved in the abstract. This expansive project reveals quite a lot of wisdom about the idea of the beloved – be it man, woman, pet, inanimate object, anything loved by someone – and its relationship to us as human beings. In that regard, it frequently hits the core of the human experience – and more specifically, the heart. When successful, the result can be transcendent – an idea seemingly too simple on the surface will reveal itself as intricately nuanced, and Orr’s ability to convey complexities with just a few words is not only evocative, for me, of some of the Asian poetry I’ve read, but also speaks to his greatest strength as a poet. The grandness of the product as a whole, however, is also its shortcoming – I left the book wondering how many poems about an abstract idea are too many and whether they begin to lose their lyrical power when the only tangible things are those happening around the subject rather than the subject itself. Of course, I feel the same way about church, so perhaps this is my own shortcoming as a human being.

Letting go, when all you want is to hold.
Turning away, when all you want is to stay.

Almost all that’s in the Book was written
On just such a day:

Someone remaining;
someone going away

Someone becoming silent;
someone who must say.

The above lines, perhaps some of the most persuasive in the book, act as a descriptor of what lies behind the poems in this collection. True, the subject of each poem is no doubt the oblique beloved, but the story between the speaker and the beloved, even humans and the beloved, is what make the poems superb. The joy of the beloved is what drives the speaker, but the heartbreak, confusion, sadness, and loss surrounding the beloved is the real story of the poems.

Human heart –
That tender engine.

Love revs it;
Loss stalls it.

What can make it
Go again?

The poem, the poem.

The book is always checked out of the library, the speaker proclaims, so better to create “Your own version:/ The poems and songs/ You love – the ones/ That saved you when/ You were young/ And suffered./ And also/ Those that consoled you/ When you were older.”

Really, I couldn’t praise the lyricism and wisdom of these poems enough. Orr has really mastered the lyric – I think the above examples are proof enough. However, the beloved is so present that the story around the beloved – joy, love, suffering, misery, salvation –also feels like a shortcoming to me, at times so hyperbolic that the words themselves seem meaningless:

How we embraced the beloved
So tightly that fate itself
Was changed into destiny

Then everything was different.

Exactly as before, but also
Different.
Death still there,
But different.
Loss still
Omnipresent, but not the same.

Held in our arms, holding us
Even as she vanished,
Even as he turned into song.

This poem feels like a lesson in the importance of the “show, don’t tell” rule. Just a few times I wished for something strikingly tangible to enter – a name, an object. What exactly does the first stanza mean? Should I debate with myself about whether it should appear on a greeting card? Have greeting cards, with their abstract, flowery language, ruined poetry? Should I have surrounded myself with dream catchers before reading it? Interestingly, I found the most tangible moments in Orr’s poems come when reflecting upon other poems:

Nazim Hikmet begins a poem
With the phrase, “Another thing
I didn’t know I loved.”
He writes in a tone of amazement.

He’s a Turkish poet in exile.
He’s on a train in winter,
Leaving Prague and headed
Toward an uncertain future.
The poem he’s writing is a list
Of things he suddenly knows
Are precious.
He doesn’t know
Where he’s going – old man
At the start of a long, cold ride.
The list he recites is also long.

As long as he keeps making that list,
He’s traveling toward the beloved.

This poem certainly stands out in the collection. It’s one of the few with specific names, places, and images. It makes me want to read Nazim Hikmet (though I read this particular poem and Orr’s poem is better). It makes me want to realize I love so many things I didn’t know I loved until this moment and it makes me want to list those things. The poem is a wonderful example of one of the most important messages of the book, yet also describes a poem in such a way that it seems the exact opposite of the poems in this book. Perhaps that’s the point, and perhaps this is why Orr is often compared to Whitman. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself” In that respect, even what I propose as a potential shortcoming could be a reflection of the complexity of human thought and the dichotomies in which we live every day. The things that move us do not do so with simplicity, but perhaps if we’re able to express those things with simplicity, we’ve started down the path of artistic mastery.

Sometimes the poem
Changes you slowly
As if eroding the old life.

You have to be patient
With the way it unfolds –
One line at a time.

So unlike the beloved:
All at once and forever.

Tags: 6 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Gregory Orr, Jason Bredle
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Ginnungagap

Monday, June 15th, 2009

by Lightsey Darst
Red Dragonfly Press 2009
Reviewed by Hansa Bergwall

Toward a Supreme Fiction

darst cover In Lightsey Darst’s dark chapbook Ginnungagap, she plays at the perpetual cross-section of time, belief and suffering. The chapbook takes its name from a term in Norse mythology referring to the magical void before creation. The author does not have a consistent cosmology, but all across Ginnungagap, religious or spiritual conceits inform and infuse delicate, modern poems of pain and joy.

Sometimes “God” is capitalized, but this is not an indication that s/he is to be revered. For example, in “Miscarriage,” Darst likens spooning scallops from a shell to her sister’s tragic miscarriage:

the raw body of my
unmade sister,
God ate that, beating,
cracking the top of her egg, bending
to scoop with his fingers and suck
what was to be

Nowhere in this chapbook is the divine to be comforting. God is more likely to be a callous tyrant. In “Dog Days,” god is lowercase; god is a small, annoying pest:

When I was little I broke open
the house with its screens
of dying ﬂies. And god

burst in through the crack
I made, buzzing like a wasp.

Both cases evoke a divine with the capacity to hurt. In one, God is a disinterested tyrant who shucks fetuses like they are shellfish. In the next, god is a bug to wave away and a sting to avoid. In other poems, she professes to hate the God of high places and love the gods who are made of twigs and mud and hang around the neck like a primitive talisman. The sum of these gods might be the large God she fears, so perhaps what we have, for whatever reason, is a stated preference for the small comforts of the micro over the inconquerable largesse of the macro. It is a familiar war, rendered here with a careful eye and ear.

In her best poems, Darst presents common scenes packed with the presence of something otherworldly, of indefinable mystery, only vaguely a “God” or “god.” “Blueberry-picking” is a particularly well-crafted example of this:

which fat fruit would come free
from the twigs, I picked a pint,
we picked two, we talked
between the bushes and twice

we heard a train come like
a little relief, or a little reminder,
its shuddering track somewhere by,

behind the empty tobacco barn,
but not so close,
and not so far.

Pleasantly, among friends, life goes on, but is rocked by the shudder of passing trains. No one is quite sure where it comes from. This is the feeling of spirit that Darst consistently invokes: the way moments of religious experience can slip into life unexpected like a wasp, or overwhelm in a moment of grief. Darst imagines and examines each phenomenon in her poetry. She reminds her readers that the ghost of the divine is inextricable from daily life, but never purports to have answers beyond this. These poems feel good to inhabit because of that spark, and her predilection to present the divine without benevolence complicates and undercuts the warm feeling usually associated with divine presence.

After reading Lightsey Darst’s chapbook, I have no idea what her beliefs are beyond the fact that she finds it valuable to ardently to engage with belief and spirit—with the magical void that her title speaks to. It is a rich vein and this little chapbook has some real gems.

Tags: 6 stars, Hansa Bergwall, Lightsey Darst, Red Dragonfly Press
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A Million in Prizes and Voir Dire

Friday, June 12th, 2009

by Justin Marks
New Issues 2009/Rope-a-Dope Press 2009
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

High Hopes

marks cover marks vd cover

In his essay “Writing,” W.H. Auden puts forth some observations about what a writer is. One observation is that one should be able to arrange a writer’s work in chronological order from oldest to newest just by reading it. Auden writes, “Every work of a writer should be a first step, but this will be a false step unless, whether or not he realize it at the time, it is also a further step.” Each poem a poet writes should help the poet arrive at the next poem. I’ve thought about this a hundred, thousand times, mostly in relation to my own work, but also in relation to the work of others, and have marveled at how different the poems I was writing five years ago are from the poems I was writing last month. Though, on a greater level, we can know that change in oneself and one’s writing will always take place; seeing its delicate augmentation take place on the page is something of a wonder. This type of progression is apparent in Justin Marks’s book A Million in Prizes and chapbook Voir Dire.

Justin Marks’s first book of poems, A Million in Prizes, chosen by Carl Phillips as winner of the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize, is an earnest gem of self-consciousness and naïve wonder. The first two couplets in the first poem of the book state:

I wanted to create the ocean, the sky
the intricate structure of a leaf

and thought by now
I’d have come close.

While these lines are painstakingly sincere, there are also riotously funny. To not only want to create something as vast as the ocean, but to think that one would have “been closer by now” speaks to many complex layers of narcissism and naïveté and proves the expectation to be hilarious in its acknowledgement. This is what most of the poems in this book are doing: declaring the infinite and learning the possible. It’s like that New Yorker cartoon where the guy sitting at the bar, clearly looking tormented, says to the bartender, “I know I’m nothing, and yet I’m all I can think about.” It’s that morbidly framed humor we eventually find behind immature uncertainties—hopefully, that is. And yet, we marvel at its discovery every time.

The poems in the first section of A Million in Prizes, called “Life is Elsewhere,” concern themselves with past selves and childhood: the poet reflecting on who he has been, who he thinks he will be, etc. And while they feel very young, there are moments throughout this section when the poet betrays his own naïveté and writes aphorisitc lines like “now that no one will ever love or hate you as much as you already do.” This feels almost wise, something that only a very brave person would be able to tell his-/herself. Or in the poem “Childhood,” when the poet writes:

I hated
being a child. My shame
is having been one at all.

This is a succinct gesture toward owning past embarrassments. A necessary declaration to get oneself past childish hang-ups and to prepare oneself for life after adolescences and adolescent psychosis.

The poems in the section “[Summer insular]” catalog just what you would expect them to, the events and surroundings of the poet during one encapsulated summer. These poems are sometimes mundane, sometimes obvious, which I guess is a lot of what life is most of the time. Certain poems act as a journal, a way of capturing even the most uneventful days:

Rain Not much
Not for long

Technically
according to the calendar

it’s still spring
May.

These poems don’t necessarily push any boundaries but are a result of a common impetus: I am here, I am real, and things are happening. As often happens when working through the day-to-day, a sort of wisdom bleeds through if you keep paying attention. Marks arrives at the ability to say what he really means at many instances in this section, specifically because he’s paying attention:

And what is there
to love about each other

but our stories
the ones we’ve made

might make
what we’ve left to imagine.

This is a very real conclusion to arrive at after being alone long enough with your thoughts. These poems are the result of accumulated thought, thoughts one returns to again and again while alone in an apartment, watching a bustling city through the window. A likeable and genuine persona becomes more apparent during this section, for instance, when the poet writes: “I’ve written out that Roethke poem, folded it and placed it in my pocket. Should I die, it will be found on me, and that, aside from the fact that I will be dead, might mean something.” The conviction behind such an earnest desire for personal meaning is both comforting and slightly embarrassing. Not embarrassing in a pejorative way, but in a very vulnerable way; it is these moments of vulnerability in the text that are worth waiting for.

The poems in the third and final section of this book, “The Voice Inside the Cheerleader’s Megaphone,” are very clear and direct. While still self-conscious, they are delivered in a less apologetic way. It could be because they are more or less prose poems and that the rhythm and pace of the lines steer the poems forward with force. These poems hint at the type of poet Marks becomes with the publication of his chapbook Voir Dire from Rope-A-Dope Press. Voir Dire is more experienced, more mature. For example, the poet writes in “Lives of the Young and the Tragic,” “I was unpracticed, and I guess a nice enough person, indiscriminating professing my love for people and thing of which I knew nothing.” This voice sounds realistic and unabashed and this serves as a likeable arc for a first book, when the book begins in one place, written in one voice, and ends with a more mature narrator. The poet is getting on with saying real, true things learned through experience and observation, perhaps having only been able to arrive at the real, true things by writing the other poems first. Hence we return to Auden and his idea of the logical progression of an artist; these poems are often self-assesments, moving from surprise to reconciliation at the poet/person’s own limitations.

Voir Dire, which is essentially one long poem, exists because A Million in Prizes exists, and is all the better because of it. The poem rambles and moves forward with an ADD-like quality, but it is the sheer amount of life surrounding the poet and the desire to take it all in, that gives this poem its energy. At some points the poet speaks with obvious affection for his wife:

I share a pizza
and movie with my wife.
She is like a carrot
and I’m a little rabbit.
Our babies will be orange.

At other points the poet wanders into thoughts like:

In a different life
I’d like to have been
a B-movie star.

In each of these instances humor is coupled with seriousness, with sincere commitment to the life he is living and the person he has manufactured. The poem still retains a certain type of narcissism—“The immense joy I receive / when reading my sent emails”—but this is a friendly narcissist. A voice that ultimately wishes you well as much as it wishes itself well. The poem returns to memories from childhood, but does not do so in a longing or scarred way as it does in A Million in Prizes. The poet reasons that:

…Most
of my good fortune
is a fluke.
The bad as well.

The poet’s lack of personal accountability is alarming, but the conclusion is comfortable; I don’t think that the poet who wrote A Million in Prizes would be able to arrive at such a conclusion without needing to know what it means. Not that the voice in Voir Dire doesn’t want meaning, but that it just has a better sense of how the world out there can operate without a hint of concern for you. And it’s not a bad thing to learn. At the beginning of Voir Dire Marks writes, “It’s good to feel good,” and I’d have to agree. Here’s to everyone that for at least one moment they get to experience that feeling. Voir Dire is a manifesto to that.

Tags: 6 stars, 7 stars, Justin Marks, New Issues, Rope-a-Dope Press
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Bill

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

by Bill Rector
Proem Press 2008
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

Bill Vol. 1

rector cover Bill Rector’s book, aptly named Bill, follows Bill through contemporary America, focusing on experiences in health care. Bill talks about Bill in the third person; he is alternately doctor and patient, insider and outsider, in a series of poems that speak like prose. Rector does an effective job of forming Bill into an idea that applies poignantly and broadly to the alienation of the American middle class.

Every poem runs into the next, building the character and world of Bill. Readers are first introduced to the emptiness of modern life and modern medicine; in “show room,” Rector makes a smart and direct analogy, using anti-depressants and America’s love of cars:

I guess what Bill is saying
is that there’s something empty

in the way we regulate our moods,
something clunky under the hoods
we drop when we go out.

Our health care system has become another thing to consume, to regulate our happiness as opposed to actually improving our quality of life. In this piece and others, Rector suggests that life has become intrinsically worthless in America because we put a dollar value on it.

Rector is not one-dimensional, though; he also shows moments when medicine fails due to the crushing inevitability of death. In “Her Husband is near…”, Doctor Bill becomes totally insubstantial while waiting with a family for the death of their father:

Her husband is near
death. Bill
changes shape constantly…

… – Bill’s
the snowflake that drifts
past the gray tower,
mind’s eye
he is
the stomach he doesn’t have
for the three sons who dropped everything to fly
in from the East

There are forces we control with economy but there are, and always will be, those forces of nature we cannot control. Poems like “The Anatomy Lesson” display the practice of medicine as little more than macabre theatre. Nearly all of Rector’s takes on health care in America are touched with cynicism, but he offers an intelligent and thoughtful variety of views.

As Bill progresses, the emptiness and insecurity of health care branch out into all corners of American life. Bill is left seeking the most basic communion within himself and between himself and others. There is the feeling that one must come before the other—but which remains a mystery. As Bill wanders without an identity (other than his plainsong moniker), he lacks morality, direction, purpose—maybe even existence. (It’s notable that the poet’s full name doesn’t appear on the book jacket or in the book, except on the copyright page.)

The whole text is straightforward, bordering on inartistic. However, there are moments presented that certainly transcend the everyday undercurrent of shallow, insecure American life. When Bill gets hit in the face with a line drive, Bill, covered in blood, refuses to show pain:

Boys don’t understand

how a man can stand
not to let pain
show. How

the mouth is a scar
that never cries
Never never

even when it can tell
what’s coming
until it’s too late.

Not even the heart bleeds like the face.

Rector references baseball, shooting, fishing, cars, politics, war, farming, and many of the images and ideas associated with the hardworking core of this country. He successfully avoids the pitfall of being blindly critical of such “American” traits. Bill is a curious and willing participant in these scenes.

This is a good book of poetry for non-poetry readers. Although Bill is too obviously Rector’s mouthpiece (Berryman’s Henry he ain’t by a long shot), it’s refreshing to read poetry from the point of view of a common man who deals with real-life value judgments daily. It’s more gestalt than deep delving, but the pace and consistent focus creates increasing intensity and suggestive meaning as the poems roll by.

Tags: 6 stars, Bill Rector, Matt Soucy, Proem Press
Posted in reviews

A Time in Xanadu

Monday, August 11th, 2008

by Lars Gustafsson
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Jim Wood

Eternally Yours

Gustafsson cover Alan Weisman recently noted in The World Without Us that long after Earth is no longer habitable by any living thing, episodes of The Twilight Zone will still be broadcasting off into infinity. It is kind of comforting to know that the universe will forever be subject to the image of a man’s head bouncing out of a jack-in-the-box, an image that terrified me almost as much last month as it did when I first saw it as a kid. The makers of the show probably had no idea that they were simultaneously affecting the audience of the time, me as a child, me as an adult, my interpretation of Weisman’s book, and the state of the cosmos itself.

The title of Lars Gustafsson’s most recent English translation alludes simultaneously to two vanished eras: the time of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, and the time of the Romantic poets who wrote about him. Oh, and Marco Polo as well. This allusion is indicative of the main theme of the book – that time is fluid, and the present constantly disappears while simultaneously affecting the shape of future “presents.” Whether I know anything about Kublai Klan, I might know something about the Romantic poets, and if not, I might at least be familiar with writers who are influenced by writers who are influenced by them. And I definitely played “Marco Polo” in the pool as a kid. Consider the poem “Traces” in this respect:

There is so little left.
Of dogs for example
only their collars.
Normally sent home in an envelope
along with the bill
from the vet.
Of the really great writers
some extracts in anthologies
that are soon thinned out
over a couple of decades
and die away in the ever-shorter footnotes
of secondary literature as the century passes.

Immortality of any kind is hopeless. We will certainly remember our dogs, and we may tell our kids about them, but our grandchildren are bound to forget. Leaving a legacy of writing is no way out either; at best it just prolongs the inevitable. The time of that poem, of that writer, is gone – no matter what.

But that doesn’t mean that anything is actually gone, in any strict sense of the word at least. Kublai Khan might be gone, but traces of his presence will never leave Mongolia completely. In “Conversation with the Dead,” we are presented with the image of snowy bicycles in the 1950s “or earlier.” The poem concludes “and this second space, / where we live / who are also both living and dead.” Time itself, and thus our status as living or dead, is subjective – at least from the perspective of the universe.

And this can give as much comfort as the thought of eternal radio waves. “In an old-fashioned bookcase, behind glass doors with green curtains on the inside, stand nineteenth-century travel accounts with etchings and woodcuts and neat cloth bindings with engraved illustrations.” There were people in the past who went to great lengths to record transient experience. But we don’t get the impression that anybody really reads these books, as they sit behind glass doors and curtains. They don’t even sound all that interesting. But that doesn’t matter, because “Yes, even they exist. / These other ones—the real places.” Time is one thing, but the universe is constantly shaped by the events within it, and so eternity happens whether one engraves illustrations into books or not.

A second theme permeating this book is the apparent stunning failure of logic and order. Lars Gustafsson, formally trained as a philosopher, comes off as a thinker who has thought about the universe from every possible angle – and has great difficultly making any sense of it at all. Even his organization of the book into sections (Prologues 5-12, Reminiscences 15-31, Philosophies 33-70, Everyday Life 73-76, Poèmes en prose 79-84, Notes 85-87) seems an attempt to impose order on chaos; are his reminiscences really that much different from his philosophies?

He displays a genuine an interest in formal logic and formalism with a concomitant doubt of its ability to express reality. In “Of Course Clark Kent is Superman,” he explains the formalism for expressing existentials, and then comments: “Did we really believe all this / in my youth? / Or did we just pretend?” Similarly, the first poem of Reminiscences discusses a poetry machine which takes works and organizes them into syntactically well-formed sentences. This machine and his description of it makes a not-so-subtle reference to early generative grammar, such as reference to “a language L” which is also featured on page 13 of Noam Chomsky’s 1957, now legendary, Syntactic Structures. However, the poetry machine composes lines of limited length, which is at odds with the early generative observation that human sentences are in principle infinitely long. “No string may be too long / And, least of all, infinitely long.” The formalization of language into technology, then, missed an important aspect of human language in the process: its infinite nature. Human nature is equally difficult to formalize, as he concludes near the end of the book: “Really interesting people have one thing in common: it is difficult to formulate what makes them such.”

Hope comes from elsewhere, namely, from whatever it is that makes things seem so chaotic in the first place, from the fact that you are a part of that chaos. “There is something in your voice … / that is for me / and no one else. / Not everything was senseless.” This is almost a non sequitur – why should we assume that because there was something which had some indefinable meaning “for you” make things make sense? But we are not to assume it; it is the position he argues for throughout the book. Time is fluid, and everything is constantly changing in response to everything else. How it changes defies logic, but when you are part of something so chaotic, only chaos makes sense.

I should mention that there are two annoying tendencies in this book. They are not fatal, but you do have to do some work to get past them. The first is his tendency to use clichés. When he declares, for example, “I did not choose this profession / This profession chose me” in reference to his career as a college professor, one is immediately reminded of Jay-Z: “This is the life I chose, or, rather, the life that chose me.” Of course, Jay-Z doesn’t get credit for the expression either, but like many clichés, it seems tired and lacking in insight.

The biggest problem with this book, though, is its tendency to over-explain. The ‘notes’ section is the most obvious example. Did you wonder what he was talking about with some kind of ‘poetry machine’? No worries, it’s all explained in the back of the book. What was that stuff about Clark Kent being Superman? Just check to the explanation in the back. Maybe I’ll look up that reference later to get a better understanding of the poem… no need, the poem and the reference are explained in full in the back of the book.

While over-footnoting might be okay (there are definitely times when footnotes are an absolute must), the tendency to over-explain also shows up in the poems themselves. “And libraries are subways.” A nice line. Would you like a minute to think about the comparison? Don’t bother, the next three lines tell you exactly what he means: “You often know where you emerge / to the agitated life of the surface again, /but sometimes in a completely unexpected place.” Great, now that line’s ruined.

An even better example is the poem “Centuries and Minutes.” The sub-title is “Poem for New Year’s Eve 1999.” Again, I wish he had left more up to the imagination. I have a hard time imagining how I would feel about this poem if I weren’t immediately accosted with the image of a maybe-slightly-too-drunk poet in the corner of a medium-sized party, pencil and notebook in hand, pretending not to be making a big scene about writing his “Millennium” poem.

Nevertheless, the poem has great moments. The fact that “Time is presence” is homophonous (in English – translator’s doing?) with presents (as in a series of present times) screams out the theme of the book along with another simple, but nice line “All that exists is a now /and that now can never end.” Again, eternity comes for free with a viewpoint which accepts the constant effect everything has on everything else.

This book is worth your time. If you can look past a few annoying clichés and some over-explaining, you will find genuine insight here. It will at least precisify ideas you might already have and supplement them with thoughtful examples and images (like, dogs). Although this book, like all others, will eventually be as moribund as anything else, it will certainly have an effect on you, and maybe that is all you can really hope for.

Tags: 6 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Jim Wood, Lars Gustafsson
Posted in reviews

Holiday

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

by Jennifer Firestone
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

Going Places

firestone cover To Travel!
To Change Countries

         To travel! To change countries!
         To be forever someone else,
         With a soul that has no roots,
                              Living only off what it sees!

                           To belong not even to me!
                            To go forward, to follow after
                            The absence of any goal
                            And any desire to achieve it!

                            This is what I call travel.
                            But there’s nothing in it of me
                            Besides my dream of the journey.
                            The rest is just land and sky.

–Fernando Pessoa

Depending on how you read the above poem, travel could sound like an illuminating experience, accentuated by actual exclamations and Buddha-like certainness: nothing ever belongs to the self, the self forever becomes someone new. In a sense this sounds appealing to me, as it also does to many others who seek to organize their lives by some tired but true maxims. Who could deny the allure of living without deadlines and responsibilities, without waking up every morning to roughly the same routine of coffee and packed lunch? It seems though, that there is a deeper psychology at work. On second look, the exclamations in the Pessoa poem read frightfully, “The absence of any goal / And any desire to achieve it!” Read in this way it sounds like the lament of someone who is stuck in the bell-jar. Perhaps the speaker who reflects that travel has “nothing in it of me” realizes something that most Carnival cruise guests don’t: the moral quandary of ourselves as empty vessels, humping further and further away to exotic places where some type of fulfillment will be beheld. Travel inherently poses existential questions to those self-conscious enough to notice.

Jennifer Firestone’s book Holiday acts as a travelogue documenting more than just the sights and sounds of far away places, as Firestone pays little homage to any place in particular. The book is divided into six sections, all without titles. Judging from the context and description of some poems, I understand when she is writing about a specific place, but without reference to mainstream tourist destinations, which Firestone more or less leaves out, it is hard to determine which small city she is wandering around in.

These poems make use of spacing instead of punctuation in most places and in turn offer no clear determination as to how they should be read. Each poem relays something different: a definite location full of references to Michelangelo, an imagined history of what may have taken place on the very street on which the speaker currently stands, overheard conversations of other travelers—there is almost no end to the differences captured in these vignettes. But regardless of this difference there is a certain kind of consciousness that pervades all the poems, one that is caught up with trying to understand the motivation behind “travel,” the exaltations of the uncertain soul seeking a sense of fulfillment, and how it is very different than “vacation,” or the guilt of leisure, gluttony, and consumption.

The voice in Holiday wavers back and forth between the silly exaggeration of “vacation[ing] the hell / out of things” and the very real disappointment in the way “other images / felt visited / always something letting you down: / at the artifact breath held / you whistles it out / assuming there was more / you were missing.” The conceit of the book manifests toward the end when a woman touring the same historic building is overheard as saying “Is it worth / going down these steps / are the bottom rooms worth it?” Such a question embodies the real tension of vacationing, or taking a “holiday” as the book is aptly titled, and the true sense of traveling as an existential experience. Is it true that traveling means the soul has no home? Or is it rather that the soul is open to developing into something that it would not have been able to had it just stayed put in one place? I’m not suggesting the book pretends to answer this, only that the poems in the book as savvy enough to recognize this moral ambiguity and that the poet thinks enough of herself and her experience to make record. The last poem in section 5 begins by saying “I can’t lose my body. I’m membered by its attachments,” reminding us that no matter where you are you are always there. Ultimately this is a lesson that everyone (traveler or not) comes to realize. Try as best you can but there will always be something of you in it, whatever that it may be.

Tags: 6 stars, Jackie Clark, Jennifer Firestone, Shearsman Books
Posted in reviews

The One-Strand River: Poems 1994-2007

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

by Richard Kenney
Knopf 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

The Sweater-Vest of Academe

kenneycover Most girls that I know who graduated from a liberal arts college with a BA in English/Literature more often than not have a story about what a big crush they had on one (or more) of their English professors. As an undergrad, my crush’s name was Professor Jarrells. In truth, he was really one of the first “guys” I had ever met who enjoyed reading writers like Kerouac and Calvino for fun (having not had too many “ambitious” friends in high school) so you can see how easy it was for my imagination to get swept away with romantic possibilities, especially after learning that he was also a huge Wilco fan.

That being said, there is also another type of professor that can also be found hiking through the campus nature reserves on any given afternoon, one that invariably will be wearing a pair of old New Balances and a sweater vest and will teach “humanities” classes, as the scope of their knowledge also encompasses philosophy and ancient history. This is the professor who always seems to be at home in his skin and often conjures a prophetic disposition akin to Dumbledore’s, the kind of guy who kept a jar of organic peanut butter in his desk drawer way before trans-fats were outlawed in New York. This type of professor tugs the heartstrings of young girls as someone whom they can admire and in be awe of, but can never quite get to know, which I guess is part of their allure.

The poems of Richard Kenney as collected in The One-Strand River: Poems 1994-2007 read somewhere in the middle of these two academic types, possibly landing closer to the latter. Either way, Kenney’s poems are a good mix of enlightened, global judgments and self-(de)aggrandizing with language obviously drawn from an extensive vocabulary. The word “sang-froid” makes a casual appearance, as does the term “volkerwanderung,” which means the migration of a peoples, more or less between AD 300-700. This guy knows not only his history but his Latin as well. I visited the dictionary constantly while reading The One-Strand River, looking up words like pate, azimuth, coign, and orrery—and this is only in the span of 10 pages. The book itself clocks in around 170. Reading these poems made me feel like I was gearing up to take the G.R.E.s again.

Some common devices these poems employ include the use of italics to make a point, especially useful in instances when the speaker is pointing out how others don’t get the point (of the poem possibly, but more often than not the ways in which they [everyone except the speaker] don’t get how to not live like a 21^st century consumption-monster without regard for the bigger picture). For example, in the poem “Air Sublime,” a poem more or less about how amazing it is that humans have the ability to fly, you know, on that philosophical level, the last line reminds us “it’s not about headphones and Coke.” And he’s right. There are bigger things at work around us then our own leisure but I wonder how much it needs to be pointed out, especially if we assume that the majority of the people reading these poems probably have the same kind of enlightened consciousness as the poet himself. Perhaps that is a bold assumption. Perhaps not.

Every line of poetry in this book, regardless of whether or not the previous one is enjambed, begins with a capital letter, an aesthetic choice that is way outside today’s mainstream. It is interesting to notice the way generational styles can serve as either a coveted invitation or a complete turn off. For me, it was a turn off.

For the most part, the poems in The One-Strand River don’t exceed one page and are neatly tucked into stanzas of mostly equal size. There are poems such as “Epicycles” that charmingly use repetition in a quasi-Ground Hog’s day fashion and “Poetry” which laments how future anthropologists will say of our time that we lacked culture because reading poetry seems something that collectively folks are valuing less and less. Overall these poems are inoffensive and reassuring. References to Greek concepts like thanatos and Nietzche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra pleasantly return one to a place of academic wonder and impression and the feeling that there are still honest people living, writing, and learning around us. The insularity of academia notwithstanding.

Tags: 6 stars, Jackie Clark, Knopf, Richard Kenney
Posted in reviews