Posts Tagged ‘7 stars’

The Turning and It is Daylight

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

by Maxine Chernoff & Arda Collins, respectively
Apogee Press 2009 / Yale University Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

A God Playing the Fool

chernoff cover collins daylight cover I know it’s cheap to use Louise Glück’s expected introductory praise to bash Arda Collins’s first collection It Is Daylight, but this is all part of the System, and I find it symptomatic; Glück is the judge of the Yale Younger Poets Series, after all. I will try to balance my initial misgivings by making this review a 2-fer with Maxine Chernoff’s The Turning, as both poets mine similar territory using different methods.

It seems commonplace that the contemporary poetic speaker is by definition marginal or isolated. Glück’s sharp reference to Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood skits on Saturday Night Live indicates what we are getting into:

Mr. Rogers’ soothing chatter mutated on late night TV into Mr. Robinson’s paranoid ramblings: Mr. Robinson was unwelcome, but Mr. Robinson, for the benefit of all us former children too hooked or wired to go to sleep, Mr. Robinson was digging his heels in and, crouched under the window, ready to talk, even if talking meant talking to a void.

Glück points out that both Collins and Murphy are inventing personae in “a master performance conducted in a deliberately isolated space, as though isolation were a form of control that promoted fluency.” Okay, the marginalized Invisible Man or Woman often speaks to us this way. Glück makes a deeper point when she compares the Skinner box of television to the Skinner box of the self, citing Collins’s sense of “metaphysical claustrophobia: the bleak fate of being always one person.”

I remember being visited by this feeling most intensely on insomniac prepubescent nights when I was tortured by all my mistakes and wondered “why am I me?” with no way to think myself out of it. Here’s Collins gamely failing to think her way out of it, nearly throughout the whole book. In order for Collins to stay in this sleepless, solipsistic mode, it requires that she maintain the same powerless paralysis that tortured me at 12. It requires that she not turn on the light, not read her favorite book, not talk to anyone (except, as Glück points out, the figure of god), not be in love or even pet her cat or dog. There are hints of an original trauma, as Collins frames the book with images of a mother screaming that her children have been kidnapped, but she doesn’t get caught up in actual narrative events. More than enough material comes through on the TV every day to create sufficient trauma out of thin air:

I was getting hungry but I felt afraid
of seeing the refrigerator light go on.
Then I would have to turn on other lights,
and then what would I do?

The Middle School answer is to get a life. One of Maxine Chernoff’s titles seems to work better for Collins’s book: “One Hundred Years of Solipsism,” but Glück is right on when she points out that what Collins really accomplishes is stopping time: “Because the self doesn’t change, because it is exposed to nothing that would change it, time seems not to pass.” The adult life and passion that the speaker is avoiding by this willful magic is partly revealed through the dark mist, but the effect is dependent on the reader’s ability to tolerate passages like:

I don’t think the sun will come up
unless it’s possible
for the day to clear a path.
I think the best thing would be
for someone to beat me,
maybe with a stick,
until I say, “Day is night! Day is night!”

If I were someone else (a typical evasion in It Is Daylight), I would call this caustic irony as opposed to plain old masochism. Franz Wright, for example, performs this kind of trick all the time, but the depths he finds there are truly frightening, mostly because of his mastery of the lonely image, the image captured by a voyeur at the end of his rope (I refer you to DJ Dolack’s recent Dickman review in Coldfront for examples of Wright’s mastery of this kind of imagery). Collins is at her best in passages like this, imagining someone

who has never seen a phone, and says blah blah blah
to the dial tone. The silence that once existed
in the dark cold universe: translated, the empty sound
is a place—the inside of a phone. Infinity,
I say, there it is.
This is where we all go to
when we touch each other;
this is what supernatural is.

This lacks Wright’s efficiency. The line breaks function largely to drag us back into dreamland, avoiding any sort of overly rhetorical epiphany that might wake the speaker up before she is ready. Glück aptly describes Collins as “hopeless on principle,” and cites her skill with camera work with keeping the reader awake. The variety of jump cuts needed to sustain these metaphysical Skinner boxes can indeed become fascinating. Here is an example of the approach:

I think I am going to stop
eating bits of paper
that don’t say anything on them—
that don’t even say anything on them
I know I should do something
as they say, for “the snows of embarrassment”
like a day in March when the blood is closer,
day singing for the loss of its whip.
Closer, I say, closer.
Or maybe I’ll arrange to have you run over by horses
unexpectedly.

Any individual passage like this is inventive, vivid, caustic, funny, claustrophobic and readable. The rhetorical fillip of repeating the line in italics could easily be a trapdoor to another plane, or at least to effective action in life. However, the note of Plathian, transformative power is undercut throughout the book by appealingly mundane double takes:

a dead person with a tan is worrisome:
had she
gone to hell?
That’s impossible, I thought. Genocide?
Farina?
Doesn’t she automatically get her ticket punched?
And that’s assuming hell is anywhere.
This is so stupid, I think,
This isn’t—
—what?
This isn’t what?

In a 1962 BBC interview, Sylvia Plath famously stated that she couldn’t bear to put toothbrushes in her poems. Collins is under no such restriction, suggesting the exciting possibility that she can say anything. Ultimately, though, Plath plus silliness equals what? The speaker never quite gets anywhere, we don’t care about the dead woman with the tan, and the reader is in danger of becoming bored. The juxtaposition of genocide and farina is not a stirring example of the liberating contradictions championed by Whitman and Emerson. It’s pointless, but that’s part of Collins’s point.

“Parts of An Argument,” one of my favorite pieces in the book, begins to herald the subtle change in the speaker that Glück helpfully alerts us to at the beginning. It starts: “I didn’t know I had god until god was gradually not there over time. I don’t feel abandoned. It is part of taking things as they come.” The speaker explains her (non) sense of god, as if he “gave me a microwave oven, but I never took it out of the box because I was grateful and never touched it.” OK, the speaker is just not going to touch this oven: “It sounds simple and fun but it is still not a big deal to use pots on the stove.” She wonders if this gift means “god thinks that I should bear many children.” The ensuing complications, elaborations, and evasions are ironic and funny. The unlined prose poem finally releases a pseudo-reasonable facsimile of a believable voice, making the speaker’s evasions seem more natural, and highlighting Collins’s warped humor. It Is Daylight is not a clinical exploration of shame, history, or original sin, but something more consistently ironic and personal about our ridiculous metaphysical position: “Since there is no god, you have to be both you and god.” So there you are, assembling the miserable “components of your dinner” from the freezer while god and his guys are off somewhere having “pear clafoutis behind a velvet curtain and driv[ing] their skulls into the center of a diamond.”

In her most recent work, The Turning, Maxine Chernoff is also concerned with the moment when “the god image / enters the man image,” but she explicitly invokes Emerson in order to Americanize the idea. Where Collins tends to fold any sense of history, politics, or literature into the solipsistic chaos of seemingly random, pointless emotions, Chernoff uses words as rocks, bricks—solid objects with the power to build or destroy. Where Collins uses rambling line breaks to evade responsibility, Chernoff cuts her lines with a razor, emphasizing the potential and actual moral “turning” of each phrase. Here are four non-consecutive stanzas from “Sensorium”:

Obsessed by prepubescent girls
the luminosity of angels
the Bible bound in shiny fish skin
………………………………….
Obsessed by pleasing objects
a sexual trauma
the Virgin on the altar
………………………………….
Obsessed by the danger of drowning
the perfection of philosophical dogma
the meaning of cool
…………………………………
Obsessed by all variety of bird
universal male suffrage
the contingent world.

Several poems ring changes like these on repeated parallel phrases. Throughout The Turning, Chernoff allows a kaleidoscopic array of historical and literary references to have a disorderly but pointed conversation, both professorial and personal. Her use of contemporary references and current events lends urgency. In a poem written for the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, she asks:

how to make a poem
out of so many terrible facts
how to re-embed sympathy and truth.

This won’t happen if we retreat into political buzzwords or high-toned aesthetic theories. Chernoff cites Emerson acknowledging that reading can easily become a substitute for living. She warns that “read as parable/ history vanishes,” and, later in the poem, “silence will out.” For the last decade of his life, Emerson slowly lost his memory, and Chernoff associates this fact with a kind of American cultural dementia. Though Emerson forgot his own words, he knew that what he said remains said: “Nothing will remain / without being spoken.” Yet, by a kind of “double logic of narrative,” Chernoff also says of Virginia Woolf, “for all she remembered more was forgotten // until the narration // closed its eyes.” In Chernoff’s universe, as well as Emerson’s, paradoxes exist as energy sources to tap into rather than walls to bang your head against.

Both Chernoff and Collins explore the slippery terrain between dementia and remembering, and they navigate the counterclaims of history and art, using puppets, pie, god, and religious imagery as props. Chernoff’s sense of history and art has an adult solidity to it, even as she removes it from its godlike chronological and narrative throne. In a standout piece, “Scenes From Ordinary Life,” Chernoff imagines a oddly touching puppet show starring two intellectual giants of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. By contrast, Collins’s efforts to stop time are more those of a child playing alone in her sandbox. Since Chernoff is not limited to depicting a consistent persona, she doesn’t gesture as wildly as Collins, but relentlessly re-imagines and deconstructs the master narratives of history and literature without neglecting the private transformations of art. She searches for the paradoxical hope that the blank page can serve as the stage for an adequate and effective response to “the contingent world.”

Though I greatly prefer the adult solidity of Chernoff’s historical and literary references, I’m willing to admit that Collins takes more risks and mines deeper territory. But talk is cheap. Let’s set up a poetic smackdown to decide! I’ll make up a Maxine Chernoff poem by taking food-related snippets from unrelated poems, and Arda Collins will get a chance to respond:

She spoke of taking pains to
be a good host. But what do cyborgs eat?
she asked the panel on Non-food Cuisine.

the surrogate ate the frozen peas
frozen. Heat makes us human

the history of dementia
recorded by Solon
(5000 BC)
(they die of starvation)

Emerson asking
“Mr. _______,
what is pie for?”

She was able to pry it out:
it was a frozen slug.

She held a big box of pastries in her hands.
“Put this on,” she said.

She brought preference to history.

From one little room an everywhere

And now for Arda Collins. To make it a fair fight, I won’t even bring in the untouched microwave. Since I’m getting ready to hightail it out of Dodge, I’ll call it a draw and leave the scoring up to you:

The components of your dinner are waiting for you downstairs.

There is something in the freezer
marked “vanilla.” I tasted it.
It was like ice cream, or like whipped cream.
But I became suddenly afraid
that it wasn’t food, but poison
for the garden.

I’m coming up the street
in the middle of the day,
coming somewhere
with a can of food
and a kitchen in my heart
thinking
the heart
can love anything,
cannot love anything.

You have a heat source in your chest,
and an electric space heater for office use only.

You ask god if god
is hungry, and god is. You ask god
what you should do
for dinner and god reminds you
that you have turkey burgers
in the freezer, and some broccoli. You’ll
go take the burgers out
and separate them with a knife.
They’ll be slippery and frozen, and
you’ll think of driving on
an icy road; and then
you’ll put them in foil under
the broiler and start the water
for the broccoli, and take out
a plate for yourself, and get
the salt and pepper, and by
that time god will have left.

*

Tags: 7 stars, Apogee Press, Arda Collins, Maxine Chernoff, Mike McDonough, Yale University Press
Posted in reviews

El P.E.

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

by Thibault Raoult
Projective Industries 2008
Reviewed by Rick Marlatt

Everything Slurred

el pe Printed in a July 2008 edition of only 100 copies, El P.E. is a 24-page collection of twelve often inscrutable collage-like meditations. Anchored by “Handle on Creatureoreure,” a mysterious, innovative shake at memory, mythology and sensory detail, El P.E. blends metaphorical reflections and picturesque motions with an uncompromising urge to strip language to its barest parts, demonstrating with letters the craft of a real visual artist.

“I’m inclined” explores the connection between personal, cultural and natural elements in the poet’s world:

I’m inclined to say there should be funk
In the constitution.

You have an accent
Of fennel.

Neonates in spring have one thing on us—
Neonates.

After teasing us with the concrete notion of politics (see Parliament, Chocolate City), Raoult backs off into an equivocal yet profound reaction to human relations, before culminating with an indirectly related reflection on arbitrary stimuli. Though brief and driven by flashes, this piece is a wonderful showcase of Raoult’s ability to generate deep and varied meaning in limited space. His couplets are blips, or distant transmissions.

Raoult’s work is about triggering emotional and cognitive responses to unique combinations and translations of words and sounds. “Mal de Mar” is a first person riddle that simultaneously pursues earnest self-examination and parodies true confession:

I am for Damoclean dalles.
I am for RIND
I love three things.

And night comes first.
And rip places second.
I am to return.

Into muntin with my moue.
And bis is third.
I am due bittern.

While readers can easily lose themselves in El P.E.’s sensory, linguistic magic, Raoult’s collection is far more than a compilation of moving sounds and images; it’s a text full of symbols. It reminds that letters are symbols only (words larger ones), and reads with the meticulous, illuminating pace of an ancient religious text. The speaker hides behind his symbols, but also clings to them for life. Beautiful pieces such as “Pretty Reason Extensions [She]” are constructed with multiple brackets, arrows, parentheses and codes which add additional breadth to the reader’s experience. “PRENUP.EDU” applies resonances of E.E. Cummings and demonstrates a fusion of word, symbol and cryptogram:

Clotting, clotting
DIVESTED
PRESENT
s’merVanna

but the seeds, how they blink:

gainsaid [as silk?] – > un-well

and somewhere calm branch
grows mien-madia

unaba unafa-
LEADING

Dadew-beasts toward
Those (londons)

who balloon who
emphasize not a soul
dances anymore
manually, sugars.

Immediately, the way lines are formatted take focus in this piece. Unique choices in punctuation, capitalization, and overall structure precede the final four lines which attempt to creatively smooth out a cluster of almost obscene signs and movements. Yet his progression throughout is elegant, and undeniably musical. His commitment to a lack of clarity is alluring, a distrust of clarity or the notion that language can affirm anything for sure. Raoult employs a variety of symbols, fonts and visual indicators; in many, one can observe the hesitations, gestures, and private emotions which accompany all human communication, and reaffirm that all communication is fragmented, suggestive of meaning (however consciously fictive) and capable of music.

Tags: 7 stars, Projective Industries, Rick Marlatt, Thibault Raoult
Posted in reviews

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
Posted in reviews

Star in the Eye

Monday, June 1st, 2009

by James Shea
Fence Books December 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

The Stars are Projectors (Yeah)1

Star in the Eye, winner of the Fence Modern Poetry Series, is a collection filled with the material of dreams and nightmares. The speaker is preoccupied with these, but somehow less than panicked. The residue of self-doubt and remorse is evident, yet sentient, beautiful images abound.

In fact, the individual poems are on occasion so fully-imagined and detailed that it is not difficult for a Simician fair to materialize for the reader. He is unsettling like Rauan Klassnik was unsettling in Holy Land, though where Klassnik’s lyrics are sometimes grotesque and shocking, Shea’s produce more subtle and steady waves of unrest (with some small exceptions of shock and gore, as in “Dream Trial,” when the speaker shoots a dog multiple times and his uncle “puts his barrel / into the wounds and fires.” The dog’s head “halves open.” I will say it again. Leave the dogs out of it.)

In the opening poem, all elements work together to form a colorful, yet unnatural setting. The title, “Turning and Running,” exhibits clear uneasiness. The poem begins, “The sun was backing away from me, / slowly like one I have betrayed.” The atmosphere is composed of fright, confusion and deceit. The speaker runs to a “river to burn in it.” Ambulances arrive; mysterious oral surgery is performed. There is unusual face-painting, and a constant search for exit. There’s regret: “There were at least four things / I should have said,” and the poem ends with a warning: “Do not step on the rug / with the live birds sewn into it.” It’s beautiful and jarring. “Turning and Running” launches the reader into the collection like a motorcyclist flying over the front of his bike. On impact, the pavement is cold and probably wet. S/he is alone, vaguely sad, pathetic, injured.

Shea’s poems do not inhabit the space of nightmares only; there is constant dreaming and waking. There’s something nebulously Vanilla Sky about this book, the familiar phiosophical wonder as to whether one is awake or dreaming; for instance, in the melancholy “Parts of an Inland Pier,” the speaker describes a trip to the beach in which he experiences individual waves “for a moment at a time.” The speaker seems to be experiencing clarity, finally “seeing” things as they are, but by the end of the poem he says, “I woke to three geese flying in a loose v. / I could live my whole life right here, in this chair.” The implication (very Wright, “Lying in a Hammock”) is that the former has been a dream; the clarity was not a reality, but could have been had he not been aware of its untruth. Whether asleep or awake, one constantly resets one’s cognition, reestablishes awareness.

Helpless to do otherwise, the speaker continually pursues new ways to view the world, better ways to absorb life’s fabric. It is lucidity he seeks; in “Around the Wind,” the speaker cleanses his senses. Shea writes:

I get in a plane and look for the earth.
I am without the sight of existence for miles.
I can see nothing from all sides.

These lines exhibit detachment both physical and mental. The distance at which Shea’s speaker stands from the occurrences of his “earth” and life allow him to acquire an alien, if fresh, perception of them.

Such distance might be valuable for the mind that composes it, but is not always so for Shea’s reader. The tone in each of these poems is similar; therefore, it is easy to feel as though the poems belong together. Yet the poems from Star in the Eye don’t entirely synthesize. They blend but don’t fuse, almost interchangeable in chronology and development. There is little movement throughout the book; beyond a few obvious redundancies, the poems don’t speak to each other. Perhaps there is something to be said for a collection that is static, reaffirming as it may our common potential for paralysis. But even stasis can be electric, a form of movement; paralysis can be movement.

Sometimes you feel it in Star in the Eye. Sometimes not. The inability to act is an American plague onset by fear of failure, rejection, death. Shea attempts to dissolve the troubles consequential to this immobility. He writes that there is “some comfort in the undoable.” Shea also includes a poem in this collection titled “Unperfectable.” The undoable and unperfectable inflict no pressure. Maybe these feelings are more universal than America, but either way, Americans suffer from them. Shea captures a contemporary consciousness in these poems. The oftener they are read, the more they grip the reader, telling a story that is familiar, if no story at all.

Familiarity is comforting because it is loyal, a constant. In one part of a 45-part poem titled “The Riverbed,” Shea exhibits the familiar through a reflection. The section is titled, “Ignoring the Riverbed,” and it reads as follows:

A boy by the riverbed
Turns his back to the river.
His body is reflected by the surface.

The lines recall a Plath poem called “Mirror” in which Plath writes of the same type of clarity that Shea’s speaker hunts. From “Mirror”: “I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, / umisted by love or dislike.” Shea’s speaker too desires to see things “just” as they are, and like Plath’s mirror, his river, faced with a betrayal, is dutiful and presents the familiar. “I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.” However, reflections, though faithful, are often distorted, contributing to the lack of clarity Shea’s speaker contends with.

In the final poem of the collection, “Dream Trial,” the next-longest in the book, Shea brings us back to the stuff of sleep—dreams both good and bad. Dreams are also a form of reflection. They often reflect that which we may be unable to face consciously, for instance, the fear of death. There’s a lot of death, or at least talk of it, in this book. There is even another multi-sectioned poem called “Death Poems” in which “The Void / welcomes you.” In “University of Air,” the speaker “spent the night practicing for the long nap.” Shea begins the second section of “Dream Trial” with the following observation: “Some animals live so briefly / they never need to eat.” Yes, by this point it is clear that the speaker is preoccupied with death, or at the very least, meaninglessness. Yet if one thing carries meaning, so do all things; the physical world, animals and all, can be imagined a character, or series of characters. Shea has found a projector of his fears in his dreams, his nightmares, all around him, even in the clouds: “Clouds pass over, watching us / what shapes we take.”

___________

¹See Modest Mouse, “The Stars Are Projectors”

Tags: 7 stars, Fence Books, James Shea, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

The Next in Line

Monday, April 20th, 2009

by Christopher Schmidt
Slope Editions 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

The End of Possibility

next in line You should probably judge Christopher Schmidt’s first book by its cover. It’s a friendly blue-grey, not too flashy or eye-piercing, but it stands out. The text elements are well balanced, the framing lines bringing a sense of order and balance. There’s a black and white photograph by John Coplans that at first seems to be an obscenely aged body, shown from the waist down—hairy, wrinkled, bunchy, strutting—but then it resolves into two fingers, poised for walking, Yellow-Pages-style. It’s clever and shocking, an intimately coy visual pun. It retains its eroticism and appeal even after surrendering to your realization of what it is, because you can still see what it looks like. In other words, when you go to the bar that is a bookstore, Schmidt’s the keeper you want to take home. The cover is a perfect flirtation, a come on—it’s a promise, and Schmidt delivers.

***

It’s easiest to start by describing the pleasure of the most obviously conceptual poems, the poems which are most clearly driven by a conceit. “Top/Butt” tells the story of an erotic outing without the use of the vowels “a” “e” or “i”. (“Soon Luc spots humongous chub on pup slut Todd.”) “Block Text” lists words that include “black” or “block” but reverses them to give us new formations that are deracinated (“Block Panther”), funny (“Cockblacker”), or topical (“Jenny from the Black”) while keeping the eroticism of the words/work in place.

The vision of the erotic that Schmidt offers is surprisingly friendly, and refreshingly playful. Throughout the poems, sex is not tortured or punished, but social and inventive, bringing back the best of the sexual ethos of a magazine like Gay Sunshine, while abandoning any self-righteousness. Timothy Liu, who selected the volume for Slope, is right to compare the work to Barthes. Schmidt is a master of that untranslatable jouissance that Barthes prized: Schmidt offered up to us as a pleasure. Who would think that avoiding vowels could make sex talk fun? Schmidt takes Kafka for an outing to a Bathhouse and the Black Party, though Franz seems to have less fun than Schmidt does (poor Franz). It’s also a decidedly gay book, unapologetically invoking Polari (a British gay slang that went out of style with stonewall), Fire Island, bathhouses, and Kiki DuRane (Justin Bond’s character in the duo “Kiki & Herb”). But it’s gay the way that Erasure is gay. You don’t have to like the boys to dance to it. It’s all right with Schmidt if you don’t speak Polari. After all, no one does.

Schmidt’s touch is so light, it feels like he’s rediscovered the harpsichord in a time of Thelonius Monk imitators. In some ways, it’s that generous trust that the reader understands that makes the book move so trippingly forward. But Schmidt’s irresistible charm is underwritten by an enormous intellect and a genuine concern for the reader. If this book were a one night stand, it would not only care about your orgasm, it would make you pancakes in the morning, and from a recipe in an obscure French cookbook you’d spend the rest of your life trying to track down.

***

Schmidt has a wonderful ear for casual speech, and for internal rhymes that come back quickly on themselves. His engagement with the banal continually elevates the mundane into a tight sonic playing field. From “Go Lightly,” a sonnet early in the book:

Helen chooses beans and egg whites. June:
yoghurt, prunes. “Starch can line a skin like stress,”
says Helen. June: “I bloat a tide full moon.”
Sugar is not a vegetable, “ought” a thing to obsess

Just as he settles into a perfect iambic pentameter, he disrupts it, and he distracts from the rhymes by overloading the lines with the same sounds. Prosodically, the poems are tight and smart, but they always insist on remaining a field of play. These poems are masterful in that the know all the rules, but more importantly, know why those rules were made in the first place. Lines like “Those who know, don’t. Those who care, scare” (39) and “Thin, skin so uninteresting” (57) pepper the collection. Unpack this one: “Queensburying (like bunbuyring, like Ashberying)” (39). Working from the template of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Invitation to Marianne Moore,” Schmidt wrests the wry “Invitation to Ms. Kiki Durane,” (appropriately) an altered Sapphic.

***

In a long poem about a (possibly seductive) student, Schmidt explores the parallels between teaching and prostitution. The boy finally reveals that he has tiny vestigal fingers growing out of his pinkies. It’s a moment of amazing intimacy and confusion. The relationship has reached the end of possibility—and it’s beautiful, in part because Schmidt is so good at calibrating those moments where there’s no where else to go. In these ways and more, Schmidt’s debut collection is a remarkable accomplishment—clever, smart, and emotionally satisfying.

Tags: 7 stars, Christopher Schmidt, Jason Schneiderman, Slope Editions
Posted in reviews

The End of the West

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

by Michael Dickman
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by DJ Dolack

Out There

dickman michael cover Before you read through and come away confused as to what the overall opinion is here, I want to say this: Michael Dickman’s debut collection is solid. It’s straightforward and self-centered and immature, but it also cares about you. It puts a lot of weight on very small moments and it wants you to read it very, very slowly. It knows for sure that when you walk away from it, you will be leaving unnerved. For better and worse, the hype-machine that has surrounded its release has made it more subject to the overly-critical eye, but I suppose that’s a small price to pay for three poems and a New Yorker feature (an amazing feat for even the established poet with tenure and/or health insurance, let alone a writer who has only a few good publishing credits and no established record of relevance). But by blocking everything but the poetry itself out, we can see a collection that uses autobiography and (dare I say it?) confessionalism to put forward a declarative and make sense of this world the only way it knows how.

Many of the poems in The End of the West seem to come from the now infamous “Dickman background”; they are built around life experiences of growing up in a rough section of town, interaction with and absence of a truant father, a single mother, romantic lust, and a great metaphysical barbaric yelp. It’s very young work, but it forces you to pay attention to singular occasions of romanticism. In the opening poem, “Nervous System,” Dickman writes:

When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on
a windowsill

The voices of my friends
in the sunlight

All of us running around
outside our
deaths

It’s a moment we are pressed into with or without him, and it’s sincere. In fact, sincerity runs rampant through the entire collection and sometimes gives us moments of information we’d be better off shielded from. In “Ode,” he fills us in a little too intimately:

Do you think there’s a difference
for the Lord
between

slow dancing in the kitchen at night, no music, your arms around my
neck, and later

my face
in your ass?

Yeah, I think there is. And I have no use to ponder it much more than you’ve given me already, but thanks for the image. It’s tough to transition from a stunning illustration like this to a more solemn and considerate follow-up:

I think His home is covered in dark leaves
cicada wings and
promises

a peaceful night
a perfect death

Ugly and frighteningly real as it is, it works. It is also one of the aspects of Dickman’s poetry that appeals to me so much. You don’t have to learn to read this book; you only have to be human. And I agree with Franz Wright’s blurbed assertion that Dickman drives against “the gratuitous non-sequiturs and obscurity for obscurity’s sake which have been fashionable in our poetry for the past couple of decades”—though I wouldn’t say Wright’s praise is surprising, as I think it’s fairly clear and just the way the guy writes. But this is just the beginning of my disagreement with some of the attributes Wright and others have themselves heralded upon the poetry of Michael Dickman. Although I see a lot to like here, and am thrilled to see what he will bring us in the future, I cannot go along with the super-sized praise that’s been bestowed upon this collection thus far, especially on the back cover.

Of course Franz Wright lauds the poems; they’re molded directly from his own early style, a style exhibited most devastatingly in 1993’s The Night World and the Word Night, a book that marked both the pinnacle of and turning point in Wright’s work. Within those pages we can find more of the stark imagery and darkness that his first collections introduced us to, and that came to define his writing until almost ten years later when it took on a subtle optimism as well as a fixed gaze on spiritual guidance. In no other collection though, has Wright’s poetry been more hauntingly effective than in The Night World…, nor has it stood together so well as an entire piece, complete with a beautifully delicate arc and pace.

As a disciple of that collection, I find Dickman’s poems fairly derivative and unable to truly reinvent themselves or seem fresh in the ways that count most. The quickly-jabbed images of light, stars, trees, leaves, needles, abandonment, and of course death, all show up within the first few poems with such a familiarity, it’s difficult to imagine that, in his enormously verbose blurb, Wright actually asserts that Dickman “has absorbed his influences and taught them to work hand in hand with his own
unique genius to produce a style like no one else’s…”. Come on, man. Can we be serious here for a second?¹

But it’s more than just these obvious images, words and subject matter that make the connection to Wright’s earlier work so distinct and insurmountable when discussing poetic style and originality, two of the things Dickman’s enthusiasts seem to applaud more than anything else. It’s the way in which Dickman goes about setting up his rhythm, his line breaks, his use of white space, as well as the tone built by these devices, that truly makes this collection seem like some kind of poetry cover album. To even the faintly read reader, it’s nothing terribly new. It does conjure the darkness we may like to associate with poetry, especially if we’re bred from such a background. It does not, however, solicit the level of praise or interest it has thus far received, especially when a number of younger poets are clearly writing and putting out collections that warrant deeper readings and attention, who have not had the opportunity or coincidence to meet, greet and drink with the Names this poet has. This understanding alone, that this simple reviewer, with no completed manuscript or published book in tow, can easily see the disconnect between what is new, original and challenging, and what this collection has to offer, is a forewarning of the comments on inadequacy and replication. Still, the connection to Wright’s style and lack of Dickman’s own uniqueness should play heavily into any unbiased appreciation and critique of the entire collection.

However, this is still not to say I didn’t like the collection as a whole, or appreciate the approach. The book is also, at many points, beautiful. It’s delicate and deliberate when it needs to be, honest when what we desperately need is honesty. Dickman manages to build small incomplete narratives in the poetry and deliver moments that are more touching than stark. In “My Autopsy” he lays out lists of declaratives that read like a last stand:

You eat the forks
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables

What do you love?

I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on despite
worms or fire

I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth

The poem is gorgeous, strange and slow; its lines inhale and exhale. But its best moments are gathered up front. The breaks between parts, something Dickman does throughout the collection, here seem to cut off the build in tension, but he always keeps us on track with the repetition of “There is a way / if we want…” beginning each part. The final part, though, is the weakest and runs a bit too far on its main image of “intestines” while ending the whole thing with a kind of dud stanza that doesn’t really tie anything in or up. We’re left with our eyes darting to the next page only to find a new title for the next poem. It’s disappointing, especially after such strong lines throughout, but we quickly understand that this is one of Dickman’s great weaknesses, and one of the few that ultimately hold the collection back: the guy can’t finish.

“Sticking the Landing” is probably one of the toughest things to pull of in the poem — a “know it if you got it” kind of thing — and Dickman surprises with the faint and unconvincing last lines he chooses. It seems in almost every poem, the lines that conclude each individual part are more effective and relevant than the lines that conclude the entire piece. He often tries to rely on singular images, delivered flatly, to bring on a reverberating crack of thunder, but they end up sounding more like cap gun snaps. Of course, this is something Franz Wright does hauntingly well, and we can see Dickman trying to emulate, but to little avail. I wouldn’t normally try to compare the skills of a young poet like Dickman to a master of the craft like Wright, but I think the palpable resemblance here warrants the evaluation.

Furthermore, there are so many potential moment-by-moment comparisons to Wright’s work, it’s probably best to just list the few I found most distracting. Although it’s difficult to really get at the resemblance through simple snapshots of the work, here are excerpts from various Dickman poems up against Wright; it isn’t out-and-out theft, but the severity of mood and image produce a kind of upside-down, rippling reflection, like a streetlamp in a puddle:

Wright (from “Midnight Postscript”):

It should always be
night, and the living with their TVs, vacuum cleaners
and giggling inanities
silenced.

With here and there a window lit a golden mysterious
light.
I love the night world,
the word night.

Dickman (from “Kings”):

Our crowns look nothing like his crown

needles and light and
needles of light
fingers
stamen

…

The kitchen window
the only light
for blocks

Now we’re going to know what it feels like

*

Wright (from “Train Notes”)

Green lightning past the last trees, they are pure
gaze.

Dickman (from “Good Friday”)

I think the light
appearing, then
disappearing

across the trunk of the live oak
is the boss of everything

*

Wright (from “Pawtucket Postcards”)

Lights of the abandoned
households reflected
in the little river through the leaves

Dickman (from “Late Meditation”)

What are you going to do?
describe the light
falling

through the pitch pines
again?

*

Wright (from “Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse”)

…horizontal snow

appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white
bees.

Dickman (from “My Father Full of Light”)

like the residue of beets
on a cutting board

also
emitted light

A blizzard of wings

Wright (from “Provincetown Postcards”)

Wolf stars

Owl’s head moth

Icon-yellow twilight

Sound of leaves & sea the silent sun

Will all have had ample experience when the last loneliness
comes

Dickman (from “We Did Not Make Ourselves”)

I can hear

dogs barking
some trees
last stars

You think you’ll be missed
It won’t last long
I promise

If you’re unconvinced, I highly recommend you check out any of Wright’s work previous to The Beforelife, both for the reference and some truly stirring poetry. I also recommend you take a good look at The End of the West for what it is, regardless of its origins or influences. It’s a book that asks for your time but not your patience, and it deserves both. In the brilliant title poem, which serves as the closing overture to the collection, Dickman writes:

They don’t say my name
but my name
is out there

I can’t help but use these lines as a way of thinking about the poetry of Michael Dickman: something that is out there, but still undefined unto itself.

¹Apparently not. That statement about style ends with: “…one as instantly recognizable as that of poetic masters such as Dickinson, Follain, and Simic.” I’m serious. These are the exact words. Now I know blurbs are supposed to talk up the work and stretch the truth a bit, but this is a great example of the blurb art form gone to shit. Who had the final say on this one, and where is the modesty and humility for a first-book poet? I imagine I’m not alone when I say that, as the author, I would have suggested a lighter phrase here, or at least an opportunity to edit. Flattery is nice, but isn’t it obvious that this kind of hyperbole just comes off as pretentious bullshit?

Tags: 7 stars, Copper Canyon Press, DJ Dolack, Michael Dickman
Posted in reviews

City of Moths

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

by Sampson Starkweather
Rope-a-Dope Press 2008
Reviewed by Dan Magers

Come Back to Me

Sampson Starkweather’s chapbook City of Moths attempts relentlessly to blur the distinction between words and things. Unlike bodies in space, which can be registered immediately, language must be actively and continuously attended to in order for it to register. The futility of using language to prioritize objects over language is this work’s driving force. The generally conversational style and discrete blocks of prose suggest an epistolary work, letters to an absent lover. But as much as our narrator wishes to speak her into existence, he is only speaking to himself.

There is no deliberate movement of logic, but two steps gradually emerge: he cancels the distinctions between words and objects, then dares us to ignore the objects. As for the first, he writes, “No difference between a poem and a tree,” or

“Poetry, she says, is a mountain. An actual mountain. A thing that fools climb simply ‘because it’s there.’ “Poetry is there, but why do we constantly feel the need to prove it exists?”

By “we,” the poet means “I”. He answers by offering a guiding example of “Wolves in the city, wandering around abandoned monuments and subway stations without any sense of fear or resistance.” When they attack,

“It’s hard to pretend the shrieks are not happening, but most people are trained by now to drown out the sounds. Need I remind you that most of the time, they simply walk through the city, peacefully, with nothing at all to do.”

We want to prove poetry (like emotion) exists because it can be neglected, ignored. With the wolves, Starkweather emphasizes the absurdity of ignoring a tangible thing, and suggests we do it all the time with intangible things, like emotions. “The perfect poem you can walk inside of,” he writes; “watch yourself from above on a series of TVs.”

These are poems conceived and collected under the guiding thread of a city, giving Starkweather room to not only populate the poems with objects, people and actions, but also events, suggesting memories, which hectically turn emotions into things. There is less concern about creating a defined time and space than there is in populating it:

“In the dream, we’re at a party in a trailer park. No, the ceiling isn’t low, that’s regret. I know, it looks a lot like metal, but it’s actually closer to mist.”

This constructed world, therefore, is very fragile—half-remembered at times or half-imagined, coming apart in our hands.

With images and ideas careening back and forth, some stick better than others. In lines like “The way ‘terror’ has lost its meaning in America,” or “there are trees in the trees,” there is less emotional investment than shorthand for tasteful political sentiment on the one hand and metaphysical shadow-play on the other. Starkweather’s poems are most his own in his strains of humor and levity that do not really look on the bright side, but lash out, retaining the whole of their weirdness: “I wanted to be a robot-cop, until I saw the scene when the politician did all that blow off the blonde’s tits at the top of some city. Look what dreams lead to.”

The most indelible comment made to the “absent other” is bristling, flip and sincere: “Tell me, what do you think, when you talk freely, without reservations, without fear, when you speak of me with your heart wide open, theoretically speaking, obviously?” Humor and desire intermingle in one of the book’s best moments:

“Did I tell you I was watching Game 2 of the Playoffs between the Pistons and the Orlando Magic…[and] this skinny little white boy with glasses, a Pistons fan, maybe 10 years old, shirtless…and painted on the entirety of his chest, in glittery pink and blue spray-paint was the message, ‘There’s No Such Thing as Magic’ and POOF – you were beside me, naked and trembling in my arms?”

He has summoned his “other” – at least, the idea of her, which is something. The other best moment takes this humor into the abyss, owning completely his weird and private world. But maybe it is not so private. Maybe some day you will be talking to a man in a bar, and in talking to him, you will have more in common with him than you think. And maybe you will even buy him a drink, but eventually you will have to say goodbye, and maybe you will ask him off-handedly where he is going, and he will answer, “I am going on a journey where all possible outcomes will end in fire.” Maybe. If not, you can imagine it.

Tags: 7 stars, Dan Magers, Rope-a-Dope Press, Sampson Starkweather
Posted in reviews

The Dream We Carry

Monday, December 8th, 2008

by Olav H. Hauge
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Christie Ann Reynolds

Apple Apple

hauge cover

Orchards have always made a nice home for the shadows of horror films, and of course, Halloween hayrides where skeletons dangle from gnarled branches. Orchards are systematically planted in rows; we know what to expect when we round the last perfect line of trees. When an apple falls to the ground, its sound is unlike the thick stinking walnuts that dent my car in the driveway and unlike the soft padded thump of an orange just ripe enough to depart from a branch.

For Olav H. Hague, the peacefulness and reality of living and working on a farm and orchard fostered a fierce, often brutal, but natural love to unfold in poems of personal dialogue and documentation. The Dream we Carry, translated by Robert Bly and Robert Hedin, contains poems that are systematic and organized as an orchard, yet full of human complications and other surprises. We don’t know if a turn of the page will bring us to that next shining apple tree or the dark boles of its sturdy trunk. These poems, some previously uncollected, some collected from seven of Hague’s books, hold the truths of life as observed through the tender and vulnerable reflections of man and earth. When reading the poem “Across the Swamp,” we may first interpret it as a memory. After a second reading, we understand the poet’s contemplation of past, and in a third reading, our own mortality.

It is the roots from all the trees that have died
out here, that’s how you can walk
safely over the soft places.
Roots like these keep their firmness, it’s possible
they’ve lain here for centuries.
And there are still some dark remains
of them under the moss.
They are still in the world and hold
you up so you can make it over.
And when you push out into the mountain lake, high
up, you feel how the memory
of that cold person
who drowned himself here one day
Helps hold up your frail boat.
He, really crazy, trusted his life
to water and eternity.

There is an obvious affinity between poet and poem that is inescapable. Hauge’s connection to nature is extremely evocative, not unlike the simple life he lived on his tiny plot of land. He grew his own food, tended his own fields and even though he was the youngest son and given the least amount of land to live from, he harvested a plethora of poems alongside vegetables and a hobby of bird watching. Perhaps being the younger son with the least amount of land was a blessing for Hague who’s poem titled, “I Have Three Poems,” states, “A good poem/should smell of tea/ Or of raw earth and freshly cut wood.” His poems do not smell of commerce or money or television or greed. Hague’s poems are not reminiscent of contemporary celebrities or problems. They literally reek of tea and of that freshly cut wood he cut each morning with muscle and axe. Robert Bly said, “If you have a tiny farm, you need to love poetry more than the farm. If you sell apples, you need to love poetry more than apples. It’s good to settle down somewhere and to love poetry more than either of them.”

What Hague loved more than his apples and farm was Chinese poetry. In a poem titled “To Li Po,” Hague writes,

To be emperor of the Divine Kingdom
No doubt appealed to you, Li Po
But didn’t you have the whole world, the wind and clouds
and happiness when you were drunk?
Greater still, Li Po, is
to master your own heart

Generally, our poet seeks to master his own heart and whatever truth can be discovered in the creation of a piece of writing. In the Chinese poets, he found a devotion to writing about the human soul and its inevitable connection to nature. For Hague, nature is as much of a truth for the world as the human soul is for the human body. This narrator knows that he can not master the inevitable course of nature because it occurs with or without him. But by writing about everyday activities of birds and roots, he can admire them, belong to them and desire their silent but expressive habits. This is evident in the silent presence of Roc-bird in “Truth”:

Truth is a shy bird,
like the Roc-bird who
arrives when you don’t expect it,
sometimes before,
sometimes after.
Some say she
doesn’t exist;
those who have seen her
just keep quiet.

It is interesting to consider these poems as not only a dialogue between man and nature, but as a documentation of a lifetime spent only on poetry and hard work on the land. Like the ocean, Hague writes, “I, too, have stars/and blue depths.” Those blue depths may very well be connected to the years Hague spent in an asylum during his twenties. However, even at his depths, he was capable of finding a richness in human soul:

This Is Not the Kingdom of the Poor
In the Asylum

This is not the kingdom of the poor,
nor the house of sorrow.
But take your hat off
as you go in.
You have no way of knowing
where love blazes here
and whose spirit
watches.
No one reads here.
No one writes here.
But God
finds the sleeping
and the waking
heart.

The fifth line of the poem rings true for all of Hague’s poems: “We have no way of knowing where love blazes here and whose spirit watches.” I think this book proves that an ostensibly simple life can lead to complex poems where the new moon is also, “a hard fingernail scratching the sky,” and where in “From the War,” of a bullet Hague writes, “I had no doubt it could kill.” The designation of bullet to death is obvious, but every time I read that line out loud, I can’t help but think of Emily Dickinson and the strangeness of, “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” The afterthought of the fly and the bullet, for me, persistently haunt.

The two poets rarely left their homes or personal space. Upon Dickinson’s death, the innumerable poems she left behind were evidence of a far more provocative mind than anyone suspected. Hague too, writing from his orchard and reading in his library reminds me of a Norwegian Dickinson. I imagine both of them out there—Hague walking through his fields and plants just as Dickinson was once pacing the small upstairs room of her Amherst home, their minds ticking and creating poems that thud into our heads like…apples.

Tags: 7 stars, Christie Ann Reynolds, Copper Canyon Press, Olav H. Hauge
Posted in reviews

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

by Tao Lin
Melville House 2008
Reviewed by John Findura

Antics

lin cover

Tao Lin is a famous author. Sort of. It does say so on a t-shirt. But mostly it seems he is of the subset where many know of him, and many fewer have read him.

I don’t think that would bother him, though he probably wouldn’t mind the added cash flow. See, Tao Lin does strange things, such as offer shares worth 10% of future royalties on his forthcoming novel, Richard Yates, for $2,000 each. He sells random stuff from his apartment on eBay. On some of the things, he draws a picture of a hamster. It’s worth mentioning he is young, most likely annoying to anyone over 25 (his age). And that he doesn’t like Anti-Tao Lin Shittalkers. More importantly, maybe, is that for all the press he drums up online, whether positive or negative, he and his writing are usually “interesting.” Consider then that his latest collection of poems, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, is worth your dollar.

For those of us taking Graduate classes in Clinical Therapy, or for those currently in therapy, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is recognized as the current “next big thing,” even though it’s been around since the 1960s, when behavior therapy bumped into cognitive therapy (which I always picture as “You got behavior therapy in my cognitive!” “No, you got cognitive in my behavior!” Both: “Delicious!”). CBT is used to treat many conditions such as mood disorders, anxiety, substance abuse, personality disorders, and on occasion, psychotic disorders. If you know anyone who has gone into therapy for post-traumatic stress, depression or OCD, chances are s/he has experienced CBT. In its simplest terms, CBT aims to change the way one handles emotions and behaviors. In Tao Lin’s case, it can be difficult to tell if the book is his therapy or the reader’s. Best answer: a bit of both.

Aside from the usual Tao Lin craziness, which is reflected in the multi-part “hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head” and in his rejection of capitalization (take that, Convention), he renders absurdist logic both Poetically and anti-Poetically. Perhaps it is because the reader is always anticipating something along the lines of “An angry hamster looks exactly like an unangry hamster because the / anger is within” that he is able to slip in a line such as “i miss walking with you at night”–and you believe him, but not in a sappy way. You can sense the desire to do coupled with the desire to think.

He can be extremely funny too (seriously, hamsters everywhere), but occasionally his Brooklynite-hipper-than-thou runs come off as juvenile. It’s self-conscious irony, for sure, and his supporters gladly look the other way and smirk. It’ll be interesting to see how long he can pull this off before it becomes tired and he has to rely on his very real talent rather than his ability to pull chip-on-the-shoulder, self-loathing snarkiness from a hamster’s ass.

Nonetheless, his infighting can be compelling, his need to negotiate the desire to do with the need to ditch his “stay fucked up forever” security blanket. As Lin writes in “the power of ethical reasoning”:

i knew how it felt to not be in control of one’s life
the next day i said ‘if you really wanted to change
you would have changed by now’

The same could be true of Tao Lin the poet. He may never stop writing lines such as “i enjoy a quiet night masturbating in front of the computer / with or without high speed internet.” But he is capable of creating these weird little windows into what feel like autobiographical toss-offs, distracting us from Tao Lin the Famous Author, who seems so much more a product than a real thing at times. I don’t mean that to be a negative: he’s learned how to sell himself, and has created a devoted following that occasionally will even Pay Pal him $20 if he asks for it on his blog. Props. But none if it has to do with the quality of a poetry that, at its best, contains a kind of cutthroat mania that can’t be faked.

For all his weirdness, and for all the seeming dangerousness of being a real live artist, what stands out the most in his poems is an apparent willingness to look into his own psyche and be honest about what he finds. He ditches the cool, detached exterior when he puts down

the secret of life is that i miss you, and this describes life

tonight my heart feels shiny and calm as a soft wet star

In the end, Tao Lin is utterly, hilariously real when he writes,

…my poems exist to dispel irrational angers, that i want to hold your face

with my face

like a hand

and finally when he says, simply, “i hope you like me so far.” Tao Lin the Famous Author? Eh. Tao Lin the Poet? Yeah…

Tags: 7 stars, John Findura, Melville House, Tao Lin
Posted in reviews

Blood Dazzler

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

by Patricia Smith
Coffee House Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Measured Progress

blood dazzler Many authors of recent books of poetry have in some way made note of the Bush administration’s incompetence and buffoonery, of the mockery it has made of the United States’ government and ideals. Though Patricia Smith also views from all other relevant angles the deeply variegated horrors comprising Hurricane Katrina, her Blood Dazzler is certainly no exception.

Throughout this sometimes tender, sometimes agonizing account of Katrina’s ruinous and pernicious journey through New Orleans, Smith references the action, reaction, and inaction of both President Bush and his meaningless wife, First Lady Laura Bush. Each time I read such a passage I am left ashamed and stupefied at the disgrace and callousness (however unintentional) of this duo.

Perhaps, what is most staggering is the persistence of patriotism in many American citizens despite the embarrassment and anguish the Bush family has caused in the face of tragedy. Smith’s book opens with a poem titled “Prologue—And Then She Owns You,” in which her narrator discusses the intense relationship a citizen of New Orleans has with his or her home:

  Weirdly in love, you rhumba her edges, drink
  fuming concoctions, lick your lukewarm breakfast
  directly from her crust. Go on admit it.
  You are addicted…

Whatever disaster may strike, a resident of New Orleans is not likely to go quietly or without great regret. The dependency of the relationship between one and the home is too strong, hence our love of country in spite of George W. Bush. It is broken, and it is ugly, but it is ours. Ownership can make all the difference, as Smith points out in “Only Everything I Own”: “These are my cobwebs, my four walls, / my silverfish, my bold roaches.” Imperfections cannot taint the sense of possibility even when one has little control over his or her environment.

We certainly desire this control, but we are powerless. We often take home for granted, and Smith reflects on moments during which our powerlessness is realized and accepted. She states:

  …I pull my bed
  down from that wall, and I fall to my knees
  next to it to question this shelter.

This is the first implication of God’s part in the disaster of Katrina, but Smith is careful not to blame. Even her commentary on President Bush is tempered and tacit. It seems we don’t have much choice when it comes to Bush. He doesn’t come right out and say what he means; he isn’t capable of that kind of clarity.

Smith first mentions Bush in “Gettin’ His Twang On.” A note that precedes the poem mentions that Bush had a small jam session of sorts with country singer Mark Willis on the afternoon of August 30, 2005, during which he played guitar while much of the country waited terrified and anxious to learn the extent of Katrina’s destruction. The awful insensitivity is reflected in Smith’s sarcastic and colloquial title and is compared to the extreme trepidation of folks in “the Ninth”: “Look like this country done left us for dead.”

While abandonment is dreadful, there are worse things. The criticisms of Bush’s measures during Katrina builds throughout Smith’s collection, and in “The President Flies Over” she notes Bush’s inability to comprehend or even sympathize with the people of New Orleans. The last line of the poem reads, “I understand that somewhere it has rained.” Certainly it is natural to reduce a disaster to its simplest form when there seems to be so few routes to true acceptance or understanding. Some people call on their faith to help them through, others their ignorance. Example, Laura Bush:

  ‘What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so
  overwhelmed by the hospitality…And so many of the people in the
  arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this—this
  [chuckles slightly] is working very well for them.’

This note opens “Thankful,” a more accurate account of the feelings of those sheltering in a Texas Hurricane Relief Center in Houston, praying to return to their homes. The poem ends, “Thank you for the ice eye, the impish giggle, / for reminding all our mothers to be damned.”

It’s therapeutic to talk about Bush these days; though he’s using his final 100 days to gut all that is good and right, there is an end in sight. Whether things are damaged beyond repair remains to be seen. Still, it’s importnat to bear in mind that the politics underlying Katrina can feel meaningless next to its physical horrors; in truth, this is where the bulk (and the best) of Smith’s work lies. Take this image of a woman trying to rescue her children from flood waters:

I have three children,
but only two arms. He falls
and barely splashes,
that’s how incredibly light
he is—was. How death whispers.

The awesome power of Hurricane Katrina is done justice here and elsewhere; her cast of characters is at turns willful, at turns devastated, always real. But despite Smith’s many successes in this book, it is not without its moments of excessive dramatization (the title, I think, is one of those moments). For instance, the series of poems that deal with “Luther B,” a dog left without a family or home with which to face Katrina, merely detract from Smith’s cause. She places human emotions on the dog which are better represented through the book’s many human characters. I think of George Orwell’s “A Hanging,” in which Orwell uses a dog to elicit sympathy from the reader for the man (criminal) that is on his way to the gallows. The human condition is best expressed in human faces, in human tears.

Smith’s poems are captivating and their heartrending subject matter adds to their allure. She is observant and precise; she captures a moment in our history that many will never forget, but also a moment that just as many will never begin to know. Blood Dazzler makes available to its readers a chilling time in America and crystallizes the nation’s fears and weaknesses. The final poem ends on a note of surrender, after many residents have returned to New Orleans, yet there is something hopeful about the book, something that says, “Progress is slow,” but maybe it’s on its way.

Tags: 7 stars, Coffee House Press, Melinda Wilson, Patricia Smith
Posted in reviews