Posts Tagged ‘8.5 stars’

‘Touch’ and ‘Pierce the Skin’

Monday, September 12th, 2011

by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011/2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

“…to the whiteness of death”

Henri Cole’s new book of poetry, Touch, follows Pierce the Skin, which selected poems from his six collections published between 1987 and 2007. In the context of his work-to-date, Touch only gains in significance.

Although Cole’s The Visible Man was perhaps his most notable encounter with autobiography and gay identity when it came out in 1998, many of his abiding concerns and conceits have been present from the beginning. Despite the ongoing evolution of style and substance in his work, Cole has consistently written contemporary lyrics. Sometimes commemorative, as in “To the Forty-third President” in Blackbird and Wolf, sometimes occasional, as in “The Annulment” in The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge, Cole’s verse finds meaning in the luminous skin of the world.

Cole’s lightness and delicacy, his reserve and restraint, also unify his work. Situated on the branch of modernism that extends from Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Stafford, Henri Cole operates a poem through the senses, figures out the world through imagery. His lines are “tempered and formalized,” like the “Poppies” of Blackbird. His elegy for his father in Middle Earth, “Radiant Ivory,” shows humble objects doing heavy lifting in service of the poem:

After the death of my father, I locked
myself in my room, bored and animal-like.
The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face,
chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air
white, insane, slathery.

Underneath the hood of these pristine poems roars a combustion engine, “memory, the motor of everything,” as Cole describes it in “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” in Blackbird. In “Chiffon Morning” from The Visible Man, he could be describing the sustaining act of writing when he says, “the mind replays what nurtures it.”  Blackbird’s “American Kestrel” offers an ars poetica:

…This is my home:
Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,
trying to create something neither confessional
nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.

Beauty is always tempered by brutality in Cole’s work. And a dynamic tension runs throughout, like a dangerous undertow. The comprehensiveness of his view is reflected in his unselfconscious melding of East and West, of Japanese and Chinese culture and classical Greek and Roman mythology. Childhood and adulthood alternate within one poem, as “the essence of self emerges / shuttling between parents” (“Self-portrait in a Gold Kimono,” Middle Earth), and “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s” (“Apollo,” The Visible Man). With each new book, the poet reveals more of the violence of his childhood. But these seeds were planted in the beginning, including “The family squabble, the bruised cranium” of “Ascension on Fire Island” in Zoo Wheel.

In his newest book, Henri Cole stretches the limits of his minimalist style, delves deeper into family memory, and widens the scope of the tensions he explores. Touch is divided into three sections, moving from the poet’s mother’s death to a troubled relationship with a younger man addicted to drugs. The volume begins with “Asleep in Jesus at Rest,” a poem of long lines laid out in overlapping caesuras, a looser and more expansive form than what we’ve come to expect from Cole. He repeats this form later in “Legend,” a bit further into the volume. And he includes “Grebe,” a poem that he translated from the French with the author, Claire Malroux. Although he continues his familiar syllabics, Cole includes more experimental pieces in Touch, such as the free verse collage of “By the Name of God, The Most Merciful and Gracious,” which gives voice to a victim of torture. If Blackbird’s “For the Forty-third President” signaled a more engagé stance, Touch does not disappoint, with additional anti-war poems such as “Quai Aux Fleurs” and “Sleeping Soldiers.”

Like his seniors—Glück, Gilbert, and others—and like his contemporaries—Frost, Powell, and others—Cole explores aging, loss, maturity, and mortality. If self, identity, and body have been enduring concerns throughout his work, then in “Myself Departing,” he treats the issue of age humorously:

My hair went away in the night while I was sleeping.
It sauntered along the avenue asking, “Why
should I commit myself to him? I have a personality
of my own.” Then my good stiff prick went, too.
It opened the window and climbed down the escape,
complaining, “I want to be with someone younger.”

This is in stark contrast to the stunning pathos of the first section of Touch, which is devoted to the poet’s mother’s illness and death and his affectionate care (as well as guilt and melancholy). Read Touch if only to appreciate the powerful poem “Shrike” in its full context. Cole begins by watching a bird capture a cricket, and then through association makes a poetic leap worthy of a trapeze artist. The cricket

. . . holds up
pretty good in a state of oneiric pain.
Once, long ago, when they were quarrelling about money,
Father put Mother’s head in the oven.
“Who are you?” It pleaded from the hell mouth.

In our inured age, we have ready clichés to describe abuse in families. Repetition has numbed their impact. Through understated elegance and direct simplicity, Cole makes this image indelible. In this section, Cole accurately captures the complexities of grieving, elaborating on the simple human truth he had first presented in “Paper Dolls” from The Look of Things: “goodbye / in a scene / at first holy, / then lurid.”

As a minimalist, Cole comes by ingenuousness naturally. An unlikely subject, such as a “Taxidermied Fawn,” leads to the discovery of a resonant truth:

A minor smear on the white spots is the only
evidence of a violent passage from bridal innocence
to the whiteness of death, which is the absence
of everything, and, in the end, all there really is.

After a career of deftly conjuring evocative imagery, Cole has earned the right to utter plain speech, as in the poem “Ulro”: “Cigarettes, love, work, liquor, brooding, despair— / one thing not controlled can destroy a life.”

More of the poet’s dexterity is on display in “Mechanical Soft,” which doubles and triples imagery, twisting the strand, while describing a son feeding his mother in hospice:

I am not
a typical son, I suppose, valuing happiness,
even while spooning mechanically soft pears—
like light vanishing—into the body whose tissue
once dissolved to create breast milk for me.

Cole’s Touch justifies the poetic obsession with childhood. As we age, circumstances call forward past experiences. We are never done remembering, or for that matter, discovering, as in “Dolphins”: “Recently, among Mother’s things, I found this: / ‘I am afraid of him. He need psychiatric care. He lead me / to believe strange things. He ignores me, threats me.’”

The dynamic tension of opposite forces evident in Cole’s previous books acquires deeper significance in Touch. The image of his mother’s hands in “Broom”—“hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair”—underscores how we know tenderness through cruelty. Other poems help extrapolate: we know peace through war, age through youth, closeness through isolation. But these are not simple binaries, as Cole explains in “Hens”:

There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

Through the accumulation of images of “the push-pull thing, the polarity stuff” (“Ulro”), we perceive the balancing act of walking a web of connections, the risks and rewards, pains and pleasures, and every subtle variation in between, tied to each step. Cole’s menagerie of poems grows with several more additions besides “Hens,” including “Pig,” “Hairy Spider,” Bats,” and more, in Touch. Animals tend to be more humane than humans and humans more bestial than beasts in Cole’s cosmology.

The tradition of story and storytelling encourages us to assume that those who suffer in youth find happiness—or at least escape—in age, like Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk. The poems in the last third of Touch help subvert those expectations. In “Passion,” Cole begins with the ending: “Our love has ended. / We only have a little time, darling. Let’s read / swim, and sleep in one another’s arms.” Ending and beginning run simultaneously, as do pleasure and pain. If “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s,” then here we see a mature son engaged in a troubled relationship: “I watch you emerge from the bathroom, / having breathed your fix” (“Laughing Monster”). Cole may be the first poet to incorporate a partner’s texts: “‘Loser old man u r a cheap cunt,’ he wrote, ‘I need coke. Unless ur buying, answer is no’” (“Resistance”).

Cole’s elaboration of two additional themes from his previous work—gender identity and language—helps broaden the focus of Touch. The last poem in the book, “Swimming Hole, Buck Creek, Springfield, Ohio,” takes forward the questioning of masculinity and femininity that Cole started in such early poems as “The Marble Queen” and “My Father’s Jewelry Box.” Or the exploration of language and writing in “Apollo” from The Visible Man resurfaces in Touch, with the poet’s reassurance that “writing this now, / sometimes in a rush, sometimes after drifting thought, / I feel happiness, I feel I am not alone.” No mere ephemeral beauties, Cole’s spare, masterfully controlled poems are a sustaining activity, a necessary function to help keep the poet, and the reader, safely positioned in the world.

*

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The Nine Senses

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

by Melissa Kwasny
Milkweed Editions 2011
Reviewed by Wendy S. Walters

“If that is true, then whose soul is this?”

A frequent element of the prose poem experiment is a wish to seize the unattainable. Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations dramatizes a struggle with such a contradiction—to want to know everything and to recognize that absolute knowledge assures one’s own destruction. Exhilaration and suffering manifest as inevitable consequences of longing, for which no resistance suffices. Only through a momentary re-imagining of space, often through intoxication, can one endure desire. Echoes of this theme can be found in René Char’s earliest “aphoristic verses,” which evoke a sense of displacement that swells and recedes according to changes in passion. A frequent theme in his prose poems is yearning to arrive at places that no longer exist.

In much the same way that the poetry of Rimbaud and Char highlight a sense of consciousness about what cannot be known, Melissa Kwasny’s insightful and moving fourth collection of poems, The Nine Senses, offers an ecological vision of interrelationship, one in which the human and non-human are not effortlessly paired. Excursions into the surreal attempt to account for the chasm between what one can and cannot know about the natural world, but the desire to find meaning in everything interferes with one’s capacity to truly comprehend mortality and eternity. Kwasny’s work suggests that even as we engage in the project of deciphering the difference between the real and surreal, fate has begun to deal out consequences for our wanting the wrong things.

* * *

In The Nine Senses, human engagement with the natural world results in a vision that is, at once, dismal and sublime. The work’s central question might be best articulated by the Char quote that Kwasny uses to introduce the third section of the book: “How can we show, without betraying them, those simple things sketched between the twilight and the sky.” Kwasny’s speaker attempts this but with the foreknowledge that failure is the most likely outcome. This is because the poet is an interloper, one who changes what is being observed by witnessing it, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in play.

The connection between beauty and death is everywhere, despite a lyrical engagement with the imaginary. Just as the speaker becomes enamored of an object or image, it spoils. In “Clairvoyance (Sunlight),” disenchantment is the point at which real and imagined spaces overlap:

Sunlight falls through the square window into the water of the inside pool and is reflected onto the blue wall above it. Ghost handkerchiefs, whiter at the folds. When I make a wave with my hand, they disperse, as in a blizzard, but soon, the fluttering squares return. I could say that when I’m gone, I’ll come back to you like this, talking to myself the way the soul does. If that is true, then whose soul is this?

The question points to how hard it is to know which places should be available to us and which ones are better for our not being a part. The natural world retains the permanent mark of a fold, a crease where we have encountered it. From this we might surmise that any reality rendered in text incurs injury from the process of being represented. Kwasny, whose work has been called “quiet” perhaps for its traces of Romanticism, shows affinity for the pastoral and the emotive fragment. But her work also suggests that what one envisions has potential to be more material than the natural world.

* * *

The Nine Senses suggests that questions of belonging arise from our unwillingness to let go of our deepest affections. “Yellow Warbler” conveys how easily we can be misled by strong feelings:

Torn between the guides who lead us and those whose very being plumps the heart—our twins, our lovers. The spellings of angle and angel are often confused. You are setting it up so all of them can circle around the house. Act the species you will become in a different season.

A “different season” might be one in which we do not exist, but this lesson we cannot learn. “The Lights of Earth” poses a similar challenge, “What is it that the earth wants us to do? A nursery rhyme is what a sick child might recite to herself. Is it up to us to see she learns the verses?”  Any answer is incorrect.

The speaker in “Shell” also suffers from strong feelings. She wants to exist and disappear at once, to experience the senses without a body:

As if we weren’t meant to be here, though here we are outside, loud-colored to the heron. Morbid, the idea of rubbing through one’s own skin, yet we yearn to stick our fingers inside. While the dead make their way through the custom lines. Shell: a quiet verb, slowed by its own sound, gull wings dipping over the clam beds.

If shell is a verb, then the action is closing off from the world while making a universe out of one’s own skin. In the poem “Bamboo,” the speaker laments her inability to hollow out, to vanish into the immaterial: “Bamboo grows straight, marrowless. Look, how we are bent and we have marrow.”

This wish to diminish in presence also functions as a refusal to cause discomfort. In “The City of Many Lovers,” we discover: “I am round. I have no edges. You can play with me. So can your dog. Then I crawl into an absence I have been remodeling all my life—a crockery, walls smoothed with warm water.” The speaker foresees herself as the endlessly yielding lover, “I have left my people behind and adopted yours. I imagine I have made this happen.” The speaker desires more engagement with the present than with fate or the past, though expectations for acknowledgment cloud the imagination with future disappointments.

* * *

Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of Kwasny’s work is in the way it brings attention to how much power the poet has in shaping perception. In the opening lines of the title poem, we are given a view of the start of day, as if all depth-of-field has been flattened by the eye of the speaker: “See how the morning light lies on the top planes of the Venetian blinds. And the tree, whole and shining, in the spaces between. Through the cracks, look. A simile, its little hinge.” From this point of view, the potential to re-open the conversation comes from less familiar ways of engaging:

The Sufis say the five senses are supplemented by four more. Curl of the living creek under the squabbling of birds, their breakfast talk, their famous comebacks. Taste of one’s tongue until there is coffee. Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to our sense of the surreal, as resolution of the real and the dream.

Throughout The Nine Senses, incidents of illumination occur outside of era or duration. Because of this lack of time-specificity, a personal urgency manifests instead of a historical one. The book’s refusal to be one thing or the other—not prose or poetry; not poetry or philosophy; not public or personal—represents the liminal spaces on which it reflects, those spaces at the threshold of sensation. While much of this book refutes the necessity of genre, a sense of frustration in one’s inability to be contained engenders its core tension. Kwasny’s poems are candid about the impossibility of removing oneself from one’s perception of the natural world, and her vision of this profound entanglement continues to be groundbreaking.

*

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Maggot

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

by Paul Muldoon
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010
Reviewed by Erin Lynn

“…for having acted on a whim”

Commonly dubbed a “poet’s poet,” Paul Muldoon is well-known for his obscurity of references and ambitious rhyme schemes. His latest collection, Maggot, fits this mold, and is made up mainly of sequence poems, with sonnets and other shorter poems scattered throughout. It begins with “Plan B,” a sequence poem which was published separately in collaboration with photographer Norman McBeath in 2009. While readers of Plan B in its original volume had McBeath’s images to guide them through the poem, those coming to the poem in Maggot must simply rely on Muldoon’s vivid images, their own historical knowledge, or an intervention from Wikipedia. This is typical of Muldoon’s work. By the second stanza of the first canto, we have already been taken “away from the straight/ and narrow of Brooklyn or Baltimore for a Baltic state,” but Muldoon keeps us steady, from Cork to Vilna to New York, by beginning each stanza with the last line from the previous stanza.

After chasing the images in poems such as “Plan B,” which discusses Edward VII, Thomas Edison and the KGB, the reader might suspect that the links between these subjects are coming from the poet’s own associative mind. The poem, like McBeath’s photos, seeks to illuminate moments of cultural memory, particularly in times of great social change. The shorter poems are usually easier to decode. “Ohrwurm” is a four-line poem that begins with “Just as I’m loading up on another low carb pork rind snack” and manages to touch upon fears of mortality via the image of a crack in the speaker’s “wing-fuselage.”

Muldoon’s repetition of commonplace phrases like “I used to” in the title poem both unifies the poem and grounds it aurally, while simultaneously defamiliarizing it, somewhat in the fashion of Beckett–virtually detaching it from meaning. In the same poem, which is another sequence, the third stanza of each canto is the same “where I’m waiting for some lover / to kick me out of bed / for having acted on a whim.” The transitions are often awkward, even as each canto fits its rhyme scheme. A comfortable attitude toward sexual promiscuity and perversion runs throughout the book, often juxtaposed with images of gruesome death and decay. This is most apparent in “The Humors of Hakone,” a long sequence that enumerates the unidentifiable parts of a decomposing corpse, relating them to a girl the speaker met at a “purikura.”

Paul Muldoon remains an Irish poet. Frogs and mushrooms continue to people his poems, along with other images and themes relevant to childhood in the Northern Irish countryside. “Moryson’s Fancy” provides an especially moving look at imperialism. He takes an image from Fynes Moryson’s A History of Ireland in which starving children feed upon the “entrails” of their mother, and then expands upon the story. He imagines the family is starving after a forced march, which would have been enacted by Lord Mountjoy, Moryson’s superior. A reference to Boudicaa, an Iceni queen who nearly drove the Romans out of her territory in England but ultimately lost, comments upon the timeless savagery of colonial forces. In the next stanza, the speaker wonders if, looking into their mother’s entrails, the children could “haruspicate,” or divine that the Muldoons would be forced off their land centuries on.

Muldoon continues to keep a close relationship with Belfast, where he lived and worked from 1969 to 1986. On February 25, 2011, he returned to Belfast to headline at the annual Bel/Nash festival at the Rhythm and Rhyme Concert alongside other Irish writers such as Owen McAfferty and folk musicians like Brian Kennedy. Muldoon recited two new poems. The second one, called “Julius Cesar was a People Person,” was a wry indictment chock full of accessible historical references and had a rhyme scheme akin to a song. His understated stage presence and soft but clear reading voice completed the humor of the poem and the beauty of its sound.

The object of the Rhythm and Rhyme concert was to demystify the process of song writing for non-industry folk. Each writer and musician was asked to collaborate to write a song for the occasion. Muldoon was paired with Brian Kennedy. According to Kennedy, Muldoon had e-mailed him his lyrics a week before, but then showed up on the day with a completely different set of verses, although you wouldn’t know it from the performance. Kennedy’s vocals flawlessly and emotively delivered Muldoon’s beautiful lyrics. The song, called “When I Heard the Sirens, I Tried to Harmonize,” concerns life in Belfast during the sectarian violence and destruction known as “The Troubles,” which plagued the latter half of the twentieth century in Ireland. But the song has further reach, referencing various other violence-plagued cities around the globe. Here, as ever, Muldoon displayed both a raw reality of the Northern Irish situation while managing to universalize it. Muldoon’s performance was revealing in understanding his appeal as a poet. While his work is sometimes obscure and difficult, and while the reader may sometimes feel led up the garden path, reading Muldoon is never without its rewards, and the garden is always beautiful.

*

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Wolf Face and Big Bright Sun

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

by Matt Hart / by Nate Pritts
H_ngm_n Bks 2010 / BlazeVOX Books 2010
Reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

“two hummingbirds singing”

Conjecture, simple statement and sense perception yield sparkling poetics in the latest collections by poets / editors / publishers / pals Matt Hart and Nate Pritts. Each author is extremely active in poetry world business affairs: Hart edits and publishes the journal Forklift, Ohio and press Forklift Ink, and Pritts is behind H_ngm_n and H_ngm_n BKS. The energy they bring to poetry is tremendous and truly generative in the best sense – when you come across a project that either or both has a hand in, you’re fired up with mad desire to respond. Their latest books are no exception.

In their own ways – Hart with mania, Pritts with hope – the poets can be glowy: “Today is the brightest day today / could possibly be!” ( Pritts, “Bright Day”). But they are always close to the matter-of-fact detail, presenting a situation at hand with intimate and mildly absurd analysis: “and your absence is company and a company” (Hart, “You Are Mist”). What they share is a dedication to approaching poetry as an occasion of serious fun. Even when edging into darkness, Hart’s response to the world is joyous:

It’s true that two hummingbirds singing
in exactly the same pitch
can shatter the blackest of mountains.
But it’s also true that the missiles
in those mountains can shatter
a hummingbird to pieces of hummingbird.
The end. But this curled mess of black
yarn, this series of concrete barrier
entanglements, means that we have to be ready
for no matter what, for whatever…

(“Electron Face”)

Do hummingbirds even sing? It does not seem to matter; the poet intuits a sound, or confluence of sound, and anyway “the missiles / in those mountains” most certainly “can shatter” hummingbirds along with all the rest of us anyway. The thought of doom immediately enters and distracts. Doom is reliable; one can have faith in doom. And as he says at the close of the same poem,

The reason it’s good to have faith
is the reason for everything good.

The abiding principle here is to get into the swing of language and immediate association, and then to allow the poem to be carried away. The darker it gets, the more that “play” is an affair meant to be harnessed. In the following example from Pritts, each line connects thought to emotion to thought as the reader is drawn in to an unsettled monologue:

Sometimes I catch myself not really listening

when other people talk & I get concerned
that I’m not expressing the proper emotion

so I just keep thinking that I want them
to shut up quick & stop asking me to care.

Earlier today I saw one bird & I thought
he looked like a sad bird so I said to myself,

“Hey, Pritts, you are one sad bird,” but now
looking back, I can see how someone else

would have thought that bird looked pretty happy,
ecstatic even, & with all those feathers

why not?

(“Sad Tree”)

These aren’t glum poems; they are landscapes of the tragic comedy of everyday living. Where Pritts seeks relief in philosophical inquiry, Hart immerses himself in the present. He displays a dazzling brilliance for the occasional and transitional. He tells us he’s

…snoozing-in 3 times, getting up finally at 6;

kissing good morning to Melanie and the cold air,
the coffee, computer, the baby and dog; make coffee…

By doing so, he’s introducing the daily routine upon which the poems depend, times of the day when

the cold air feels terrific, my ears filled with traffic.
I feel like I’m still dreaming, each step automatic, my body

self-propelled. And on the streets with no lights
without my glasses, I can’t see a thing.   So Daisy and I

simply rocket, bolt and breathe, benevolent burn,
and only the trees with their low-hanging branches,

which scrape against my face every thirty or forty
seconds, break me out of my trance and remind me

of me, and also where we are – Cincinatti, November!

(“Blackbox Cockpit Voice Recorder”)

Hart stays rooted in daily habits and in a very specific place, Cincinatti. He has no knowledge of what’s presently to arrive, but commits himself to nailing down hard truths against the surrounding darkness. Both Pritts and Hart understand and perhaps thrive on the treacherous detours a poet is likely encounter with this kind of writing: turning a corner of a thought on a line and finding that the corner corners them. Pritts

…can look up & see that same night sky,

that it will always be empty black or riddled
with starlight but, whatever it is, it will be,
always, & I’m convinced that being convinced

is a good way to handle all this doubt,
just like I am convinced I could do almost anything
& still be me in the morning.

(“That Me”)

But the only thing that keeps him from falling up into the “empty black” is the conviction that he is at least as constant as the sky. The work they excel at requires they remain outside the society that benefits from their work, but remain deeply engaged in the daily functions afloat on its surface. Discomfort becomes endemic, an inescapable side effect of getting the job done. What keeps the work going is the satisfaction that comes now and then from catching a glimpse beyond the usual charade. Here is Pritts:

I can’t handle complex systems. Imagine if this were all one big
celestial accident. The senseless piles up
& with time the mass becomes hot enough to shine. So simple,
the shine, & so beautiful. Its beauty may put you in shock.

(“Daisy”)

This is a calling Hart shares:

Weird wonder these days how it only gets darker
and figuratively speaking full of teeth in the glow.

(“Wolf Face”)

Each poet has the presence of a mythic punk Ted Hughes. They address the indecipherable density of existence, even sharing images – the senseless mass, the teeth in the glow – as the frightening repeatedly returns to the beautiful. They find levity in darkness, trusting in the knowledge that the richest blood in the heart flows darkest. The poems arrive enmeshed in the lives of the poets, because the poets place their faith in experience, perception and people. There is no escapism to be found here. There’s much to be lamented, but importantly, there’s plenty to enjoy.

*

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The Intent On: Collected Poems 1962-2006

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

by Kenneth Irby
North Atlantic Books 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

8_5

“the back / calm pasture of the mind”

In 2009, North Atlantic Books published a handsome book finally gathering the work of Kenneth Irby, one of Charles Olson’s lesser known disciples, who has labored in small press obscurity since the early ‘60’s. Irby fans (including myself) have been waiting for a comprehensive collection since Station Hill Press put out Call Steps in 1991. My first reaction was too much like the blurbs on the back, making me feel like, as Stephen King put it in the self-effacing preface to his book on writing, “a literary gasbag or a transcendental asshole.” But any review of Irby should emphasize that this work is not necessarily easy to approach.

As a title for his collected works, The Intent On is unpromising and not as representative as previous headings such as Orexis, Catalpa, or Relation might be, but it does make the point that Irby is writing in the space “after I,” and suggests two of his main influences, Louis Zukofsky and Ed Dorn, who might be overlooked beneath Olson’s looming presence. The title also points towards his increasing attention to tracking the atomic particles of language. I offer the following quote as an example of Irby’s pacing and form:

or all the high school years again, unslept, reviewing the annual faces over and over
               till they run green in the movies after the eyes are closed
                                        and still as distant as they were in person

                                                                                                  the society of ordinary
                                                                                 high school days, never left, will it?

Noted book designer Jonathan Greene strikes a balance between Irby’s sometimes impossibly long lines and the steady accumulation of his sequences or sets, making it easier for the reader to track the progress of the author’s obsessive dreamscapes from the deceptively straightforward reportage of Relation to the denser, allusive mastery of Call Steps, often regarded as Irby’s central work. Comparison with the Station Hill edition suggests that a decision was made here to put multiple poems on a single page in order to emphasize the continuity of his career, not simply to save paper. It helps to see Irby’s poems set differently in other editions, as they are constructed in ways which inevitably emphasize the local circumstances of each printing. Although it’s sometimes annoying to see the lines broken in so many different, awkward ways, it shows how the limitations of the printed page animate the work. Ironically, A Set, a broadside printed landscape here to preserve the original lineation, is not his best work, and printing it sideways feels more like a gimmick than a revelation of the poem’s true shape.

***

Inspired by Charles Olson, and associated with three important Roberts (Duncan, Kelly, and Greiner), Irby’s work offers a bridge between the San Francisco scene, Deep Image and Language Poets, but don’t let that deter you. Irby’s work is not based on schools or theories, but values. From the start it was apparent that he was out to construct what Olson referred to as an “actual earth of value”: “There is nothing, then, that does not/ contain the divine.” Not only is every event interpenetrated by the divine, every historical event occurs in space based on specific local conditions: “We have approached the fact of this land/ as body as alive as our own.”

Starting from Fort Scott Kansas where he grew up, and moving west to New Mexico and Berkeley, California, and  circulating back via the northwest coast, with intriguing glances towards China and Japan, Irby’s poetry rides the currents of our historical restlessness, surrounded by landforms; his lines stretch out to meet the horizon and stack themselves in geologic strata. They track secret migration routes to the west and south, currents useable by truckers and tourists alike. Irby knows that the east side of the street is a different world from the west side of the street, and that the land makes demands on us: “find the Secret History of your Self, wherein you live, which is more vast and great than any Shell or Strife you know.” If Olson nervously paces the beach, looking out over the sea, past Rome, past Greece to our prehistoric and geologic attentions, Irby searches for “that back/ calm pasture of the mind/ where all weather is.”

Irby turns the idiosyncratic particular into the universal with impressive ease, knowing that beyond our conscious attention we are drawn into continental gyres and mired in interior Sargasso Seas. Here’s Irby, in the early ‘70’s, drawing landform maps in the shape of animals, years before the digital work of Japanese cartographers presented in Katherine Harmon’s You Are Here. Decades before the alarming stories in the news magazines, he told us that the best place to fix global warming is to start with the weather inside the head: “I keep scratching my head, for the uncertainty of the weather in there.” In the mid ‘70s he wrote prophetically:  “We’re living in the midst of a change like the ice age, that IS the ice age, so pervasive it’s hard to tell.”

As Irby’s lines pile into strata, seemingly geologic forces fracture the layers and puncture the boundaries between dream, myth, and reality. Fossilized particulars are pushed in by the waves and stranded by the outgoing tide like trash on the beaches of our attention, opening surprising vistas into “that endlessness of everyday/ that is precisely eternity.” Post-Whitman, he will look at our adolescent yearning and say “this is the rite of the drugstore counter heart.” Olson called Americans “the last first people.” We are rude, sensual, angry, not fully formed, and perpetually desiring self-determination and initiation into the earth’s mysteries, without realizing that our conflicting wishes can only cancel each other out.

***

Irby draws me back to the feelings that attracted me to maps and poetry in the first place. He names inchoate desires, locates them, and tells us they recur to be used as fertilizer for growth. I think of a specific image from my high school lit mag: someone hanging upside down from the highway overpass, waiting for the trucks to come, and preparing to pull up at the last second. Irby knows that this trope can appear in any American town bisected by a freeway, along with the darker but complimentary fantasy of throwing stuff off the bridge or shooting bb’s at cars: giving oneself to the flow, or violently disrupting it. Irby wants us to remember those selfish, destructive feelings, even though it may be difficult to respect them; these are the currents that reveal us, they are “limits to go see the sacred places on the table with the scrambled eggs and hash browns, between and on.”

Describing a noisy bus ride, Irby quotes from a letter he received from Gerrit Lansing to the effect that the challenge is reconciling “not chatter, [but] incessant loud yuk- yuk- fucking- yuk- yuk it’s always got to be insisted its right to enjoy […] to poetic elitism which grows & can reconcile Mallarme’s (& S. George’s) & Lautreamont’s (poetry is for everyone)… & the mirror of supernatural economics.” Irby’s take on supernatural economics is idiosyncratic, elliptical and elusive, but just when you think he’s gone off the deep end, he snaps you back to reality, parked out back by the dumpster, confronting the waste our culture generates.

Irby can use a word like opalescent with an entirely straight face. It helps if you can hear the flat Kansas accent he speaks in, but his lack of pretension shines through in various ways. Key to Irby’s work is his paradoxical push against endlessness and limit, an introspective fever based on an aesthetic of failure; things are constantly flubbed and fucked up, our language is not always up to the task, but the demand is always there:

We give, ourselves,
even in the stupidest words

or we are assholes

Similar notes of a breathtaking, urgent honesty seemingly unique to Irby keep the reader moving through an otherwise monumental book. Irby adds some real insights about domestic life and friendship, but as in Olson’s Maximus Poems, there is a pervasive maleness of tone and concern which may leave some readers feeling stranded. But it eventually becomes clear that however personal his emphases, he agrees with Walter de la Mare: “All that we are is in our love. It is an archipelago, and its islands may be visited each in turn.”

Ultimately, I find that The Intent On, ostensibly so derivative of The Maximus Poems, deals more with life as actually lived; and the more you realize Irby’s debt to other writers, the more you are convinced that here is a true original, above literary politics, a writer who has urgently charted the dream of the North American continent, tracing our psychic migrations in ways presciently germane to our current social, environmental and political crises: “The Climatology of Attention is not the Extension of Empire.” Though his mentor drunkenly declared himself President of Poetry at the 1964 Berkeley Poetry Conference, Kenneth Irby has stayed true to the quest for twice as many years as Olson was given,  and staked a solid claim to be North America’s premier psychogeographer, if not Interior Secretary of North American Poetry.

*

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The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

by Jennifer L. Knox
Bloof Books 2010
Reviewed by Stacey Harwood

8_5

“Ghost or Badass?”

The brainchild of poet Shanna Compton, Bloof Books has published enough titles of fine poetry by emerging poets that it can safely be considered an established small press. Among its backlist you’ll find handsomely produced volumes by Danielle Pafunda, Peter Davis, and Sandra Simmons.  With The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Bloof brings us its third volume by Jennifer L. Knox (previous titles are Drunk by Noon and a 2007 reissue of her first book, A Gringo Like Me), thereby demonstrating that Compton knows how to pick a winner and stick with her.  

Jennifer L. Knox’s work has been widely praised for its dark humor, and those looking for laughs with their lines will find them, beginning with many of the forty-three poems’ titles.  But crack the spine and you’ll see that Knox’s humor is rarely without a bite; her poems can be funny, yes, but along with the humor is an uncomfortable edge, and you could end up feeling as if you laughed too soon at a joke with a cruel punch line. This is to say that Knox’s poems shake your initial assumptions about the seemingly wacky situations in which she places her characters.  Again and again, Knox overturns her reader’s expectations with the skill of a quick change artist; with a casual, almost droll tone and matter-of-fact language, she engages the reader with a familiar scene that is quickly transformed to an alien and harsh world. 

Here’s a test:  Take “Belle with a Showy, Red Leak,” one of my favorite poems in the collection. See if you can guess the line that follows the opening “It was tough to poke the thick embroidery needle through / ”  With the Victorian world conjured by an image of  woman hunched over her cross stitch, did you even come close to “her lower lip and twist the stud in before the hole closes”?  Neither did I.  By the end of the poem’s thirteen lines, the subject has moved from lip piercing to “getting shoved listlessly from one set of hands to the next / like a beach ball the whole crowd’s tired of hitting.” As we follow Knox’s imaginative leaps, we’re struck wondering, like David Byrne, “Well, how did I get here?”

Many of Knox’s poems fall in the tradition of the unexpected encounter (think “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”):  the narrator has a peculiar encounter that leads to a mystifying transaction, and ends the poem with an altered perspective.  In “Old Friends,” the speaker sits in a coffee shop remembering an “old friend” who had committed a despicable act.  The narrator allows herself a moment of self-congratulation. Unlike the erstwhile friend, she’s become “a better person, certainly better / than the women I knew, who I would never be friends with / again—she probably hadn’t changed at all . . . ” But in the midst of her reverie, the bodies of everyone she’s ever “drowned in sacks years ago begin / falling from the sky, heavy like wet sandbags from a crane.“  The battered grownup cannot escape her past. 

In “Old Friends” and elsewhere, Knox demonstrates her well attuned ear and an enviable gift for metaphor making.  Here’s one example, and pay particular attention to the smart internal rhymes and pitch-perfect alliteration, qualities that add to the pleasure of reading a Knox poem aloud:

Beverly Hills Cop III

This again, but way lamer. We started out
outlaws, now we’re law (in chichi suites, yet).
Why does every bright, rare thing we are boil
out like wine’s kick in a simmered port glaze,
leaving only virgin vapors, Ghost or Badass?
Like this: The synthesizer—formerly a wink, sweet
mystique—thunders now, boops and stomps around
as hammy as a Scottish soccer anthem. The walk-on
waiter and his foppish lisp have sailed from sidelines
to sidekick—shares every scene, gets his own
badge, his own girl, his own fight and fall.

 “If you want to touch your reader’s heart, grow colder,” Chekhov advised an aspiring writer, and it is with this kind of cool, precise language that Knox moves us so deeply, especially in “Cars,” a spectacular sequence of fifteen prose poems that could introduce a new genre: the life story as told through a series of car accidents. The prose poem is a particularly genial form for Knox.  Beginning with her first experience as an unwilling child behind the wheel of a truck, the car accident is the means by which the speaker explores the trajectory of her drug-and-booze wrecked life and more specifically her painful relationship with her father.  You know things will go downhill when the father buys a Corvair, the “unsafe at any speed” vehicle that launched Ralph Nader’s career as a consumer advocate.   And they do.  Cars slam into telephone polls, flip over, swerve “like a cat on iceskates,” yet the narrator survives all of these wrecks to hear her father’s weepy apology for worrying “about you so much,” to which she responds with preternatural wisdom: “’It’s OK,’ and I mean it, because suddenly I know, he’s just scared.  That’s why he did all the things that he did.”

While many of the poems in The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway are confounding—we may wonder how to interpret their stories or about the nature of the anxiety that inspired them—they are ultimately exhilarating and fresh, the work of a poet with a unique sensibility and singular intelligence.

*

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Come on All You Ghosts

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

by Matthew Zapruder
Copper Canyon Press 2010
Reviewed by Kathleen Rooney

8_5

“…a little digital hope.”

zapruder ghosts cover“Growth is always loss.” So says psychologist James Hillman in his book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. His statement is probably pretty true in general, but it also seems particularly applicable to Matthew Zapruder’s third collection, Come On  All You Ghosts. Because what Hillman also means is “The imagination changes.”  Yes. Zapruder’s hip, lyrical imagination, the one that powered his first two books, American Linden and The Pajamaist, is still in force here, but it is different: older and not necessarily wiser, per se, but even more open than before. The speaker of these poems admits he is no longer young, but he remembers that he once was, and he writes of those who still are, speculating in the poem “Global Warming”: “The young. / Maybe they’ll let us be in their dreams.” Meanwhile, he acknowledges that he is becoming, or has become, one of the “people of middle/indeterminate age” of whom he also writes.

The edgy and Post-Avant sensibilities for which Zapruder has come to be known are still present as well, but they have been tempered with elegy and aging. The book is in large part “about” the biggest loss of all: death, including those of the poet’s father, of David Foster Wallace, of Robert Creeley, of Kenneth Koch and numerous others. But the collection is also about a loss of certainty, and a shift to an older perspective in which the observer gets stripped of his youthful confidence, thereby becoming better able, as he puts it in the poem “Pocket,” to try “standing in an actual stance of mystery / and not knowing towards the world.”

Zapruder begins one of the book’s most lovely and representative poems, “Grace Paley,” with the blunt statement that “People say they don’t understand poetry,” then continues, “Meaning how must we proceed.” Zapruder proceeds with a graceful movement back and forth between the past of his youth, and the present of his middle-age. Here is a lengthy passage, but the length is necessary to capture the sense of motion, of growth and loss:

                             I was thirteen, Earth
was a couch, without any irritable reaching
after fact or reason I placed thousands of
Sweet Tarts into my mouth. Five years
later someone said they saw Diane P.
kissing a girl in a car, and they punched
the window on the passenger side
in and I laughed, and it’s all been as
people say downhill from there, meaning
until this moment I have been coasting,
but from this one forward Grace I vow
I shall coast no more.

This section is typical of the gentle slaloming feeling—inevitable, never forced—that Zapruder’s poems have as they slide toward conclusions that are surprising, but apt.

Other reviews have already said that these poems are beautiful, and they are. As in his previous books, Zapruder delivers erudite descriptions of such things as “the hoarse glassy call / of the black American crow” and a colleague’s desk, which “is a medium-sized wooden lake / on which float two staplers.” He sounds like a discerning critic—a refined reviewer of life itself—when he observes in the poem “Prelude” that Diet Coke:

                                        …tastes
like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,
or an acquaintance of chocolate
speaking fondly of certain times
it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,
or nothing remembering a field
in which it once ate the most wondrous
sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese
yet still wished for a piece of chocolate
before the lone walk back through
the corn then the darkening forest
to the disappointing village and its super
creepy bed and breakfast.

At the same time, though, these poems also wonder what the point of any of this—of beauty, of thinking, of writing poems, of living, etc.—really is.  

In “You Have Astounding Cosmic News,” for instance, he writes, in an ostensible open letter to sociologists, “we’ve been conducting field experiments into our private thoughts. One / faction next to the soul shaped watercooler wonders whether / there’s any reason at all to remember the feeling of being a child.” These are thoughtful poems, which is to say they are poems in which the speaker frequently mentions his own act of thinking, declaring at one point, “I am getting ready to have important thoughts,” and at another, “I see sad crushed plastic / everywhere and put / some thoughts composed / of words that do not / belong together / together and feel / a little digital hope.” And, perhaps in keeping with his shift from a youthful knowing to an older wondering, as he thinks about his thoughts, they become less and less familiar. “When I think very hard / about my thoughts,” he writes, “they seem / to me to be very small horses / attached to invisible reins / attached to facts.”

Throughout the collection, Zapruder’s poetic persona seems concerned with its own authority: What can he say? What should he be saying? Plenty of poems and poets have covered this turf, with the more language-y ones tending to conclude that there is little to no such authority to begin with—that words inevitably fail, that communication is bound to break down. Yet while Zapruder’s poems are playful and funny, he makes it clear he’s not just playing around. His poems posit that something is at stake, or at least that something ought to be. And the book, though not linked together with any overall story or clearcut throughline, does suggest an arc, the speaker starting out with these doubts, grappling with them, and concluding: yes, I can make meaning and I can make it in such a way that this meaning can keep being made after I am gone. Communication can, does, and should occur. In a way, Come On All You Ghosts poses, wrestles directly and indirectly with, and finally answers yes to the question of whether poetry can matter.

Zapruder ends the book with the 14-page title poem whose last stanza expresses a satisfaction of sorts about what he—as a person and as a poet—is trying to do, and that when it’s his turn to become a ghost himself, he will:

…have done my best to leave

behind this machine
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter.

*

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Like a Sea

Friday, July 16th, 2010

by Samuel Amadon
University of  Iowa Press 2010
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

8_5

“each country has made these phrases for / us”

amadon like a sea coverSamuel Amadon’s new book, Like a Sea, is like a sea in that, when you are floating out the middle of it, you have no idea where you are.  It is also like a sea in that nothing but a sea is really like a sea.  The book’s twisted intelligibility comes together over pieces of language that are not strictly supported by meaning or uninterrupted relay of information.  It is easy to trip over the big, heavy things Amadon hides amid his poems’ scrambled logic.  The poems obsess over the limits of language, moving from clarity into complicated washouts of prepositions, copulae and pronouns.  They do plenty of philosophizing.  “Each H,” a series of poems that provides a strong, philosophical skeleton for the book, is a premiere example of the book’s overarching mode.  “Each H (IX),” for instance, begins with the simple first line, “That it could sound like him.”  The speaker then folds the line under itself with, “That it could sound like him / sounding like he knew / what he sounded like.”  By the final stanzas of the short poem, we are racing to keep up; it disintegrates into ambiguity:

we all sounded saying that
was it, but that was it
again, and then wasn’t this more

it anyway, or just it with more
people, more to say
that it could sound like people.

Because the speaker begins clearly, it is easy to imagine the rest of the poem as an intricate word puzzle.  The “it” and “that” and “was” are ordered so they lose their original points of reference.  The words become less specific, opening them wide for interpretation.  The idea that these two, three, and four letter words might veil some earth-shattering revelation is itself a revelation.  There are underlying forces—unidentifiable forces—that push all the components of language together into its primary use as a communicative tool.  The poem implies that language can seem to make perfect sense without the burden of meaning. 

This implication brings to mind a telling adage that Wallace Stevens, whose influence is made explicit through an epigraph, slipped into a short essay defending the artistry of one of Marianne Moore’s poems: “Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing.”  It is tough to know what Stevens meant by “aspect.”  One suspects it refers to a kind of aura of connotative and denotative meaning that exists around very real, hard things.  The ambiguousness of some of Amadon’s poetry fulfills this definition.  But applied strictly to Amadon’s book, “aspect” might mean something like “component.”  In the middle of “Cognitive Burr,” the effect is kaleidoscopic:

                                                 This is the scene for the less-

than-casual gardener. The gardener of import
is not the gardener of intrigue
which is why we have levels rewarding the non-

native English speaker works for a mapmaker
who strikes that those are not
the phrases I would use cultural to assume

each country has made these phrases for
us.

The effect is kaleidoscopic because the poem breaks the world into disconnected bits of language (words, phrases, idioms, points of view), holds these bits up against one another, and argues which is the purer, prevailing thought.  It is also kaleidoscopic because it fluidly forces those components back together into something fractured but softened, something that avoids simple representations of time and space but takes on an “aspect” of reality.  When the speaker in “Cognitive Burr” explains “why we have levels rewarding the non- / native English speaker,” we can’t be sure what he means by levels or by rewards.  We can be sure that some kind of hierarchy exists—one that seems to parallel the hierarchy inherent in an economy.  We are given a bit more guidance with the words “import” and “strike.”  Ideas about money, the economy, and personal relationships hover here, suspending the pressure each exerts on the other.  The lines are like individual thoughts pulled from a collective consciousness; the complexity of the relationship between these thoughts and the finiteness of language allows the poems to seem bursting with meaning.

From its opening line, “I could not sound like anyone but me,” Like a Sea is possessed by its fascination with the limits imposed on communication by the concept of “voice.”  The voice Amadon lends his speakers is just one more restrictive container of thought and emotion.  It is one more thing his speakers must overcome to communicate clearly.  In most cases, the poems exemplify these constraining elements of voice, but there is a definite, self-aware desire to explain these limitations.  In “Like an Evening,” Amadon’s speaker makes a fumbling attempt to characterize his own awareness:

                       I could go several ways
with how best to put everything
should come together is no longer available
now that I am aware I govern
what makes what I govern
differ not from how it must seem

In a book of poems that takes every opportunity to shrug off intelligibility, moments like this are attractive.  But even when communication is intended, language can prove a flimsy system.  It takes much effort to understand how the “govern[ing]” is occurring here, though the lines are likely worded in the clearest possible language.  Parsing out the kind of reflection found in “Like an Evening” (and elsewhere) is still not easy, and Amadon has made the distinct decision to avoid clear-cut, nostalgic adventures in aphorism.  In avoiding making perfect sense in perfect syntactic units, the big emotions, the ones that make us cry or punch people in bars, have been set aside.  By forgoing manipulation of the big emotions in favor of initiating nervous laughter or confusion, Amadon avoids simplification and approaches a portrait that seems much closer to the emotional and intellectual environment in which we–always a little claustrophobic and scatterbrained–live our lives.

*

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The Dance of No Hard Feelings

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

by Mark Bibbins
Copper Canyon Press 2009
Reviewed by Stephen Burt

8_5
“Truly, it never gets old.”

bibbins coverIn the whirligig monologues and post-rock lyric throughout his first book, Sky Lounge (2003), Mark Bibbins sent kids with high hopes and low dreams into a glittering, punishing, shimmering dusk-to-dawn city. The kids in this second book are almost grown up, trying with very mixed success to make, and to understand, their remixed lives. The “I” and the “you” here sound almost self-assured, almost confident, but never quite: they face autonomy with all the demands of youth unmet, and since those demands are so great – sex, love, civic solidarity, promises kept – they may never be met, or not all at once. “Whatever you say sounds better with your thigh / against mine and caught in the camera-phones / of our undoing,” Bibbins writes in “There Is No You Are Everywhere,” which is either a poem of betrayal admitted, a breakup opus, or a regretful ode to averted risk: “you’re too burnt to burn,” he complains, to a lover more risk-averse than he, “or admit we wanted to try what feels almost new.”

Like Sky Lounge, The Dance is a book of subcultural scenes – “white kids giving / mad props to zombies, Jersey studs / with waxed eyebrows and brilliant / buffed nails” – but it’s also a book about feeling fake, urbane and inauthentic, too old for the makeup and too raw for anything else: “another false copy of me returns.” The real appears only through negatives, glimpses, outlines: “the best way to see a thing,” Bibbins says in a fine long poem called “The Devil You Don’t,” is to

                                                    catch
                        the edge of light
                                      that burns

around its opposite, that
                which it would otherwise
obscure.

The slipperiness, the unstable pronoun reference and the constantly changing scenes, that in another poet would point to a theory of language or comprise a postmodern Everyman in Bibbins are signs of a worried, anxious, too-cool-to-stay-cool personality: one who has learned to cherish, perhaps too much so, his power to offer scruples, to change his mind. “I’m not acting coy,” he protests; “I’m just terrified / of some rhetorical you.” But in Bibbins’s city every “you” is rhetorical, and rhetoric – verbal flourish, conscious construction – is not a block to strong emotion but a condition for its expression. Almost every scene and every figure seems both made-up and real, staged and genuine, disturbingly rickety and yet lovely enough that we wish it could stick around. (The devil “adores / the show, the high // tech of it, the low.”) When “an actual naked human stands / on a pedestal on the street” on West Broadway, Bibbins says, “you… don’t stop because you figure // it’s only art,” but Bibbins stopped; otherwise he could not have written the poem. He does not stop for long, though; his language keeps going, almost helplessly churning or burning through whatever phrases he finds: “I grew into a stuffed animal who wanted / only to insert itself into the fossil record…. When / it burns you move away // is good enough advice.”

For all its anxieties, The Dance is still (like Sky Lounge) an exhilarating New York book, even an I Love New York Book. It fizzes and sparkles against the sunlit buildings like O’Hara’s love poems to Vincent Warren:

They’ve hired skywriters
to compose clouds in a sky
off-color but clear; such
clever hats the chimneys

wear; so furiously they twirl.

If you hear something sour in that sparkle, something disappointed in that final iamb, so do I: the lover and his love don’t fit the poem, don’t fit the sky, can’t keep up the twirl. Rural areas give other poets ways to think about nonhuman nature, about what grows and thrives outside and beyond us, but they usually give Bibbins reasons to think about why “we” are artificial, unruly citizens, neither hardy nor solitary, and urban to the core: “a picnic in early autumn” becomes “a perfect time to resent / vegetarians, fuel-efficiency, / and ideas,” while geese overhead set “a kind of gray / fire down at our heads.” He tries, in other poems, to visit the ocean, the desert, even Germany, but he still feels like a poet of city life.

When Bibbins does not remind you of O’Hara, he might remind you of D. A. Powell: one poem is literally a collaboration with Powell (it begins “I used to have the shampoo / by the balls but the wind hurt my hair so”), and others could be. Like Powell, he makes the urbane and colloquial collide with the High Romantic; like Powell, he is inescapably sexy and unmistakably gay, and like Powell he is fond of square brackets and white space: “I want him to kiss me and another way of saying so // [he left a spark on my lip].” Sometimes Bibbins seems too fond of white space: the pages that look like erasures or ancient fragments, with two or three words to a line (“[crawl to // an end / an edge] // defer suffering // without proof”) may not play to his strengths. Even there, though, a racy, divine youth presides: “mercury / in a dirty hat // we see / ourself // but aren’t curious per se.”

Mercury presides over the whole book (as he presided over Sky Lounge): he is the god of quick changes, of youth, of speed, of thieves, of translation, of commerce and of the cities (built around marketplaces) where commerce accretes the connections it also destroys. Bibbins’s “devil” (who also rides a skateboard) is Mercury in Judeo-Christian drag; the beautiful youth who might know everything, the young man who is always running (but not always running away), makes a fit sponsor for Bibbins’s electric lines, and he sees himself, still, parties, in crowds:

Kids roll hash into
              their cigarettes and spotlights
turn the smoke pink
               in the trees. If he’d had

               a childhood, he’d have spent it

               running under sprinklers
to cool his smoldering skin.

“He” is the devil, the “abominable fancy” identified earlier in the same poem with Bush-era politicians (“the president who is not the president / trapped in a red room”). But “he” in the passage above is also the poet, always observing, and on fire, like it or not.

Those poems full of white space, their margins all over the place, look at first like failed attempts at philosophical, cod-Greek texts, but at their best they are worldlier, and more personal, and less idea-driven, than their format suggests. One of the best white-space sequences reinvigorates that hoary amateur genre, the breakup poem: “Forcefield [Ardor]” reads, in part,

take the couch

               the stove you’ve seen

and even touched me somewhere near

I want more city                                           to kiss you in
                             [you say]….

you can leave your hand

                             on the empty

                             chair between us

Bibbins can sound almost helplessly hip, a poet who cannot help but represent his generation (which is no longer the youngest one to publish poems): a prose page entitled “Suicides of the 90s” alludes to Reagan and Bush in terms undergrads today won’t understand (“Creepy cowboy got an era, crossword lothario got years”). Another poem asks, “Why shouldn’t he let someone / else fuck him to the mixtape / I made?” That such phrases will sound dated soon, that they will need footnotes in 30 years, makes no case against them, no more than against Lunch Poems, or against “The Rape of the Lock.” Bibbins does not write an entirely new kind of poetry (it is a very rare poet who does): he writes a kind perhaps 15 years old, old enough to have prompted reductions to absurdity (as in some of the poetry now called Flarf) and worthy counterrevolutions (as in some of the poets published by Flood). Yet it is a kind that still works, whenever (as here) it takes an interest not only in words on the loose, on bits of culture in the wind, but in people who mean those words or cherish those bits, who watch their city as they watch and love and often lose one another, caught up or caught out amid the mercurial fun.

*

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One Neither One

Friday, September 11th, 2009

by Shane McCrae
Octopus Books 2009
Reviewed by Steven Karl

8_5

“One of us had to save the other one”

mccrae coverThroughout the years poets have written about identity and its intersection with race. Many volumes of poetry and anthologies seek to demonstrate or recapitulate either the hyphenated-American or immigrant experience. Nella Larsen, who wrote the novels Quicksand and Passing, is perhaps the most famous writer who had attempted to tackle something even more complicated: the “bi-racial”* or multi-ethnic experience.  In 2006 it was reported that there is a minimum of 6.1 million U.S. citizens who identify their ethnicity as bi- or multi, yet comparatively little has been explored in the landscape of poetry.  Shane McCrae’s chapbook, One Neither One, sets out to give a voice to this other other.

McCrae wisely uses surrealism to obtain intensity and reveal poignancy. His chapbook contains seven poems. The first, titled “That’s Entertainment,” deals directly with the concept of white half vs. black half:

White half the white half    mule the black half black   /   But more
pleasing to either eye more hav-
ing neither but the black half eye    more hav-  /  ing neither
which which half

McCrae sets-up a lexical, almost Dr. Suessian employment of language by the sly use of repetition which seeks to both hammer in the words and to force the reader to re-examine each word in relation to the other.  When McCrae writes, “which which,” I think first which white, which black, but then when I reread “which which” it becomes an impatient question or demand.  The following five poems are titled “Mulatto.”  Instead of simply using people, McCrae utilizes the animal image (mule, horse, donkey) in “Mulatto,” thereby achieving the surrealistic trick of making anew a topic which has been a long historical abhorrent in American history and blurring the distinction between animal and human. 

The first “Mulatto” poem begins, “Half-donkey and half-human being    half-horse/”; the second “Mulatto” poem explores the old adage of one drop will do you, “Not even half three-eighths one drop of blood/ Is blood is blood is blood my blood is not/ My mother’s blood my body in her body/”. Anyone who has lived the experience of being bi- or multi-ethnic will easily tell you that the “one drop” does not allow you belong to one side or the other, in fact, this mixed identity often finds you neither accepted by the white or the black community.  The fourth “Mulatto” poem deals with this by recalling an experience where a black girl is being sexualized by white boys—she exists in their eyes not as a black person, but first and foremost as an object of sex:  “The white boys licked her breast    it was a game / It had a name and that is how I knew / It was a game.”  The white boys are in the position of power, so they have the ability to name and then to define the game.  The speaker of the poem decides he wants to be in on the game:

I got in line    and all the white boys saw

There was a nigger in the line    a mule
But none of them could tell    and the one black girl
Called me a nigger made   the white boys laugh
One of us had to save the other one

The last poem in One Neither One is entitled “Ghost,” and it deals with fragmentary ideas of self and memory, that other hiding, ghosting inside and caught in this in-betweeness.  One Neither One excels not only for its subject but also for McCrae’s poetics: his inventive use of line breaks, how he works the space on the page, and the ability to effectively incorporate surrealism.  My only disappointment with this chapbook is that it feels too brief and left me wanting to read more.

* I used “bi-racial” in this review because it is a term common to readers, but decided to put it in quotes since race itself is a construct and politically speaking, some of us chose not to empower the word and its antiquated definition.

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