Posts Tagged ‘8 stars’

Meme

Wednesday, June 19th, 2013

by Susan Wheeler
University of Iowa Press 2012
Reviewed by Danielle Blau

8

“not peaceful but hers”

In Meme, known experimentalist Susan Wheeler blends high and low registers. She throws in ditties and limericks, obscenities and puns. But these are not poems of dispassion or distance. While the poet may be passingly interested in poetic memes (traditional elegies, for instance), she constantly explores their limits. She is surpassingly interested in the extra-poetic memes that mold an individual’s life: the disembodied voices we inherit from the figures of our past, those which crowd out the space for our own authentic experience of the present. For Wheeler, who says she “lost [her] mother and [her] marriage” in the course of writing Meme, the present is always particularly important.

It is for these personally palpable memes that Wheeler reserves the bulk of her fury. For this reason, there is urgency to her poems that experiment for its own sake tends to lack: “Such is the state of our poetry caught in my throat on its way / to my mouth, why not do everything,” Wheeler writes. But it is no mere poetic war being waged on these pages. These poems present a poet fighting the outer noise that would deaden her inner voice, the memes that would deaden her unique reception of the immediate world. And so, in a sense, these poems present a poet fighting for her life.

The notion of the meme was first proposed by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as a cultural analogue to the biological entity that is the gene. Wheeler says “meme” is “a word that originated with genetic replication, and has gained currency since Dawkins as a unit of cultural effluvia that spreads widely very quickly.”

Biological evolution is determined by “successful” genes that manage to transmit themselves (or, rather, copies of themselves) to future generations; so, too, cultures are shaped by “successful” memes—ideas and practices—that spread themselves from mind to mind. Just as successful genes don’t “care” about the good of the host organism—all they “want” is to be passed on—a successful meme isn’t objectively good for the mind that houses it. Just think of some of the ideologies throughout history that successfully killed off their hosts (Children’s Crusaders, Kamikaze pilots, suicide bombers) in droves.

Wheeler takes memes personally. Between the genes lodged in our chromosomes, on the one hand, and the memes lodged in our minds, on the other, what room is there for individuality to flourish?  Or, as she puts it:

Where is there room for all I have to say
in the deepening dark of fall’s afternoon?
Baubles, prizes, in the cereal box.

We inherit our genes from our parents, and for Wheeler, the most potent—and most virulent—form of meme-transmission is traceable back to this same source. In the first of the three sections that compose Meme, “The Maud Poems,” Wheeler does something ingenious, which takes us straight to the crux of her “impure” experimentalism. She constructs an entire character—the terrifyingly powerful mother figure whose voice drowns out the lyric meditations of her daughter—entirely out of clichés. Clichés are a particularly successful form of verbal meme, and this mother is successful at replicating herself in her daughter’s mind. Proust, in speaking of “the deadening effect of habit, which cuts away—from things we have seen many times—the taproot of deep impression and thought, which alone give them their real significance,” seemed also to get to the heart of the deadening and insidious effect of clichés Within each of the “Maud Poems” is an elegant, if encapsulated, lyrical voice trying to hear itself through the relentless idiomatic clamor of maternal memes. Framed (or more, caged) within the jumbled shibboleths, dated slang, and unforgiving shrillness of “Now you go across the street and / apologize. Tell them who put number two in their fence” on one end, and “Not one word, young lady! You’ve raised enough Cain for one/ afternoon” on the other, we find:

Bird dips its head: it’s an owl, recalcitrant
in its non-hooting state. Wild billowing of
sails beyond it. Wind-swept surging of trees.

The high and the low play off one another meaningfully, frighteningly, at times heartbreakingly, throughout the first sequence, as the lyric poet-daughter’s private voice strains against the ungiving vernacular  hard-press of the mother’s not-so-motherly memes.

Wheeler’s struggle, then, involves carving out small spaces of freedom and, despite the cacophonous vocal imprints of the past, peaceably concentrating on raw impressions of the present, on the feel of the moment. This takes a more narrative—and nightmarish—turn in the second sequence, “The Devil—or—The Introjects.”  And often it seems like a losing battle:

She mocks what she gives. On the diving-board edge of a shiny new
pool, she’s braiding a noose of your hair. The long light, the trees, the
quickening air—a ladybug’s whir to the crook of your arm and the soft
plod of shoes coming forth from the house—the peaceable place not
peaceful but hers.

Of course, there could be no human society, as we know it, without memes. Words themselves are memes. But that does not stop Wheeler from fighting the good fight. This is especially true in the book’s final sequence, “The Split,” which is influenced by the end of the poet’s marriage. As she had to do in the wake of her mother’s great influence and eventual death, she has to build her own world again. She does so by performing a near assault on language itself. She pulls its basic units limb from limb:

Imported?

’im poor taunt, as in taunt what you porter in

She rhymes and puns:

The fink was fickle.

Finkl finkl finkl
little star

With strikethroughs, she inflicts a physical violence on words:

Born alone, die alone.
Be born alone, die alone.
Birth alone, die –
Arrive alone, depart alone.

And in general, she wreaks utterly sui generis linguistic havoc: “Canal this, canal that——/ It’s a Canalabaloo.”

To explore, and combat, the many-faced virulence of cultural transmission (“It was the winter of the Z-pack, when any Tom or Dickhead with a / medical shingle repeated viral like a clock on the hour”), Wheeler has at her command a dangerous roving carnival-army of forms—discordant jingles and laments, formal lists and dirty limericks. There is a sense in which all art can be seen as a rebellion against memes. And much of Meme reads like a glorious, reckless act of defiance.

At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophius, the philosopher Wittgenstein writes:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them.  (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Similarly, one of the most fascinating—and tragic—aspects of Wheeler’s book is that in her effort to free herself from entrenched and tyrannical memes, she has no choice but to make use of the very memes she longs to exorcise. (One limerick plays on the cultural touchstone Men Are From  Mars, Women Are From Venus, a cliché so wrought it is painful to see it used even in an ironic or satirical context.) There is no getting around the external forces—including the malignant influences of our past (“had you no other lens but damage to gaze through”)—that determine, from the outside in, how we see and feel the world. Wheeler does not pass over any of this painful paradox in silence, and her poems are a brave expression of autonomy.

*

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In the Light Of: after Illuminations

Friday, June 14th, 2013

by Ciaran Carson
Gallery Books 2012
Reviewed by Matthew Ryan Shelton

“From castles built of bone”

In recent years, poetic translation has largely been dominated by “the version,” subject to the will or particular preoccupations of the translator, who is more often than not an accomplished poet in his or her own right.  In the British Isles, we may number such notable versions as Alice Oswald’s Memorial, a refashioning of Homer’s Iliad from the viewpoint of its lesser heroes; Don Paterson’s Orpheus, a versioning of Rilke’s famous sonnets discussed at a glance by Peter Howarth in his recent review of Selected Poems in London Review of Books; and on this side of the Atlantic, Anne Carson’s Antigonick, which reshapes Sophocles into a multimedia romp of intellectual and artistic nuance only Anne Carson could realize. In this context, Ciaran Carson’s new book becomes a progressive revolution, taking “the version” to its next stage by reintegrating what Walter Benjamin once termed “the original’s mode of signification.”

The ingenuity of Carson’s approach is his audacious use of form. Opening In the Light Of, the reader expecting Rimbaud is not expecting to see verse at all, but verse is exactly what the reader finds—verse poems, culled from the source text’s tempestuous prose.  Regarding his previous volume of translations, The Alexandrine Plan, Carson writes:

My concern in that book was not so much to give a “literal” meaning of what the poems might be saying, as to reproduce the original metre in English, and see what interpretations might emerge from those constraints, both of rhyme and the twelve syllables of the classical French alexandrine.

To apply a similar method to Illuminations might, on the face of it, seem erroneous.  After all, unlike verse, which ensures a poem’s formal unity through pre-established conventions like rhyme and meter, prose necessitates its unity be generated by the text itself. Rimbaud’s organic, image-drunk poems are in prose, not verse, prose that sought to crack open the entrenched formalism of its time.  Any question of reproducing its original metre is moot.  But Carson speaks to his process:

At first, it seemed perverse to translate prose poems into verse: but the more I worked the more it became apparent that many passages in Rimbaud’s musical prose could be read as verse, with a prosody of their own, scanned, rhymed, alliterated.  One could see incipient sonnets embedded therein; and it happened that several of my versions came out as fourteen lines.

One is reminded of Benjamin’s imperative: “a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.” Carson’s book forms around a central metaphor, from which it branches outward, crystalline, again and again returning and rebranching—a hybridized image embodied in and embodying Carson’s own methodology, naturally rhizomatic in the Deleuzian sense.

In “Vigil (from Veillées),” we encounter light that has direction: “Once more the lighting returns to the central beam, the roof-tree.” It is the light of “nondescript stage sets”—another recurrent image throughout the volume—projected in an “intense and rapid dream” across a vessel wall, reminiscent perhaps of Un Chien Andalou, or ”brightly-coloured magic lantern slides.” Along with ”Tale (Conte)” and “Genius (Génie)” – the only other prose pieces in the collection – ”Vigil” reestablishes light and the casting of that light at the heart of Rimbaud’s Illuminations.  It is at once an illumination and a remembrance (cf. Benjamin: “a translation issues from the original–not so much from its life as from its afterlife”).

In the poem “Snow (Fleurs),” Carson completes the full significance of his ”verse form grafted on to Rimbaud’s prose.” Given the original phenomenon of light, it becomes in Carson the task of the translator, and indeed the poet, to direct that light by means of form – a concept in line with the work of the German artist Günther Uecker, who spoke of ”shaping light” via white-painted nails driven into the blank canvas.  In an interesting subtext, Carson also situates his refigured poem in the Northern Irish poetic tradition, taking a turn from his eminent predecessor Louis MacNeice.  Here, instead of flowers, it is the latticework of snow (qua snowflakes) that provides the necessary structural features by which light’s reflection and refraction create new colors and images.

But Carson is not Wilson Bentley. Acknowledging the force exacted on the rigid alexandrine form by Rimbaud’s temperamental prose, the grafted form becomes deranged as its model is deranged–the text is rife with shifted, sometimes omitted caesuras, slant rhymes, and tercets at times finishing out an otherwise neatly paired-off poem. Snow – each snowflake reminiscent of an ideal, yet each as slightly flawed by injury and nuance – becomes the lattice for his source text’s light, and this process becomes a pointed metaphor for his own form-based method of translation. Light and lattice form the collection’s central metaphor, running through all 25 pieces, ever-present, and ever mindful of the moment of translation.

Carson’s choice of rhyming couplets, moreover, compounds the effects of this metaphorical framework.  For example, in the poem “Cities (Villes),” rhyme brings together the disparate elements of Rimbaud’s vision –“surround” paired with “resound,” “gorges” with “gorgeous.” Perhaps the most interesting coupling is “abyss” and “borealis,” combining depth with distance, embodying the all-encompassing vastness of the cities. By juxtaposing Rimbaud’s tell-tale oppositions, Carson enacts a visceral tension, harking back to the task at hand:

Bacchantes of the suburbs sob their Bacchic song,
the moon responds with lightning shocks and howls along.

The moon is made wolf, intoning unto itself in self-reflective reverence – a pointed match to the translation’s dialectic embodiment of Rimbaud’s original. Carson’s interlingual translation mimics Rimbaud’s own intersemiotic translation of the cities in all their visionary glory and terror. Moreover, by placing “Cities” between “Snow” and “Seer (Mystique),” he reinforces his recurrent theme, and where “Snow” spoke of glancing light becoming flower-like brilliance, “Cities” introduces a parallel, synesthetic shift

From castles built of bone
come undreamed-of melodies hitherto unknown

Snowflake becomes castle; light becomes sound – reenacting Rimbaud’s famous dereglement by means of a shrewd, organic verse. Carson’s reorganization of his source text’s original ordering reinforces the central image of the lattice.  The three prose pieces establish major themes and images, framing in even distribution the two groupings of eleven poems each.

Ciaran Carson has created a monster in the frame of 62 pages, a cohesive extension of Rimbaud’s original that is itself an independent whole.  In his premise, he has taken an enormous risk.  But in doing so, he has also shaped a book that stands alone in his predecessor’s lengthy afterlife.  What it means for poetic translation in the twenty-first century can, at present, only be guessed at, but certainly Carson has created a thoroughly resonant, readable, allegorical work.  He has given us something new: a dialectical “renovation” of Rimbaud’s notorious light.

*

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Apart

Monday, June 10th, 2013

by Catherine Taylor
Ugly Duckling Presse 2012
Reviewed by Diana Arterian

“yet another way to lay claim to power”

The prologue to Catherine Taylor’s Apart is entitled “Forms of Parallel Transport,” and in it, Taylor discusses how sentence structure can produce rhythms and simulate motion through speed and punctuation. Then Taylor moves to pendulums, then resonance, then: “Resonance is produced by sympathetic vibrations. Resonance evokes associations and emotions. // Resonance can result in catastrophic failure of the vibrating structure. This is known as ‘resonance disaster.’ (Soldiers, break step.) Look how we have learned to love the wreckage” (12-13). This is where the prologue ends. The prologue was, for me, wholly mystifying but completely captivating. In its two-plus pages, Taylor introduced me to her structure (brief lyrical paragraphs). More importantly, she made me feel like I should trust her completely. I wasn’t entirely sure where she was taking me, but I didn’t much care.

After finishing the prologue, I found out quickly enough. Apart is broken in to six parts, the first being “Cape Town Journals.” Each of these parts contains several named, smaller sections, punctuated by single-stanza prose poems. Taylor opens “Cape Town Journals” with a fraught exchange she witnesses between a Black man and Coloured woman (the latter being a generally accepted title for mixed-race persons there) about racial labels. She ends the scene on a feeling of uncertainty about whose word she should trust and the complications of her own whiteness. She follows this with a prose-poem, writing, “…soak your kites in kerosene and let me be clear, this story twists on the stake of me and mine” (18). Indeed, for Taylor has revealed a few tidbits in the first scene: South Africa is the place of her mother’s birth, and Taylor has not visited the place for nearly 30 years.

The next section pulls us from the open-air market and arguing merchants to the Cape Town airport and its pristine sterility. Then to what you can experience as a tourist in Cape Town, which Taylor describes with such allure you find yourself desiring what is absolutely offensive when considering what you must drive through to get there—what she describes next—“The Hell Run, a 5-mile, six-land swath through a series of black townships…tin shacks and tiny concrete houses…home to over a million people.” And so we come to the heart of it—the horror of the class and racial divide that still exists in post-apartheid South Africa. Taylor continues, “Some say to go hell-for-leather, pedal-to-the-metal, with the doors locked and no stopping for anything since the last attack was just a week ago. But we’re going to have to stop and pull over—that’s why we’re here.” We learn of the uprisings, coups, deaths, and general violence throughout the 70’s and 80’s in South Africa.

We also follow the poet through her travels and experiences there. You see her as researcher and journalist, but also just memoirist and thoughtful observer. She interviews former political prisoners, visits prisons. At one point, the poet describes talking to her cousin, who describes the violence and torture soldiers (South Africans in Zimbabwe, Americans in Iraq) enact on others: “She says, I blame war, the institution. Blame. I think, I blame myself. But I like her answer better. Let’s send war to jail. And national identity, too.”

The second section, “Letters,” contains slightly self-conscious letters that are all addressed to “A” (“my little letter will be zinging and singing, dressed in her tourist beads”). In the letters, the poet reveals to A (and us) her potentially being part Black, and her mother’s involvement in the Black Sash anti-apartheid movement. Then we have portions from the Black Sash archives, in Courier typeface, listing death after death after death of Black and mixed-race persons. The sheer volume and matter-of-factness steal your breath. An example: “Reports of severe ill treatment: smashed elbow, pellet wound, shot and thus crippled and mentally disabled, shot through the hips by riot police, shot in the throat.” Not long into it, Taylor writes, “There are dozens of folders…There are so many [reports]. Bullets separate them.” And, arguably, tie them together. Nearly all of these accounts are of shootings, and almost all by police. One report begins to describe an attack on a family in their home and the rape of the son, followed by “[19 pages of narrative are attached here.]” You cannot help but feel somewhat grateful to be spared further description. Taylor goes and looks at jellyfish afterward to try and decompress, bringing us there with her.

The third section, entitled “Duffer’s Drift,” is the kernel of the book. There are short lyrical paragraphs (one per page) with footnote-y bits beneath, each distinct but informing each other. There are also photographs and diagrams. Mostly, it’s about the narrator being in a club as a teenager and having an odd conversation with a Black albino man, then what seems like perhaps an assault or sexual encounter (or none of the above). The lights go up, and Taylor discovers that the club is hosting a minstrel show—Black performers wearing whiteface. Taylor astutely interrogates the shows, stating the players are “mimicking whites mimicking blacks or blacks mimicking whites mimicking blacks…Yes. Maybe. The mockery is multiple. Surely both master and slave take a beating. Or maybe neither.” Then, there is the title, which references Ernest Dunlop Swinton’s book The Defence of Duffer’s Drift, a historical novel about the Boer War and the protagonist’s defending an area called “Duffer’s Drift.” And “duffer” also has some vernacular meanings. Attempting to reduce this portion to even a long-ish paragraph proves incredibly difficult, pointing to the brilliance of the form that Taylor uses here. It allows for much complexity and narrative, but not a concise description that fully honors what it accomplishes.

The remainder of Apart predominantly interrogates Taylor’s family history in South Africa, shame, her mother’s involvement in the Black Sash movement, and more from the Black Sash archives. This time, instead of reports of death, we read ways in which the Black Sash activists attempted to assist people in navigating bureaucracy (but are ultimately still thwarted by it). Overall, Apart is Taylor documenting and embracing uncertainty and engaging with grey areas of history and experience. This, and her willingness to take herself to task for her impulses (which, upon closer inspection, are hugely problematic), make her seem trustworthy, not just as a writer, but also as a person engaging with others, with history, with the landscape she describes. While driving: “Everything outside is obscenely gorgeous…I can critique the aestheticizing urge, but I can’t resist it. Driving in Africa, a constant oscillation: ecstasy, shame, ecstasy, shame.” When discussing the likelihood of her own blackness (her brother passes for Egyptian, her nephew thinks his father is black): “…insinuating, and enjoying, the possibilities of my own blackness. But then I read Nadine Gordimer’s story ‘Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black,’ in which she takes white South Africans to task for finding their one drop of black blood as yet another way to lay claim to power.” She incorporates many voices, and thumbing through the works cited will give you a sense of her influences: Judith Butler, Agamben, Fanon, Shoshana Felman, George Oppen, Lyn Hejinian, Wayne Koestenbaum. Even the title itself is savvy: Apart[heid]—the second portion of the word performing its homophone. To our benefit, Taylor has no interest in hiding much of anything.

*

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Easy Math

Friday, June 7th, 2013

by Lauren Shapiro
Sarabande Books 2013
Reviewed by Nick DePascal

“The audience explodes”

Don’t be fooled by the title of Lauren Shapiro’s debut, Easy Math.  This collection is anything but easy.  Despite its accessible and open tone, despite the poet’s clear word choice and rather informal diction, and despite the concrete imagery placed firmly in modern times, Easy Math is a dizzying and surreal journey that doesn’t offer simplistic answers to any of the questions it may or may not pose.  Instead, Shapiro takes familiar experience and expression and bends them just so—“When I lick my shadow,/ it tastes like the ground and vice versa”—barely eluding obvious sense and suggesting that fixed and final understandings always leave us wanting. Though the images, characters, and settings of Easy Math seem easy to apprehend on the surface, something operating beneath the surface of these poems offers the most excitement.

It’s nice when the first poem of a collection sets the rules for the world that the remaining poems will inhabit. Shapiro begins with these lines in “The Conversation”: “There is always a woman eating a sandwich./ Today she is large as everything/ that wasn’t said. It is ham and cheese.”  After we watch the large woman eat the sandwich for a while, things seem to shift, and perspectives change: “The woman has finished eating her sandwich/ and is one to another one. Now she is tiny/ as a shrimp. She is eating the smallest/ egg salad sandwich in the world.”  The poem ends with the speaker and the sandwich-eating woman finally conversing:

I’ve wanted to talk to you for ages, she says,
but instead I keep eating all these sandwiches.
I know, I say. And I keep going to the bowling alley
with Dale Hickey. It’s been hell.

The poem is slow and quiet.  Not much happens apart from this short conversation.  Yet in its focus on the mundane, the poem posits a deeper question about the nature of relationships and communication, and the harsh truths that lie behind the simplest things we say.  The simplicity of the situation, one that could take place in a break room at your job, or the food court of the local mall, is twisted by the almost existential moment at the end, when the speaker and subject of the poem both admit, through the niceties of normal conversation, that the repetitiveness of their lives make them living hells. These statements, about the sandwiches and the bowling alley and Dale Hickey are repeated from earlier in the poem, and like Sartre’s No Exit, hell for most people is the terror of involving themselves with other people.  The difference between what we say and what we feel, bound as we are by the strictures of polite society, are often as far apart as the woman in large and in miniature.

“The Conversation” is a perfect poem to begin with, because the idea of conversations, of what we say versus what we mean (even if we don’t know what we mean), is a powerful and overarching theme throughout the collection.  In the next poem, “Botanical Garden,” we see this same sort of communication at work when we learn that “Of course there’s a rose named Martha Stewart,” and that “Next door in the café old men eat scones/ and talk about Iraq. The women at the next table// also talk about Iraq. The children, too, playing in the corner–/ they don’t know it, but they’re talking about Iraq.”  This last sentence, about the children, casts doubt on whether anyone is actually talking about Iraq, or whether our speaker is forcing that meaning onto others’ conversations.  The poem perhaps posits each conversation is really an argument, no matter how subtle, with each side trying to persuade the other.  How many of our daily conversations are really just us talking over one another, seeking supremacy of voice and story? At the very least, the poem suggests there are so many conversations happening at any given time it is perhaps impossible for them to matter all that much. Perhaps something about our modern world permeates the deepest level of our minds, and each individual conversation is actually a manifestation of the same brand of fear and guilt.

But the poem, in its beautiful, weird, and hilarious final image, proposes a solution wherein, “Martha Stewart opens up her petals/ like a cup of tea in the jungle. The delicate dog takes// a delicate piss. The quadriplegic smells Martha Stewart./ I smell her. A line starts. Even the infant wants a go.”  If our language and our methods of communicating are hopelessly muddled and ineffective, than this poem seems to propose that it is the experience which requires no talking that ultimately lets us communicate as equals.  When we give up argument, and give ourselves over to the image, to those beautiful, mundane things that populate our world and which we ever seem to be talking around, then we might achieve something like harmony in our relationships.  It’s a poignant moment made more poignant by the grace with which Shapiro allows the reader to reach it.

So it is the image, strangely juxtaposed with the mundane features of everyday life, that Shapiro seems to traffic throughout the collection.  Whether we see that “The last baby/ born in 2009 beats up the first baby born in 2010,” or “Life is mirrors pointed at other mirrors and then one day/ your mom comes in and breaks them all,” there are many instances where it is the shocking image, or accrual of such images, that drives the poem towards its always unexpected, yet vaguely logical conclusion.  In an era when some worry that the image may be supplanting the written word as the preferred method of communication, Shapiro seems ready to embrace this change as a way to reconnect with one another at a level deeper than our constant, vocal discussions about our needs and wants. We should all become images, or at the very least, situations—performances that communicate our willingness to engage and see and listen.

And so, in the final poem of the collection, “So Much Beauty from Despair,” the speaker stands on a train platform in a tutu, imagining and performing her despair through a series of strange and vivid moments: “I extricate the chopsticks from my purse…A three-legged cat with no fur paws by./ I toss my ballet shoes from center stage/ and crumple dramatically. The audience explodes.”  We all live confused, and at times, sad lives, and for the most part we live our pains and failures alone, despite whatever family and friend network we might have around us.  And thus it is the performance of our pain, the sensory-based image of it that allows for the best communication of it, if only each of us will listen, or see one another.  As the poem ends, we’re again given that subtly beautiful, epiphanic moment that lifts us toward meaning:

Then it’s over and a sad monkey with a cap
starts picking up the pistachio shells.
I decide to give the monkey a good home.
He sits on my shoulder and is very pleased.
We will stop for bananas on the way back,
I tell him. He claps his hands and begins
to clean the wax out of my ear.

Shapiro ends with this absurd and humorous image of the monkey that is carrying a lot of weight in the poem.  Here, the image precedes the speech.  The monkey is the method by which the speaker’s ears will be cleaned, and the speaker will be once again ready to listen.  What Shapiro does here then, and throughout the collection as a whole, is not to propose disposing of verbal communication between people, but rather suggest that being attuned to one’s natural surroundings, with all five senses, should precede the impetus to speak, and that true understanding can perhaps only be attained by careful attention.  That what we all need are monkeys on our shoulders.

*

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Vanitas, Rough

Monday, June 3rd, 2013

by Lisa Russ Spaar
Persea Books 2012
Reviewed by Peter Longofono 

8

“regnant with a strange, godlike power”

Reading Lisa Russ Spaar, one can’t swing a stick without hitting Hopkins or Keats. Her chiseled diction and nimble command of vocabulary ennoble her subjects in ways reminiscent of both; she is equal parts sensual and cerebral. Furiously compact, classically restrained, her poems arrive at weighty moral fulcrums after astonishing flights of virtuosity. It’s all earned, and formally packed with such adroitness that her numinous, soul-destroying gestures gust backwards through the lines preceding them. Here is the complete text of the poem “Midas Passional”:

No one has touched me for weeks
yet in this drugged, gilt afternoon, late,

when nothing is safe, I’m paralyzed,
as though so wildly desired—passing solo through the garden’s

cinnamon, marigolds, famished roses, where a matted shingle
of the swept-up human hair I begged from a local beauty shop

& spread out fruitlessly among the blooms & canes
to keep away the deer might well be a satyr

passed out in the palace’s candied gold—
that something regnant with a strange, godlike power

could not help but reach out from the umbral blue
to tap my white arm. It is a day to die,

the light autoerotic, theatrical, with an unbearable listing,
stalled in cusp, in leonine torpor. Is courage artifice?

As though to answer were within my means.
Or to even move my mouth.

This is breviary poetry, prayer-taut and rite-prone. One look at the table of contents confirms her hagiographer’s bent—“St. Protagonist,” “St. Volition,” “Graven,” “Iconoclast”— if the term weren’t already so loaded, devotional poetry might even be the perfect descriptor. Spaar reclaims it, brimming with litanies, doxologies, canticles. Her talent for catalogue simultaneously claims American poetry’s obsession with objecthood and Baroque ornamentation. Strong accoutrement, at once worldly and other-, greets the reader front and center, as in this opening volley: “triangular glasses, brumal volts, gin, / frescade of pearls, plucked, sunned olives.” We’re reminded of pagan spreads, but also the Hagia Sophia.

This characteristic paradox lodges in most of her poems, spicing them, often an alloy of the final image and the words making up said image. It is important to Spaar, crucially so, to incorporate these troubling elements. For example:

On knees stained by the zodiac
I hold nothing back;

self in augend now, low tide—
a sky increased by subside—

There’s Dickinson in there, too: neat rhyme capped with dashes, the Self sharply apparent against the Eternal. Yet as often as things rise to sacramental intensity, she’s never unwilling to cut the pretty out. She’ll drop a “metafucked” or a “vagenda” disarmingly, willfully upsetting her own sense of procedural care. Self-abasement and doubt play freely with lust, resoluteness, and empathy. Nothing’s reducible, least of all God. And there’s Hopkins and Keats for you: the former’s sonnets, the latter’s negative capability and struggle with received spirituality. How to read her, then? She’s their great-granddaughter. She’ll floor you out of sheer whim and have you convinced, all in fishtailing syntax and Fabergé prosody. Read each terse piece three or four times—don’t worry, you’ll want to—and revel in a voice steeped in generations of delicious unease.

*

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Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom

Wednesday, April 17th, 2013

by Sung Po-jen (translation by Red Pine)
Copper Canyon Press 2012
Reviewed by Diana Arterian

8

“read the poem of old Tung-p’o”

In his original 1995 preface to Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter) describes his personal history with the text. Red Pine found a 1928 edition of Sung Po-jen’s book in a used bookstore in Hangchou, China in 1989; he writes, “I had never heard of Sung Po-jen or his book, but I was captivated by the pictures.” The history of the text itself, extrapolated in Lo Ch’ing’s introduction, involves several centuries of disappearance after its original publication in 1261, with moments of resurfacing every few centuries or so before copies were made from an original edition in the 1800′s. The preface by Sung Po-jen included in the original Guide is quoted at length in Ch’ing’s introduction. Po-jen writes, “…I painted the flower from the unfolding of its buds to the falling of its petals. I painted more than 200 portraits, and after eliminating those that were too staid or too frail, I was left with 100 distinct views. And to each I added an old-style poem…[the Guide] is about capturing the spirit of the plum blossom.” Guide is, as far as historians know, the first printed book to integrate poetry with images.

As for the book as provided to us by Red Pine and Copper Canyon (this is his sixth book of translation with the publisher), it is a unique bilingual edition as well as facsimile, as it includes the illustrated text. With the facsimile, a large portion of the page is devoted to the image of the blossom, which is below the title of the poem. The poem itself is in two columns to the left of the image. Though Po-jen originally painted the blossoms and poetry, thirteenth century printing in China involved reproducing images onto woodblocks. The images included in Copper Canyon’s edition very much bear the woodblock appearance, with some portions and lines that are meant to be solid black with chips of white in them.

The poems themselves are very short – four lines with five or six words each, the originals each bearing five characters per line. The poems’ titles describe the shape Po-jen sees in that particular blossom – like “Rabbit Lips,” “Frightened Gull Flaps Its Wings,” or one of several items used in China at that time, such as “Pien” or “Yu.” The poems are not about the plum blossom at all, but rather about the shape at different points in its blooming, and that shape’s relation to Chinese history and thirteenth century Chinese culture.

Beneath the translated poems are notes by Red Pine explaining the surprisingly copious references in each brief poem (cultural, historical, literary) as well as what is otherwise lost in translation – puns and the like. This instantly reminded me of some versions of Aesop’s fables that include notes explaining the meaning of each, though Red Pine’s notes were often a paragraph or so. Initially this can seem a bit tedious, or at least require a particular mood. My process often went something like this: looking at the image, reading the poem but not understanding it, reading the notes, looking at the image again, returning the poem and understanding it a bit better (or some variant thereof).

Often these poems do not hold their own with those who are not extremely knowledgeable about Chinese history and culture, so Red Pine’s notes are a necessary presence. The tedium lightens, appropriately, as the blossoms slowly begin to open (the book moves from bud to spent bloom over its eight sections). When the blooms are fully open, Po-jen apparently had a difficult time attributing the shapes to anything other than birds and insects, so there are fewer references to retain when returning to the poem to comprehend it fully. But the best way to explain is by example. My favorite poem of the collection happened to be a mingling of the blossom relating to nature as well as the historical. The entirety of “Horse Ears” states,

what’s Ch’i-chi without Po Le
thin pointed useless knives
on North Terrace half-buried in snow
read the poem of old Tung-p’o

Looking at the image you can see the blossom does indeed look like it has horse ears, but the poem itself is likely lost on us. Red Pine explains that Po Le was a famous judge of horses who was particularly interested in ears as tellers of a horse’s quality. One horse Po Le deemed of good breeding was Ch’i-chi, “whose name is still synonymous with speed.” As for “old Tung-p’o,” Su Tung-p’o wrote a poem on a friend’s North Terrace wall after it snowed “that the only things visible above the snow were the twin beaks of nearby Horse Ear Mountain.” Now the poem again.

what’s Ch’i-chi without Po Le
thin pointed useless knives
on North Terrace half-buried in snow
read the poem of old Tung-p’o

If this doesn’t test your patience, then I recommend Guide. Even if it does, the fact the text becomes easier to interact with as you make your way through the one hundred portraits makes your experience feel (befittingly) like progress and growth. One poem describing an open bloom that only needed two sentences of explanation was particularly nice. I include it in full – it reads:

New Lily Pads in Pouring Rain

a small pond newly green
pads of floating jadelike coins
in the rain ten thousand pearls
only a clever wife could string

“Clever wife” is another name for the tailorbird, which builds its nest with great skill out of next to nothing. Here, Sun Po-jen calls on it to fashion a necklace from raindrops.

*

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Train Dance

Saturday, April 13th, 2013

by Jonathan Wells
Four Way Books 2011
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

8

“I cannot catch tomorrow’s train tonight.”

In Train Dance, Jonathan Wells tells clear-headed and powerful stories. There are definite ideas and feelings he wants conveyed and, boldly, he speaks them to the reader. Wells has gone out of his way to avoid artifice and obfuscation. The clarity is almost disconcerting, but as the poems progress through their four distinct sections, the reader stands on the base Wells has built. The late poems earn a higher attainment, not only by being strong poems, but by ensuring the reader is prepared to feel them thoroughly in a single read. Where he begins by taking in a whole city, his poems grow more intimate by degrees. The later poems in the book cover more personal content, but have already been thoroughly contextualized, and so legitimized, by earlier sections.

In the opener, “The Dream Line,” Wells refers to “the lamp side of the river” as he dreams his next day’s commute, and closes with the recognition that  “no matter how far I lean into those turns / I cannot catch tomorrow’s train tonight.” This is observational poetry – simple images that are immediately obtainable by any reader and used to gather insight. Many of the early poems exist in the space between dream and reality, a sensitivity perhaps cultivated by inert and passive train commuting. Wells contemplates the role of writer as someone both removed from and creating reality. In “Another One,” Wells refers to the two selves (at least) that each single person represents:

In each one of us there is another one
[...]
who sits outside at night in winter
who releases his love and enslaves his son
who grieves for all his mothers
but shows no signs of it . . .
and there is another one who writes it down
who erases who conceals the seed of feeling
who says it is not his who adds one plus
one plus one to make another one.

In the next poem, “Nearsighted,” Wells works to identify with the reader and treats the writer as another third-party observer to the outcome of writing:

I provide the thief closing
his quick hand: money, identity
tricked away. I provide a red cyclone
of dust that ropes my feet.
And I provide a cop to chase the thief
through a grid of unlikely streets
and a phantom dancer swirling her soiled skirts
of light who leads me safely away.
In the city, glasses on, I am refocused

And in “The Giving Position,” poems are presented as forms that exist off of the page. They are an inevitable gift of the poet who is grateful from the first line, “The poems gave me a house, a boat, two rivers,” to the last, “Day by day I pay them back.”

In public, Wells’s voice as poet is guarded. Wells, or his speaker, is often a mysterious observer who occupies a private space in public, or public spaces made private like trains in the middle of the night. In “Morning Gamblers,” he writes, “they look through me as if I had not lived / yet in my shapeless suit, my unwrinkled shirt. / I pass them in the gambling car which rocks,” and so estranges himself from that particular group on the train. However, he re-communes with humanity at large at the poem’s close: “I take my ticket and slip it back / into the lottery of the city.”

In similar fashion, poems like “The Tailor’s Song” claim some of Carl Sandburg’s expansive populist enthusiasm, but Wells stops far short of claiming to know anything of the other through casual observation or generalization. The people Wells focuses on are family. He identifies more with locations from childhood than a stranger passing in Grand Central Station. In “London Plane,” Wells acknowledges that in talking about his love for a tree, he is lonely but not alone. The tree asks him: “When I call to you / what loneliness / makes you listen?”

Much of the same alienation and sporadic, unlooked for connection transitions seamlessly into Wells’s poems on family. “The Last Summer Night” is a beautiful vignette on a son leaving home; the reader doesn’t know why, only that the son “…will never / quite return…” This sense of connection and loss is best displayed in “A Visit.” A brother returns from Kandahar and brings back memory as concrete as his physical presence:

If my brother crashes on the floor, his dreams porous,
awakened now, will he remember the elements

I haven’t chosen. Even asleep he offers comfort
without color. He is still here but unconscious

and, gone but conscious, how will we live
again that clear woodsmoke evening.

Wells suggests that the present people occupy is powerful enough to disrupt the past, but not to sever the bonds of loved ones. Again and again, the speaker’s parents, brother, son, and “Beloved” emerge, but the reader becomes more connected, not distanced, from the poems as a result. So when the reader comes to “The Future” in the final section and reads:

I met a man
who sat in the sun so long
he could remember how deep
the day could be in him
and he sank into his shadow
which ate into the grass
and he became my father.

the reader already has feelings for the father, for Wells’s sense of inevitable aging and succumbing to his own shadow, and of the ability of passionate love to temporarily hold back that shadow.

The actual train dance, in the poem “Train Dance,” is done by the speaker and his son. It is a rain dance meant to make the train arrive. Even the most standard machinations of human culture are as mystic and whimsical as the falling of rain, so Wells chooses to enjoy. Wells is generous throughout the collection, sharing his joy while never compromising art, structure or taste. These poems live up to the promise of poetry that is attainable in a single read but continually new and yielding thereafter.

*

 

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Balloon Pop Outlaw Black

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

by Patricia Lockwood
Octopus Books 2012
Reviewed by Francesco Grisanzio

8

“When the world was ending, liquidators came.”

Patricia Lockwood reclaims the word “cartoonish” from the pejorative with her first book, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. The poet embraces the essence of cartoons to develop the logic behind lively, surreal, imaginative, and humorous poems, insisting on curious intellectual rigor and formal dignity throughout. Her poems are populated by Popeye, by “a worm wearing glasses.” Lockwood uses these characters as tranquilizers, and as the basis for complicated discussions on symbolism, perspective, invention, and language, among other topics. The highlight here, though, isn’t that Lockwood uplifts the reputation of cartoons by treating them with curiosity, respect, and intelligence (which she does); it’s that she taps into how weird and fascinating cartoons are as she embraces their essence for the logic of her poems.

There’s an elasticity to Lockwood’s work, the kind a cartoon body displays when turned into an accordion by a plummeting anvil or as demonstrated by the endless transmutations of Daffy Duck in Duck Amuck. It’s easy to see this flexibility in the forms of Lockwood’s poems as they vacillate between prosaic, poetic, and organizational (think referential asterisks). But malleability is also found in the differing modes of existence present in the poems. There’s a cartoon physics by which things can suddenly exist, and cause-and-effect is reduced to just effect, like in “The Cartoon’s Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace,” in which Lockwood writes, “When the cartoon needs to be born, he reaches deep into his pocket where nothing was before and suddenly brandishes her two pink legs.” Yet scenes like this are often framed by a reality more familiar to the reader as the narrator tries to make sense of it in comparatively quotidian terms. In “When We Move Away from Here, You’ll See a Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung,” Lockwood writes in regard to “popeye” (as a word or idea rather than a character):

He is famous for being always on time; he arrives at his destination in one second flat.* In one minute flat. In one hour flat.**

 *How? We suspect that he lives in an atlas, where all distances are collapsible.

 **“Flat” is not the word. Say instead, there is a limited amount of him, like water, and it seeks its level.

 Things get delightfully messy through these interactions, like a 2-D entity trying to describe three dimensions or, as is the case, something physical trying to define what it is to be conceptual. Although we’re given fairly tidy images of concentricity—like “water filled with ripples, with approximately equals signs” (“The Quickening”)—to relate our interpretations to and are addressed by a confident, authoritative narrator who often explains what it is we’re looking at, we are shown too much complexity to understand it that simply. I prefer this image (also from “The Quickening”), if any, as representing the book and the experience of reading it:

The boy reaches into his pocket to jangle these odds and ends, and finds a pair of magnets also. He takes the magnets out and lets them repel each other, he feels force firm as a grape between them, and pops it into his mouth.

 It’s from that murky, conflicted middle ground between poles—not just the poles themselves—that the highly inventive, playful, and unexpected emerge.

 *

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Grand & Arsenal

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

by Kerri Webster
University of Iowa Press 2012
Reviewed by Seth Graves

8

“When the world was ending, liquidators came.”

Kerri Webster’s poems are fiery and verbose. She injects the biblical-apocalyptic into the seeming mendacity of chain stores, thrift shops, big skies, and small airports. Her concerns become an unfamiliar kind of unease, her sonic chops and twists always juxtaposed with the expansiveness of her subjects of place. She imbues in the reader a fear that folks can accept an imitation for the natural:

You think the park’s the world,
it’s not even a real view, the dream
of safety a sculpture garden,
a figment—a boy sleeps
on the riverbank, coat for a pillow

(“Tinnitus”)

Grand and Arsenal is an intersection of South Grand, an eclectic neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. Though the neighborhood boasts a more international collection of food and influence, St. Louis, like many of its other Midwest city equivalents, is the land of sweet BBQ, the blues, proximate farm and university towns, and cities that still suffer from ramifications of white flight (though in a rare mid-city move, STL does manage a dinky subway system). South Grand is one of those burgeoning midtown neighborhoods.

The poems of Kerri Webster’s Grand & Arsenal, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, seem provoked by her four-year tenure as Writer in Residence at Washington University in St. Louis (alongside the company of poets Mary Jo Bang, Carl Phillips, and Jennifer Kronovet), as well as her native Idaho. Webster pairs poems from the interior with the wide-angle lifestyle of the Midwest and West. As a former Missourian, I recollect weekends of long drives through flat fields from midsize city to midsize city—Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines, Omaha, Champaign-Urbana—in equal observation of homogeneity and prized cultural locavorism.

In “Seed Vault,” she writes in prose, “I abandoned one town, found another, turned at the three windmills, said Holy the hail I’d FedEx by handfuls if I could as desert gave way to flash flood and lightning kindled the foothills unto tinder.” Her sounds twister-swirl. She fuses the importance of place with the cognate manmade redundancies of the American landscape: big suburban infrastructural grandiosities (“On cruise control we drove the saint’s/ wide avenue”), big Walgreens (“Folly becomes us, the end of empire uncomfortable and strange, in the Walgreens’ parking lot always someone with hand outstretched and I am stretched inside”), big Wal-Mart, big pork chops, big sky (“The sky gets in my clothes./The fireplace stars/small apocalypses./Across the sea,/the goldsmith rubs her eyes.”).

“We rode our fine horses, our sad horses,” she writes in the final poem, “Postscript.” “We sounded/ the ram’s horn and waited. Wanted. Rubbed cloves/ on painful gums. Split the creature, crawled inside.” The poem maintains the pitch of a frantic voice reaching for landmarks in the human condition.

Imagine houses filled with trinkets. Or a pregnant woman living inside a Wal-Mart like Natalie Portman in Where the Heart Is. She opens the book with invocations to the muses—God, and knickknacks:

Bless me I am not myself. These days. Objects
pile on my work-bench: a flame. A seed. A heart. A brass
pig. A fat key. A creamer and pitcher also.

And she ends the poem, “Where the meters/ are all broken, find me.” In these lines the poet has masterfully spliced rhythm and spliced image in tandem, invoking the anxiety and swiftness of the book’s work.

Webster’s work gallops. And like a well-cooked pork chop, it grants substance over tricks and provides an intimate perspective of the country’s middle.

*

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Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me

Saturday, October 20th, 2012

by Mark Leidner
Factory Hollow Press 2011
Reviewed by Kathleen Rooney

8

“…when I’m not trying to be funny, but I get a laugh.”

Mark Leidner is responsible not merely for crafting the poems in his collection Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me, but also for the cover, where a red-uniformed basketball player soars above the New York City skyline to dunk on the Twin Towers. Like the poems in the book, this cover reads as both striking and provocative—funny, uncomfortable, and not without pathos. Leidner’s illustration is risky. It also speaks to the pleasure of sport: watching someone who is exceptionally gifted at a specific activity who is doing it not only well, but also joyfully. Leidner’s poetry is aware of and delighted with its own virtuosity, but is not arrogant about it; the poet is not only cognizant of, but insistent upon, its limitations. No amount of dunking will bring back the Twin Towers. This book is good at what it does while being concerned with what it is unable to do, often taking that very inadequacy as its subject.

One of the best pieces in the collection, “Yellow Rose,” comments on the futility of anti-war poetry in particular and “political” poetry in general. After a page-and-a-half of comic riffing on scenarios that give the prurient, immature speaker “a boner”— including, but definitely not limited to: “tornadoes on the news,” a woman pronouncing “apricot,” and “the way the sun came through the window/prismatized by smears of grease”—he transitions to images which do not, starting with “the level of tranquility/a Jeep of body bags achieves/jostling off along a twisting gravel/path, bound for home,” and including “War/in general, and in particular/the current war”. The speaker bitterly concludes:

I am against the current war the most
because while it unfolds
I live, and I love
I suppose. But who could possibly care
what I have to say about this war?
I could say anything here,
it wouldn’t matter. I could say,
“I am Motortrend Car of the Year.”

Or,

“You are the yellow rose
corkscrewing out of the slippery rocks
that gird the river of black water.”
“I have seen a thousand moons
wax and wane to completion
since we last touched.”

And though the speaker tragi-comically asserts his own impotence in the face of institutionally sanctioned violence, he simultaneously shows that his statements do matter; the poem ends up politically and emotionally efficacious because it spends most of its time winning the reader over and accruing a degree of good will before getting to its real thrust. As the poem progresses, the reader comes to realize that the innumerable goofy hard-ons are not arbitrary, nor are they just cheap signifiers of lowbrow bodily humor; they are also interrogations of masculinity. Thus, the semi-sudden turn at the end to war is not a 180, but a smoothly connected component of an argument, a surprising yet inevitable shift toward the classic juxtaposition of that which is erotic with that which is deadly, as well as the pain of being largely powerless in the face of institutional coercion. “Yellow Rose” is hilarious, weary, and sad, and speaks eloquently of the frustration of being an atomized subject in a “democracy” that does not care.

It would be misleading, though, to suggest that this is primarily a political collection. Most of the poems make no mention of global conflict or politics, but rather take as their premise something the reader will know passively and forcing them to know it actively. For instance, few people have not heard the expression “Pearls Before Swine,” just as few people are unfamiliar with how the formulaic plots of “Romantic Comedies” unfold. Rhetoricians and cynical film makers exploit pre-existing knowledge of these things all the time, inducing their audience to buy what they are selling without actually thinking about what they are saying. Leidner sets out to give the weirdness of these things back to his audience—to make his readers aware of all the detritus in their heads. The penultimate paragraph of the prose poem “Pearls…” asks:

How would you feel if your whole life was worth nothing? And nothing came of it? You would be like a dog staring up at a Rembrandt. Or a single-cell amino acid stranded on some meteorite in space. Or a really good baseball player back in primordial times, back before there was baseball, or even civilization.

Be smarter than you have to be, the poem seems to suggest; don’t waste your brain, don’t waste your life. Compelling though it is, this accusatory tone might fail if the speaker did not, in the ultimate paragraph, accuse himself as well, admitting:

Sometimes I feel like that too. Sometimes I feel like a swine pearls are being cast before. Like at sunset. Or every time it snows. Or when I have sex and the girl is on top. Or sometimes when I’m not trying to be funny, but I get a laugh.

In breaking this expression down to a degree that does not, on the surface, seem possible or even worth attempting, Leidner seems to be asking both “How on top of my game can I be?” and “Isn’t there a different game we should be paying more attention to?” This latter bit of self-critique—does poetry matter? Does art? Does beauty?—ensures that neither the book nor the individual poems come off as shallow exercises in technique.

Similarly, “Romantic Comedies” consists of 17 pages of pitches—“Everyone in his life has drowned and he hates dogs and she’s a collegiate swimming coach with a thousand dogs”—that put one in the mind of a Baroque composition; they are increasingly ornate as they accumulate, building to a crescendo by way of timing and repetition. The piece takes shape as a comment on love, but it also suggests that the search for love in rom coms is potentially metaphorical for all kinds of searches, so it goes both ways, and the poem helps the reader see that.

Leidner’s poems always seem to set out with a purpose, and then to be making surprise discoveries en route, and sometimes those discoveries consist of what the poem can or cannot do. For all their high-concept premise-i-ness (Recall that of the cover: “What if a guy tried to dunk on the Twin Towers?”), the poems do not embark with mere novelty as the goal, but rather commence with something received to see what happens when a ton of pressure is applied—can I take this coal and squish it into a diamond? Over and over again, Leidner takes risks—seemingly multiplying potentially “bad ideas” times a million to see if he can eventually push through to a good idea. If these poems were just riffs, then nothing would be at stake, but because he is trying, always, to be coherent—to make his poems add up to more than the sum of their parts. The reader wonders “Can he do it?” and roots for him when he does.

“Biographies of Einstein,” for instance, begins with a series of outrageous statements and one-liners, such as, “They say he had a small family,/about four inches tall”, kind of like the animated song “George Washington” by Cox and Combes or “Anecdotes from the Life of Pushkin” by Daniil Kharms. At first, the piece seems as though it might be a series of fanciful non sequiturs, but then—as he does elsewhere—Leidner proves himself thankfully ill-suited to non sequiturs, stringing them together until the poem becomes narrative. Thus, he achieves the steady energy of a non sequitur-driven poem while retaining the option of progress, moving in a direction toward a point. Instead of discrete fireworks (which could be charming enough), Leidner’s poems take their beautiful flashes and choreograph them into a full-on laser light show. His poems have takeaways—they have, to use an old fashioned high school English class word, themes. They refer to things outside themselves, and they do not merely quote them. “Biographies of Einstein” is ridiculous and silly, but so too does it deal with the heroic and problematic sides of the actual Einstein, and his complicated relationship with the nuclear history of America.

To put it another way, Leidner tends to write poems that argue. He produces poetry that a reader can agree or disagree with. His poem “Story” reads like a parable mixed with a PhD thesis, or like a Milan Kundera novel where a great deal of the “story” is actually thinky commentary on the deceptively simple narrative. Language, the poem declares, “calls action forth, out of the body. / That is what powerful, believed language does. It is the wind in front of the locomotive that pulls the rest of the train into the future.” Here and elsewhere, the reader can see what the poet is asserting, can discern the values and ideas being expressed and defended; Leidner’s poetry is not a series of clever but ultimately empty utterances or dropped statements that never link to the surrounding ones, interesting though they may be. Rather, this poem proceeds unexpectedly yet logically, making a case, offering exhibits and evidence and adding them up to a whole, all the while keeping the reader’s interest because of the inherent tension suggested by the title—is this poem a poem, or is it a story, and how can anyone tell? Beauty is the case, as the collection’s title explains, and Leidner obviously wants to entertain and to meet his readers where they live, but also wants his poems, above all, to be beautiful.

*

 

 

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