Posts Tagged ‘Ben Mirov’

Gifts for Poets and Poetry Lovers

Friday, December 9th, 2011

It’s that time of year again! Here are some suggestions that might make the perfect gift for those that love poetry!

How about a gift subscription to jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, or Fence?

Many presses offer 1 and 2 year subscriptions such as Litmus Press, $75 gets you or your loved one everything they publish in 2012-13 including their journal, Aufgabe.

$75 also gets a year worth of books from the fine folks over at Wave Books.

Nothing says Merry Christmas more than a two year gift subscription to Octopus Books! For $64 you get 6 full-lengths and around 4 chapbooks with free shipping. The list includes with Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees, Rebecca Farivar’s Correct Animal, Brandon Downing’s AT ME, and a reprint of CD Wright’s 40 Watts. And then 4 more books: Chris DeWeese’s The Black Forest and Jenny Zhang’s Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, Patricia Lockwood’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Ben Mirov’s Hider Roser.

For only $50 you get all of this from Black Ocean: Hunger Transit by Feng Sun Chen (Spring 2012)
Fjords by Zachary Schomburg (Spring 2012), Handsome Vol. 4 (Spring 2012), Dark Matter by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Fall 2012),The Moon’s Jaw by Rauan Klassnik (Fall 2012)

No Tell Books has a deal where you can get any two of their titles for $20. Some of their authors include Bruce Covey, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, and Lea Graham.

Yes Yes Books offers both print and e-book subscriptions. When you subscribe, Heavy Petting by Gregory Sherl and Panic Attack, USA by Nate Slawson will be immediately mailed to you. On February 14th, 2012 they’ll send you I Don’t Mind if You’re Feeling Alone by Thomas Patrick Levy.

Ahsahta Press has a three different gifts packages (ranging from $65-35) including books by Kate Greenstreet and Karla Kelsey.

Dancing Girl Press has a (chap)book bundle of 5 for $25.

Projective Industries publishes hand-bound chapbooks. You can get four for $20 (while supplies last).

How about Fact-Simile’s Trading Cards including poets such as Bhanu Kapil, CA Conrad, and Joanne Kyger.

If you find yourself in Brooklyn or Manhattan, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop is offering free door-to-door delivery on their bicycles (weather permitting). Not only is that green, but you can support multiple presses and hand-select you’re own gift packages!

Likewise, if you find yourself in Northampton you’d be remiss not to stop into Flying Object or shop from them online!

While “best” has always been an arguable term, if you need more suggestions of what people have been reading/raving about take a look at Third Factory/Notes of Poetry and No Tells.

Tags: Ahsahta Press, Ben Mirov, Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Black Ocean, Brandon Downing, CD Wright, Chirs DeWeese, Dancing Girl Press, Denver Quaterly, Fence, Flying Object, Heather Christle, Jenny Zhang, jubilat, Lit Magazine, Litmus Press, No Tell Books, Octopus Books, Particia Lockwood, Projective Industries, Rebecca Farivar, Third Factory, Wave Books, Yes Yes Books
Posted in news

Parish Krewes

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

by Micah Ballard
Bootstrap Press 2009
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

“I will not rise / to receive their grievances / nor their praise…”

ballard cover Publishing almost exclusively in small press chapbooks, Micah Ballard has led a career that has been an homage to an era of poetry beginning during the San Francisco Renaissance and continuing on into the 1960s and 70s when poets like Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson and Philip Whalen were considered an older generation of masters and younger poets like Joanne Kyger, Tom Clark, Ann Waldman, Bill Berkson and Lewis Warsh (to name a few) were forming tight knit groups, and publishing communities.

Many of the small press projects Ballard is involved in still produce chaps that reference this period when publications were mostly produced in an 8 1/2′ by 11′ format on mimeograph machines or made by hand. Ballard’s new collection, Parish Krewes, is mostly a selection from a number of small press publications, printed by friends and circulated within select communities. Many of the poems are dedications and their language reflects the intimacy and idiosyncrasy of these friendships (see: “Purification,” dedicated to the poet Partrick Dunagan, and “All Saints Day,” for Ballard’s wife and fellow poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux).

Much of Parish Krewes owes its stylistic nuances to poets of this era such as David Meltzer (one of Meltzer’s collages graces the cover), and Joann Kyger, but perhaps Ballard’s most significant predecessor is the poet John Wieners. Closely associated with SF renaissance poets like Duncan, Spicer and Robin Blazer, Wieners was widely read and known in the poetry scenes of his time. Despite being lauded by Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, Wieners remains a poet who never enjoyed the success of his peers. A large number of Weiners’s poems condense a sense of longing and loss into elegant, seemingly effortless poems. Often, his language runs into the dark, recounting moments of solitude and destitution, drug addiction, and love loss. If you are lucky to find a copy of his rare chapbook The Hotel Wentley Poems, you will find a tonality and diction much like Ballard’s work in Parish Krewes. Take for example Ballard’s poem “Queens Tunnel to Lexington”:

Not enough
sleep
dreams where the real
life is lived
Surrendered realms
which initiate
the inner workings of deals
left undone.
Until there are none to be done.
Only the premonition
of where we’ll be when they arrive
what’s next
after they’re gone.
It all returns. But is it morning
or am I still here from yesterday?
Blood rushes below. Rain
seeps through windowpanes
the bell rings. Stop. I will not rise
to receive their grievances
nor their praise, false ambitions
material poetry.
There is another communion to tune in with
Something more immediate than flesh.

Throughout Parish Krewes there is the strong sense that each poem is resisting “false ambitions” and “material poetry.” All of the poems in Ballard’s collection maintain their integrity by refusing to participate in “Surrendered realms / which initiate / the inner workings of deals / left undone.” It is not made explicitly clear what these realms are, except that they promise the unsatisfying “…premonition / of where we’ll be when they arrive / & what’s next / after they’re gone.” This sort of explicitly opaque language is employed throughout Parish Krewes in order to create space that is both esoteric and open. The dedications to close friends, the idiosyncratic diction, the dark, private tone of the poems all function towards this end. My favorite poems in Parish Krewes inhabit an otherworld. They incrementally build themselves into a dimension where the poem hangs in the ether like a ghost, waiting to be recognized and listened to. Even the more esoteric moments shimmer with obsidian intensity.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Ben Mirov, Bootstrap Press, Micah Ballard
Posted in reviews

Undersleep

Monday, November 10th, 2008

by Julie Doxsee
Octopus Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Refigures

doxsee cover Many of the poems from Julie Doxsee’s Undersleep feel like descendants of early Robert Creeley poems, especially those from Words. The torque one feels moving from line to line is very much like the experience of reading a Graham Foust poem. The density of other poems and the way individual words seem packed full of content, bear similarities to the work of Rae Armantrout. For the most part, however, Doxsee’s poems are exotic and lack strong comparison. Perhaps their most unique characteristic is their obtrusiveness, which derives from predecessors while simultaneously creating an architecture all its own. Take the poem “Ice Shapes,” which contains many of the idiosyncrasies that can be found throughout Undersleep:

A mercury spill
follows you, spelling
between figure 8s:

the large cloud
fell from the wall
with sugar-water before

leaping to the magnet
wall. A curl of my
pillow-head-you

goes upsidedown
with a vase of orchids
as the evening

new pulls a flood
of ink from every
pen on earth.

“Ice Shapes,” like many of Doxsee’s poems, seems to exist in a realm where imaginative language flirts with physicality. The “mercury spill” in the opening line of “Ice Shapes” creates an unfamiliar context. The inclusion of the nonspecific “you” in the second line abruptly brings the poem back into focus by forcing the reader to consider itself within the zone of this bizarre circumstance. This conflation of poem-world and reader-world allows the “Ice Shapes” to unravel in a way that is wholly mysterious, as the “mercury spill” proceeds to write “between figure 8s.” Much like the “mercury spill,” these lines have an affronting quality built upon an internal logic which is both impressive and opaque. The “figure 8s” might be taken for infinity symbols and/or a type of knot; but what matters more is that their presence is integral to the construction of the poem. The “mercury spill” that precedes them and the strange procession of objects that follow seem welded together. Each one is a keystone.

The lines that follow are similarly confounding: a cloud falls from a wall with sugar water “before leaping to the magnet / wall,” “… as the evening / new pulls a flood / of ink from every / pen on earth.” While one could easily take on the task of ascribing meaning into each moment in the poem, the integrity and significance of Doxsee’s poems comes from their sculptural qualities. Each poem in Undersleep affects the space around it; the space on the page, perhaps even the reader’s space, the brainspace one uses to conceive the more chimerical compositions of poetry. Many of the poems in Undersleep function like sculptures in a gallery; they force an observer to navigate through and reconsider the space they inhabit. This is an array of poems that touch you in unique, troubling and frequently pleasurable ways.

Tags: 7 stars, Ben Mirov, Julie Doxsee, Octopus Books
Posted in reviews

Coeur de Lion

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

by Ariana Reines
Mal-o-Mar 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

King Cheese

Ariana Reines’s new book, Coeur de Lion, is named after a common brand of Camembert cheese (see the book’s inner cover) and for King Richard I of England (1157-1199), also known as Richard the Lionheart or “Coeur de Lion.”

Camembert is a French cheese usually served at room temperature. Good quality Camembert smells like dirty socks but has a complex, head-filling flavor, and a creamy texture. The cheese attains its more interesting bitter notes from natural ammonia that develops as it ripens. Its taste is an acquired one with a complexity analogous to that of fine scotch. Richard the Lionheart was King of England from 1189 – 1199 C.E. At the age of 16 he commanded an army in a failed revolt against his father. He was crowned King in 1189, but spent the greater part of his rule fighting in the Crusades, far from his Kingdom. The conflation of Coeur de Lion the cheese and Coeur de Lion the King creates a multifaceted symbol that describes Reines’s project.

Coeur de Lion, a discontinuous long poem composed of smaller, titleless poems, is a record of a doomed relationship between two young, well-educated New Yorkers. The narrator examines this relationship with a balance of sympathy and incisive critique:

The other night
When I couldn’t sleep
Next to you and I
Said I wanted to cry
And you said I should
And I looked down and breathed
And then I did cry
And you tried to touch me
And you did
And you tried to kiss me
And you sort of did
And I was so scared
That I love you and you don’t love me
I felt stupid when I put my pants on
And I felt stupid when I put my shirt on
And I felt stupid when I went to the other room to get my book
Beware of Pity by Stephan Zweig

The simplicity of the line structure and the anaphoric repetition of the word “and” are self-conscious and direct in a way that undercuts the otherwise clichéd content of the lines. Similarly, the reference to Beware of Pity, a novel by obscure Austrian writer Stephan Zweig, seems pretentious and redundant but in a self-effacing, affirming way. Throughout Coeur de Lion the narrator’s language reflects a similar self-awareness; she is conscious of the “cheesiness” of her situation while being simultaneously swept up into its chivalric void. It’s this feeling of being rapt in another person’s unrequited love that Coeur de Lion explores with a sense of masochistic relish, self-possession and integrity that is captivating, moving and often hilariously self-critical.

Transcending clichés of self-indulgence, self-pity and tediousness one might expect from a long poem about a failed relationship, Reines’s book is not so much about the object of the narrator’s longing, but the luminosity of the emotions that flourish in the absence of that object. The cheese/king symbol serves as a placeholder for the narrator’s failed relationship, embodying both the absence of the narrator’s former lover and the presence of a stinky yet delicious form of sustenance. Similarly, Coeur de Lion the poem, like the Camembert cheese it is named for, is a complex, heady blend of emotions best savored with a bottle of wine.

Tags: 7 stars, Ariana Reines, Ben Mirov, Mal-o-Mar
Posted in reviews

Rogue Hemlocks

Friday, September 5th, 2008

by Carl R. Martin
Fence Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Essential Jellyfish

Each of the poems in Carl R. Martin’s Rogue Hemlocks is miraculous and leads to a broad spectrum of meaning and possibility. Here is a poem called “Pumping Station One”:

Holy jellyfish
making innocent the insouciant curve of the hip
male or female.
Petrol in the beak, the pellucid orb
reigning slipshod in the air
of extant Being
as it bubbles afresh from this watery dissolve.
So you dispute this comic version,
laugh at those plaster statues of sheep,
shout your seminal baa of sequined mirth?
I too laugh at the clear proximity of her skin,
her see through toga adrift
in this briny pool love poisons with flammable
liquids.

Like “Pumping Station One,” the other poems in Rogue Hemlocks encourage a holistic reading; you could probably dissect a “Holy jellyfish,” but it’s better to watch it swim “in this briny pool love poisons with flammable liquids.” Martin’s poems are tenuous and whimsical while affirming the essentialness of their constituent parts and the material of which they are made. In a sense, they embody qualities of beingness one finds in living organism–or at least, an indelible sense of thingness displayed by inanimate objects.

It’s difficult to associate Martin with a school or predecessor. The protean consistency of style throughout Rogue Hemlocks is reminiscent of John Ashbery. Other poems, like “Mime Song,” reflect the crystalline imagery of the protosurrealist Pierre Reverdy:

When in the suborned world
fear of death strums
the blue xylophone, space
is clear and tense
as gloved hands gripping nowhere:
mime without meaning, or girder wheeled around in air
before its fall,
and the face slips into place.

For the most part, however, Martin’s syntax and diction, his wacky music, his sense of history and pop-culture are idiosyncratic. Each of his poems is a singular disturbance in the matrix of contemporary poetry.

If there is any weakness in Martin’s writing it is that this sense of wonder it invokes can be intimidating. The generousness and sublimity of the poems in Rogue Hemlocks may not be for everyone, but everyone should seek them out and be challenged by them:

We know, we imagine vulnerable colors, skimpy legs,
watching the noodles slither from chopsticks.
We hear sonic explosions, the pure lake’s concentric beauty.
Individually or as one we abandon the mistakes.

(from “Duties of a Paper Hat”)

Tags: 8 stars, Ben Mirov, Carl R. Martin, Fence Books
Posted in reviews

Letters Toward Jim

Friday, July 11th, 2008

by Matthew Langley
Catfish Press 2006
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Desert Wisdom

langley_cover Matthew Langley’s chapbook Letters Toward Jim is a collection of correspondence poems between a narrator and someone named Jim (potentiallly Jim Goar, editor of Past Simple and Catfish Press). Whereas other notable correspondence projects such as Jack Spicer’s After Lorca use the oblique relationship between sender and receiver as a justification for compiling and categorizing the collected poems, in Letters to Jim, the motivation behind the letters is open-ended and the relationship between sender and receiver is left unspecified. In this sense Jim becomes an idea rather than a real person. Who Jim is and what he represents remains to be embodied by the letter-poems and not by historical context or narrative explication.

As the title implies, these communications may never actually reach their destination. Their function is as an indicator towards the possibility of Jim. Who is Jim and does he exist? Is Jim and editor, a friend, a synonym for God, or all of the above? In a way, Letters Toward Jim is a compilation of uncorrespondences or communications sent with the awareness that they may never receive a response and that their recipient may not exist. Individual poems reflect this uncertainty:

We horsemen, astride our horses, what
do we care about?
The answer a loud wondering:
“Stroll to your profit; flick the wind east.
Gather a mighty following, a ranch
of desert wisdom. And if men balk
at your entreaties, beat it straight
to the mountains, trailing bullets
from your heels.”

The answer to “what / do we care about” is generated by the rhetorical nature of the question and not from a second party, as one might expect. In this case the answer or “loud wondering” implies more questions than answers. What is the “profit” mentioned in the fourth line? What are the consequences of flicking “the wind east”? What composes the “mighty following”? None of these questions are answered by the poem. The various components all seem to amount to “desert wisdom,” or a type of knowledge that is only as useful as it is barren. Many of the poems in Letters Toward Jim embody this idea of “desert wisdom,” or knowledge or insight brought about by the act of “loud wondering” and not via dialog as the letter-form suggests.

The aim of Letters Toward Jim is admirable if not wrought with Sisyphean challenges. One could picture Langley continuing his letters indefinitely, filling at least an entire volume a la The Dream Songs. The best poems have prayer-like qualities and a settle, self-effacing sense of humor and pathos, while the weaker ones get tangled on themselves and never quite produce enough energy to provoke repeated readings and or meditations. For the most part, the poems are lighthearted and attractive and make for a solid collection.

Tags: 7 stars, Ben Mirov, Catfish Press, Matthew Langley
Posted in reviews

Sensational Spectacular

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

by Nate Pritts
BlazeVOX Books 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

110%

pritts cover There is an unabashed revelry in Nate Pritts’s Sensational Spectacular that reminds me of certain poems by Frank O’Hara. In O’Hara poems like “Having a Coke with You” or “Ode to Joy,” passions take precedence over highbrow intellectualism. As a result, the objects in the poem become manifestations of the poet’s more intuitive emotions. In Sensational Spectacular this tendency leads to an appealing, bombastic aesthetic. Take for example these lines from “A Day in the Life”:

Any patch of land with a giant grenade buried in it

knows exactly how I feel, like I’m about to be

all up in the air (…)

More ephemeral comparisons can be made between O’Hara and Pritts. Sensational Spectacular is bookended by two sections called “Secret Origins” and “The Brave and the Bold,” which catalog the exploits of a narrator and his friends: Red, Green and Blue. As in many O’Hara poems, Pritts’s concern in these sections is the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Red, Blue and Green get in fights, play games, fall in love, and have adventures. The result is an intimate look into a “scene.” Just as O’Hara’s poems encapsulated the burgeoning yet exclusive art and poetry communities in the 50s and 60′s, Pritts’s poems examine the inner-workings of a small select group:

My friends and I believe in excluding newcomers

from our secrets: secret lair, secret handshake.

We collect our separate feeling of scorn

&rage& elitism the way other groups of friends

collect sea shells on the shore of the vast

ocean of Hello! (…)

The main difference here is the manner in which the people in the poems are presented to the reader. In O’Hara we get names like DeKooning, Ashbery, Freilicher and Goldberg, figures with personal and artistic histories. In Sensational Spectacular, the identities of the characters involved in the poems is masked and abstracted from the burden of history by their identification with the colors red, green, and blue. Red, Green and Blue feel like real people, but their personas and exploits develop in an imaginative otherworld, simultaneously like and unlike the world in which we live. If O’Hara had chosen a sort of dream-world constituted by his imagination rather than New York City, he might have written poems very much like Pritts.

There are many aspects of Sensational Spectacular that are unique. One of the most appealing nuances of his writing is its relentless sincerity. Nowhere in these poems does one get the feeling that the author is holding back or evading the reader for the sake of cleverness. The best poems feel unabashed and outrageous:

My life is a funhouse: giant faces taunt me

& every cornering reveals another hazard

volcano simmering in the guestroom, dinosaurs

holding bazookas. As if their teeth weren’t enough.

In these lines from “Never Be the Same Again,” the giant faces, the volcano in the guestroom, the bazooka wielding dinosaurs push the envelope, but what they lack in terms of subtlety, they make up for with their wholeheartedness. For all the risks Pritts takes in Sensational Spectacular, he never veers into affectation. In a time when so many poems are nothing more than impressive panoplies and poets can find a million precedents to divorce themselves from taking responsibility for their lines, Nate Pritts is a refreshing, entertaining writer. I look forward to seeing what he does next.

*

Tags: 7.5 stars, Ben Mirov, BlazeVOX Books, Nate Pritts
Posted in reviews

Forget Reading

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

by Anthony Hawley
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Broken/Beautiful

hawley cover Anthony Hawley’s second book Forget Reading is an insightful, relevant collection of poems that exist in and around the sonnet form. Though many of the poems are conspicuously labeled sonnets, their distance from traditional sonnet form speaks to the overall project of Forget Reading. Many of the “sonnets” even exceed fourteen lines. The poems in the final section, “Productive Suffix,” have a great deal of space between lines, making them feel exploded. Poems from other sections, especially “P(r)etty Sonnets,” have short choppy lines giving the feeling that the other half of the poem has been deliberately torn away, leaving only the left side. Most of the poems in Forget Reading feel like sonnets in a state of disrepair.

As the section heading “P(r)etty Sonnets“ suggests, imperfection and beauty are integral to each other in Hawley’s new collection. The interjecting “(r)” turns the word “petty” into “pretty,” so that both words seem to exist interdependently. While the parenthetic “r” creates the simultaneous meaning, it also creates a rupture within the word “petty” that is both artificial and disruptive. Many of the poems in Forget Reading try to achieve a similar effect. Take for example these lines from the poem on page twenty-seven from the section “Apple Silence”:

atomized margin

drip of glass

stone wall reduction

heather heather

that obscure object

of the flicker

The opening lines of the poem from “atomized margin” to “heather heather” contain images that maintain their identity via transitory physical states. An “atomized margin” is neither a margin, nor a collection of disparate particles, but a baffling oxymoronic combination of the two. The following line, “drip of glass,” conjures both the image of molten glass, as well as a drip of water that appears to be glass in the moment of our imagining it. And what is “heather heather,” but a girl named Heather that is simultaneously a flower? All of these images are representations of “that obscure object / of the flicker.” Like the section heading “P(r)etty Sonnets,” they maintain their character through their contradictory qualities.

This collection is about more than Hawley’s unique imagery. The oxymoronic images, and the (dis)function of the sonnet form both point towards Hawley’s desire to create a collection of poems that is as elusive as it is perpetual. As the directive title suggests, these poems are meant to maintain their mysterious, contradictory qualities in order to be read again and again. Even if this is a quality most of us seek out instinctively in the poems we read, Hawley’s aim is as admirable as his book is rewarding.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Anthony Hawley, Ben Mirov, Shearsman Books
Posted in reviews

In the Pines

Monday, March 31st, 2008

by Alice Notley
Penguin Books 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Whole Night Through

notley cover

Alice Notley’s In the Pines takes its title from a Leadbelly song of same name. The lyrics of the blues classic go like this:

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

My girl, my girl, where will you go
I’m going where the cold wind blows

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through

My husband, was a hard working man
‘Til a mile and a half from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night

In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
(repeat)

The song is interesting because of the similarities in structure and tone it shares with Notley’s book (if you haven’t heard the tune before, it’s worth checking out on YouTube. Nirvana’s tremendous cover should also be mentioned). Composed of repeating questions and their answers, the structure relies on an interchange between two personas. The opening line, “My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me,” tells us the first persona claims some type of ownership and authority over the second, the “girl.” In the ensuing lines we learn that the girl has lost her husband and that her sadness and dispossession have driven her into exile.

The comparison between the girl and Notley is obvious. Notley survived the untimely death of her husband Ted Berrigan in 1983 and went on to expatriate to Paris in the early nineties. Although Berrigan’s death and Notley’s expatriation may only be indirectly related, unlike the girl in the Leadbellly’s song, the similarities lend insight into the overall tone of In the Pines. This is a book full of haunting lamentation. It is also a reply to the discourses of power that seek to control and paraphrase those emotions.

The structure of the Leadbelly song is also an impetus into the complexities of In the Pines. Two personas compose the dialog that gives the song its structure. The back and forth between these personas moves the song forward. This occurs in Notley’s book as well, where poems contain multiple voices. This section from the opening long poem, also titled “In the Pines,” functions in much the same way as the Leadbelly song:

If you detest everything about your society, you say,
why are you writing?
It is time to change writing completely.
You are not doing that.
Wait and see.

The back and forth between two personas propels this poem. Just as in the Leadbelly song, one persona questions while the other replies. The main difference is that Notley is explicit about her aim in using the technique. Unlike Leadbelly, she doesn’t intend to tell a story. Instead, she is concerned with “changing writing completely.”

Just as Leadbelly’s song gives form to the story of a young woman who has fallen on hard times, so does In the Pines seek to embody the voices of those who cannot speak for themselves. Like Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Notley contains “multitudes.” The difference is that her multitudes are specifically the disposed, forgotten, forsaken and often the dead, as in this section from “The Black Trailor (a noir fiction)”:

You say that you’re dead and it’s dead: can’t be pushed
back through a hole in timelessness?
You say that I can’t really get at you.
You’re not where you expected to be dead, I say.
Is this a system? you say.

In a sense, Notley is more medium than poet. The rendering of multiple personas in In the Pines reminds me of the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer’s analogy of “poet as radio.” Notley is not writing so much as she is ciphering information from various sources outside herself and placing it into a “system.” In a way she is more like a “machine” than a “writer.” In a reading at the Kelly Writers House on November 6, 2006 (available at PENN sound), Notley professed to being “high on interferon,” a drug used to treat hepatitis C, while composing In the Pines. At the same reading, Notley also told the audience she composed Mysteries of Small Houses, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in a “process of self-hypnosis.” Whether or not the drug affected her writing, or whether she actually writes in a trance, it is clear that being in an altered state is a key component of Notley’s writing process and one of the most arresting aspects of her as a contemporary writer.

Beginning with her formative years as a poet on the lower-east side of New York and continuing with her expatriation to Paris, Notley has always identified herself as an outsider. It’s a title she has earned throughout her career and why she is perhaps one of the only poets writing today who could have written a visionary book like In the Pines. Although it is laced with vitriol, desperation, tribulation, sadness and regret, In the Pines, is hopeful. As its dedication “For my sons and their friends” suggests, In the Pines is for younger generations of readers and writers. It is instructive in the sense that it attempts to show new writers how a poet can change poetry for the better of everyone, poets and non-poets alike.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Alice Notley, Ben Mirov, Penguin Books
Posted in reviews

Primitive Mentor

Monday, March 17th, 2008

by Dean Young
University of Pittsburgh Press 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Modern Disciple

primitive mentor Now nine books into his repertoire, Dean Young risks a number of easy criticisms. One of these is that his poems are simply permutations of themselves, that each maps the same territory as the last. Another more conspicuous concern with Young’s work is its extremity. Unabashedly surreal, his imagery and his narrative impulses can be dismissed as wacky and superfluous. More than any of his past books, Primitive Mentor squelches these concerns.

While maintaining his characteristically deep, impulsive humor and outlandish images, Young explores new dimensions while honing his more familiar instincts. Young is not an experimental poet in the traditional sense; he doesn’t try to reinvent his style with each book. Instead he is concerned with a “constant plumbing of the spirit – / Like living in a mine making a study / Of cave ins.” In his first book Design with X, Young staked out a small soul-sized plot which he “mines” again and again and for the most part, more deeply with each attempt. In Primitive Mentor, new vistas appear. Take for example the opening lines from the poem “Triage”:

Fatally, the boy picks up a what he thought
on the occupier/insurgent fractioned
road. Fatally, the man goes out for popsicles
in the storm not for himself for his two
days later from the mudslide pulled he’s
given a kind of super power, drive a nail
into his chest he won’t care or notice.

The chopped syntax is something Young has done before, but here it has been applied to different ends. Take for example the lines “In the storm not for himself for his two / days later from the mudslide pulled…” The altered syntax feels like a jump in time. We expect to see “not for himself for his two kids,” or “children” or “friends” and instead are given a jarring forward movement. It’s worth mentioning that triage is both an action that organizes according to quality as well as a medical term used to prioritize a large group of patients according to the urgency of their ailments and or wounds. In this light, the break not only conveys the sense of urgency of the subject via its form, but is also characteristic of Young’s deeply ironic humor. The break between “two” and “days” encapsulates the period of time “the man” is trapped beneath the mudslide and the moment he is pulled from it, thereby gaining “a kind of superpower.” Of course, this power can only be death, which might send one back to reexamine “the boy” from the first line who fatally picks up a “what he thought.”Ostensibly, what Young is doing in “Triage” is assigning degrees of urgency to a group of patients who are already dead. His touch with the subject is insightful, bathetic and funny as ever.

The “two,” “day” line break is indicative of the greater project of Primitive Mentor. For me, Young’s writing has never been about the impressive quality of his imagery or his wit, although those are definite bonuses. What I appreciate most about Young, and what strikes me most about Primitive Mentor, is the spaces between the words, the line breaks that take 180 degree turns, the tenuous blankness between stanzas and words, the often concealed darkness at the heart of his poems. It’s in these spaces that the unifying force of Young’s poetry and the depth and scope of Primitive Mentor can be found. Image and wit are little more than tools Young uses to enter into these unknown areas. They lead him into dangerous places that the conscious, logical mind can neither purposefully go to, nor operate near, areas where more is at risk because less is known by the poet. The result, for the reader as they enter into these dimensions, is confounding, hilarious, idiotic, melancholy, heartbreaking—and never boring.

One of the miraculous aspects of Young’s poetry is that despite his forays into seemingly unreal worlds of poetic experience, everything he writes is deeply connected to our reality. His poems are recombinations that assume each word refers to something other than itself and that that something is real. A rabbit is a rabbit. Granted, that rabbit might be placed within a hallucinatory context entirely unfamiliar to anyone; nevertheless “Force of Rabbit” is a force felt, and stands among the best poems of the year so far. All of Young’s poems are based on the assumption that the world preexists poetry, that it is there, absolutely, and that its purpose is to lead us into greater areas of consciousness. He’s not just fooling around for the sake of creating a impressive panoply of images. Take for example the title, Primitive Mentor. What exactly is this? What implications does it have for us? What are we to learn from this mentor? Is it simply a creation of Young’s overactive imagination?

It’s my feeling that the “primitive mentor” is as real as the brain inside out skull. It’s the mechanism buried deep within our animal mind that knows more than we know. It’s the part of Young’s mind that reaches out to us from the line breaks and logical leaps that just barely defy our understanding. In a sense, “primitive mentor” is more real than the chair we sit on or the coffee we drink. In fact it may be the only real thing, as it is what allows us to reconfigure our reality into a new more vital one, just as Dean Young does with startling consistency and increasingly refined artistry in each new book.

Tags: 9 stars, Ben Mirov, Dean Young, University of Pittsburgh Press
Posted in reviews