Posts Tagged ‘Ben Mirov’

Sensational Spectacular

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

by Nate Pritts
BlazeVOX Books 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

7.5

110%

pritts coverThere 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.

*

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Forget Reading

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

by Anthony Hawley
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

6_5stars_6

Broken/Beautiful

hawley coverAnthony 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.

*

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In the Pines

Monday, March 31st, 2008

by Alice Notley
Penguin Books 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

7.5 of 10 stars

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.

*

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Primitive Mentor

Monday, March 17th, 2008

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

9

Modern Disciple

primitive mentorNow 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.

*

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Poemes en Prose

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

by Pierre Reverdy, translated by Ron Padgett
Black Square Editions 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

8

Pocketed

reverdy coverNot much is known about Pierre Reverdy. He was associated with the most important writers and artists of his generation, among them Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, and Guillaume Apollinaire. He loved the work of Juan Gris. He published a short-lived vastly influential journal called Nord-Sud. Andre Breton called him “the greatest poet of the time.” He spent large periods of his life in isolation, dedicating himself entirely to his writing. He spent the last portion of his life in a monastery. He also created a modest body of poetry that has withstood the test of more than 100 years.

Despite the little we know about Reverdy in the way of biographical details, his poems continue to be a source of inspiration to many contemporary poets. He has had his share of translators, each of them erudite, many poets themselves. Among the best have been John Ashbery and Kenneth Rexroth. Ashbery, who recently released a translation of Reverdy’s long poem “Haunted House,” (Black Square Editions and The Brooklyn Rail) has long been a proponent of the French poet. Ashbery’s translations are excellent, as one might expect; often sounding more than a little Ashberyesque, they capture the calculated, austere imagery characteristic of a Reverdy poem. Kenneth Rexroth’s translations are equally breathtaking and perhaps more open and readable than Ashbery’s pieces.

Ron Padgett’s translations of Reverdy’s “Prose Poems” seem to fall somewhere between Rexroth and Ashbery. “Prose Poems” was Reverdy’s first book. Reading the poems, one cannot help but look for the nascent aspects that manifest themselves in his later work. Padgett has done an admirable job of remaining transparent while allowing all the nuances characteristic of Reverdy to shine through. The lapidary, Magritte-like imagery of later lineated poems runs throughout these translations. If nothing else, this is proof of Padgett’s sensitivity and skill as a translator. In “At Dawn,” for example, Padgett captures all the Reverdy-like elements that one would expect to see in the poet’s early work:

In my dream the head of a child was in the center.
If the clouds gather on your roof and the rain spares you,
will you keep the secret of this double miracle?
But no voice calls you. If you get up barefoot, you’ll get
sick. Where would you go, anyway across these ravines of
light.

What draws me to Reverdy again and again is his ability to embody what Rexroth, in his essay “The Cubist Poetry of Pierre Reverdy,” calls “…simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction.” Take for example the sentence “In my dream the head of a child was in the center,” where precision and clarity of image coalesce with abstraction. What does the head of the child look like? What expression does it have? Why is it there? All these considerations are left to the reader of a Reverdy poem. No image is interpreted and the author’s opinion about his subject matter is never interjected (the imperative “If you get up barefoot, you’ll get sick,” is about as didactic as Reverdy ever gets). The effect achieved is one of a middle-distance, where images and ideas become preternaturally focused. A classic Reverdy image is one that cannot bear the weight of any more details than that of those which it has already been prescribed. Ornate description, didactic utterance, or further paring down would disrupt the grace and balance of the image. This quality makes each of Reverdy’s poems feel miraculous.

Beyond the phenomenal singularity of each individual image, Padgett’s translations also capture the intense architectural qualities of Reverdy’s work. In “The Cubist Poetry of Pierre Reverdy” Rexroth notes that in a Reverdy poem

…the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we assume to be the result of causal, or of what we have come to accept as logical sequence, and then an abnormally focused attention is invited to their apprehension, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. So isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an unanalyzable transcendental claim.

In this section of the poem “Fascinated” we find the intense recombination of the physical strata of the world into the “radically different” structure Rexroth mentions:

All the eyes turn toward this point, and the street seems to want to leap over the balcony. And nothing is protecting
the sidewalk. Behind the old man who is smoking, there
is a younger and far too pretty head.

The images in this section, from the “All the eyes,” to the “far too pretty head,” seem to proceed based on a secret logic. There is no apparent reason why “the eyes turn,” or how this causes the street to “want to leap over the balcony.” The overriding sense is that the poem very well may not be held together by the experience of the poem’s narrator. If we tell our friend that we saw an attractive person sitting behind a man smoking at a sidewalk café, our friend will most likely take our word for it. This is not quite the case for a Reverdy poem; the juxtaposition and recombination of images forces the reader to cipher and grasp the information being delivered by the poem on a level that is as mysterious and subjective as the poem itself. In a sense, a Reverdy poem forces us to question neither the validity of its narrator’s experience, but the validity and coherence of our own consciousness.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the book signing for both “Haunted House” and “Prose Poems,” held at the CUE gallery in Chelsea. As Ron Padget scribbled his signature into my copy of “Prose Poems” I mentioned I was disappointed not to hear him and John Ashbery read. All he said in reply was, “these speak for themselves,” which says a lot more than I ever could about the quality of these translations.

*

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Drunk By Noon

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

by Jennifer L. Knox
Bloof Books 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

7.5

Painted Tunnel Syndrome

knoxcoverThe poems in Jennifer L. Knox’s second book Drunk By Noon mix pathos and humor in a way that reminds me of Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. Knox’s poems and the old Looney Tunes masterpieces are both rooted in a similar type of existential pain. Remember, Wile E. Coyote only chases the Road Runner because he’s starving. It’s his hunger that brings him to strap himself to rocket roller skates and plot intricate schemes involving glue and hand grenades. If it weren’t for the coyote’s constant suffering, we wouldn’t have the discrete series of imaginative situations he engenders or all the laughs that come from those situations.

The world Knox creates in Drunk By Noon is like this. It’s a series of beautiful failures linked together by the imaginative desire to fail again and again in highly enjoyable and creative ways. Just as one finds solace in the coyote’s tenacity and even joy in the endless permutations of his imagination as he plots the Road Runner’s demise, so too, can one be refreshed by the poems in this collection. Take for example this section from “So Sweet Our Teeth Ache”:

Let’s get incapacitated
under a tree –
short of that –
slowly bleed to death
through our sock bottoms.
We got nothing
going on at work.
We got no
fresh perspective
and by the looks
of the stumps still rotting
in the bear traps on the lawn,
none’s on the way.

Ostensibly, “So Sweet Our Teeth Ache” is about folks without shoes getting drunk and bleeding to death in someone’s backyard. The overriding sense in the poem is that everything is hopelessly doomed; however, this hopelessness is undercut by Knox’s wry humor and bursts of unexpected imagery. There may be no hope for enlightenment in the world encapsulated by “So Sweet Our Teeth Ache,” but who cares about “fresh perspective” when there are beers to drink and stumps to trap.

Not since I first read James Tate have I encountered a poet who is able create a world that is at once so bizarrely asymmetrical to ours and yet somehow uncannily accurate in its portrayal of humanness.  Even as Knox takes on the persona of “a little bird girl with a very, very / big dick” or laments the way in which, “We swing and miss, back / and forth, between the pussy // and jail,” she develops a strong sense of empathy for everyone and everything in her poems.

Granted, that empathy is often cloaked in scathing critique and incisive humor.  In the poem “Short People,” the Japanese Emperor Hiro Hito must tell the people of Japan that he is going to surrender, but:

People had never / heard emperor Hiro Hito’s voice before – they thought the Emperor was God. He / spoke in the highest level of formality – using words so antiquated, / ordinary people couldn’t understand a thing he was talking about.

Despite Hiro Hito’s good intentions, his message must be translated by an academic:

A man wearing big glasses translates: / “He’s saying we all did a really great job…” he pauses, furrows his brow… “but I think he wants us to give up.”

Until this point in the poem, the scene is wrought with a kind of sad irony. The leader of a defeated nation is forced to tell his people that he plans to surrender to invading forces, but his message is skewed by his use of an “antiquated” high-dialect that can only be understood by literati.  Knox could be addressing any number of critical topics in “Short People”: the role of the poet in society, the disparity between a government and its citizens, or the complexities in the relationship between author and reader. All of these issues seem present in “Short People,” even as the final line, “This is what most of Randy / Newman’s songs are about.” deposes them of their seriousness.

This is characteristic of the wonderful way in which Knox manages to be thoughtful and relevant while not taking anything too seriously. In light of the final line, the emperor seems less god-like and more human as he is compared to a pop-pianist. By comparing Newman and Hiro Hito, Knox manages to cast Hiro Hito as an artistic type, trying his best to get his message across to a distant audience. In this light, the emperor is far more likeable, but no less humorous and entertaining than he was at the outset of the poem. Most if not all of the personas in Drunk By Noon are like Hiro Hito: highly fallible and very laughable in a way that is acutely human.

What I like most about Drunk By Noon besides its imaginative leaps and phantasmagoric imagery is that it never seems to lose track of the quotidian. In “Speech to the Crowd at the Rodeo,” the narrator prattles on about “…a totally hot threeway” inside a tepee, decapitating the heads of enemies and using them as puppets and impregnating “all you fine, fine women out there.” The strangeness of the narrative, however, gains an eerie relevance when one considers that the “Crowd at the Rodeo” is not an imaginary one, but rather, us, the members of the collective audience reading or hearing Knox read. The implication that we are “the crowd” suggests that we are also an essential part of the occasion that has engendered the narrator’s tangent filled speech, not an amorphous third party watching from a safe distance. In this way, the poem avoids interpretation as an imaginative projection, analogous to, yet unaffected by, our reality. The world of “Speech to the Crowd at the Rodeo” isn’t a fantasy. It is the one we share and inhabit together.

One of my favorite Wile E. Coyote gags is the one where he paints a fake tunnel on a wall hoping the road runner will try to run through it. Anyone who’s ever watched Looney Tunes knows what happens next… the Road Runner passes through the tunnel… When Wile E. tries to follow… we know what happens, we always know, but it’s funny and new every time. This is the main reason to love Drunk By Noon. It’s not a giant leap from Knox’s equally sassy-sarcastic A Gringo Like Me, but it’s nice to watch someone do what they do and do it well. I’d recommend this book to anyone, even if they don’t start their day with a sixer.

*

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