Posts Tagged ‘Bryan Stokes II’

Classification of a Spit Stain

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

by Ellie Ga
Ugly Duckling Presse 2009
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II

7.5

Beneath Our Feet

ga coverDrawing upon the trappings of rigorous, scientific research – data logging paper, rigid categorization systems and stark photographs – Ellie Ga gives an air of legitimacy to a landscape of historical records beneath our feet. Classification of a Spit Stain examines the amalgam of chewing gum, urine and deteriorated concrete common to urban streets and sidewalks and finds not only depth, but beauty.  
 
Although the press release proclaims Ga as a photographer by trade, the opening images do little to boost this reputation.  The photographs are reproduced with little contrast in a violet-blue ink atop a reproduction of found scientific notebook paper, providing an output similar to that of the old duplicating machines once favored by schoolteachers.  Despite lacking in quality, the images nonetheless offer a practical reference point for the descriptive text woven in the pages between.

The textual portion of the book, written to resemble the specific and formulaic phrasing of a geology textbook, manages to accomplish this with a vaguely poetic cadence.  The first page stumbles to describe a spit stain (“The spit stain is a / The spit stain is a natural / The spit stain is a natural occurr”), retaining all of Ga’s restarts and handwritten revisions to produce a text that evolves naturally into its conclusions. By continuing this organic voice throughout the book, Ga invites the reader to explore this world with her in a way that embodies the scientific method.

                                                     ***
 
True to its title, much of Classification of a Spit Stain focuses on the characteristics of varying stains, resembling in many ways a field manual for the identification of birds or exotic insects.  The reader is introduced to round raised stains produced by gum, free-form stains from urine or gasoline and “other categories of underfoot materialization,” including sidewalk cracks and graffiti, which Ga misspells as “graphitti” on one occasion.  What initially seems an unmerited investigation of the mundane transforms into an exciting scavenger hunt.  The low quality of the images is rendered moot because Ga has provided the readers with the tools to find and classify on their own.
 
In addition to her foray into garbology, Ga offers some insightful observations about the sociological implications of her two years of sidewalk stain research.  Round raised spit stains, she tells us, “tend to form clusters of polk-a-dot patterns around doorways and bus stops since the tendency to discard increases where people exit, enter and wait.”  The further tendency of unsuspecting pedestrians to scrape gum from their shoes yields the “thin, wirey offshoots” found in some stains.  Of all of the forms of underfoot materialization, only “decorative elements,” such as graffiti and litter, serve as an “unequivocal sign of human presence and intervention.”  Again, Ga provides a detailed framework not only for interpreting her work, but for drawing one’s own conclusions from local stains.

Ga’s creative acuity shines towards the latter half of the book.  She manages to find beauty even in “the piss stain” which “if they are discovered within minutes of inception…will glisten and form a variety of curvilinear shapes.”  Perhaps her greatest strength lies in her ability to detach herself from the origins and composition of her subject, using a photographer’s eye to focus solely on visual elements. 

                                                       ***
 
After amassing her descriptions of the many and varied stain types, Ga turns her attention to contextualizing these disparate sidewalk droppings into what she refers to as “the stained landscape.”  A spit stain, she tells the reader, “does not always exist independently from its cement host.”  To prove this point, she presents a sort of grand unifying theory of stains, positing that the uniqueness of paved surfaces is as much defined by “uneven applications of cements or the pedestrian disturbance of drying cement” as by those elements which collect upon them.
 
With the introduction of this theory, the pictures take on a more surreal and intriguing quality.  In lieu of dark violet dots on a slightly lighter violet background, Ga offers expressively detailed photographs such as figure #9, which in its richer contrast and combination of visual elements creates a portrait of the stained landscape which resembles an overhead image of a jagged coastline.  The individual stains which previously seemed so meaningless are now essential elements to a vast visual ecosystem.
 
And so it is with Ga’s work itself.  Fleshed out by a detailed appendix, rife with even clearer images of the stained landscape, Classification of a Spit Stain exceeds its original vision by becoming something greater than a collection of annotated photographs.  Instead, it proves that the standard of useful research is determined by its ability to contribute to our understanding of our environment.  In crafting this work, Ellie Ga has substantially expanded our view of the world by pointing to the exciting narratives hidden beneath our feet and explaining how to read them.

*

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God Bless

Friday, September 12th, 2008

by H.L. Hix
Hanging Loose Press 2009
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II

3_5

Voicing

hix god coverRather than describe his latest collection as mere poetry, H.L. Hix positions God Bless as a “political/poetic discourse,” of which he serves as mediator.  Such a context, though tinged with hubris, allows Hix to explore a fascinating question: what if George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden engaged in an ongoing public correspondence.  Hix melds together an assortment of press releases, executive orders and other public statements into month-specific blocks of fervent, presidential verse.  Select lines from the public statements of bin Laden mix with Hix’s own attempts at bin Laden’s stylized form to serve as rebuttals in a series of interleaves. 

In execution, the resulting poems are at times smooth-flowing and conversational or disjointed and contrived—sometimes all of the above within a single poem.  Hix notes in his brief prologue that “no attempt is made to signal where one quoted passage [of Bush’s] joins another.”  This technique yields some rewarding juxtapositions, as in the first poem entitled “January 2001”:

The dogs seem to have adjusted. I worry:
one year, you may test and everything is fine.
I’m going to protect that privilege.
Every child must be taught these principles:
we will build our defenses beyond challenge,
we’ll see how that affects possible arms talks.
In four years, you measure again,
and all of a sudden something isn’t fine.

The capricious range of topics convincingly suggests that Bush has picked up the direct line to the Al Qaeda caves and embarked on a casual conversation with their leader.  The resulting effect manages to provoke thought in an unsettling manner without taking itself too seriously.  Unfortunately, Hix sheds this carefree approach in later poems, exchanging a successful literary device for hyperfocused propagandizing.  In “July 2001,” each stanza ends with the refrain “we’re going to keep the pressure on Iraq,” yielding a disjointed, repetitive verse with a bluntly forced agenda.

Hix further jeopardizes this enterprise in his approach to bin Laden’s responses.  The verse from Hix’s own hand often fails to fully engage with the italicized direct quotations used to frame it.  While the interleaf following “April 2002” effectively captures the tone of bin Laden’s own speech (“Khaled al-Sa’id, Abd al-Aziz, / Maslah al-Shamrani, Riyadh al-Hajiri: theirs / is the honor the rest of us missed, / to die for following God’s decrees, killing Crusaders.”), others rely upon the quotations as a mere prop, allowing the poet to vent his own political disturbance through a borrowed mouthpiece.  The interleaf following “July 2003” particularly falls into this trap, ascribing to bin Laden idioms and ideas that fail to ring true:

But Bush put his own private interests 
ahead of American public interest,

paying himself and his administration
with no-bid contracts to Halliburton…

Al-Qaeda spent five hundred thousand on
what cost America five hundred billion;

Bush and his cronies continue to siphon
billions into pointless occupation.

Hix allows his anger to cloud his judgment in these poems, shifting bin Laden’s voice into the voice of a predictable American anti-war activist.  Worse, he ignores the premise of this collection, trading a personable dialogue for a didactic diatribe.  As the collection progresses, the poems devolve further and further into mishmash of phrases from Bush and unconvincing vitriol from bin Laden.

Despite these flaws, several poems manage to shine. “October 2003” marks a return to thoughtful simplicity and conversational form, noting that “nearly every day / we’re launching swift precision / raids against the enemies of peace.”  So too does the interleaf following “November 2001” serve to bolster the collection as a realistic discourse (“Again and again he claims to know our reason, / and tells you we attacked because we hate freedom. / Perhaps he can tell us why we did not attack Sweden.”)  Unfortunately for God Bless, such poems are the exceptions that prove the tremendous lost potential of the concept.

Such concerns are foreign neither to Hix nor the reader, however, because the ending pages of the collection make public the pre-publication dialogue between the poet, publisher and others asked to critique the book.  The publication of often scathing criticism and counterargument is a groundbreaking concept and redeems some of the flawed execution of the poet’s other grand experiment.  Readers become privy not only to criticism from author Robert Mooney that “worse, though, is not just the sense but the absolute certainty on the part of any given reader that language is being manipulated in God Bless to serve a passionately held pre-scribed idea and ideology,” but also the author’s rejected (and not replaced) preface, which claims that the poetry “needs to be justified because it is transparent.”

While it would be relatively simple to castigate God Bless as a failed experiment, it serves a much more useful purpose as a case study on the expansion of not only the poetic form, but on the idea of a text itself.  One wishes not, as Mooney suggested, that Hix had been dissuaded from publishing this collection, but rather that he’d taken to heart the very criticism that he saw fit to publish along with it, transforming a first draft with great potential into the great final draft that it potentially could have become.

*

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Do the Math

Friday, June 20th, 2008

by Emily Galvin
Tupelo Press 2008
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II

7

Shoe-ful

Galvin--Do the MathExpectations run high for a debut book of poems; critics and readers alike search for the intangible that merited this particular manuscript’s salvation from the slush pile. Even higher expectations await the progeny of famous writers who must prevail over the assumption that they have achieved publication by connections, rather than merit. In her first collection of poetry, Emily Galvin – daughter of renowned poets Jorie Graham and James Galvin – sets the bar higher still by employing a wide array of complex and challenging interdisciplinary devices. Do the Math spirals out of the mathematical foundations of Fibonacci and Euclid, at times risking clarity, readability and meaning in search of new literary ground.

The collection opens with a wholly unnecessary and unintentionally patronizing introduction by Barry Mazur, a Harvard mathematics professor. While Mazur makes an earnest attempt to explicate the inner workings of Galvin’s mathematical verse structures, the very presence of such an introduction undermines the idea of the poems as viable creative works. An introduction should, at its essence, argue before the reader that turning the page will prove worthwhile. It should not supplant the ability of the reader to discern the meaning of a poem or interpret its structure independently. Galvin’s reliance on a mini-mathematics lecture to prepare the reader to view the poems in a certain light is troubling.

Introductory transgressions aside, Galvin immediately redeems her literary efforts with the first poem, “Spiral,” a challenging and rewarding simulacrum of a word search puzzle. Without spaces between words, and without a guide to navigating the maze of words, the reader must fail many times before ultimately finding the method to the poet’s madness. The poem ultimately consists of several smaller poems, seemingly unrelated but equally confessional, one consisting of only a single word – “Insidious.” Yet, even in this brilliant reformation of the traditional poem, Galvin is challenged with a pervasive detachedness – the poem often seems disjointed and unconnected, crystalline forms without rhyme or reason.

What follows “Spiral” pushes the limits of poetry further, as Galvin introduces elements of drama into her verse. The aptly-named “Premise” sets the stage for performances yet to come, creating the sort of detail-obsessed theater set that might be demanded of an overbearing director. Yet, strangely, the performance itself exists solely for performance’s sake, as “at the moment, there is no audience but the chairs. Bolted-down chairs with folding seats, rounded tops and metal backs, upholstered in coarse red cloth.” As the crescendo of details and descriptions builds, what was once a theater set transcends the stage and becomes a distinctive moment in time. Galvin calls for “winter afternoon light, the light that hits an Iowa cornfield at about 3:00 pm on a sunny day in February.” These intense stage directions set the scene for the next set of poems far better than any introduction might.

What Galvin does next redeems many qualms that a reader might have with this collection, as she develops her setting into a series of dramatic vignettes, sparse interactions between two characters. The building patterns of conversation between simply named characters – First and Second, A and B, Greater and Lesser – provide an engaging insight into interpersonal relationships and dialogue. In the seventh stanza of “Euclid’s Algorithm,” Galvin creates an entire scene without words. Simple and repetitive, yet powerful, movements supplant the need for language without denying the poetic essence in each line:

(B. looks at the ceiling. B. looks at A.
B. moves hand towards A. B moves slightly
towards A.)
(A. looks at B. B. freezes. B. brings feet
together. (Add) A. opens mouth.)

Without words, A and B transform their conversation into an elaborate dance, bringing the literal rhythm of their movements into the meter and pattern of the poetry.

Near the middle of the collection, with the poem “Rhinestone Hair Clip,” the novelty of Galvin’s conversational poetics begins to wear thin. The fascinating form fails to overshadow a lack of fresh and engaging content. In this poem in particular, the two characters, Ann and Ben, search for Ann’s new rhinestone barrette to no avail. Ann evokes a potent anger and desperation for this inconsequential and seemingly vapid object. An eventual revelation that Ben possessed the hairclip all along serves not as catharsis, but as a source of infuriation for the reader.

Galvin abandons the binary conversations for a more traditional sort of poetry later in the collection, adding a much-needed sense of balance. “Light Warning” makes excellent use of Galvin’s well-honed ability to capture the essence of a scene in compact, three-dimensional verse. “You know how / The air feels after everything / Has been carried out, doors and windows closed?” These more conventional forms challenge her playwright’s voice and yield fascinating verse and witty interludes (“I think when you ask for advice, you really want accomplices”).

If Galvin wishes for this collection to demonstrate her mathematical prowess, then her highly regulated and patterned dichromatic conversation poems serve this end admirably. In serving as her debut as a poet, however, the mathematical forms risk creating a false difficulty, obfuscating meaning and form under layers of algorithms and fractals. While it is fascinating to read Galvin’s “Notes” section and learn of the mathematical secrets lurking in her syllabic arrangements and line numbering, it is imperative that the poems of this collection be allowed to stand on their own. Do the Math is a promising start from a brilliant poet, but it can only be hoped that her next collection will throw off the scaffolding and present the caliber of lyrical verse that she affords only glimpses of here.

*

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Forms of Intercession

Monday, April 7th, 2008

by Jayne Pupek
Mayapple Press 2008
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II

7.5

Tangible Flesh

forms of intercessionOn the last page of Forms of Intercession, Jayne Pupek’s first full-length collection, a short author bio notes that she has spent most of her career as a mental health professional.  The off-kilter verse on each of the preceding pages, however, intentionally gives the perception that they were written from within the proverbial padded room.  In a time when taboos have themselves become verboten, Pupek manages to recapture in poems about sickness, infidelity and death the same uneasy awkwardness once reserved for discussions of politics, religion and money.  Poems such as “Lunch Hour” carry a continuous narrative through stark, startling images of the carnivalesque and unexpected: “I watch / a woman wrestle a dog to the ground. / She wants his bone.”

Divided into three sections, Forms of Intercession opens hesitantly.  The first section, also titled “Forms of Intercession,” begins with a disjointed poem of the same name, each stanza of which holds a tightly wound microcosm of a narrative, unrelated to any other.  It takes several poems with loosely connecting threads before Pupek settles comfortably into multi-poem ruminations on death and mental illness.  She warns in “Walking in the City” that “sometimes there is no absolution. / Scrape the onions off the bread and keep going,  / You do what comes next, no matter how ordinary.”  Yet there is nothing ordinary about the poems which follow.  After the ghost of suicide Spalding Gray guides a young woman away from a bridge railing, concerned about “the wistful look in your eyes, / and the way your body leans towards water,” the ghost of Sylvia Plath visits in the next poem, encouraging a woman to follow in her footsteps.  “Just leave / the children’s milk in a bowl, and don’t forget / to stuff rags in the cracks of the kitchen door,” Plath advises, her disembodied head appearing in the depressed housewife’s oven.  Pupek’s unwavering attention to detail fleshes out these narratives, bringing the grotesque form of Plath’s “dirth-blonde head” on which “charred skin peels from her cheeks” into vivid life on the page.

The grace and creativity of Pupek’s effort lies in her ability to spread a single theme across a wide swath of poems without risking dullness or repetition, or without even once acknowledging that the stories are related or that the narrator’s voice is the same across disparate poems.  Readers are left to question whether the woman in “Inkblots” who watches as bats “fly off stiff white cards / and circle the room” at her therapist’s office also later in “Puzzle” suffers as:

Red block letters tell me
there are 1,000 pieces.

I find only 999.

I look under chairs, dig under carpet,
bite brittle nails to quick.

On the mirrored side of the window,
I can’t see the examiner reach into his pocket
to caress my piece of sky.

The single, clear voice threading through each poem intensifies the litany of woe that Pupek builds in this collection.  Unending and unsparing suffering makes a reader want to turn away (“Broken water and a baby born wrong. / She is not what anyone wanted. She is not what you wanted and / you are her mother.”), yet that urge is overcome by attachment to this well-developed tragic character.

If any flaw must be found in Pupek’s brash verse, it is a flaw no worse than that of a Stephen King novel or a blockbuster horror film: desensitization.  By the middle of the collection, the reader no longer feels shocked when, in the poem “Apparition,” an ill woman receives a visit from her boyfriend, dead by suicide, and calmly announces that during their embrace “I found the hole in the back of his skull / and plunged my fingers into its core.”  Nor does it surprise that, next to her slivered almonds, she keeps “a jar holding a fetus. Homo Sapiens. Female.  / Born to another woman. I hesitate to name her,” which she carries around in public and displays to unsuspecting passersby.  The poems come to embody the carnival, where the three-headed dog is no longer an oddity, but a stale part of the everyday fare.

Oversaturated themes are easily overshadowed. Pupek exhibits a rare ability to drag a poem out of the realm of the abstract and compel it to expose the tangible flesh underneath.  In “Some Days,” five stanzas of gentle ruminations on past explorations of mathematics are shattered by two stanzas of undeniable substance.

Today, a nurse escorts visitors to my bed.
She assigns each one a name. This is your family,

she insists. Not students. The students are gone.
They stand around, a row of faces

Amid Pupek’s many themes, reality proves itself the most meaningful.  The poems of this collection defy easy interpretation, preferring to unveil their secrets slowly as the narrative builds.  Pupek’s greatest tool proves to be her scalpel, excising the outer coverings of metaphor and obfuscation that other poems might sheathe themselves in, leaving only the essence.  “She opens his vest, pokes with bare fingers, / pulls organs like magician’s scarves.”

*

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