Posts Tagged ‘Fence Books’

Dead Ahead

Monday, November 1st, 2010

by Ben Doller
Fence Books 2010
Reviewed by Matt Soucy

“Each thing charged / with ought bends –”

Ben Doller’s new book, Dead Ahead, is, dare I say,…fun. The dedication is “hey Sandra,” and the opening quotation is from a piece of colloquial writing by a seventeenth-century sea captain who explored the Pacific. The opening poem, “What Do You Do,” is a greeting between narrator and narrator. The writing is immediately fanciful and fast-paced:

What do you do.

Well. I tie population
knots in a length
of baling twine
laughing at mister
water & my, well –

(our elation
ship swell) –

Once you are started it is easy to be carried along from sound to sound and poem to poem. There is a vivid coherence of image and thought without the feeling of being brought into some writer’s overly-intense personal world. Doller uses a fair balance of sea-faring images, abstraction and personal interjection. His social commentary is quick and broad enough to apply to more than just current social woes.

What makes Dead Ahead strongest, though, is that concepts and sounds are well run-aground together. Piled internal rhymes and staccato beats keep the reader bouncing over the page:

A weight
A stick of space. A beam. Of zilch.
A swivelhead. Reverse trend
in cellular conglomeration. A cult.
An inner target. An origin disorder.
Send the word
send the word.
Telegram. Missile command.

(from “Pointing Habit”)

For all of feeling and sounding good (and good-sounding tongue-twisters that seem to move off of the page, e.g., “hotwater heater heating water hotter”), Doller also includes lines of a more personal nature that do not break up the central coherence of Dead Ahead:

were I were

steadfast as art

(from “On Vacation”)

but I have no city
an outline plus stains

a map of trade
routes winds & a market

community a target
humanity niche

I get so twitchy
when they call themselves me

(from “No City”)

Even when making serious points, as on the individual and community, Doller does not take himself too seriously. Even though much of the imagery used is reminiscent of pirates and exploration (ships, waves, squabs, holds, galleons, sails, citrus, etc.) his treatment of the images is light but not sarcastic. The strength of the book is in Doller’s obvious joy of words. The crafting is careful but not cumbersome.

The best example of this joy is the final poem, “Each Thing Changed,” where Doller jams sounds and words together to create two (or three) simultaneous poems. Here are the first few lines:

Each thing charged
with ought bends –

breaks light, which
is ought but

part star. Ought
is, I see

in the thick
book, a vulgar corruption.

Someone heard
someone say

an aught when
they said a

naught. Each thing,
charged with a

naught, bends,
breaks light bad.

The book ultimately moves through multiple formats and landscapes, moods and methods. What remains consistent is that Dead Ahead sounds good and feels good. Doller will delight you and remind you of poetry’s potential to create with language. Here, language pushes thought, not the other way around.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Ben Doller, Fence Books, Matt Soucy
Posted in reviews

The International Train from Ridgewood to St. Mark’s

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

The end of September will follow the thunderstorms of today, or at least Friday will, which can only mean that the autumn armada of readings will push on. Of incredible note, Michael Gizzi—author of over ten books of poetry, Brown University MFA graduate, and highly notable Burning Deck fellow—passed away on September 28. And, as Rimbaud so hates, the world marches on. For the past ten days, per usual, readings series have been actively off and running. Of record, there were two great ones—Poetry Time at SpaceSpace (on Saturday) and the Monday Night series at the Poetry Project, which oversaw the release of the new international magazine VLAK.

Saturday night ushered plenty of poetry-seekers to Ridgewood, Queens (or, what the curators call the “Bushwick/Ridgewood borderlands”) where the Poetry Time at SpaceSpace reading series kicked off its third season of literary performances. SpaceSpace hosts many other neighborhood activities for Bushwick and Ridgewood residents like music, yoga and crafts.

The Poetry Time crowd was pleasant and in ample number, topping out somewhere around fifty—all in one large apartment living room and kitchen!. In usual fashion, there was a garbage can filled to the top with cheap beer, a big ticket raffle for many arbitrary and deliberate (as well as unmentionable) items. Ben Gocker plays host to the series, offering up introductions that act as conceptual alternatives to the rather bland bios-read-straight-through tradition, one in which he cited a review that Gilbert Sorrentino wrote regarding the work of Curtis Jensen, one of the night’s performers. Sorrentino died in 2006 and probably never read Jensen’s work, but hey, he did attend Brooklyn College (as Jensen currently does).

Poetry Time is held at the residence of a handful of folks and all the readings are preceded by video presentations, a few of which have been compiled, produced, and edited by Fence poet Brandon Downing. This time was no different. The selected poets read to the audience while sitting at a desk, their sheets of paper under a green table lamp. Listeners sat on sleeping bags laid out on the large living room floor. Others stood in the kitchen around an island counter top. Each performer read for an average of twenty minutes (listed below, in order of appearance):

Brandon Downing (video presentation)

Curtis Jensen

Catherine Wagner

Judith Goldman

September 27 kicked off the Poetry Project’s Monday night reading series, hosted and curated by Macgregor Card. Not quite a normal Poetry Project one-off, it was the initial release event for the bi-annually released VLAK magazine, an international journal of poetics and art holding up forts in New York, Prague, and London. The list of the inaugural issue’s contributors is pretty astounding, an intercontinentally-inclined consortium of highly accomplished poets and critics and artists.

As each night’s reader took the stage to deliver a few poems, he or she thanked VLAK’s two attending editors (Louis Armand and Stephan Delbos) for putting together such a lovely artifact, each commenting on how great the issue looked. Pierre Joris publicly told Armand that the magazine looked better than anything he had been responsible for in his forty years of editing, writing, reading, etc. Eileen Myles took home the unofficial award for getting the audience to laugh loudest, reading from a piece that didn’t completely slam Ron Padgett (who was not in the audience to defend his self) but did highlight the rotisserie of people that St. Mark’s tends to simmer.

Of note, the Poetry Project Newsletter for October and November (#224) has also gone to the printers and become available to the reading public. Pick up a copy.

Listed below are the readers for the first Fall 2010 Monday night series at St. Mark’s, all contributors to VLAK as well:

Louis Armand

Vincent Katz

Abigail Child

Jess Fiorini

Elizabeth Gross

Arlo Quint

Stacy Szymaszek

Eileen Myles

John Wilkinson

Joshua Cohen

Stephanie Strickland

Stephanie Barber

Bruce Andrews

Christine Wertheim

Pierre Joris

Marjorie Welish

– Ken L. Walker

Tags: Ben Gocker, Brandon Downing, Brooklyn College, Bushwick, Catherine Wagner, Curtis Jensen, Eileen Myles, Fence Books, Gilbert Sorrentino, Judith Goldman, Ken L. Walker, Louis Armand, Macgregor Card, Marjorie Welish, Pierre Joris, Poetry Time, Ridgewood, Ron Padgett, Space Space, Stephan Delbos
Posted in features

My New Job

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

by Catherine Wagner
Fence Books 2009
Reviewed by Jacquelyn Davis

“Impression of a deluxe life.”

Both a public document and a relaxed collection of intimate poetry fusing arguments, personal writing exercises, confusions, clarifications and candid declarations, Catherine Wagner’s My New Job wears many faces: a seductive smile, a snide sideways glare, a big-toothed grin, a downward glance, an open-jawed stare:

Just in every rathole, just trying to learn everything at once
I was learning everything at once

The poet–sometimes sexual and raw, occasionally impotent and anti-social–shares her moods without regret. Feelings are recognized, made fun of, accepted and even resented. Bittersweet yet rich, this job is one that is fulfilling and yet doesn’t bring on the guilt that comes with eating too much or talking out of turn.

There is something ineffable that occurs when you discover poetry that makes you realize that you as a self, you as part of an unspoken or spoken multitude of men and women, that you are a fragile yet colossal creature in a world of creatures—either known or unknown—somehow capable and strong enough to continue. This is how Wagner affects her readers.

I remember reading her second book Macular Hole (2004) in my early twenties and then later being pushed to locate her first collection, Miss America (2001). I remember thinking that I had never read a book of contemporary poetry like Macular Hole ever, dissecting bold lines like:

Hatred and doom

Took it torquing jealous into my gut. I flamed
& I came kindness.
I hoped I was kind and good and fretted
my tongue with pink & raw serrations.
I imitated nobody in
my hate.
I was alone.

Or:

I dream of an end like a fount to this night
Run thinner and thinner and then it’s all light
Macerated in signal

I admit that Macular Hole remains my all-time-favorite by Wagner. Re-reading Wagner’s texts reminds me that I, too, still possess my own odd set of lusts, loves and aversions—some readily justified, some embarrassingly far from explicable. For me, Catherine Wagner did not exist before Macular Hole, for this book was the way in which she entered my life as a wide-eyed college grad, giving NYC a spin, gathering impressions in search of my own.

Wagner hardly ever relays identical feelings; across her oeuvre, the poet’s mood courageously morphs, though her books unconsciously refer to one another in an obscure conversation. For example, her fixations and connections between holes and voids and sex and natural life cycles (e.g. Macular Hole, sections from My New Job entitled “Hole in the Ground” and “Roaring Spring,” poems with titles such as “I’m total I’m all I’m absorbed in this meatcake,” “I don’t believe in bodiless” and “Big Bang”). Her tactics careen between trench warfare and cosmic bliss—she links life and death, absence and presence, speech and living in multiple sweeps.

So, let’s discuss fucking—or love-making, or sex, or whatever explicative phrase some might use in reference to the act. My New Job, like its poetic predecessors, does not shy away from the visceral and physical aspects of sexuality. Wagner writes in Miss America:

Scout and Rumor suck me off
We will flower inside you like a dog at your trails
I am sorry
Just a gigolo
Friendly and forsaken
It is hotter to wear a bra
Or let my boobs stick to my chest
Melanin, melatonin, metonym, melanoma

Or in Macular Hole:

I have recently masturbated and hair-sparklings
descend before me to reward me

Or in My New Job:

Fallacious = fellatio + delicious

but is delicious
cut grass and oysters

Beachy head, if unpleasant

against the rear throat

the gag reflex you learn to control
in high school

Terrify all comers.

But even as Wagner writes in My New Job, “The fucking isn’t interesting / The fucking is friction / The friction is two surfaces in contact and moving.” My New Job continues to investigate the poet’s rapport with the act. Though we might be able to fool ourselves into thinking that we do not care about this act, that we have more pressing issues on our plate, it is this act that keeps many of us ticking. In My New Job, Wagner equates oral sex on a man as something between an ocean-inspired fantasy, the feeling of ingesting an aphrodisiac-laced spread of hearty meats and the wholesomeness of “the girl next door” actualized as otherwise (“cut grass” being an image, perhaps, from a middle class family’s preened yard or from a haphazard sex scene). For this “girl next door” symbolizes a woman’s journey and investigation into her own needs — experience by experience she conquers, eventually overtaking future lovers with honed expertise. Yet, by making a connection between the word “fallacious” and “fellatio,” Wagner hints that this act can be deceptive; it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Pleasure and self-fulfillment are reliable friends, there to help us overcome whatever malaise we battle. Wagner embraces this “fucking territory,” well-aware of its increasing weight and our unbridled interest in how it affects our respective realities. She writes:

Part of the poem includes:
fucking the penis from
behind it, the point of view of the “man”
his body fucks it, it’s split off from him
around it the woman

My New Job is separated into five diverse sections: “Exercises,” “Hole in the Ground,” “Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large,” “Roaring Spring” and “My New Job.” The first section is exactly what it claims to be: writing exercises (ranging anywhere from the # 1 to #45), but not in any chronological order. “Hole in the Ground” begins with an excerpt from an unnamed folksong:

Like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down
I wish I was a mole in the ground

This section is the most sexually charged. “Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large” is analytical, including grid-like rationale, sharing observations between the poet and other forces: the poet as poet, the poet as lover and the poet as mother. Wagner shares sentiments that accompany motherhood:

I’ve made myself a recognizable woman
and I bred so:
belly and breasts jut out extraordinary from my ordinary
frame, which does not change, and I am
complimented on this, on my same
sprouting forth, and the excrescence
“lovely excrescence” snipped off to
walk around

Or about knowledge:

My understanding is quite limited.

“Roaring Spring” includes 28 sections, which is also the number of days between menstruation periods; one immediately feels a build-up leading up to an unavoidable eruption. The numbered poem takes a brief pause, and an embedded sub-poem, entitled “Roaring Spring,” interrupts between poem #9 and #10 in the sequence. The presence of this sub-poem introduces itself at one of the most sexually potent periods in a woman’s cycle, just days before ovulation. This sub-poem “Roaring Spring” is unlike its numerical counterparts; it directly approaches the subject vs. object relationship in a given heterosexual partnership:

If I am the author of my intentions
For your objecthood
And receiver of
What you mean to me

If you try to get through to me
Who launched your objecthood
Your cock bumps against my cervix
Slow out, slow out, make a vacuum
My pocket
Pulls towards you

Yet as the poet vocalizes obsessions and writes her mission, it is clear that writing is her mission; she is documenting her search, rarely interested in the same subject matter twice, and if so, not from a copycat perspective. It can be gathered that Wagner’s speaker finds solace or some necessary escape via her specific process. Macular Hole reads:

So I write a moralizing poem
so a poem to feel better.
Do what I want to it.

And:

I knew I would scream if I didn’t write it down because I needed
to be alone reproducing.

The reader senses her attachment to the craft, even if this rare feeling originates from self-love. Someone else’s narcissism often brings bees to the honey, if they aren’t already drowning in their own emissions. Wagner has a specific way of speaking; she breaks down and ultimately responds to her desires and demands—like an eager child arguing to get what she wants without caring about established social dictations. Except: imagine what the world would be like if we listened more to what our children say. Over time, it becomes easier to mute certain voices, and it can be an even more specific talent or misfortune to ignore one’s own voice. Wagner’s speech is free, uninhibited yet aware—she does not ignore but instead breaks down our giant world into digestible figments. Miss America reads:

Shine and shine and shine and shine

[flicker]

where the salt is, which drawer the spoons are in

BLAT!

I am tired of this ugly language

I am tired of this ugly language. If anything, her fatigue with the confines of the English language repeats itself. Wagner adopts the responsibility of unleashing complex word equations, and like a thin balloon almost holding its maximum capacity for air, she pushes and pulls syntax, hoping for a record of expansion and release. Wagner’s thoughts are not easily confined to conventional words and definitions; it seems that the “job” of My New Job is both to bluntly eradicate archaic notions of the woman’s societal role, as well as to give credit where credit is due to significant facets that still hold merit: the awestruck mother, complicated lover, analytical examiner of the unfolding day.

My New Job concludes with its reflective title poem. It is an airy poem, and the reader is given direct entrance into Wagner’s world. Again, her magnetic vortex appears, if only for a short spell, cajoling you, hoping that you will find what you need, enter and remain:

Disappear into a hole

Into Mama

but come back out.

Go in, boys.

Go in and stay there.

Tags: 8 stars, Catherine Wagner, Fence Books, Jacquelyn Davis
Posted in reviews

Stranger

Friday, January 15th, 2010

by Laura Sims
Fence Books 2009
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Outlines

sims cover There is an abundance of white space in Laura Sims’s Stranger, white space that connotes absence. The title itself implies unknowing, missing information, and speakers in the poems are hesitant, unsure of their relationship with anything that surrounds them – yet they are aware of a change, of crossing an invisible boundary. Stranger speaks to loss, specifically the loss of a mother. More so, the poems explore the composition of absence, and attempt to outline the components that evaporate at death and those that remain whole and viable in memory.

Reflecting the sense of incompletion that comes after a loss, these poems are deeply fragmented, and are spoken through multiple voices. The book is arranged into five chronological sections representing a mother’s life before the birth of her daughter, this mother’s sickness and death, and life as it exists for her surviving daughter. At times it is difficult – particularly in the case of a page break – to tell whether one fragment is part of a previous poem, or if something new has begun.

It seems that loss can only be told in sketches, loss the obscurely diagrammed space between relationship and the absence of relationship. One is reminded in Stranger that any relationship is in some sense defined by the fact that it will end. This fact adds almost ungovernable weight and value to the real, physical, mental experience of the relationship as it passes through time. In what I take to be the second half of the opening poem, titled “Seemed to have crossed a dark lake,” the speaker begins her exploration of memory and establishes the relationship between mother and daughter. The poem concludes,

She smiles and gestures, nodding her head, beckoning as she backs up,

backs into her mother, and curls away from us, smiling into her mother’s

skirt, moving her lips against the soft, scratchy fabric.

For many daughters, mother is protector, one who provides the initial connection between child and world. So what happens to that connection when the wire’s casing dissolves? A daughter facing her environment for the first time without her mother must learn to negotiate in new ways. Suddenly, she finds herself on the front lines.

Of course, that’s not to say that a daughter doesn’t or can’t have a relationship with the world that is wholly her own; eventually she must – but very often her mother provides a first lens through which to view the outside, and to work towards understanding it. When a daughter finds herself without that barrier for the first time, she might feel lost, confused or broken, might feel that a part of her own identity has died. In “My hand, too small for gathering,” a poem from the final section, we see Sims’s speaker feeling fragile:

A dried leaf –

I was afraid.

The valley was deaf

And cluttered with occupants

*

The world was old with spoiled arts.

The dry dust billowed in the marketplace.

The daughter was there for her mother’s long illness, which adds layers to the experience. A fragment in the section “Letters from Elsewhere Part 2 (1993)” provides the speaker’s painful realization that she is watching her mother vanish:

You sleeping too much

What it means is
Crossing the bridge into fog

In the many attempts to reconnect with her environment after the loss of her mother, the daughter in Stranger finds herself wondering if it is still possible relate to a mother who is no longer physical.

In “The way she loves her,” Sims repeats the word “underground.” As a culture that often buries our dead, it can be difficult to overcome the fact that the body we once experienced regularly still has form, but is part of the body of the earth. It will never be touched by human hands again, will never be seen. We look elsewhere for signs that the body is unimportant, that essence remains of something that no longer exists:

“All this,” she says, spreading here arms to the ocean.

“All this,” her friend echoes, leaning over the rail.

The sharp wind reddens their faces, tangles their hair. They laugh

open-mouthed. She can’t say where she comes from now–Ocean?
Sky?

The ethereal ever-presence of the dead, real or imagined, is repeatedly expressed throughout the collection. It is evident in a later poem’s title, “She is water poured out.” Death can be seen as a release: in death, one achieves simultaneity with other unliving things that carry dramatic force, such as sky or water. The speaker recognizes hope that her relationship with her mother need not die or end with her mother’s death; death is simply a borderland or blending, even if only imagined as such.

Stranger’s closing poem, “ ‘Bound together, we matter’,” is hopeful and combats loss with the notion that family ties provide undying bonds; they enable the deceased to live on and continue to be loved. The final lines of the poem are as follows: “Dissent cannot undo / An end or // An origin.” The finality of a death implies the absolute certainty, or completion, of an existence. Sims’s speaker grows stronger in recognition of this. Though the poems in Stranger are often elusive, they never fail to leave the reader with a clear, emotional meaning. We feel a certain way, though we don’t know exactly how we arrived at the feeling. It’s the same with grieving, sadness or regret – we cannot retrace our steps, but we can filter hints, whispers.

Tags: 8 stars, Fence Books, Laura Sims, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

Star in the Eye

Monday, June 1st, 2009

by James Shea
Fence Books December 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

The Stars are Projectors (Yeah)1

Star in the Eye, winner of the Fence Modern Poetry Series, is a collection filled with the material of dreams and nightmares. The speaker is preoccupied with these, but somehow less than panicked. The residue of self-doubt and remorse is evident, yet sentient, beautiful images abound.

In fact, the individual poems are on occasion so fully-imagined and detailed that it is not difficult for a Simician fair to materialize for the reader. He is unsettling like Rauan Klassnik was unsettling in Holy Land, though where Klassnik’s lyrics are sometimes grotesque and shocking, Shea’s produce more subtle and steady waves of unrest (with some small exceptions of shock and gore, as in “Dream Trial,” when the speaker shoots a dog multiple times and his uncle “puts his barrel / into the wounds and fires.” The dog’s head “halves open.” I will say it again. Leave the dogs out of it.)

In the opening poem, all elements work together to form a colorful, yet unnatural setting. The title, “Turning and Running,” exhibits clear uneasiness. The poem begins, “The sun was backing away from me, / slowly like one I have betrayed.” The atmosphere is composed of fright, confusion and deceit. The speaker runs to a “river to burn in it.” Ambulances arrive; mysterious oral surgery is performed. There is unusual face-painting, and a constant search for exit. There’s regret: “There were at least four things / I should have said,” and the poem ends with a warning: “Do not step on the rug / with the live birds sewn into it.” It’s beautiful and jarring. “Turning and Running” launches the reader into the collection like a motorcyclist flying over the front of his bike. On impact, the pavement is cold and probably wet. S/he is alone, vaguely sad, pathetic, injured.

Shea’s poems do not inhabit the space of nightmares only; there is constant dreaming and waking. There’s something nebulously Vanilla Sky about this book, the familiar phiosophical wonder as to whether one is awake or dreaming; for instance, in the melancholy “Parts of an Inland Pier,” the speaker describes a trip to the beach in which he experiences individual waves “for a moment at a time.” The speaker seems to be experiencing clarity, finally “seeing” things as they are, but by the end of the poem he says, “I woke to three geese flying in a loose v. / I could live my whole life right here, in this chair.” The implication (very Wright, “Lying in a Hammock”) is that the former has been a dream; the clarity was not a reality, but could have been had he not been aware of its untruth. Whether asleep or awake, one constantly resets one’s cognition, reestablishes awareness.

Helpless to do otherwise, the speaker continually pursues new ways to view the world, better ways to absorb life’s fabric. It is lucidity he seeks; in “Around the Wind,” the speaker cleanses his senses. Shea writes:

I get in a plane and look for the earth.
I am without the sight of existence for miles.
I can see nothing from all sides.

These lines exhibit detachment both physical and mental. The distance at which Shea’s speaker stands from the occurrences of his “earth” and life allow him to acquire an alien, if fresh, perception of them.

Such distance might be valuable for the mind that composes it, but is not always so for Shea’s reader. The tone in each of these poems is similar; therefore, it is easy to feel as though the poems belong together. Yet the poems from Star in the Eye don’t entirely synthesize. They blend but don’t fuse, almost interchangeable in chronology and development. There is little movement throughout the book; beyond a few obvious redundancies, the poems don’t speak to each other. Perhaps there is something to be said for a collection that is static, reaffirming as it may our common potential for paralysis. But even stasis can be electric, a form of movement; paralysis can be movement.

Sometimes you feel it in Star in the Eye. Sometimes not. The inability to act is an American plague onset by fear of failure, rejection, death. Shea attempts to dissolve the troubles consequential to this immobility. He writes that there is “some comfort in the undoable.” Shea also includes a poem in this collection titled “Unperfectable.” The undoable and unperfectable inflict no pressure. Maybe these feelings are more universal than America, but either way, Americans suffer from them. Shea captures a contemporary consciousness in these poems. The oftener they are read, the more they grip the reader, telling a story that is familiar, if no story at all.

Familiarity is comforting because it is loyal, a constant. In one part of a 45-part poem titled “The Riverbed,” Shea exhibits the familiar through a reflection. The section is titled, “Ignoring the Riverbed,” and it reads as follows:

A boy by the riverbed
Turns his back to the river.
His body is reflected by the surface.

The lines recall a Plath poem called “Mirror” in which Plath writes of the same type of clarity that Shea’s speaker hunts. From “Mirror”: “I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, / umisted by love or dislike.” Shea’s speaker too desires to see things “just” as they are, and like Plath’s mirror, his river, faced with a betrayal, is dutiful and presents the familiar. “I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.” However, reflections, though faithful, are often distorted, contributing to the lack of clarity Shea’s speaker contends with.

In the final poem of the collection, “Dream Trial,” the next-longest in the book, Shea brings us back to the stuff of sleep—dreams both good and bad. Dreams are also a form of reflection. They often reflect that which we may be unable to face consciously, for instance, the fear of death. There’s a lot of death, or at least talk of it, in this book. There is even another multi-sectioned poem called “Death Poems” in which “The Void / welcomes you.” In “University of Air,” the speaker “spent the night practicing for the long nap.” Shea begins the second section of “Dream Trial” with the following observation: “Some animals live so briefly / they never need to eat.” Yes, by this point it is clear that the speaker is preoccupied with death, or at the very least, meaninglessness. Yet if one thing carries meaning, so do all things; the physical world, animals and all, can be imagined a character, or series of characters. Shea has found a projector of his fears in his dreams, his nightmares, all around him, even in the clouds: “Clouds pass over, watching us / what shapes we take.”

___________

¹See Modest Mouse, “The Stars Are Projectors”

Tags: 7 stars, Fence Books, James Shea, Melinda Wilson
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

The Cow

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

by Ariana Reines
Fence Books December 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

The Hardness of the Frame

the cow OK, that is a slaughterhouse on the cover of The Cow, and those are dead cattle. Framed by the clinical language of a livestock manual, Ariana Reines’s first book runs language, culture and sex through a meat grinder, and the results are not pretty. Perhaps those who like poetry or sausage should not watch it being made. But as the Koran points out, “Do you then believe in a part of the book and disbelieve the other?” Reines insists on showing us “the other side of the animal.”

Consider vomit and velleity. It’s not a matter of whether one word is poetic, and the other not. It’s not just a matter of balancing diction so that the same poem can plausibly use both words—let alone the same poet. It’s a matter of using vomit to describe a real transaction between inside and outside, retaining all its disgust, the reflex of it, as a way to address ideas like cultural bulimia without hiding behind the adjective. In the same way, velleity needs a similar anchoring: used non-ironically, it can still compare the language of consciousness with the fingertip precision of sewing lace. In both cases, the feedback loop is profoundly physical. Unfortunately, both times “velleities” is used, it is misspelled. Either way, Reines’s relationship with language is fraught, ambivalent, and serious. The work contains quotes from Ashbery, Baudelaire, Burroughs, Proust, Rilke, Stein, and the Bible, among others.

Reines’s work is undeniably raw and powerful. Her verbal shredding has none of the clinical neatness of the computer algorithm, or the vaguely reassuring frisson of scissors on paper. The insistence on blood, shit, cum and guts within an experimental framework reminds me of Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, down to the use of a similar sans serif typeface, but it also sets up useful contrasts. While Schwerner’s sense of cultural transformations is similarly sexual and his body parts are similarly scaled, stacked and strewn, Reines will not let the aura of myth slur the body count. The cow is sacred, a mother, a lover—and equally, “murdered meat.”

Reines removes the scholarly mask and talks even more directly: the harshly clinical frame of the manual and the constant sense of the body as muscle, blood, and water make the possibility of rebirth or any meaningful myth much less luminous, and much filthier. She reminds us that the cultural construction of bulimia is not that different from putting a portal in the stomach of a cow so that the digestion process can be seen. The myths are real. It is the people, the bodies that are ruined, not the tablets or the statues. She writes, “We were the real’s dead mimes”. No warm nests to return to here. Only slits, gashes, and holes. Reines scolds us: “We are going to be smarter about these things from now on.”

In “Item,” Reines combines a discussion of feedlot/slaughterhouse practices, and the advent of mad cow disease with the story the speaker’s down-and-out mother, once a medical practitioner, walking downtown from Washington Heights to ask her for money for a steak. This wraps itself around a discussion of language and truth. After describing how cows cannot digest their forced diet of corn without massive doses of antibiotics, she writes: “A wimple fell over the real as if to protect it: a ruckus in the girl is artificial as anything, fortified by nutrients.” Despite the tone of this line, Reines often calls the ironist’s bluff by using language as literally as possible. She calls the cyberpoet’s bluff by calling our attention not only to shredded texts and the cultural commodification of desire, but actual holes in physical bodies. She might even call Beckett’s bluff: she is not convinced that language can’t describe real things, but the purgatory effort is just as bleak and wearying as anything Beckett’s characters confront.

What happens to the world when a body is a bag of stuff you can empty out of it.
Errors, musculatures.
Can I empty language out of me.
What difference does it make how a thing dies. Consciousness. Nobody knows
what that is.

Be warned: the obsession with bodily functions is pushed past the comfort zone, however sturdy your sealegs. Reines wants to make you sick, and shock you into a different place. The last stanza of “Advertisement” reads:

You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take. You have got to, absolutely got to put your face into the gash and sniff, and lick. You have got to learn to get sick. You have got to reestablish the integrity of your emotions so that their violence can become a health and so that you can keep on becoming. There is no sacrifice. You have got to want to live. You have got to force yourself to want to.

By any measure, this is hectoring, risky, and, in this case, not concerned with being good poetry. Reading this book may be a test of your masochism, but it just might change you. She’s aware of the risk. The book is peppered with such lines as: “Ailmenting the world perpetuates it,” and: “I will not train myself to love this shit.” With all the aggressiveness of Reines’s stance, it is unsettling to see the oddly beautiful spaces her work opens up on the killing floor. Look at the cover long enough and you may find an unsettling balance between beauty and horror, a sense that stays with you long after the book is closed.

The last quarter of the book does permit something approximating gentleness to appear. The poem “Rest” starts with “Hymns can make your forgetting happen.” and ends with “The mouth’s a haven for all an eye cannot disperse.” But in the context of such fraught, relentless hammering, such brief moments of beauty can risk seeming like desperately mimed cliches. Here’s a chunk of “You:”

I looked up and was assuaged.
I carried to my mouth the ointment of the cloud that had ceased to move,
That had ceased to pass over me.
I found a secret duct amid these floes of air and then they left off their coquetries,
their complications.
The beauty makes me feel it really happened
The sky had stars in it they glittered like calories upon the world

Whatever the state of poetry, words like “beautiful” and “lovely” should never be taboo, but it’s harder to earn the right to use them: the cost of beauty is greater today. Using such a vague word as beauty requires a corresponding concreteness. Vagueness gains its relevance by the hardness of the frame. Reines pushes this logic to a place it hasn’t been before, and doesn’t want to go, a place past politics, but profoundly informed by it; a craft that appropriates and shreds other texts, but which sometimes hides the theft; a search for beauty under piles of carcasses both metaphorical and real. At one point she asks, “how badly does narrative long to be beautiful?” Does Reines succeed? Given that all meters are in the red, and that the answer has to wait until the end of the book, “Afterward” sounds understandably weary, but oddly, cautiously hedged. Hope is hard, too.

Tags: 8 stars, Ariana Reines, Fence Books, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Swallows

Monday, December 18th, 2006

by Martin Corless-Smith
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Six Nights at Nonsuch Palace

Corless Smith Cover Houses can make you act oh so romantic. Years after you’ve moved from an old home, there might exist the compulsion to stare at it like it’s some old friend or dog or food-find. If it used to be brown but has since been painted yellow, it’s not the house’s fault.

So how about looking at a library. A great big one, one housing as best it can the entire history of human composition, imagination, thought, and language. Even the books that aren’t in there are in there because the idea of books and their importance is in there—the idea, at least, that there have been great minds willing to bend themselves around questions most knew very well couldn’t be answered because the discovery of ineffable clarifications were perhaps clarification enough.

Exeunt library and books. Return “house,” but not the kind you can watch: the kind constructed entirely of the language you’ve read, will read, have written, will write. It’s a house you don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving to take a nostalgic glimpse at, anywho, because it’s always around in the same way: one part self, one part everything not-self, two parts the complete annihilation of both: the moment something resembling truth has been arrived at via language, we’re reminded in Martin Corless-Smith’s fourth book, it has little to do with the lucky poet or his body, and instead becomes a shingle on a more universal house of language that has kept us warm for a couple of millennia now.

With a seriousness that can only be described as “British,” Martin Corless-Smith takes two steps back from the house of language to genuinely watch it; in doing so, he’s able to discover that it’s at once futile and vital to sidle up and slap on a little vinyl siding of his own.

Ok, house as metaphor, got it. But while one idea is scarcely enough to anchor a whole collection, Corless-Smith’s fragmented, phrasey, lyrical, almost awkwardly ambitious attempt to grapple with—well, everything— sustains this, his fourth book. A poem segment (it is, in many cases, difficult to discern what is a “poem” and what is a part of another “poem”) might begin with generalization (“We wish to prolong what we can see and touch and talk of / We can do the work of the universe), but end with dazzling and evasive lyric:

The coombes breed whole families
daintiest snails in saxifrage & moschatel
the spurge and spurge laurel
saffron-heared primrose greenish in the light of its own leaves

Corless-Smith makes it clear early on he intends to remove himself from things as they stand for the sake of lyric exploration: “My quarrels I dissolve, and my former deeds.” The exploration itself is all over the place; he goes to the beginning, so to speak, searching for the Sabine Villa, the physical location from which Horace wrote. He emerges, however slightly, as skeptic rather than cynic:

Happy enough in my Sabine farm
the grave lends an ear to free the poor man
I shall quit the towns of men
Even now the winter gathers over my shoulder

We’re also taken to a remote Hebridean island where the house/language metaphor is its most explicit. A brief note at the beginning of the section notes that “During WW 2 the poet William Williamson worked as a radio operator on a remote Hebridean island. A series of poetic fragments and long prose pieces were later found written on the walls of his weaver’s cottage.” The section transcribes some specific Williamson lyrics, and offers some of the book’s most lucid concepts:

Now, in this poetry of fragment after fragment we
experience more than just the poem and its outside,
we experience the simultaneity of many poems, all
poems, with their own ends and their beginnings—
their readings—intersecting—their lives in the space
of being read—on the page just now we see self-
consciously noted a fourth-dimensionality.

Corless-Smith is up and down over his various fragmented series, inhabiting both inspiration and torment, most commonly caught in the hopeful/desperate middle:

choked with a toad in its throat
the snake was unable to swallow
the toad was unable to die

He’s captivating when analytical, when lyrical, when mentioning swallows or the act of swallowing, when quoting an abundance of great writers, and when slipping almost completely into obscurity. For all his depth and density, though, on occasion some heavy notions are settled with weaker ones, or with weak metaphor, as when “the cost of the journey” is “now part of history / leaves to a tree.”

Which reminds us of course that writing great lyric is painstaking. On several occasions Corless-Smith seems almost obsessed with his own limitations, presenting cross-outs and revealing the indecision involved in realizing a poem—whether outlining an idea is necessary, or letting it lie implicit with fragment presents a truer truth. So those who’ve done it well are to be celebrated, and that they can be celebrated by exiting the limitations of the flat reality of things as they are and inhabiting the impossible house of language they unwittingly constructed. In the end, the book—the poet too? Up to you—possesses a mania that leaves you feeling you’ve been there to return.

Tags: 7 stars, Fence Books, John Deming, Martin Corless-Smith
Posted in reviews

Yes, Master

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

by Michael Earl Craig
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Musings of a Private Mule

craig cover Michael Earl Craig opens his second book, Yes, Master, in praise of anvils: “..the anvil / rewards you with impact, with rebound, / the inverse of your efforts.”

As Wallace Stevens once dictated, when one decides to put faith in the finding of small satisfactions—in people, things, and the imaginative associations they imply—it is perhaps implicit that some items are, by nature, more worthy of praise than others: “Your favorite pipe could be smacked from your mouth. / This will never happen with the anvil.” Absurd Craig chooses the anvil, and ends the poem—titled “This is How an Anvil Comes to You”—with a random transition to the anvil’s heavy relative, the anchor:

Even an anchor…have I mentioned the anchor?
Even an anchor must be dropped
(they call it “lowering”)
and sometimes dragged.
How so totally sad is the anchor.
Let us take a minute to stop here and pray
for this pitiful object.

Welcome to the weird little world of Michael Earl Craig. You won’t want to leave.

Yes, Master is the natural successor to Craig’s excellent first book, Can You Relax in My House, but displays even cleaner, more fully realized poems. His poems are hilarious, but not without stoicism; absurd but not indulgently so; hidden and insane but not without affection. If you tend to enjoy non sequiturs, humor, and surreal imagery in the tradition of, say, James Tate, buy this book now.

A sense of humor is one of Craig’s most potent weapons. “I know it’s not healthy to worship / any one gun,” he posits in “Gathering My Thoughts About You,” before switching gears and regarding “the munching and gasses of beasts / in the black pasture.” His deft ability to construct unforgettable two-liners also accounts for his ability to invite a reader into his poems. The openings to his poems are never forceful: “Something came to mind this morning: / a pudding esplanade,” he writes in the opening to “Ways of Dealing.” And later in the poem, a fine example of his willingness to poetry in the minutiae of pop culture: “Ideal for Sigourney Weaver tombstone: / You saw my panties in Alien.”

Indeed Craig’s use of humor underscores the therapy of humor; in “Seahorse” he recalls “laughing so hard I fell down” after reading the Sonny Bono obituary that serves as the poem’s epigraph:

“It was a Fantasy Island gig that convinced Bono he needed to
leave Hollywood. He had one line and botched it, calling Tattoo
‘Pontoon.’ When the actor started screaming at him, Bono
decided it was time to get a new life.”

—USA Today, Wed. Jan. 7, 1998

Craig has done the reader a favor by simply reprinting this inherently comic obituary, and does credit to Bono, who emerges as a sort of hero, bent on giving up on the absurd fakery of Hollywood culture. Really any poem would be a worthwhile excuse just to print this epigraph, but the poem that follows it becomes backwards and comical:

looking up, glancing down again,
as I drive my newly lacquered motorcoach
up an icy mountain pass at dusk
on my way to see my therapist
who once spent 3 years in the circus with
her “Largest Tits in North America.”
She always cries during our sessions.

Craig is then a sympathetic poet, and all his characters are tragicomic heroes. The strangeness here, coupled with the confession that he sees a therapist, shows Craig’s understanding that good poetry is of course built on more than being jokey. His absurdist/sarcastic leanings also lend themselves to a wholly unique, powerful lyricism. These lines, for example, close “Poem”: “terrifically / is… / …how a castle flashes. / Are you familiar with how a castle flashes?”

That brand of strangeness shows again a poet putting faith in his own imagination and nothing else. Any person, then, ought to consider doing the same, as he points in the (albeit, extraneous) conclusion to “Ways of Dealing”: “You can’t leave it to me to describe your world.” Craig’s world also becomes interesting, because he seems as far from the poet-careerist bitch-match in contemporary poetry as possible. He lives near Livingston, Montana, where he works as a farrier—accounting, perhaps for the anvil and for the horses that come up time and again in the book: “A horse is walked before me / and needs her toes shortened.”

Craig’s poetry is ultimately a poetry of compassion. He shows in “I’m Glad I Found the Horse Doc” a fury that seems characteristic of a bout with depression. Where Craig can use his absurdist powers to charm and dazzle, he can also use them to frighten: “Another cat, asleep on the freeway rumblestrip.” And on rare occasions, he’s plain blunt: “Some days I want to kill.”

But by and large he seems interested in helping himself and helping the reader, and he succeeds. “I’ll Fight Depression For You” offers one of the book’s finest lyrical moments, full of tongue-in-cheek compassion in urging people to beat depression:

But one can always punch one’s way out of it
like the grand manatee erupting from a bad dream
to bust through five inches of ice
on the surface of the sea

The notion that an anvil rewards a person with the inverse of his or her efforts returns near the end, when the “Horse Doc” puts him in a better mood: “He tells me ‘one man’s journey / the inverse of another’s.’” Everyone, then, finds their own way. Craig has envisioned the modern poem in a way that invites readers in and keeps them there. The poems are short and satisfying, fully realized while not slap-in-the-face ambitious. Not every poem is perfect, and a few suffer from a touch of over-statedness, but the fresh moments cancel these out by a long shot; in the end, you’ll find Craig’s poems generally improve the quality of your life.

I’ll leave you with some of my favorite two-liners: “I’d like to see just once / the rabbit box this hawk.” “I’ve just shaved my beard and head / and feel like a baby turtle.” “My cheeseburger comes at me / through the drive up window.” “We wave but don’t expect / to be seen. It is always this way.” If Craig’s answer to that paradox is to follow Stevens’s dictum and put faith in the imagination, he goes so far as to half-heartedly deify himself in the book’s final poem. For posterity, here’s that little poem, titled “Prayer,” in its entirety:

As I hold my head low
I see the many flecks of black pepper
on my placemat.
They look like horses
running away from me at a great distance.

*

Tags: 9 stars, Fence Books, John Deming, Michael Earl Craig
Posted in reviews

The Stupefying Flashbulbs

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

by Daniel Brenner
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Tracked by Evil Cube

The Stupefying Flashbulbs, winner of the 2006 Fence Modern Poets Series, is one of the best poetry books this year in the way that it demonstrates a poet comfortable scribbling on the walls in a world of his own. Daniel Brenner doesn’t give us total access to his world, but he lets us know it exists, and that’s enough. If he were too forthcoming, satellite spies might intercept and translate his code.

Nevertheless, the poems comprising The Stupefying Flashbulbs beg for repeated reads. The book, Brenner’s first, offers a mild rethinking of language across 65 short lyrics, each punchy and modern, celebratory but with a sense of ceaseless surveillance and impending doom. “It’s time to put the cloth on the cage,” he writes in “Satellite Photography,” and proceeds to burrow in his own language.

I find it obnoxious when writers use “2” instead of “to,” use “u” instead of “you,” and so forth, because the device is not nearly witty enough to justify the mutilation of language. But when Brenner pulls similar tricks, there’s no sense that he’s trying to reinvent language or be fiendishly clever; he simply reminds us, in the age of the instant message, that language is eternally capricious. These lines from “McLight Pottery,” for example, show that though his words can be construed as senseless; they might also probe the conscious decision-making and scrutiny we face daily:

For all the time it’s still a diminishing option
Down ancient lines into myths or 2 be ridden
About the prophecy when it gets slalomy

At first glance, “2” does the work of the word “to”; but it might also represent a second “option.” Ultimately it doesn’t matter; each line is strange, and Brenner lets the language sit and deconstruct itself. The letters “N” and “U” even seem to become characters in the book.

But what makes The Stupefying Flashbulbs excellent is less Brenner’s language play than his fusion of wiseass sarcasm and masked dread. The poems appear impulsive, but present the need to be read in sequence. In the first section, Brenner employs a technique reminiscent of Matthew Rohrer. Absurd repeated images—a whirlpool, an evil cube, Phoenicians—become main characters:

The cube returned and it made me nervous
You too I see & yet you read on
Recovering a sense of blurry theft

A Simic-like sense of mystery is fused with an Ashberyan sense of inventiveness and associative-thinking. When you’re in this book, after a while, you realize you’re in a secret place. Brenner almost decodes his letter-play for us in “Sunsets Too,” but stops just short, perhaps because there’s really nothing to decode: “That I/you are un/an / & ancient like a ritual.” Sometimes he’s able to dazzle, sometimes his sarcasm is just funny as hell: “The main goal is still to rock and appear extra-excited.”

But in the end, his sarcasm and absurdity are a fitting way of responding to dread, and amid Brenner’s chaos, there are some beautiful lyrical moments, as in “Wonder Rocket 1840”:

Sometimes the haze is so bad I am biting at the rest doubled
Down by the river where the apples fall with the hail under
The wreathed swamp figures the ones with sage plastered
All over the muck and seed and condyle caught in their hearts

In each of these small poems, there’s the sense that something’s chasing every one of us, be it government, a lover, an evil cube, fate, or anything in between. “We all make mistakes,” Brenner’s able to conclude in a moment of lucidity, perhaps nodding that no matter how much you want to hide, as long as you’re not dead, you have to respond to the world in some form. As a price for being alive, something’s always bearing down on you, there are always more mistakes to be made. In the end, his fear is finally transmitted: “I’m afraid of looking back from the perspective of being chased / & doing whatever it is that the perspective of being chased urges.”

Tags: 8 stars, Daniel Brenner, Fence Books, John Deming
Posted in reviews