Posts Tagged ‘Hanging Loose Press’

Getting Lost in a City Like This

Friday, July 10th, 2009

by Jack Anderson
Hanging Loose Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

3_5

Loved and Lost

andersonJack Anderson’s new collection Getting Lost in A City Like This is an unpretentious collection of light prose poems, many of which are odd love letters to New York City. Disdaining the urbane humor of the New York School, they assert an innocence that sometimes suggests William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, but more often suggests milk left too long in the fridge. Certainly, innocence should take unexpected left turns to avoid being cloying, but Anderson’s work tends to protest too much. It’s one thing to recall a young man taking off his clothes in the London Underground, perhaps on a dare, his relaxed, innocent manner causing people to smile and become his friends and “friends of one another,” and another thing to conclude, “while he was naked / we were joined together / in sweet solidarity: / it was all so innocent, / so civilized, / so good.” Can I take this, straight or twisted? Where are you Walt Whitman? Let nakedness stand on its own bare feet. Here the innocence begins to stink.

I know Anderson wants to keep things light-hearted yet lurid, and to avoid the “humorless profundities” Edward Field cites in his blurb. It’s a tough balance, though, and Anderson’s childish mask would be more effective if his speaker were less like a self-conscious Forrest Gump: “I am hungry, happy, // lean with desire, / I want to fatten on life, // for the world is one big Chinese restaurant…” Gump is fine, Gumpness pushed one step too far equals curdled milk:

yes I want to roam through your city exploring and delving
deeper and deeper into locales districts quarters and neighborhoods
the working class ones as well as the ritzy
and I pray they all have their own special dignity
yes I want to see what there is where you are
so invite me invite me oh please invite me

It can be disappointing when Anderson uses this strangely insistent, cloying tone while invoking a New York not deep enough to be dreamlike. It undermines the bite needed when Anderson later explores the bitter humor inherent in aging, and writes towards the end, “Only danger is real.” Italo Calvino got much more mileage in Invisible Cities by waiting until mid-book for Kublai Khan to challenge Polo by suggesting that all the cities he describes are variants of his native Venice, and taking care to construct a chessboard of alternating chapters integrating Polo’s breathless descriptions of imagined cities and his direct and disillusioned discourse with Khan on the inevitability of his empire’s decline.

Admittedly, Anderson never takes himself that seriously: “Dogged Love,” the story of a gay couple that stays together in a dead relationship for the sake of their dogs is lighthearted and fun, with a sting at the end. Other pieces are simply weird, like “Indulgence and Restraint, A Moral Lesson,” where the speaker eats his toes, which taste “good. Quite Good. Something like a cruller.” These are hit or miss, and uniquely odd. You might like them. You might laugh out loud. “Hitler’s Daughter” does a better job of anchoring Anderson’s sometimes creepy humor in a situation that repays some additional thought.

One fully integrated success is the delightfully nasty “The Schattners Are Coming,” which takes on the old time conventions of rural hospitality in properly cracked fashion. The Schattners, of course, are relatives from hell. “On certain Sundays, Gramma would get this hunch: / “The Schattners are coming. I feel it in my bones.” / (And she was usually right.)” The only way to avoid their visits was to pretend that you were not home. The Schattners, of course, would persist banging at the front door, and sneaking around the back until someone inside was unlucky enough to betray their presence by moving. The thinly-veiled mutual social destruction then escalates to a Hatfield/McCoy level of insanity.

Other successes such as “Who Are the Rich and Where Do They Live,” or the Calvinoesque “Three Museums,” occur when Anderson drops most of the wry commentary and even mutes his sense of humor, allowing his appealingly simple, direct, uniquely ironic observations to freely combine nostalgia and innocence, letting them dance and deepen into more complex emotions. For the most part though, the imagined city Anderson is getting lost in could use a deeper, more intriguingly structured invisibility.

*

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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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Lobster With Ol’ Dirty Bastard

Monday, September 8th, 2008

by Michael Cirelli
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by Erica Miriam Fabri

9

To Flatly Refuse to Dumb Down Nothing

cirelli coverIn Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Michael Cirelli’s first full-length collection of poetry, the poet has arranged to have the academic order of poetry take on a romantic courtship with the vernacular of hip-hop. In the poem “Dead Ass,” the two genres finally get in bed together:

Fo’ shizzle, crunk, hella: I place in
           glass jars like rare moths.

In “Dead Ass,” he not only praises the colorful and rare language that comes from hip-hop culture, but he also bows down to it, just as an archaeologist might bow down to a great artifact; he is humbled by it, as if he will never be able to keep up:

These words make me feel old, and alabaster.
When I hear something new, it’s like I discovered it
for the first time, like I excavated it from the mouth
of a teenager. So I dust it off with my fossil brush
and try to jam it into the keyhole of academia.

One-third of the book is made up of a series of poems which Cirelli has coined “Hip-Hop Sonnets.” However, you should not expect anything too formal; the only formal rule that is followed is that each poem is fourteen lines long. Each poem is a dedication to a different rapper and tells a story from the rapper’s personal life. In most cases, the story is unexpected or uncommon. In the title poem, the infamous father-of-thirteen has brought his entire brood of offspring to a seafood restaurant in Brooklyn. When they sit down to eat, chaos erupts in the dining room:

Dinner rolls bounce off the walls like handballs! Sword fights break out with shrimp skewers, the toddlers wear calamari rings on their fingers like diamonds, and lil’ Rusty does the fake-sneeze-trick that leaves an oyster in his open palm. Ol’ Dirty is ravishing a huge boiled lobster, drawn butter dripping down his chin, as he cracks open the claws with his golden fangs.

The hip-hop artists that Cirelli has chosen to immortalize in sonnet-form are always caught at moments that regular fans wouldn’t normally witness: Talib Kweli expelled from Brooklyn Tech, Pharoahe Monch at a teen poetry slam, Common as a high school basketball star, Phife Dawg in a hospital bed receiving dialysis and Suge Knight using his connections to set up headaches, divorces and pregnancies.

The “Sonnets” are usually witty, but at times become serious. In “Phife Dawg Awaits a Kidney,” Cirelli writes:

…his mother is patient as an olive tree. She understands 
the thick accent of dialysis, isn’t fooled by the organ’s rhetoric.
Instead, she marvels at the fluid that scrub’s her son’s blood
             clean—
makes metaphors about this science-water.

Interspersed with the “Hip-Hop Sonnets,” another third of the book tells the story of the death and life of poet’s own father. His father also suffered kidney failure in his final days, and the poems that deal with his illness echo eerily:

…he dumped
liquor over his head until his kidney floated up
to his throat. 

In dealing with his father’s death, Cirelli revisits memories of the life his father lived and tackles the “myth” and “legend” of who he really was. In poems like “Damn it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” his father begins to resemble the stereotype of the “gangster” lifestyle commonly assumed by hip-hop artists. In the poem, he has driven his son to the local housing projects to make a “delivery.” His descriptions are stark:

…my father walked out with a chest
made of scales and whistled, with two fingers at the corners
             of his lips,
to the shadows that responded from a window…

The father character is obsessed with consumption and with being noticed. He buys expensive sneakers, remote-control monster trucks, surfboards and rare puppets to win his son’s love; he eats a plate of veal in seconds and storms out of the shower and onto the street (completely naked) to beat a neighbor to a bloody pulp.

Yet, he is loved by all, including his son. In “The Giver,” the father is:

…surrounded by every
tag-a-long-mooch-kiss-ass
in the neighborhood,
taking big bites (on his dime).   

In his glory, he resembles Ol’ Dirty Bastard from the title poem. However, when he falls, he falls hard. After years of drug dealing, he is arrested and while awaiting trial he grows ill and never recovers. In the poem “Framing the Picture,” Cirelli grapples with his father’s mortality and his final moments:

In the hospital, I watched
my father cry out for his mother,
who has a prosthetic leg. The nuns brought in
silver chains with archangels dangling from them,
and they draped the metal like garlands around his neck. 

His father returns twice after his earthly death. Once in a dream, in a poem titled “Lives of Astronauts,” where son seeks father at his family’s local bar, expecting him to be in the same place where he had always been before:

…In my dream, I walked through
the smoked glass and my uncle was pouring drinks,

my cousin was sitting in a chair by the green nuts.
I looked around for my father.

The language is delicate and slow and a reader feels as if every character in the book has suffered a sort of small death themselves. Then, someone at the bar finally speaks:

Your father is dead. I asked my cousin if it was true.
He pulled up his sleeve and showed me a memorial tattoo.

The father returns again in the last poem of the book. This time, he is speaking from heaven, asking that his son write more poems about him. The final couplet is a haunting moment: a ghost’s request that this very book be written:

Meanwhile, dad is not satisfied with the poem he got. He wants
             14 more lines,
one final couplet that paints him in that soft, forgiving light.

No hip-hop inspired book would be complete without the bravado and thrill of romance, sexuality and lust. The final third of the book is made up of poems that are Cirelli’s dedication to none other than: the ladies. And, to follow suit, he has made certain to have no shortage of “ass” references. “Culture” is an ode to hip-hop fashion:

…the diamonds in the teeth
make the ladies squint—these same ladies in their too-tight jeans
showing off ass, for the fellas
in their too-loose jeans showing off ass.   

In “Girls, Girls, Girls” (borrowed from the Jay-Z song of same name) a piece that offers a detailed list of the colorful array of women that adorn New York City’s streets, Cirelli writes:

…I love how the ass moves up and down when they walk
like two fat kids on a see-saw.

The poem does not hold back. It is pack-filled with metaphor after metaphor:

…I love the high-heels that hoist the rump into
a half-heart silhouette. I love them pushing strollers,
with tattoos of ships on their shoulders.
…………………………………………………………
…I love them in headwrap, in floss, in sari, in cliché
t-shirts on Houston, on Bowery, with braids that wind
like DNA…

Through it all, Cirelli manages to make “rare moths” out of the intricacies of hip-hop and to merge them with the intricacies of his own life without forgetting who he is: a white, middle class guy from the suburbs. He briefly mentions the step-father who raised him, who was “out earning the roof for us,” while a young Cirelli waits at the window for a Saturday visit with his “deadbeat”/“dopehead” birth father, who never shows. He also includes a heartfelt poem about his mother that again highlights Cirelli’s fascination with the language and influence of hip-hop idiom (his mother misunderstands a rap song’s lyrics “Buy you a drank” to mean “Buy you a train”), while also displaying his admiration and love for the woman who raised “…the son / she carried down three flights of stairs / on Leah St. with no car and nowhere / to go…” 

In “Losing Creativity,” Cirelli writes of the frustration of a struggling poet trying to get his point across:

I used to rub on these letters for hours
until they shined like patent leather shoes.

The poems in Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard stand powerfully on their own as precise and complete pieces of writing. As a collection, they weave a complex and fascinating story that is equal parts witty and poignant, and at every moment compelling.

*

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Overnight

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

by Paul Violi
Hanging Loose Press 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

9

Some Notes Pretending to be a Review of Paul Violi’s Overnight

overnight1. Paul Violi has long been a purveyor of strategic and diversionary guerilla tactics in poetry: slippage, wobble, & recklessness. I mean this as a compliment, of course.  And related to this is the fact that one of the single most important aspects of Violi’s work (both in his newest collection Overnight—his eleventh book of poems—and in his previous work) is the way that he has again and again reinvented writing poetry by ever reinventing (often radically) what a poem can be—the grounds upon which a poem can stand up straight and hold water (or lemon juice or blood, what have you, whatever).

2. His poems are also hilarious, packed with fabular zaniness, brainy sharp teeth and mountains of props.  I would hate to have to match wits with him or with Overnight.  My assessment: hands down, he’s a poetry giant.  My worry, hands up and reach for the sky.  No, on second thought, don’t worry, it’s a pretty inspiring sky.

3. Clearly, Paul Violi has two eyes and a nose and some ears.  He was born in 1944, a very good year near the end of the war.  I think he lives in New York.  He’s received a lot of awards, and for very good reason.  (See some reasons below).

4. When I think of Paul Violi’s poems, I think of Peter Pan, Dennis the Menace, and Casper the Friendly Ghost hanging out in a blender with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Raymond Queneau and Kenneth Koch.  I think of indexes, police blotters, and TV Guide listings masquerading and functioning with great intelligence, human torque, and good humor as poems.  I think of words like “fracas” and “splurge”.  When I look at his author photo on the back of Overnight, I think, “It’s good that he’s smiling, otherwise I might be afraid.”  I think he has a shadow.  I’m afraid of his shadow—and also in awe of its philosophical and historical, though perhaps ridiculously playful, coloring of the sidewalk.

5. Lately, however, when I think about Paul Violi’s poems I think of this quote from his poem “Thief Tempted by the Grandeur of February” which appears in Overnight, “… poetry it’s easy/And impossible—like stealing from yourself.”  To me this is—and has always been—the conundrum at the heart of Violi’s work—a conundrum which he works hard to enact and formalize by taking (stealing) linguistic shapes out of the world of language which is not poems (the ordinary language of speaking, working, and making) and then placing them in poetic contexts where he makes of them electrical, brilliant, and hilariously hardworking poems.  In other words, he recognizes that poetry wants to be as big as the world, so he just keeps appropriating bits of it for use in poetic contexts,making it bigger and bigger and bigger.  For example, take his poem “Acknowledgments” (one of three poems with this title in Overnight) where he appropriates the utilitarian “acknowledgments” paragraph found in nearly every published book of poems these days:

A month of twilights, laglight, fritterdusk.  Withered plants, soggy   bulbs, stubble.  The Garden in February.  Mold and tendrils, colorless   scribbles dangling from a ripped-back carpet of matted leaves.  Fresh hole   in the frozen ground that looks like it was made by a pickaxe, a fang.   Smeared dirt and frost, diamond slime.  Paradise a child’s notion.     Paradise painted one stroke. One phrase, one glimpse at a time, whatever   lightning flare reveals of it.  Blunderblink.  An invitation.  Mr and Mrs.   Dwindle.  Request.  Demand.  The pleasure of your company, your antics,   your fervor, your moodiness, your stolid numbing small time solemnity,   your contempt, your pig-headed pride, your carelessness, your squalling   self.

In this version of an acknowledgments page, references aren’t made to particular poems and poetry journals, but to the guts of writing itself.  Obviously, the joke here—and also the serious capital T-Truth of the matter—is that in “Acknowledgments” Violi notes the real places where a poet’s “work” first appears (to the poet!), i.e. in the poet’s world of experiences and perceptions and language. As Frank O’Hara once wrote in an article about the sculptor David Smith, “[In art] the slightest loss of attention leads to death” and in “Acknowledgments” Violi implicitly argues for extreme attention, a recognition of not only where one gets one’s work—where one finds it—but of the responsibility one has (both to oneself and existence) in the finding (no matter how one then uses—employs and deploys—what one’s found to make meaning).

I should note additionally

6. that the other two “Acknowledgments” poems in Overnight play a little more on the idea of the “acknowledgments page” as a sort of taken-for-granted but ridiculous mainstay of every new book of poems, calling into question not only the places we publish, but why we publish, and the whole in/significance of the endeavor.  For example, take these lines from the beginning of one of his other “Acknowledgments” poems:

The author wishes to express profound gratitude to the following publications in which some of these works previously appeared: Architectural Digest: “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”; Teen Life: “On the Death of Chatterton”; Cosmopolitan: “Constancy to an Ideal Object”; Bon Appétit: “Drinking versus Thinking,” “The Eagle and the Tortoise”; La Cucina Italiana: “Fire, Famine and Slaughter”; House Beautiful: “Kublai Khan,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”; Better Homes and Gardens: “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”…

This is funny sure, but it’s also a reminder that a) an acknowledgments page is always a sort of pledge of allegiance to a tribe of poetry and poets and b) that the subjects of our poems—our interests and preoccupations—perhaps (both are and) aren’t as transcendent and beyond the pale of popular life and culture as we (and others) sometimes like to think.  The juxtaposition here of the very literary (and mostly Coleridgean) poems with contemporary, popular, non-literary magazines marries the reading and the writing in a way that makes poetry (even old poetry) seem weirdly relevant—and very Violi.

It’s worth noting specifically here as well the heavy-duty role Coleridge plays in this “Acknowledgments” poem.  In addition to the mention of his “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (not once, not twice, but three times) “Kublai Khan” (twice—it’s listed as having appeared in Interiors as well), “Constancy to an Ideal Object,” “Drinking versus Thinking” and “Fire, Famine and Slaughter,” the poem also later attributes “Dejection: An Ode” to Sports Illustrated and “Christabel” to Hustler.  Coleridge, as the granddaddy of imaginative play and t/error—not to mention as someone who was accused of plagiarism—seems a perfect reference point and match for Violi, who handily (easily and impossibly) makes a poem out of the traditionally non-poetic form of the acknowledgments page, while simultaneously “stealing” the works he is acknowledging as his own.  Furthermore, paying this sort of homage to one’s (in this case, romantic) forebears, not only recognizes one’s debt to them, but it literally (and literarily) puts one in alignment with (the) stars.

7.  This sort of elbow rubbing with the Vast (“From an early age I was habituated to the Vast” wrote Coleridge in a letter), as well as the appropriation of the formal parameters of non-poetic language-games (as Wittgenstein might call them) are consistently among Violi’s greatest strengths, both in Overnight and his other work.  Perhaps best known for his poems “Index” (which looks and reads like…well, a portion of an index referring to an imaginary artist/renaissance man, Sutej Hudney) and “Triptych” (which looks like a morning, afternoon, and evening TV Guide-style list of programs, including the various times and channels at which, and where, they will appear) (both poems are included in Violi’s sadly out-of-print 1986 book, Splurge), Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all.  For example, in addition to the three “Acknowledgments” poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious “Counterman” which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish “who’s on first” routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, “Finish These Sentences” which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey “I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities”— which is essentially 11 “who am I” style riddles.  Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker—ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture—which ends with the question “Who am I?” Here’s number 3:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his on flesh, roast them
And eat them)—For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?

The upside down key at the end of the poem tells us that the answer to this riddle is (here comes the spoiler) Marc Antony (sorry, riddle purists for giving away the goods.  You’ll have ten more chances when you read the book).  Riddles like these often include various obfuscations of the riddler’s exploits, as well as puns, logical puzzles, figurative leaps, etc.  The idea is that a careful reader (a careful reader!) can solve the riddle simply by using the given clues and some brain power.  In “I.D.” the joke is that in many of the riddles one would need a PhD in history, etc. to have any hope of solving them.  The correspondence here between the stated clues and the persons they refer to are (to put it mildly) obscure—and these correspondences are the jokes inside the inside jokes.  Additionally, in every case, there’s the added difficulty that these riddles all have to do with “mistaken identities”.  For example, at least one of the speaker’s in “I.D.” is a movie character (a “mistaken identity”) played by a famous actor and so technically speaking not someone who ever existed at all.  In the riddle above, poor Philologus was punished for murdering Cicero—a crime which he didn’t actually commit (Herennius was the murderer)—but which he was commanded to commit by Marc Antony.  Thus, Philologus’ punishment was a case of “mistaken identity.”

8. For those with a more traditional formalist bent, Overnight includes several lush and often whacky sonnets: “Written in a Time of Worry and Woe, “To Dante Alighieri,” “Poet and Cynic” “Inkling in a Flurry” and a beautiful single sentence fragment sonnet, which appears at the end of the longer poem “Finish These Sentences”.  Both “Pastorale” and the aforementioned, “Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow” might be considered twists on the Romantic conversation poem, and the “The Art of Restoration” which is shaped like a broken commemorative dinner plate is a wonderful Apollinaire-like calligramme.

I mention this, because Violi is a formalist poet through and through—one who understands that working formally involves working with and against (never within) the formal parameters at hand.  Whether one is working with sonnets or acknowledgments page poems makes no difference

9. And now for something completely different: check out the musick [sic] in these final lines from “Toward a February Songbook”:

—Soon enough
The entire hillside will be buried
In greenery, the low stream will leap
Back into itself and guzzle away, but now,
Ah, now February is springtime for gray
And I’m at my light-hearted best
Heart as light as a hornet’s nest.

“Heart as light as a hornet’s nest”—reminds me of John Clare’s final lines from “The River Gwash,” “O thus while musing wild I’m doubly blest,/ My woes unheeding and my heart at rest”

“Heart as light as a hornet’s nest.”

10. Reading Violi, one always has the feeling of being on thin ice in terms of what one knows and can fathom, but also in terms of the grounds one is standing on.  His poems often feel like they might fall apart at any second, but for the fact that they’re so well hammered together/to the bone.  Strangely, this makes for thrilling (rather than annoying) reading and occasionally the poems are downright beautiful.  “Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow” is a good case in point.  It begins, “The muttering of sedentary artisans/ Hunched over desk and workbench/Two or three stories below/In the”.

11. Yes, that’s where the poem breaks off for, of all things, a big parenthetical distraction, which turns out to be a coming-to rather than a drifting away. The parenthetical in question is in the form of a 1st person, prose entry—almost diaristically written: “(I must have been half-listening for quite a while as I lay reading in bed […] I couldn’t return to my book until I knew the origin of that distant murmur[…])”—as if the initial lines of the poem were what the speaker was reading until he was disturbed by a sound coming from outside.

As he listens more intently, he comes to realize that the sound he’s hearing—the one that’s taken him so abruptly (and parenthetically) out of his book (and the lyric imaginary space of the poem) is actually “rain falling soft and easy on deep snow […] A natural fact […] more pleasurable than anything I could imagine, and I wondered if perhaps I had grown tired of imaginary things.)”  That is, the weather outside has undermined his concentration, taking him out of the poem and back to reality (which again I should point out is in parentheses, as if reality is somehow a mere aside to our imaginary lives).

Riddle solved as to the nature of the disturbance (light rain falling on deep snow), the poem (“Light Rain Falling on Deep Snow”) then jumps back into the imaginary world of the initial poem (the one the speaker was reading before he was disturbed by the rain) right where it left off, “basement of the year.”:

The muttering of sedentary artisans
Hunched over desk and workbench
Two or three stories below
In the

[(…)]

basement of the year…

Ultimately, the speaker finds his way back from his parenthetical prose distraction to the poem part of the poem (the shorter lineated lines and stanzas) by going through the rain—one might say by weathering the storm of consciousness.  Of course, now, having come back to the poem he isn’t the same (“sedentary artisan” reader) he was before the distraction, when (for a brief moment) there was an imaginary world to get lost in.  In the speaker’s new post-parenthetical reality, he has a different sense of things, “Imagination, methinks, is a closed shop/And even though I own the place/I’m treated like an apprentice.”  In other words, he’s aware of his imagining mind, and he can’t go back to his previous state in full-throttle flight.

The poem is a heartbreaking testament to the power and peril of reading, to paying attention, to thoughtfulness, and most importantly to the pitfalls of invention, and yet it manages well the conundrum of being wholly romantic at the very same time.

12. These notes were written in two overnight sessions at the end of July in Cincinnati, Ohio, 2008.  Is this a note important to note?

13.  Finally, I’d like to end by looking at Violi’s narrative poem “As I Was Telling Dave And Alex Kelley,” which appears near the beginning of Overnight and for me sums up not only Violi’s way of proceeding in this book, but in the vast-most of all of his books. First, however, I want to mention that Overnight is dedicated “To David and Alexandra Kelley”—I assume the Dave and Alex in the title of “As I Was Telling Dave And Alex Kelley” making this poem even more a sort of centerpiece/ars poetica than it might be otherwise.  By telling us what he told them (people he’s obviously close to, having dedicated the book in their direction), we are by extension made privy to a kind of classified information—that is, information outside the book, the overnight’s daylight inspiration in lines—information which has been previously (and under different circumstances) shared with people close to the poet/speaker.  The poem begins:

As I Was Telling Dave and Kelley

My brother swears this is true
And others have willingly—
generously testified,
As they did that other time…

The title and first few lines set us up for being told an apparently unbelievable story, which the speaker claims is, according to several other people (including his own brother), true.  So far so good.

From here, speaker Violi proceeds to relate the somewhat amazing true story of how his brother once went into a place he didn’t know to order some drinks.  While there, a vicious fight broke out between two women on the other side of the bar, so he “…jumped between them/To break it up” only to realize after he’d done so that this place where he’d randomly stopped to get a drink:

was a supper club theater
And he had just jumped into
The climactic scene of the play—
But this, I hasten to add, is not
About my brother but his neighbor,
A man whose roof needed repair,
A man, who, more than most feared heights.

In other words, the initial story about the brother and the dinner theater is a sort of tangent—in this case, a rational derangement of the poem’s narrative, which as we shall see Violi uses to shore up, and set the stage for, the poem’s actual/central narrative.

14.  Now the actual story of Violi’s speaker’s brother’s neighbor (whew!)—“A man whose roof needed repair” and was “more than most”  afraid of heights”—is not only a fabulous (and fabulously lineated) narrative, but a demonstration of the sort of shifts and slippage that makes Violi’s work so great.  With that in mind, watch your step, here we go.

Apparently this neighbor was so afraid of heights that before climbing the ladder to the roof (why he just didn’t call a roofer is never explained), “…he wrapped/A rope thick enough to moor a barge/Around his waist and lashed/The other end around the car bumper,” carefully asking his children to wait below and steady the ladder. Thus secured, he climbed up to the roof and began his work, when suddenly, “He heard the station wagon door/Slam shut, then the ignition,/The engine roar to life…”  Uh-oh…

Apparently the man’s wife, who was unaware of his rope anchor had some errands to run, so she ran them, and the poor man was dragged off the roof behind the car to his great misfortune.   And all the while his oblivious wife was driving along wondering “Where were those screams coming from?”  Yikes.

After some discussion of whether or not the wife could possibly not have known she was dragging her husband to his death (“Doctors, Police, all believed/ She could very well have not…”), the speaker re-enters the poem, stating:

This man deserves a shrine
Which, if donations are forthcoming,
I am willing to oversee
The construction of
At 145 Sampson Avenue,
Islip, Long Island, New York.
That’s right, that’s the name
Of the place: Islip.  I swear.

Snap goes the trap.  Unbelievable, yet believable as promised?  Yes.  A joke with real depths, both tragic and hilarious?  Check.  Wordplay lost and found?  You bet.  But what’s of premium interest poetically here is that just as the narrative of the poem itself initially slips off on a tangent as a way of illustrating and supporting the central narrative to come, Violi’s poems in general always find a way to yank the rug out from under us.  There’s always a slight or massive tear in the fabric of the poem, shifting the grounds beneath us as we read him.  We think he’s doing one thing, and then he does another, OR he does three or a thousand.  To put it in the simplest terms possible, Violi is a master of setting up expectations and then radically undermining and/or expanding their scope.  To me this is the foundation of his work, and the thing that keeps me reading him, one fantastic surprise to the next.

*

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Winter Journey

Monday, May 5th, 2008

by Tony Towle
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

9

For Whom the Bell Towles

winter journeyI’m giving Winter Journey an extra half-star because I want you to look past its cover. The drab, pointillist abstraction slapped on a dull lavender background, bracketed by titles apparently printed with defective disappearing ink, does not reflect the lively, erudite intricacy and humor of the work inside. Even if you recognize the looming bulk of the WTC towers, be assured this book contains no elegies for 9/11. Towle shares some blame for the nondescript title, which doesn’t reflect the mood of the book. Take a look at tonytowle.com to see some good cover designs, including one by Jasper Johns and my favorite by Larry Rivers: there’s the energy that should be on the cover.

It’s sometimes hard to be fair to any collection so soon after a career-spanning greatest hits like A History of the Invitation. You have to look past the intimidating difference in scale and leave enough time to judge the new work on its own merit. Happily, in Towle’s case, Winter Journey contains work that ranks with his best, and avoids any tendency to coast. In fact, I was certain that “Hudson and Worth” was in Invitation, since it contained such a classic Towle premise as turning a parking lot by a construction site into a map of the 1943 tank battle of Kursk:

…the asphalt below,
where a diagram of the 1943 battle of Kursk has been laid out
in myriad notations of red and orange.
Notice the red arrows near the parking lot. They
are Rossokovsky’s T-34’s which will pierce the German salient.
At sunrise, faculty from a military college
will utilize jackhammers to simulate the clamor of battle
while we huddle in our bunkers until the lesson is complete.

Towle is a master of satirical conceits, and this is no small thing. He follows their implications until they ascend to Parnassus and/or blow up in his (and our) faces. While I admit that language often acts as a deconstructor in chief, many poets seem to regard extended metaphors and fulfilled premises with a moral distaste which to me seems akin to cooking an omelet by cracking the eggs and dropping them on the kitchen floor. It’s like a joke without a set up, or a set up without a yolk. Towle, being a seriocomic gourmand, reliably cracks his eggs in the pan, cooks the omelet to a turn, flips it deftly, topping it with iffy mushrooms and cheese, which speak to him with historical relish and trepidation of blond invaders with puffy tents and egg-shaped Viking helmets, causing him (and us) to turn green and to volubly puke into the faux marble birdbath out back while Frank O’Hara adds a funny, touching zinger for dessert. Figuratively, of course.

You, reader, have a friend in Tony Towle: he is willing to go to these absurd lengths for you. His poems are in a hyperdrive that has nothing to do with character-driven realism, but stabs at the heart of the oversignified, ad-ridden, thoroughly engineered world that we live in—Donald Barthelme with a streak of John Donne? Watch what he does in “Truth in Advertising,” especially the section on Michelin’s iconic inflatable demigod’s especially “resilient… compassion.” Read his take on the beer commercial where the man pretends to be a doctor in order to take advantage of the limo with the bar (wait, you’re endangering the lives of real patients to get this full bar and you take the light beer?). Don’t miss the one where the SUV bounces its way across terrain consisting of the letters of its own name like the animated bits on Sesame Street, until, faced with “plummeting into the bottomless canyon” between the P and the A, “the vehicle awakens, its cold engine shuddering/ in the silent showroom, beads of moisture covering the hood.” Another classic Towle motif is the co-opting of the calendar for commercial purposes:

Every little breeze
takes on import
during Hurricane Awareness Week
which has kicked off
another Real Estate Avarice Month
here in fashionable Tribeca.

Towle is fond of reminding us that he is a Gemini, and therefore really gullible. Laugh, but don’t believe that for a minute, though his recent work has been reliably and fortuitously bipolar, not to mention a bit schizophrenic—which may be shitty for his consciousness but gravy for us. Our current war anxiety speaks to him in the guise of Mognol hordes disposing prisoners by rolling them up in rugs and kicking to them to death in order that no blood be shed. “YES, IRONY IS WHAT MADE OUR EMPIRE GREAT/ intones Genghis Khan from his bottomless tomb./ SURE IT WAS, confirms his son Ogodei, /rolling his eyes…/in an early use of italicized sarcasm.”

Winter Journey also contains muted elegies for the losses inevitably sustained over 40 years. One might not even catch the elegiac tone in “Bagatelle” because the surface is so breezy. The computer spell checks a reference to Teshub, storm god of the Hittites, as “Toshiba.” The poet continues to breeze of endless rain and cosmic investors cutting a loss as if they were clicking a mouse. 2/3 of the way through, we find a reference to sitting on the beach and considering “The Great North Atlantic,” which is a geographical fact as well as a reference to a book by Towle’s late friend, Kenneth Koch. Then we can reread the passage, astonished by the intricate thought that has been camouflaged by Towle’s comic, absurdist tone:

By now I’m on a trip, if not exactly a vacation
though I anticipate brambles, mosquitoes,
poisonous berries and lunatics with shotguns
as I usually encountered on vacation,
except when I would sit on the beach
and consider the Great North Atlantic
investing the feeling
that vacations would last longer
than I knew they were going to.

Lines like these give us a new sense of emotional directness in poetry. His fantastic and funny scenarios read less as escapism than challenge. Towle’s tonal mix of absurdity and pathos is so seamless that, as Ron Padgett put it, we are not permitted to distinguish between the real and the imagined. This would seem to be a recipe for schizophrenia, so let me elaborate: when we think of The Wizard of Oz primarily as an allegory, we have distinguished between fantasy and reality: we think we know what the book is really about. This gives readers a sense of security that Towle’s work does not. If we know the virtual world is located in silicon chips and fiber optic lines, then we think we know where Reality (capital R) is. In Towle’s poems, his speakers are in game world even as they walk down Broadway dodging traffic. Towle doesn’t have to set up a bleak Sci Fi future to scare us. The future is already here. The wonder is Towle’s resilient humor: we are all walking underwater and making the best of it. The wonder is that the undertow of loss is so well-balanced with the immediate pleasure of being alive. Here’s the fine miniature that kicks off the first poem, “In The Coffee House,” a contemporary mirror of the exciting, artistic life the once youthful Towle was looking for:

the Mona Lisa, in the Village
at Bleecker and Seventh, a blip
from the middle ages
on the radar screen of that young woman over there,
while she thinks of someone else.

The poet laments “the missed opportunities strewn about the incorporeal field” with the realization that, lost in his feelings, he, like, missed the 60’s while it was actually going on across the street at the San Remo:

exhilarated
by loneliness, poverty and paralyzing
indecision, resolutely ignoring the fact
that everyone cool in there
knew that I wasn’t.

Buffeted by time and memory as the poet is, the bounceback is around the corner. He is

waiting for an actual girlfriend:
and in fact it’s cool to have a girlfriend at my age
I think amusedly to myself
behind the overpriced coffee—
2.95 to contemplate the traffic
fleeing down the avenue and into the past.

I said that Towle does not allow us to distinguish between the real and the imagined; that his world is mostly engineered, and the wonder is that it isn’t a bleak, apocalyptic dystopia, but mostly pretty damn funny. Yes, he sometimes hides sadness behind the breeziest of tones. Yes, his game worlders are at risk of actually being struck by traffic crossing Broadway, but Towle insists he is an optimist. He feels that even in an engineered world, nature will always be there, if sometimes in disguise; we will be able to tell the difference if we cultivate a sufficiently practiced eye:

But to work out an agreement with these successive vistas
we will need help from a circumference of clarity
and a marvelous pencil to record what is happening. The lake still
needs help; it is far from the actual water. And this is characteristic
of the sort of designer who disappears among the cypresses,
asking the very mildness of the atmosphere for help.

This stanza is one of the few in the book that have a straightforward tone, but the poem is actually a Miltonic sonnet, and the stanza is the sestet balancing a far more absurdist octet. This helps us see, as Charles North pointed out, the musical structure of Towle’s materials, the counterpoint of his ideas, and the tendency of his stanzas to move in different directions and begin the poem anew, like symphonic movements.

Like the monomaniac coyote, we can paint a tunnel on the cliff to fool the roadrunner, and get hit by an oncoming train. Like the roadrunner, we can run right through to the other side. The difference is the clarity needed to make the marvelous pencil work for us, pun intended, so that we can see through the potentially fatal enticements of the ACME jet-powered bat suit—which is as far as this ridiculous comparison can be stretched. And since you’ve read this far, I can safely take that last half star off the curve.

*

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The Virgin Formica

Friday, April 25th, 2008

by Sharon Mesmer
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by P.J. Gallo

six

Once a Punk

mesmer cover

My introduction to the work of Sharon Mesmer was a YouTube video in which she reads four invariably obscene poems, titled “Annoying Diabetic Bitch,” “Ass Vagina,” “Squid Versus Assclown,” and “You Fucked Jimmy” at the Bowery Poetry Club for the 2006 Flarf Poetry Festival. I must admit I came to her newest collection, The Virgin Formica, with a sizable set of preconceptions.

While Mesmer still manages to disgust, she does so in doses bearable and often comical. These largely voice-driven poems are not groundbreaking—think Kathy Acker meets Eileen Myles—but they keep alive a vital, post-punk, feminine, American mode of speech. The book is not without moments of utter solipsism and gratuitous sexual explicitness—her poem “I’m Not Sorry,” for instance, describes the smell of male genitalia, “and that area between the dick and the balls / smells like that plastic stuff they sell way west on Canal Street”—but Mesmer’s voice plainly offers a raw and often refreshing sense of uncompromised subversion along with moments of sweet nostalgia.

Mesmer couldn’t have picked a better opening poem than “Canticle.” Not only is it one of the best-executed examples of her varied colloquial voice, but it prefigures the rest of the book. Early in the poem, Mesmer proposes a kind of manifesto for her work when she writes, “but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. / I’ve been rockin’.” Besides the obvious irony of this line being a part of a poem, we know what she means. “Rockin’” is an appropriate euphemism for Mesmer’s overtly “anti-intellectual” persona. Parts of these poems cannot be examined in the context of academic criticism (in which they would be too easily written off) because they specifically attempt to defy contemporary convention. But Mesmer seems conscious of the problems with this defiance and, in a later poem, her speaker adopts the name “Auntie Intellectual”—a handle that at once embraces and denies her own intellectual tendencies. Also, she is quick to leap from slangy crudeness into a more recognizable poetic mode. For instance, later in “Canticle,” she describes “rockin’”:

Oh Lucifer, light-bringer,
singer of our hymns to failure,
cut us loose from our tribal pieties,
our forebodings at what this new age means,
for we shall be known by new names.

These lines give the dual sense of silly, melodramatic irony and a sincere pleading for the detachment that only a more visceral art can provide, and their complexity affords a certain knowing smile in any reader who has reminisced about the once intoxicating effects of “rockin’.”

Irony is Mesmer’s weapon of choice, but she uses it with sporadic quality. In her flawed “Blue-Collar Typeface” for instance, she describes a series of people who inaccurately think or wish they are blue-collar. In the finale of the poem, she defends real blue-collar people against these poseurs:

I know lots of useless,
imperfectly complicated
blue-collar people.
And their line breaks
kick your line breaks’s
ass.

She is of course being ironic. Nevertheless, these lines immediately reestablish a duality between two classes of people, undermining the poem’s earlier and quite ingenious breaking down of this duality. The idea that blue-collar poets are in some way separate from poets of other-colored-collars, and that these poets somehow need defense against what can only be thought of as some ethereal intellectualist or academic force is philosophically backward. At one point she writes with sincerity, “Blue-collar people often don’t care about / academic poetry, / the breaking of the line,” and in one stroke belittles both blue-collar poets and the conventions of what she considers an academic poetry. This poem is the most obvious example of moral carelessness in the guise of self-righteousness throughout the book, but every dozen or so pages, her work requires a moment of pause, not in contemplation, but in dismissal.

It must be mentioned that the second section of Mesmer’s book is devoted to a poem/comic collaboration with David Borchart called “Madame Bowery.” Surprisingly, the language itself stands out from underneath the shadow cast by the overwhelming novelty inherent in the inclusion of a comic in a book of poetry. In a common and overtly post-modern way, the poem and the art successfully annex some of the themes of Madame Bovary, namely helplessness (at one point the character glides along a set of railroad tracks) and the potential of language (“but that was the golden age, before men figured things out and everything started sounding like Tonto said it”), but the comic’s strength lies in the heroine’s various analyses of self and society. At one point, this strangely drawn three-eyed female speaker provides another broad manifesto for Mesmer’s work saying, “I want to discuss continuity now, imposing chaos on order.” It is in these moments Mesmer realizes the great philosophical monsters hiding behind her post-punk, anti-intellectual aesthetic.

Because Mesmer’s poems are often self-interested, many of the strongest moments in her new book refer specifically to herself and her own voice. A few of the book’s best are “Never Lose Your Sense of Wonder,” “Retarded Aerosmith World,” and “Lonely Tylenol.” In “Stupid University Job,” she writes of her tragic flaw, “Mine is like that of the naked man / who holds up a sign that says I’m ‘naked.’” Of all her mini-manifestoes and moments of self-consciousness, this is her most accurate. The Virgin Formica is antipathetic and subversive, but Mesmer makes no bones about reminding us.

*

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The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

by Indran Amirthanayagam
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by J. Mae Barizo

6stars_7

Pictures of Grief

amirthan cover“I find it hard to write even today about this tremendous beast,” Indran Amirthanayagam writes in the preface to The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems, referring to the 2004 natural disaster that took the lives of over 225,000 victims in southeast Asia. On December 26, 2004, the day that his country of birth, Sri Lanka, “lost half its face,” he was consumed by a desire to “write that face back.”

He is not the first writer faced with the urge to bear witness to calamity. Nelly Sachs survived the concentration camps of World War II, going on to write literature that would win her a Nobel prize in 1966; Gottfried Benn worked as an army physician for prostitutes during World War I, his poems from that period marked by their preoccupation with decay and the human body. More recently, there is Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy. There is also D. Nurkse’s Burnt Island, which contains a series of poems that are a homage to post 9/11 New York. Tragedy is difficult to chronicle for the same reason that it is difficult for a trauma patient to revamp his or her damaged psyche: the mind possesses an aggressive anathema towards healing.

Amirthanayagam displays that he is no stranger to the backdrop of the disaster. There is an inherent ease in the way that he describes the allure and the ferocity of the sea; one can almost smell the salt and feel the stickiness of the tropical fruit on the fingertips while reading his well-crafted verse. It is the emotional map of the poem that is less developed, but he does his best to transport the reader to the scenes of wreckage: fisherman’s shanties, village churches, holiday hotels along the gutted coast. In “Commandment,” he does a praiseworthy job of conjuring up the injured landscape:

…the sea drew back
exposing rocks
huge like elephants,

then catapulted,
bludgeoning beaches,
bodies roused out
of seething, headless water,

The five-hundred-mile-an-hour
funeral march;”

The writing is vivid; the lines are fluid; the narrative is propelled incessantly by loss. It is this omnipresent saturation with death and devastation, however, which tends to wear heavily on the reader. What is it that happens in the mind as it attempts to simultaneously delve into and skirt around catastrophe? Maurice Blachot, in his book, L’Ecriture du Desastre, writes: “it is not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge as disaster and knowledge disastrously — carries us…deports us (whom it smites and nonetheless leaves untouched), straight to ignorance, and puts us face to face with ignorance of the unknown so that we forget, endlessly.” The reader of The Splintered Face is constantly reminded of this endless cycle of remembering and forgetting as we become aware of Amirthanayagam’s writing processes. Again and again, we are given a glimpse of the Tsunami and its aftermath, while the author projects heartbreak, anger and futility onto the speechless victims in his poems. This transference suggests to me that the author has not fully internalized death, and in order to minimize his own vulnerability, transposes loss onto the various narrators of the poems.

Throughout the collection, Amirthanayagam often writes from the first-person viewpoints of survivors. In “Words and Orchids,” the narrator is a wife whose husband was washed away as “he sucked mangos with his hands.” “Faith” is told in the voice of a minister or priest of a congregation that “lost eighteen nuns that day.” “Wrecked: Coconuts” is a poem that tells the story of a fisherman who ate coconuts for twenty-five days until a ship found him, his wife and children swept away. The list goes on. This movable “I” of the collection, speaking from its numerous narrators, removes the author from the landscape of the poem, letting the victims speak for themselves.

This method is one that has been used before, notably by authors such as C.D. Wright and Bei Dao, and is successful when utilized tastefully. In The Splintered Face however, it contributed to my longing for a more unified continuum between thought and emotion, life and death. This use of multiple narrators, all infused with similar mournful inflections, prevented me from becoming vested in their stories, no matter how affecting they were. The well-crafted poems in this book are the ones that are committed to description, a type of lyrical yet informed journalistic cataloguing of events and characters which make sense of catastrophe from an appropriate emotional distance. Take for instance this terrific employment of description in “Order”:

:the past where we danced ballroom
while the children played carom, and mangos

stained our lapels, and today, hobbling,
scavenging in ash heaps, how easy

the arithmetic, day and night, two by two.
Bring on the mind workers.

Let a thousand doctors bloom.
I lived right here on the x, my name

is blue: sea green blue blue green…

The strongest poems in the collection, “Birds”, “Intruder:Mullaitivu”, “Teaching Noah”, and the stunning “Order” speak to the reader on a level which outstrips grief, approaching the disaster from a even-tempered place, rather than articulating from the seat of suffering. Writing from the experience, instead of about the actual event, allows the author to reject sensationalist methods of description, letting the poem transcend above disaster and all that the word demands.

*

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Moraine

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

by Joanna Fuhrman
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

4_5

Review Moraine

fuhrman coverDon’t worry.  Moraine is not a textbook on geology.  Fuhrman helpfully provides the definition: “a mound, ridge or ground covering of unsorted debris, deposited by the melting away of a glacier,” but she chooses to riff off the domestic implications of unsorted debris, the gunk of cut stems in the sink, ice cubes and mirrors.  Fuhrman’s time scale is personal rather than geologic.  It is a protective, middle landscape that does not reach too high or too low.  Instead of Atlas holding up the earth, the poems seem to be holding up the sky, both bravely keeping the middle space open and frantically warding off the void of eternity. What’s left is Fuhrman’s language, which skips delightfully but never quite flies. 

Every poem in the book is titled some sort of “moraine.” In “Partial Escapist Moraine,” she writes to her friend Noelle Kocot after the death of her husband, the composer Damon Tomblin:  “Let’s pretend we’re on a trip.  Rip out the moldy sky, package our emotions in even intervals so the jury will have no doubt about our business acumen.”  This initial strategy seems to fail after the first section lapses into the silence of an asterisk.  The second part resumes:  “I’m sorry I can’t help you today…You know I pray to my atheist god to make me ashamed, to be a train to take you away, a joy train unashamed … the lights in your name more awake than this death conglomerate was ever asleep.”

This passage demonstrates a skillful balance of centripetal and centrifugal emotion.  No single mood is allowed to take the ball and run, whether grief or imagined joy, humor or ponderousness. The god in the passage is atheist.  Death is conglomerated.  The tendency to spin out into the cosmos, or even into an extended metaphor is carefully muted.  But there is no howl, epic or otherwise.

In literary discussions of masculine and feminine ethics in Frankenstein, it’s been said that the masculine idea of justice means determining right and wrong, and that the female idea of justice means that no one should suffer.  Such differences humorously play out in several places in Joanna Fuhrman’s book.  In “Bayonet Moraine,” the speaker imagines herself both male and female:

Then I was a man again.
The monorail twisted through the hydra.

Then I was a woman again.
My breasts: life preservers for opposing armies.

In “School Days Lost Song Moraine,” first-graders are involved in a conflict resolution workshop (!).  One girl insists she is a sponge in the sink, and soon all the other girls join in.  But the boy stays apart, dribbling an imaginary basketball.  The teacher asks the girl to think of something they could all do together. 

“We can all be in the kitchen/…and he can be a basketball player.”
Wouldn’t his playing cause the dishes to break?” The teacher asks.

“No,” the three-foot girl explains, “he will be a basketball player
not playing ball.”

Throughout Moraine, any emotional or linguistic tendency to break out of orbit is paired with a twin bringing it back to earth.  All escapes are partial escapes. “Cento Moraine #2” is a standout two-part poem evoking the atmosphere more than the fact of the attack on the twin towers and the subsequent televised war.  Part one starts to grieve for the lost twin, but part two almost seems to give up.  It starts: “There is no longer any use in harping on.” The poem ends, “Two, of course there are two.” For Fuhrman, that statement runs deep.  This eternal pairing seems not as much a dilution or an intensification of emotion, but an acknowledgement of the fact of gravity.  Here a reference to Emily Dickinson almost visibly wards off the depth of its own implication.  There, singularities, even “the unkissed/ data specialist, audience rear” are eventually paired off.  How this happens is funny but never quite laugh-out-loud.  Likewise, while I am struck by the good sense, compassion and playfulness in the book, I find myself listening for a scream that never comes.

*

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