Even though we have mentioned The First Annual New York Poetry Festival in a previous post, we figured it couldn’t hurt to mention it again. This Saturday and Sunday the two day poetry festival will populate Governors Island- a quick free ferry ride away from NYC/BK/NJ.
We’d also like to remind you that Coldfront Magazine will take part in the festival. On Stage 1 of the Commodore from 12:30-1pm Coldfront’s founding editors, John Deming, Melinda Wilson and Greame Graeme Bezanson will be joined by POP Editor Jackie Clark, News Editor Steven Karl (me), and Video Editor DJ Dolack. Come out to the festival, drop in on our reading and say “hi” to us afterwards.
If you find yourself in Boston definitely check out the Boston Poet Tea Party featuring Coldfront’s Features Editor, Ken L. Walker.
Abraham Smith’s chapbook Last Ride presents readers with a curious combination of form and genre: a chapbook—miniaturized, focused—inside which one long, sprawling poem dwells. Unpunctuated and without stanza breaks, Last Ride reads like an interstate drive without directions. Each line speaks to the other, with characters and images as ready signposts, yet the poem’s speaker dwells so far inside himself that the road to understanding falls just out of view. This lends the chapbook a feel of adventure and discovery: an emotionally driven look at a fast world passing.
The poem’s speaker, held captive by anticipatory fear, inhabits a space of constant observation. What he learns and sees, the reader receives in quick enjambment: “70 when you ain’t yet 30 / and the light like egg whites troublin’ over clay” opens the poem, revealing a speaker aware of the bodily tolls of work and time. “mother may i re-up on the womb[,]” he asks soon after, “for this world is a hungered world / and there’s paper crane carrion / all over the moon.”
In this continuous, rambling structure, it’s hard to eke out a continuous narrative or assert the presence of a faithfully appearing character. Instead, Smith relies on image, sound and speed to propel us through the poem’s scenes. Last Ride is meant to be consumed whole, with no small poem to dog-ear for a break or quiet place to pause for the night. While the speaker’s voice can feel more like obfuscation than enlightenment, Smith’s eye for the gorgeous and devastating image impels these poems forward.
–Rachel Mennies
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Climate Reply, Trey Moody (New Michigan Press 2010)
In Climate Reply,Trey Moody tries to create aninsular space in which the poems can live and rub off on one another,and hemanages to do so in about half of the poems. The restdistract the reader from the more interesting mood and tone.
The first poem, “What We First Said,” is inviting. It doesn’t open with a bang, but the last lines give way to a quasi-metaphysical pause: “In the history of human suffering,/ this must be what we meant:// an eye or an ear,/ replaced with hard clay, or a plum.” Later,the title poem appears, and that too is wonderful, using the words “Weather as if” as prefix to about half ofthe lines. There are beauty and meaning in such repetition, which lure the readerintothat insular place mentioned above.
However,that place is punctured by the“Dear Ghosts” poems. The poem set attempts to portray (ghostly?)domestic situations, but ultimately falls short, detracting from the bigger climate metaphor the other poems are working hard to instate. The “Dear Ghosts” poems almost pull away from the chapbook; both these and the other poems would have benefited from the “ghosts” having their own space.
Other poems in Climate Reply do work together. “This Forest Isn’t a Room” begins, “ The trees are always laughing down on you,” and continues,“ Their trunks don’ t shake when they laugh, you notice./ You cannot remember what your body does// but you believe your body’ s not a tree, a tree not a body.” This speaks nicely to the poem “One Question” which ends with the question, “When the weather’s right, Lord,/ will I grow from the ground like a tree?”–which in turn complements “Birdsong,” and its line, “ The song was guidance, even if the pines were aware, sharing our ears.” Continuity and well-constructed lines speak to the over-arching concept of Climate Reply: how the weather, and the lifeout in the weather, respond to the poet’ s (and the reader’ s) conscious and unconscious questions.
–Jackie Clark
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Disappears in the Rain, Matthew Thorburn (Parlor City Press 2009)
Matthew Thorburn’s Disappears in the Rain won The Broome Review 2009 Chapbook Competition. The chapbook contains 20 pages of poetry, all segments of the one long poem, “Disappears in the Rain.”
The speaker finds himself somewhere near Mount Fuji with his significant other, Lily, and perhaps because the speaker travels with his partner, some of Thorburn’s lines succumb to schmaltz. From page ten: “and the day unrolls like a paper scroll / spooling out birds trees rivers flowers you.”
In the opening segment, the narrator familiarizes his audience with his surroundings. He notes that “everyone sleeps on the floor,” and that breakfast is “steamed rice / and tofu soup, a pink wedge / of salmon, miscellaneous pickles.” The first page sets the scene, and the scenes throughout the book are nice, but Thorburn’s phrasing sometimes distracts from the imagery. For example, he writes, “socks or bare feet / get you to bed.” But the socks cannot “get” one anywhere. The socks are along for the ride.
However, the vacant footwear found at various entryways oddly intrigues and haunts:
a pair of slippers
outside the bathroom door—
come back later
The slippers indicate that the bathroom is occupied, but they also leave the reader with a ghost-like presence.
Other images aren’t as effective, and Thorburn’s ability to refresh some clichés is inconsistent. He writes, “the cat / revs his engine / at her touch.” These lines don’t capitalize on the cat’s purring. In other places, though, Thorburn renews common poetic images, as on page 15: “the water shows pieces of sky / to the sky.” And from page 26: “our t-shirts stuck to our backs / like licked stamps.”
Such images are memorable, but as a solitary unit, Disappears in the Rain is ultinmately isolated and vulnerable.
InDigest Magazine celebrated its three year anniversary on Sunday, December 12th at Le Poisson Rouge. InDigest Magazine is an online journal which curates readings in New York City and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The anniversary party also served as a fundraiser for Dean Young who needs a heart transplant. For more Coldfront coverage on Dean Young click here.
Kid A was released ten years ago this month. You will find below 22 short pieces of writing about or inspired by Radiohead’s landmark fourth album. The ten tracks comprising Kid A are peppered throughout, culminating with the music video for the album’s final track, “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” The full experience of listening Kid A actually includes two and half full minutes of silence — at the close of “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a full-minute of silence culminates in a gorgeous meteor shower-crescendo; this is followed by a further 90 seconds of silence, creating a lovely effect when the album is listened to on repeat. We have included each separate track throughout so that you may listen as you read. For more artwork and video, click here. Otherwise: listen, read, enjoy. Ice age coming.
Featuring writing by: Julie Ann, Stan Apps, Joe Bueter, Jackie Clark, Brooklyn Copeland, John Deming, Brent Goodman, John Harkey, Jeff T. Johnson, Peter Bogart Johnson, Steven Karl, Amy Lawless, Masin Persina, Michael Schiavo, Christopher Snyder, Matt Soucy, Justin Taylor, Adam Trull, Ken L. Walker, Alice White, Melinda Kaye Wilson, Jim Wood
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[Everything In Its Right Place]
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Stan Apps
Kid A as contract
What was it he said? “We have heads on sticks, and you have ventriloquists.” Our assets are different, but our interests are convergent. Some sort of bargain seems imminent. What form may that bargain take?
One possibility is partnership, an LLC to profit from production of allegory. For the allegorical process, the floating heads and disembodied voices must perform concurrently, on cue, for an indefinite period: cooperation best established by pooling assets under independent new authority.
Or it could be a supply contract. Head-owners could pay cash for rights to ventriloquists. It must be ventriloquist-suppliers who sell, because where gains from trade take the form of symbolic knowledge production, those with most need for justification have the greatest capacity to profit.
I was exploring the south of France right around the time when this album took off, and I remember seeing the graphics in the record stores. Part of my travels always includes collecting the rare-in-my-country recordings, and communing with music lovers from not-my-country in record shops (How to Disappear Completely). A Radiohead fan from Pablo Honey days, I was blown away by their presence. I bought a small poster with French fine print, and display it when the colours are where they should be (Everything in Its Right Place). Four years later, my husband used Idioteque as background music to one of several postmodern pastiches of images and videos from our European travel. It turned out scarily amazing. The way he focused such dramatic attention on me makes me totally understand but also turn from the “release me” of Morning Bell. Radiohead knows how to make melancholia utterly wretch from your heart and gut, and to make it ok, a bit, because the music is so sublimely lovely. Which makes it cool. I think I’m crazy, maybe… but I’m doing good enough (Optimistic). (Yikes!)
***
Joe Bueter
Kid A on the Bus
I visited England for two weeks right after Kid A was released. My friend burned me a copy for the trip. It was his copyright-approved backup copy—I swear. I think he warned me about the album in that way enthusiastic music fans do when they pass along something unbelievably new. I found myself listening to Kid A at night on these giant charter buses that took me to tourist destinations and the school I was an exchange student at. The buses had huge picture windows that provided wide views of Buckingham Palace and Ely Cathedral, although I don’t remember seeing those landmarks from the bus.
I remember dozing until the fractured horns of “National Anthem” woke me to some muddled sky over the country. Once it was an orange-colored storm turning over the sky across a field. Once it was Guy Fawkes Day and several distant towns were shooting fireworks into the clouds. By the time “In Limbo” started, my eyes fell from half-opened to closed, only to be jacked open again by “Idioteque.” Somehow the album made me feel calm, strange and solitary, but powerfully immune to the shadows of those emotions. It was like being a low-ranking god out on a budget tour of earth for a report no one would read, but feeling good to be out of the office and noticing large, beautiful scenes.
Everything in its right place and you sucking a lemon. Everything in its right place, and there you are, sucking a stupid lemon, they say. You understand everything beginning with a tentative rift. Everything always beginning with the same few notes, the same repetition. A static foundation given the status of home, distorted, then amplified. You woke up yesterday sucking a lemon and everything else was just right. You were wrong. You woke up and tried to say something but everything was in its right place. You gave yourself a name, a song, you introduced ambiance and echoed your plea. You scrambled your soliloquy and confused guitar wails for baby cries. There are two colors. You know there are two colors. But those that are not you define the collective artifice. They project onto others, they speak unto others, offer friendship through affliction. They put everything is in its right place, escalating toward the very top, the very last breath, but you will always understand the part of the whole, the full-throttle synecdoche of sour.
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I first heard Kid A as an exchange student in Finland. I was 16 years old. I’d spent the two years prior obsessively collecting every piece of Radiohead (albums, EPs, singles) I could find. When I heard a new album was in the works, I was really, really hoping this one song I’d heard in the Meeting People is Easy documentary (which I’d recorded from MTV on a VHS tape and kept until a friend of mine gave it to an older guy she’d wanted to impress) would make the track list. I believe the song was called Follow Me Around. Obviously, it did not appear on Kid A. Kid A was the first thing I ever ordered from Amazon. It arrived well after the release date. Having ignored the online reviews and the buzz on the only real Radiohead website (greenplastic.com), I played the album immediately after school the day it came in the mail. My host sister, Ida, was doing homework at the dining room table. I was in the living room on the couch. I listened all the way through. I asked Ida what she thought. She tried to be kind. “It sounds like background music,” she said. I agreed. I still do. I was one of those annoying people who resented Kid A for not sounding like OK Computer. And I’ve been annoyed with Radiohead ever since. A year later, when I got back to Indiana, I traded in my entire Radiohead collection for Rolling Stones albums.
Just before Kid A was released, some music channel broadcasted an image of a phonograph and played the whole album. In between each track, the record player was replaced by one of Radiohead’s now famous ‘bear’ faces:
At the time, I was reading Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s post-apocalyptic tale “The Portable Phonograph” for a critical analysis class. The story is about a man who has invited other men over to his shelter. They listen to music and have conversation. The man explains that when he realized “what was happening” — the apocalypse — he told himself, “It is the end. I cannot take much; I will take these.” “These” are classic books, as well as his records and portable phonograph. Much of the story is devoted to descriptions of an empty, frozen, bomb-scarred landscape.
In a landscape constructed entirely of silence and desolation, any sound has tremendous gravity: Was that wind? Or a bird? Or some signal transmitted from another living human? The thickness of sound in Kid A evokes the expanse, terror and beauty of that world, among others. It is filled by its own emptiness; it twitches with death and with life insisting on itself. Brooklyn Copeland’s comment that Kid A is “background music” is apt. It is atmospheric, and mood-inducing, and for me, the only record that enhances the experience of writing rather than distracting from it.
But this is only one of Kid A‘s applications. It significantly rewards focused, active listening. You can press your ear against it and hear blips and transmissions. Buried syncopation. Sounds are timed, flipped, remade. The songwriters specialize in nuance, momentum, subtlety and repetition. Johnny Greenwood’s string arrangements in “How to Disappear Completely” swell and absorb; Colin Greenwood’s bassline in “The National Anthem” punishes as horns flail like slaughtered innocents. Fragmented, associative, representative lyrics hint that saying anything is saying too much. Still, there are quotable moments in every song:
* yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon
* we’ve got heads on sticks / you’ve got ventriloquists
* everyone has got the fear / it’s holding on
* in a little while I’ll be gone
* treefingers
* this one just came out of the swamp
* I’m lost at sea / don’t bother me
* here I’m alive /everything all of the time / ice age coming
* cut the kids in half
* I think you’re crazy
Kid A can be an intensely solitary experience and the quintessential example of music that opens itself up with repeated listens. It ends on “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” one of the saddest songs in a generation. (Hear a very nice demo version with additional verse here.) Really, the sounds in Kid A were new to a lot of ears, but not entirely new in the music biz. (Aphex Twin, a major influence on the band and album, famously didn’t see what the big deal was.)What it is: a transformative amalgam of pop songs, and the best of its kind. You can live in Kid A,or die there, you can expect experience both the terror of inevitability and the freedom of letting it go.
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1. Above the muted pulsing progression, cut to a dreaming man the moment he realizes he wants to run. The most disturbing note the one which doesn’t modulate.
2. All the children’s toys lift off the floor, suspend, begin to melt. The Speak & Spell spirals, singing.
3. Outside, on the back of a flatbed truck breaknecking backwards downhill in neutral, someone uncases a baritone sax, another a slide trombone. Crashing at the bottom, the bannered park gazebo shatters into patriotic splinters.
4. Watching from beneath dripping trees, a transparent guitar considers which calm suicide might claim him.
5. Ice water skin. The river carries our bodies submerged past sunken swan bones.
6. Ascending two scales at once, you can try the best you can. Somewhere in the near distance, tom toms drone almost tribal.
7. When a dreaming man runs, the ground whirlpools around him. The fixed note a sonar beacon.
8. Scrape a screwdriver down your arm. Cast the flashback between a tied-down boy and a beatbox metronome blinking every quarter note.
9. What a stunning sunrise through the charred window frame.
10. The reed organ you bellow with bare feet thinks itself giving birth to embers. Your curved fingers spaced equally apart, raking the glow. Both of you breathing now. Angels too, invoking their top-heavy harps.
11. Every dream ends in sine wave. Every wave wakes before the first pulse.
O millennial epitaph, encrusted with phonemes.
O you cobwebbed-attic puppet-theater of fire and ice, you wet/dry vac, you shotgun marriage of heaven and hell.
O damaged space-baroque pageant of drones, drifts, winding sheets, lurches, lapses: we find ourselves in successive ecologies, swerving from revelry to reverie to resignation and back.
……………
If it takes two-and-a-half species of sonic flora elapsing for a creature-voice to wriggle to the surface, so be it: those searching, mewling, lovely melodic strains are so many cursive etchings on your gleaming obsidian tray. We swoon in several new ways.
O creepy Garden of Earthly Delights—sumptuous, polymorphous, lush with obscure deviance and pleasure and spoilage—you are the true sound of the suburbs!
O mission statement in how convulsive beauty might survive when it finds itself subjected to varying types and doses of sedation, we can think of no more cogent synthesis of the ominous and the elegant!
……………
Your composite cloud of disembodied emanations bespeaks not precisely paranoia or an android future but what felt and still feels like the cosmic undercurrents of THE PRESENT MOMENT: the aching and respiring and babbling of all manufactured material substance itself, of the aggregated gestalt that’s made up of every human-generated object on earth at any given moment—un-nature’s collective cantata-mass.
O you nice dream, thanks for haunting us.
ALPHA. I can’t think about KID A without thinking of AMNESIAC. I don’t even think of them as part one and part two. More like side one and side two, though there are eight sides total (each album released as a two-record ten-inch vinyl set). EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE just ended—in the space before KID A, a dog barked out the window, digging into the open grooves. Now Thom Yorke’s going YZOWWWW. This was what Yorke had to say after OK Computer. Could I have predicted that KID A and AMNESIAC would age more slowly than OK Computer?
BETA. Yes and no. Everyone is so. Near. We thought KID A and AMNESIAC would go away, and we’d return to or be left with OK Computer. Until we realized we liked this strange new Radiohead, which had more to say about the new millennium. We could hear Radiohead better on this side. So alive? So allowed. So alone. Horns battle bass for most relentless instrumentation. We drool along, pry open the tray to find the hidden liner. Soon we’ll know HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY. Nice dream. Listen carefully. This isn’t happening. The band comes around. We’re still not here.
GAMMA. Ten years are self-evident. Five years can’t be recognized. Eight years are hard to grasp. Ten years make sense. Your co-worker liked OPTIMISTIC. You knew why. The best you can is good enough. Your co-worker was a nice person. You didn’t keep in touch. OOH OOH OOH. When are you IN LIMBO and when are you OPTIMISTIC? Check the readout, mark the groove. Trap doors that open. You know what comes next. You’re living in a fantasy. Between here and there is better than either here or there. The warp and wend of you and you and you and
DELTA. Here they are. Glitching mad. Recall a hidden vocal. Ice age come and ice age come in. This is really happening. Will this sound classic and new in another 10 years? Everything all the time. They’ve forgotten their titles. They’ve missed a few beats. The bump on the head. Welcome to the afterfuture. Everything is dated and now. A chorus of woe. Setting consonants. Shrieking strings. Watch them go. Harmonium for their troubles. The same last song as next time and the time after that. The crackling grows with the giant fluttering. In their world, the songs go on.
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It’s the Tuesday after Kid A came out, and I’m driving down 70th past El Cajon Blvd. There’re just a few lights and I can speed a little. San Diego’s just cooling down, which means a gimmicky shade of cold – low 60’s and everyone’s in pea coats, scarves. Windows closed. I’m on my way to drop off the photos I shot for Alan and Stina’s wedding, glossy black and whites of the condo pool area, the minister in sunglasses and an AA hat. They absolutely played Time of Your Life. This little girl got her finger stuck in the pool gate. Right now, on the other, much better hand, Idioteque’s on loud and making my crappy speakers almost go fuzzy, skirting that boundary but holding tight in the blue margin just enough. So good.
But this is just a slightly awkward detour: my new girlfriend’s flying in this afternoon from New York, and at this exact moment she’s almost certainly bleary eyed in Vegas International before the final leg of the budget flight we’ve been talking about for months, and a couple of desperate husbands are absolutely running back to the slots in the smoking area, probably checking her out, and she’s listening to the exact same thing, headphones on tight. I know it. She called me two days ago and said she got high and rode the D train just to watch the maintenance lights pass the windows in time with it, and for that how could I love her any more, really? How?
Let’s start somewhere near the beginning. The second time I saw Radiohead live they were opening up for Belly at the University of Maryland. Thom Yorke mentioned that he had overheard a record-store clerk refer to them as a “one-hit wonder.” Fast-forward to Kid A— the double 10” LP that I had to have. Naturally, despite various media reports of this album being “cold” and “not a rock record,” the vinyl sold out almost as soon as it hit the rack (so much for being only a “one-hit wonder”).
I remember pedaling all over Portland (Oregon, where I lived at the time), scouring Seattle, visiting family and hunting through bins in Philly and South (& North) Jersey for the record. I also searched my favorite record shop in Barcelona where I found Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psycho Candy, The Cure’s Pornography and a Moose 12-inch (remember them?).
Later I found myself in Paris shopping in some large mega store (like Virgin) thinking that a PJ Harvey record might have been released in France before the US and instead stumble onto a bin full of Kid A records. Score!
Much later that same year my girlfriend (at the time), a roommate and I piled into the car at 2 in morning, pumped on caffeine, Kid A blaring from the speakers, to make our way to see Radiohead play at Gorge Ampitheatre located in Washington on the Columbia Gorge. It was the best Radiohead show I’ve seen and I will always remember Thom Yorke squealing away as the sun was swallowed up by the gorge and then there were stars and guitar feedback. What more could a person ask for?
Kid A’s anniversary will come and I will make myself a drink, think of landscapes, road trips, past loves, old friends— the life thus lived, the life which remains. I will think of “Idioteque,” “Here I’m alive/ Everything all of the time.”
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August 14, 2001–I was at Suffolk Downs with my friends seeing my first Radiohead show ever. For those unfamiliar, Suffolk Downs is Boston’s horse racing track. Previous to that night, I had never been there. All you need to know is that it’s both awful (isn’t all horse racing kind of awful?) and near Logan Airport. We gleefully smoked a ton of pot making merry horse and dog racing jokes. I couldn’t even bore you with a description of who said what. Memory does not serve. I do remember, however, what happened during the show.
The sun finally started to fucking set in that August blue that makes everyone want to live forever. But unfortunately, Radiohead was in a foreshadowing mood. Idioteque. During Idioteque the planes from Logan began to pound down overhead at rush hour pace. Low. Loud. Almost as loud as Radiohead.
Ice age coming
Ice age coming
…
Here I’m alive
The intensity of these words while the planes flew low (I mean dangerously low over the crowd) was terrifying. Women and children first. I felt like something really bad was happening or about to happen and please don’t assume it was a weed freakout. My friends all felt like something bad was going to happen also. The whole crowd’s energy implied something bad was about to happen.
Something bad was about to happen.
This was really happening.
I felt a message in the song and in the planes over head – that is, in the juxtaposition. Since that night I have learned a lot. I don’t believe in fate. But that night cross my hahhht there was an awful stink in the air and it wasn’t the horses’ shit from Suffolk Downs.
I realize how common it is to hear of an album changing someone’s life. Nonetheless, may I tell you how this album brought me from an economics degree at Wake Forest, NC to writing poetry in Oakland? Nearly ten years ago I decided to pledge a fraternity. What could I do? I was a liberal, attending (for foolish reasons) a conservative university and actually feeling more lost than in high school. I don’t remember what prompted me to make a stop on a pledging errand to pick up Kid A, nor the many of dozens of listens to the album that semester. However, I do remember writing my first poem while Kid A played on my earphones. Yes, my first poem, outside of a school assignment, was about outer space and inspired by Kid A. Granted, it was not a good poem, but I’ve never recovered from the boundless feeling writing it gave me. That spring, I took a poetry workshop and found my passion. The rest followed in quick succession. I worked in Manhattan for two years, writing poetry at my cubicle. I then moved to UC Davis for an MA in Poetry, where I met my wife, Allison. And here I am, writing poems and teaching English and Creative Writing to high school students in Oakland. Always one for completing circles, I recently played Kid A to my Creative Writing class during their warm-up activity and joined them.
Temple Mount visit prompt intifada, when the previous evening brought new reports of growing dissatisfaction
satisfactions of literature discarded, revolution mauve, sonics belonging both to people & planet, concrete rose
rose planetary hallucinations not without appeal—after all, we find ourselves in circumstances yet revealed
revealed in the crusades, the human-looking voyages that passed for republics without history or religion
be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.
We think we are on the right road to improvement because we
are making experiments.
Out of deserts, out of brute, boutiques glance at farms only to sneer about real
“real” the other, somehow “unreal” . . . It was just freeing to discard the
notion of purely
pure soul menace, dance billions, tower, tours of the dent & mortuary, tours of folly
& November never once beat us, the bluebells long gone by the time any federal
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I had never listened to Radiohead before. Ok, maybe “Creep,” on the radio back home in Los Angeles, but I don’t think that counts. In any case, “Creep” didn’t sound a thing like this. Kid A is a problem. It is noise. It doesn’t make any sense. “You like this stuff?” I say to my freshman year roommate. I remember being 10 years old and hearing Achtung Baby for the first time: flamboyant, dirty, flanged out. I didn’t get it. Kid A was different: sterile, depressed, computerized. I don’t get it, either.
Some months later, on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles, maybe I’m going home for Christmas. But anyway, Kid A is on my headphones, probably because I’ve decided to give it a second chance. I can’t sleep on airplanes, but I can’t stay awake, either, so I doze off. Later, I wake up. “Motion Picture Soundtrack” is just starting. I’ve never ventured this far into the album. The song is gorgeous. Is sad and beautiful and perfect. (There are harps. There is a pump organ.) I play the song again. I start the album again from the beginning. I don’t know what has changed. Something has changed. The album ends. I start it again. Ok, I get it now.
I despaired when I heard that Neil Young, a major music hero of mine, had made the comment that music cannot change the world. It bothered me for months, until I came to terms with the fact that nothing can change the world. Then I reflected on the moment that changed me and realized that only individuals can be overthrown, altered, or improved. I can remember exactly how I felt, where I was, and how it smelled the first time I heard Kid A. I thought, “Everything is changed.” It was all I could think. Kid A has been a filter wrapped around my brain from the moment I turned on MTV2 and watched a record spin and heard Kid A come out. I immediately lost all sense of place and time; during that first listening, I was crippled. Kid A is a towering piece of musical art that left me feeling like a stranger in my own self. The sounds are disembodied, the lyrics are modern poetry, the mood is so unnerving the listener can only be left with catharsis. Even the song structure, the use of plot arc from Greek tragedy, rips Kid A from everything that came before it in popular music and forces itself on you like a revolution of the personal.
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Kid A came out the fall of my freshman year of college, and I guess I was more or less aware of it (I’d seen Radiohead live as early as 1995, when they opened for REM on the Monster tour, and were still willing to play “Creep”) but it didn’t make an impact on me for roughly a year. My group of friends and I blasted Kid A compulsively all through the long strange fall of 2001. Kid A seemed then (and still seems now) to have best embodied, validated, and salved the schizophrenic charge of collective possibility and doom that infused wake-of-9/11 America—in our little cranny of Northern Florida no less than anywhere else, as unbelievable as that may sound. It was a record you could play while sipping rotwhiskey alone at sunset, brooding over the wounded country and the lying war, but then put on again at ten-thirty to start an impromptu dance party in your living room. And if you queued it up a third time at say two AM, it would lend tremendous depth and romance to your lovemaking or else rock you off to lonesome self-pitying oblivion—whichever the case was. There seemed to be nothing that Kid A was incapable of making better and more true and so we loved it until it was thin and ruined for us. I took a several years’ break from it and still only listen to it rarely, when I am hungry to be sucked back up into the old beautiful bullshit and magic.
I’m going on too long but let me tell you this one more thing. In a late scene in my first novel, a character stops by a record store. The book is set around the turn of the millennium, and I needed her to buy something that would serve as an emblem not just of her own change, but for all the ways in which the country and culture around her had changed, were changing still. I wanted very badly to give her a copy of American Water, because the Silver Jews are one of my favorite bands and because I honestly believe that she would’ve liked it, but of course that was not the answer. She could only have picked up a copy of Kid A.
Radiohead’s Kid A has left an indelible and significant imprint in the history of music and art. These marks do not come easily. First, it requires that the particular work of art breaks the status quo. Kid A yanked the steering wheel and publicly established a new and crucial musical genre in the new millennium. With heavily-textured, post-apocalyptic electronic layers; Thom Yorke’s desperate and despondent vocals; Phil Selway’s perfectly-syncopated percussion; Yorke, Ed O’Brien and Johnny Greenwood’s polyrhythmic bass and guitar work; and hosts of live instrumentation that included string-orchestras and afro-beat horn sections, Kid A forged a path whereby thousands of progressive/“indie” rock acts could perform, but know their limits. Second, it requires that a musical work not only engages the listener, but also immerses them in the experience. Kid A forces listeners to submerge themselves in heavy solitude and blindingly bright consciousness. At times, it is so unbearable that, like staring into the sun, its listeners sharply pull away.
***
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Thom Yorke, during the recording of Kid A, said his favorite record label was Warp Records. I liked that a whole hell of a fucking lot because my favorite musical act were signatories with Warp—the Anti Pop Consortium. Yorke listed the “abstract rat pack” as one of his favorite acts, too. This was 1999, the same year that I heard The Roots’s Things Fall Apart, specifically a track called “You Don’t See Us,”—where Black Thought spatlines: “Ok Computer/Radiohead’s knock to the future/shock like Curtis/at your service. . .” I realized Radiohead was righteous enough to get attention from these types of folks I thought were in another musical realm which was merging jazz, fusion, sampling and electro into one apparatus of sound. This is what good hip-hop does—shouts you out and expands your audience, samples you and revives you, big-ups you and exalts you. Deserved attention is just that.
***
Alice White
Kid A
fireworks and hurricanes
howling down the chimney
red wine and sleeping pills
fodder for the animals
lost at sea
that’s not me
I wanted to tell you
standing in the shadows
this is really happening
floating around on a prison ship
it’s not like the movies
the lights are on
you’ve got ventriloquists
trapdoors that open
at the end of my bed
sleepy jack the fire drill
cheap sex and sad films
two colours
a bunker
a bump on the head
another message I can’t read
I wanted to tell you
on the lawn with the furniture
this isn’t happening
the moment’s already passed
in its right place
all of the time
little white lies
women and children
rats and children
the first of the children
sucking a lemon
that’s not me
I’m not here
I wanted to tell you
I will see you in the next life
strobe lights and blown speakers
now I might as well
if you try
to say
until I
walk through walls
spiral down
good enough
everything
is so near
I wanted to tell you
yesterday I woke up
***
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I’ve always stubborly maintained that OK Computer is a better album than Kid A. I’ve argued this relentlessly. I remember attempting to support this claim one night maybe four years ago at a bar in the East Village. I was outnumbered. I was inarticulate, and I was fighting a losing battle. But no one could convince me. It was “Motion Picture Soundtrack” that finally made me see I was wrong. I listened to it over and over. It stuck, covered me in a thick syrup. Ten years later, this is my official statement of surrender:
Kid A is perfect. Yorke’s voice is distorted in all the right places. The Wasteland backdrop radioactively hums. Civilization continues to decline, and the apocolypse approaches with “Strobe lights and blown speakers / Fireworks and hurricanes.” When “Treefingers” plays, I think of the droning tree frogs of my childhood. They have these vocal pouches that allow them to make their alarm and distress calls, their static meditative noise.
There’s a certain horror in the measured dialogue of Idioteque, where one side insists, “We’re not scaremongering,” and the other side demands, “Let me hear both sides.” In fact, the release of Kid A coincided with the start of a decade of terror, where public attention was consumed by fear: and Kid A is a terrifying album.
I’d been in the Air Force for two years when Kid A came out. I remember ‘my first time’ very clearly, and I haven’t listened to music the same way since. I didn’t have much good to say about the album right away, but I couldn’t really say anything bad either. I wasn’t neutral; I just realized I didn’t quite ‘get’ what I was hearing. A few days later I had the (at the time inexplicable) urge to listen to it again. After this second run-through, it stayed in my CD player for a while.
It wasn’t just innovative because it incorporated electronic music in an unprecedented way; it had horns, distorted bass, 1950′s-pop-music-style string arrangements, forwards/backwards loops, thick vocal layering (again, backwards and forwards), polyrhythms, and possibly the most beautiful album ending I’d ever heard.
Kid A is a terrifying album but it is soothing at the same time– possibly because it reflects the terror and structured discomfort that already surrounds us. Kid A offers a catharsis to this, an almost religious kind of comfort, when it finally ends with “I will see you in the next life,” (whatever that might be). And it makes good on its promise with the short, Treefingers-like reprise after a moment of silence. It remains an album that I listen to from start to finish, and there is still nothing out there quite like it.
by G.C. Waldrep Tarpaulin Sky Press 2008 Reviewed by Jackie Clark
Interchanging
The poems in G.C. Waldrep’s One Way No Exit are not poems exactly. They are more like postulations, little logical deductions that prove themselves one cog at a time. An easy way to decipher these postulations would be to declare them ekphrastics, as the pieces in this book are derived from the 1989 exhibition “One Way: Fotografien” by the German photographer Peter Rathmann.
This seems like a sensible thing to do on some levels. It can help one come to terms with what is ultimately difficult, theory-driven writing. Their relationship could most easily be called impenetrable and of little consequence (the photographer is, incidentally, very obscure, the majority of his work difficult to find, even on the internet or in the NYU library). Whatever its impetus, this is writing that attempts to achieve its own specific ends.
While it would be wrong to say that these poems don’t revolve around the first person, as they are most certainly based on and around the subject’s “real” life, their scope is terrifyingly ambitious. I say terrifying because their ambition is realized by taking things as they come (i.e. the photos in the exhibition that you will never see) and being “realized consistently in one direction” (i.e. One Way), as Waldrep declares in his prologue. The brief prologue introduces some ideas behind not only Rathmann’s aesthetics, which Waldrep borrowed from the exhibition’s catalog, but some ideas about Waldrep’s own aesthetics, and theories about the way places and their people happen repetitively, happen “consistently in one direction.”
The place he means is America. The people he means are Americans. America’s interchangeability is what we as readers come to understand about these unseeable photos; it is their inherent nature to be interchangeable. The titles of the Rathmann photos are all in the form of “City, State, Year.” Example: “XXII. Snow Hill, Maryland, 1989,” “XXIII. Charleston, South Carolina, 1989,” etc. In sum, banal. At one point I found myself writing in the book: “am barely reading the titles anymore.” But this wasn’t exactly true. I was interested in the years, the way they made me recall the look of places I inhabited looked during those years. I imagined Waldrep did this as well.
The imagined places differ only slightly. If someone came by and switched the titles on any of these pieces, I wouldn’t have noticed. Though the individual pieces do in some sense serve as representations of the absent photos (“more wall, more lines, more curbs, driving on the left,” in “XXVI. Dorchester, 1984”), I imagine that they are mostly imaginings by Waldrep. Exaggerations of what the photos succeeded in capturing, the way these bland photos of the American landscape by a non-American end up declaring Americanism, the way they lend themselves to Waldrep’s postulations.
In “VI. Daytona Beach, Florida, 1987,” consider “An American photo would avoid boredom the way popcorn avoids hot oil. / An American photo would draw [sic] in inaccurate map in the sand. / An American photo would not suggest the possibility of an electromagnetic front, / which this photo does. This is not an American photo.” Waldrep “consistently and in one direction” questions and redefines America. It is sometimes a place, sometimes a people, sometimes a habit. Its ubiquitousness lends its definitions to the landscapes, lends itself to the Buick, the car which serves as the automobile-elect in these photos and poems. It is 1987 after all. There are many such metaphorical layers throughout the book and I suppose it would be foolish for me to believe that relaying them all here would be possible, or sensible.
What I can tell you is this: The prologue states: “The surprisingly uncomplicated nature of Americans is apparent in their trivial architecture.” Though physical architecture is assumed, it results in more than that. We create an architecture by living in each other’s proximity; an architecture develops as a result of people living close together for long stretches of time. The photos and the writing concern themselves with “the ‘relentless banality’ of America’s small towns,” and the idea that “to be American is to believe in exits.” Believe in them, even if they aren’t there; Waldrep is able to strengthen his point in “XIII. Monterey, California, 1988” by saying “An exit is an uncomplicated avoidance of the necessity of the collective. / An exit is a form of worship if approached consistently and in one direction”–so says the chorus of the book again and again.
Waldrep philosophizes the classic suburban nightmare; think Revolutionary Road. What one thinks to be a release or an exit ends up not being so, ends up in fact fating those in constant search to a life of repetitive circles. To be American is defined over and over again; he employs new metaphors each time, lessening the possibility of escape each time. Things are further complicated by the fact constantly obsessing about defining what it means to be an “American” is very…American.
Much of this book is beautiful for its grace alone; these pieces have wonderful moments which are akin to, as the poet describes in “XVI. Long Beach, NY, 1989,” “grass growing up from between the seams of a concrete patio.” There is unexpected beauty peppered through out the already interesting and intelligent landscape of these poems. In certain pieces, “the air tastes of nickel” or certain photos are described as having “swallowed a sweater.” There is a confident beauty to reduction, to imagining someone imagining something that someone else said yes to—someone else said, “I pick this here landscape and this here time, under this here sun to take home with me.” And though this is an exercise for Waldrep to better understand Rathmann’s aesthetics, it is also an exercise in tangentials for the reader. What is ancillary to what is provided. We makes sense of things by giving them names and seeing how they relate. Waldrep does this with Rathmann’s photos. We do this with Waldrep’s poems. Then we draw conclusions.
by Jennifer Firestone
Shearsman Books 2008 Reviewed by Jackie Clark
Going Places
To Travel!
To Change Countries
To travel! To change countries!
To be forever someone else,
With a soul that has no roots,
Living only off what it sees!
To belong not even to me!
To go forward, to follow after
The absence of any goal
And any desire to achieve it!
This is what I call travel.
But there’s nothing in it of me
Besides my dream of the journey.
The rest is just land and sky.
–Fernando Pessoa
Depending on how you read the above poem, travel could sound like an illuminating experience, accentuated by actual exclamations and Buddha-like certainness: nothing ever belongs to the self, the self forever becomes someone new. In a sense this sounds appealing to me, as it also does to many others who seek to organize their lives by some tired but true maxims. Who could deny the allure of living without deadlines and responsibilities, without waking up every morning to roughly the same routine of coffee and packed lunch? It seems though, that there is a deeper psychology at work. On second look, the exclamations in the Pessoa poem read frightfully, “The absence of any goal / And any desire to achieve it!” Read in this way it sounds like the lament of someone who is stuck in the bell-jar. Perhaps the speaker who reflects that travel has “nothing in it of me” realizes something that most Carnival cruise guests don’t: the moral quandary of ourselves as empty vessels, humping further and further away to exotic places where some type of fulfillment will be beheld. Travel inherently poses existential questions to those self-conscious enough to notice.
Jennifer Firestone’s book Holiday acts as a travelogue documenting more than just the sights and sounds of far away places, as Firestone pays little homage to any place in particular. The book is divided into six sections, all without titles. Judging from the context and description of some poems, I understand when she is writing about a specific place, but without reference to mainstream tourist destinations, which Firestone more or less leaves out, it is hard to determine which small city she is wandering around in.
These poems make use of spacing instead of punctuation in most places and in turn offer no clear determination as to how they should be read. Each poem relays something different: a definite location full of references to Michelangelo, an imagined history of what may have taken place on the very street on which the speaker currently stands, overheard conversations of other travelers—there is almost no end to the differences captured in these vignettes. But regardless of this difference there is a certain kind of consciousness that pervades all the poems, one that is caught up with trying to understand the motivation behind “travel,” the exaltations of the uncertain soul seeking a sense of fulfillment, and how it is very different than “vacation,” or the guilt of leisure, gluttony, and consumption.
The voice in Holiday wavers back and forth between the silly exaggeration of “vacation[ing] the hell / out of things” and the very real disappointment in the way “other images / felt visited / always something letting you down: / at the artifact breath held / you whistles it out / assuming there was more / you were missing.” The conceit of the book manifests toward the end when a woman touring the same historic building is overheard as saying “Is it worth / going down these steps / are the bottom rooms worth it?” Such a question embodies the real tension of vacationing, or taking a “holiday” as the book is aptly titled, and the true sense of traveling as an existential experience. Is it true that traveling means the soul has no home? Or is it rather that the soul is open to developing into something that it would not have been able to had it just stayed put in one place? I’m not suggesting the book pretends to answer this, only that the poems in the book as savvy enough to recognize this moral ambiguity and that the poet thinks enough of herself and her experience to make record. The last poem in section 5 begins by saying “I can’t lose my body. I’m membered by its attachments,” reminding us that no matter where you are you are always there. Ultimately this is a lesson that everyone (traveler or not) comes to realize. Try as best you can but there will always be something of you in it, whatever that it may be.
by Richard Kenney
Knopf 2008 Reviewed by Jackie Clark
The Sweater-Vest of Academe
Most girls that I know who graduated from a liberal arts college with a BA in English/Literature more often than not have a story about what a big crush they had on one (or more) of their English professors. As an undergrad, my crush’s name was Professor Jarrells. In truth, he was really one of the first “guys” I had ever met who enjoyed reading writers like Kerouac and Calvino for fun (having not had too many “ambitious” friends in high school) so you can see how easy it was for my imagination to get swept away with romantic possibilities, especially after learning that he was also a huge Wilco fan.
That being said, there is also another type of professor that can also be found hiking through the campus nature reserves on any given afternoon, one that invariably will be wearing a pair of old New Balances and a sweater vest and will teach “humanities” classes, as the scope of their knowledge also encompasses philosophy and ancient history. This is the professor who always seems to be at home in his skin and often conjures a prophetic disposition akin to Dumbledore’s, the kind of guy who kept a jar of organic peanut butter in his desk drawer way before trans-fats were outlawed in New York. This type of professor tugs the heartstrings of young girls as someone whom they can admire and in be awe of, but can never quite get to know, which I guess is part of their allure.
The poems of Richard Kenney as collected in The One-Strand River: Poems 1994-2007 read somewhere in the middle of these two academic types, possibly landing closer to the latter. Either way, Kenney’s poems are a good mix of enlightened, global judgments and self-(de)aggrandizing with language obviously drawn from an extensive vocabulary. The word “sang-froid” makes a casual appearance, as does the term “volkerwanderung,” which means the migration of a peoples, more or less between AD 300-700. This guy knows not only his history but his Latin as well. I visited the dictionary constantly while reading The One-Strand River, looking up words like pate, azimuth, coign, and orrery—and this is only in the span of 10 pages. The book itself clocks in around 170. Reading these poems made me feel like I was gearing up to take the G.R.E.s again.
Some common devices these poems employ include the use of italics to make a point, especially useful in instances when the speaker is pointing out how others don’t get the point (of the poem possibly, but more often than not the ways in which they [everyone except the speaker] don’t get how to not live like a 21st century consumption-monster without regard for the bigger picture). For example, in the poem “Air Sublime,” a poem more or less about how amazing it is that humans have the ability to fly, you know, on that philosophical level, the last line reminds us “it’s not about headphones and Coke.” And he’s right. There are bigger things at work around us then our own leisure but I wonder how much it needs to be pointed out, especially if we assume that the majority of the people reading these poems probably have the same kind of enlightened consciousness as the poet himself. Perhaps that is a bold assumption. Perhaps not.
Every line of poetry in this book, regardless of whether or not the previous one is enjambed, begins with a capital letter, an aesthetic choice that is way outside today’s mainstream. It is interesting to notice the way generational styles can serve as either a coveted invitation or a complete turn off. For me, it was a turn off.
For the most part, the poems in The One-Strand River don’t exceed one page and are neatly tucked into stanzas of mostly equal size. There are poems such as “Epicycles” that charmingly use repetition in a quasi-Ground Hog’s day fashion and “Poetry” which laments how future anthropologists will say of our time that we lacked culture because reading poetry seems something that collectively folks are valuing less and less. Overall these poems are inoffensive and reassuring. References to Greek concepts like thanatos and Nietzche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra pleasantly return one to a place of academic wonder and impression and the feeling that there are still honest people living, writing, and learning around us. The insularity of academia notwithstanding.
by Clay Matthews Ghost Road Press 2008 Reviewed by Jackie Clark
Horse Hope
I like placing two dollar bets and playing a horse for show, which means you think your horse will either come in first, second, or third. Playing for show never really amounts to winning big, but if you’re good at drawing inferences from the little stories about each horse printed in the stat booklet, your two dollars can last for all ten races.
A Superfecta in the horse racing world means that you select the first four finishers in exact order. This kind of bet is made with blind certainty: a sense of faith in what you are about to bet on, or a sense of hope that your intuition proves to be the real deal. Depending on your wager, you can either win big, or—well, you know the old maxims as well as I do.
In “Elegy for a Bet that Couldn’t Lose,” Matthews postures exactly this:
And then language takes over
as a sort of resonate emotion, and we stumble
into the sound as much as we stumble into the need
to move forward—superfecta, trifecta, quinella, exacta,
exactly what we didn’t realize we asked for when we gave
prayer another try in the bathroom this morning.
The poems in Superfecta all hinge on this idea of broken faith, on the need to, as Matthews says, move forward, despite prior disappointments, and give prayer a second chance. But these aren’t “God” poems. They are earnest engines that propel themselves with their own uncertainty of both the external and the internal. Matthews is constantly conscious of the way he impacts his surroundings and the way his surroundings impact him.
Matthews is most successful when he simply documents these observations. For instance, in the poem “Self-Help for the Lost and Found,” he observes:
When you walk out of a lot
of these flea markets, it’s kind of similar to walking
out of those enormous gothic churches, of walking
out of the darkness and into the light. The best
thing every time is how surprised you are
at what time of day it really is, and how alive
in a completely different way the rest of the world
becomes, and always was so far as you can tell.
This is precisely the same feeling one gets when leaving a movie matinee. What is surprising is the feeling of your own absence, the curious way you wonder what, if anything, goes on in the world when you aren’t around. This tension is believable and frustrating and reassuring all at once. When Matthews says,
I say truly
and I mean it. I say I mean it and I mean I mean
nothing, and cannot say anything truly. I have
no preoccupations at this moment other than this
and the smell of gasoline on my fingers.
I believe him. I can smell the gasoline on his fingers. He is hopeful that each little moment means something, but wouldn’t be surprised if he discovered otherwise.
I lost count of how many times the word hope appears in this book, but just a haphazard inventory of last lines (“What is beautiful is that they will do this again tomorrow”; “a hot meal and cup of coffee for every last thing crawling home”; “If there is a god then I guess it’s just as well”; “to that dark blue motel that continues to wait at the end”) and you understand the way Matthews chooses to rectify these tensions. Are the endings sometimes too tidy? Yes, but I don’t think they can help it.
This tidiness is indirectly addressed in the aptly titled poem “Regarding My Sentimentality and Love of Hole-in-the-Walls.” I dig self-acknowledged earnestness. That being said, the use of certain colloquial catch phrases made popular by movies, now probably referred to as “camp,” like “do you feel / lucky, punk, well, do you?” and “well, then, sue me,” deflate the I’m-so-uncertain-I’m-certain tension in those poems. Intended or not, this takes away from more interesting, intimate lines like “the sad shadow / of Nebraska corn.”
Most poems in Superfecta are chunky and chatty and filled with segues and stream-of-conscious meanderings. For example, “Broadcast of Another Speech about Forever” begins by setting the scene of the poet sitting on the couch watching the NFL Hall of Fame speeches. He mentions how John Madden is announced to come out and speak and the word “announce” sets of this memory for the poet:
now that I’ve said announce
all I can think about are those terrible camps I went to as a kid,
where in the cafeteria if anyone had anything to say, everyone
else would sing this song about announcements, a terrible
death to die, a terrible death to talk to death. I always hated bullshit
songs like that, and coming back and coming back to John Madden, sportscaster
extraordinaire, maybe talking out way out of this life
and into the other is the best option possible.
Non sequiturs like this find their way into many of these poems. I assume that most poets want their readers to feel some kind of connection to his or her poems, but the poems in Superfecta never let you forget that they know you are out there, potentially reading them and relating.
by Yerra Sugarman
The Sheep Meadow Press 2008 Reviewed by Jackie Clark
Kind of Bag
Yerra Sugarman’s second collection of poems, The Bag of Broken Glass, is definitely absent of organizational problems. The poems are neatly divided into six sections with the apropos “Coda” acting as the final section. The word coda always strikes me as a poetic way of declaring the end of something, as that is what it is I guess, but it always does seem a bit fancy, too consciously musical. But my opinion on whether or not it works depends on what it is used in conjunction with, and the mood of the poems it is serving to finalize.
The heightened Poetic-ness of the word coda in this collection is more than appropriate, as Sugarman spends more than 100 pages writing poems infused with religion, death and disappointment. The poems are mostly narrative, mostly confessional, as the reader can infer by the book’s dedication, “For My Mother, in Memory Pearl Maler Sugarman (1919-2000),” and the completely heartfelt first section of the book, “Her Hands.” The poems in this section relay in pretty good detail the horrors of having to watch a parent die a slow and painful death. And because they are about the poet’s mother, many childhood recollections appear, as it is probably necessary to the process of grieving to make sense of the death of the person who gave you life. That said, is it horrible to say that while reading these poems maybe I was slightly bored and anxious to move on to another poem, which only in turn made me anxious to move on from there? Stanzas like,
Solitary my father—
the wool of his voice,
the thinning part we could barely hear
death reel in,
raveling it and winding it around my mother’s dying.
in the poem “The Lamentations of the Crows,” appear again and again through out the book. And it is heartrending and yes, it quiets me with compassion and future fear but that may just be because I feel badly when anyone experiences hardship—not because the poems necessarily speak to me.
It may be though that the experiences she is drawing on are things I have yet to experience or that culturally, I cannot understand. Sugarman uses Yiddish phrases throughout the book and uses her family’s experience as Polish Jews during World War II as the basis of many poems in this collection. It is thoughtful of her to include the translations of certain Yiddish words at the bottom of the page, though at times it felt slightly gratuitous. This is not to take away from their obvious importance to this text. I think overall Sugarman works well within the framework she creates and I can see how people marvel at stanzas like this one from the poem, “Jounral: Rai’ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv, July 2003”:
And what of our connecting
the body’s pain,
but also the soul’s,
the mind’s, the heart’s—their pain
with the pain of the world
Sugarman’s poems are constantly trying to achieve the above. She is trying to understand the synergy of pain and suffering and life and love. A valiant task for sure. But speculations like “Maybe this is what memory is: / God wounds” make less sense than she wants them to. I can no longer suspend my disbelief long enough to posture the possibility of my memories being wounds from God. She’s strayed too far from the center; does this particular God have any particular motivation? The religious fervor and fatalism in this book leave me an outsider. I am sure there are many other people who are moved by experiences similar to the poet’s. I don’t really think that my being an outsider makes much of a difference.
by Ander Monson
New Michigan Press 2007 Reviewed by Jackie Clark
Heart-Shaped Book
Ander Monson’s chapbook Our Aperture is 30 pages of poems that feel huge, but huge in the sort of referential way one wanders through subway stations and feels like s/he is seeing the whole shape of the moment, encapsulated and removed, a participant.
These poems revolve around and around the “I,” and gratefully the “I” is less of a judge and more of a participant. The concern or conceit of this “I” involves a genuine understanding of the way circumstance colors our situations and the way that something which is pushed responds by being moved: “What came after the world: / silence, lots of it.”
There are three poems in this chapbook with the title “Availability.” The subject matter of these poems is what one might expect: quasi-lists of things that are available and of ways to be available. But they also go further than that; much of the language is recycled and recontextualized in each poem. Even the forms change; some just pour down the page, and others are neatly tucked into in even stanzas.
Some begin like stories: “In the midst of darkness, this presence / is also always and it will be it…” Others start in medias res: “What is also is always.” But to look at the idea of availability from the point of view of someone who has occasionally been made available or who seeks availability calls into question just what it is one looks to be available for, and at last, the many methodical ways in which the concept itself can be deconstructed.
While all of these poems broke my heart, the one I marked up most was “Exhaust”:
streaming exhaust
out of a pip that leads to the heart of the world
where great things are constantly being created
from scratch
And:
Who
cares about now. Fuck the moment. I want the next
one, and the one after that: result, proceeding, the dark
heart of it out of reach of the streetlight, flashlight,
motion-detector floodlight you installed
to keep the world out of your heart.
The poignancy of this greed for more and more moments weighs heavy on the chest; the image of the floodlight as protector of the heart made me think of the way one might move around slowly late at night, understanding that the lights are motion detectors and that turning them on is a bad thing. The tender and careful feeling I get from this makes my own heart feel less exposed if only because I am reminded that there are other little hearts out there guarding themselves as well.
The title Our Aperture cleverly suggests joint ownership of the speaker’s split. It can be read as collective sigh and protection, or as instance of failure—of flaw or blip that is unfortunate but unavoidable, as many things turn out to be when reasoned enough. The last poem, “Any Vanishing Point is as Good as This,” reflects this:
half-hopes
of the family viewed only from above
from such a distance that love disappears.
Perhaps there is a limit to love’s extensions and perhaps the place where this is true is safer.
Even though we have mentioned The First Annual New York Poetry Festival in a previous post, we figured it couldn’t hurt to mention it again. This Saturday and Sunday the two day poetry festival will populate Governors Island- a quick free ferry ride away from NYC/BK/NJ.
The poems in G.C. Waldrep’s One Way No Exit are not poems exactly. They are more like postulations, little logical deductions that prove themselves one cog at a time. An easy way to decipher these postulations would be to declare them ekphrastics, as the pieces in this book are derived from the 1989 exhibition “One Way: Fotografien” by the German photographer Peter Rathmann.
To Travel!
Most girls that I know who graduated from a liberal arts college with a BA in English/Literature more often than not have a story about what a big crush they had on one (or more) of their English professors. As an undergrad, my crush’s name was Professor Jarrells. In truth, he was really one of the first “guys” I had ever met who enjoyed reading writers like Kerouac and Calvino for fun (having not had too many “ambitious” friends in high school) so you can see how easy it was for my imagination to get swept away with romantic possibilities, especially after learning that he was also a huge Wilco fan.
Yerra Sugarman’s second collection of poems, The Bag of Broken Glass, is definitely absent of organizational problems. The poems are neatly divided into six sections with the apropos “Coda” acting as the final section. The word coda always strikes me as a poetic way of declaring the end of something, as that is what it is I guess, but it always does seem a bit fancy, too consciously musical. But my opinion on whether or not it works depends on what it is used in conjunction with, and the mood of the poems it is serving to finalize.
