Posts Tagged ‘Kathleen Rooney’

Come on All You Ghosts

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

by Matthew Zapruder
Copper Canyon Press 2010
Reviewed by Kathleen Rooney

8_5

“…a little digital hope.”

zapruder ghosts cover“Growth is always loss.” So says psychologist James Hillman in his book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. His statement is probably pretty true in general, but it also seems particularly applicable to Matthew Zapruder’s third collection, Come On  All You Ghosts. Because what Hillman also means is “The imagination changes.”  Yes. Zapruder’s hip, lyrical imagination, the one that powered his first two books, American Linden and The Pajamaist, is still in force here, but it is different: older and not necessarily wiser, per se, but even more open than before. The speaker of these poems admits he is no longer young, but he remembers that he once was, and he writes of those who still are, speculating in the poem “Global Warming”: “The young. / Maybe they’ll let us be in their dreams.” Meanwhile, he acknowledges that he is becoming, or has become, one of the “people of middle/indeterminate age” of whom he also writes.

The edgy and Post-Avant sensibilities for which Zapruder has come to be known are still present as well, but they have been tempered with elegy and aging. The book is in large part “about” the biggest loss of all: death, including those of the poet’s father, of David Foster Wallace, of Robert Creeley, of Kenneth Koch and numerous others. But the collection is also about a loss of certainty, and a shift to an older perspective in which the observer gets stripped of his youthful confidence, thereby becoming better able, as he puts it in the poem “Pocket,” to try “standing in an actual stance of mystery / and not knowing towards the world.”

Zapruder begins one of the book’s most lovely and representative poems, “Grace Paley,” with the blunt statement that “People say they don’t understand poetry,” then continues, “Meaning how must we proceed.” Zapruder proceeds with a graceful movement back and forth between the past of his youth, and the present of his middle-age. Here is a lengthy passage, but the length is necessary to capture the sense of motion, of growth and loss:

                             I was thirteen, Earth
was a couch, without any irritable reaching
after fact or reason I placed thousands of
Sweet Tarts into my mouth. Five years
later someone said they saw Diane P.
kissing a girl in a car, and they punched
the window on the passenger side
in and I laughed, and it’s all been as
people say downhill from there, meaning
until this moment I have been coasting,
but from this one forward Grace I vow
I shall coast no more.

This section is typical of the gentle slaloming feeling—inevitable, never forced—that Zapruder’s poems have as they slide toward conclusions that are surprising, but apt.

Other reviews have already said that these poems are beautiful, and they are. As in his previous books, Zapruder delivers erudite descriptions of such things as “the hoarse glassy call / of the black American crow” and a colleague’s desk, which “is a medium-sized wooden lake / on which float two staplers.” He sounds like a discerning critic—a refined reviewer of life itself—when he observes in the poem “Prelude” that Diet Coke:

                                        …tastes
like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,
or an acquaintance of chocolate
speaking fondly of certain times
it and chocolate had spoken of nothing,
or nothing remembering a field
in which it once ate the most wondrous
sandwich of ham and rustic chambered cheese
yet still wished for a piece of chocolate
before the lone walk back through
the corn then the darkening forest
to the disappointing village and its super
creepy bed and breakfast.

At the same time, though, these poems also wonder what the point of any of this—of beauty, of thinking, of writing poems, of living, etc.—really is.  

In “You Have Astounding Cosmic News,” for instance, he writes, in an ostensible open letter to sociologists, “we’ve been conducting field experiments into our private thoughts. One / faction next to the soul shaped watercooler wonders whether / there’s any reason at all to remember the feeling of being a child.” These are thoughtful poems, which is to say they are poems in which the speaker frequently mentions his own act of thinking, declaring at one point, “I am getting ready to have important thoughts,” and at another, “I see sad crushed plastic / everywhere and put / some thoughts composed / of words that do not / belong together / together and feel / a little digital hope.” And, perhaps in keeping with his shift from a youthful knowing to an older wondering, as he thinks about his thoughts, they become less and less familiar. “When I think very hard / about my thoughts,” he writes, “they seem / to me to be very small horses / attached to invisible reins / attached to facts.”

Throughout the collection, Zapruder’s poetic persona seems concerned with its own authority: What can he say? What should he be saying? Plenty of poems and poets have covered this turf, with the more language-y ones tending to conclude that there is little to no such authority to begin with—that words inevitably fail, that communication is bound to break down. Yet while Zapruder’s poems are playful and funny, he makes it clear he’s not just playing around. His poems posit that something is at stake, or at least that something ought to be. And the book, though not linked together with any overall story or clearcut throughline, does suggest an arc, the speaker starting out with these doubts, grappling with them, and concluding: yes, I can make meaning and I can make it in such a way that this meaning can keep being made after I am gone. Communication can, does, and should occur. In a way, Come On All You Ghosts poses, wrestles directly and indirectly with, and finally answers yes to the question of whether poetry can matter.

Zapruder ends the book with the 14-page title poem whose last stanza expresses a satisfaction of sorts about what he—as a person and as a poet—is trying to do, and that when it’s his turn to become a ghost himself, he will:

…have done my best to leave

behind this machine
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter.

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Post Moxie

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010

by Julia Story
Sarabande Books 2010
Reviewed by Kathleen Rooney

8
“you are barely a sound”

story coverThe only really bad part of Julia Story’s Kathryn A. Morton Prize-winning debut, Post Moxie, is the judge’s introduction by Dan Chiasson. “You wouldn’t call them ‘prose poems,’ implying the unbelievably drained tones and attitudes of that anemic genre,” he writes, introducing what is, in fact, a collection of prose poems, or perhaps a long poem composed of small prose blocks. “Prose poems don’t thread the needle the way Story’s poems do.”

Even leaving aside a desire to argue that a lot of prose poems do “thread the needle” and are quite good, why Chiasson would want—even jokingly—to dismiss the very genre in which Story’s book is written is baffling. Reading him do so feels misdirecting and does the book itself a disservice, throwing the reader out of the appropriately open frame of mind in which the collection is best encountered. Story’s work is generous and formally innovative, whereas its intro is ungenerous and narrow, or at least distracting and tonally off. Thus, the best approach to Post Moxie might be to skip the introduction entirely and just jump into the text.

Jumping right in is a technique at which Story excels; her opening sentences establish scenarios and atmospheres with a subtle blend of specificity and mystery. “We look at a statue and feel uncomfortable,” says the speaker in the book’s first poem. “Time is a series of pellets,” starts another, and “For six years the girls careen in his dream like little flashlights” starts another still.  Her second and third sentences, when the blocks go that long, are equally skillful, balancing precision with generality, as when she writes in the ensuing sentences of the aforementioned poems: “I am backward light, which isn’t as cool as it sounds,” and “The gerbil that sniffs them reacts by scratching his neck ferociously,” and “My intelligence is measured by the number of sweat bees in the yard.”

If these individual poems present a compelling balancing act, then so too does the book as a whole, establishing a coherent narrative element in its content alongside a cohesive formal one in its structure. Like any poetic form, the prose poem possesses its own rules and restrictions, as well as opportunities for its writer to make personal flourishes. Story takes full advantage of these chances. In an interview, she explains how she shaped the book into its finished form: “For a while, the stanzas were in short lines. About a month into writing them, I got tired of messing with the line breaks; they seemed arbitrary and unimportant to what I was trying to do. Once I set up the prose blocks, I could do the work I needed to do, which was to pour the language into little containers.”  

Cover to cover, Post Moxie does give the impression that writing it might really have been this easy, as though Story just poured the words like water into vases; but this apparent ease would belie the precision and care with which the prose chunks must have been composed. Remnants of the “shorter lines” to which Story refers still lurk within the blocks. They create tension within the sections and across the book because, although the final form consists of solid bricks of writing, within them lies a competing sense of fragmentedness. Some of the blocks themselves are unfinished and fragmentary:

As delicate as an ass’s bray are the little
lights which descend from the distant
city inside you can’t pedal fast enough
to get there and when you finally do
catbirds have called it a day ears grow
dim you are barely a sound so you head
out again for the ring of trees

This poem appears to be a huge run-on, a single breathless sentence. But there’s no punctuation and it ends abruptly with no period, so it’s not even a sentence. In her interview, Story adds, “There was a certain impatience and desperation I felt when writing and I think the form reflects this.” It does. What happens in the ring of trees? From what menace is the speaker fleeing? Story isn’t saying. Thus, the pull the reader feels is often a narrative one, although the narrative is never complete or conventional.

Even when they seem to possess a plot, the poems are patchy, full of omission. One poem reads in its entirety:

Fucking mirrors. Reaching into a . . .
feeling. Pleiades a group of shadows on
the floor, flickering light to see me by.
Sadly the erotics of doubt.

Almost every prose poem in the collection has the quality of an intriguing overheard conversation that you would totally understand had you caught just one more sentence. In the end, the conversation is that much more memorable because you didn’t.

Story’s speaker can be funny and critical, as when she writes “My neighbor drives his big stupid car over and asks do I want breakfast,” but also self-deprecating, as when she implicates herself in the same poem: “No, I say, I’m writing, then go back in to watch Sixteen Candles.” Her speaker is also frequently elegiac and wistful, mournfully observing the passing of childhood, the natural world, and love. Story manages to do so in a fashion that describes the perception of ordinary moments in a way that restores strangeness both to the moments and to the act of perception itself. The poems’ elusiveness evokes their speaker’s efforts to place these moments in a coherent narrative—efforts that never quite succeed, if only because they tend to expand and open onto other potential narratives, becoming properties to which all have access and none can claim ownership.  “Everyone understood that the world was a kind of story,” Story writes in a poem toward the end of the book.  Maybe not everyone, but Story definitely does.

*

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That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

by Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney
Otoliths 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

8

Anthems for a Seventeen-Year Old Girl

Gabbert & Rooney CoverAmerican collaborative poetry is a peculiar rabbit, partially because the American tradition is so rooted in self-reliance. In the introduction to Saints of Hysteria, an anthology of collaborative poetry published last year, Charles Henri Ford (an early practitioner of 20th century collaboration) is quoted as calling the method a kind of “intellectual sport.” Yes, sport.  Play sounds about right; as the reader, you get to watch poets have a blast.

But I’m suspicious of most collaborative poetry. In Saints of Hysteria, poems are accompanied by authors’ notes explaining process. I can’t help but feel that this is because in much collaborative poetry, process is the only valuable part; the poems themselves are seldom live enough to outstrip the poets’ blatant need for creative, collaborative process—in select cases, their need for a public banding of arms. But of course it’s the resulting organism, not the authorship, which matters most in poetry.

That said, I’ll borrow a construction from the venerable Kurt Loder: I think I’d trade the last six “collaborative” books I’ve read for just half of Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney’s hip, smart, self-aware and incredibly focused new collection.

The best thing about That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness is that it is a singular, sustained inspiration spoken by a singular, if conflicted, voice. The other best thing is how completely unreserved the authors are about using “teenage” language. They live in 21st century United States, which means they live in the world of text messages, of expressions like “LOL” and “hottie”—and they have the speech of the place. Which of course means they risk a number of easy criticisms.

Yet these criticisms would not only show a complete misunderstanding of satire and irony–they would be the criticisms of some all-knowing “authority figure” who thinks—teaches, even—that things can only be one way. This “authority figure” is to be defied. Of course rebellion for its own sake, while charming, is ultimately juvenile. This poet willfully floats on her sinking raft, fully aware of the air as it hisses out, fully aware that she is, by natural law, on the road to becoming some form of “authority figure” herself.

That is, the Gabert/Rooney poet at once makes fun of and celebrates her own naïveté. She is a strikingly, believably conflicted young woman who is generally good-natured about her romantic, professional, and fatalistic struggles. She is sarcastic, but never cynical:

                                       …everyone knows
college is a rite of middle classage. They said
Write what you know—what I know is
waitressing.

These lines seem a refusal of banal regurgitations that might creep up in formal education. But there’s a nice contradiction; amid her anti-intellectualism, she relies significantly on formalism. There is a lot of speedy, associative back-and-forth, but there’s also an abundance of villanelles, tritinas and ghazals, even a cento. Our heroine has an unreserved flare for modern slang, pop culture references, and playful commentary on the business of poetry. In fact, the title That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness is a slice of poetic commentary, a neatly ironic reference to another line of “collaborative poetry”: a Robert Bly translation of Theodor Storm, one that can only be described as vintage Bly, almost absurdly romantic.

The jokey Bly reference is emblematic of how wholly ironic this book is. Early on, our poet remarks that “somehow bad drama is worse than bad comedy.” Some items in this book border on the latter, but do so knowingly. Take for example the constant impulse to rhyme:

Yet the leader of the rabbits was
making a racket, disappearing over
the ridge in a blaze-orange jacket.

There’s a whole history of forced rhymes that “work” because the poet or songwriter delights in his ability to find and link like-sounding language (think hip-hop, think Woody Guthrie and the folk tradition that predetermined him). Yet these moments of play are quick, associative distractions from various personal issues the poet encounters. For one, she has always had to obey authority figures:

                                             …Authority
figure, biblical allusions are the hobgoblin
of gregarious gasbags, frantic last gasps of your brand
of blowhard. Coming home in a body bag
is not what I got this bod all jacked to do. Can’t you
accept my pacifist vows? One more kapow
& I’m through being Officer Dirty Little Secret.

If one is to defy someone purely on the basis of the fact that that person is an “authority figure,” then what does one do if one succeeds, and overthrows the powerful? Regardless of their virtues, they are to become an “authority figure” and, by definition, should be resisted by the next generation. Our poet anticipates this transition: “The word monster comes from the Latin to show. / If you don’t believe me, you might have a problem with trust.”

This coming-of-age quality resists being rote or sentimental because it’s completely unabashed, unhinged. This narrator is like Allen Ginsberg’s narrator in “America”; she indicts the Established Order as a means of exposing her own weaknesses. She propels herself into adulthood in the most American way possible: goes to college, makes friends, makes sloppy decisions, learns about herself from them. “Temp” offers some cloudy intoxication:

           …I can’t breathe in here. Are those
the hands of an angel holding my hair? 
Throwing up, I think, it’s just like me to think
this is so unlike me, this thick upheaval.

Forget the puns for a moment and you see a person—one person, not two—growing older, testing her own limits, seeing if the image she’s projected of herself lo these many years is in fact the person she is growing into: a college graduate taught with great cliché to write what she knows while wondering (perhaps with an eye on the job market) if she knows anything at all.

If her business of choice didn’t turn out be as glamorous as it could’ve been, neither did her love life. The poet often addresses her partner; in “Second Person Omnipotent,” he’s likened to (or is) one of those odd Renaissance Faire aficionados:

Ever since you bought those pantaloons
it’s King Richard’s Feste this, Renaissance
Faire that. Can’t we stay home? I’m sick of
jousting. Any time you go to a spectacle,
you expect to be “slayed.” This willingness,
nay, desperateness to be impressed,
your notorious sense of wonder has long
been one of the world’s greatest blunders.

Playful, virulent. In “What Happens in Vegas,” we even learn that someone is “in serious recovery / from the breakup of the century.” But if relationships aren’t quite perfect, that’s okay. The book also offers what I’ll call a tongue-in-cheek Sex and the City aesthetic (I say this as a person who despises the show). Talking with girlfriends about relationships and sex is as good, if not better, than assorted attempts at meaningful, long-term relationships. Sadness is replaced with nostalgic sass:

                                …Misty looks bombed
& Crystal’s passed out in the unisex restroom.
A fitting name, really, since we’ve all had sex
in that funky little lovesexy wreck of a room.

Some people will hate this kind of talk, which is fine, but I think if they do, they misunderstand satire. This book catalogues the mutation—not destruction—of idealism. This is an important distinction. While I love Cate Marvin’s book Fragment of the Head of a Queen, I’ve always hated a rhetorical question issued as part of the “summary” on the back of the book: “What are we to do when experience hands our idealism back to us in pieces?” I think anyone who grows up thinking they’ll someday wear a sparkling gown and glass slippers probably deserves to get blindsided. The poet behind Voluptuousness treats disappointment with perspective, as though there are far greater evils in the world.

Which leads to the important point that the book’s formal bent and slangy girl-talk bent would be for naught if no for its fatalistic bent. The quotes I’ve presented so far should give you a good sense for the tone and play of Voluptuousness, but leave out an important element: the surety of death, of nothing, of how empty ambition can be, even as a war on death. “The Day After the Day After Tomorrow” is emblematic of how play (the poem’s title puns a movie title) can be counter-balanced by our most elemental fears:

                                    …I never asked to be a hero,
friends, but since when have we gotten what we want?

I know there was something I wanted to do before the end,
but I forgot. Tell mother I loved her. The sky is green.

And earlier, in “Lucid Villanelle,” we see this balance again: “& I’ll never die b/c this is a dream.” Yes, even people who say “LOL” and “b/c” will die someday. “Tritinal w/ DTHWSH” has a morbidity all its own:

A death wish is a normal wish

for the girl who’s done everything. I wish
I could fill the blanks of every if-then
scenario w/ surprise. But life, friends,

upends all wishes & dies—see you then.

The poets are in such accord that you forget it’s a collaboration; the poets are single cells on alternate sides of the brain; the poems are the point, not the process. “Ambition makes you look pretty ugly,” writes ironist Thom Yorke. You still have to pay the bills. In the final poem, our poet wraps up every loose end and resists her childish rebellion:

Tiny hearts all over my c.v. led me
to a lovely unemployment. I say:
Let the kids do what they’re gonna—
that’s the only way they’ll learn.
I miss it already, all the kissing
of my youth, the days of yore.
Forget what I’ve said before. This is
all I’ve got. There isn’t any more.

She indicts the authority figure; she’s also ready to make some concessions; it’s the stuff of growing up in America.

If Ford is right and collaborative poetry is “intellectual sport,” I think that most collaborative poetry is more like the Home Run Derby than it is a real game; all pomp and workout, little at stake (pardon the baseball reference; the MLB Home Run Derby just took place a few miles from my home). And Rooney and Gabbert have a good bit of fun. The poem titles, for example, are often funny (“Dark Days With the Dark Knight”), sometimes annoying (“Abercrombie Addresses Fitch”), and always enthusiastic (“Baby, Oh No!”)—yet I have hunch that each knows what it is doing. You might argue that the slang and references will soon be outmoded and irrelevant, that looking back, this book might look like little more than two pals goofing off with way too much free-association and forced rhyme. Fair enough. But a book that’s able to simultaneously accept and reject the Established Order of its own medium is not a common thing.

*

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