Posts Tagged ‘Matt Hart’

I ♥ Your Fate

Monday, August 15th, 2011

by Anthony McCann
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Matt Hart

“And stood there all naked and human and shaking”

I ♥ Your Fate is as electrified as it is buttery, as glue-faced as it is full of angles and soul—constant surprises, the turnings of corners, trap doors, blinding sunrises, Samuel Taylor Coleridge!—why can I not just type out all of the poems here and call it a day?—alibis forever, the visitor’s locker room, which turns out to be a vagina—an interview with Kobe Bryant—O beautiful for “EAGLES/big as nouns,” “…something as thoughtful as chairs in the snow…” I could go on forever. It goes on forever. Figuring and reconfiguring—and then it ends, leaving me to retrace my steps, with hope, looking forward to the next tracks. The thing is, I almost don’t believe these poems exist. This isn’t a review. It’s an appreciation, a lecture on debacle, both fuck-up and flood, a dry-dive into whatever comes next—this is our fate. I’m spoiling too much. I ♥ Your Fate is one of those books I’d like to take to class and just read out loud with/to my students–no discussion! Why talk when one can listen?

The grass thinking snow thinking snow thinking snow
And under the grass the system of roots
The systemless system of dark wiggle roots
And the master who lurks in the rooms after dark
In his motionless hand the luminous milk

(from “Putin with Lynch”)

Why be analytical when it feels so incredibly strange and on fire to be baffled, face to face and attentive to the deepest parts we know, and yet obviously still have a lot of trouble articulating?

The purpose of behavior is disputed.
Though it serves
a hopped display

hammered in distinctness

How wonderful to be “hammered in distinctness”—that is, with clarity and detail—and also to BE hammered “indistinctness” (i.e. the opposite—unclear, ambiguous, vague, connotative) at the very same time. There’s something nearly primordial about these poems. We read them as they come to be, reaching prophetically, apocalyptically, lovingly, and elliptically toward their own ends, which are our ends—our FATE—as we read them:

I say the names of my hands
First left and then right and then right
Strange to have hands and a name
I look down to my hands when I speak

I don’t say my name to my hands
(I’ll save the dark magic for last!)
This event will go unrecorded
Weird, fake birds overhead

(from “Letter Never Sent”)

I like that things end—that they end and just end, making me long for new beginnings, for more Anthony McCann poems, for my fate to collide with his and theirs. I also like being blind-sided/surprised, as in these lines from (McCann’s poem) “Samuel Taylor Coleridge”:

and through my brassy spyglass
I will watch the city advance
the contracts, the workers, contractors
the plywood, and dust buttered trucks

I will dream of rivers of glue…

The adjective phrase “dust buttered” to describe the trucks is so beautifully/perfectly wrong, especially as it leads to the speaker (essentially, oh so romantically) looking away from the scene into the “dream of rivers of glue.” The image is so HIGH…and of course, so was STC a lot of his life. Great. Welcome to life—which is everybody’s fate, one way or another. But what’s really important here is the infusion that these poems insist upon—through their descriptive idylls, constant meander/ discovery, and one surprise party after another—into and with our lives. As McCann puts it at the end of “Samuel Taylor Coleridge”:

tall swaying tawny thin grass
rhyming my steps with my words
the sea will appear, pocked with sails
Then I’ll enter your life

What could be more gorgeous or more intrusive or welcome?

II.

Maybe I should mention that I ♥ Your Fate consists of three titled, numbered sections—1. The Event, 2. I ♥ Your Fate, and 3. New Dreams of Mammal Island. Sections one and three are bookends for section two—which itself consists of a single, long title poem in fourteen unnumbered sections (more on that below). A lot of books contain section breaks that seem totally unnecessary; in McCann’s book, one leads into the next, prepares the way. There’s a real sense that one is being taken somewhere, fatefully—perhaps fatally—and yet the guide knows just about as much as we do. The difference between him and us—if there is a difference—lies only in the degree to which we’re prepared for the surprise…

Like a ghost
     showing its
first
tender
ghosthood

to another
       quieter
                more
bashful
                ghost

(from “Mammal Island”)

And this is strangely—at least to me—of some comfort. If I’m heading into the darkness, I’d rather go along with someone who’s thrilled by it, than with someone who’s terrified. Should we embrace our fate or work against it? Does life actually have something in store, or is the store the thing we build over the course of our lives?

Can you believe now once how my body talked
With all these words in the hands of the dead
Every day I disown myself twice wake again
Go back to sleep with my brains in my hands

III.

Section 1, The Event, begins with the poem “Post-Futurism” in a nearly narrative voice:

When I was young, life
was instrumental and
through experience (in life)
through which I poured myself
I passed through various
Containers of
pre-dawn excellence

and then finishes up with the section’s title poem “The Event,” which itself ends:

I knew you’d come
to describe the animal
and I never drank again

I love the track this creates from the beginning to the end of the section, the speaker “pouring” himself through “various/ Containers of pre-dawn excellence” only to arrive eventually at a point where “you’d come/to describe the animal/ and I never drank again.” There’s something wildly triumphant about tracking the section this way. In it I find a spirit reminiscent of Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” and his line about seeing “what men have thought they saw.” What gets me here is how the section enacts from beginning to end, with all its machinations in between, a big event—The Event—life-altering and pivotal. Yet, what’s really funny is that it isn’t the declaration that “I never drank again” that’s epiphanous/momentous, it’s that “you’d come”—ENTER: you—“to describe the animal”—interpret the animal a thousand different ways. And this leads us directly into section:

2. I ♥ Your Fate, which (as mentioned above) consists of 14 unnumbered sections (a sort of stretched to the gills, pushed to the limits sonnet-sonnet), and each of these sections in turn is composed of five quatrains, with mostly four beat lines. In other words, McCann becomes both a balladeer and a sonnet sequence writer simultaneously, the I/you relationship taking center stage in the poem right from the start:

I came out of the past, with fingers all stained
Behind my face my brain glows like carp
It’s like this, you’ll see, even in pictures
Leave it to someone to figure that out

What follows goes wild in the streets and in the margins, the regularity of the stanzas contrasting with the contents which are as surreal as they are romantic, as violent as they are analytical, as distorted and particular as they are lyrical and volcanic. For example, take these stanzas from 3 different sections of 2. I ♥ Your Fate:

Soft moccasin light streams down through the leaves
Can’t live a day in a world without birds!
I drag myself toward you using only my face
To see each little flower, forever at once

*

“What have you done?” our someone exclaimed
You shrieked as though you’d stabbed me yourself
It was weird: being there, with the rocks and the trees
I leapt from the platform into your arms

*

The miracle gland gives my body no rest
To be emptied again by the meaningless roar
Let’s go die, and then die, and then die and then die
Roll on, little toes, to the top of the earth!

As I hope these stanzas (which I sort of picked at random) demonstrate, the book’s second section is maddeningly beautiful in its wiry shiftiness. The lack of end-stops, (except for occasional exclamation points—which serve more than anything to barrel us—with alacrity—into the next stanza) makes the sections and the individual stanzas seem less than nailed to the page. And this, in turn, makes me want to jump around in my reading, to try new configurations of the poem’s lines/stanzas/sections. It’s like being given a forest made out of Legos. The first thing I want to do is map out the forest, then I want to play hide-n-seek in it, and after that I want to take it apart and build a monkey or a fighter jet.

This isn’t to suggest, however, that the poem as McCann has written it is “undone”—he’s made real choices; he’s given the poem a real trajectory and shape. But at the same time, he’s crafted the poem (and each line) with such detailed musical consistency—and with such unnerving jump-cuts and leaps—that it almost begs to be read around in with both pleasure and re/constructive imagination. It’s a poem to read and to play with—a toy box of Anthony McCann samples that points toward endless, marvelous (and kind of frightening) remixes. To illustrate what I mean, take a look at these stanzas that I made from the three I quoted above:

I drag myself toward you using only my face
The miracle gland gives my body no rest
It was weird: being there, with the rocks and the trees
Can’t live a day in a world without birds!

Roll on, little toes, to the top of the earth!
Soft moccasin light streams down through the leaves
To be emptied again by the meaningless roar
I leapt from the platform into your arms

To see each little flower, forever at once
Let’s go die, and then die, and then die and then die
You shrieked as though you’d stabbed me yourself
“What have you done?” our someone exclaimed

The point here is that the poem is so rich, so musically intertwined in itself, and so out-of-control-in-control in terms of its content, that reading it as McCann has written it suggests—almost insists on—a reader’s rearranging it endlessly in order to read the massive plethora of its surfaces and depths. It’s a poem that rewards reading, re-reading and re-inventive-reading, allowing us to get lost and find both each other and ourselves, over and over again:

No object here aches to be seen (except me)
Once again I’d arrived at the limit of friends
It might just be me and it might not be me
But it’s nice to be held while watching the waves

3. New Dreams of Mammal Island:

But one day they changed the color of everything
It was kind of like tasting all the world’s locks
And then a girder the size and shape of a fork
Fell to the floor and presented this room
And a bus barreled down and the whole building quaked
And the trees opened their shirts stepped out of their shirts
Out of their pants stepped out of their pants
And the trees started to weep I mean rain it was raining
And stood there all naked and human and shaking
And your face was an image of waiting in that rain

(from “Your Voice”)

I ♥ Your Fate’s final section seems to take off where section two leaves off, each poem a new wave pounding against us, flooding the stage with the strangest clarity ever, removing our clothes:

When I opened the fridge:
Leprosy tanks!
I’m up on the ladder
when the leaves start to shake
I am holding my hair
holding my teeth
I am resembling knees
when the birds start to twitch
In the meantime:
Miracle cops!
Filled with small traits
I was combing my head
When you touched my wrist
I was leaning

(from “Alibi”)

Everything in this book is leaning—on a slant, a little bent, off-kilter, a little bit waiting in waiting, hoping for the future, headlong into the future. It makes me want to reflect on and connect to the world, to other people and to words, differently, physically, with abandon, apocalyptically.

It strikes me after all of this that more than most books I ♥ Your Fate is a book of intersections, of fates and lines and stanzas—of words—mingled and commingled and deliberately intertwined to create one of the strangest, most human, and most out of this world (yet) worldly places I’ve ever been. It takes me places I could’ve never predicted or expected and which feel nevertheless exactly like home. More importantly, the book points over and over to that one crucial intersection that exists in almost any reading experience, the collision of reader and writer at the book. I ♥ Your Fate is a sort of love letter to our fates intertwined—mine and yours with Anthony McCann’s and poetry. The book’s title implies I heart your fate, because I heart our (don’t forget the “our” in “your”) fate in these poems. To read these poems is to keep fate in mind—to reflect on where one has been, who one is (the relationships that define us) and what it all points to—with openness to the possibilities of significant dis/connection.

Tags: 9 stars, Anthony McCann, I Heart Your Fate, Matt Hart, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

Wolf Face and Big Bright Sun

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

by Matt Hart / by Nate Pritts
H_ngm_n Bks 2010 / BlazeVOX Books 2010
Reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

“two hummingbirds singing”

Conjecture, simple statement and sense perception yield sparkling poetics in the latest collections by poets / editors / publishers / pals Matt Hart and Nate Pritts. Each author is extremely active in poetry world business affairs: Hart edits and publishes the journal Forklift, Ohio and press Forklift Ink, and Pritts is behind H_ngm_n and H_ngm_n BKS. The energy they bring to poetry is tremendous and truly generative in the best sense – when you come across a project that either or both has a hand in, you’re fired up with mad desire to respond. Their latest books are no exception.

In their own ways – Hart with mania, Pritts with hope – the poets can be glowy: “Today is the brightest day today / could possibly be!” ( Pritts, “Bright Day”). But they are always close to the matter-of-fact detail, presenting a situation at hand with intimate and mildly absurd analysis: “and your absence is company and a company” (Hart, “You Are Mist”). What they share is a dedication to approaching poetry as an occasion of serious fun. Even when edging into darkness, Hart’s response to the world is joyous:

It’s true that two hummingbirds singing
in exactly the same pitch
can shatter the blackest of mountains.
But it’s also true that the missiles
in those mountains can shatter
a hummingbird to pieces of hummingbird.
The end. But this curled mess of black
yarn, this series of concrete barrier
entanglements, means that we have to be ready
for no matter what, for whatever…

(“Electron Face”)

Do hummingbirds even sing? It does not seem to matter; the poet intuits a sound, or confluence of sound, and anyway “the missiles / in those mountains” most certainly “can shatter” hummingbirds along with all the rest of us anyway. The thought of doom immediately enters and distracts. Doom is reliable; one can have faith in doom. And as he says at the close of the same poem,

The reason it’s good to have faith
is the reason for everything good.

The abiding principle here is to get into the swing of language and immediate association, and then to allow the poem to be carried away. The darker it gets, the more that “play” is an affair meant to be harnessed. In the following example from Pritts, each line connects thought to emotion to thought as the reader is drawn in to an unsettled monologue:

Sometimes I catch myself not really listening

when other people talk & I get concerned
that I’m not expressing the proper emotion

so I just keep thinking that I want them
to shut up quick & stop asking me to care.

Earlier today I saw one bird & I thought
he looked like a sad bird so I said to myself,

“Hey, Pritts, you are one sad bird,” but now
looking back, I can see how someone else

would have thought that bird looked pretty happy,
ecstatic even, & with all those feathers

why not?

(“Sad Tree”)

These aren’t glum poems; they are landscapes of the tragic comedy of everyday living. Where Pritts seeks relief in philosophical inquiry, Hart immerses himself in the present. He displays a dazzling brilliance for the occasional and transitional. He tells us he’s

…snoozing-in 3 times, getting up finally at 6;

kissing good morning to Melanie and the cold air,
the coffee, computer, the baby and dog; make coffee…

By doing so, he’s introducing the daily routine upon which the poems depend, times of the day when

the cold air feels terrific, my ears filled with traffic.
I feel like I’m still dreaming, each step automatic, my body

self-propelled. And on the streets with no lights
without my glasses, I can’t see a thing. So Daisy and I

simply rocket, bolt and breathe, benevolent burn,
and only the trees with their low-hanging branches,

which scrape against my face every thirty or forty
seconds, break me out of my trance and remind me

of me, and also where we are – Cincinatti, November!

(“Blackbox Cockpit Voice Recorder”)

Hart stays rooted in daily habits and in a very specific place, Cincinatti. He has no knowledge of what’s presently to arrive, but commits himself to nailing down hard truths against the surrounding darkness. Both Pritts and Hart understand and perhaps thrive on the treacherous detours a poet is likely encounter with this kind of writing: turning a corner of a thought on a line and finding that the corner corners them. Pritts

…can look up & see that same night sky,

that it will always be empty black or riddled
with starlight but, whatever it is, it will be,
always, & I’m convinced that being convinced

is a good way to handle all this doubt,
just like I am convinced I could do almost anything
& still be me in the morning.

(“That Me”)

But the only thing that keeps him from falling up into the “empty black” is the conviction that he is at least as constant as the sky. The work they excel at requires they remain outside the society that benefits from their work, but remain deeply engaged in the daily functions afloat on its surface. Discomfort becomes endemic, an inescapable side effect of getting the job done. What keeps the work going is the satisfaction that comes now and then from catching a glimpse beyond the usual charade. Here is Pritts:

I can’t handle complex systems. Imagine if this were all one big
celestial accident. The senseless piles up
& with time the mass becomes hot enough to shine. So simple,
the shine, & so beautiful. Its beauty may put you in shock.

(“Daisy”)

This is a calling Hart shares:

Weird wonder these days how it only gets darker
and figuratively speaking full of teeth in the glow.

(“Wolf Face”)

Each poet has the presence of a mythic punk Ted Hughes. They address the indecipherable density of existence, even sharing images – the senseless mass, the teeth in the glow – as the frightening repeatedly returns to the beautiful. They find levity in darkness, trusting in the knowledge that the richest blood in the heart flows darkest. The poems arrive enmeshed in the lives of the poets, because the poets place their faith in experience, perception and people. There is no escapism to be found here. There’s much to be lamented, but importantly, there’s plenty to enjoy.

Tags: 8.5 stars, BlazeVOX Books, H_ngm_n BKS, Matt Hart, Nate Pritts, Patrick Dunagan
Posted in reviews

Ruefle wins William Carlos Williams Award

Monday, March 21st, 2011

Mary Ruefle has won the Poetry Society of America’s 2011 William Carlos Williams Award for her Selected Poems (reviewed here by Jennifer H. Fortin). The prize is given annually to an outstanding book of poetry. Other finalists included Timothy Donnelly for The Cloud Corporation, Kathleen Graber for The Eternal City, and Ange Mlinko for Shoulder Season. You can read about all four books in our Top 30 Poetry Books of 2010 and 2010 Year in Review.

Both Ruefle’s and Donnelly’s books were published by Wave Books in 2010. Graber’s book was published by Princeton University Press, and Mlinko’s was published by Coffee House Press.

In a citation on the PSA Web site, Rodney Jones writes, “What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle: fond of experiment, but just as pleased to write of tilapia or county fairs; always novel, but never pandering to a mode; refusing neither the absurd nor the sublime. Any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence. For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience. Her Selected Poems, like the work of William Carlos Williams, is a testimony not only to the power of artfulness, but to human empathy.”

More coverage of Mary Ruefle:

Jennifer H. Fortin reviews Selected Poems

Melinda Wilson reviews The Most of It

Matt Hart reviews Indeed I Was Please With the World

John Deming reviews A Little White Shadow

Tags: Ange Mlinko, Coffee House Press, Jennifer H. Fortin, John Deming, Kathleen Graber, Mary Ruefle, Matt Hart, Melinda Wilson, Princeton University Press, Selected Poems, Shoulder Season, The Cloud Corporation, The Eternal City, Timothy Donnelly, Wave Books, William Carlos Williams Award
Posted in news

Tourist Trap 2: Hart & Pritts

Monday, November 15th, 2010

Tourist Trap, NYC is a web video series that follows touring poets to some of New York’s top tourist destinations, as well as lesser known bars, reading venues and unheralded back streets. Each episode features one or two poets as they explore the city, discuss their work, how urban landscapes influence their writing, the history or importance of landmark they’ve chosen to visit, as well as any conversations they might deem relevant along the way. Each episode culminates with a short reading at their destination of choice.

Available in HD!

~

Matt Hart is the author of Wolf Face (H_NGM_N Books 2010) and Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and the editor of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, and Light Industial Safety. His work has appeared in The Canary, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Diagram, H_NGM_N, and Typo. He lives in Cincinnati, where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

~

Nate Pritts is the author of four full-length books of poems – most recently Big Bright Sun (BlazeVOX, 2010) & The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon Books, 2009), as well as several chapbooks. His poetry & prose have been published widely, both online & in print, in journals such as The Southern Review, Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Octopus, & Forklift, Ohio among many others. Nate has his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College (‘00) & his PhD in British Romanticism from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette (‘03). He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N & H_NGM_N BKS.

~

Tourist Trap, NYC is produced by Eye For An Iris Press and Coldfront. Email ttrapnyc@gmail.com for more information.

Next Episode: Kate Greenstreet. Stay tuned!

Watch previous episodes here.

~

Tags: Matt Hart, Nate Pritts, Tourist Trap
Posted in features, news, video

Sunny Wednesday

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books 2009
Reviewed by Matt Hart

“Good for us who walk among the ghosts.”

Today isn’t Wednesday. It’s Sunday. And it isn’t sunny. It’s actually really cold and rainy out—a perfect day to stay inside and scribble out a few words on Noelle Kocot’s Sunny Wednesday, a book I’ve been carrying around with me since I got it last Spring. Between then and now, I’ve read it many times. It was one of only two books I took with me to Europe this past summer (the other being Renato Poggioli’s Theory of the Avant-Garde—another story entirely), and it’s been with me this Fall wherever I’ve gone—Houston, Louisville, New York. A couple of times, I’ve thought to take it out of my bag and replace it with a different book, but something (not the thought of writing these remarks) has always stopped me. What something? I don’t know. I’m not really sure I care. Can I say the book is haunting, perplexing, electric? I can. I do. Do I have some big thesis to make here? I do not. Or maybe. Yes.

Sunny Wednesday is a book in the middle of something, halfway between the end of time (the end of a certain time—with double emphasis on “certain”) and the next thing, as yet in the shadows. I think about this next thing (these next things) a lot (both in relation to the book and life), the past and the future as seen from that momentary and ever-shifty, yet perpetual middle ground of the present—that Wednesday between Sunday and Saturday, the midway between absolutes—the birth salute and the death salute. And it’s sunny, too, this Wednesday, this green-y middle meadow, but don’t let that fool you. Rather, think about it as ambiguously as possible, i.e. that “sunny” doesn’t necessarily mean things are (figuratively speaking) looking up—only that someone is (literally) looking up into the sky and noticing there a brightness, perhaps in marked contrast to the way the looker actually feels:

The study of heat blinks
In the midday sun.
Soon, a blaze of rhyme
Will cast an artificial glare
And sunset on the windowsill.
Good for us who die in flames.
Good for us who walk among the ghosts.

(“Nature Poem”)

And yet, with so much goodness at hand, the feeling remains complicated. The world remains a haunted place: half-sensations, and echoes and traces.

So now, with all that in mind…

***

At the center of this collection of 59 poems is a massive absence, the loss of a beloved—a spouse—producing a gargantuan swell (or perhaps shock after shock) of mourning, longing and ekstasis. To read these poems is to experience a terrible, though often beautifully wrecked and crushing, embodiedout of body strangeness, “I saw my love shoot up the intravenous moonlight, / Vanished in a Milky Way of negatives” Kocot writes at the beginning of “Neptune,” an image which is simultaneously fucked-up and lush, galactic and romantic, flooded with light and sucked into darkness. In fact, and perhaps paradoxically, dispersion, fade-out and negation (both formally and subject-wise) are the prime movers of these poems, for example in these lines from “Rite”: “I forget and walk off into the dying world without you / And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void.” What’s weird about so much of this book is how the poems seem in a constant state of vanishing, and yet they never blink out entirely. Their radiation imprints a spirit on the air itself:

I predict the end of my predictions
And the loss of the whole world
At your brilliant shadow
And I will continue to hum
Your buried music like a refrigerator
Deep into the night

( from “Tribute #2”)

What I love about these poems is that they’re brimming with personal metaphorical gestures, which, at their best, don’t come off as secret-code making—and even when they do I usually could care less, because the images themselves are so arresting, stirring, and/or devastating:

Too often, you are only a shadow cast

Across an endless sunny Wednesday:

Trapezoidal sleep, spell-check aflame with saints,

Roseate silo, the arrows are dark, the moment sharp.

(from ‘“You Will Always Be My Animal”’)

That said, I’m also intrigued by the fact that reading these poems I’m not able to set aside—the way as a “good” reader I’m supposed to be able to set aside—what I know and have read about Noelle Kocot, the person—that she was married to Damon Tomblin, a composer who died as the result of a heroin overdose—a loss which has had an understandably profound effect on Kocot and her work. References to “Damon” and “shooting up” abound in this collection, along with constant reminders of a deep separation of souls. It seems that autobiography is the scaffolding upon which Sunny Wednesday’s poems (not to mention those in Kocot’s previous book Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems) hang both their grief and amazement at the fact that anything exists at all. And while it’s the personal that provides the poems’ stability, it’s the universality of the larger human issues here that give the work its visceral power. These poems aren’t what one might typically think of as confessional lyrics. For one thing, they don’t confess or divulge the personal beyond the scaffolding I’ve already mentioned. Rather, they take note in the midst of the scaffolding—as if, weirdly, to build it up imaginatively, so as to be both wholly inspired/mired in it and also transcend it entirely, often floating or collapsing—resolutely unresolved:

Now, as I wait, miles ahead of and miles behind

My time, a train that hovers here suspended

Over a warm pool of numbers, never adding up

Or subtracting delicately away.

(from “This Is What You Get”)

And whereas, the more I think about, for example, Robert Lowell’s poems, the more I’m drawn to think about Robert Lowell, in contrast, the more I think about Noelle Kocot’s poems the further away from her I get. Rather than being therapeutic explorations of the facts, Kocot’s poems explore the possibilities—emotional, imaginative, and intellectual—of what the facts point to—something beyond, “I forget and walk off into the dying world without you/And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void.” In other words, these poems are, more than anything else, physically moving responses to the swirl of existence and its constant barrage of beginnings (surprise) and endings (loss). As such, the poems in Sunny Wednesday are an assertion of BEING in the face of our having to live with and against its antithesis, GRAVITY/NOT-BEING.

Furthermore, whereas many poets use poetry as one of the ways to organize, make sense of, and explode the presences and experience of the overwhelming fullness of life, Kocot seems to be using it to make sense of this fullness in the face of the Void, an unshakeable and overwhelming emptiness/absence, one brimming simultaneously with meaning and meaninglessness, breath and breathlessness, ritual and randomness, aloneness and loneliness, music and silence, darkness and light. Nowhere in the book is this more mind-blowingly and beautifully demonstrated than in “Once Upon a Time in America” where Kocot begins the poem addressing her deceased husband:

Here in this room I slept
As you lay dead and alone
After you died, while I, superstitious
Peasant slept, slept through
Phone call after phone call from
Detective after detective, finally
Waking to Daniel’s simple and beatific
Damon’s dead […]

From here, however, the poet, after making arrangements “like a cop/Or fireman” and saying “I love you to the morning sky” flies into the imaginative ether:

Never having been one of the fully
Living, I live, half of me in
a cornfield filled with skyscrapers,
Half of me in that place we are
Before we’re born and after we die.
Tonight, I was outside thinking
Of that holy drunken terror
Jackson Pollock. Fuck you moon,
He’d shout and cry. A big dog
Came running up to me and his owner
Shouted, Jackson, come back here.

It’s as if Kocot’s associations and imagination become REAL LIFE—from saying “I love you to the morning sky” to Pollock’s “Fuck you moon” to the rather mysterious/mystical appearance of Jackson, the dog—as if Kocot’s own associations have come instantly TO BE. The poem ends with the poet once again addressing her husband:

You are a dead musician who died
Alone. I wait to go to you,
Smoking and breaking curses under
The Jackson Pollock fuck you moon.

What’s so blindingly weird to me here is that the poem leaves off with everything blundered-up-the-same: the musician has died alone, the speaker waits alone, and Jackson Pollock’s “Fuck you moon” has been transformed/transferred to the moon itself, which presides over everything in anger, defiance and recognition/resignation. It’s as if all the stuff of life is just one shifting mess of strangeness and witchcraft.

And yet, the book is not without its own antidote, as words themselves not only describe and articulate, but make, meaning—which is always a kind of connectedness, one thing to another to an other. Or as Kocot puts it in “To You, the Only”

And when I am lost
Your scent wafts toward me
Like the notes of a vibraphone
And I shake off the muck of existence

[…]

To remind you that before all else we are animals full of music
Tethered to the contradictions of this world.

Tags: 9 stars, Matt Hart, Noelle Kocot, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

Overnight

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

by Paul Violi
Hanging Loose Press 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

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

1. 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.

Tags: 9 stars, Hanging Loose Press, Matt Hart, Paul Violi
Posted in reviews

Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse

Friday, April 18th, 2008

by Darcie Dennigan
Fordham University Press 2008
Reviewed by Matt Hart

Atom Smasher

It’s a beautiful Spring day here in Ohio. Things are turning green and bursting. And finally, once again, the sun is upon us after months of “winter events” and gray skies/cold rain. I’m typing in the dining room, and through the windows to my left I can see Melanie outside planting pansies, hyacinth, and mums. Meanwhile, our nearly two year old daughter is “helping” her mother—picking up dirt, pointing at birds (singing “bird bird bird”) and pulling the petals off the flowers where she can. Earlier, as I was trying to bring her inside to eat lunch she wouldn’t let go of the handful of purple petals she had clinched in her hand, no sir. A little fit ensued. The terrible twos. Definitely not a big deal, but her fist would NOT open. Thus, the purple petals now strewn about my living room and kitchen floors.

Of course, this is not a disquisition on parenting, nor is it a description of the Midwest in Spring. This is—will be—as the title promises—a “review” of Darcie Dennigan’s debut book of poems, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse, which won the 2006-2007 Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud Prize—and which, by the by, I have been waiting to read for quite some time.

I plan to argue, here, (among other, unplanned things—we shall see!) that more than with a lot of other books, the title of Dennigan’s Corinna sets the stage—provides an associative backdrop and atmosphere—that when unraveled can provide a useful way of thinking about the book both as a whole and in terms of its individual poems.

Given this, I should perhaps connect the tissue of my initial domestic anecdote, as tenuous as it may be, to the book at hand. At the heart of Dennigan’s book is “A-maying” (both in its title and its content), which my daughter without any prompting is doing right now—that is, celebrating the end of winter via the gathering (and beheading!) of Spring flowers. Of course, it’s important to remember that at the heart of a-maying is May Day—and its various festivities: gathering spring flowers (yet again), the crowning of the May Queen, dancing round the maypole, and in more recent years parades and celebrations in support of labor and workers’ rights, a whole host of left-wing (“bird, bird, bird”) political demonstrations. In other words, to go a-maying is to demonstratively spring into Spring.

However, I can’t also help but be reminded associatively that “May Day” is “mayday,” the international radiotelephone distress signal used by ships and aircraft—as well as by fire and police departments (in “mayday situations”) to declare the commencement of search and rescue operations. Associatively speaking, then, a-maying has its darkside. In fact, “mayday” is a shortening of the French venez m’aider, which means “come help me”. And as long as we’re going out on associative limbs, looking at the French m’aider makes me think of the English “maiden” of which Dennigan’s Corrina is one. Her name is in fact a version of the Greek “Korinna” which is derived from kore meaning “maiden,” and furthermore is an epithet of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter (the Greek goddess of agriculture) and Zeus (head honcho of the gods).

The story, which I’m sure most everybody knows, goes that Persephone, herself out a-maying with her attendant maidens, was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. He had apparently taken a liking to her and wanted her to be his queen, so he opened up the earth and essentially swallowed her. A May Day mayday indeed. However, this didn’t sit well with Demeter, who was so forlorn over her daughter’s disappearance that she failed to tend the crops, and thus the first winter came to the earth. By all accounts it was a TERRIBLE one. So bad in fact that Zeus eventually intervened, ordering Persephone to spend half the year in the underworld and half up top with her mother. Thus, explaining the changing of the seasons. And now for a brief hiatus.

I can imagine already people saying: well, if you have to do all of this associative research-y type work just to get the backdrop and atmosphere upon which Dennigan’s world turns, the poems must not stand so well on their own. On the contrary, it’s that they stand so well on their own—they’re rock solid! in fact—that allows them to fly. Spitting associative sparks off both real and imagined landscapes, the poems in Corinna invite readers to excavate, associate, and riff off of what’s given. As Dennigan writes near the end of “The Virgins,” which moves deftly in its first 15 lines from a loveseat on a New England porch to a “porcelain Mary three towns over” that “cries type O blood from her eyes” then onto the myth of Clytie and Apollo and finally to an avalanche scene on Mount Blanc in the French Alps:

…See how
I have gone from home to mythology
to the Alps & nobody has moved.

Love, when I say I want to be close
to you I should say more
about avalanches & bleeding out,
how we will move through eons
& hemispheres in a white clapboard house.

In other words, for me, these poems demonstrate both an incredible groundedness (in terms of form AND content), “nobody has moved” and an associative leaping, inter/woven-ness, “avalanches & bleeding out,” which is immeasurably interesting not only for what the poems say, but for what they point to as well. In a way, these poems work in the tradition of Keats’ Odes, which remain stable (because they’re actually about things) while sliding from one idea to another exploratively. Dennigan’s poems thus demonstrate a 21^st Century imaginative engagement with actual life, which is not only fantastic, but compelling. As Dennigan writes near the end of the book’s title poem:

All the front door keys to all the places
I have ever lived drip from the dogwood tree
& chime in the wind

—which makes me want to read and re-read and also do my homework. But back to the book’s title…

Many people will surely note that the title of Dennigan’s book directly references, and plays on, the title of 17^th century poet Robert Herrick’s “Corrina is Going A-Maying,” a poem that argues against keeping one’s maiden self cloistered away in the protective custody of decorum when one can be out frolicking among the daffodils, etc.

And while Herrick’s poem may not go as far in suggesting/arguing for physical good times (or more darkly, terrible ones) as, say, Andrew Marvel does with his coy mistress, there’s certainly enough ambiguity in Herrick’s poem to suggest that the speaker may have ulterior motives for getting Corinna and her posse out into the wildflowers.

This is a theme that Dennigan herself picks up in several of the poems in her book, including the aforementioned “The Virgins” and the title poem. However these themes are even more acutely tackled in “Orienteering in the Land of New Pirates,” where she writes, “…isn’t adventure always better than stagnant water?/ —I say this standing waist deep in a swamp.” Then later, “I wouldn’t want my boy to think the world is kind./ Wouldn’t want him to think his games have no dark side.” What’s great here and different from her 17^th Century models is the way she takes both sides of the argument, as both the persuader and the persuaded, for better or for worse. Another example of this occurs in “Eleven Thousand and One,” where the speaker, after weaving together the story of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgin martyrs with a contemporary Boston bar scene of five young women, who she’s rather voyeuristically watching through the bar window, she apologizes to “mom, god, you there” for allowing herself to be lured into connecting the dots and then, more importantly, connecting them to herself. Ultimately, the poem builds to its one unimagined momentous climax. Choosing expression over decorum, the speaker, who’s been leaning against a dying sapling for much of the poem, finally stops imagining the lives and purported lives of others and bursts out with, “I need to make love to something.”

Finally, besides “Corinna” and her “a-maying,” there’s also the apocalypse to contend with—a sense of universal or widespread destruction. In this As Dennigan writes in her poem “Interior Ghazal of a Lousy Girl,” (a poem which indeed does contain a ghazal in its interior:

Kingdom come.
Bring rum. Come

Sling, strum, come.
Stinging crumb, come.

Dennigan mum. Come,
my sobbing plum, come.

), “I am the excess of exuberance,/ one crummy girl swallowing ruin.” That is, the book contends with the apocalypse by eating it (the way Hades made the earth to swallow Persephone) again and again. How does one eat the apocalypse? Very carefully, but also as the interior Ghazal above demonstrates by not giving up in the face of it and by going to the party no matter come what a-maying (“Kingdom come. Bring rum.”). In other words, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse is powered by conundrum, surprise, imagination, recklessness, wonderment, earnestness, and above all giant playfulness and smarts. Even as it plumbs the depths, it refuses to take itself too seriously—from the palindromic “Sit on a Potato Pan Otis” to “The New Constellation” (which begins, “I loved the Starbucks”) to the amazing prose poem “The New Mothers” (which tells the story of orphan hospital nurses who invent new mothers for their patients out of cheap wind-up clocks, even as the poem deconstructs its own un“metered” language into a tick-tocking new mother tongue). Just as Corinna A-Maying plays against the Apocalypse that follows it in the book’s title, Dennigan is also careful in the poems themselves to play playfulness (both in form and content) against the book’s more devastating/earnest moments. No place is this more apparent than in the poem “Sentimental Atom Smasher”, which uses the opening of the greatest bar joke ever told as a way to talk about longing, stasis, and feeling:

So this guy walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Sorry,
               the bartender says, I only sell atom smashers

                And the guy says well isn’t that America for you–
every happy-hour Nelson’s a homemade physicist and no thank you,

just an ice cold one, but it’s too late–suddenly, he’s on his butt
                in a ballfield where handsome men are chasing a ball over grass

                sad grass, yellow like the hair of his once-young mother!
and again he says, no thank you–I’ve seen this movie before

And the bartender says it’s a joke and you’re inside its machine…

It’s funny ha-ha in spots, and also funny strange/funny not. It’s a joke alright—the joke’s a “joke,” because it’s actually poem—a sort of ode to Jokes and their shadows, and the poem itself’s a joke, because, well, “a guy walks into a bar,” and as a result we are immediately sucked into its wonderful machine:

A guy walks into a bar,

–actually just the beer-drinking bleachers of a ballfield–and says
                is this some kind of joke?

                 Well, says the bartender who has observed the little lamb
and the tyger burning bright and tickled their particulates,

because your life has lately been stagnant, we have yoked you
                 to a joke and we await the gasp that will gas up the cosmos…

                 Just then there’s a hit at the plate–and it’s going,
it’s going–gone to smash the guy in the skull

                 And since baseballs are made of nostalgia atoms, the guy,
with concussion, says I want to buy a coke for a nickel

                 I want to install applie pie perfumemakers in the crotch of every
                              tree
Bartender, bring me dried nosegays! Start the stalwart pageants!

Who hasn’t been cured of what ills them by getting hit in the head in a joke inside a joke inside a poem? Yes, of course, but what’s the punchline/final line, you ask? Is it an atom smasher that blasts away sentiment or a smasher of sentimental atoms? Well, as it turns out, neither is correct—the punchline is one that no doubt would make Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Koch, and even Robert Herrick proud: “the moonlight and the moonlight is curdling into freon…”

Then again, “If we only stay careful and awake—if we are good people—/ Ha. Then nothing.” Then “The Feeling of the World As a Bounded Whale Is the Mystical.” Then “I killed my heart to feel it.” “…a geologic instant…” Then “The Chrysler Driver blows his horn,” and Darcie Dennigan has this amazing new that you should read right now. Here in Ohio, the sun is going down. It’s a different day. Tomorrow, “There will be a loud report.”

Tags: 8.5 stars, Darcie Dennigan, Fordham University Press, Matt Hart
Posted in reviews

Simply Rocket

Thursday, February 7th, 2008

by Matt Hart
Lame House Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

hart rocket cover

I’d like, in death, to be able to say of myself that I spent more days feeling inspired than not. Certain great poets continually encourage and foster this need. For Guillaume Appolinaire (“At last I can hail I don’t know whom / They pass by me they gather out there”), for example, poetry is a place of worship and almost ceaseless inspiration. When he’s in a poem, he’s in it for everything; the common parts of the day are there provide more than enough dullness, sadness and horror. Yet even these sensations can be framed in language and divinity (“And their faces paled / And their sobs broke”). The very air around the poet’s head seems charged with static fuzz and unity.

Matt Hart is obsessed with the sky. In his first book, Who’s Who Vivid, it was everywhere. It was here: “Sometimes fluttering is all that’s required. / Or the air…” It was here: “O emerald, forgive me, / the sky.” It was here: “I was kept / in a blind spot, pinned to a sky by the house.” And it even closed out the book:

Write me
about anything.

The sky is full of words.

I am awaiting
your reply.

Hart writes about wings and about flying with ambition that reminds me of great French surrealists: the urge to escape is perhaps rooted in a kind of unaccountable sadness, and escaping into poetry is as close as one can come to escaping into the sky. Not dying: escaping into the sky (See: P-Funk).

Simply Rocket is the name of Matt Hart’s new chapbook. “Analysis is not all” he declares, and begins to develop a self-sustaining argument that a person shouldn’t seek truth in place of beauty, because truth is beauty—and that even if it is not, we ought to imagine it is anyway. Poetry becomes liberation; everything outside of one’s body is sky and escape.

Rocket is a rhythmic and urbane-antique progression of 14 (how apropos) sonnets. The repetition, the exuberance and the neatly-trimmed singsong of these poems will grab you right out of the gate. They rhyme sometimes, though the rhythm is what floats them beyond the stratosphere:

Or perhaps one discovers a wasp in one’s heart
or an astronaut listening intently to Venus,
then crying out with a dusting of crickets,
I think it not near far enough!

Beyond applauding Hart for his ability to land a sort of “ye olde” exclamation, you’ll also like his consistency; as these four lines conclude sonnet two, sonnet three begins: “Not nearly enough, but more anthemic than ever.”

The musicality is incredibly late 20^th/early 21^st century. His rhythms pause and loop, and he samples himself; the lines “Analysis is not,” “All manner of citrus” and “My little daughter demands it” are among many that pop up in a variety of places, as is the name Theodore Geisel, whom the poet “learned the love of repetition” from and reminds us in Notes at the end is more commonly known as Dr. Seuss. Repetition indeed. The title itself appears in another Hart poem, the peculiarly “autobiographical” poem “Black Box Cockpit Voice Recorder,” which appeared in Issue 5 of Parthenon West Review: “…without my glasses, I can’t see. So Daisy and I // simply rocket, bolt and breathe…”

Yet for all his musical enthusiasm, optimism and poem-chopping ambition, the poet likes to debate the issue of poetic form; he vaguely accuses himself of going standard, of following the traditional “verse/ chorus/ verse/ chorus/ solo/ chorus chorus” form as it pertains to poetry—that is, an overused form—the sonnet. Yet overplayed as the sonnet may be, Hart proves its place:

O super Frankenstein or a dog
named Dinosaur, kitchens filled with infants
and comets of rust sweet peas, mangoes,
silhouette aorta, today’s the day to sonnet—

Sometimes such willful ownership of the sonnet, of vaguely traditional meter, of French surrealist powers, and of, well, Dr. Seuss, will even make you laugh out loud:

What I learned from my wife—Cincinatti the poem
                     Hardhat the poem
My darling the boombox the cricket the poem
                     no irritable screeching
Kitchens filled with infants new dreaming of dust
Marimba the poem              Too drunk in the poem
Boomerang toomerang soomerang poem                Seriously
are you a bit overblown, poem?

This gets significantly funnier when you read the notes in the back: “‘Boomerang Toomerang Soomerang’ was the magic catch phrase used in conjunction with the boomerang of Lady Elaine Fairchilde, keeper of the Museum Go-Round in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The apparent childishness—Seuss, Rogers, ice cream, the perpetual, ironic doses of look at me, I’m writing a Poem—becomes rather liberating for the reader.

In “Black Box Cockpit Voice Recorder,” Hart declares, “It’s like I’m flying, / and I hate flying. But not this time, / and not this.” A boomerang, like a rocket (ideally), goes into the sky and comes back. Matt Hart has done that with the tastefuly tight and artfully crafted Simply Rocket; it’s secretly inspiring and one of the best sonnet sequences in recent memory.

Tags: 8 stars, John Deming, Lame House Press, Matt Hart
Posted in reviews

Indeed I Was Pleased with the World

Monday, July 9th, 2007

by Mary Ruefle
Carnegie Mellon University Press 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

Critic’s Corner

The cover of Mary Ruefle’s 10th book of poems, Indeed I Was Pleased with the World, shows a detail from artist Zoe Leonard’s installation piece Strange Fruit—a work composed of the torn skins of various kinds of fruit, which are sloppily but beautifully sewn back together with needle and thread, then scattered about the space like so many damaged (if badly/weirdly, wonderfully) scarred survivors of gravity’s end-stop. As a result, the work achieves a beaten up, desperate, and tragic presence, which somehow simultaneously gives off a vibe of deep and impossible monster marvelousness. One might conclude that it draws its inspiration equally from Billy Holiday, Frankenstein, and The Sex Pistols. All in all, the work is a vivid depiction of damaged goods in all their great sadness and fiery goodness. As such, it is easily (though interestingly) interpretable in terms of various aspects and avenues of our contemporary world (the casualties of war, plastic surgery disasters, reality television), as well as in terms of human life and existence generally (see GRAVITY above).

The detail in question on the cover of Ruefle’s book is of a single orange skin with one long vertical cut, which has been loosely sewn together with a single stitch. The top of the orange has been completely capped (think of removing the top portion of someone’s skull for a brain surgery) and then sewn back in place in a dizzying off-center circle. In addition, stitches also creep out from beneath the orange, alluding to other damage underneath and perhaps also around its back. As a result of all its trauma and lack of substance—this is after all merely an orange’s skin, there’s no orange to be found—the orange is misshapen and lonely looking, though it does retain something of its lovely red-orange color as a reminder of its past natural beauty. Finally, the juxtaposition of the skin (how quickly things become ambiguous!) with the white thread and the still attached hanging needle gives the image an immediate, if in between, sort of glow—the image of a thing mended/on the mend—something fallen and put back together again—but only in terms of its surface; darkness peeking out from a depth-charged emptiness.

Looking at the image, I can’t help here but to be reminded of the fractured Humpty Dumpty and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men trying without success to put him back together… How frustrating. Standing back and looking at the fragments of something—something one knows used to be whole, and functional, and astonishingly alive, but is now just so many pieces of a once was…

*****

Enter Mary Ruefle and her magnificent book of poems in the face of what once was—as a skewed extension of it, or better, as an antidote to it! Indeed I Was Pleased with the World suggests that there was a/the world (however pleasing it may have been), and now in its aftermath (which began the moment right after its math, “In the beginning…” etc.) there is its poetry—Ruefle’s poetry, which is often times both a resigned-to-it re-imagining or re-versioning of things as they were and also a high-stakes commentary on the everything-around-us state of creation this minute next week. Take, for instance, these lines from her poem “Refrigerator”:

There is the sound of the refrigerator being on.
There is the sound of god beating inside my heart,
which is a strange sound since he does not exist.
There is the sound of a stone sent years ago
which was never answered.
There is the sound of handwriting on a human forehead.
There is the sound of forty-three ducks flying through glass.
There is the sound of a feather duster.
There is the sound of dust heard over the telephone.
There is the sound of a piano with a faint heart
coming from below, a hell where people are happy.

From the refrigerator to the outer limits to a hell of happy people, Ruefle’s poems relentlessly call into question what we know and what we expect, leaving in their wake a glimpse of the extraordinary impossible “without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.” Indeed, if there’s a poet writing today who has Negative Capability, its Ruefle, whose poems are elastic, fearless and open-ended. But unlike that empty strange fruit—that globe of an orange skin that bedecks the cover of her book—Ruefle’s poems have a substance beyond the beyond and depths to match their surfaces. As she writes in “Darke Body of Clowds,” “Sitting in this chair/ with sardines under my nails/ I could very well cloud my whole life/ and never untragic,/ a darke body of clowds/ hanging in the room, obscuring, my lunch…” Here the sardines and clouds-of-self swirl with an/other metaphysical-ish 17th Century “darke body of clowds”—the speaker’s unspecified trajectory (tragic-story)—bringing the past present and future, as well as the personal and historical, into play all at once. The poem is a sort of lyrical diary entry, which for all its “darke”ness moves with a weirdly wonderful lightness. The end of the poem reads:

Darke body of clowds of fishes
Darke body of clowds of birds
Pity the poor proofreader
who thinks this darke body of clowds
was my life

The title “darke body of clowds” comes from a 1644 diary entry by the English gardener and diarist John Evelyn. Thus, this “darke body of clowds” isn’t strictly speaking Ruefle’s. But (strictly speaking) neither was it Evelyn’s. Rather, it was part of a description of a landscape he entered into willingly—not something hanging over him, but a sort of allegorical passageway to Heaven. Of course, the best play here is with the proofreader, a.k.a. the critic—the technician—who’s looking for “fatal” mistakes and finds so many “misspelled” words (not to mention inconsistent punctuation) in a poem of 23 lines. To attribute these “problems” to the writer—which in this case is at least two people—would be both misguided and ridiculous, as it’s this occasion for misunderstanding (and mis-attribution) that makes the poem a delight to read. In many ways “Darke Body of Clowds” is a poem that on multiple reads keeps shifting the weight of its meaning—cloud to clowd to fishes to birds to you—dear proofreader.

To me one of the thing’s that’s so compelling about Ruefle’s poems in general is that they don’t exist in light of the facts, but in spite of them. Her process seems to be one of discovery and nerve, ever and over diving headlong into new possible worlds: the Meadow AND the Void, the Everything AND the Nothing. And this is precisely why her poems feel so full of capital-T Truth. That is, they exist out on that edge of experience where there’s enough of a presence of the shadow of the Vast that the facts are the afterthought of meaning rather than its substance. For example, in her poem “How I Became Impossible”—a sort of monologue wherein (among other things) the speaker remarks that she has always imagined polar bears and penguins “grew up together playing side by side”—but then encounters “facts” that fly in the face of her imagination:

One day I read in a scientific journal:
there are no penguins at one pole, no bears
on the other. These two, who were so long intimates
in my mind, began to drift apart, each on his own floe,
far out into the glacial seas. I realized I was becoming
impossible, more and more impossible,
and that one day it really would be true.

Rather than allowing the facts to re-adjust her vision to fit the world, the speaker imagines harder and with even more resolve to make the world fit her vision. The result, then, isn’t the conformity of the individual to the world but the world to the individual’s imaginative will. This suggests perhaps that the only thing more incredible than leaping from pole to pole via ice floes is leaping from pole to poetry via the ice floes of the imagination, the self recast as both unfathomably adrift and transformatively visionary. The last line’s knowledge that “one day it really would be true” runs contrary to all (and any) fact or reason, and yet nevertheless it’s convincing. More so because “it” is ambiguous—polar bears and penguins side by side, the self imagining its impossible other.

*****

And speaking of impossible, here’s my Mary Ruefle anecdote. In the Fall of 1999(?), I took a Greyhound bus from Cincinnati to Chicago to attend a reading by Kenneth Koch and Dean Young. I arrived at the reading early—about 30 minutes before it was to begin (and as you know, those things never start on time), but the large ballroom was already packed with people talking and drinking. It was a festive, even momentous occasion. Koch was reading from New Addresses, which was just about to be published, and Young was as always reading never-before-seen new poems. I was in my mid-twenties and knew no one, so milled around nervously looking at everyone and trying not to make eye contact. Just the summer before I had met Dean Young briefly, and in the few minutes we talked he had recommended some books—among them Mary Ruefle’s Cold Pluto—which I immediately got hold of and loved for many of the same reasons I’ve discussed with regard to Indeed I Was Pleased with the World… Anyway, looking around the room I suddenly noticed a tall woman with brilliantly deep red hair talking animatedly to a young couple, and it hit me suddenly that this was Mary Ruefle. I recognized her from the author photo on the back of her book. Immediately, I started trying to work up the courage to go over and say something (no doubt ridiculously awkward) about how much I appreciated her poems. (Note: I realize that this may make me sound a wee bit neurotic and perhaps even a little strange. I am the former, though not the latter. What can I say? To me, the poets I admire are rock stars, and I hope this is something I’ll never get over. Nuff said, I hope. Anyway, hang in there—this anecdote’s about Mary Ruefle, not me.) Tick-tock, tick-tock… and Mary Ruefle dashes out of the ballroom down the stairs and out the door onto the street—I don’t know why—but there she went. I followed about 20 seconds later, and she was nowhere to be seen. I looked up and down the block, but she had vanished into thin air—probably down the street and around the corner—I didn’t go and look—just stood in the doorway alone, astonished and strangely happy. To me, in that moment, it was as if she had de-materialized, gone to Borneo, or had been merely an apparition/hallucination—perhaps heat-lightning or a swan made of steam… I never saw Mary Ruefle again that night (though I have been told by mutual friends that she was there), nor have I seen her since. Still, somehow I was thunderstruck by not meeting her—or rather seeing only the electric animated version of her from afar. In retrospect, this seems perfect. Our paths have not crossed until right here in this review of Indeed I Was Pleased with the World. Oh yes, this is still a review.

I lifted my long terrible arm
and turned on the water.
(from “Lines Written on a Blank Space”)

*****

Welcome to the Critic’s Corner. To my mind Ruefle’s work is masterful, but I can imagine some people criticizing its emotional exuberance, as well as its deep on the sleeve melancholy (“I am going to make you a toy./When you play with it,/ in my heart I open my sad eyes/ and stare.”—from “Permanent Loan”) which at times gives the work an antique-y charm—largely Romantic in nature, but occasionally Baroque or Victorian, in its air—its “Darke Body of Clowds” notwithstanding.

There are also moments here where one feels that poems have been rather brutally truncated—chopped to their foundations at the expense of not having achieved a real sufficiency. For example, here’s the poem “Me Too” in its entirety:

I will raise my right hand
and swear to tell the truth:
lovest thou me? Lovest thou me?
Jesus said it seven times:
I counted.

Such poems can come off seeming slight or un/dis-crafted in light of the other work in the book. And there are many other poems here that just END—in the sense that they seem to suddenly fall over a cliff never to be heard from again. However, I might argue that such poems (and there are more than a handful here) are a lot like that orange on the cover of Ruefle’s book in that they point to a poem that was or could be—a shadow that Ruefle often does get right to, but which sometimes can’t, or perhaps shouldn’t always, be gotten to. Sometimes it’s enough to know it’s there. Sometimes to end significantly, one has to do it abruptly. One has to (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus) “grind one’s teeth down to points” and fly in the face of expected good manners and decorum.

*****

Indeed I am pleased with the world of Indeed I Was Pleased with the World. Word to word, line to line, poem to poem—Ruefle’s work is consistently here (if at times dangerously) non-conformist, mysterious, romantic and bold. When it comes to abiding by what’s given, no poet’s work that I know is more full of creative refusals and visionary re-invention in the face of what’s given. Working her magic (and it really is at times like a sort of sorcery—a non-linear, leaping confluence of will and idea with wildness and faith), Ruefle sees things no one else sees and knows things no one else knows—by which I mean her poems are mysterious and grand, and written just for all of us. This is generous work, and nowhere is it more clearly so than in “Kiss of the Sun,” where Ruefle writes: “…at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry/ (and wheat and evil and insects and love) […]/ I will be standing at the edge/ of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you…” And thus, I leave this off where it all started—though on a rather different note—in light of the orange in all its shining glory:

I hope you will take it, and remember on earth
I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw,
and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd
or anything else so that I am of it,
I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.

Tags: 9 stars, Carnegie Mellon University Press, Mary Ruefle, Matt Hart
Posted in reviews

I’m the Man Who Loves You

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

by Amy King
BlazeVOX [books] 2007
Reviewed by Matt Hart

Sky Blue Sky

king_imtheman Between the declarative first gesture of its title, and the final line of its final poem, Amy King’s second book I’m the Man Who Loves You is a-swirl in a tornado of mixing (but not mixed) messages. The book’s 60(!) poems, which are arranged alphabetically by title and with no section breaks, operate like transcriptions of satellite signals criss-crossing in the Vast. At their best, they’re compositions of bright ideas, music, and noise, resulting in (among other things) the deployment of form and content against one another to create tension, poetic texture, and (paraphrasing Apollinaire) the flare-up of multiple meanings in the flames of joy.

As a result, I’m the Man Who Loves You not only has guts and attitude, but achieves altitude (meta-tude) in its refusal to say the simple thing simply—which is (tracking from the title to the final poem), “I’m the man who loves you—Yes, you.” Thus, one might argue that “I love you” is the book’s fundamental operating system and thesis. And yet, of course, as with actual love, it’s complicated, but (also, as is often the case with/in actual love) it’s these complications that make it interesting, risky, and marvelous (that is, both love and the book itself).

For example, one such complication is in how the book’s “I” and “you” are constantly shifting positions, clanging and banging against one another, and at times even disappearing altogether. As King writes in the book’s opening poem, “A Ghost Is Born,” “me into me into I unto thee,/ thyself or not,” and later in “One Bright Thing”:

And if
you follow these two threads
with hands through a trail of smoke
you’ll find pictures of you and pictures
of me in the pockets of jeans cannot charm ourselves
into the arms of discrete belief, everlasting.

The effects here are disorienting and woozy-making, especially when the syntax goes haywire, “…in the pockets of jeans cannot charm ourselves into…” Such light-be-headed distortions are one of King’s hallmarks, and more often than not one of the things that makes these poems not only poetically daring, but charming and smart as well. Think: one part Gertrude Stein + one part Andrew Marvell + one part Guided by Voices (see more below); now add 2 parts Harry Houdini—and Voilà! “I am a fun loving lady/ thinly slicing bread into squares/ of handwritten text” (“Autobiographical Encounter”). Or, on a related but different note:

Accordion adventures, they’re the best instrument
to windbag, to bleat, to push air through daisies
for an alphabet’s sake. Androgyny and honesty
ought to play frozen roses on apocalyptic landscapes,
the landscape of Amy King’s face fused
with artificial intelligence on which hers lies
infinitely predictable. Blindfolded books could do worse
than the diction of bedtime verse
(“Miniature Disasters”)

It’s brilliant stuff. The book is well-lit, musical, and playful while being simultaneously mind-bending in its acrobatic use of what I might call syntactical, juxtapositional and associative dyslexics (and which a lot of other people have called other things) to delimit meaning and lay bare both its surfaces and depths in a coherent but (nearly always) non-linear fashion.

However, these aren’t the only tricks up Amy King’s sleeves. Here’s an example from the beginning of her poem “Taking the Time” where she uses a rather obsessive rhetorical stance to create a maze (amazement, amusement) of possibilities for meaning, via a compelling and yet non-sequitur self/other interrogation:

When the only thing left to ask is when
will you join me in our gallery of projected
sonatas, still another inquiry feathers the birds:
How has this seasonal Sunday of continuous
flowering and everyone gliding
on sidewalks after dusk kept up
in matching short sets and white muscle tanks
without turning their emotional battles over
to the authorities? I mean, must we all be riddled by
the need to fix closeness with distance? In flip flops?

What’s weird in all this is that, unlike a lot of poems which are stylistically similar to King’s, these poems aren’t grounded by a narrative scaffolding, but rather by a distance from one—a deliberate attempt to mean variously (and get close) via the avoidance of narrating/telling. With this in mind, King ends the book—ironically, almost teasingly— with the line, “there’s a storyteller within, if you’d only let her loose.”

Of course, part of why these poems work is because they don’t tell stories, and they aren’t loose either (esp. formally, musically). However, they are perhaps indebted to that other sense of “storytelling,” a.k.a. the fine art of fabrication/imagination. Or, as Oscar Wilde so delicately put it, “the fine art of lying.” And this leaves the reader and “you” and “I” ever on an ambiguous note—one that serves to echo, highlight, and remind us of the limits of understanding and sense-making.

Another such moment occurs with the poem “Robert Pollard’s Kind of Wrong,”—a reference to Bob Pollard, best known as the lead singer and songwriter for Indie Rock royalty Guided by Voices. Here, King creates multiple meanings and enlarges poetic space right from the start with the ambiguous syntax of the title. “Robert Pollard’s Kind of Wrong” could be a statement, where “Pollard’s” is a contraction for “Pollard is,” as in “Robert Pollard’s kind of wrong about thinking the Reds will win the World Series this year.” Or, it could be a way of describing something qualitatively, where Pollard’s is a possessive modifier, as in “Those shoes are Robert Pollard’s kind of wrong.” Furthermore, this “wrong” in turn could be either a good thing (That’s so wrong it’s cool) or a bad thing (The war is just plain wrong). King’s book in general, and this poem in particular, remind us that what’s “wrong” is often what’s important and, by extension, perhaps what’s right—the thing that drives and spurs us on in the search for meaning and solace, “Remove your blouse and become a kind of free on me/ and have a brilliant face…” the poem begins. And later, via a series of switchbacks, which build in intensity and complexity, the speaker remarks:

Each morning, I wear clothes of an industry,
a closet climate, regions I afford
are extras in their roles with an extra s for good breath clouds

Later drive through
me with your irresistible you

At risk of sounding too “Rah! Rah! go Ms. King” about things (though I see nothing wrong with that really), I should mention that this is a book that must/needs be read SLOWLY over time and ACROBATICALLY. One must be willing to read around, back and forth, and sideways in/between the poems—not merely left to right, top to bottom down the page. The music and connective tissues of the book work best when they’re allowed to speak to one another. The first couple of times I read through I’m the Man Who Loves You (top to bottom, etc.) I felt a sort sameness about the work—that some of the poems suffered from too much post-avant glitter and not enough “I’m the man who loves you” substance.

Certainly, one criticism might be that not all the poems here are necessary—that occasionally one is left with a sense of “so what” or a desire to cut things out/move things around, which perhaps points to a material management issue. Furthermore, the alphabetical ordering of the poems (rather than a more deliberated organization of them) may seem to some a little easy. However, one often has the same feelings reading the best works of Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, or even while watching the best Woody Allen films (all of whom are invoked in King’s book in various ways).

I realize that some people may object that I’ve failed in this review to note the book’s obvious Wilco references. Yes, the book’s title is the same as the title of a Wilco song from their album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And it’s also true that the book’s first poem “A Ghost Is Born” is the same as the title of Wilco’s 2004 album of the same name. My sense, however, is that King’s book is of the sort that’s full of cultural references and markers, which will be of interest (or not) to readers depending on what they bring to their reading. To put it simply, getting the specific references (like the Bob Pollard reference above) may say a lot more about a reader’s interests than it does about King’s poems. Notice too that what’s important about the Pollard example is the ambiguity of the title’s grammar, not Bob Pollard or Guided by Voices. Perhaps on this point it’s enough to note that King’s poems are embedded in their moment—its various props and sets and scenery, which are more interesting for their placement within the possible world of the poem/book than they are for what they specifically reference. By my lights, the poems provide formal and contextual clues that help a reader read all of King’s materials in terms the book’s larger issues and its swirl of meanings.

On the whole, I’m the Man Who Loves You works beautifully, and it’s a book worth spending some time working through. For all its flashy machinations, the book remains surprisingly human and knowingly lovely in love. As King writes in “The Bowl from Whence You Came”:

I’ve assumed
your love for me and am having issues with instruments
over for a strain of immortality.

Truly, the pay-off here on multiple readings is huge, and “At first taste,/ a blue streak bleaches the entire sky.”

Tags: 7.5 stars, Amy King, BlazeVOX Books, Matt Hart
Posted in reviews

Posts Tagged ‘Matt Hart’

I ♥ Your Fate

“And stood there all naked and human and shaking”

Wolf Face and Big Bright Sun

“two hummingbirds singing”

Ruefle wins William Carlos Williams Award

Tourist Trap 2: Hart & Pritts

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Sunny Wednesday

“Good for us who walk among the ghosts.”

Overnight

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

Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse

Atom Smasher

Simply Rocket

Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Indeed I Was Pleased with the World

Critic’s Corner

I’m the Man Who Loves You

Sky Blue Sky

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