Posts Tagged ‘Mike McDonough’

The Intent On: Collected Poems 1962-2006

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

by Kenneth Irby
North Atlantic Books 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

“the back / calm pasture of the mind”

In 2009, North Atlantic Books published a handsome book finally gathering the work of Kenneth Irby, one of Charles Olson’s lesser known disciples, who has labored in small press obscurity since the early ‘60’s. Irby fans (including myself) have been waiting for a comprehensive collection since Station Hill Press put out Call Steps in 1991. My first reaction was too much like the blurbs on the back, making me feel like, as Stephen King put it in the self-effacing preface to his book on writing, “a literary gasbag or a transcendental asshole.” But any review of Irby should emphasize that this work is not necessarily easy to approach.

As a title for his collected works, The Intent On is unpromising and not as representative as previous headings such as Orexis, Catalpa, or Relation might be, but it does make the point that Irby is writing in the space “after I,” and suggests two of his main influences, Louis Zukofsky and Ed Dorn, who might be overlooked beneath Olson’s looming presence. The title also points towards his increasing attention to tracking the atomic particles of language. I offer the following quote as an example of Irby’s pacing and form:

or all the high school years again, unslept, reviewing the annual faces over and over
               till they run green in the movies after the eyes are closed
                                        and still as distant as they were in person

                                                                                                  the society of ordinary
                                                                                 high school days, never left, will it?

Noted book designer Jonathan Greene strikes a balance between Irby’s sometimes impossibly long lines and the steady accumulation of his sequences or sets, making it easier for the reader to track the progress of the author’s obsessive dreamscapes from the deceptively straightforward reportage of Relation to the denser, allusive mastery of Call Steps, often regarded as Irby’s central work. Comparison with the Station Hill edition suggests that a decision was made here to put multiple poems on a single page in order to emphasize the continuity of his career, not simply to save paper. It helps to see Irby’s poems set differently in other editions, as they are constructed in ways which inevitably emphasize the local circumstances of each printing. Although it’s sometimes annoying to see the lines broken in so many different, awkward ways, it shows how the limitations of the printed page animate the work. Ironically, A Set, a broadside printed landscape here to preserve the original lineation, is not his best work, and printing it sideways feels more like a gimmick than a revelation of the poem’s true shape.

***

Inspired by Charles Olson, and associated with three important Roberts (Duncan, Kelly, and Greiner), Irby’s work offers a bridge between the San Francisco scene, Deep Image and Language Poets, but don’t let that deter you. Irby’s work is not based on schools or theories, but values. From the start it was apparent that he was out to construct what Olson referred to as an “actual earth of value”: “There is nothing, then, that does not/ contain the divine.” Not only is every event interpenetrated by the divine, every historical event occurs in space based on specific local conditions: “We have approached the fact of this land/ as body as alive as our own.”

Starting from Fort Scott Kansas where he grew up, and moving west to New Mexico and Berkeley, California, and circulating back via the northwest coast, with intriguing glances towards China and Japan, Irby’s poetry rides the currents of our historical restlessness, surrounded by landforms; his lines stretch out to meet the horizon and stack themselves in geologic strata. They track secret migration routes to the west and south, currents useable by truckers and tourists alike. Irby knows that the east side of the street is a different world from the west side of the street, and that the land makes demands on us: “find the Secret History of your Self, wherein you live, which is more vast and great than any Shell or Strife you know.” If Olson nervously paces the beach, looking out over the sea, past Rome, past Greece to our prehistoric and geologic attentions, Irby searches for “that back/ calm pasture of the mind/ where all weather is.”

Irby turns the idiosyncratic particular into the universal with impressive ease, knowing that beyond our conscious attention we are drawn into continental gyres and mired in interior Sargasso Seas. Here’s Irby, in the early ‘70’s, drawing landform maps in the shape of animals, years before the digital work of Japanese cartographers presented in Katherine Harmon’s You Are Here. Decades before the alarming stories in the news magazines, he told us that the best place to fix global warming is to start with the weather inside the head: “I keep scratching my head, for the uncertainty of the weather in there.” In the mid ‘70s he wrote prophetically: “We’re living in the midst of a change like the ice age, that IS the ice age, so pervasive it’s hard to tell.”

As Irby’s lines pile into strata, seemingly geologic forces fracture the layers and puncture the boundaries between dream, myth, and reality. Fossilized particulars are pushed in by the waves and stranded by the outgoing tide like trash on the beaches of our attention, opening surprising vistas into “that endlessness of everyday/ that is precisely eternity.” Post-Whitman, he will look at our adolescent yearning and say “this is the rite of the drugstore counter heart.” Olson called Americans “the last first people.” We are rude, sensual, angry, not fully formed, and perpetually desiring self-determination and initiation into the earth’s mysteries, without realizing that our conflicting wishes can only cancel each other out.

***

Irby draws me back to the feelings that attracted me to maps and poetry in the first place. He names inchoate desires, locates them, and tells us they recur to be used as fertilizer for growth. I think of a specific image from my high school lit mag: someone hanging upside down from the highway overpass, waiting for the trucks to come, and preparing to pull up at the last second. Irby knows that this trope can appear in any American town bisected by a freeway, along with the darker but complimentary fantasy of throwing stuff off the bridge or shooting bb’s at cars: giving oneself to the flow, or violently disrupting it. Irby wants us to remember those selfish, destructive feelings, even though it may be difficult to respect them; these are the currents that reveal us, they are “limits to go see the sacred places on the table with the scrambled eggs and hash browns, between and on.”

Describing a noisy bus ride, Irby quotes from a letter he received from Gerrit Lansing to the effect that the challenge is reconciling “not chatter, [but] incessant loud yuk- yuk- fucking- yuk- yuk it’s always got to be insisted its right to enjoy […] to poetic elitism which grows & can reconcile Mallarme’s (& S. George’s) & Lautreamont’s (poetry is for everyone)… & the mirror of supernatural economics.” Irby’s take on supernatural economics is idiosyncratic, elliptical and elusive, but just when you think he’s gone off the deep end, he snaps you back to reality, parked out back by the dumpster, confronting the waste our culture generates.

Irby can use a word like opalescent with an entirely straight face. It helps if you can hear the flat Kansas accent he speaks in, but his lack of pretension shines through in various ways. Key to Irby’s work is his paradoxical push against endlessness and limit, an introspective fever based on an aesthetic of failure; things are constantly flubbed and fucked up, our language is not always up to the task, but the demand is always there:

We give, ourselves,
even in the stupidest words

or we are assholes

Similar notes of a breathtaking, urgent honesty seemingly unique to Irby keep the reader moving through an otherwise monumental book. Irby adds some real insights about domestic life and friendship, but as in Olson’s Maximus Poems, there is a pervasive maleness of tone and concern which may leave some readers feeling stranded. But it eventually becomes clear that however personal his emphases, he agrees with Walter de la Mare: “All that we are is in our love. It is an archipelago, and its islands may be visited each in turn.”

Ultimately, I find that The Intent On, ostensibly so derivative of The Maximus Poems, deals more with life as actually lived; and the more you realize Irby’s debt to other writers, the more you are convinced that here is a true original, above literary politics, a writer who has urgently charted the dream of the North American continent, tracing our psychic migrations in ways presciently germane to our current social, environmental and political crises: “The Climatology of Attention is not the Extension of Empire.” Though his mentor drunkenly declared himself President of Poetry at the 1964 Berkeley Poetry Conference, Kenneth Irby has stayed true to the quest for twice as many years as Olson was given, and staked a solid claim to be North America’s premier psychogeographer, if not Interior Secretary of North American Poetry.

Tags: 8.5 stars, Kenneth Irby, Mike McDonough, North Atlantic Books, The Intent On
Posted in reviews

Selected Poems (Vol. 1 & 2)

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

by Edward Sanders
Coffee House Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

“O beautiful for an end to war”

If anyone doubts the impact Charles Olson had, look no further than the prolific and varied career of Ed Sanders, one of the chief chroniclers of his generation, and in a fair way to be the Carl Sandburg of our era. While editing Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts out of the Peace Eye Book Store, the legendary Lower East Side gathering place for poets and radicals, Sanders fomented the mimeograph revolution, America’s answer to the Samizdat. Founding The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg in 1965, he virtually invented folk rock. Today, he creates unique musical instruments such as the electric necktie and the pulse lyre. He also writes a 9-volume populist history of America in poetry, invigorating both history and poetry with a sense of performance, music and myth.

Here’s an introduction to the Fugs for their foreign tour in 1968, complete with what one imagines to be hilarious Danish subtitles attempting to translate Ed’s impromptu comic book psychosexual romp introducing his concept of goofitude:

It is also worthing checking out The Fugs official site, where Ed’s goofy outrageousness is toned down into a politically engaged, historic camaraderie. Sanders’s work is so congenial by now that it takes historical perspective to remember how subversive and necessary his elm fuck poem was:

fuck till the come drift
down through the bark furrows
        fuck thru the warm afternoon
        sperm steams in the sun

such care and kindness
—as when a rabbit nose snoozles a carrot—
                     but give it thrill jabs,
                     give it to her

a tree-twat is as good as
a buttock
& the elm branch is the dryad’s breast

So joyously in your face. What might have once seemed gratuitous and shocking now seems almost environmentally sincere, if a bit goofy.

Knowing what I do about Sanders’s place in history, I wanted to get a little more excited about the 2 volume career-spanning retrospective put out so professionally by Coffee House Press. Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century is his collected poems from 1961-1985, and Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War covers a similar span of years from 1986-2009. In addition to including some of his song lyrics for The Fugs, Sanders taps into the tradition of the illuminated manuscript, freely incorporating his own glyphs and illustrations. Poems such as “Sun Arms” reproduce the original Courier typeface, and the glyphs surround the poem like a pair of arms. Glyphs like “The Celestial Golf Game” arrange hieroglyphs that indeed look like a golf course mapped from space, or chart “Paths Through the Data-Clusters in the Search for Brilliant Verse.” The quest here is to unify an entire body of work in various media by squeezing it all into print.

Problems arise with the inevitable leveling of print, and the use of a standard typeface and page size. Even though Ed’s handwritten glyphs and illustrations are beautifully reproduced, the print and the drawings don’t mingle as promiscuously as you’d expect, sometimes feeling more like illustration than a Blakean marriage of poem and art. A hip primer is still a primer. A picture of the pulse lyre seems only to point out the lack of actual sound. Life defies our attempts to trap it within the covers of a book. Sanders’s work should be distributed on broadsides and in stapled mimeographed editions; it should be written on the inside of toilet paper rolls and cigarette packs and smuggled out of jail in your shoes, as was his first major effort, “Poem from Jail,” after his arrest for trying to swim aboard a Polaris nuclear submarine.

Sanders keeps you reading with fond recollections of Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats. Most of this reminiscence doesn’t come across as self-indulgent, partly because the incipient nostalgia is tamed by Ed’s sense of gratitude at the community they created, and his sense that the work of the beats is still ongoing, which shows up clearly in “A Visit to Jack’s Memorial Park,” a poem also interrupted by a somewhat gratuitous photo of the skateboarding kids of today:

“Life spills out”, as Olson says
and so it does as the boys skrunk happily
among your tall shiny stones, o Jack Kerouac

where I catch in a blaze your sense of
being part of eternity
staring at your writings carved in the shiny

I am feeling the awe of the Loner commingling
so Newly
amidst all the conservatism

O Jack phantom of the Lonely Dream
Daimon of the skrunks!

The experience of writing The Family, a book about the Charles Manson cult killings that once ranked a close second to In Cold Blood in the previously nonexistent “True Crime” genre, led to Sanders’s practice of investigative poetry, perhaps the true fruit of Olson’s anguished efforts to be both a poet and a historian. For both Olson and Sanders, polis is eyes, and every citizen must investigate for themselves: “know the new facts early! And do not back away one micro unit because some CIA weirdomorph whose control agents never ended WWII invades your life with a mouthful of curdled exudate.”

Sanders is more interested in the cosmic story than the ideology: we easily forgive the occasional gratuitous asides, because his storytelling ability is in no way limited to personal anecdotes or political sloganeering. Through scholarly backtracking he traces his rebellious spirits to Sappho and the Egyptian slaves forced to build the tombs of the Pharaohs. He mingles ancient tales with stories adapted from Anton Chekov. He takes us easily from ancient Egypt to the depths of outer space.

But unlike his mentor, you don’t get a sense of mythic massiveness as much as a sense of event, of reportage. The mythic element is much lighter, and more digestible. Sanders’s work dreams big, but does not totter under its own weight. One senses immediately that Sanders is a happier man. The older I get, the more I feel that should count for something.

Sanders is a sincere idealist, reminding us as Emerson had it in his essay “Politics” that:

In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case; that they are all imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.

Whatever your politics, this is a much needed message of hope. One need to look no further than “Further Verses for ‘America the Beautiful.’”

O beautiful for an end to war
An end to class and strife
Bring Freedom Rides where no one hides
The truth in every life!
America! America
Come sing your song of grace
For every hue beneath the blue
And every creed and race!

Tags: 6.5 stars, Coffee House Press, Edward Sanders, Mike McDonough
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Slaves To Do These Things

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

by Amy King
BlazeVOX [books] 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

The Earth Mother Talks Back

king slaves cover Louis Zukofsky spoke of the unwritten histories of “a,” “an” and “the,” but today’s installment of “Watch Your Language” concerns that innocent little preposition “of.” My dictionary lists ten definitions of “of,” but I’m confining myself to those hyper-conscious phrases that turn a straightforward descriptive phrase into a metaphor of a metaphor, and threaten an infinite regress.

In a workshop, Paul Violi had us break a page into five columns and write an adjective in column two, a concrete noun in column three and an abstract noun in the last column. Once these words were chosen, we plugged “the” in column one and “of” in column four, thus creating an overwrought phrase such as “the slimy toothbrush of faith” (“The fickle finger of fate,” anyone? anyone? Bueller?). As these phrases piled, up along with the groans, I came up with “the copper bathtub of justice,” which was maybe one of the bearable ones, but I figured out later that the horror wasn’t the overwrought vocabulary as much as what that innocent preposition was being forced to yoke together against its will.

Amy King’s Slaves to Do These Things takes these “of” phrases a step further and turns them into a symbol of a symbol such as “the brick of my revolving heart’s axis,” which resolves in terms of Violi’s exercise to “the brick axis of my revolving heart.” Don’t get me started on the chummy use of the possessive contraction for very abstract terms. These displacements effectively undermine both the concreteness of the brick, and the symbol of “heart’s axis.” They create a glimmering, repelling surface by flipping the normal syntactical spin, and not letting the reader closely contemplate any one of them. It becomes a force field separating you from what is described.

Her long stanzas often make us despair of a resting place, and deny us the childish pleasure of counting. Instead of a freight train passing by (coal, coal, lumber, lumber, fuel, boxcars, snake eyes, “the pure products of America, anyone?”), you get a procession of painted stage sets that come from who knows where to end up buried in our attics. King wants us to see the horror of that multiplication, its artificiality, and lack of purity. For the sake of this endless fluidity, it seems King gives up the possibility of piercing the reader in the heart.

Early in his career, at his most doctrinaire, Borges wrote an essay decrying the infinite regress of describing a metaphor in terms of a metaphor. He wrote “The defenders of this verbal doubling may argue that the act of perceiving something—the much frequented moon, shall we say—is no less complicated than its metaphors, because memory and suggestion intervene; I would retort with Occam’s restrictive principle: We should not multiply entities uselessly.” For Borges, the tragedy of these multiplied entities is that they make the cosmos a house of mirrors; like the scholastic complications of enumerating the hundreds of angels needed to move the celestial spheres, they serve only to show us what insignificant creatures we are! In contrast, once you’ve read Robert Hayden on the Middle Passage, you take the word “slavery” in its most physical, literal sense. The word becomes a rock, a prison, a wound. Though we break, we bear the weight of the world like Atlas.

For King, Borges’s argument against is an argument for. She constantly uses this self-conscious, regressive syntactic displacement to create what she describes in one poem as a “false encounter.” The defense for the metaphor of a metaphor is that it describes the insularity of the thought process, and shows us the ways that we are forcefully separated from our world. Freed from describing any historical condition of involuntary servitude, and quickly pushed off stage by her ever shifting sentences, fraught phrases such as “gusts of slaves” float between the abstract and the concrete like a layer of smog. Her poems create a world that never quite has a floor.

Another “of” phrase I circled in an advanced state of despair was “the taste of memory’s slag” (which might resolve in terms of Violi’s exercise to “the tasty slag (or slaggy taste) of memory”). As I tried to analyze my discomfort with King’s language, I wanted to change this line to something like, “I taste coal, slag, memory,” which is certainly more egocentric and omnivorous (“poet, be like god”). But when I asked why this construction should be “better” than King’s, I realized, as Graham Robb points out in his biography of Rimbaud, that all these years I had taken to heart the stanza quoted by Olson in “The Kingfishers:”

If I have any taste at all,
It is only for earth and stones.
Dinn Dinn Dinn! Let’s eat the air
The rock, the coals, the iron

without considering the answering stanza:

Enough of these landscapes.
What’s drunkenness, friends?

I’d just as soon, in fact I’d rather
Lie rotting in the pond
Beneath the horrible cream
By the floating woods.

Amy King lives compassionately in that soberly answering stanza, trying hard to look her (and our) spiritual alcoholism in the face. Like Walter Benjamin, she wants the reader to confront “the forever project of waking up.” Her finely mocking metonymies “The philosopher, a pompadour, / speaks without moving his lips” question the metaphysical evasions of philosophy and poetry. Sometimes, her speaker sounds like an earth mother figure mocking the ecstasies of men:

Shadowed by the nagging
hope is that we women
will prepare the canal
for you to slip back through & into.
Such is the plight of the dodo
staring down the barrel,
demanding life to speak.

Sometimes the earth mother is more forgiving, and the body and the soul get along, and our artificial memoirs become a natural process like digestion:

The body’s prospects turn proteins
into peptides and bacterium
to carbon. We cleanse the other like
the moon is replete in her remembrance pool:
our memoirs in broken lines
of the people she is
and the people she sweetens

For King, though, we suffer from growing up more than being male or female. The philosophers she mocks are not exclusively male, and both genders suffer from being in their bodies. In these poems, the vulnerability of a girl is not very different from the vulnerability of a boy when both are “pressured by an adult perspective.” The book cover then becomes an apt illustration of inaptness: The soul builds donkeys and birds of wood, the spiritual generality longs for the physical particular as if language were yearning for its speakers and trying to create them. And though we know our encounters are false, that our donkeys are wooden, this is where King’s over-multiplications shine as a deliberate strategy, by embracing the artificial, the childishness of the play, until our wooden birds actually fly:

when I die,
play the boy on the soul
of that death and use
my memory’s mud
to make gods of us from the dust.

Robert Duncan wrote “Soul is the body’s dream of its continuity in eternity—a wraith of mind. Poetry is the very life of the soul: the body’s discovery that it can dream. And perish into its own imagination.” Amy King approaches the same territory from another direction. Instead of resting in either the urbane or acerbic irony which she displays throughout the book, instead of the magic alchemy of art, of ecstasy turning stone into living flesh, King ultimately tells us that:

… I am still feeling
the walks between steps
drowning in part,
footed forever with this
forever project of waking up.

By embracing our inadequacies, our postmodern lack of certainty, Slaves to Do These Things is a smart, compassionate take on contemporary anxiety and longing— which is what you get when you talk about “the soul that suffered from being its body,” and take the idea as seriously as Amy King does here. And to think that all this drama hinges on the tiny word “of.”

Tags: 7 stars, Amy King, BlazeVOX Books, Mike McDonough
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The MS of My Kin

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

by Janet Holmes
Shearsman Books 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Many Mornings

holmes cover

It turns out Emily Dickinson is the best correspondent reporting today from Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems she became an expert on asymmetrical warfare when she started sewing those little poetic IEDs and storing them in her trunk. Since she had only her life to give, she found that it was more effective to stockpile homemade bombs made out of paper, ink and thread. Many unsuspecting souls have been wounded by them since.

By focusing on material dated from 1861-1862, Janet Holmes’s skilful erasures place our most accomplished literary terrorist right at the onset of the Civil War (America’s greatest oxymoron) while also holding up a mirror to Cheney & Bush’s “War on Terror.” Holmes’s re-settings are often startlingly timeless. As Susan Schultz notes, Dickinson’s poetry is so compressed and gnomic, that it comes to us “nearly pre-erased.” Hewing to this magic, Janet Holmes’s poems rarely feel tortured. I like the open closure Holmes achieves, preserving a sense of Dickinson’s taut rhythm, while the deliberately composed blank spaces help the reader visualize the force field surrounding each of Dickinson’s words. The book is not a flashy gimmick or Emily “through a glass, darkly.” Taking advantage of powerful self-correcting digital optics, Holmes projects a Dickinsonian matrix in wide-screen plasma HDTV without fracturing the original or overly distorting its shape.

The loudest authorial intrusion (other than the book’s awkward title) is in the notes, a pointed litany of specific references and occasional speakers for the poems that I did not necessarily hear. Though Holmes is keenly aware that hers is a willful project, this final litany is the only conspicuous betrayal of Dickinson’s sly, timeless power. The speaker in these erasures is such a consistent presence that it seems more productive to imagine that Dickinson speaks all of them. Dickinson’s poetry puts the architects of war on trial without needing to name names. She is quite able to speak as a terrorist, or Donald Rumsfeld, or a mother who has lost her son to war, because she knows war’s justifications and its cost to the soul. Her extreme verbal compression burns the lie from every rhetorical sentence, leaving only bones. Tom Raworth’s blurb is absolutely right: “war is war and its words are already written.”

The two poets are eager co-conspirators. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic and strategic capitalization slyly assists Holmes’s contemporary torquing. With the help of Holmes’s selective projections, we can see how Dickinson drafts her readers, recruiting sleeper cells of individual souls, “loaded guns” against the apparently omnipotent status quo. Nothing can replace or improve on Dickinson’s work, but happily that isn’t the point. Holmes’s erasures give us a smart take on the experience of reading Dickinson today— an artful eclipse that lets us see the corona of the sun, and a mirror inevitably reflecting that we are the readers of whom she was so provocatively and passionately aware.

Tags: 8 stars, Janet Holmes, Mike McDonough, Shearsman Books
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Getting Lost in a City Like This

Friday, July 10th, 2009

by Jack Anderson
Hanging Loose Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Loved and Lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: 3.5 stars, Hanging Loose Press, Jack Anderson, Mike McDonough
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The Turning and It is Daylight

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

by Maxine Chernoff & Arda Collins, respectively
Apogee Press 2009 / Yale University Press 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

A God Playing the Fool

chernoff cover collins daylight cover I know it’s cheap to use Louise Glück’s expected introductory praise to bash Arda Collins’s first collection It Is Daylight, but this is all part of the System, and I find it symptomatic; Glück is the judge of the Yale Younger Poets Series, after all. I will try to balance my initial misgivings by making this review a 2-fer with Maxine Chernoff’s The Turning, as both poets mine similar territory using different methods.

It seems commonplace that the contemporary poetic speaker is by definition marginal or isolated. Glück’s sharp reference to Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood skits on Saturday Night Live indicates what we are getting into:

Mr. Rogers’ soothing chatter mutated on late night TV into Mr. Robinson’s paranoid ramblings: Mr. Robinson was unwelcome, but Mr. Robinson, for the benefit of all us former children too hooked or wired to go to sleep, Mr. Robinson was digging his heels in and, crouched under the window, ready to talk, even if talking meant talking to a void.

Glück points out that both Collins and Murphy are inventing personae in “a master performance conducted in a deliberately isolated space, as though isolation were a form of control that promoted fluency.” Okay, the marginalized Invisible Man or Woman often speaks to us this way. Glück makes a deeper point when she compares the Skinner box of television to the Skinner box of the self, citing Collins’s sense of “metaphysical claustrophobia: the bleak fate of being always one person.”

I remember being visited by this feeling most intensely on insomniac prepubescent nights when I was tortured by all my mistakes and wondered “why am I me?” with no way to think myself out of it. Here’s Collins gamely failing to think her way out of it, nearly throughout the whole book. In order for Collins to stay in this sleepless, solipsistic mode, it requires that she maintain the same powerless paralysis that tortured me at 12. It requires that she not turn on the light, not read her favorite book, not talk to anyone (except, as Glück points out, the figure of god), not be in love or even pet her cat or dog. There are hints of an original trauma, as Collins frames the book with images of a mother screaming that her children have been kidnapped, but she doesn’t get caught up in actual narrative events. More than enough material comes through on the TV every day to create sufficient trauma out of thin air:

I was getting hungry but I felt afraid
of seeing the refrigerator light go on.
Then I would have to turn on other lights,
and then what would I do?

The Middle School answer is to get a life. One of Maxine Chernoff’s titles seems to work better for Collins’s book: “One Hundred Years of Solipsism,” but Glück is right on when she points out that what Collins really accomplishes is stopping time: “Because the self doesn’t change, because it is exposed to nothing that would change it, time seems not to pass.” The adult life and passion that the speaker is avoiding by this willful magic is partly revealed through the dark mist, but the effect is dependent on the reader’s ability to tolerate passages like:

I don’t think the sun will come up
unless it’s possible
for the day to clear a path.
I think the best thing would be
for someone to beat me,
maybe with a stick,
until I say, “Day is night! Day is night!”

If I were someone else (a typical evasion in It Is Daylight), I would call this caustic irony as opposed to plain old masochism. Franz Wright, for example, performs this kind of trick all the time, but the depths he finds there are truly frightening, mostly because of his mastery of the lonely image, the image captured by a voyeur at the end of his rope (I refer you to DJ Dolack’s recent Dickman review in Coldfront for examples of Wright’s mastery of this kind of imagery). Collins is at her best in passages like this, imagining someone

who has never seen a phone, and says blah blah blah
to the dial tone. The silence that once existed
in the dark cold universe: translated, the empty sound
is a place—the inside of a phone. Infinity,
I say, there it is.
This is where we all go to
when we touch each other;
this is what supernatural is.

This lacks Wright’s efficiency. The line breaks function largely to drag us back into dreamland, avoiding any sort of overly rhetorical epiphany that might wake the speaker up before she is ready. Glück aptly describes Collins as “hopeless on principle,” and cites her skill with camera work with keeping the reader awake. The variety of jump cuts needed to sustain these metaphysical Skinner boxes can indeed become fascinating. Here is an example of the approach:

I think I am going to stop
eating bits of paper
that don’t say anything on them—
that don’t even say anything on them
I know I should do something
as they say, for “the snows of embarrassment”
like a day in March when the blood is closer,
day singing for the loss of its whip.
Closer, I say, closer.
Or maybe I’ll arrange to have you run over by horses
unexpectedly.

Any individual passage like this is inventive, vivid, caustic, funny, claustrophobic and readable. The rhetorical fillip of repeating the line in italics could easily be a trapdoor to another plane, or at least to effective action in life. However, the note of Plathian, transformative power is undercut throughout the book by appealingly mundane double takes:

a dead person with a tan is worrisome:
had she
gone to hell?
That’s impossible, I thought. Genocide?
Farina?
Doesn’t she automatically get her ticket punched?
And that’s assuming hell is anywhere.
This is so stupid, I think,
This isn’t—
—what?
This isn’t what?

In a 1962 BBC interview, Sylvia Plath famously stated that she couldn’t bear to put toothbrushes in her poems. Collins is under no such restriction, suggesting the exciting possibility that she can say anything. Ultimately, though, Plath plus silliness equals what? The speaker never quite gets anywhere, we don’t care about the dead woman with the tan, and the reader is in danger of becoming bored. The juxtaposition of genocide and farina is not a stirring example of the liberating contradictions championed by Whitman and Emerson. It’s pointless, but that’s part of Collins’s point.

“Parts of An Argument,” one of my favorite pieces in the book, begins to herald the subtle change in the speaker that Glück helpfully alerts us to at the beginning. It starts: “I didn’t know I had god until god was gradually not there over time. I don’t feel abandoned. It is part of taking things as they come.” The speaker explains her (non) sense of god, as if he “gave me a microwave oven, but I never took it out of the box because I was grateful and never touched it.” OK, the speaker is just not going to touch this oven: “It sounds simple and fun but it is still not a big deal to use pots on the stove.” She wonders if this gift means “god thinks that I should bear many children.” The ensuing complications, elaborations, and evasions are ironic and funny. The unlined prose poem finally releases a pseudo-reasonable facsimile of a believable voice, making the speaker’s evasions seem more natural, and highlighting Collins’s warped humor. It Is Daylight is not a clinical exploration of shame, history, or original sin, but something more consistently ironic and personal about our ridiculous metaphysical position: “Since there is no god, you have to be both you and god.” So there you are, assembling the miserable “components of your dinner” from the freezer while god and his guys are off somewhere having “pear clafoutis behind a velvet curtain and driv[ing] their skulls into the center of a diamond.”

In her most recent work, The Turning, Maxine Chernoff is also concerned with the moment when “the god image / enters the man image,” but she explicitly invokes Emerson in order to Americanize the idea. Where Collins tends to fold any sense of history, politics, or literature into the solipsistic chaos of seemingly random, pointless emotions, Chernoff uses words as rocks, bricks—solid objects with the power to build or destroy. Where Collins uses rambling line breaks to evade responsibility, Chernoff cuts her lines with a razor, emphasizing the potential and actual moral “turning” of each phrase. Here are four non-consecutive stanzas from “Sensorium”:

Obsessed by prepubescent girls
the luminosity of angels
the Bible bound in shiny fish skin
………………………………….
Obsessed by pleasing objects
a sexual trauma
the Virgin on the altar
………………………………….
Obsessed by the danger of drowning
the perfection of philosophical dogma
the meaning of cool
…………………………………
Obsessed by all variety of bird
universal male suffrage
the contingent world.

Several poems ring changes like these on repeated parallel phrases. Throughout The Turning, Chernoff allows a kaleidoscopic array of historical and literary references to have a disorderly but pointed conversation, both professorial and personal. Her use of contemporary references and current events lends urgency. In a poem written for the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, she asks:

how to make a poem
out of so many terrible facts
how to re-embed sympathy and truth.

This won’t happen if we retreat into political buzzwords or high-toned aesthetic theories. Chernoff cites Emerson acknowledging that reading can easily become a substitute for living. She warns that “read as parable/ history vanishes,” and, later in the poem, “silence will out.” For the last decade of his life, Emerson slowly lost his memory, and Chernoff associates this fact with a kind of American cultural dementia. Though Emerson forgot his own words, he knew that what he said remains said: “Nothing will remain / without being spoken.” Yet, by a kind of “double logic of narrative,” Chernoff also says of Virginia Woolf, “for all she remembered more was forgotten // until the narration // closed its eyes.” In Chernoff’s universe, as well as Emerson’s, paradoxes exist as energy sources to tap into rather than walls to bang your head against.

Both Chernoff and Collins explore the slippery terrain between dementia and remembering, and they navigate the counterclaims of history and art, using puppets, pie, god, and religious imagery as props. Chernoff’s sense of history and art has an adult solidity to it, even as she removes it from its godlike chronological and narrative throne. In a standout piece, “Scenes From Ordinary Life,” Chernoff imagines a oddly touching puppet show starring two intellectual giants of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. By contrast, Collins’s efforts to stop time are more those of a child playing alone in her sandbox. Since Chernoff is not limited to depicting a consistent persona, she doesn’t gesture as wildly as Collins, but relentlessly re-imagines and deconstructs the master narratives of history and literature without neglecting the private transformations of art. She searches for the paradoxical hope that the blank page can serve as the stage for an adequate and effective response to “the contingent world.”

Though I greatly prefer the adult solidity of Chernoff’s historical and literary references, I’m willing to admit that Collins takes more risks and mines deeper territory. But talk is cheap. Let’s set up a poetic smackdown to decide! I’ll make up a Maxine Chernoff poem by taking food-related snippets from unrelated poems, and Arda Collins will get a chance to respond:

She spoke of taking pains to
be a good host. But what do cyborgs eat?
she asked the panel on Non-food Cuisine.

the surrogate ate the frozen peas
frozen. Heat makes us human

the history of dementia
recorded by Solon
(5000 BC)
(they die of starvation)

Emerson asking
“Mr. _______,
what is pie for?”

She was able to pry it out:
it was a frozen slug.

She held a big box of pastries in her hands.
“Put this on,” she said.

She brought preference to history.

From one little room an everywhere

And now for Arda Collins. To make it a fair fight, I won’t even bring in the untouched microwave. Since I’m getting ready to hightail it out of Dodge, I’ll call it a draw and leave the scoring up to you:

The components of your dinner are waiting for you downstairs.

There is something in the freezer
marked “vanilla.” I tasted it.
It was like ice cream, or like whipped cream.
But I became suddenly afraid
that it wasn’t food, but poison
for the garden.

I’m coming up the street
in the middle of the day,
coming somewhere
with a can of food
and a kitchen in my heart
thinking
the heart
can love anything,
cannot love anything.

You have a heat source in your chest,
and an electric space heater for office use only.

You ask god if god
is hungry, and god is. You ask god
what you should do
for dinner and god reminds you
that you have turkey burgers
in the freezer, and some broccoli. You’ll
go take the burgers out
and separate them with a knife.
They’ll be slippery and frozen, and
you’ll think of driving on
an icy road; and then
you’ll put them in foil under
the broiler and start the water
for the broccoli, and take out
a plate for yourself, and get
the salt and pepper, and by
that time god will have left.

*

Tags: 7 stars, Apogee Press, Arda Collins, Maxine Chernoff, Mike McDonough, Yale University Press
Posted in reviews

The Tangled Line

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

by Tod Marshall
Canarium Books 2009
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

What More Can I Say

marshall cover

As James Wright struggled towards the loosening of the tight iambics which had brought him to notice in the first place, he seems to have struggled with the difference between emotional honesty and the traditional demands of form. I go back to his classic poem depicting emotional bankruptcy, “Saint Judas,” which culminates in a memorable oxymoronic tableau of Judas recalling Mary in the Pieta, holding a beaten man in his arms: “Flayed, without hope,/ I held the man for nothing in my arms.” The tone is masterful, and perhaps succeeds all too neatly at making failure seem all too easy to redeem. In “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave,” Wright would berate his own iambic mastery: “I croon my tears at 50 cents a line.” How do we find a craft worthy of the depiction of failure? Todd Marshall solves the problem of succeeding too easily by being willing to fail. I’m giving the book a 6.5 not because of lack of craft or ambition, but because his 10 so tightly embraces his 3.

Take the idea of the first poem, “Describe KFC to Icarus.” The pop irony of the title and the cheesy flatness of “Admit the labyrinth, accept / chicken bones / piling up in the kitchen” is undermined by the traditional uplift of the ending: “the climbing with a song towards sun.” No tone is allowed to
predominate. The next poem is a fevered lament “Describe Wildflowers to Ethics” which earned a marginal comment of “GAG!” for its displaced desperation, including the description of his son’s toy “erection,” with the bracelet with “What Would Jesus Do” printed on it, culminating in a remarkably futile listing of botanical names:

…Try again,
write scribbles of smoke against the sky—
fillyum, trilliom birdfoot, violet blueflag,
Try paintbrush, buttercup, try please. Try
fire and tears. Try greeny green green.

Taken separately the initial poems in The Tangled Line present a series of poetic ideas that often function as dead ends, labyrinthine blind alleys, a car crash of tones, themes and forms. The fascination of the first three sections is one of finding the fly in the soup or the feather in the KFC bucket. There are three abortive sequences with pointed titles: “Describe (X) to (Y);” “Admit (X) to (Y);”, and several poems titled “Meanwhile.” In the same abortive vein, any poem titled “The Reader is Urged to Not Read This Poem” is a cheap joke or a deliberate failure until proven otherwise.

We learn that the speaker is describing the fraught territory of his divorce and losing custody of his son in terms of the myth of Icarus, from Daedalus’s point of view, the guilty father lamenting the loss of his son. The cheese factor of a modern-day myth is played up to different degrees in the first two sections. Using myth and history in a deliberately shallow way is a risky business, especially in a poem titled “Describe Turner to MLK.” The apposite Turner is JMW, and the poem describes the famous picture of the slave ship throwing the bodies overboard. Without the command of Robert Hayden, the poem threatens to become a futile undergraduate joke, and given inevitable associations with Nat Turner, there is nothing the speaker can say to MLK that can render the poem a traditional rhetorical success. Marshal braves these waters in an interesting way.

The Tangled Line makes me think of those psychological tests where you have to decide whether the face depicted is expressing laughter, anger or pain. Maybe you’ve had that moment where either you couldn’t tell which was which, or you knew the answer was supposed to be laughter, but looking at a face so unnaturally frozen caused a nearly overwhelming, irresistable feeling of despair, of hopeless emotional bankruptcy. Or you might realize, as Robyn Schiff’s blurb points out, that “here…turning towards anything for comfort, respite, or just because its irresistible is doomed.”

Emotions are often ironic guises, with slight cover provided by deliberately cheesy titles, or presented as too much or too little, futile. The speaker is unmoored in different contexts, and no poem is permitted to rise quite to the redemptive tone of Wright’s “St Judas.” With an emotion fraught beyond self-deprecation, or the boozy companionship of Richard Hugo, Marshall describes his separation from his son. In “What the Age Demanded,” recalling Pound’s scathing “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley,” Marshall writes:

…the boy was a necessary loss
what happens when you fly,
expendable. O Daedalus,
don’t try to hide in a sigh.

Your legacy’s ensured: maze maker,
inventor’s patron, you cad,
No one will mistake you for father,
no one will call you dad.

The reader might not be sure at first that whether Marshall is trying to find that redemptive note and failing, or has chosen to stay safely hidden behind ironic poems quite successful without needing the emotional frame of the speaker’s divorce, such as “Describe Book Blurbs to Nationalism,” Meanwhile, the range of emotional responses piles up impressively. As Robin Schiff’s blurb reads, “Full articulation flies maddeningly towards lamentation as these poems steer between narrative and lyric expression.” I’d change “steer” to “veer,” and define lamentation as the shirt-rending tone found in the biblical Book of Lamentations. The variety of tones from flat to feverish is matched by an impressive array of modern American poetic tropes, such as the all time winner of the “Drunk Dad Takes Son Fishing” category, “Admit Possession to Rent,” with a gruesomely telegraphed payoff which rated the marginal comment “OMFG!” There is an excellent entry in the “Boy Bonds With Fucked up Older Male Relative/ Friend” genre, “No Nightingales in Kansas,” which is balanced by an inspired entry in the ironic “Still-Life With Livestock” genre, as well as an entry in the “Life Lessons of Fishing” category which I’ll quote in its entirety to show you that Marshall’s treatment of these forms is not usually parodic:

HATCH

Mayflies—
tiny white smudges
above blue sky

reflected in the creek
until wings get wet
and useless

except
to flutter recklessly
and attract

the attention of teeth.

Marshall’s command in poems like these and several others assure us that a game is in progress, that he is deliberately taking the reader much farther down formal and tonal dead ends than less confident poets care to go. “Loam” replaces Saint Paul’s well-known homily on love: “Love is patient, love is kind,” with a deliberately clunky, “Love is peasant. Love is find. It lends me, it is unlike toast, it is prow.” The poem searches for a tone it’s not going to find. When the next poem starts with, “You are not lost. I know where you eat and sleep,” we feel we are finally coming close to a solid core where emotional complexities exist as paradoxical, yet emotionally complete wholes. The emotion is adequate to the subject matter and form.

The 10-part final poem, “The Book of Failed Descriptions,” puts all the cards on the table, and attempts to unify all the deliberately overwrought stances and variety of forms, themes, and sequences. The stakes are high, and the father/son relationship as well as the themes of Icarus falling from the sky and the father’s culpability are resolved in a touching , unforced way (“he looks at me with worry, and I know that the game is on break, that this is real”) which I want to quote in its entirety, but I hate to deprive you of the pleasure of finally getting there yourself. Quoted by itself, it might look a little flat: it takes reading the whole book to get the full effect. In The ABC of Reading Pound wrote, “Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.” The fascination in The Tangled Line is the unlikely, and surprisingly honest way that the emotional check is ultimately made good.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Canarium Books, Mike McDonough, Tod Marshall
Posted in reviews

The Endarkenment

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

by Jeffrey McDaniel
University of Pittsburgh Press 2008
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Quantum Cubist Quarterback

mcdaniel cover Anyone remember the video game Q*Bert? Sort of a 3-D Pac Man with better characterization. You controlled a tube-nosed character springing up and down a pyramidal staircase of squares, changing each square to a different color while avoiding the coiled demons and making sure not to jump off the stairs. Sometimes, if you were trapped in the bottom corner, you could jump on a magic disc and get transported to the top of the stair pyramid again, and the demons chasing you would spring into the void, stretching uselessly for a recoil that never came. Sometimes there was no magic disc, and you jumped off the staircase into the void, spouting cartoon curses like #$@!. Jeffrey McDaniel’s poems in The Endarkenment are like playing a double game of Q*Bert, as if you controlled tube-nose with your right hand and its mirrored opposite with your left.

In the first poem, McDaniel smartly sets up a flawed god character who has not only made some funny, touching and very human mistakes in creating the speaker he addresses, but addict himself, has imprinted his suicidal desires on “that pulsating/ estuary,” thoughts shimmering like “glow-in-the-dark jellyfish” in your mind: “It still feels like I am the razor, and you // are the wrist, like I’m the window and you’re the person about to jump out.” Great stanza break. Right-hand Q*Bert looks on complicit while left-hand Q*Bert springs hopelessly into the void: #$@! QED.

This flawed god helps us chart the book’s lietmotif of self watching self. In “Little Sadness,” he calls the pain inside him like a dog: “Come here my little sadness, I whisper/ down my esophagus. Oh, here // he comes, the three legged bugger,/ with mother’s turpentine eyes and fur…”. This dog is so pitiful, he can’t even jump into the speaker’s lap, “but tries anyway, bashing / his bony head against my kneecap, / whimpering. Good, little sadness, good.” Cornered by comical demons, left-hand Q*Bert jumps for the magic disc as right-hand Q*Bert completes the board. Both start over again.

McDaniel’s metaphors are kaleidoscopic but not necessarily showy; he sets them up so that they fail of their own accord, and in emotionally smart ways. I particularly like how “Lament for A Shriveling Flesh Plant” works:

I sit here pressed against the bed, pressed
against my exterior, wishing I had more to give,

so in the dark, when you tilt me to your lips,
a wave could rinse through your insides,

but alas, I’m just a cheap, unwashed glass
with three ounces of tap water

in my grasp, and you are the whore
who will one day hurl me against the wall.

This extended quote does not show how the metaphor’s coming together mirrors its self-destruction shown here, throwing the film into reverse.

McDaniel exploits metaphors that work just as well as ones that don’t. Initially, I liked the cover ballpoint drawing of a tough, wiry, one-eyed cat more than the title poem “The Endarkenment” and the deliberately stretched definition the word is given in the book’s epigraph. Later, I came to see this as a canny strategy carving out a space just literary enough for second thoughts to occur, but not so literary that they are sure to succeed.

The title poem can be diagrammed like a failed football play: McDaniel looks right (“Sometimes I hate this language with its false words like sunset.”), looks left (“Moonlight is another lie”), the pocket collapses (“I know the glass is half full, but it’s a shot glass and there are four of us and were all very thirsty”), he scrambles backwards avoiding the inexorable rush (“I turn on Fox News and imagine the reporters are giant penises, and coworkers are stroking their legs”), then, cornered (“what would it be like to mate with a sheep?”), he throws a Hail Mary pass into the stands (“the I’m-a-caveman routine. Pound / my chest, howl, look at me mom, I’m banging a sheep./ To someone far away it might sound like I’m on tv.).

Compared with the usual ham-handed strategies declaring collections of poetry anti-establishment or anti-literary, McDaniel’s stance seems smarter and more to the point, the least condescending way to approach the “even-if-you-hate-poetry-read-this-book crowd.” McDaniel aims straight at pretentiousness without overly telegraphing his moves, or hiding behind campy identity politics and a blustery us and them attitude. There is maturity here, a canny, compassionate assessment of his drug addicted years, as well as the second chance he found in sobriety, wife, and family. Continuing his smart self-observation, he knows that his left-hand self is not defeated, only underground, the constant itch that keeps him clinging to stability. I particularly like the confused wonder with which he approaches his wife and their new parenthood. In “Self-Portrait as a Trampoline…” he can

…hear the screams of the children
bouncing on her, the tension and release
of her taut fabric. The little squeaks
of her coiled springs almost sound like hello.
Hello, Martha, I whisper into the night.

If this almost sounds too cute, the last poem “Self Portrait as a Stick of Butter…” sets up a kind of Twilight Zone episode where a stick of butter is trapped in a closed refrigerator (“nothing in here / except a jar with a single olive… all round and perfect in its glass.”). It wishes it could be spread on a warm piece of toast, but fears being left out overnight, melted in a useless puddle. OK, desperate silliness aside, how does the butter know the olive is there? The poem (the poet? the daughter?) as a stick of butter trying to resolidify itself like an oleaginous Humpty, its complacent, fearful self image melted by exposure to a new existential space? By concentrating, it becomes

…solid again.
Uncut. A sturdy stick of butter,
back in the dish’s cradle.
The olive glimmering
like that hint of moon
visible on a moonless night.

The literally inchoate metaphor is well placed. Because it so desperately wants to cohere but doesn’t, it can speak self-effacingly to the fragility of a fetus becoming a human being, the fluid, womb-like void somehow concentrating itself into solidity, and the confusion and hope of new parents in a way that you didn’t think was possible. The prime virtue of Jeffrey McDaniel’s The Endarkenment is that the usual literary assumption of attained wisdom is gently mocked, even as the necessary effort towards clarity is made.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Jeffrey McDaniel, Mike McDonough, University of Pittsburgh Press
Posted in reviews

Winter Journey

Monday, May 5th, 2008

by Tony Towle
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

For Whom the Bell Towles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: 9 stars, Hanging Loose Press, Mike McDonough, Tony Towle
Posted in reviews

Parcel

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

by Sarah Anne Cox
O Books 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Tableture

cox cover Sarah Anne Cox’s Parcel reads like a Cliff Notes version of the aesthetics of the fragment. While the book can stand on its own, I think the reader can get more out of it by referring to its predecessors. Long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and Guy Davenport had recently published the first translations of Sappho preserving the blank spaces and lacunae of ancient sources rather than patching them with complete sentences, Armand Schwerner started writing The Tablets, a series of poems in which a fictional scholar-translator offers translations of ancient cuneiform tablets.

Much of the interest of The Tablets lies in the tension between the ostensibly objective translation of the scholar translator and the anguished identity crisis his texts and glosses reveal. Given the gaps, untranslatable sections and many alternate readings the tablets present (made visible by a set of ostensibly scholarly symbols), we see that his translation inevitably creates a new text for his own personal reasons. In Parcel, though, it is taken for granted that we are looking at the present with the eye of an archaeologist. In one poem, Phaedra writes a suicide note, but the narrator/ archaeologist (my own term) finds only parts of it, making it read like a weird multiple choice test. Elsewhere, women are forced to fill out forms to find their beloveds lost to war. The fragments are very self conscious, which suggests the poet is questioning her urge to create an alternate narrative:

I am afraid of stories, Of where they lead people, of the costume’s various hemlines, of the bleak night that has connected the teller with the fortitude and the moral ground. Even collections of facts are suspect, psychological profiles, a shocking array of imported fruit, a warning to small craft, a slave rebellion, a Papal council.

In The Tablets the scholar-translator’s anxious thoroughness piled up evidence of the subjectivity of his text. Parcel takes subjectivity for granted, and Cox’s female narrator can be read as a contemporary counterpart of Schwerner’s anxious scholar-translator. The fragmentary texts Cox presents here are postcards rather than broadsides, and often carefully pointed with the purpose of empowering the reader. Here’s section 2 from “The Scribes (considering Linear B text)”:

beginning from numbers
the absence of a word for scribe
no special name
your name here
tiresome pictogram
it is said men wore striped gym socks
should there be different words for shoes and socks.

Her modes are various and her work is always smart. She can mix the ancient and the contemporary without sounding forced. This classical veneer lends some weight to Cox’s sharp critique of the current political scene, most obviously in “We of the Capitals”:

god and he by the water cooler, in the limo, in the rec. room
choking over pretzels during football
god loves him because he is rich and powerful but also humble
and ignorant

And Cox knows where this ignorance leads us: “We can no longer use words without becoming dirty ourselves.” Cox is not simply recovering an alternate narrative but trying to create a space where the story isn’t simply a story of dominance and submission:

I dyed my hair blond because of a lack I perceived….

To what extent is this an act of submission certain that there
cannot be two things at once…

dear Phaedra,
It is true we colluded with the things that would undo us
in order to tame them
in order that we could have a say
in our own undoing

In Cox’s work we learn how to read our own narratives in the cultural fragments we find. We confront the simple drama of humans using and being used by language. Here’s section 17 of “The Scribes:”

The thin
tablets
not notebook
size
only
strips
of hard gray.

In the final long poem “Offering Table with Hearth in Center,” the narrator-archaeologist digs into what she calls a “text from the first body.” Her diagrams of the excavation fill themselves with greyed-out background texts in what I can’t help but thinking of as a response to The Tablets. The following section is enclosed in a rectangle with rounded corners, recalling the outline of a tablet:

the running man to the woman of
possessions one to the other marked in
time as

wwww lllluuu kkkhhhaaa

then reduced or expressed more
formally clay tablets not baked
but liquefied lists to be remade the
way of transportation several
men on a ship owning no shirts
owning each counted by the
creaking in the hull

the ship is to the body a chest is smooth
and rippled with goosebumps full
sound wet air untranslatable texts
the weld adheres to steel because
the eye saw to it.

The efficiency of Parcel is admirable and welcome, as well as its unabashed love of kitsch. I do miss the often funny and sprawling contingency of Schwerner’s scholar translator as he begins to suspect his text is self-created, though I admit that Parcel is an easier read. Where The Tablets deals more directly with bodily functions, lust, and decay, Parcel deals more directly with modern life, including for example a poem titled “My Hello Kitty Motherhood,” and a willingness to deal with the very recent past, including a brief, but surprising reference to GM’s late, unlamented, and formerly ubiquitous J Car platform. Cox reminds us that fragments are not just monumental or sacred inscriptions on rocks and parchment, but toys, postcards, forms, receipts, the junk of today, and that anxiety need not rise to a classic, keening pitch. Whatever form the message takes, sacred, secular or banal, both books remind us that human emotions remain unchanged.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Mike McDonough, Sarah Anne Cox
Posted in reviews