Posts Tagged ‘Mike McDonough’

The Cow

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

by Ariana Reines
Fence Books December 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

The Hardness of the Frame

the cow OK, that is a slaughterhouse on the cover of The Cow, and those are dead cattle. Framed by the clinical language of a livestock manual, Ariana Reines’s first book runs language, culture and sex through a meat grinder, and the results are not pretty. Perhaps those who like poetry or sausage should not watch it being made. But as the Koran points out, “Do you then believe in a part of the book and disbelieve the other?” Reines insists on showing us “the other side of the animal.”

Consider vomit and velleity. It’s not a matter of whether one word is poetic, and the other not. It’s not just a matter of balancing diction so that the same poem can plausibly use both words—let alone the same poet. It’s a matter of using vomit to describe a real transaction between inside and outside, retaining all its disgust, the reflex of it, as a way to address ideas like cultural bulimia without hiding behind the adjective. In the same way, velleity needs a similar anchoring: used non-ironically, it can still compare the language of consciousness with the fingertip precision of sewing lace. In both cases, the feedback loop is profoundly physical. Unfortunately, both times “velleities” is used, it is misspelled. Either way, Reines’s relationship with language is fraught, ambivalent, and serious. The work contains quotes from Ashbery, Baudelaire, Burroughs, Proust, Rilke, Stein, and the Bible, among others.

Reines’s work is undeniably raw and powerful. Her verbal shredding has none of the clinical neatness of the computer algorithm, or the vaguely reassuring frisson of scissors on paper. The insistence on blood, shit, cum and guts within an experimental framework reminds me of Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, down to the use of a similar sans serif typeface, but it also sets up useful contrasts. While Schwerner’s sense of cultural transformations is similarly sexual and his body parts are similarly scaled, stacked and strewn, Reines will not let the aura of myth slur the body count. The cow is sacred, a mother, a lover—and equally, “murdered meat.”

Reines removes the scholarly mask and talks even more directly: the harshly clinical frame of the manual and the constant sense of the body as muscle, blood, and water make the possibility of rebirth or any meaningful myth much less luminous, and much filthier. She reminds us that the cultural construction of bulimia is not that different from putting a portal in the stomach of a cow so that the digestion process can be seen. The myths are real. It is the people, the bodies that are ruined, not the tablets or the statues. She writes, “We were the real’s dead mimes”. No warm nests to return to here. Only slits, gashes, and holes. Reines scolds us: “We are going to be smarter about these things from now on.”

In “Item,” Reines combines a discussion of feedlot/slaughterhouse practices, and the advent of mad cow disease with the story the speaker’s down-and-out mother, once a medical practitioner, walking downtown from Washington Heights to ask her for money for a steak. This wraps itself around a discussion of language and truth. After describing how cows cannot digest their forced diet of corn without massive doses of antibiotics, she writes: “A wimple fell over the real as if to protect it: a ruckus in the girl is artificial as anything, fortified by nutrients.” Despite the tone of this line, Reines often calls the ironist’s bluff by using language as literally as possible. She calls the cyberpoet’s bluff by calling our attention not only to shredded texts and the cultural commodification of desire, but actual holes in physical bodies. She might even call Beckett’s bluff: she is not convinced that language can’t describe real things, but the purgatory effort is just as bleak and wearying as anything Beckett’s characters confront.

What happens to the world when a body is a bag of stuff you can empty out of it.
Errors, musculatures.
Can I empty language out of me.
What difference does it make how a thing dies. Consciousness. Nobody knows
what that is.

Be warned: the obsession with bodily functions is pushed past the comfort zone, however sturdy your sealegs. Reines wants to make you sick, and shock you into a different place. The last stanza of “Advertisement” reads:

You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take. You have got to, absolutely got to put your face into the gash and sniff, and lick. You have got to learn to get sick. You have got to reestablish the integrity of your emotions so that their violence can become a health and so that you can keep on becoming. There is no sacrifice. You have got to want to live. You have got to force yourself to want to.

By any measure, this is hectoring, risky, and, in this case, not concerned with being good poetry. Reading this book may be a test of your masochism, but it just might change you. She’s aware of the risk. The book is peppered with such lines as: “Ailmenting the world perpetuates it,” and: “I will not train myself to love this shit.” With all the aggressiveness of Reines’s stance, it is unsettling to see the oddly beautiful spaces her work opens up on the killing floor. Look at the cover long enough and you may find an unsettling balance between beauty and horror, a sense that stays with you long after the book is closed.

The last quarter of the book does permit something approximating gentleness to appear. The poem “Rest” starts with “Hymns can make your forgetting happen.” and ends with “The mouth’s a haven for all an eye cannot disperse.” But in the context of such fraught, relentless hammering, such brief moments of beauty can risk seeming like desperately mimed cliches. Here’s a chunk of “You:”

I looked up and was assuaged.
I carried to my mouth the ointment of the cloud that had ceased to move,
That had ceased to pass over me.
I found a secret duct amid these floes of air and then they left off their coquetries,
their complications.
The beauty makes me feel it really happened
The sky had stars in it they glittered like calories upon the world

Whatever the state of poetry, words like “beautiful” and “lovely” should never be taboo, but it’s harder to earn the right to use them: the cost of beauty is greater today. Using such a vague word as beauty requires a corresponding concreteness. Vagueness gains its relevance by the hardness of the frame. Reines pushes this logic to a place it hasn’t been before, and doesn’t want to go, a place past politics, but profoundly informed by it; a craft that appropriates and shreds other texts, but which sometimes hides the theft; a search for beauty under piles of carcasses both metaphorical and real. At one point she asks, “how badly does narrative long to be beautiful?” Does Reines succeed? Given that all meters are in the red, and that the answer has to wait until the end of the book, “Afterward” sounds understandably weary, but oddly, cautiously hedged. Hope is hard, too.

Tags: 8 stars, Ariana Reines, Fence Books, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Special Orders

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

by Edward Hirsch
Knopf 2008
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Shelfer

hirschcover The title of Edward Hirsch’s new book Special Orders refers to his late father’s job of selling boxes, especially sizes made to order. If I say the title poem is flat, you might accuse me of a horrible pun or ask how a poem having to do with boxes can start out anything other than flat, given the exigencies of manufacturing them. If I say that Hirsch’s work feels underwrought, you might point out that a box is the simplest way to enclose any given contents in a square form.

Fair enough, but the work sometimes reads like off-the-shelf product rather than the special orders Hirsch emphasizes—which doesn’t bode well for those seeking tricornes, toruses and tubes. Things might be better if we had more of a sense that, if you brought his father a dachshund, he could make a box that gave the dog room to breathe, but also increased its dachshundness by elevating its inherent rectangularity to the level of art. But no, the job is a grind, the boxes are basically boxes, and the stress of it leads to his father’s grave. It is the grieving son who must find the power of “the secret torch that forever burns / inside us, a beacon no one can touch.”

A good Edward Hirsch poem is gently metaphorical, agnostic and searching, full of unaccountable moments of grief, humor, wonder, and joy. A bad Hirsch poem might have these qualities too, but the music flags. While most of his poems touch real emotions, the emotions are sometimes undercut by pat endings. In “I Wish I Could Paint You,” the book’s most unabashedly erotic poem, his Venus-like model steps out of the shower in the morning, evoking all of the speaker’s desires, but the poem ends with “your smile as wide as the sea / and your eyes that are deeper blue. / I wish I could paint you.” It’s supposed to be rueful and melancholy, but something about the closure undercuts the eroticism and gives me the sense of a high school senior rounding a period.

For all the brevity of Hirsch’s poems, I often find them going on a line or two longer than I’d like. His appealing directness is sometimes marred by rhetorical tags such as “It is true that.” A poem starting with “come with me” has already lost me. It’s not the tag by itself; Whitman’s “come with me”’s are wonderfully, absurdly expansive and exhilarating when not overwrought. It’s not the well-worn tropes of Hirsch’s poems that cause him to miss; something about the music flattens, doesn’t quite spark the thought it might.

When Hirsch hits, he brings us to a fondly remembered place enclosing a deep acceptance of solitary melancholy. “To DB” recalls an old friend’s apartment in the West Village. We don’t learn much about their relationship, but the speaker does say “If there is a West Village in the other world, … I’ll reach over / and hug you, which will make you uneasy.” Without noticing it, we have just stepped on the shyest of mushrooms, and released all the spores. It’s touches like these that let the poem get away with one of the oldest tricks in the book, the woman named Faith, who is “rustling around downstairs, / getting ready for work, unwilling to die.” “Man Without a Face” ends:

Now I am a man walking around
without a face to compose,
a skeleton, a stranger to myself,
an aching bone, a nerve exposed.

It’s another old trick, but it works: the final, almost full rhyme when the rest of the poem only suggests it.

The antepenultimate poem (forgive me) is “Green Couch.” Although the speaker’s abandoned his green couch, left it to molder only to have it rescued by a friend, he’s not looking for something to reupholster it, he’s carting it to the dump. He’s looking for a way to accept his grief, but he’s abandoned his religious faith. The poem ends:

Darlings, I remember everything.
But now I try to speak the language of
the unconscious and study the earth for secrets.

I go back and forth to work.
I walk in the botanical gardens on weekends.
and take a narrow green path to the clearing.

Despite (or because of) the (intentional?) echo of Zsa Zsa Gabor in Green Acres, it’s like a leftover cheeseburger becoming a feather: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Special Orders is similar in tone and content to Hirsch’s previous book, Lay Back the Darkness, down to the centrally located elegiac poem in shard-like fragmentary stanzas. What makes the latter better is that the framing structure of classical tropes buttressing memories of the Holocaust is more solidly and consistently present, giving him just the coat rack to hang his gentle, melancholy rhetoric on. The lighter touch in Special Orders sometimes leaves us floating. Given the subtle difference between Hirsch poems that work and those that don’t, each reader will probably be struck by a different poem in Special Orders, but I think it would be hard for any reader to like all of the poems here.

Tags: 5.5 stars, Edward Hirsch, Knopf, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Threads

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

by Jill Magi
Futurepoem Books 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Estonia Fragmented

magi cover

Estonia is a small Baltic country of 1.4 million souls. Modern Estonia was founded in 1918, and had only twenty two years of independence before it was occupied by Russia from 1940-1991. Estonia is still creating and defining its own national identity. The Soviet era definitely meant suppressing cultural characteristics, language and ideas that were declared “too Estonian.” As a result of this oppression, most of the materials and documents of Estonian culture are fragmentary and hard to find, obligating Estonians to redefine their national culture through their own personal interests and efforts.

Threads by Jill Magi tells the story of her journey back to Estonia’s capital, Talinin, in the months after “the singing revolution” to try and understand her own family heritage. Magi’s father was a Seventh Day Adventist minister who fled Estonia to the United States during World War II. Jill Magi never lived in Estonia, and did not grow up speaking Estonian, nor is she now practicing her father’s faith. Guided by some maps and documents annotated by her father, she tries to piece together and understand her doubly distant heritage. The book vividly describes her halting efforts to learn Estonian, and to bring back poems by Estonian poets so that her father can help her translate them. “Dear Dad, if you can even vaguely translate,” is a refrain throughout the book.

The book contains artful images created by Magi herself of books and documents repaired with threads so as to emphasize the seams, the mismatched fit, those crucial segments of documents that have been razored out and replaced, or simply lost to time. Also interspersed are passages from a book describing how to bind books by hand. The idea of hand sewn bindings is doubly meaningful here, because any books preserving Estonian histories and poetry are presumed to be hand-bound for private use, to be hidden from the eyes of prying Russian authorities. Magi does a good job of evoking the preciousness, the rarity, the intentional duplicity and hidden-ness of these handcrafted objects and their highly idiosyncratic, personal construction and contents.

Magi’s lines are deliberately fragmentary, echoing the uncertainty of her task. Opening the book nearly at random, I find: “With water on all sides, I approach/ holding on/ to the only guidebook and a dictionary where to weep is pronounced/ nutma and wave is laine and threadbare is kulunud—” Magi is not seduced by easy answers, although, given the language barrier, stereotypes and the reassuring gush of tourist guides are scarcely available to seduce her. Or are simply ghosts. One of the most moving lines in the book is: “Feel a map as the phenomenon of a ghost limb: then there is no loss.” Accordingly, the book resists narrative closure. Some of the more interesting passages deal with the comedy involved with others clumsy attempts to stereotype Estonia:

“What is your nationality Miss?” “Really, I thought you were French.”
“Because (this is because ) I am from—” His accent and not myself.
“This
is because my nose is not or my ears are so or not as blonde as my
sister”
and “The Estonian’s humor is particularly dark.”

Earlier in the book is the line “”Sweden exiles Estonia sweetly, on the other side of perhaps” But ultimately, Magi’s efforts at even vaguely outlining the meaning of Estonia are not much less clumsy than those of outsiders, who think of Estonians as poorer Finns, even though Estonia is relatively wealthy.

Threads is a penetrating study of personal as well as cultural identity. It is filled with evidence of the power of naming, and the loss involved when previously named things become ghosts. Jill Magi’s book is peppered with lines like:

Phrasebook marked here.
I am
hello. My name unfolded from a backpack tightly

I’ll close with a disappointingly simple cliché, and because I can find no better way to say it, I say it with grateful relief: Threads is thoughtful and intriguing, and should be read.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Futurepoem Books, Jill Magi, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

Old Heart

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

by Stanley Plumly
W.W. Norton 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

John Keats, Meet Ted Williams

The poems in Stanley Plumly’s National Book Award nominee, Old Heart, are a series of masterful suspensions. I don’t mean something static. I’m thinking more structural, like a bridge where tension and compression are held in such balance that the only possible movement is vibration. It’s as if the forward push of the ego were momentarily shocked by an encounter with time, transfixed or impaled like a hooked fish, or in this case, a shot crow:

                        The killed crow fell the sixty feet in seconds,
                     less, though in the while it took
                     to find it, it had moved. My mother,
                     alive in the machine, becalmed on hard white sheets,
                     the narrative of legs, arms, animal centers stilled,
                     some starlight in the mind glittering off
                     and on, couldn’t tell me
                     whether or not to leave her.

Crow, mother, and son are all transfixed by their encounter with time. The mother is stilled but unable to die. The son cannot reach out to his mother, as he can find nothing of her to hold on to. In the face of such shock, only the crow is able to move, to hide (even already “killed”!) The speaker is not as much cold or removed, but suspended, unable to move but very much ENGAGED. It is a situation so fraught that any overt judgment or summation would seem unwarranted. Emotion is not brooded over, but held taut by the poet’s solid attention to the bedrock of nature. Plumly’s poems witness that we are shocked out of ourselves by the fact of mortality. For Plumly, as for Stevens and Keats, “death is the mother of beauty.” But Plumly modifies the Keatsian “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” by reminding us, “truth first, then beauty.” Or, as Mark Twain put it, “Meat first, then spoon vittles to top off on.”

Ever since Keats alerted us to the idea of negative capability, western poetry has been troubled by what Pound called “the lyrical interference of the ego.” It keeps English majors busy, but to me it’s a truism that, as Keats put it, “we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us” and that we dislike “to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist.” Plumly has taken Keats’ classic strafing of Wordsworth to heart. He strives for a hopeful disinterestedness without resorting to a trendy use of Buddhist or overtly religious tropes, or sounding too self-satisfied. No journal entries here. Plumly is pretty sure that much of his daily life is not worthy of poetry, but his irony is not the corrosive, self-deprecating cocktail bar John Berryman variety. It has all of Keats’ seriousness about the world as the “Vale of soul-making,” and much of Keats’ reverence for beauty. Plumly’s regard for “the spiritual world the negative of this one,” and the idea that “the soul must live / in space constructed out of nature” is sincere. For Plumly, metaphor is belief, but everything ain’t coming up roses.

“Fishing Drunk” with his father and uncle, Plumly describes two coolers, “one for fish, and one for beer and baloney,” and how the fish not kept alive for campfire consumption are “pulled in and hammered hard with a mallet” by his uncle who later “sleeps off what little’s left of the / stoned afternoon.” We are not spared the unflattering details, but Plumly doesn’t need to push the obviously vulnerable perspective of the child to ask, not without humor, “when did we fall out of the boat?” and to say at the end, in the only use of the first person in the poem, “I’m thinking we could die out here.”

In addition to the lingering death of his mother, a recurring theme in Old Heart is the early death of Plumly’s father from a heart attack.

            He went down, like a building, on his knees.
         I sat in the dark inside the feeling
         I was turning into stone, or, if I turned
         around to salt, salt crystals diamonding
         the blackouts. Silence is what you hear,
         the mouth a moon of o’s black filling up
         the body with its blood. I listened.

Again, feeling is suspended. The ego is shocked, clubbed like a pickerel into salt crystals or stone, a vibrating, drowning silence. There is none of the defiant, desperate release of the final line of James Wright’s “Saint Judas:” “I held the man for nothing in my arms.” or his revelatory redaction of Rilke: “I have wasted my life.” For Plumly, revelation comes in under the radar, the product of the attention each of us unavoidably gives to nature’s silent truth. No religious props are necessary, since as the existential blurb says, each of us “faces death alone.” The ego moves forward when the poem stops—and art or nature is not a simple consolation. As Plumly writes in “Audubon Aviary,” “art, again, indifferent to the life / inventing it.”:

            nothing will hold the moment
         save the kill. Audubon’s silences,
         his dark articulate stillnesses
         are what we have against what
         we’ll remember.

Although we seem to have traveled a long way from Keats, the distance might not be as great as we think.. Take a minor Keats poem, “In drear nighted December” (I hear you groaning, but stay with me for a moment). “The too happy, happy” brook’s

            Bubblings ne’er remember
         Apollo’s summer look
         But with a sweet forgetting
         They stay their crystal fretting,
         Never, never petting
         about the frozen time.

Keats wishes it were so for lovers:

            But were there ever any
         Writh’d not of passed joy?
         The feel of not to feel it,
         When there is none to heal it,
         Nor numbed sense to steel it,
         was never said in rhyme.

Plumly’s silences, stony or stoned, can be read as an effort to supply this kind of lack. And the best part about Plumly’s poems is that the same impersonality that turns emotion into salt crystals ensures that the compensating beauty is often described with a remarkable and refreshing lack of fret. Plumly’s poems make it easier to imagine the kind of poems Keats might have written if he had the luxury of growing old. “Greensboro Campus Sonnet” describes a gentler moment when the ego is startled, or simply embarrassed into the moment:

            those seconds that the couple’s kissing lasts,
         an embarrassment of riches, so you look away,
         then back, until by itself looking makes its
         judgment: joy, then awkwardness, some sentence
         in the mind interrupted.

Again, the speaker is alone, but not alienated. The personal reaction to this loaded scene suspends without comment (the poem’s in the second person after all). Even judgment is an interrupted sentence. The moment when an aging man might vicariously regret his embarrassing loss of passion and power is put aside. Only then can the poem work back to what it finds at hand:

            first crocuses and the lavender called redbud,
         stunning girls with Walkmans wired and skating,
         and heraldry of diamond shapes of birds against
         the shielded, shielding brightness of the sky.

Here are Keats’ Attic shapes who are still “friend to man,” even “When old age shall this generation waste,” as the poem works toward a hopeful tone:

            And old and loving rain thinking of starting,
         whose scent is on the air, invisible flowering,
         And yellow, then the red dress of the sun.
         Love’s cracked, healed-over cup full at the lip.

This is as good an update as any to “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I particularly like “Love’s cracked healed-over cup,” because nobody can get through Love’s battles without a split lip and lots of Superglue. As good as he is, Plumly never flaunts profundity.

There is a lifetime of low-key mastery here, and by the time you read this review, Stanley Plumly may already have won the NBA. When I think of the kind of work that should win such Oscarish awards, I tend to look for something that, without pandering to trends, insists on being heard RIGHT NOW, like Christopher Logue’s War Music, his ambitious adaptation of The Illiad. Since I don’t see anything that earth shaking in the list of nominees, I’m not going to pretend to have the inside skinny this year. But work as appealingly modest and well crafted as Plumly’s could lead me to recalibrate my seismometer. It may already have done so.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Mike McDonough, Stanley Plumly, W.W. Norton
Posted in reviews

Three Mouths

Wednesday, October 24th, 2007

by Tod Thilleman
Spuyten Duyvil 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Cheeseburger Special and a Glass of Beer

three mouths The Cheeseburger Test measures the degree of concreteness in the work: is the reader given a cheeseburger, or ideas about a cheeseburger? Is the cheeseburger a cheeseburger first, before it is made to symbolize anything else? Is this language I want to eat, or is scentless mental air? Am I grounded or floating? You can tell my biases already: I like cheeseburgers and beer. I like my abstractions organized spatially like tangrams or maps, so I can find more places to get cheeseburgers and beer. But there is more to it than that.

Three Mouths fails the cheeseburger test in an interesting and productive way. A book- length poem keyed to the powers of sound, each of its three sections (“Wave Run”, “Sonic Model”, and “Between”) are presided over by a daemon, a being half human, half divine. The content isn’t strictly devotional or ecological, though those elements are there. The stormy shore in “Wave Run” is not, as the otherwise helpful introduction suggests, Fire Island or any place that needs to be named: beachness is limned, not in a strictly ecological sense, but to show how words model thought. Thilleman wants a better model, not “the dirigible though dead,” something more like the “deterrent property of air,” or the action of waves on a beach, though the opposition set up between empiricism (science’s “starveling assumption,”) and the chthonic powers feels a bit pat to me.

Thilleman’s method is remarkably consistent: each page is a sentence that continually doubles back on itself, ebbing and flowing, abruptly repeating. A recurring trick is adding the possessive case as a syntactic hook, to suggest strangeness, and the animation of matter. “Angle of entry set others of the sea / Wind’s triangles’ wave ridge / Grasps continual wavelets” is a neat trick, those two possessives grasping like wavelets, and canceling each other’s charge, while suggesting movement and continual interlocking animation of matter.

Though Thilleman does a good job of animating abstractions and proceeds by mimesis rather than logic, the cheeseburger meter stays low, because even onomatopoeia can be taken to the level of abstraction: A blurber suggests that in “Sonic Model” we are being taken for a ride on the New York City Subway, but what New York conveyance has ever made a sound as polite as “bing-bong”? As in “Wave Run,” we are given no specific locational clues in the text. The sounds are echoing the properties of matter because, as Thilleman writes, “matter’s journey is our journey.”

Though we are given a vague sense of the speaker having gone on a Dante-esque journey to get here, we are oriented nowhere except the mind—which of course is how we are oriented anyway, and Thilleman rightly treats this as a Eureka moment: “Everything that makes sense becomes the model’s body!” This strongly recalls Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality: “Every statement about the geometrical relationships of physical bodies in the world is ultimately referable to certain definite human bodies as origins of reference.” Incidentally, Whitehead, despite (or perhaps because of) being the father of process philosophy and discoverer of “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” also fails the Cheeseburger Test, but that’s a different story.

Some of my favorite lines in Three Mouths are: “a strange beast / Munching quadratic equations of an earthly dynamo / Exhausted by its alien brain,” And this:

Now earth animates as ever
Sprung from the head of death
Twinned in a moment, helixed through meat
Spewed for answer, received in matter
Ecstatic daemon at edges of Okeanos

It is a serious effort, and John Taggart is right to invoke Zukofsky in his blurb; but he is also right to note that for all his invoking Okeanos, Thilleman is after a different sea than the Greeks. The idea is strong, but I’d like to use Zukofsky’s example to suggest why Three Mouths often sounds flat to me. The Cheeseburger Test guards against excessive abstraction, but it is also a positive directive. In “Mantis, an Interpretation,” Zukofsky explains the abstraction that we should avoid:

so that the invoked collective
Does not subdue the senses’ awareness,
The longing for touch to an idea, or
To a use function of the material:
The original emotion remaining,
like the collective,
Unprompted, real, as propaganda

I’m going to avoid the use of the word propaganda here, except to say that Zukofsky had some naïve hopes about the political possibilities of Objectivism, and I’m going to interpret “invoked collective” as any large abstraction the writer wants to use, partly because, though some overtures were made, the Communists knew Zukofsky was not going to stick to the script. By this admittedly stacked measure, Thilleman is vivid, but only occasionally real. To make things fairer, I’m going to compare a Thilleman sea poem with a Zukofsky sea poem. The content is similar in both:

The voice, so close, needs
Connect anything
Spilling wave-tip on flat water
Under-bottom wave-coil
Collapses splashes upon the line
Where before power hefted boulders
Now lays absorbing shore-sand
Sea-poem foam and froth sheen
Dissipating smooth atmosphere
A SEA

the
foam
claws

cloys
close

In both examples, all the lines are close to the same length. Both poets have stripped away aspects of grammar in order to open the sentence to new readings. Thilleman deploys some thunderous sounds and a roiling sense, an effective churning, a beach of syllables to reshape. But the wave refuses entry: the pointers “Where before,” “and now,” and the opposites “absorbing” and dissipating,” quasi-scientific as they are, lead the sense to nothing beyond what we already have when the poem starts. We take a step back from immediate sense, starting with “the voice, so close,” and ending with “dissipating smooth atmosphere,” which is an abstraction of evaporation. In Zukofsky, the direction is reversed: we start with the dead ore of “the” and end with “close,” which, with “claws” and “cloys,” suggests that the sea has turned into a rather strange cat. It’s not simply an image or metaphor; it also a mimesis of the wave, employing effective sound effects: three times in a row, we have those hard c’s separated from those hissing esses by low vowels.

It’s worth remembering that Zukofsky was the first poet to do things like putting “the” on its own line. This also refuses easy entry: “the” is a syllable, inarticulate as a grunt but also very real, independent of its use as definite article, having its own properties. But that isolated syllable is plugged in to something far more accessible and intimate, as carefully as a puzzle piece or a single musical note. “The” is sounded to create a shape that, like a hammer, is ready to use, as opposed to the impenetrability of a freight train passing by. When Thilleman starts with “the voice, so close” I am ready to listen, I reach out and am ready to touch something new, transformed. But he turns up the volume and by the end of the page, I have forgotten I heard the voice in the first place. If the voice turns into all voices, both absorbs and dissipates, if the sensual voice is a wave passing by, I can only rest in the blank space: I only get the voice back when I stop reading the poem.

In the Zukofsky example, I get the voice that I can listen to, the impenetrable word, and the blank space as well. Zukofsky knows that by using words at all we are not “getting” reality, but we are at least dancing with it. Here Thilleman starts the dance by whirling you into the impenetrable qualities of matter. Note that paradoxically, by personifying the earthly powers as daemons, we are pushed further towards matter as raw, physical stuff. Sound is turned into iron, but we can’t build a bridge with it. The “longing for touch to an idea” is thwarted.

If we do further violence to Thilleman’s poem by editing it thus:

The voice, so close, needs
Sea poem foam and froth sheen
Dissipating smooth atmosphere

We have an emotional unit, we have retained “the longing for touch to an idea” and something of “the original emotion” at the cost of adding sentimentality. I would argue that ultimately the content of both poems is equally sentimental, but this is where Zukofsky’s concision becomes more amazing. In the same way that a solid beam is turned into a truss by removing the unnecessary parts, Zukofsky takes the original emotion and whittles it down until what remains is a drawing of lines of force, the intimate dance of tension and compression, while Thilleman, with all his admirable enthusiasm for process philosophy, turns the dance of matter into a vaguely Wagnerian opera. There’s nothing wrong with that, except when compared to a slight touch on the shoulder, and a whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”

Tags: 6.5 stars, Mike McDonough, Tod Thilleman
Posted in reviews

Black Diamond Golden Boy Takes Bull By Horns

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

by Geoffrey Gatza
BlazeVOX [books] 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Never Can Tell

gatza cover I wanted to like this book. The set up is a recasting of Ezra Pound as Merlin enacting some kind of ritual self-sacrifice, killed by the irrelevance of his own magical poetic myths, and it contains interesting quotes from Buddha, Churchill and William Carlos Williams. The idea became less and less coherent as I read. In this book we do not care about Pound, Merlin, or the knights of the Round Table, or wonder at how magic persists without them. In the first section, there is much talk about food and the creativity of chefs, and if I had to choose, I’d rather eat than read poetry, but somehow with all this talk of food, I am never made hungry. It is one thing to try to cure yourself by glut, as was done so gamely in Fast Food Nation, but it is entirely another if you don’t like the taste of McDonald’s food in the first place. I am all for a reconsideration of our pieties, but this overwritten mess makes no sense.

Occasionally post-avant statements surface, purporting to be clear, such as “One cannot build a better poem without understanding / what is wrong with the present one,” and “literary anarchy seeks to unleash authority from authorship.” Do we need 160 unnumbered pages of bad poetry to prove it? Then a section on poetical anarchism is crossed out. That saves me from having to explain the idea. The evidence of the book suggests that a persistently incorrect use of the possessive apostrophe is involved, along with deliberately flaunting most of the homophones cited by grammarians.

If anyone is curious about anarchy in poetry, let them read the work of John Cage (and also Jackson MacLow). Anarchy does not involve suicide by glut, revolution by petty annoyance, pseudoliterary emetics or pretentious poses, whether ironic or not. It challenges us with unreadability, and the productive uses of boredom, but doesn’t need stagey histrionics. Though paradoxical, its emotional center is quite clear. It does involve saying a lot by staying silent, and saying little by talking constantly, but it also acknowledges at all points that there is no beginning and no end, and we can come and go as we like. It runs Thoreau through a blender, ignoring his embeddedness in the world of his time, while expanding his libertarian streak. Through the magic of clear thinking and the abiding discipline of silence, what is simple stays simple and what is complex becomes simple by becoming somehow different. It is also peace-loving, funny and oddly touching, whereas Gatza’s work tries to be but is not. Gatza’s idea of silence is the enforced crossing out of text, rather than a telling omission. His work tends to be busy and loud. Perhaps Gatza’s work is symptomatic of the mess we are in. I persist in the idea that if I am asked for bread I try not to give you a stone. Or maybe I sculpt a loaf of bread out of the stone, or plant a field of wheat. I proceed by offering a positive direction rather than proving how bad your current one is. The empty blab of the world tends to take care of itself. Even Zen Koans, so aggressive in their frustration of analysis have a bracingly spare humanity to them, and a subversive and sly sense of humor. Gatza’s work has none of these qualities. There is humor in the book, but it is not very sly. He persists in being a one man band playing on and on, interrupting himself, then playing the same thing in reverse, until you beg him to stop.

There is no idea that Gatza cannot talk to death. A potentially interesting section on Edward Hicks’ beloved proto-Hallmark Peacable Kingdom paintings is drained of its insouciance by the use of too many words. Many of the poems here seek simplicity but never stay quiet long enough to actually listen to the silence that persists. There is no easy conversational tone that cannot be rendered somehow strained, no tragic figure that Gatza cannot talk into irrelevance. The poem dedicated to Woody Guthrie does not mention music. Even the poem about Andy Dick manages to contain nothing engaging, even in the expected pop culture junkie sense, except the photo of Andy Dick, while somehow avoiding any mention of News Radio, acting, TV, or comedy. Of course, addictions such as Andy’s have a pointlessness to them that is not very appealing. If there is an emotional core to his work, it is probably in the poem “to be:”

I don’t know what to believe really.
I know how I feel and that’s one thing
and I know for a fact that what I believe
to be true and what is true cannot be

so what the fuck. I hate
well not really hate
so much as I am angered
by the calumny, but this

I mean fuck

Which is the funniest and most directly engaging poem by far, trust me, and I haven’t even read the whole book. I’m doing you a favor. This book is too pretentious to be seriously challenging, consistently funny, trashy bad or camp, if it’s trying for that. It’s often hard to tell. The last quarter of the book is taken up by “So This is What Happiness Is, (a poem marketed as a play)”, a burlesque of Arthurian characters and Jesus Christ, another potentially interesting idea that turns out to be curiously overstuffed, unfunny and pointless. Dada at its worst was more innovative, and better at offending artistic taste. This book vastly increased my respect for Duchamp’s urinal. If I’ve missed the point I don’t want to get it. The pictures and graphics, often busy and irrelevantly captioned, are a positive relief from the generally numbing text, and have increased my rating of the book by one-half star. Calgon, take me away!

Tags: 2 stars, BlazeVOX Books, Geoffrey Gatza, Mike McDonough
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a half-red sea

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

by Evie Shockley
Carolina Wren Press 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

At Ease

red-sea Evie Shockley’s a half-red sea is a smart, eclectic collection. She knows her literary history, as the book is framed by epigraphs by Phillis Wheatley and Lucille Clifton. A high point is reached when, in her wonderfully descriptive title, “wheatley and hemmings have drinks in the halls of the ancestors.” The collection inhabits this massive sweep of history in multiple ways without being abstract or overly academic. You can get your American Studies groove on. It’s why you went to college in the first place.

The strengths and weaknesses of this approach are perhaps exemplified when the lyrics to Steely Dan’s “Peg” make an unexpected appearance near the end of a signature poem “a thousand words,” printed on a gatefold page literally framed by repetitions of the word torture. The poem works up a haunting and obsessive rhythm, while the increasing self-consciousness of the punning content both hints at and closes off some serious depth. Then again, it would take the resources of Robert Hayden to write a long poem about torture at the highest, classical level of intensity. Shockley can reach that pitch but doesn’t insist on it, which is to say that she is willing to experiment with a variety of forms, voices and tones to make that history come to life. Which is also to say that she is willing to risk writing poems that might appear weaker in comparison to her best ones. Happily, this doesn’t happen often. Old slave narratives, film noir, the overcooked language of advertising, and the Anita Hill hearings are all used to good effect, because (forgive me) her emotional compass remains steady.

Her poems flash authentic grit: “Poems are bullshit unless they are trees a century old, sentries lining the streets of Senegal.” Or: “The spit of fifty foreign tongues / visa’d by Christ.” Lyrics from Parliament and the Temptations mark key refrains, keeping us grounded through poems that might otherwise come across as exercises. “double bop for Ntozake Sange” is a member of the stalwart, usually boring genre of poems about poetry readings, but this one vividly evokes the simple physicality of being there rather than some vague, strained abstract of content or mood.

you kept us waiting, sprawled across
the rigid network of seats like so much
spanish moss, a fungus of patience.

why you wanna treat me so bad

arriving, you staggered, no, tightroped
your way to the mic. your hollow apology
rang with the purity of a spoon tapped
against plastic. reading, your words poured
like oatmeal, clumped and milky, over your
red lips. what could (be) wrong (with) you?

At its most appealing, Shockley’s work delights in the permutations of words, but is more emotionally resonant, risky and revealing than Haryette Mulen’s canny but overly consistent punning in Sleeping With the Dictionary. “the ballad of anita hill” confronts this modern tragedy with all the vitriolic ambivalence it deserves:

bring your family (nuclear only). make
sure they dress middle class and hug
you affectionately. be strong, or fake
it, but in a womanly way. don’t be smug

or shy or prudish or loose, when testifying
that he said “pussy” or “penis” on the job:
push the words out, as if they were defying
gravity, then let them fly. weep. don’t sob.
exude celibacy—heterosexual style.
sit up straight. smile. don’t smile.

The lack of capitals here reminds me of Cummings’ best satire in “next to god of course america, i” hitting perhaps harder because of the use of a specific, painful incident that is still available to memory even as we keep trying to forget it. The expected snideness is complicated by how the standard American script is thrown in our face, and brought into stark relief by Hill’s obvious integrity in the face of editorial onslaught. Both Hill’s and America’s character are revealed.

In contrast to the uncompromising “ballad of anita hill,” some of her more traditionally proper and reverential poems seem weaker, and not all of her experiments with layout and format are spot-on. But these moments are easily outweighed by the stunning variety of mood and content she displays, in a time when the internal consistency of a collection builds barriers to interdisciplinary thought, as if each author has to decide that she is writing either short, pseudorealistic novels, artful unassailable abstractions, or practical political weapons. Shockley negotiates the musical, historical, artful, political, personal, abstract, concrete and experimental dimensions of language with an ease that remains firmly grounded in a historical consciousness, a faith in that elusive something that makes us American. Perhaps because it evokes that faith, a half-red sea is not consistently cutting edge. If Shockley can be accused of being academic, she doesn’t neglect the sheer variety of words, the picture or the music, while insisting on readability throughout. At its best, a half red sea is a richly polyphonic riff, evoking a wide variety of emotions and characters, the kind of longed-for, half-remembered, half dreamed, all-too-real America Ralph Ellison would recognize and appreciate.

Tags: 8 stars, Evie Shockley, Mike McDonough
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On Dream Street

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

by Melanie Almeder
Tupelo Press 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Sounds Like [?]

almeder I grew up in one of those wealthy seaside towns that endure hoardes of Sunday watercolorists painting quaint things (or turning spare, Yankee light into an expensive tropical languor). These lines from Melanie Almeder’s “Elegy for Grief” sum up my feelings about the atmosphere evoked by Sunday painters:

our best theatrics, the gods, our losses,
refuse to punish us,
but loll among us, abstracted
into other mild states resembling the play of light.

Fear Sunday painters: Almeder is not one of them. She knows the price of beauty’s abstracted grief; her remembered beloved is:

no more than the window there
open to endless kudzu. You are no more
than the crumbling limb of a marble statue, than the pink light
against which swallows stitch untranslatable erratics.

On Dream Street, Almeder’s debut, is a book of transformative lyric poems: each reaches towards a visionary moment. Taking a cue from W. Eugene Smith’s evocative photograph “Dream Street,” the book unfolds a series of well-constructed visions in an often elegiac mood. The trouble with prominently featuring a photograph from a certain artist is that it promises special insight into that artist’s work. By itself, Almeder’s title poem doesn’t tell me anything that isn’t better found in the picture. I don’t get any sense of Smith’s wartime milieu or his troubled, intense life. Almeder’s poem mentions the old Ford in the picture, but I’m pretty sure that’s a 1950 Studebaker Champion Convertible. That fact could carry the emotional weight of the poem by itself, given the nostalgia of a certain generation for Raymond Loewy’s distinctive designs. Almeder’s poem subordinates those details for the sake of a more generalized lyric transformation. The book as a whole ends up doing better service to Smith’s photo than the title poem.

My personal pique aside, Almeder’s poems don’t really need much topicality. Parked off the road at a rakish angle, the car is gone to seed, and is in shadow just enough to leave doubt as the identity of that inimitable bullet nose. Almeder knows that grief ruthlessly strips the specificity of things, but leaves very strong impressions behind. Her poems are not as much an enactment of grief, but a dream of grief, which keeps the mood from being oppressive.

Almeder’s poems work best as a description of a generic landscape, and in cases where the speaker is addressing another person. Even when specific places are mentioned, such as Rangeley Lake, I don’t get much locational magic. There are exceptions to this. The poem about Key West is spot on in mentioning the railroad’s “long want,” which has more resonance the more you know about the quixotic feat of building a railroad across the Florida Keys. There is an insistent music that comes through, as in “Mock Orange,” describing camelia blooms:

it was not God,
but those lithe lord gods themselves,
mocking birds, intoning every other voiced thing
from dirt-slicked limbs of magnolias, until, distracted,
they tipped past the waxed leaves the sun makes silver of;
not God, lord gods; not love, insistence, disregard.

Even if you are deaf to floral content, this is strong music. It’s a neat trick when the rhythm of the line tends to make you pronounce “voiced” as two syllables sans accent mark, and without messing up the normal pronunciation of “waxed.” Some problems crop up, though. The looseness of Almeder’s line encourages the occasional weak repetition as well as stage props such as “truth be told,”“I tell you,” or “after all.” Like Frost supposedly limiting a poet to 10 lifetime uses of the word “beautiful,” I’d like to mandate a limit on the number of times a poet can use the ejaculatory “O.” (Wait. Let me rephrase that.) As an example of both the strength and weakness of her line, in “Ode to Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds,” when describing plovers, she writes:

They were not “plaintive,” I tell you,
they simply peeped like small trucks backing up
and off they went…

Though the mood is generally dreamlike, sharp reality checks often rise up, and her sense of rhythm generally carries us through.

I shouldn’t waste my time quarreling with blurbers, but I have to take issue with Gregory Orr’s absurdly qualified comparison: “Emily Dickinson’s intelligence stretched out over a longer sinuous line that wraps around itself” would not be Emily Dickinson’s intelligence but a parody of it. Whitman’s intelligence chiseled to a thin line might be A.R. Ammons, but the point is it would be a different animal. Almeder’s work develops a rhythm and intelligence all its own, though she does invokes Dickinson’s “thing with feathers” in different ways.

The poem “Women Made of Words” lives up to its Wallace Stevens epigraph, “What should we be without the sexual myth, the human revery or poem of death?” This is an achievement by itself. Here’s a sample:

No more, the torturers: without the sexual myth, they transmogrify
into window cleaners, buffing simulacra of cloud migration.
And then sex withers, drips off like Morning Glory blossoms.
Off drops Helen of Troy, Carthage.
Gone the begotten trench, the bloody stump, pulchritudes of land
bombed into a pocked birdlessness.

I’m not sure I should suggest that Stevens would be a better comparison for the tone and reach of the book, but I’ll try to describe the kinds of transformations that Almeder’s poems work towards. Her vocabulary is sometimes rather baroque. Her music aspires to a certain density. Her knowledge of the natural world, while pervasive, scores more philosophical points than ecological ones. God is constantly mentioned, but always keeps his distance. Her humor is best shown by her sense of grief. “Cure#4: If the Roof of Your Home by Sad Chance is Chosen by Buzzards As a Roost” starts with: “Cancel paper delivery immediately— / they will only beat you to it, eat the news,” and ends with:

They will preen
in the rooftop drains. Your ceiling will begin to leak.
Forget the buckets. Give it at most one week. Move.

Which doesn’t really sound like Stevens at all. Though it traverses some well-known poetic territory, Almeder’s visionary music manages to leave enough actual and rhetorical space for the reader to make their own comparisons.

Tags: 7.5 stars, Melanie Almeder, Mike McDonough, On Dream Street, Tupelo Press
Posted in reviews

Human Scale

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

By Michael Kelleher
BlazeVOX [books] 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

But Mom, He Missed the Kyrie

kelleher_cover In a recent email to Coldfront, Geoffrey Gatza , publisher of BlazeVox Books, took my anguished pan of what I felt was his overwrought book in fine spirit, and I thank him for that. The second BlazeVox entry I’m reviewing shows almost too neat contrasts with the first. Human Scaleby Michael Kelleher is a small book, measuring not quite 4X6. Its contents are pared almost to the point of minimalism, and its cover pictures a solitary figure standing on a ridge of ice, silhouetted against an immense, blue sky. Interior graphics are also pared down, consisting of high contrast monochromes of things like birds on streetlights, an osprey pole and buildings in Buffalo, NY, where Kelleher lives, and runs the “Olson Now” project. He does a good job of using the book’s small size to advantage. The content plays to the book’s disarming size in ways that are ingratiating more than cloying. It’s almost as if Kelleher wants to play the deliberate foil to Charles Olson’s giganticism. This can only be a good thing, as no one can outdo the master at Mythico-Zeusian bloviating, and I say this as a huge Olson fan.

Part of what Kelleher brings to the table is an appealing understatement. When one of my critically savvy friends picked up the book and turned right to “Seasonal Affect,” with its 18 nearly identical four-line two-word stanzas, there was a definite eye-rolling moment. I wanted to defend this book and this poem in context and in general, and I’ll use the opportunity here. The first stanza is:

Cold spring

Cherry blossom

Petals falling

Summer bloom

Since Kelleher wants to describe the unfolding of seasonal change, he starts with a simple two-word phrase, and runs through the permutations of changing one word at a time to a similar-sounding word (“cold” to “hold”, “cherry” to “apple”, “ blossom” to “picking”, “petals” to “nettles”, “falling” to “folding”, and “bloom” to “blue”), until the middle two stanzas are repeated, then changing each word back until the last stanza repeats the first. This stratagem might seem mechanical, but to me it emphasizes the continuity of the natural cycle, and the closeness of each word to its opposite.

Kelleher walks us through other similar changes in this book, more successfully in some than in others. “La Jetee” is a powerful but somewhat predictable permutation of the cycles of world violence. “A Passing Shadow” is a rather heavy-handed take on Plato’s allegory of the cave. More winning for me is “Mon Voyage Around the Lake”, a deliberately flat, macaronic travelogue, which, as Henri Bergson might say, humorously transposes the natural expression of an idea into another key: “Ensuite, je drove to Detroit. Je walked about. /Je looked at buildings. Je rode The People Mover around the eviscerated urban core.” This reminds me of a line in Wallace Stevens’ oft-collected December 2, 1920 letter to Harriet Monroe: “Je vous assure, madame, q’une promenade a travers the soot deposit qu’est Indianapolis est une chose veritablement estrange”, which still delights me, probably because I don’t know any French. My larger point is that this is the Wallace Stevens you want to invite to dinner, rather than the Olympian poet, or the dour insurance executive.

In “Nachtmusik”, Kelleher writes a miniature missal for the kind of ecological, spiritual poetics encouraged by Olson. The first stanza explains the title phrase:

Noir, noir,
The night has come,

The human scale
Is tipped, the rut,

The groove, the frame
Of mind forming

Out of themselves
Themselves.

This reads like a refrain. In fact, the poem will end with “What that love// Might mean, omen/ After omen, amen.” This prayer yearns for “Water, light, earth/ & stars” and a school where he can “learn/ /To read these/ Beautiful warnings.” The disarming sincerity displayed here is remarkable for its humility, and warms cobwebbed cockles in my heart that haven’t been swept since my Confirmation. Kelleher makes this risky move work because of the relative subtlety of the book’s My First Missal-like size and structure, the careful escalation of the explicitness of his refrains, and the correspondingly tough, semi-surrealistic takes on Cuba and Picasso’s Guernica that frame the collection, protecting it like the rind of a handmade cheese, making it suitable for export and rough handling. I should close on that note. Don’t let my liturgical nostalgia deter you from this book.

Tags: 6.5 stars, BlazeVOX Books, Michael Kelleher, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews

New Poets | Short Books

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

Edited by Marvin Bell
Featuring Boyd Benson, Gwendolyn Cash & Lisa Galloway
Lost Horse Press 2007
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Getting There

bell cover Lost Horse Press has a new annual series, each edition a book featuring three emerging northwestern poets chosen by the unflappable Marvin Bell. This review promises fun for all, because you get three reviews for the price of one.

Lost Horse’s no-frills packaging is welcome, particularly the lack of blurbs on the back. The short prose statements by the writers themselves do a good job of introducing their work. The implication is that these poets are writing for themselves, not for the trade, promising a freshness of outlook—as Bell puts it in his introduction, “the poetry in poetry.”

So if you remove the usual trappings and come-ons, what do you have left as a hook? Since all three poets are from the northwest, there is a tendency to downplay the 800-pound gorilla in the room. The regional poet label can all too easily limit the reception of a writer’s work; but at the same time geography, however personal, is a tremendous hook, especially if the poet is not well known. Yet even without editorial cartography, readers still have their own inscrutable quirks and expectations, and the more I think about it, the usual blurbage might serve the function of flattering the reader into putting aside their most peevish peeves, at least until they purchase the book.

Gwendolyn Cash’s long poem “Acts of Contrition” brought up a few of my own. One: made up words or variations of real ones that are too close to the actual word. We know what the word transcripted means, but what’s wrong with the actual word transcribed? If you are going to “ring your little prophecy by the neck,” I can’t help but suspect a typo, even if the word “jingle” is winking in the vicinity. That aside, the poem is a bitchy fairy tale about her mother; it’s filled with poisoned blood and devils, dreams of dead fathers and loaded guns, and it can’t quite decide whether it wants to be serious or not, while holding down several wonderful lines like, “conjure me a crypt, witch, and I will call it Forgiveness.”

Another one: the speaker confesses a habit of “breaking everything into pieces” and “carrying them in a velvet bag.” We can guess the intention, but the word “everything” creates unintended distractions, as it allows me to think of another poem in which a speaker going through a messy divorce says, “so you want half of everything: fine,” then takes a chain saw to the piano. That’s gotta be a really big velvet bag.

With all this nitpicking, I haven’t emphasized Cash’s “Bluegrass”, one of my favorites in the book. It evokes a landscape that is pastoral, casually ugly, and memorably real, like the economically depressed zones that often lie just outside the borders of showcase national parks—zones with junked cars and gas stations, with welfare offices right by the river, where one can easily find a thicket of blueberries and wildflowers. It’s the usual river of life metaphor, but nicely done. Gwendolyn Cash’s introduction mentions Carolyn Forché, and she uses an epigraph from Richard Siken. There’s a cool authorial blurb right there! It tells me that for this author, this is the company she’d like to keep.

Boyd Benson’s introduction mentions Emily “Dickenson” (unfortunately misspelled) as the company that “the little old lady” in his heart would like to keep. The tenor of the note suggests that he appreciates her poems as surreal miniatures, parables of the contained wildness of (human) nature. Benson’s poems are miniatures. They want to have a very light touch, and repay a word-by-word reading, with their short lines and juxtaposition of childlike and adult details. Here’s the end of “The schoolyard”:

You carried a map
of yourself and pointed
shyly to each county line

coal mining country,
the backbone of industry,
and to the flashlight on your hat.

A mouse began to spin
from door to door
across the schoolyard

as we estimated how many
Toodaloos it might take
to get us somewhere.

That mouse could be doing so much more work here! I am left wondering about the effect of the word “toodaloos” in any poem. Could work, but doesn’t here. The balance of silly and magical would work better if the language took itself more seriously by being more closely pared. In another poem, an interesting image is stranded by unnecessary vagueness:

There were many tall trees
and likewise crow obscenities
beneath them. I did not
stop. They did not see me.

“Many” and “likewise” do nothing here. The “crow obscenities” need a stronger verb like “scrawled beneath them,” even at the risk of corniness; and did the trees not see the speaker or the crows? I’m not harping on grammar as much as asking which one would be more interesting. It’s not a matter of naturalistic fidelity, but of giving the metaphors the best chance to work.

Lisa Galloway admits in her introduction that she writes “ovaries out,” in quest of psychological shock. Her work has the riskiest subject matter of the three. Her freewheeling rhythms can be exhilarating, partly because she’s likely to lead you to a dead end, something poets should not be afraid to do. A standout rhythmically is “Jam on the Exit Ramp”, which describes the speaker “driving away from but closer to” a lover. The poem is filled with starts and stops that risk being dead ends, and places where the comparisons are pushed too hard in context:

Right now, a flashing four way socks me
like the metaphor in your words:
The winter cap hanging on the coat-rack
at our diner looks like an unwrapped condom.

In the context, the strategy works, but warning signs abound. Later in the selection we get a sense that the speaker, while enjoying the ride, is struggling to find larger significances in her escapades. The poem about the dildo doesn’t go much farther than slapstick humor. Certain tendencies give Galloway away. Describing the metallic taste of blood is an absolutely great and vivid detail, but when it is used multiple times in a short collection, it suggests that the writer is pressing this detail for more than it’s worth. I can’t give it the status of Proust’s madeleine or Richard Siken’s obsessions yet. Her craft needs more honing.

“Acquisition vs. Creation,” a poem about coming home for Christmas to her adoptive family is quieter but stronger than most. Galloway evokes the sense of outsideness felt by many adoptees: “I come home at Christmas to observe your religion.” The speaker is “paraded through the house” like she is her own third person until “ I confront an altar to myself./ Twenty… pictures perched on a chest of drawers/… a rite of passage… announcing/ only those who accept your daughter/ can pass”. The distance from her feelings is absolutely relevant, and more effective than if the emotional struggle were played up in her usual go-for-broke fashion.

Overall the collection plays well to the anti-New York buzz crowd, but has a ways to go to make anybody forget the passing of Poetry Northwest.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Boyd Benson, Gwendolyn Cash, Lisa Galloway, Marvin Bell, Mike McDonough
Posted in reviews