Posts Tagged ‘PJ Gallo’

Essentials: Marianne Moore’s ‘Observations’

Monday, September 19th, 2011

Observations by Marianne Moore

The Dial Press 1925

“supertadpoles of expression”

Often undermining “plain American speech which cats and dogs can read,” Marianne Moore’s modernism is deeply complex and persistently beautiful, and Observations is possibly the best and definitely the least adulterated example of her exotic genius.  Moore’s American debut was also the first collection selected, edited and approved by Moore herself. It promptly received the Dial Award and subsequent acclaim.  Among the many truly great poems found in Observations is her mind-bending “An Octopus,” her early extended version of “Poetry,” and “Marriage,” a rumination on the subject that characteristically bounds from convolutedly prosaic (“This institution / perhaps one should say enterprise / out of respect for which / one says one need not change one’s mind / about a thing one has believed in”) to consonantal (“One must not call him ruffian / nor friction a calamity / the fight to be affectionate”) to humorously metrical (“He says, ‘What monarch would not blush / to have a wife / with hair like a shaving-brush’”).  Observations is a circus of a book, and Moore is its ringleader—sometimes smirking, sometimes serious, but somehow turning hippopotamuses, elephants, zebras, and octopuses into an important and inherent part of the American idiom, and despite H.D.’s early opinion of Moore as an anachronism, nearly every poem in Observations warrants mention, testifying to the unrelenting timeliness of Marianne Moore’s originality.

–PJ Gallo

Find Observations here and in Becoming Marianne Moore.

See all essentials.

PJ Gallo lives in Durham, North Carolina. His poems have recently appeared in Bat City Review, H_NGM_N, Independent Weekly, Roanoke Review and elsewhere. He is a co-editor of the weekly online poetry journal LEVELER.

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chap nook 4: Waite, Liening, Casey-Whiteman

Monday, June 6th, 2011

the lake has no saint, Stacey Waite (Tupelo Press, 2010)


Stacey Waite’s loose mosaic of (mostly) prose poems, the lake has no saint, chronicles its speaker’s gradual and variable understanding of self and gender. The title of every poem in the collection begins with the word “when” (i.e. “when praying for gender,” “when in spring the self pity”), so although the poems describe a personal history, they take on a quality of advice gleaned from a specific past but meant for a collective future.

The first half of the chapbook is colored by its hesitant memories of childhood. In “when the chalk of androgyny,” the speaker recounts, “there was always something about the public bathroom doors, always the chalk of androgyny sticking in my throat as i’d walk towards the women’s room with my mother.” The unpleasantness of this sensation—and the speaker’s subsequent inability to urinate—is assuaged by the speaker’s mother singing, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” It is a painful story, but it is touching. This formula is characteristic of the chapbook’s most important idea—that humiliation, confusion, and horror can be tempered by love.

The book’s latter half largely abandons childhood memories to gather around the speaker’s unnamed lover. Thematically, Waite still takes interest in the ways some relationships can alleviate the pain of others. Late in the book, the speaker addresses this passage to the lover:

then you say to me it is not your fault that your mother is lonely. it is moving into winter. long highway, your daughter asleep in the backseat. you are driving toward what’s left of ohio’s fields.

We can’t know whether they are driving toward or away from the speaker’s mother, but it’s clear the speaker’s “lover” has been absorbed by the same space in which a mother sang her diuretic rendition of a John Denver song. the lake has no saint pulls most of its strength from relationships, so when Waite’s language gets slippery, or wriggles out of perfect coherence, it is because relationships—even without the speaker’s autonomous piecing together of a gender identity—are slippery, wriggling, incoherent things.

–PJ Gallo

*

Oblivion, More, Brad Liening (H_NGM_N Bks, 2010)

Brad Liening’s oblivion, more opens with a seemingly casual disdain for poetic language (“I can already tell this won’t end well, / struggling in the belly of a whale.”) The words are aggressive, and sometimes too self-possessed, as he writes about robots, all-consuming fire, and the apocalypse. But the opening poems are there to set up the groundwork for a well-composed cycle of poetry. The reader is slowly exposed to the speaker’s doubt and vulnerability; in “Oblivion, More,” he thinks about bravery:

I don’t know
if this means
I don’t understand
what it means
to be brave or
if there’s bigger bravery
we have yet to tap into.

Even though this poem is highly personal, it introduces a broader hope for humanity that is all but crushed out in the opening poems. There are great lines that fit into his “sci-fi is reality” apocalyptic, but also prove an undercurrent of compassion (if you loved Wall-E, you might love the line “The robot turns its face to the sun”). As the poems progress, Liening also moves toward the abstract and creates a distinct sense of unwinding. The crushing images of apocalypse that open that book are too heavy to maintain, and there is a well-directed shift to impressions and a more personal imagery. Compared to the fire and robots that open the book, the poems at the end might even be said to be sweet:

You weren’t supposed to be there

but the moon was so big

and for a second

it was like all those fish

were just waiting there to say hey.

(Poem)

Because of the poet’s heavy hand and heavy brow, it may at first be easy to misjudge this intelligent and human set of poems.

–Matt Soucy

**

Lure,  Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman (Poetry Society of America 2009)

The speakers of Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman’s Lure are intimately familiar with the body:  how it performs and contorts, how it comes to stand for the self. Lure–Arthur Sze’s selection for the Poetry Society of America’s 2009 Chapbook series–begins as a performance: “The curtain lifts without a sound,” and the speaker asks, “Where should the eyes go first?” In “Strange Hope” and other poems, Lure’s speakers focus on the figures of typically female performers. She is often an artist—dancers Marie Taglioni, her protégée Emma Livry; painter Frida Kahlo—or, as with Patience Mouffett, the subject of art (“Little Miss Muffett”). But she is also another type of performer—a “Patient”  whose behavior is detailed by a cold, objective observer, as in the three “Case Study” poems. (Perhaps the patient is actually Patience Mouffett, whose father tried to cure her ailments with various insects thought to have curing properties.)

Throughout Lure, human, insect and animal bodies curl up and arch over (“A mouse curled up inside of me;” “the man with the turtle/posture, each step a careful roll / of the foot”) as much as they fold sharply (“…I can fold myself / into clean origami shapes”; “she folded into herself like an envelope / when touched”). Through such careful attention to images of the body, Casey-Whiteman explores the complicated nature of appeal and attraction or the multiple facets of what it means to lure or be lured, to be a lure and to be alluring. While the poems that open and close the collection effectively entice and reward readers, those in the middle either lilt or teeter in line or language. When the leap is long or the figure ambitious, the presence of banal verbs (“to be” forms particularly) dulls its effect. Readers will prefer the start and end of Lure, where Casey-Whitman’s language is sharp, her poetic leaps as natural as the figures on which they focus.

–Roxanne Banks Malia

***

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Like a Sea

Friday, July 16th, 2010

by Samuel Amadon
University of  Iowa Press 2010
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

8_5

“each country has made these phrases for / us”

amadon like a sea coverSamuel Amadon’s new book, Like a Sea, is like a sea in that, when you are floating out the middle of it, you have no idea where you are.  It is also like a sea in that nothing but a sea is really like a sea.  The book’s twisted intelligibility comes together over pieces of language that are not strictly supported by meaning or uninterrupted relay of information.  It is easy to trip over the big, heavy things Amadon hides amid his poems’ scrambled logic.  The poems obsess over the limits of language, moving from clarity into complicated washouts of prepositions, copulae and pronouns.  They do plenty of philosophizing.  “Each H,” a series of poems that provides a strong, philosophical skeleton for the book, is a premiere example of the book’s overarching mode.  “Each H (IX),” for instance, begins with the simple first line, “That it could sound like him.”  The speaker then folds the line under itself with, “That it could sound like him / sounding like he knew / what he sounded like.”  By the final stanzas of the short poem, we are racing to keep up; it disintegrates into ambiguity:

we all sounded saying that
was it, but that was it
again, and then wasn’t this more

it anyway, or just it with more
people, more to say
that it could sound like people.

Because the speaker begins clearly, it is easy to imagine the rest of the poem as an intricate word puzzle.  The “it” and “that” and “was” are ordered so they lose their original points of reference.  The words become less specific, opening them wide for interpretation.  The idea that these two, three, and four letter words might veil some earth-shattering revelation is itself a revelation.  There are underlying forces—unidentifiable forces—that push all the components of language together into its primary use as a communicative tool.  The poem implies that language can seem to make perfect sense without the burden of meaning. 

This implication brings to mind a telling adage that Wallace Stevens, whose influence is made explicit through an epigraph, slipped into a short essay defending the artistry of one of Marianne Moore’s poems: “Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing.”  It is tough to know what Stevens meant by “aspect.”  One suspects it refers to a kind of aura of connotative and denotative meaning that exists around very real, hard things.  The ambiguousness of some of Amadon’s poetry fulfills this definition.  But applied strictly to Amadon’s book, “aspect” might mean something like “component.”  In the middle of “Cognitive Burr,” the effect is kaleidoscopic:

                                                 This is the scene for the less-

than-casual gardener. The gardener of import
is not the gardener of intrigue
which is why we have levels rewarding the non-

native English speaker works for a mapmaker
who strikes that those are not
the phrases I would use cultural to assume

each country has made these phrases for
us.

The effect is kaleidoscopic because the poem breaks the world into disconnected bits of language (words, phrases, idioms, points of view), holds these bits up against one another, and argues which is the purer, prevailing thought.  It is also kaleidoscopic because it fluidly forces those components back together into something fractured but softened, something that avoids simple representations of time and space but takes on an “aspect” of reality.  When the speaker in “Cognitive Burr” explains “why we have levels rewarding the non- / native English speaker,” we can’t be sure what he means by levels or by rewards.  We can be sure that some kind of hierarchy exists—one that seems to parallel the hierarchy inherent in an economy.  We are given a bit more guidance with the words “import” and “strike.”  Ideas about money, the economy, and personal relationships hover here, suspending the pressure each exerts on the other.  The lines are like individual thoughts pulled from a collective consciousness; the complexity of the relationship between these thoughts and the finiteness of language allows the poems to seem bursting with meaning.

From its opening line, “I could not sound like anyone but me,” Like a Sea is possessed by its fascination with the limits imposed on communication by the concept of “voice.”  The voice Amadon lends his speakers is just one more restrictive container of thought and emotion.  It is one more thing his speakers must overcome to communicate clearly.  In most cases, the poems exemplify these constraining elements of voice, but there is a definite, self-aware desire to explain these limitations.  In “Like an Evening,” Amadon’s speaker makes a fumbling attempt to characterize his own awareness:

                       I could go several ways
with how best to put everything
should come together is no longer available
now that I am aware I govern
what makes what I govern
differ not from how it must seem

In a book of poems that takes every opportunity to shrug off intelligibility, moments like this are attractive.  But even when communication is intended, language can prove a flimsy system.  It takes much effort to understand how the “govern[ing]” is occurring here, though the lines are likely worded in the clearest possible language.  Parsing out the kind of reflection found in “Like an Evening” (and elsewhere) is still not easy, and Amadon has made the distinct decision to avoid clear-cut, nostalgic adventures in aphorism.  In avoiding making perfect sense in perfect syntactic units, the big emotions, the ones that make us cry or punch people in bars, have been set aside.  By forgoing manipulation of the big emotions in favor of initiating nervous laughter or confusion, Amadon avoids simplification and approaches a portrait that seems much closer to the emotional and intellectual environment in which we–always a little claustrophobic and scatterbrained–live our lives.

*

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Sleepers’ Republic

Wednesday, November 25th, 2009

by David Gruber
Astrophil Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

7

The World Outside

gruber coverNo matter how deliberately we arrange language, certain states of mind defy our attempts to freeze them into poems.  David Gruber’s Sleepers’ Republic is a book of tightly composed, rhythmic dreams, and like all dreams, they are undermined by their translation into English.  They shift through geography and time as dreams do.  They turn suddenly forbidding where they were once joyous.  They slip into and out of coherence.  But necessarily, the words his speakers choose are the words used to describe a dream, not the dream itself, and the best poems in Sleepers’ Republic faintly acknowledge that even a dream world is limited by language.  In the first stanza of “Approved Methods,” Gruber reveals one of the ways he will attempt to recreate the experience of dreaming:

Strange wedding music, savage
echo against the brass door
a coughing
an interruption
that slid through the water
where we hung.

Here, Gruber presents a set of disconnected images that seem uniquely compatible with one another.  It is hard to place why “wedding music” and “brass door” make such an appropriate pair, but together they become a foundation for the tiny universe of the poem.  The poems are held together with a recognizable Lynchian logic, though even in his most acclaimed and recognizable dream sequences, David Lynch can only capture the spirit of dreaming.  While Gruber’s poems are less superficially provocative than Lynch’s sequences, like Lynch, Gruber is restricted to conjuring the spirit of dreaming.  Interestingly though, he discloses the impossibility of such perfection.  Sometimes this acknowledgement is explicit, as in “No vocabulary is enough / to catalogue your geography,” and sometimes it is subtle.  The first several stanzas of “Prelude in a Time of War” dither over where to begin:

In the queen’s closet, with no mirror:
lavender soap, open window, the scent
of oranges and sky beginning to blue.

Or: a broken pane of glass
held together with masking tape.
Bacon frying down below.
Photographs pinned to the wall.

Or: the worm tunnels through our guts,
the moth settles in our nostrils.

Gruber’s speaker cannot decide which image is best, and when he makes broad, cinematic cuts from image to image to image, he admits the failure of all three.  None is a perfect beginning, and the failure of language begets the failure of dreaming. 

Though his poems arise out of a sleepers’ republic, they are a way for Gruber to reckon with the real world’s troubles.  His speakers’ inability to effectively construct their dream-like existence becomes their failure to effectively contend with real sociological, political, emotional and intellectual concerns.  In one moment of such concern, Gruber imagines a glossing-over of agriculture, a deeply necessary pursuit, with media-induced artificiality:

There are field and dreams about wild herd. Once the clover is gathered the hay is baled and rolled. There are cartoons of these things: the soiled colors that overtake knowledge and replace the organs under flesh with a composite of image and speculation. Every eye an iris, all the leaves dampened by snow dissolve in their cinema.

In moments like this, it becomes clear that Gruber’s speakers are not hiding behind dream logic, but that they have been forced behind it.  The “cartooning” of the landscape is the speaker’s way of reaching out from behind the veil of the dreaming and into a world where “cartoons” have specific implications.  Of course all language has specific implications, and the world of the dream, rooted in the subconscious of real people, is a negative image of the world outside the dream.  Through a process of reverse-engineering (i.e. reading), the stilted goings-on of the poems’ dreams appear increasingly representative of the real world, and the speaker’s prohibition from proactively responding to a very real, very important reality depict a common, contemporary feeling of individual helplessness.

If dreaming is an apt half-metaphor for contemporary life, any confrontation of the world’s violence (as made unconfrontable by distance or time) is restricted to waking and describing the dream.  If the dream is indescribable, the world eludes consequential influence from the individual.  In “Lisbon,” Gruber writes, “Once the softest word made the world tremble / […] but it came that we wrote loud / large on land and sky.”  The speaker here is privy to the ineffectuality of language because, unlike in the past, language has little manifest effect on the world outside the poem.  The speaker is caged by the way the world demands certain things from language.  One poem, “Film: Butterfly Oeuvre,” is stuck pretending to be a film.  Another, “Instructions for Antigone,” is stuck pretending to be stage directions.  Even the emotional realities of many of Gruber’s poems cannot avoid infiltration by the bits of premade language that float overbearingly around in contemporary speech.  In “Ingathering of the Exiles,” Gruber writes “Satellite passes you to me again, a plea from / outside my service area.”  That the emotional reality of the poem is supported by the phrase “service area” makes great sense, as if amid many attempts to cut through language toward truth, Gruber takes language back and stabs deeply and momentarily at those things that keep us contained in our dreams.  Even where no art is perfectly accurate, we still continue to try, and when the world becomes “like a magazine forgotten / on a chair, then reupholstered,” it is not only forgotten, but also noticed again.

*

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Spy Poem

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

by Samuel Amadon
Projective Industries 2009
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

8

 ”we understand goats wholesale”

amadonspySamuel Amadon’s latest chapbook, Spy Poem, exudes a quality of overhearing.  Its jarring, syllabic headspace, informed by observations that are mightily susceptible to interruption and misinterpretation, impresses both the elusive hum of a single conversation in a noisy room and the open quiet that characterizes an erasure.  Such is the smartly executed oxymoron of Spy Poem: to communicate clearly the unclear.

The notion of espionage is a nearly perfect apparatus to expound the ways language can pop in and out of perceivable meaning (see John Hollander’s Reflections on Espionage).  Theoretically (or cinematically), espionage employs all of language’s potential for overhearing, underhearing, interpretation, and misinterpretation.  In the latter half of one early stanza, Amadon makes the poem’s procedure clear: however hard we listen to what his speaker says, we will not hear what his speaker means:

 but by most accounts this conversation

             does not exist

                          as he orders

 coats we understand goats wholesale

Here, Amadon’s speaker steps from behind a curtain of misinformation. The stanza is a rare moment of self-consciousness that serves as a clear guide to the poem’s intentions.  But even as his speaker necessarily understands that his perceptions may be misguided, Amadon avoids being trapped by second-hand philosophy.  Instead his speaker is soaked directly back into the dismembered swirl of the poem with the lines of the following stanza, “now close the door now ice cubes or / paneling now that kind of light,” and the very same circumstances that keep the speaker aloof to the truth hold the reader from full comprehension.  Amadon hijacks a direct and effective method of instruction: he tells us what he is going to do, and then he does it. 

To the same effect, where the poem’s speaker surely finds the distinction between “coats” and “goats” an important one, the implications of the miscommunication are withheld.  For a reader, this bit of misinformation floats around without particular distinction, and even if the moment did suggest some sort of philosophical or emotional message, it would be impossible to know whether such an inference should be set in motion by “coats” or “goats.”  Spy Poem warns against the stilted sort of connective tissues a reader might tack on to the poem by keeping the success or failure of their application an impossible issue.

In the aforementioned reentry, the first line’s symmetrical meter and internal rhyme (“now close the door now ice cubes or”) butts against the weaker meter of the following line, but the two lines remain connected by a third repetition of “now,” and they typify the various ways in which Amadon’s attention to sound helps hold his poem’s disjunctive lines together.  This attention to sound also occurs in a broader way, keeping the beginning, middle, and end of the poem bound by common language.  In another early stanza, what seems a non-sequitur, “a boy the kid he means the kid,” recurs two stanzas later as “boy does he mean the kid he means.”  Another variation occurs in the final pages of the chapbook wherein Amadon writes, “kid means boy the kid means back to.”  Each line is a nuanced address to multiplicity of meaning, and together they keep the poem moored to its themes throughout.  That the lines are syllabically identical is no mistake, as they are part of larger syllabic structure that emphasizes their similarity while highlighting the alterations they contain.

The poem’s discontinuity initially and falsely conveys spontaneity and improvisation, which seems appropriate when considering its imposed urge towards miscommunication.  But, as mentioned, Spy Poem adheres to a strict set of syllabic guidelines (with some flexibility allowed for ambiguously pronounced words like “Israel” and “realizing”).  The syllable count for the seven lines of each stanza—correspondingly eight, eight, six, ten, four, four, and eight—extends the poem’s reliance on repetition with subtle limerick-like pacing.  The shorter third line and more fully truncated fifth and sixth lines turn each stanza into a visual and aural funnel that widens again with each final line.  The resulting syllabic pattern pushes the poem along by mirroring the peaks and troughs of narrative, and more importantly draws attention to the poem’s unifying rhythm and sound, oblique in an architectural way, illuminating particular bits of space through certain-shaped windows.

Because of the jerky irregularity of its syllabic structure and the unreliable, flighty voice of its speaker, Spy Poem’s lines approach a parity of importance, wherein no line seems truer than any other.  This is the natural result of being continually misled; lies breed comprehensive mistrust.  Thus even as lines perplex and clarify in turns, they all pretend themselves an important point.  Take a representative stanza:

             or and again with whom begin

                          who’s there holding himself like he’s

                          no better than right where

 right is a simple alternative to

              what makes one good

                           yes yes that one

 who seems as if he wasn’t aware

There is more than a vague connection between some of the lines (the “one” in the sixth line seems to refer to the “who” of the seventh, the “right” in the fourth might refer to the “what” of the fifth), but even when the literal logic of the stanza is clear, its mathematical logic cuts each line abruptly away from the former.  Here, this is most evident in the connection between the first line and the rest of the stanza; the connection is thematic and almost inexpressible in its ambiguity.  The poem is dosed heavily with these mysterious disconnections which improbably provide another cord of cohesion.  This cohesion serves to undermine a different sort of cohesion, in which words cohere into larger, more connotatively rich divisions of comprehensible language.  When these divisions are separated from each other, they lose their designations as phrases, and occupy an attractive world of autonomy.  In its curving continually away from comprehension, Spy Poem is like one of its lonelier lines, mingling with order, but holding fast to its idiosyncrasies.

*

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Begin Anywhere

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

by Frank Giampetro
Alice James Books 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

5_5

Frankly

giampetro coverFrank Giampietro’s Begin Anywhere is, above all, an exercise in self-consciousness, self-interest, self-indulgence and a number of other self-nouns sprung from the same sort of goofy egotism allowed in children. That said, his poems can be compelling insofar as they remain wide-eyed explorations of their invariable and stylized subject, Frank Giampietro. When Giampietro resists indulging in his persona, his speakers’ self-interest can be an effective representation of the way the self splinters among the various parts of our daily lives. More often, though, he just seems like he can’t help himself.

On one hand, an uncharacteristically rhymed sonnet like “Frankstory” (sidenote: other titles that include the poet’s first name are “Frank Giampietro, Poet,” “Frankie the Haggler,” and “Anti-Ekfrankcis”) takes on an interesting conceptual structure wherein one man’s sense of his own history is placed in the context of global history which is then placed inside another man’s sense of his own history. The result is three historical moments presented like a set of Matryoshka dolls, and it is unclear whether the speaker’s personal history is to be thought the most important or the least. The method borders selflessness but implies that history cannot exist if not for its iteration in the minds of living people. On the other hand, a poem like “Me Spy with My Little Eye” might more accurately represent the collection’s single-faceted obsession with the self—all while chanting a childlike me, me, me:

Me and no more fifty-gallon fish tank.
Me in my new hundred-dollar shoes
and my, if me don’t cut my hair just so
my head looks huge.
Me, my head is huge.

Everything exists in the poem because of the speaker, which makes some obvious philosophical sense. Giampietro wisely avoids philosophy, but still, his hybrid baby-talk and the afterthought “you” introduced in the final three lines of the poem amount to a silly sort of manipulation—the kind used to uphold rules in a children’s game. Giampietro concludes, “You’re so smart / and so cool, but I freakin’ spy you.”

Most of the poems in the collection are not so syntactically inventive or formally organized—most are colloquial and observational. The connection is strong, and one of Giampietro’s more derivative modes is to present a series of invariably self-referential statements tied together with an ambiguous title such as “Another Poem Scoring 4.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test” or “Confessional Poem #783.” The first few lines of the latter poem test the limits of the style with representative humor:

I have dried my hands on my dog.
I have stolen the first line of this poem
from a TV commercial
for beer. I have used a cock ring.
I fear the art teacher at the school where I work
will use this knowledge against me someday.

The poem ends strongly, with the speaker’s opinion of himself projected imaginatively through his son. The final lines, “if my heart doesn’t give out too soon / my boy will pity me,” deflate the supposed importance of what comes before and subtly recognize a sad quietness in the gaps between the speaker’s yells. Nevertheless, these poems rely on their becoming fresher and fresher with each incoming line—a technique that, even when done successfully, can feel like a tedious, meandering search for the next great self-oriented shock.

Evident in those same early lines of “Confessional Poem #783” is another of Giampietro’s methods, namely a persistent self-consciousness. “Dear J, I Patched This up Instead of That One I Promised About Simone Weil” is the most obvious of such poems, and Giampietro doesn’t stop with the title. In it, he writes, “‘After Eating an Apple Core and All, While Riding in my Car’ / is what this poem was going to be called.” Of course, the poem does end up largely about Simone Weil, highlighting the one-dimensional strangeness of being told what not to expect but expecting it anyway. To say a poem would have been about Simone Weil or could have been a villanelle or hasn’t fulfilled any number of alternate possibilities is to be bland and obvious, but also means a recognition that circumstances necessarily external to the poem have interfered with its purpose—and that the self or the speaker or Frank Giampietro, despite the precedence any of them takes, does not exist without something gleaned from the rest of the world.

The title poem may be the best of such poems. The poem reveals the physical and emotional history of a woman’s death, but it does so in very distinct, well-paced steps. Halfway through the poem, after the speaker’s father has mysteriously thrown a shotgun into a lake, Giampietro reveals the cause of death, and his speaker begins his appropriate unraveling:

Or I could begin after the splash, with the ducks
flying back to the bread. Or ten minutes earlier
with my father not consoling, but wanting to console
my half-sister as she stands there, a shadow’s length
from the doorway watching him hold
what’s left of his first wife. Of course I could begin
with his wife shooting herself
in my half-sister’s abandoned playhouse.

The poem begins again several times before and after these lines, and it works largely because it reluctantly backgrounds its self-consciousness in the face of a visceral, emotionally-charged incident. It also works because the poem’s self-conscious refrain and the inherent emotionality of the subject meld successfully into a sad stutter, as if the speaker must continue to begin the story because he is afraid the end of his story will really be the end.

Such human moments make it difficult to take a hard line on Begin Anywhere. It would be easy to find fault with the overstated, colloquial comedy of many of Frank Giampietro’s poems, but there is an endearing clumsiness about his speakers, as if they are forever under threat of tripping on their shoelaces or drinking too much wine at their in-laws’. Still, Giampietro gives himself a starring role in the collection, and like most character actors, his better work is done in bit parts.

*

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Perpetual Care

Monday, April 6th, 2009

by Katie Cappello
Elixir Press 2009
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

7.5

 Creeping

cappello coverKatie Cappello’s debut, Perpetual Care, is lit in hard light and shot with a high-contrast filter.  Her book arrives out of a long tradition of painting the south grotesque—wherein darks are very dark, and lights are mostly overwhelmed—all of which might be tedious and disheartening if not for the arresting importance Cappello grants her poetry’s ugliness.  Still, defying the tropes of the grotesque as it applies to the American south can be impossible without the exclusion of obvious symbols, particularly in a book with such necessarily regional scope. 

Cappello’s poems take place across the deep, gulf coastal south, and on the interstates and rails that connect those varying places, but they mostly take place in a New Orleans ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and in slow repair.  Cappello signifies her book’s cultural and geographical locale through readymade signifiers—magnolias, bottle trees, Dixie beer, etc. —that establish both the speaker and reader as observers who notice the same glimmer of novelty in an alien landscape and bestow a mythical quality upon it.  But Cappello transcends the myth of the south by decorating her poems ornately enough with image to turn her signifiers into side notes. 

These poems do not escape their region, but they do wish to reorganize it a bit, so Cappello paints surreal colors over and around her more obvious evocations of the south.  The effect is largely positive and reminiscent of the hypnotizing images of clowns and walruses drawn over live action dancers in Max Fleischer’s Talkartoons (see one dancing walrus here at 4:30); something familiar wears a very strange mask in these poems, but great presentation overpowers the urge to expose.  One haunting image in the poem “Crescent Express” illustrates this technique, contorting what might be familiar: 

 This child, the size of a fist,
 is covered in black grit.
 I clean him off.  He’s hungry.
 I wrap him carefully in a clean shirt.
 I’m sure there are others here—
 these tired, dusty passengers—
 wonder why I take such care
 with such a dirty little thing—
 they don’t know how long
 I’ve carried him, his black head
 a hole between by breasts.

The child in the first two lines of this stanza introduces one of the recurring images in Perpetual Care, a dirty baby or, extrapolated, innocence gone awry.  If such images are themselves heavy-handed or obvious, they are excellently executed.  The baby in this poem feels pulled directly from our stock of horrid images of childhood starvation and squalor, photographs like Kevin Carter’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner. The poems don’t have the same emotional heft as such a photograph, but the speaker’s mothering is a response to such brutal imagery.  The stanza exemplifies the way Cappello’s poems can operate with a sporadic knowledge of what they conjure. The first poem in the collection, “Twentieth Century Genesis,” starts the book equally unsubtly, but with its obviousness Cappello turns the key to the rest of the collection.  Midway through the poem, a girl gives birth to an unmistakably phallic monster: 

 The snake slid out, pale pink 
 like the insides of organs.
 When she put her legs together
 she counted fifty tiny razors
 cutting her fifty times.

While the birth of her pink snake alludes to a violence perhaps inherent in sexual connection, it also conjures intestines or other viscera, or because at this point in the poem the girl has been impregnated by space aliens (amidst the darkness of Cappello’s universe, there is a welcome trace of dark humor), and the pink snake may simply be one of the aliens in its larval stage.  Neither gender conflict nor violent space alien births are particularly fresh ideas, but from the contorted pairing of their corresponding images emerges a skin-crawling resonance, and in the obvious correlative ways, ugliness becomes as important as beauty.

With this first poem, Cappello opens the door to her world of creeping, crawling things—locusts, bats, cockroaches, silverfish, mealworms, snakes—by birthing them literally from her initial poem, and from this creation her poems develop into their sprawling, grotesque province.  At times, Cappello relies too heavily on her images, and they can overshadow her poetry.  In “Lament for a Wart,” one of a series of laments in the book’s final section, she begins, “When you left, a wart appeared / wrapped in pubic hair.”  The vulgarity of this original image sets a precedent for the poem that is never realized.  Still, these laments are some of the strongest poems in the batch.  They are appropriately darkened by the helplessness her speakers feel, and they are less forthright and accusatory than we might expect a series of explicitly post-Katrina poems to be.  Instead, these laments express a familiarity with what once existed and the eeriness of remembering what was never supposed to disappear.

One of the most interesting of the book’s preoccupations is travel.  There is a preponderance of movement, primarily by car, that imparts her speakers’ desire for travel but also the impotence of geographical escape.  Her speakers can presumably move freely around the country, but Cappello fixes them to their region.  In the pairing of the aforementioned “Crescent Express” and the poem that follows, “Cabin Swimming,” she draws a subtle parallel between driving and swimming.  Though “Cabin Swimming” is not explicitly about swimming, it invokes the entrapment necessary to swimming—more clearly, the necessity of water, or sweat in this poem’s case, to the existence of a swimmer.  In the preceding poem “Crescent Express,” which places its speaker on the train of its title, is more explicit about the impossibility of genuine escape: 

                     The Express
 is merciless, will leave me
 if I disembark—no chance
 to re-board down the line.

The pairing of “Crescent Express” and “Cabin Swimming” is indicative of the rare cohesion Cappello creates even between the most disparate poems which, to be less reductive, stir forays to Coachella and the Philippines into the Creole she cooks up.  Her laments are a compelling capstone to the collection, treating the irreversibility of the destruction of New Orleans with subtlety and astonishment.  Her poems are collectively enchanted and haunted by tangible ghosts, but thankfully she doesn’t make the easy mistake of treating the south as America’s backwoods haunted house.  She turns an ordinary gothic representation of the region into a smoky, whiskey-breathed realm full of requisite danger, but also full of magic.

*

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Invitation to a Secret Feast

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

by Joumana Haddad
Tupelo Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

3

Not It

haddad cover

With hefty pinches of pleasure and sin, Lebanese poet Joumana Haddad begs her audience to notice the abundant sexuality in her newly translated selection, Invitation to a Secret Feast.  The selection is thickly overlaid with the standard ingredients of poeticized sex, and even those poems which purposefully skirt the subject cannot avoid a bodily subtext that arrives more or less at the foyer of an idealized but forbidden sexuality.  In his introduction, editor and partial-translator Khaled Mattawa touts that Haddad’s “ferocious and almost tactile femaleness [...] is grounded within a contradictory genderless desire to create space for creativity, original thought, and experiences,” and while this is a wonderful and valid criterion for any selection, its premise is inaccurate.  Haddad is ferocious (and often outright violent), but the paradoxical “genderless desire” that Mattawa cites does not exist. 

Haddad has a tendency to treat the body as a kind of weathervane, receiving interpretable information but necessarily leaving interpretation a bit to the wayside, and her dualistic approach is most often made possible through thinly-veiled encounters and painterly description.  Her speakers are women who have a sexual existence but keep its details under layers of breathy concealment.  Thus, a resulting separation from their men and each other becomes the primary way her speakers approach their own sexuality limiting Haddad’s poems to the realm of reaction: instead of stemming naturally from a woman’s bold, parthenogenic lust, her poems react to a perceived lustlessness in others and a desire to undermine that lustlessness.  She addresses this directly in one stanza of one of the best and longest poems in the selection, “Your Homeland is this Burning Night”:

 Lust sates your parched body
 like a desert drunk with the thirst of its sands.
 Your narrow land is wider than a lover’s chest.
 One drop of your nakedness
 and the moon falls apart.

Haddad makes her motives evident by the potential for destruction she grants “nakedness,” and her work cannot be read without its quiet but strong feminist implications.  She imposes lust on the experiences of her speakers, whose ownership of sex and their bodies is meant as a literal manifestation of the power their sexualized bodies hold.  In this fundamental way, her speakers parallel the women of Lysistrata, but where Lysistrata and her counterparts use their power toward a distinct political goal, Haddad’s speakers remain motiveless, merely acknowledging their power before fading back into passivity.  Take the first two stanzas of “Slow Down,” a poem that characteristically endows men with both sexual motivation and action:

 Slow down, impetuous man.
 Don’t rush,
 slowly mend your nets.
 
 Slow down,
 coming and going are the same.
 The water’s journey starts from below, rising.
 And my body—
 trust me—when the time comes
 will not escape your deluge.

Of course, Haddad is not always so passive.  The poems in the first section of the book, a selection from Haddad’s 2004 collection Lilith’s Return, are its most “ferocious,” and its most interesting.  In them, Haddad reaches beyond her cursorily political sex poems for something that escapes social reaction and moves closer toward poetic subtlety.  Each of the poems imagines the mythological Lilith in all her creative and destructive fury, and while speakers sprinkled throughout the book are awarded similar powers, none are as lushly celebratory and fully imagined as those in this first section. Take the disparity between her two approaches to nakedness.  Where nakedness destroys the moon in “Your Homeland is a Burning Night,” in “Lilith’s Return,” the title poem of the first section, Haddad writes, “I am the naked / who gives nudity the flower of its meaning,” conferring appropriate creativity to the female body and throwing in some wonder and mystery to boot. 

In some ways her earlier speakers’ acquiescence can be seen as a perfect antithesis to both active sexual pursuit and active sexual aversion in the same way indifference can oppose both love and hate.  But it is difficult to escape that the underlying obligation her speakers feel voids the positions of authority they are afforded as the poem’s speakers and as the apparent keepers of sex.  Many of Haddad’s women seem to have accepted the idea that they will be romantically and sexually pursued, and they believe their universal and unanimous approval is a way to pretend participation.  This implicit and embraced helplessness is presented most perceptibly in “I Am a Woman,” where Haddad attempts to undermine an acknowledged power structure with this strange reversal:

 I am a woman.
 They think they own my freedom.
 So, I let them,
 and I happen.

The lines stand together as one of the more provocative and fascinating moments in the book, but it often difficult to ignore that she sounds a bit like a child on a playground who, when tagged, proclaims they wanted to be “it” anyway.

*

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The House of Marriage

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

by Erin  Hanusa
Louisiana State University Press 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

5_5

Quiet Riot

hanusa cover

American poets often teeter over a fine line between individualism and egotism.  On the one hand, such poets have a responsibility to exemplify and elucidate their uniquely American philosophical perspectives—perspectives that likely include some affinity for Emersonian self-reliance and individualism.  On the other hand, personal experience and so-called self-expression are too commonly mistaken for valuable, and the ideal of the self as a vessel for poetic experience is reduced to self-centeredness and artistic tackiness.  Erin Hanusa’s debut, The House of Marriage, wobbles across the aforementioned fine line, sometimes devolving into tedious moments of self-interest and, thankfully, sometimes exploding the self into something larger and more striking.

Throughout the book, Hanusa has a good eye for description and an excellent feel for great words in good places.  In “Beachgrass” for instance, she describes the titular subject: “The backyard sand loomed ineluctably / lunar: nightscape transformed / into a glowing undulation of white.”  Her voice, unmistakably feminine in perspective and subject, moves steadily through each of the book’s four sections and returns repeatedly to motherhood, fatherhood, birth, and the relationships that develop out of each.  Despite these consistencies, there is sometimes an aversive smallness about The House of Marriage that proffers an indifference to the speaker’s assorted and very specific situations.

Where Hanusa’s debut feels like a welcome relief to the ironic, lexical babble that sometimes seems to dominate contemporary poetry, it is often equally self-interested.  Hanusa sometimes mistakes trivial personal moments for moments of broad poignancy.  In “A Bridge Building Competition” for instance, she sandwiches an ambiguous and unconnected stanza about a speaker’s father and sister between two stanzas about a sixth-grade science project.  The transition between the final two stanzas is a good example of Hanusa’s heavy-handedness:

                                   …To list
the things I remember about her
would be to act like she’s dead,
but that would be mistaking her for me.

The weight the teacher loaded on
collapsed my bridge easily.

Veiled by her appealing and sporadic sense of rhythm and rhyme, the emphasis Hanusa places on this blaring temporal leap is obvious and damaging.  Not only is the literal situation of the poem unclear (is the sister dead? is the speaker dead?), but the method of connection through disconnection that occurs between the two stanzas is overused and undeveloped.  Such moments, while uncommon in the book, are unsustainable fabrications, and the strained severity with which she treats this colloquial occurrence undermines the speaker’s obvious sincerity. 

A majority of the poems in the book revolve around colloquial experience, and most of them treat such experience effectively and with great sincerity.  The short final poem of the book, “Conception,” is one such poem, and although its lyric voice strays a bit from that of its preceding poems, it is one of the best in the book and one of the better poems published recently by any press.  Earlier in the book, it seems Hanusa’s more structurally consistent poems are also her most syntactically and thematically consistent.  Her poems of couplets and tercets are often her best, if only because they add a sense of visual formality to her overwhelmingly viscous voice.  For instance “My Father’s Fruit Trees,” a beautiful poem of nostalgia, ends with a touching and comical moment between a father and daughter:

And one morning
he squeezed them, still green,
grunting, forcing resistant

bodies onto the juicer’s spike
spilling pale fluid and seeds.
We drank silently then, waiting

to see who would admit first
the sting of unripe lemon,
not orange, burning in our throats.

Here, in the father and daughter’s collective mistake, emerges a palpable moment of silent awareness between the two characters.  Hanusa’s poems are interested, perhaps primarily, in uncovering and understanding moments of silence as they pervade common life and personal experience.  Hanusa’s speakers are often silent observers of nature or people, and even when they are participants in the goings-on of their own poems, they seem to reflect silently after the fact. 

If the individual poems in Hanusa’s book are sometimes inconsistent, the book is held together tightly by its common thematic threads and its strong voice.  The consistency of these commonalities edges toward monotony, but this is also in part because Hanusa furnishes her speakers with a deliberate and linguistically extravagant sense of the world.  It isn’t without a few standout rough patches, but The House of Marriage is a capable debut, and while Hanusa’s mode of quiet contemplation may have a relatively specific contemporary audience, her intelligence is obvious and praiseworthy.

*

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