Posts Tagged ‘Rachel Mennies’

chap nook 6: Pritts, Dhompa, Herzer

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Sentimental Spectacular, Nate Pritts (Mondo Bummer, 2010)

Nate Pritts’ chapbook Sentimental Spectacular contains five poems, a short collection, even for a chapbook. Though slight, Sentimental Spectacular mines the sentimental for careful, specific image and sound, crafting a work that’s, yes, deeply sentimental, but one willing both to celebrate its sentimentality and to search for a major key of resonance in its reader.  “Darling, darling, darling,” reads the title poem, “there’s something sensational in the way / my heart takes on different forms.” (It is probably worth noting that the poet has also published a book called Sensational Spectacular.) We encounter the speaker’s heart—large, lush, loudly beating—in each of these image-rich poems.

Pritts engages with other poets in Sentimental Spectacular, including Frost in his poem “Frost at Midmorning”: “…me, a proud honorary / astronaut sent out as a lover of uncontained / & immortal beauty but, O, just a chump in love / with the ground…Frost in autumn, frost at midnight, / Frost on a hotel bed, telescoping from mountains to buzzsaws…” Here, we find a wisp of a reference to Frost’s “Out, Out–”, an arguably unsentimental tale of a young boy’s lost hand, as well as ever-sentimental Whitman, with his exultant and emotional O’s and preoccupations with lovelorn “chumps.”

In the final poem “Inarticulate Bird in Befuddled Blooming Bafflement,” Pritts upends his moment-driven sentimental explorations, challenging memory and nostalgia as stable vehicles of sentimentality. “You can’t bring [this poem],” states the speaker, “to the waterfall you made up, // you can’t show it to the rainbow you see when you / close your eyes.” Where imagination and desire intersect with memory, Pritts shows, sentiment becomes longing, and Sentimental Spectacular veers in an unexpected direction, as startling as it is beautiful. “Some handy flower to dip into,” the speaker calls this shadowy memory, this longing for a past self that did or didn’t exist, “a struggle to remember the sweetness.”

–Rachel Mennies

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selvage: for country, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa (Belladonna, 2011)

The title of this chapbook from the Belladonna Chaplet series sets a complex backdrop for the poems within. The word selvage refers to the edge of a woven fabric that keeps the fabric from unraveling. The word selvage also calls to mind the word salvage. A selvage salvages the unity or wholeness of the fabric; it preserves the individuality of something, keeps it from blending in with the rest of the world and becoming invisible in the chaos.

In these poems, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s speaker seems to be struggling to preserve identity, control and hope. For instance, in the first poem, the speaker proposes that “Perhaps it is no longer necessary to hope” and asks, “Does it matter how I feel?” The first poem establishes a general sense of giving oneself over to the powers that be. And all that is left is hope as can be seen at the end of the second poem: “And if I think with all my heart / and if I listen with rituals and codes in place, / maybe it will come to pass.” There exists, within these lines, the possibility for sarcasm, though. The phrase “with all my heart” is clichéd and obvious, suggesting a speaker that is, in fact, no longer hopeful. A sarcastic moment here would indicate that hope does not have the power to revise.

Hope plays a substantial part in these fifteen pages of poetry. A poem on page 13 ends, “everything balances on hope.” Although hope becomes central to these poems, there are multiple forces working against it. The concept of free will also shows up often in Dhompa’s collection, but almost always, it is rejected: “As though / the plants on my kitchen window have free will” and “No point bringing up free will.” Dhompa’s poems expound the internal human struggle to understand and control one’s life.

Some of the poems, however, become too abstracted and limit the reader’s ability to connect with the speaker. Take the following lines for example, “Not error but irony / of displacement gives tyranny / degrees of exception.” The piggybacked prepositional phrases and abstract nouns—“of displacement” and “of exception”—push the reader farther from the poem’s core. But nonetheless, readers are left with a beautifully confusing and hopeful moment: “I leave / today and will / see you yesterday.” Yes, see you then.

–Melinda Kaye Wilson

**

i wanted to be a pirate, Christine Herzer (H_NGM_N, 2010)

By design, Christine Herzer’s chapbook i wanted to be a pirate is an uneven and unpolished read. A visual artist, Herzer has scattered text, handwriting, scribbles, and blacked-out lines highlighting text in white. The poems are more successful in their telling rather showing, but Herzer mitigates that success by trying to maintain a distance from her poems and characters. She has several recurring characters, (‘surfer boy,’ Pan Tau, family members, and more), but none of them move beyond stereotype.  There is very little personal connection here either between the reader and the poems or the speaker and the poems.  Herzer writes, “I remember sister getting lost.” There is no article or possessive pronoun affixed to ‘sister,’ creating a colloquial, dramatic dissociation, which is soon contradicted. Other character-relation instances in the book feel similarly detached, emotional but partially insincere.

Though many whole poems don’t quite connect, there are many stand-out lines within them.  The most simple and direct lines are the strongest: “the party, us arriving together / & leaving together, I liked it,” “where would i go if i had to be there / who would you call before the plane crashes.”  Strong lines frame the poems but the attempted stories/emotions put to those lines are too expected.  For example, the eponymous line, “we have so much love to do” is obscured in the poem, relying  too heavily on butterfly sentiment (“it is a delicate process / branding wings, numbering wings”). While it’s unfair/unreasonable to expect narrative from poetry, “i wanted to be a pirate” is more notable for stand-out lines than its overall direction or impression.

–Matt Soucy

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You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

by Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press 2011
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

“HUMAN MACHINE:”

The Internet feels different after I finish reading You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake. Throughout the collection, Anna Moschovakis mines the Internet’s various engines and portals—Craigslist, Wikipedia, MySpace—for subject matter, reflecting back to us, her readers and the Internet’s reliable users, the complicated and troublesome material it holds. We move quickly and boldly from nature to cyberspace.

In the collection’s first half, Moschovakis shows us a world both hunting and hunted, using anaphora to craft scenes of human struggle against industry and scenarios testing our moral resolves. Variations on the title reappear throughout, crafting repeatedly the beginning of a narrative that doesn’t always end or neatly conclude. Later sections find us in front of the computer while Moschovakis makes a biting cultural study of our technological habits. It was after reading these disorienting and lyric sections straight through that I could sense my online self growing skeptical, even wary, of my usual e-landscape. This is Moschovakis’s strongest work in You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake: a forced, and imperative, reconsideration of the world we inhabit and mindlessly exploit.

“Everybody should have a position on everything,” asserts the speaker in the collection’s prologue poem. “We take our positions with us, like folding stools to the beach.” The long poem that follows, “The Tragedy of Waste,” shapes positions as tight, enclosed scenes, using iterations and variations of the book’s title clause to set the stage:

You are approaching a lake. You have canoes, tent, axes.

The heroine says: We shall first try to secure
an aeroplane view of our own

This taxes the imagination. Too many studies have begun
and ended in the middle.

* * *

You and others, approaching

We shall be asked for a way out

               to be fed

               to keep warm and dry

Here, the tragedy isn’t what little we’re given to survive, but the socio-cultural mess made in our attempts to do so. Moschovakis alludes to: Germany, 1917, modern industrialism, Western overconsumption, war and genocide. As explorer of the twentieth-century, she suggests, the Western world has created its own demise, a lifestyle where “ten men could live on the corn / where only one can live on the beef,” and we’re accusable and accountable for the configuration of this way of life. “You have your axes // What, precisely, is your procedure?” Moschovakis asks us at the poem’s end.

In the collection’s next long poem, “Death as a Way of Life,” we look more closely at the animal and human costs of this world—what it takes, both literally and figuratively, to produce the beef we require to survive. “In 1755,” the speaker tells us, “Louis XV / assembled 13 hunters / for an 18-day excursion.” We’re confronted next with their list of kills, an astronomical body count of wild animals:

19 stags
18,243 hares
10 foxes
19,545 partridges…
for a total 48,237 killed

This spectacle of consumption, as much about the pleasure of the hunt as it is for sustenance, receives its condemnation in later sections of the collection, as we visit briefly the names and ideas of twentienth-century philosophers known for their commentary on animal rights and the ethics of animal slaughter. “Then there is that Jewish thinker Emmanuel Lévinas / who wrote about violence,” notes the speaker of “Death as a Way of Life,” who later references philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer. Singer’s name, books and philosophy appear in the background of portions of You and Three Others Are Approaching A Lake, offering a sort of compass through this corrupt, made world. “Anna is not on MySpace,” we learn later in the collection. “But she has read Peter Singer. Reading Peter Singer causes a creeping fire to burn its way up her center.”

“Annabot,” who led most directly to my own disorientation, speaks to us in the collection’s third poem, “The Human Machine.” In this and “In Search of Wealth,” the book’s fourth and final poem, e-found phrases and images push against their ethical use and purposeful cultural misuse by e-citizens. We’re taken through the landscape by Annabot, a sort of doppelganger for the author who takes us through the landscape by way of a “pop-up”-echoing, playful structure which aids in Moschovakis’s conjuring of the online realm). In the fourth of thirty “chances,” or small poems-within-the-poem, we learn that Annabot “is a chatbot designed to pass / the Turing Test. This is the language // of simple, obvious things.” Throughout this portion of the collection, Annabot interfaces with the Human Machine; the forces often confront one another, revealing Annabot’s struggle to process and render sincere emotional reactions in the medium to which she’s confined:

ANNABOT: But I am not cheerful.
HUMAN MACHINE: I ought to reflect, again and again, and yet again, that all others deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself. I place my hand over your heart.
ANNABOT: I cannot feel your hand.
HUMAN MACHINE: I cannot feel your heart.

We learn the consequences of this difficult human synthesis in “In Search of Wealth,” which uses the Internet as a found medium for sections of the poem. Here, we find excerpts from Craigslist: people looking for retail work or rough sex. We read of Scientology in a factual list, presumably culled from the organization’s own website. Our brain cache—like, one can assume, our Internet cache—fills to the brim with clutter and danger, periphery and violence. And yet: we still live in this world, even grow it: “But still we type,” asserts the speaker in the collection’s epilogue, “one letter at a time.”

Culpability shadows You and Three Others Are Approaching A Lake: the culpability of early Western industrialists, whose greed led to the depletion and ruin of our natural world; the culpability of those who prefer violence to rhetoric (“can a grammar kill?” asks a quoted poet in “Death as a Way of Life”); and the culpability of those “person-bots,” perhaps all of us, who choose to exist online over existing humanly. As Annabot, Moschovakis shows us provocatively what our online lives have the risk of doing to our psyches by placing them in an important historical narrative—that of past moments where cheap indulgence (meat over corn, hunting over cultivating, Craigslist sex over human connection) leads to an erosion of our very moral centers. Our anti-bots, our human selves.

And what of these human selves? Individual and complex, non-programmable, we have the most to lose by plugging in too far. “Dear Reader,” the book ends: “your documentary is prize winning.”

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chap nook 3: Smith, Moody, Thorburn

Sunday, April 3rd, 2011

Last Ride, Abraham Smith (Forklift, Ink. 2010)

Abraham Smith’s chapbook Last Ride presents readers with a curious combination of form and genre: a chapbook—miniaturized, focused—inside which one long, sprawling poem dwells. Unpunctuated and without stanza breaks, Last Ride reads like an interstate drive without directions. Each line speaks to the other, with characters and images as ready signposts, yet the poem’s speaker dwells so far inside himself that the road to understanding falls just out of view. This lends the chapbook a feel of adventure and discovery: an emotionally driven look at a fast world passing.

The poem’s speaker, held captive by anticipatory fear, inhabits a space of constant observation. What he learns and sees, the reader receives in quick enjambment: “70 when you ain’t yet 30 / and the light like egg whites troublin’ over clay” opens the poem, revealing a speaker aware of the bodily tolls of work and time. “mother may i re-up on the womb[,]” he asks soon after, “for this world is a hungered world / and there’s paper crane carrion / all over the moon.”

In this continuous, rambling structure, it’s hard to eke out a continuous narrative or assert the presence of a faithfully appearing character. Instead, Smith relies on image, sound and speed to propel us through the poem’s scenes. Last Ride is meant to be consumed whole, with no small poem to dog-ear for a break or quiet place to pause for the night. While the speaker’s voice can feel more like obfuscation than enlightenment, Smith’s eye for the gorgeous and devastating image impels these poems forward.

–Rachel Mennies

*

Climate Reply, Trey Moody (New Michigan Press 2010)

In Climate Reply, Trey Moody tries to create an insular space in which the poems can live and rub off on one another, and he manages to do so in about half of the poems. The rest distract the reader from the more interesting mood and tone.

The first poem, “What We First Said,” is inviting. It doesn’t open with a bang, but the last lines give way to a quasi-metaphysical pause: “In the history of human suffering,/ this must be what we meant:// an eye or an ear,/ replaced with hard clay, or a plum.” Later, the title poem appears, and that too is wonderful, using the words “Weather as if” as prefix to about half of the lines. There are beauty and meaning in such repetition, which lure the reader into that insular place mentioned above.

However, that place is punctured by the “Dear Ghosts” poems. The poem set attempts to portray (ghostly?) domestic situations, but ultimately falls short, detracting from the bigger climate metaphor the other poems are working hard to instate. The “Dear Ghosts” poems almost pull away from the chapbook; both these and the other poems would have benefited from the “ghosts” having their own space.

Other poems in Climate Reply do work together. “This Forest Isn’t a Room” begins, “ The trees are always laughing down on you,” and continues, “ Their trunks don’ t shake when they laugh, you notice./ You cannot remember what your body does// but you believe your body’ s not a tree, a tree not a body.” This speaks nicely to the poem “One Question” which ends with the question, “When the weather’s right, Lord,/ will I grow from the ground like a tree?”–which in turn complements “Birdsong,” and its line, “ The song was guidance, even if the pines were aware, sharing our ears.” Continuity and well-constructed lines speak to the over-arching concept of  Climate Reply: how the weather, and the life out in the weather, respond to the poet’ s (and the reader’ s) conscious and unconscious questions.

–Jackie Clark

**

Disappears in the Rain,  Matthew Thorburn  (Parlor City Press 2009)

Matthew Thorburn’s Disappears in the Rain won The Broome Review 2009 Chapbook Competition. The chapbook contains 20 pages of poetry, all segments of the one long poem, “Disappears in the Rain.”

The speaker finds himself somewhere near Mount Fuji with his significant other, Lily, and perhaps because the speaker travels with his partner, some of Thorburn’s lines succumb to schmaltz. From page ten: “and the day unrolls like a paper scroll / spooling out birds trees rivers flowers you.”

In the opening segment, the narrator familiarizes his audience with his surroundings. He notes that “everyone sleeps on the floor,” and that breakfast is “steamed rice / and tofu soup, a pink wedge / of salmon, miscellaneous pickles.” The first page sets the scene, and the scenes throughout the book are nice, but Thorburn’s phrasing sometimes distracts from the imagery. For example, he writes, “socks or bare feet / get you to bed.” But the socks cannot “get” one anywhere. The socks are along for the ride.

However, the vacant footwear found at various entryways oddly intrigues and haunts:

a pair of slippers
outside the bathroom door—
come back later

The slippers indicate that the bathroom is occupied, but they also leave the reader with a ghost-like presence.

Other images aren’t as effective, and Thorburn’s ability to refresh some clichés is inconsistent. He writes, “the cat / revs his engine / at her touch.” These lines don’t capitalize on the cat’s purring. In other places, though, Thorburn renews common poetic images, as on page 15: “the water shows pieces of sky / to the sky.” And from page 26: “our t-shirts stuck to our backs / like licked stamps.”

Such images are memorable, but as a solitary unit, Disappears in the Rain is ultinmately isolated and vulnerable.

–Melinda Wilson

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Seedlip and Sweet Apple

Monday, January 24th, 2011

by Arra Lynn Ross
Milkweed Editions 2010
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

8

“a voice / I have heard faintly all my life”

“The words flew up”—with that spectral incantation, we’re immediately in the world of Ann Lee, figurative mother and literal founder of the Shakers. Seedlip and Sweet Apple, the first full-length collection by Arra Lynn Ross, mines the life, death, and faith of Lee, crafting a world as spiritual as it is grounded in labor—the different labors of farming, sex, prayer. Lee’s work here is to redeem her followers from the sins of the body, and Ross details the rise of the Shakers flush against the narrative of Lee’s life. “I walked through briars,” says a young Lee in the poem “Jane Helped Me to My Feet,” “and came out the other side, scratched // and torn, my blood as red as anyone’s.” By way of Lee’s conversion, Ross writes of abuse and resilience, using experimental forms to add a strange and authentic dimension to Lee’s story.

Rarely are these poems orderly or demure. Even when telling of Lee’s austere disavowal of the bodily and the sensual, Ross sprawls lines and meanders stanzas, creating a deliberate, complicated contrast between the book’s form and content. In “Sabbath Breaking,” short lines capture a violent and recurring scene of Lee’s physical punishment for her beliefs:

I spoke of
                         God
                                                       in seventy-two
          languages
and still
             they would have nothing
but my body broken.
                                                     Bound
with rope,
                                        knocked with clubs,
                                                                kicked
every two miles…

Here, fragmentation and spacing disorient the reader and confuse the line even as the poem’s described moment wrenches us with its pain. We see in these snippets the twisted logics of torture and religious persecution. Form in other poems serves a more historical, “found” purpose. In poems like “Manchester Constables’ Log” and “The World’s Course,” Ross mimics written media from Lee’s time—a police logbook in the former poem and a town ledger in the latter—granting the book a faithful, contextualized feel. These are Lee’s poems, from Lee’s time, and Ross captures these emotional and historical climates with riveting accuracy.

Despite the violence and sufferings of Lee’s life, Seedlip and Sweet Apple is ultimately a joyous text, a liturgical text, a text about love. Some of the collection’s most beautiful poems mine Lee’s different loves—for her savior and her followers—in earnest and rapturous verse. “Learn to Sing By Singing” lists, in a sort of nonce prayer, the stuff of loving, what’s observed in the process of worship. “You are // the love, lemon and rind. Soft pine, cicada, swamp and vine. / Cattails at the edge of the road. Blue-eyed dragonfly. / Moon. Friend. Lizard in the woodpile. Sweet surprise.” Even during the moments prior to Lee’s passing, faith takes a positive cast: a tone grateful to a difficult life. “To be held in God’s arms,” yearns the speaker of “God Is the Mother of All,” “to hear / the trumpets in his voice, a voice / I have heard faintly all my life, / as a babe inside the womb.”

This beauty—hard-wrought and suffered-for—resounds throughout Seedlip and Sweet Apple. Far from fragile or delicate, this collection shows love and faith at its most fraught and ugly moments, and allows its heroine Lee room for complication and doubt even as she bravely founds the Shakers. Ross has written a book of quiet, wrenching triumph: a narrative for a strong woman surrounded by violence, whose piety and faith in God burns, a fierceness in her guts.

*

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Crossing the Line: Poetry’s E-Book Horizons

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011



As e-readers proliferate, poetry publishers try to keep poems looking like poems

by Rachel Mennies

Since the widespread releases of the Kindle (2007) and iPad (2010), the discussion about e-books has largely focused on prose, if on genre at all.  E-prose is certainly more popular, more widely read and sold, than e-poetry—a reading practice that mirrors our larger reading interests and purchases here in the United States.  When we debate or embrace or disavow the e-book, according to those who make the devices, we’re typically picturing a novel, or a collection of essays, and we can find evidence of this claim by glancing at the text displayed on screen in TV ads for the products (Sedaris for iPad, for example) and the books most prominently advertised on the devices’ homepage stores.  This not only reflects what Americans are reading, but the works that most presses are producing for e-bookstores.

While part of this production decision reflects demand, certainly, it also highlights a second truth about e-books: it’s harder to produce an e-book of poetry than it is for prose.  Prose, after all, can tumble from page to page without concern.  Changing font typeface or size affects prose text aesthetically, but leaves its content and meaning intact.  A chapter of The Grapes of Wrath, for example, can take up five pages or seven, and its sentences can spread over the page in any number, without wrecking the integrity of the writing itself.  As small presses innovate in the e-book realm, contemporary poetry begins to make its e-book debut.  This debut raises new and genre-specific concerns, the greatest of them deriving from one of poetry’s smallest units: the line.

Long-line poets have the most to fear from the e-book, as the line is the most easily distorted prosodic element on an e-reader.  Poets like Kay Ryan, known for her short-line prosodic focus, might find their work nearly impossible to mangle on a Kindle (unless the poems are inexplicably double-spaced, like Ashbery’s work in the iBooks version of Notes From the Air). In contrast, long-line poets face breakage and splintering in their work depending on the reader’s use of the font-alteration and font-size-change options that come standard on both Kindle and iPad.  One vetted long-line example is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” whose anaphoric line-starting “who” became lost and muddied when translated into e-book format.  Craig Morgan Teicher of Publishers Weekly wrote of this problem last October, noting “Even from a distance you can see the difference”:

Ginsberg broke his poem into what he called “strophes,” those long lines that hark back to Whitman.  The indentations you see above are meant to indicate that the line keeps going beyond the end of the page, until the next left-justified line.  Ginsberg was careful in his liniation [sic], and part of the poem’s impact is in seeing that “who” sticking out again and again on the left side of the page. The digital version pays no mind to this whatsoever.  What we get is not the poem itself, but a kind of poor transcription of it.

Here, the e-book turns poem to prose—badly blocked and confused prose, at that.  We lose Ginsberg’s sprawling yet meticulously organized thoughts, his carefully nested musings on the “best minds of [his] generation.”  If this is the future of the e-poetry book, as Teicher wonders in his article, perhaps this approach has already failed us.  Perhaps another methodology will serve the medium well, find the right sort of justice for its art.

In the wake of these early malfunctions, finding the “correct” or faithful path for e-poetry might seem like a daunting process to undertake.  Several small presses, thankfully, have emerged as willing pioneers. Ugly Duckling Presse garnered national attention in the poetry community last year when it announced a shift to e-publishing its back stock and chapbook titles.  Another independent press, Milkweed Editions, has just released in both Kindle and paperback formats Seedlip and Sweet Apple, the first full-length collection by poet Arra Lynn Ross.

Seedlip and Sweet Apple examines the life of Shaker founder Ann Lee; it’s a stunning, quietly wrenching collection, one which follows the narrative arc of Lee’s story from birth to death.  Ross most often uses persona to eke out Lee, to show her in a complicated and intimate manner to the reader—though many other voices, including Lee’s brother William, mother, and members of the converted, speak in the book as well.  “I could fold the world over,” declared the child Lee in “Mother’s Touch,” “and make it rise up right.”  This collection crafts each moment in this “rising right:” as Lee inspires the Shakers, endures torture and prosecution for her beliefs, and moves to America to formally instate her sect.  Throughout Lee’s life, Ross gives voice to her doubts—her darknesses as well as her triumphs—in a manner as poignant as it is haunting. “I am Ann the Word / but who here will have heard?” asks Lee once arrived on New York soil.  In Lee, we can hear the insecurities of any founding voice, any new spirit on the cusp of invention.

Seedlip and Sweet Apple’s print version—the version I read first—makes innovative use of experimental lines, using right and center justification, varied spacing, and wide ranges of length to explore the collection’s myriad chorus of speakers.  Here, we find prose poems alongside lineation and innovative nonce forms like the newspaper-announcement heading-and-date style of “The World’s Course.”  Ross employs dialogue, placing her two speakers on the right and left margins; she often takes up the entire page with her verse, choosing to leave swathes of white space in the middle of lines and stanzas.  In “Manchester Constables’ Log,” Ross uses three columns of text to convey Lee’s punishments for her developing faith in England, mimicking, as in “The World’s Course,” the format and structure of an actual logbook:

July 13, 1772                                                    John Lees and Ann Lees,
                                    daughter                       appear before Justice
                                    of the Peace                  Peter Mainwaring…

In the print version of Seedlip and Sweet Apple, this formal play heightens the poems, granting them a contemporary open-form context in the midst of a historical biography’s telling. Seedlip and Sweet Apple’s Kindle version, however, presents some of the problems Teicher described with “Howl.” In its untouched form, the e-poems look faithful to print—and, on the Kindle for iPad app that I used in my reading, they glowed from the iPad with a beautifully contrastive intensity. Milkweed preserved Trajanus, the font from print, making the reading experience nearly one-to-one with the physical book.

It wasn’t until I purposefully started altering the font size that the poetry eroded; the poems only “failed,” or lost their original identity, at the widest extremes of large and small.  Ross’s lines and stanzas blurred in big fonts, and floated away on a screen of white in small ones.  While I’d wager that most readers would find these extreme sizes off-putting or unhelpful to the reading process, the mere fact of their enabled existence presents problems for Ross’s experimental, innovative prosody.  Her shifting, multifaceted line looks either correct or corrupted on the iPad, depending entirely on how far up or down the font bar a reader swipes her finger.  This flexibility might be a liability of the reader, the press or the device, but it certainly should not concern the writer as she develops her art.  I imagine a poet like Ross adapting her unusual line to the constraints of the iPad, and can only see the collection suffering for this awareness of e-form.

Ross, Milkweed, and Seedlip and Sweet Apple certainly aren’t alone in this struggle to maintain the integrity of poetry as it moves to e-book format.  The e-poetry book, while different from its print parent in medium and use, certainly shouldn’t become alien to print in content: a shell of its former glory, a mere vehicle for transliterated prose versions of poems.  Losing control of lineation is ruinous to contemporary poetry, and could very well limit its progress in the e-book realm.  And yet, this same system of delivery could invigorate the genre, as readers and writers of poetry are turning increasingly to online venues to expound literary magazines, scour for poetry news, and submit writing to journals and presses. E-book readers don’t just read poetry books—they also use RSS readers or e-magazine subscriptions to receive blogs and journals.

As we come more frequently to the Web for writing about poetry, poetry reviews, and individual poems published in web-only journals, we’ll start looking for e-poetry books from all of our favorite presses as well. Dedication to the development of these e-books coupled with consumer interest might well change the face of literary publishing. And Seedlip and Sweet Apple—though I’m certain it was never intended as an allegory for e-poetry—serves well as a lens through which to view the current state of these changes. Ann Lee, founder of a new religious sect—and role model to a group of hardworking craftsmen—looks out upon her strange new world often throughout the collection, marveling at the power of combining faith with innovation. “And what of you, my child?” asks the speaker of “Say to This Mountain, Move:” “Surely, / you have more faith than a chicken.” Far from Luddites, the Shakers embraced change; how fitting for the fierce and gorgeous Seedlip and Sweet Apple to show us another sort of strange new world, and well.

*

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Wild Goods

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

by Denise Newman
Apogee Press 2008
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

7.5

“Open all the doors and drawers.” 

newman coverWhat makes a poem wild? Is it a structure forgone, an inattention (perhaps deliberate) paid to the confines of the page? How about its subject — do we see the wild in an untrammeled speaker, or a setting overflowing with color and noise? In Denise Newman’s Wild Goods, the wild finds its way into both the domestic and the spiritual. Newman makes use of an experimental, unpunctuated free verse to un-civilize her speakers and subjects. Here, we find titles without poems (“This is Only a Beginning of Perfection”), and poems that leave stanzas behind in order to couple with the next page’s verse.

In addition to her structural experimentation, Newman proves her wildness through dense, tactile, hyper-sensory images; her poetry, associative and lyric, brings forth a world that intermingles the earthly and the divine — and the successes and failures left in the wake of this mixing. “How easily,” remarks the speaker in “Serious Faults,” “the fabric of goodness is disorganized.” The titles for the collection’s second section, “The Beginning of Perfection,” come from a guide to monasticism dating fifteen centuries in the past. They mark poetry far from abstinent or penitent, but instead lines that exalt: “Open all the doors and drawers / undo all the knots // let order be broken with water.” Newman recalls Whitman — “Unscrew the locks from the doors / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” — echoing his search for a union of spirit and flesh.

While Newman eschews structure and form within each poem, the book itself is a piece of carefully-designed architecture. The sections vary in length and concern, but all take up their myriad subjects with the same voracious exploration, the same freedom from punctuation — all are wild. The speaker of “Three Cants,” the first section of Wild Goods, describes the dizzying freneticism of new motherhood, imagining that it demands a sort of spiritual switch into the body of another:

she’s sandwichtime
climbing up over world to nurse their silent agreement
will eventually eat container too
mustn’t resist transmogrification though cranky
from resistance imagines being jeered at:
              almost worthless—meaning, something there to whack—
worse than worthless

The speaker’s hunger threatens to consume her whole, and to send her towards transmogrification — here, a metaphor for motherhood, where the speaker gives up a part of herself in order to parent. Other moments in “Three Cants” speak more explicitly to this sacrifice: “she knows she’ll have to marry baby whom she calls / her inner life.”

One of Wild Goods’ most wild moves comes in “The Beginning of Perfection.” In this section, discerning the end of one poem and the beginning of another is barely possible; while poem headings are bolded and enlarged, open clauses and sparse end-stopping suggest a continuity of reading that defies this suggestive typesetting. This makes for a meandering, flowing reading, one that challenges the typically cordoned-off, demarcated structure of individual poems within a collection. This “melding” happens early in the section, with the poems “The Sleeping Arrangements” and “Mutual Obedience:”

…To spare the angels, Lot offers the mob
his virgin daughters and in the rubble
they wine him then explode Lot’s seed into life
Driving the copies on the wide road
face down in

Mutual Obedience

He remembers nothing—so it is written
it’ll happen again…

Typographic conventions tell us that a poem has ended, and that another has been named and begun. However, in this wrapped style, it’s impossible not to read through the typeface, making the words on the page inevitably a part of the same work. This is a risky move, and one that certainly has the potential to confuse or alienate a reader. It raises questions about the speaker — for example, do we read the “he” of “Mutual Obedience” as Lot? — as well as concerns about the usefulness of this sort of spatial ambiguity. I’d argue, though, that a poem — especially a wild one, a good one — should raise these sorts of questions. And the lushness of Newman’s images, the memory-rich and liturgical nature of these poems, make us want to keep reading, even if it means reading through.

“I could’ve been God if I was one,” asserts the speaker of “The Soft Answer,” a poem in three parts. Newman mines the spiritual throughout Wild Goods, and her images incorporate the body with God in a manner as probing as it is deeply pensive. “The Soft Answer” takes up spiritual concerns most explicitly, with the poem’s speaker questioning her position in this realm throughout. “One has always gone above the horizon,” she notes, “to talk to God the light is better / Some light in relief with the mind’s / dark question: what does the body know?” The body here is fragile, imperiled; the mind is always aware: “What can the mind do but hover over / with its dimming question: can I trust this leaky boat?” And while answers don’t come easily to ponderings of mortality, in this poem we find a modicum of peace. “Eyes look and read,” the speaker answers, “ a thousand expressions of yes.”

Wildness can be dangerous — it can move with an unbridled violence, and leave unpredictability in its wake. Here, wildness is exultant, celebratory. Newman makes an interior space rich with this instability and thrives on the variables that life in a body presents.

*

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Marginal Road

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

by Rachel M. Simon
Hollyridge Press 2009
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

6_5stars_6

“no word, wetted memory”

simon coverThe chapbook, a focused creature, often shows a reader the author’s preoccupations or fixations: what she’s metabolized lately, or what’s she’s turning over in her mind. Rachel M. Simon — author of the full-length book Theory of Orange — gives her full attention to a contemporary cultural realm of television and food, relatives and celebrities, in her chapbook Marginal Road. Compact, evocative lyricism moves us between ketchup bottles and Hilary Clinton, or STDs and Julius Caesar. The poems are densely packed and sparsely adorned with punctuation, building momentum with enjambment and wry, humorous, wild imagery that concerns itself with the amassed memories of a particular perspective within a vast, undependable American landscape.

“Build your memory directory with this,” commands the speaker in “Game One of the World Series with Your Father.” Inside the “directory” of this particular poem, we find “The racial insensitivity of scalpers / and Wahoo cut by mid-memorabilia,” “[t]he testosterone thick / for levitation and towel swinging.” Far from an American baseball pastoral, “Game One…” hunts down the specific and the strange, and the poem stands instead for a postmodern America, one where seams and artifice are a suddenly visible component of a polished front. A similarly disillusioned look at memory-making comes in “Late November,” a poem examining the days after Thanksgiving:

Every lunch sack contains a turkey sandwich
the Monday after Thanksgiving.
United: poultry, potatoey, we trudge back
to desks and jackhammers. Parts of our day
resemble standardized tests.

Here, we eat the same food at the same time, performing jobs with the same rote affect and a “standardized test”-like robotic mindset. United by the American holiday, we’re also united in its drudging aftermath. And, of course, the day has its penalties: “the cost of seeing your childhood roof, / the place you learned to inhale a cigarette,” has left us “nostalgia fluffing on the company dime.” Remembrance in “Late November” becomes indulgent, a distraction we shouldn’t be taking from the task at hand — and an unbreakable element of contemporary American anxiety.

Simon has an impressive pop cultural memory, and in her examinations of contemporary moments, her chapbook’s dark, impressive humor comes to the foreground. “America’s Next Top Poet” skewers fluff reality TV shows, with the poem’s speaker directing a second-person “you” to do various tasks in her new elected position: “Your first challenge,” orders the speaker, “is to sleep in the home / of a famous dead poet evading security / mimic the ghost’s style without mocking. / Hidden cameras will asses your breaking / and entering, poetic posture, line breaks, / and attention to historical hairstyle.”

Like the bizarre activities contestants must endure on America’s Next Top Model — recent memory, I admit, recalls a circuitous New York City scavenger hunt — Simon’s Top Poet must travel the country performing absurd acts, only to “return / to adjunct salary and piles / of student poems.” As the poem ends, and as we laugh at the strange idea of a Top Poet TV show, Simon portrays the strange reality we welcome into our daily lives with the same attention. She shows us the writing world’s absurdities; we are all jumping through narrow hoops, “smelling of underachievement.”

Simon favors enjambment over end-stopped lines. In short, dense poems like “In the Aftermath,” each line has its own small life, heightened by the sparse use of punctuation:

wall of water drapes your town
wind is named by alphabet
now a ‘copter overhead

sea wall, inlet, undertoe
grey demolished house on stilts
no word, wetted memory

These seven-syllable, generally trochaic lines conjure a post-hurricane town through images as particular as they are gripping, revealing both man-made (“wind is named by alphabet”) and natural (“wall of water drapes your town”) forces at work in the days after disaster. Here, too, we see a compelling example of Simon’s memory-based examination — in this poem, the work of the past is “wetted,” inevitably also damaged in the storm’s aftermath.

At times, the poetic line in Marginal Road becomes so discrete that it requires a new form to realize its full expressive potential. “Postmark from the Transition” — an almost-sonneted fifteen-line numbered list — turns the line into a labeled unit:

…4. costumes of our drama
5. soup stock of animal and bone
6. thigh, syringe
7. non-ninety degree staircase…

Readers glean only snippets of plot (a gender transition?) through this list, and the image juxtapositions, weird and peculiar, at times evade understanding. By making a list, Simon seems to suggest that each line asserts its own story. This technique risks obfuscating a reader, but it also mimics the flashes that memory often grants: sometimes associative, sometimes elusive.

It could be said that Simon relies on artifice a bit too much — the list, the reality TV gimmick, may turn off certain readers who won’t necessarily find their way back via her less accessible material — but perhaps the same reliance on artifice could be attributed to the culture that Simon depicts. If a chapbook grants a brief peek into a writer’s preoccupations, Marginal Road reveals a universe fit to burst with images and sounds, memories and found objects. Simon strips her poems of nearly all else, privileging the sharp image over the traditional stanza or line. By doing so, she makes a world that’s spectacularly hers.

*

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The Beginning of the Fields

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

by Angela Shaw
Tupelo Press 2009
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

7

Things as Things Just So

shaw cover

“The true mystery of the world,” Lord Henry tells us in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “is the visible, not the invisible.” Henry, though imagined by Wilde over a century in the past, could have been speaking of the poetry of Angela Shaw—poetry that endeavors to uncover the mysteries of life’s encountered objects. In The Beginning of the Fields, her first book, Shaw writes of wedding gowns, the boudoir ritual, tomatoes and swimsuits and lace, rendering each with its own life and personality against that of her intimate first- and third-person speakers. Tinged with nostalgia, Shaw’s cultivations form a timeline, through memory, of life’s losses and gains, all set tangibly in the realm of the material. Each poem makes its own museum-like, yet pulsating, space on the page.

Anyone familiar with the intricacies of the clothing realm will take particular pleasure in Shaw’s cultivation of the subject. Taking language from the ad copy of a J. Crew catalog for her poems “Garden Party” and “Pin-up,” Shaw lingers over every detail of her described subjects, granting them utility and purpose. “Is that shirt flirting with you across the cotton / lawn?” asks the speaker in “Garden Party,” comfortable in the language of fabric and flirtation: “The man with the seersucker / ease is prone to softly silk-like talk, mellowed / stuff.”  Here, the dressings and pinnings-on of what we put on our bodies literally speak volumes. A former retail employee myself, I see none of the flat, frozen faces of catalog models and the staleness of ad copy in Shaw’s reimagining. Instead, the lush luxury of the brand’s fabrics and patterns find shape and breath.

Shaw renders this clothing-centric world most strikingly in “White Picket,” a poem in the series “Five Fences: On Marriage,” where, as a wedding commences, “The gown enters first—dazzling, embattled— / and then its bride on her cloud / of song.” The dress—and all it represents at the nascent pure moments of a marriage ceremony—finds itself in stunning conflict; and as the series continues, the reader cannot help but recall the first “dazzling” vestments of this marriage as Shaw’s study of the union twists and turns through sweetness and strife.

Shaw writes deftly of both sorrow and joy, though it is the collection’s physical particularities that grant its unique perspective. Marked by the oft-noted passage of time, the poems in this collection palpably relate the feeling of each season and its associations—lingering August, “itinerant January,” “clumsy December.”  Inside each month, Shaw finds a vignette to match. “Mobile Home,” site of January, captures the month’s chill and languor:

Old, tested wrestling holds: winter’s half-
nelson does in the tin shelter, brought
here from some Lubbock or Saginaw, bought
local. Staked to the yard two once-stray whelps
snarl their chains. Inside, a near-marriage sputters
and flares, left on a low burner.

December, the year’s other bookend, receives language similarly preoccupied with winter’s stasis. In “Bird Nests,” the speaker examines the damage cancer has wrought on a household:

                                   …Some sickness quickens
in you or what the doctors, those wordsmiths,
call growth. Beyond the house our great oak pumps
in the wind like a wild lung. Dumb earth.

Sterile and “dumb,” the December landscape contrasts in this poem with cancer’s quick growth—its urge the reproduce itself. Shaw, as in “Mobile Home,” couples setting and subject with revelatory dexterity.

The Beginning of the Fields’s lyric preoccupation with beauty makes its most stunning observations in moments, such as in “Bird Nests,” where life’s ugliness demands response. Loss suffuses the collection, but never overwhelms. One of the book’s strongest poems, “Miscarriage” renders its subject in a confessional first-person, as the speaker copes by harvesting tomatoes:

I trowel a hole for each loose bundle
of roots, slosh water from my pail, and refill
the gap, my hands gathering at the base of each
fluid stem. I go down where my husband’s long
shadow startles the grass. It is weeks
before we will again come carefully
unsewn, take to each other, hungry and thick-
tongued…

Later in the poem, as the speaker “go[es] down on all fours/ in search of what I lost,” the devastation her loss has caused becomes heartbreakingly clear. Where some things grow, Shaw suggests, others perish; making sense of this harsh truth proves fertile subject matter.

In The Beginning of the Fields, careful study of the physical world takes us far from it, into questions of origin and purpose, time and place. The poems are calm, mild-mannered even, perhaps too much so for readers who tire of placid natural images, or of melancholy and sometimes sentimentality. But Shaw keeps these in check. This book should be read, several times, by any reader wondering how her own world—and her own amassed collection of things—came to be just so.

*

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When She Named Fire

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Edited by Andrea Hollander Budy
Autumn House Press 2009
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

7.5

Balancing Acts

budy cover“The paradox in American letters is that it has always been easier for a woman to write and for a man to be published.”

—Paul Theroux, on the social and professional acceptance of writers in “Being a Man”


In 1973, Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, preoccupied by the dearth of anthologized women poets, created the groundbreaking women’s poetry anthology No More Masks! Howe, commemorating the occasion in the collection’s introduction, writes of its exigent formation: “The most important reason for this volume to exist is an ideological one: a belief in the uniqueness of women.”  Unique and underrepresented, the eighty-seven original contributors revealed, through their poems, their preoccupation with the politics of the moment. 

The collection caused quite a stir in the poetry community—Elizabeth Bishop famously declined to contribute, noting what she perceived as the “segregation” inherent in the collection’s intentional exclusion of any male writers. Others criticized its politics-heavy momentum. But regardless of its reception, No More Masks! gave women writers an invaluable  gift, setting the precedent for the existence of all-women’s poetry anthologies; the tradition has continued with a re-issue of No More Masks! and several new women’s anthologies, including Columbia University Press’s The Extraordinary Tide. Here to contribute vibrantly to this tradition comes When She Named Fire, the new all-women contemporary poetry anthology from Autumn House Press.

Born between 1925 and 1976, the writers included in When She Named Fire comprise the heavyweights of American women poets; current United States Poet Laureate Kay Ryan has a section, as do former Poet Laureate Rita Dove and literary luminaries Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, and Maxine Kumin, the sole poet appearing in both anthologies.  With ninety-six poets overall, the tag “American women poets” allows for great variegation of voice, culture, and style, and editor Andrea Hollander Budy takes care to cultivate this diversity.

Though diverse, the poets’ gender unites them, and a study of what it means to be a woman graces the pages with insight and clear focus. The poets here write about loss and birth, the changing of the seasons and the changing of a tire with an eye for new exploration. Political exigency, though present at spare moments, largely steps back to make way for more complicated, contemporary examinations of a woman’s world. And while some contributors rely heavily on expected tropes and thus contribute weaker poems, overall When She Named Fire examines women’s lives with a marked consistency of skill.

In an anthology with such well-loved contributors, isolating individual achievers proves a difficult task. As a whole, however, this collection serves as a study of what preoccupies women writers in 2009, and illness rates high among these preoccupations. Deborah Bruce writes deftly in “Prognosis” of the anxiety grown from waiting for a diagnosis: “But what I’m searching for is what I’ve left/behind—the snug, sunlit privilege/of making plans with when instead of if.”

HIV/AIDS also figures as subject in several contributors’ poems. Marilyn Hacker, who makes brilliant use here of the ghazal and glose (historic Spanish) forms, links the making of “easy” art to the contraction of AIDS. In “Ghazal: min al-hobbi ma khatal,” she writes,

The all-night dancer, the mother of four, the tired young doctor
all contracted HIV from the love that kills.
There is pleasure, too, in writing easy, dishonest verses.
Nothing protects your poetry from the love that kills.

An examination of AIDS also appears in the poetry of Marie Howe, whose brother John died of the disease in 1989; she takes John as subject in her masterful poem “What The Living Do.” Perhaps no contributor writes more hauntingly of disease than Kenyon, who passed away in 1995 of leukemia. “I got out of bed/”, she writes in her staple, “Otherwise,” “on two strong legs./It might have been/otherwise.”

Spiritual concerns also consume contributors’ attention. Chana Bloch, poet and translator, writes of the experience of keeping a kosher household in “‘And the darkness he called night:’”

I was trying to keep things neat and shiny.
I had two sets of dishes—one for love,
one for hate. I kept them in separate cupboards.

For Bloch, the rituals of Judaism mystify even as they compel, and her poems focus beautifully on this contrast. For poet Naomi Shihab Nye, interfaith struggles serve as subject in “Half-and-Half:”

You can’t be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast day after Ramadan.
So half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can’t love
anyone else. Says he.

Here, Nye studies the challenges borne from interfaith unions, an issue of crucial relevance in today’s mixed-religious society. Judeo-Christian archetypes also figure prominently in the collection, with Biblical allusions appearing throughout. For numerous contributors, faith both limits and liberates, carrying undeniable importance.

If No More Masks! provides a retrospective history of women writers in the twentieth century, When She Named Fire aptly looks forward, ringing in the 21st with some of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated voices.  Whether curious readers pick up the collection for its striking female assemblage or to unlock current concerns of the larger contemporary poetry movement, they will find satisfaction in the collection’s examination of women’s issues. No More Masks!, in its 1993 reissuance, successfully expanded its contributors from eighty-seven to one hundred and four; When She Named Fire adds 95 poets to the list, making the number of anthologized women poets both vast and accessible to any reader.

No longer must women like Howe and Bass worry about the historical future of women writers—here, in a collection as strong as When She Named Fire, they will surely last, and continue their canonization in anthologies to come. Utterly of-the-moment and thoroughly inclusive, When She Named Fire, in step with this historical importance, will hold the attention of even the most well read of interested poetry connoisseurs: even those already well-acquainted with women writers in particular. Bishop might be correct that to distinguish by gender is to emphasize separation. But I’d contend it is equally true that to assemble work that updates us on the state of a historically under-represented group in American letters is a valuable, leveling, enterprise, lest we take several decades of progress for granted.

*

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