Many presses offer 1 and 2 year subscriptions such as Litmus Press, $75 gets you or your loved one everything they publish in 2012-13 including their journal, Aufgabe.
$75 also gets a year worth of books from the fine folks over at Wave Books.
Nothing says Merry Christmas more than a two year gift subscription to Octopus Books! For $64 you get 6 full-lengths and around 4 chapbooks with free shipping. The list includes with Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees, Rebecca Farivar’s Correct Animal, Brandon Downing’s AT ME, and a reprint of CD Wright’s 40 Watts. And then 4 more books: Chris DeWeese’s The Black Forest and Jenny Zhang’s Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, Patricia Lockwood’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Ben Mirov’sHider Roser.
For only $50 you get all of this from Black Ocean: Hunger Transit by Feng Sun Chen (Spring 2012) Fjords by Zachary Schomburg (Spring 2012), Handsome Vol. 4 (Spring 2012), Dark Matter by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Fall 2012),The Moon’s Jaw by Rauan Klassnik (Fall 2012)
No Tell Books has a deal where you can get any two of their titles for $20. Some of their authors include Bruce Covey, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, and Lea Graham.
Projective Industries publishes hand-bound chapbooks. You can get four for $20 (while supplies last).
How about Fact-Simile’s Trading Cards including poets such as Bhanu Kapil, CA Conrad, and Joanne Kyger.
If you find yourself in Brooklyn or Manhattan, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop is offering free door-to-door delivery on their bicycles (weather permitting). Not only is that green, but you can support multiple presses and hand-select you’re own gift packages!
Likewise, if you find yourself in Northampton you’d be remiss not to stop into Flying Object or shop from them online!
While “best” has always been an arguable term, if you need more suggestions of what people have been reading/raving about take a look at Third Factory/Notes of Poetry and No Tells.
by Anthony McCann
Wave Books 2011 Reviewed by Matt Hart
“And stood there all naked and human and shaking”
I.
I ♥ Your Fate is as electrified as it is buttery, as glue-faced as it is full of angles and soul—constant surprises, the turnings of corners, trap doors, blinding sunrises, Samuel Taylor Coleridge!—why can I not just type out all of the poems here and call it a day?—alibis forever, the visitor’s locker room, which turns out to be a vagina—an interview with Kobe Bryant—O beautiful for “EAGLES/big as nouns,” “…something as thoughtful as chairs in the snow…” I could go on forever. It goes on forever. Figuring and reconfiguring—and then it ends, leaving me to retrace my steps, with hope, looking forward to the next tracks. The thing is, I almost don’t believe these poems exist. This isn’t a review. It’s an appreciation, a lecture on debacle, both fuck-up and flood, a dry-dive into whatever comes next—this is our fate. I’m spoiling too much. I ♥ Your Fate is one of those books I’d like to take to class and just read out loud with/to my students–no discussion! Why talk when one can listen?
The grass thinking snow thinking snow thinking snow
And under the grass the system of roots
The systemless system of dark wiggle roots
And the master who lurks in the rooms after dark
In his motionless hand the luminous milk
(from “Putin with Lynch”)
Why be analytical when it feels so incredibly strange and on fire to be baffled, face to face and attentive to the deepest parts we know, and yet obviously still have a lot of trouble articulating?
The purpose of behavior is disputed.
Though it serves
a hopped display
hammered in distinctness
How wonderful to be “hammered in distinctness”—that is, with clarity and detail—and also to BE hammered “indistinctness” (i.e. the opposite—unclear, ambiguous, vague, connotative) at the very same time. There’s something nearly primordial about these poems. We read them as they come to be, reaching prophetically, apocalyptically, lovingly, and elliptically toward their own ends, which are our ends—our FATE—as we read them:
I say the names of my hands
First left and then right and then right
Strange to have hands and a name
I look down to my hands when I speak
I don’t say my name to my hands
(I’ll save the dark magic for last!)
This event will go unrecorded
Weird, fake birds overhead
(from “Letter Never Sent”)
I like that things end—that they end and just end, making me long for new beginnings, for more Anthony McCann poems, for my fate to collide with his and theirs. I also like being blind-sided/surprised, as in these lines from (McCann’s poem) “Samuel Taylor Coleridge”:
and through my brassy spyglass
I will watch the city advance
the contracts, the workers, contractors
the plywood, and dust buttered trucks
I will dream of rivers of glue…
The adjective phrase “dust buttered” to describe the trucks is so beautifully/perfectly wrong, especially as it leads to the speaker (essentially, oh so romantically) looking away from the scene into the “dream of rivers of glue.” The image is so HIGH…and of course, so was STC a lot of his life. Great. Welcome to life—which is everybody’s fate, one way or another. But what’s really important here is the infusion that these poems insist upon—through their descriptive idylls, constant meander/ discovery, and one surprise party after another—into and with our lives. As McCann puts it at the end of “Samuel Taylor Coleridge”:
tall swaying tawny thin grass
rhyming my steps with my words
the sea will appear, pocked with sails
Then I’ll enter your life
What could be more gorgeous or more intrusive or welcome?
II.
Maybe I should mention that I ♥ Your Fate consists of three titled, numbered sections—1. The Event, 2. I ♥ Your Fate, and 3. New Dreams of Mammal Island. Sections one and three are bookends for section two—which itself consists of a single, long title poem in fourteen unnumbered sections (more on that below). A lot of books contain section breaks that seem totally unnecessary; in McCann’s book, one leads into the next, prepares the way. There’s a real sense that one is being taken somewhere, fatefully—perhaps fatally—and yet the guide knows just about as much as we do. The difference between him and us—if there is a difference—lies only in the degree to which we’re prepared for the surprise…
Like a ghost
showing its
first
tender
ghosthood
to another
quieter
more
bashful
ghost
(from “Mammal Island”)
And this is strangely—at least to me—of some comfort. If I’m heading into the darkness, I’d rather go along with someone who’s thrilled by it, than with someone who’s terrified. Should we embrace our fate or work against it? Does life actually have something in store, or is the store the thing we build over the course of our lives?
Can you believe now once how my body talked
With all these words in the hands of the dead
Every day I disown myself twice wake again
Go back to sleep with my brains in my hands
III.
Section 1, The Event, begins with the poem “Post-Futurism” in a nearly narrative voice:
When I was young, life
was instrumental and
through experience (in life)
through which I poured myself
I passed through various
Containers of
pre-dawn excellence
and then finishes up with the section’s title poem “The Event,” which itself ends:
I knew you’d come
to describe the animal
and I never drank again
I love the track this creates from the beginning to the end of the section, the speaker “pouring” himself through “various/ Containers of pre-dawn excellence” only to arrive eventually at a point where “you’d come/to describe the animal/ and I never drank again.” There’s something wildly triumphant about tracking the section this way. In it I find a spirit reminiscent of Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” and his line about seeing “what men have thought they saw.” What gets me here is how the section enacts from beginning to end, with all its machinations in between, a big event—The Event—life-altering and pivotal. Yet, what’s really funny is that it isn’t the declaration that “I never drank again” that’s epiphanous/momentous, it’s that “you’d come”—ENTER: you—“to describe the animal”—interpret the animal a thousand different ways. And this leads us directly into section:
2. I ♥ Your Fate, which (as mentioned above) consists of 14 unnumbered sections (a sort of stretched to the gills, pushed to the limits sonnet-sonnet), and each of these sections in turn is composed of five quatrains, with mostly four beat lines. In other words, McCann becomes both a balladeer and a sonnet sequence writer simultaneously, the I/you relationship taking center stage in the poem right from the start:
I came out of the past, with fingers all stained
Behind my face my brain glows like carp
It’s like this, you’ll see, even in pictures
Leave it to someone to figure that out
What follows goes wild in the streets and in the margins, the regularity of the stanzas contrasting with the contents which are as surreal as they are romantic, as violent as they are analytical, as distorted and particular as they are lyrical and volcanic. For example, take these stanzas from 3 different sections of 2. I ♥ Your Fate:
Soft moccasin light streams down through the leaves
Can’t live a day in a world without birds!
I drag myself toward you using only my face
To see each little flower, forever at once
*
“What have you done?” our someone exclaimed
You shrieked as though you’d stabbed me yourself
It was weird: being there, with the rocks and the trees
I leapt from the platform into your arms
*
The miracle gland gives my body no rest
To be emptied again by the meaningless roar
Let’s go die, and then die, and then die and then die
Roll on, little toes, to the top of the earth!
As I hope these stanzas (which I sort of picked at random) demonstrate, the book’s second section is maddeningly beautiful in its wiry shiftiness. The lack of end-stops, (except for occasional exclamation points—which serve more than anything to barrel us—with alacrity—into the next stanza) makes the sections and the individual stanzas seem less than nailed to the page. And this, in turn, makes me want to jump around in my reading, to try new configurations of the poem’s lines/stanzas/sections. It’s like being given a forest made out of Legos. The first thing I want to do is map out the forest, then I want to play hide-n-seek in it, and after that I want to take it apart and build a monkey or a fighter jet.
This isn’t to suggest, however, that the poem as McCann has written it is “undone”—he’s made real choices; he’s given the poem a real trajectory and shape. But at the same time, he’s crafted the poem (and each line) with such detailed musical consistency—and with such unnerving jump-cuts and leaps—that it almost begs to be read around in with both pleasure and re/constructive imagination. It’s a poem to read and to play with—a toy box of Anthony McCann samples that points toward endless, marvelous (and kind of frightening) remixes. To illustrate what I mean, take a look at these stanzas that I made from the three I quoted above:
I drag myself toward you using only my face
The miracle gland gives my body no rest
It was weird: being there, with the rocks and the trees
Can’t live a day in a world without birds!
Roll on, little toes, to the top of the earth!
Soft moccasin light streams down through the leaves
To be emptied again by the meaningless roar
I leapt from the platform into your arms
To see each little flower, forever at once
Let’s go die, and then die, and then die and then die
You shrieked as though you’d stabbed me yourself
“What have you done?” our someone exclaimed
The point here is that the poem is so rich, so musically intertwined in itself, and so out-of-control-in-control in terms of its content, that reading it as McCann has written it suggests—almost insists on—a reader’s rearranging it endlessly in order to read the massive plethora of its surfaces and depths. It’s a poem that rewards reading, re-reading and re-inventive-reading, allowing us to get lost and find both each other and ourselves, over and over again:
No object here aches to be seen (except me)
Once again I’d arrived at the limit of friends
It might just be me and it might not be me
But it’s nice to be held while watching the waves
3. New Dreams of Mammal Island:
But one day they changed the color of everything
It was kind of like tasting all the world’s locks
And then a girder the size and shape of a fork
Fell to the floor and presented this room
And a bus barreled down and the whole building quaked
And the trees opened their shirts stepped out of their shirts
Out of their pants stepped out of their pants
And the trees started to weep I mean rain it was raining
And stood there all naked and human and shaking
And your face was an image of waiting in that rain
(from “Your Voice”)
I ♥ Your Fate’s final section seems to take off where section two leaves off, each poem a new wave pounding against us, flooding the stage with the strangest clarity ever, removing our clothes:
When I opened the fridge:
Leprosy tanks!
I’m up on the ladder
when the leaves start to shake
I am holding my hair
holding my teeth
I am resembling knees
when the birds start to twitch
In the meantime:
Miracle cops!
Filled with small traits
I was combing my head
When you touched my wrist
I was leaning
(from “Alibi”)
Everything in this book is leaning—on a slant, a little bent, off-kilter, a little bit waiting in waiting, hoping for the future, headlong into the future. It makes me want to reflect on and connect to the world, to other people and to words, differently, physically, with abandon, apocalyptically.
It strikes me after all of this that more than most books I ♥ Your Fate is a book of intersections, of fates and lines and stanzas—of words—mingled and commingled and deliberately intertwined to create one of the strangest, most human, and most out of this world (yet) worldly places I’ve ever been. It takes me places I could’ve never predicted or expected and which feel nevertheless exactly like home. More importantly, the book points over and over to that one crucial intersection that exists in almost any reading experience, the collision of reader and writer at the book. I ♥ Your Fate is a sort of love letter to our fates intertwined—mine and yours with Anthony McCann’s and poetry. The book’s title implies I heart your fate, because I heart our(don’t forget the “our” in “your”) fate in these poems. To read these poems is to keep fate in mind—to reflect on where one has been, who one is (the relationships that define us) and what it all points to—with openness to the possibilities of significant dis/connection.
by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books 2011 Reviewed by Nick Sturm
“There is no other life.”
The basic reason I pick up a book of poems, or attend a live show, or walk along a river, is to get closer to something I don’t understand, or at least to feel like I’m getting closer to it. Most of the time I’m just sitting in it, eating macaroni and cheese in it, feeling hurt or happy in it, sleeping in it, reading poems in it. Noelle Kocot’s The Bigger World has it, and each time I read these poems I feel fixed. I am a human being surrounded by things I don’t understand, and loving it, and falling apart in it, and suddenly this mysterious pronoun that once referred to everything I don’t understand now refers to the poems in The Bigger World.
As the title suggests, this is a book of amplification, which I mean both as the act of making something larger and also as the process of artificial, large-scale reproduction of DNA sequences. These poems are ontological; they are clear windows on a world that is brittle and elegant. From “Fugue”:
The building gleamed
In the midday rain. The cats
Ate their turkey dinner. She
Screened phone call after
Phone call. A wild loneliness
Descended like a flock of
Robins drained of their red.
The Bigger World is self-identified as a book of character poems; each poem has its own unique, unrepeated cast, and this cast animates and is animated by Kocot’s imagination, a la James Tate in Return to the City of White Donkeys and The Ghost Soldiers. One poem in this book tells us about Jelka, a woman who lives in an MRI machine for a few months. Another describes how Jim once had a tricycle accident but is now a butterfly. But these poems resist these kinds of futile synopses. Something big and full of light and pressure lives inside them. Meet Mary, who is “standing on so much wreckage / I think my legs will break.” Kocot shows her:
…groping fruit in the market,
Pretending it was the body of a lover,
And eating disgusting things out
Of cans, while the birds chirped quietly
In the dawn outside her kitchen window
After she’d rubbed her wrists with
Scissors oh-so-quietly in the dark.
This amplification works through Kocot’s often-charming, often-disturbing specificity. As readers, we are seeing parts of people we aren’t supposed to see: the parts they gave up on, their coping mechanisms. These lives and situations are tangible, yet fantastic. I trust the narrator when, in “Kind Regards,” she tells us about Rex, a man who spends his time looking for poisoned apples.
…Rex didn’t like being harassed
By a honeybee, so he crushed it
And rolled it around in his hand
Until it was nothing but a fine paste.
He touched a little of it with his tongue,
And discovered that it had the exact
Same aftertaste as a poisoned apple.
Rex was quite pleased with himself
And turned his car back toward home.
“What do you know about that?”
He thought. He was soon home,
And he turned on the television.
The mayor licked his balls like a dog.
Rex had plans. He dropped off to sleep,
Dreaming of buzzing things, dreaming
Of poison, and making plans that no
One in his right mind would ever understand.
The poems are about private lives. They are strange, but so is privacy. They are not surreal; they are—sometimes horrifyingly—all around us. As Kocot states, “There is no other life.” She gives her characters strange, illuminated specificity. The above poem also shows Kocot’s ability to adopt a fairy tale-like premise, magnetize it with a contemporary phenomenological reality, give us an uneasy laugh, and then unsentimentally ring our hearts out. It’s amplification. It’s your DNA being recoded.
More than anything else, Kocot’s generative imagination is the main catalyst that makes these poems explode. Illuminated, feral, Kocot’s creativity engenders an excitement comparable to being twelve years old, exposed to good poetry or music or art for the first time, and knowing that, for better or worse, things have been bent. One can’t help but to be unsteady, but believe in that instability. Meet Ritchie and the sleeper from “Fourth of July,” two unordinary guys with one foot in American masculinity and another in the metaphysical.
There was a shrinking downpour,
And the sleeper’s beans rusted
In the heat. Then, in a mercurial
Instant, there were unimaginable
Sounds, and bright pinwheels lit up
The Fourth of July sky better
Than fireworks. “What do you
Say we get some hot dogs to go
With them beans?” Ritchie asked
The sleeper. “The river, the sun,
And the night will take us
Where we want to go,” he replied.
“Hot dogs are for sissies.” Then,
Like tired sages, they dropped
Off to sleep and each had the same dream,
That they picked up a tiny blue
Moose and it was smiling.
The surreal turn at the end—reminiscent of certain poems by Tate and Dean Young—is nonetheless terrestrial, as it is placed in a dream. Kocot’s skill, and her heart, allow these poems to interweave the whimsical and the unworldly, opening us up to a sudden wonder, a falling through what we thought we knew. And really, the falling has never felt so necessary (in the final poem, a father butterfly named Jim buys his daughter a tricycle and has to watch as she rides “away / Unfettered into the summer night.”) It’s akin to a kind of spiritual awe, like being exposed to ancient stained glass or looking at the sun through a waterfall. She leaves us hanging in the best way: always about to fall, always about to be saved.
Both Ruefle’s and Donnelly’s books were published by Wave Books in 2010. Graber’s book was published by Princeton University Press, and Mlinko’s was published by Coffee House Press.
In a citation on the PSA Web site, Rodney Jones writes, “What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle: fond of experiment, but just as pleased to write of tilapia or county fairs; always novel, but never pandering to a mode; refusing neither the absurd nor the sublime. Any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence. For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience. Her Selected Poems, like the work of William Carlos Williams, is a testimony not only to the power of artfulness, but to human empathy.”
by Matthew Rohrer
Wave Books 2011 Reviewed by Nate Pritts
“and then they do / and I don’t know”
Poetry that rejects the delicacies & eloquences of the human spirit as it interacts with our human world crushes in all around us. Some of these poems work by way of a distorting & discomforting syntax, presenting readers with speakers who barrel their way from one strobe-like & startling & empty pronouncement to the next without notating any kind of ideological or emotional sphere or allowing any linguistic system for discursive, narrative or associative logic to take hold. Still others of these rushed & slight poems work by way of creating a hermetic & closed subject composed of disconnected caricatures or random images where the initial surprise of the material is supposed to stand in for staggering insight & carry the vapid poem all the way to its empty transcendence. While neither of these strategies is inherently flawed, much contemporary practice employing loose prosody or a subject that has been thoroughly wrung through the tenets of yellow journalism relegates Poetry to the role of minor diversion.
Still, there is Poetry that articulates & deepens our conception of what it means to be alive–a flawed human fumbling glimpsed however imperfectly through a busted lens. Matthew Rohrer’s Destroyer and Preserver struggles heroically with the need for concentration & revelation against a field of distraction & shattered perceptions. Rohrer has written with such tender affection–for people, for places, for the very ability to feel & think–that each poem feels weighted with equal parts nostalgia & hope.
The first poem in the book, “From Mars,” demonstrates the kind of motions these poems make, quietly & insistently, while also announcing its broader underpinnings: “the imagination thinks / in phrases but the universe / is a long sentence [.]” By colliding the terms “imagination” & “thinks,” Rohrer settles the reader into a logical & emotional universe, the Romantic worldview that Shelley or Keats espoused. Remarkably (& effortlessly), the poem parses itself cleanly despite the fact that there is no punctuation at all. Clearly, the reader is still being led down a path marked by the considered syntax of thought, even without the placeholders. This sense of a simultaneity of thought & impression, coupled with the feeling of a sturdily woven Romantic unity, helps deliver the poem’s resounding close:
but we have sad
news this morning
the dream has no
location or direction
and friends separated
by thousands of miles
are thinking of each
other simultaneously
but they have no idea
and we have no way
to reach them
The line breaks create the subtle & controlled reverie of this section. However, Rohrer is directing the reader’s concentration not on some enflamed or exaggerated image, but to a painful & human truth–a feeling already residing in our souls & not something we need to scramble to invent. The wonder of the pathos generated is that it stirs us to reside more fully in our selves.
In many of these poems, the speaker is presented in everyday situations or scenarios; “Poem for Starlings” describes a visit to the bank, though the speaker is obviously out of synch with his surroundings–both humorously in terms of action, as in “When you try to make a joke / in a bank / it falls flat,” & also emotionally in terms of attention, as in
my step as high
as the starlings
bickering in the sky
the birdsong
of the city
and the paper lifting off
the sidewalks
goodbye, I wish
the world were different
This wish fuels much of the Poetry in this collection, made up of a desire to see the world more precisely as it is, to open the self more fully to the range of human experience, to make some kind of lasting change.
Ultimately, the title of Rohrer’s collection signals the crucial dichotomy of the speaker’s ability. Human shadows are capable of destroying so much of the real charged living that gets presented to us while we struggle to preserve what’s worth preserving. But creation is outside the province of the speaker–it’s enough to notice, to defend, to assert belief, as in the luminous & fragmentary poem “Believe.” In repeated quatrain bursts, the speaker notates his surroundings through both objective & subjective renderings:
black unmarked vehicles appeared
in front of the
bagel place a part
of me wants oblivion
…
my face started to
twitch I pushed my
daughter through a city
I still believed in
These build to create a system because of the weight given to seemingly disconnected impressions & experiences–seeing the bagel place, wanting oblivion–& the insistence on meaning & human perception as great unifiers.
In “Red Flowers,” Rohrer’s speaker begins by pledging fidelity to watchfulness & observation
I don’t know what
kind of flowers they’ll be
until they open
and then they do
and I don’t know
while thwarting the reader’s expectation of knowledge. Sometimes paying attention & focusing your concentration like a laser through the hard steel of preoccupation & distraction is its own reward. The poem ends with what seems to be a quiet surrender
I see you, I see you
I whispered to her
but I would never see her like
this again
but is instead a reaffirmation of the powers of Poetry to be destroyer & preserver, & finally, human.
The KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Reading Series opened its spring season last night with readings by Anthony McCann and Jeremy Schmall, who have released new books in 2011. Schmall read from Jeremy Schmall & the Cult of Comfort(X-ing Books 2011) and McCann read from I ♥ Your Fate (Wave Books 2011). The KGB Series is hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez, and Michael Quattrone. It was founded by Star Black and David Lehman. In 2000, the pair edited The KGB Bar Book of Poems. Here is a list of poems read by Schmall and McCann:
Jeremy Schmall
“…This is what you shall do,” from the Preface to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
from Jeremy Schmall & the Cult of Comfort:
1. Lately I’ve been thinking…
2. Some third grader on a trumpet…
3. The blankets inside this head…
4. It’s true I have no stomach for frivolity…
5. Mired in the reprehensible age…
6. If you look carefully you can see…
7. In the movie version, all ten…
from The Hammer:
1. 146
2. 110
Anthony McCann
from I ♥ Your Fate:
1. Post Futurism
2. Field Work
3. The Assistant
4. Putin With Lynch
5. Poem (“cleaning what we took to be a field…”)
6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
7. Dear Catholic Church,
8. The Event
9. I ♥ Your Fate
—“Here’s something as thoughtful as chairs in the snow…”
—“Music came back and made us its slave…”
—Deseret
—“In this forest milieu: an encounter with void…”
—“The clouds lifted over a late human lunch…”
10. Your Voice
11. Alibi
12. In the Visitors’ Locker Room
13. Mammal Island
14. More Dreams of Waking
by Mary Ruefle
Wave Books 2010 Reviewed by Jennifer H. Fortin
“bearing small black eggs”
The modest act of noticing has been made, in Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems, spirited and spiritual. In these poems, selected from nine of her books spanning 25 years, her speakers notice (how many times this word appears!); they care, and are constitutionally altered as a result. Nothing is small enough to escape location and examination. Three of the poem titles contain “little,” and the word pops up frequently as a descriptor: little wooden bridge, little buns like the white hair, little glass hammer, little sister, little acts of love, little way, little parcels—all of these in only the first twenty pages. Not to be missed is the voice’s tenderness when “little” is used as the diminutive, o dear little reader.
Size in Ruefle is not a matter of objective judgment, but relativity. In “Replica,” “Once you wanted to be . . . / an iris in April, / or only its pistil, just that, a prayer so small / it was only rumored.” In “Seven Postcards from Dover,” “The child broke the chalk. / The mother said be strong. / The child said when I die I want to be a dwarf.” And it’s a red dwarf—dizzyingly huge, yet in name so tiny—that “will finally consume us.” From darkness, Ruefle restores “the meat / from half of a walnut, a fly / on a purple grape, the grape / lit from within and the fly / bearing small black eggs” (“The Last Supper”). Attention alights sometimes on the straightforward fact of size, as in the former two quotations. At other times, as in the latter two instances, the size of the ostensible smallness is subverted: the red dwarf is capable of ending it all, and the grape’s light is strong enough to illuminate. “The Last Supper” closes with a small group of people whose small pairs of eyes provide “infinite light.”
This effect of big smallness is heightened by another of Ruefle’s tendencies, which is to isolate specific objects or instances. Our extreme observer wipes out others and remarks upon one. “Out of a Hundred” is an entire piece dedicated to the impossibility that moments of meaning occur and the miracle that they actually do. Ruefle concludes the poem with: “Even if you knew that, you might not know / there are moments seized with tenderness. / This was one of them.” A relationship between size, singularity and the deeply personal is persistent throughout the poems in this Selected: “One wants so many things . . . / One wants simply”; “Were you off by one?” and “What book will you be reading when you die? / If it’s a good one, you won’t finish it. / If it’s a bad one, what a shame”; one grandfather, one grandmother; “You know the answer, you suspect / you are the only one in the classroom”; and so on.
Ruefle’s speakers cast their gazes toward the most difficult to reach distances and breadths. What may have been easy to overlook becomes hard to overlook. And it is hard, without a doubt, to exist as an extreme observer. Naturally, embarrassment surfaces and resurfaces in the book, because it’s awkward, it’s confusing to take so much of the world in and to presume one’s relationship as observer has any value. From “Full Moon”: “It is embarrassing to be alive. / Sometimes you have to stand out on the street / and look upwards, and then you have to pretend / the stone at your feet / is not an object of observation, / when it is.”
One might guess that a person so keenly observant would vivify even within her imaginings. Ruefle’s tremendous specificity of description means the lives found in her imagination are complex and dimensional. One speaker thinks of a woodchuck “who can no longer fit in any of the tunnels / he’s built, their labyrinth a sorrow / to his forlorn highness who has one eye.” The compassionate imagination pushes harder and harder to take a lingering feel around. While in its potential for alienation this move could be hazardous to a poem, the extreme specificity chucking us into oblivion, Ruefle’s work is balanced by inclusive theys, someones, somewheres, sometimeses that welcome the reader into Ruefle’s personal space. The reader is continually shown a small space of observation and then drawn in by the poem’s conclusion.
Attesting to her depth of vision, adjectives and adverbs abound, especially of the –est variety. The first poem’s title is “Standing Furthest,” not “Standing Far.” Our maven makes regular use of bests, worsts, nevers, always, forevers. Thus she establishes ethos, earning the power to remain palpable even where the first person is omitted (“The Intended,” “From Memory,” “All the Activity There Is,” “Barbarians,” “Perpetually Attempting to Soar,” “The Brooch”). To get maximum torque from her poems, Ruefle constantly casts them in a charged environment. The emotional heft of her poems is more real in a place where things are either the best or the worst.
Ruefle’s empirical language, littered with superlatives, activates the imagination of the poems’ speakers. What’s noticed draws forth what’s absent (side note: the poet is also an accomplished erasure artist). The previously absent is now present, as real as any other reality. The world is enriched as a result of being looked at. Vivid actions, thoughts and feelings are animated in the speakers.
Two of the best examples here are “Mercy” and “Glory.” “Mercy,” a crystalline poem opening with a calm request, closes with the same request, now urgent exclamation. Sandwiched between is imagination wild with detail—then the end: “I notice and I care. God have mercy on me! / I would lie down and put a dagger in my heart / if I only knew how and where and why.” The speaker, her mind increasingly populated, is compelled to the brink of drastic action. “Glory” starts with the beginnings of bloom; it ends with a gigantic question: “What’s your opinion? / You’re a man with a corona in your mouth, / a woman with a cottonball in her purse, / what’s your conception of the world?” In between is the sacredness of minutia. If this isn’t a stunning behavior for a poem, I don’t know what is.
Apparently, yes, there is a little glow about most things.
by Michael Earl Craig
Wave Books 2010 Reviewed by David Sewell
“I wish now to speak plainly about a one-eyed horse.”
I have never read TheDa Vinci Code, which I don’t mean to present to you here as an advertisement of my suitability for mating. Or perhaps I do, though I don’t want to give the impression that that’s the only reason I’m mentioning it. But, anyway, having lived in Paris for almost two years now and having seen groups of tourists lugging that estimable work all across this fair city, it occurs to me that the twain must have some connection. It’s possible I could validate this hunch with a few clicks on the computer machine and some time surfing the world wide web, but my ironic coolness depends on my not really knowing, and my ironic coolness is very important, not only to me, but to forces far greater in scope, coherence, and personal hygiene—forces, for all of our sakes, I dare not mention here. So let’s just assume the tourists are not misguided, other than in a sartorial sense, and keep this journey of discovery steaming along.
Slowly, and then somewhat more quickly, then, strangely, slowly again, it occurred to me that my being in Paris, the book-toting tourists’ being here, the deictic opus’s being set here (as far as I know), and my being asked to write a review of a new poetry collection…it was all starting to add up to something. I needed to focus my eyes, or perhaps let them go out of focus completely, or perhaps I just needed a stiff drink, and then what exactly had been carefully hidden out of my view for so long, the big secret that would make all of this make sense would be revealed, like Lindsay Lohan’s underpants as she emerges from the backseat of a chauffeured sedan.
I discovered the path through this forest of intrigue around 1 a.m. one night, walking home through the darkest evening of the year, rain filling up the streets, somewhere near the Louvre, after staying out past the Metro shutting down and having no cab fare after spending all my money on research materials. I had miles to go before I could sleep, so might as well exercise the old cerebrum along with the legs. If you have read TDC, as the cool kids call it, it might be useful at this point for you to think of whichever character is the sandalwood-smelling, furiously handsome one, and imagine me as him. Or him as me—it is really the same thing. I am your hero. Please keep that in mind as we move forward. The fate of all humanity now and in the future could very well depend on it.
~
Anyway, speaking of reading effluvia, if you’ve ever passed your eyes over any of the handful of reviews I’ve written for this site, I’m frankly surprised that you’re still reading this now. You see, the me that writes poetry reviews is a bit of a dandy, a fancy-pants who pretends to write reviews nominally about the book in consideration but mainly spends an unwarranted amount of time trying to show off some notion of je ne sais quoi, or mateability, that, in the end, really should have been kept concealed beneath the proverbial trench coat. (If, on the other hand, you find yourself captivated by my tarty insouciance and florid scratching style, please do yourself a favor and check out my multivolume doctoral dissertation on the role of trouser pleats in nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, available at some of the finer university libraries in Bhutan and Turkmenistan.)
You might notice, for instance, that we are more than six hundred words into this very review and I’ve yet to say anything even remotely substantive about the book, such as its title or the author’s name. You don’t need me to tell you that life is like that sometimes—not so much a box of chocolates as a long walk home at 1 a.m., with the recurring urge to knock a fellow night denizen off his velocipede as he cycles by, then pedal quickly away, whisking yourself safely home, where there is never a shortage of research materials or anyone telling you you’ve had enough research for one night and will be given no more, or if there is, you are certainly more powerful than her and her puny girl arms. But that is tea for another time, as the man says.
~
It is at this point that you are probably thinking that the review of the book will begin, but I’m sorry to inform you, dear reader, that is not quite the case. I haven’t even laid out the bare facts of the Da Vinci Code–like case we have on our hands here, the revelation of which I’m sure will shock and excite you in, hopefully, unequal measures. Here it goes: Michael Earl Craig, the putative author of Thin Kimono, goes authorially by three first names, any of which may or may not be his own. Such a situation is unusual in today’s go-go times of acronyms, initializations, and abbreviations, especially as his friends seem to refer to him as Earl (full disclosure: I would like to be his friend). There are any number of reasons why this might be the case, the most prominent of which is that his nom de plume (and, perhaps, de vie) is a sly, tripartite homage to (1) Philip Michael Thomas (also three first names), noted thespian best known for his smoldering turn as Ricardo Tubbs in the ’80s romantic comedy Miami Vice; (2) the Earl of Sandwich or the Second Earl Grey, or possibly both (thus totaling three Earls); and (3) Craig T.(heodore) Nelson (three first names again), noted coach. I once had a Miami Vice Trapper Keeper, every day I eat exactly one sandwich and drink exactly one pot of Earl Grey tea, and one time I saw Mr. Nelson at the airport… This is starting to get spooky.
There is yet another layer at work here, revealed to me late one night after doing extensive research in my kitchen by the light of the moon. You see, no sane individual would ever believe that anyone would say or write a name as long as Michael Earl Craig’s these days. As a thoroughly mateable and ironically cool person, I’m privy to the knowledge that the cool kids nowadays write and say, in their sexting sessions and such, “MEC,” when referring to our mysterious author. Fine, you might be saying to your wife or prostitute or butler, so what? Well, did you know, smart guy, that mec is a word in French, which by some strange coincidence is the official language of the country I currently live in? Weird, I know. And it’s not just any word, either. In French, mec is roughly equivalent to dude in English. (Need I remind you of the original definition of dude—“a non-westerner or city-dweller who tours or stays in the west of the U.S.”—and that Michael Earl Craig was born in the thriving metropolis of Dayton, Ohio, and now summers and winters, as well as springs and falls, in the wild west?)
~
Cleverly, our thrice-forenamed author has revealed to us his true identity: the dude. A crucial document in the corpus of mysterious symbology behooving us to consider it is the 1998 historical documentary The Big Lebowski, which followed the comings and goings of a Renaissance man and bowling enthusiast who also went by the name of The Dude. Here is some introductory prose from that film, which sums up that dude’s presence rather succinctly:
“…He called himself The Dude. Now, Dude, that’s a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But, then, there was a lot about The Dude that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But, then again, maybe that’s why I found the place so durned innarestin’…. I only mention it ’cause, sometimes there’s a man—I won’t say a hee-ro, ’cause what’s a hee-ro? But sometimes there’s a man…. And I’m talkin’ about The Dude here—sometimes there’s a man who, well, he’s the man for his time ’n’ place, he fits right in there—and that’s The Dude…. Sometimes there’s a man…. Sometimes there’s a man. Ah, I lost my train of thought here. But… Aw, hell. I done introduced him enough.”
Indeed. Sometimes there’s a man… Sometimes there’s a man in Montana who shoes horses and writes unadorned poems about extraordinary ordinary things, and all the time this is a good thing for the rest of us. The poems in Thin Kimono (as in his previous two books), for the most part, eschew the sudden jumps or shifts in tone, style, placement, or focus that so many poets today hop around on like a crippled albino being chased by a tiger, perhaps also albino. (The second section, of three, is one long, sectioned poem mostly comprising unconnected images and thoughts presented in somewhat non-sequitur fashion. But there’s plenty of emotional/tonal glue here, and it works.) Most of the poems’ images, lines, and thoughts follow what came before in a natural yet not-obvious way. Nearly everything is connected in a logical and emotional sense. This is sometimes called accessibility. Indeed,even the detours are easy to manage—they feel like normal cognitive diversions, following the mind as it follows a tangent to a related place, then returns to the original train of thought like a cross-country traveler who just needed to stretch his legs on the platform for a second.
On the stylistic level, the poems are most often composed of simple declarative sentences, short in length, without many subordinate clauses or complex constructions. There’s not much enjambment of lines, not many metaphors or much figurative language. Most of the lines end with a period or a comma. There’s nothing really experimental, nothing neo-this or post-that at work here. And yet the poems consistently pop with brightness and originality against a humorous and clever backdrop.
Take, for instance, the poem about the man hanging out at the bottom of the swimming pool to check out (and not in a weird way) two dozen synchronized swimmers as they practice. Or the three poems about being at an acupuncturist’s. Or the two about lying on a hotel bed. The poems here are about small things: talking to his grandmother on the phone, visiting New York City, riding on an airplane, shoeing a horse. The poem “Windsor” begins, “I wish now to speak plainly about a one-eyed horse.” Then, for the rest of the poem, he talks plainly about a one-eyed horse. That is more or less how these poems work. One does not have to consult the etchings on Bruncvik’s Sword or stare intently at a pair of Leonardo’s used underpants during a penumbral lunar eclipse to unlock the secrets here, or to fully enjoy these poems for all that they are and aren’t. “Trying again I wrote / in capital letters THE READER / CAN ALMOST BE DUMB REALLY / AND STILL GET MY POEMS,” he writes in “Bluebirds.” Empirically, I can attest to that statement’s truth.
The source material Craig draws from is the same available to anyone else, but the results transcend the standard product. He talks often about things he sees in the newspaper, on TV, while driving his automobile. It’s through the peculiar alchemy that occurs in the writer’s/speaker’s head that these everyday scenes and situations become something of a more precious nature—to quote “After a Terrifying Nap”: “Not golden like a bar of gold / (an ingot) / or golden like honey / or paint on a football helmet. / It was another kind of gold.” That poem is about a golden grasshopper that falls into a car and comes to rest, next to a potato chip, on the floor in the backseat, below a soundly napping infant. That’s all that happens, really, yet the poet somehow arrives at, “The grasshopper sent forth a golden light. / The infant awoke in his car seat, / looked at the grasshopper / and wiggled his feet, his white socks.”
~
It’s worthwhile mentioning the sort-of shorthand poetics found in “Poem (The nitwit danced…)”: “To those people who are always talking about ‘surrealism’ / can I suggest you open your fucking eyes? / If you do this, you will see mothballs. And a green nightgown.” I think the point here is less whether these poems do or do not trade in surrealism than that such discussions are inherently less interesting than what one can see by simply opening one’s eyes and looking around. Ultimately, it’s what Craig sees, and how he sees it, that makes these poems work so well. “Clear writing is clear thinking,” he writes in “Humans.” The obvious danger in such perspicuity is that stripping away all the stylistic and poetic drapery is a bit like being naked in front of a crowded room of insurance salesmen: there’s nothing to conceal one’s human frailties from their prying, insatiable eyes. That Michael Earl Craig’s poems are continually as lean, well-proportioned, and finely chiseled as that other Renaissance giant, Michelangelo’s David (no relation), proves he has nothing at all to hide.
by Timothy Donnelly
Wave Books 2010 Reviewed by Stephen Burt
“The suffering from which we had come to expect so much.”
For most of its extraordinary length The Cloud Corporation is the most abstract, the most inward-turned, and the grimmest of recent good books. Timothy Donnelly meditates on the very terms that make meditation possible—terms such as “knowledge,” “mystery,” “particular,” “mind,” and “will” (all occur on the first page)—and he makes the tough time we have pinning those terms down into one of his typical subjects. His kind of pessimistic introspection, cast in long sentences and in three-line stanzas, might remind you of late Wallace Stevens, the grey, chastened Stevens of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Stevens described “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain”; Donnelly gives us “The Malady That Took the Place of Thinking”:
There had seemed to be only one world to adhere to
but now I can see how there really isn’t any, just roads
with signs directing further, towards and away
from the same humiliating noplace you already are.
Yet Donnelly rarely sounds or feels like Stevens: Donnelly’s music is harsher, his bitterness decidedly up to date: his “cardboard city/ collapses around us; another beautiful document/ disassembles into anguish.” Donnelly’s questions about the futility of thought, the inaccessibility of souls, join up willy-nilly to contemporary questions of political economy. How much of the alienation he describes (so his verse asks) arises from the conditions of all human life, and how much arises, instead, from American lives overstuffed with commodities, based on unsustainable consumption, beclouded by corporate entities, propped up by intermittently visible wars? Had Stevens written anything entitled “The Rumored Existence of Other People” it would have been one of his late poems against solipsism; when Donnelly uses that title, it describes his guilt when he thinks about the ill-paid “people I would never meet or know,” who grow or manufacture most of our stuff. “Intuition stopped short of determining whether or not/ any of the objects kept in contact with their makers.” Half-buried by the shiny new products of alienated labor, we inhabit a new Atlantis, ripe for deluge; “to those who lacked the ability to see// through the radiance of things, the Atlanteans appeared/ to be thriving.”
When not economic, not weighed down by cloudy commodities, Donnelly’s vision of human life is positively Lucretian in its atomized meaninglessness—“Here is the river from which/ we crawl, there the next into which we one day dissolve.” When other people and their poems propose ways to palliate his sense of isolation, salves for his sense of futility, Donnelly simply knows too much to believe them. (He has read a lot of other people’s poems; Donnelly co-edits the poetry and the poetry criticism at Boston Review, where he has accepted, and improved, much of my own prose.) Some of the funniest, harshest lines in The Cloud Corporation show Donnelly’s alienation from other writers’ less incisive work:
…I don’t want to have to
locate divinity in a loaf of bread, in a sparkler,
or in the rainlike sound the wind makes through
mulberry trees, not tonight. Listen to them carry on.
(from “The New Hymns”)
Relatively consistent in attitude, in tone, Donnelly takes care to vary his rhythm, his line: some short stanzas owe less to Stevens than to Creeley. He varies, as well, the arguments in his complaints, the reasons he gives for feeling stuck, baffled, oppressed: it’s no fun to feel alienated from everything and everyone, but it’s even more disheartening, and morally worse, to feel bound up in the sort of collective entity (the United States, the Western world) that stands to blame for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, for “what’s// done in my defense, or in/ its name, or in my/ interest or in the image// of the same.”
Short of resigning from Western civilization, short of devoting one’s life (as this poet could not, temperamentally, do) to a possibly fruitless radical activism, what on Earth should we do? Is there nothing to do? “I just feel soporose, so// soporose tonight… You think/ I should be concerned?” So ends his six-page poem about Abu Ghraib, “Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris. ” The subsequent poem, “Fun for the Shut-in,” begins as a scary tutorial:
Demonstrate to yourself a resistance to feeling
unqualified despair by attempting something like
perfect despair embellished with hand gestures.
What to do? “Embellish”: it’s useless, but so is everything else.The demonstrations in The Cloud Corporation stand out not just for their unflinching look at such sad speculations but for their intricate combinatorics: each long abstract sentence really makes sense, really says something about the course of a thought, something that could not be said in some other way. Donnelly can make a drawn-out music of self-attenuating introspection, or a self-resenting music of grinding, gnashing sounds, dissatisfied with every move in its repertoire: a villanelle, “Claire de Lune, ” says “We tire, we bore./ We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us” (that second line is a refrain).
There is something disturbingly Puritanical about Donnelly’s introspective annoyance, as if tactile or gustatory or indeed sexual delight just deserved our suspicion: what’s wrong with liking 47 flavors of ice cream? why should abundance, in and of itself, make us cringe? But in eating all that ice cream, we are not just using the rest of the world for our pleasure; we are using it up, consuming lives and resources we can never replace, and we seem (at least collectively) unable to stop. No wonder Donnelly cannot stop worrying, not even when he tries to think about metaphysics instead. When he asks how to measure time passing, he proposes “a unit known as the snailsdeath”:
…the average length of time,
about 43 seconds, elapsing between the loss of the first
snail to toxic waters and the loss of the next, roughly
equivalent to the pause between swallows in a human
throat.
(from “Globus Hystericus”)
It is as if speech itself, ostensibly the least harmful of human activities, were killing off the Earth all by itself, one invertebrate species at a time.
Other contemporary poets—from Frederick Seidel to Joyelle McSweeney—have answered violence with violence, reacting to ecocatastrophe, to the metastasis of the corporation, with poetry whose aggressive imbalance seems to reject everything associated with ordinary (and therefore privileged) American life. Neither Donnelly’s temperament, nor his sense of how language works, can let him do that: chaos is for him less interesting and less attractive than a self-questioning, even a self-hating order. Not content to be merely chaotic, aggressive, “subversive,” averse to the writings that simply mime smashing things up, Donnelly has found a way to try to think about our imbrication in what he attacks, about the pleasure we get, the habits we have, and the parts of civilization—perhaps inextricable from baser pleasures—that we perhaps ought to want to preserve.
That way of thinking comes out in his intricate sentences, in his relentless introspection, and in his sour moods: he is—as I am—attached to an unjust order, an order that in its complex, “corporate” entirety can (so it seems in December 2010) neither be defended, nor replaced. The loneliness of a helpless spirit in space, unable to know other people’s inmost souls, and the helplessness of a sad citizen unable to stop consuming, are for Donnelly part of the same problem, the general problem of individual helplessness, and prompt the same sort of inquiries, the same baffled tones. It is a poetry in which (as Matthew Arnold said of his own early poetry, disliking it) suffering finds no vent in action: “the suffering/ from which we had come to expect so much/ remained mere suffering; the swamp due south… stayed water choked in excess life.” Donnelly wants to cut off (but cannot cut off) the part of himself that keeps discovering (in the economy, in his ontology) problems that cannot even be palliated, only chewed over and turned into art:
The times the thought of being pulled apart from
you comes as a relief have come now to outnumber
those it startles me like light from a hurricane
lamp left burning unattended dangerously near
the curtains of the theater we both attend and are.
That stanza sounds as if he were breaking up with a lover, or asking for a divorce, but he is not; the poem instead bears the title “Antepenultimate Conflict with Self.” Antepenultimate, outnumber, average, equivalent: the generalizing, philosophical or mathematical language that comes naturally to Donnelly sits just one chair away from the easily mocked word-hoards of the legal profession and the social sciences, and Donnelly knows as much, writing half-serious halves of poems in legalese:
And such proceedings shall be considered criminal:
amusement amendments, two or more individuals,
any dream proceedings which engage in the activities
indicating intention, love or other things of value…
(from “The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports”)
Here the trick is to keep the tone neither wholly satirical, nor wholly exempt from satire. When the trick works—as in the writings of Donnelly’s Columbia University colleague Ben Marcus—we may be shocked to see how similar the supposedly deep and personal language of literary introspection and the supposedly hollow, or impersonal, languages of law, of economics, of sociology, really are. (Lines in this poem, a note says, actually take language from the USA_PATRIOT ACT and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”)
It would be hard to create a whole book of poems—especially a long book, and this one is long—from such projects, and Donnelly does not try. Pithy illustrations, one-page, one-scene poems, become superb counterweights to the extended, distressed abstractions. Take “Montezuma to His Magicians,” here quoted whole:
If they are gods, if they have
divinity in them, then why
when we lay at their feet
garlands of quetzal feathers
and gold coins do they leap
upon the gold as dazzled
monkeys might and tread
on sacred plumage like dust?
Conquistadors are closer to monkeys, to base animals, than to their own immortal souls: they prefer the baseness of exchange value to the pleasure of the sacred, the precious-in-itself. Animals with such preferences are doomed, as the Aztecs were doomed, as imperial Spain was doomed, too; Donnelly accretes analogies between our own empire and the doomed civilizations of the remote past—Aztecs, Sumerians, Egyptians (“Advice to Baboons of the New Kingdom”), Rome (“Tiberius at the Villa Jovis”).
Donnelly’s pessimism never amounts to stoicism, to indifference—he likes the world, and the words in it, too much for that. Instead, it amounts to a kind of gray, faute de mieux aestheticism—he suspects that the greatest accomplishment words can achieve is to help us lose ourselves inconsequentially amid a merely verbal order:
Miraculous to find time to do nothing other than gather
dust like the mismatched furniture in whose slow company
my gratitude increases the longer I don’t think about me,
no cringe at what I’ve done, no wince at what’s to do.
(from “Explanation of an Oriole”)
At least, like the Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the contemplation of still life, of dust on furniture, of words on paper, is mostly harmless. It may even lead to a quasi-Buddhist distance (much sought) from the desiring self, or else to a delight in baroque arrangements (as in the mesh of clauses above), whose very contours seem to lead him back to the “I” that worries so much, though he would rather be led, at last, away: “You wager too much, small self, on the way you feel. Nothing/ you have thought should last forever can’t be lost.”
And so Stevens comes to Donnelly’s aid again: not the discursive Stevens of that all-too-ordinary evening, but the earlier, slightly sunnier Stevens of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” The Cloud Corporation points back to that poem in its title and in its many oceans, lakes, ponds, seas, each of which stands (as in Stevens) for the contrast between an alluring surface and a monotony beneath: “Looking out on the water in time we came to see/ being itself had made things fall apart in this way.” Stevens’s “Sea Surface” delights in variations on its underlying Thing That Will Not Change. In Donnelly’s seven-part, eight-page title poem, that Thing could be our all-American class system, with its half-hidden privileges, its half-hearted meritocracy, whose surface churns like “a mythology of clouds” while down below the foundations of power remain. The Thing could be, instead (in a neat reversal of Stevens) imagination, delusion, wishful thinking, the human faculty that starts and continues “wars/ to keep clouds safe”: we like to imagine that
whatever is desirable will come to pass, a caressing
confidence—but one unfortunately not borne out
by human experience, for most things people desire
have been desired ardently for thousands of years
and observe—they are no closer to realization today
than in Ramses’ time. Nor is there cause to believe
they will lose their coyness on some near tomorrow.
The Cloud Corporation toggles between the two modes of pessimism that Donnelly’s self-scrutinizing sentences explore: first, the private-introspective-philosophical, the poet lamenting entrapment in his own head; second, the public-economic-political, the poet sad to be trapped in our civilization. On the one hand, the attempt to conclude “a single, half-articulate drama/ about the self and the wearing it must suffer”; on the other hand, the attempt to account for “the infinitesimal portion of the blue/ planet’s mass that answered to my name.” Both attempts seem ultimately futile, and yet perversely beautiful, in Donnelly’s long lines.
And yet he does not end his book on a note of futility: instead he finds ways to imagine a return to the social, and to the concrete, a fictive resurrection that will bring him “back to you, World, wholehearted for the real.” “Chapter for Not Dying Again,” the penultimate poem, marks the end of the “private” book: Donnelly sees himself as an Egyptian spirit, able to return to life, “counting the hours/ until the plover carries me back in pieces in its beak.” Death and bodily resurrection in fleshy pieces: a happy ending, as such things go.
But that is the private, domestic (with “tuna fish and breakfast flakes”) ending to The Cloud Corporation. The very last poem provides a “public” ending, a final take on “the cloud of food-court/ breakfast,” “the shopping center… escalator… up to the story/ intended for conference space.” Having spent much of the volume identifying himself with the civilization that will fall, the Babylon of seven-syllable words, corporations, and food courts, he can finally, ironically, quietly, imagine himself instead as a barbarian at its gates. So Donnelly concludes by envisioning “His Future As Attila the Hun,” coming to the shopping center as it were from the outside, finally ready “to lay/ waste to the empire now placed before me at my feet.”
by Geoffrey Nutter
Wave Books 2010 Reviewed by Kate Angus
“with ever-growing care, and interest”
Christopher Sunset, Geoffrey Nutter’s most recent collection, is a book that sails forward into a world of transformations and immense possibility. In it, one might buy “watermelon / sold from a blue shack, or a shark,” and Nutter’s openness to the potential inherent within that tiny consonant-shift allows him to present a world where “If shark, the fruit / has quills, exquisite” and, by the poem’s end, “banished from the abstract,” readers finds themselves somewhere with “all doors ajar” (“Prospectus”).
The verb “sails” is an appropriate one for Christopher Sunset, not only because some of Nutter’s most frequently occurring images are of boats and the sea (as he himself makes note of with his announcement of “Nautical imagery” in “The Sea and the Bells”), but also because the movement of many of these poems is like that of sailing — the way a boat propelled by the wind and tides may suddenly yet seamlessly shift its trajectory. Nutter is a poet whose hand rests on the rudder, but who is also confident enough to let his poem-ships follow the current underneath. It’s a movement similar to the way dreams progress (dreams and sleep are two other motifs in this collection) where the propulsive force of associative imagery leads each poem forward down the page.
This is not to say, however, that the book is abstract or unfocused; rather, Christopher Sunset presents poems where concrete images allow both contemplation and an acknowledgement of the almost numinous possibilities inherent in the world. Because anything can happen, everything can happen, and we all–even the poems themselves–want to know what the future holds. In the book’s opening poem, “The Strawberry,” Nutter’s description of a “pale yellow strawberry” leads us to the shadow of the pavilion where it grows, and that in turn allows us to “play in its beginning / the way children played in this pavilion,” and soon the poet asks us “What happens next?”, a question that he follows with images of the somewhat ominous night where “the city lurches forward with its white eye” and the information that “something, in these leaves, is watching us.” There is an immense strength in Nutter’s willingness to be ambiguous here. That observant presence could just as easily be a predator as a protector as it watches “with ever-growing care, and interest”; the “care,” after all, could be concern about us as much as concern for us. Still, the overall sense in both this poem and the book as a whole is that whatever is watching us is doing so with solicitude, that it is paying us the same kind of serious attention that this poet asks us to pay to both the external and internal world. There’s a sense of connection or camaraderie that prevails: whatever is in the leaves “wants to see what will happen next, too.”
Nutter’s vision is a remarkably positive one–his is not the elegiac voice nor does he croon with dark hipster cynicism. Instead, this is a book full of yeses and metamorphoses: the pink carnation heads that become bells or small busts of deceased Spanish philosophers or lamps or heads that “nod yes, nod yes” (“Miguel de Unamuno”) or the way that a Max Ernst painting resurfaces as a “prayer book / called Children Menaced by a Nightingale” that will fill us with tenderness (“Bedtime Stories”). These are generous poems, full of the impulse both to pay attention to things as they are and to allow them to become whatever other things their deeper selves contain or lead to. It is, again, the sort of generosity that comes to most of us in dreams where we too, as in this book’s final echo of the Song of Songs, might say, “I sleep…but my heart is awake” (“Je Dors, Main Mon Coeur Veille”).
It’s that time of year again! Here are some suggestions that might make the perfect gift for those that love poetry!
