Galatea Resurrects #12 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE 12: TABLE OF CONTENTS

2009-05-20T23:55:00.000-07:00

ISSUE NO. 12 TABLE OF CONTENTS

May 20, 2009

[N.B. You can scroll down for all articles or click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to the referenced article. Since this is a large issue, if it takes too long to upload the entire issue, you can click on the individual links below to more quickly get to a review that interests you.]

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
By Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Thomas Fink reviews 237 MORE REASONS TO HAVE SEX by Denise Duhamel & Sandy McIntosh

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews 237 MORE REASONS TO HAVE SEX by Denise Duhamel & Sandy McIntosh

John Herbert Cunningham reviews CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ABOUT NOW: COLLECTED POEMS OF JOANNE KYGER by Joanne Kyger, and THE COLLECTED POEMS OF PHILIP WHALEN BY PHILIP WHALEN Edited by Michael Rothenberg

Nic Sebastian reviews HARLOT by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Tom Hibbard reviews ENDGAMES by Márton Koppány

Amber DiPietra reviews OCCUPATIONAL TREATMENT by Taylor Brady

Rebecca Guyon reviews MOONGARDEN by Anthony McCann

Angela Genusa reviews MAXIMUM GAGA by Lara Glenum

Eileen Tabios engages OBSOLETE—AN ALPHABET OF POEMS INSPIRED BY DEAD WORDS by Katie Haegele

John Herbert Cunningham reviews CONTEMPORARY POETICS edited by Louis Armand, PRIOR TO MEANING: THE PROTOSEMANTIC AND POETICS by Steve McCaffery, and PATAPHYSICS: THE POETICS OF AN IMAGINARY SPACE by Christian Bök

Tom Hibbard reviews FRAGILE REPLACEMENTS by William Allegrezza

Kristina Marie Darling reviews THE HOUSE IN THE HEART by Willie James King

Garrett Caples reviews MARTINIQUE: SNAKE CHARMER by André Breton

Michael Caylo-Baradi reviews HUMAN CATHEDRALS by John Sweet

Thomas Fink reviews HISTORY OF THE COMMON SCALE by Edward Foster

Eileen Tabios engages DISCLOSURE by Dana Teen Lomax

Fiona Sze-Lorrain reviews THE HEAVEN-SENT LEAF by Katy Lederer

Richard Lopez reviews ALL ROADS...BUT THIS ONE by Jon Cone, Claudie Grinnell, klipschutz and Albert Sgambati

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews POEMS FOR THE MILLENIUM VOLUME THREE edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C Robinson

Eric Gelsinger reviews TIME MACHINE by Ric Royer

Jeff Harrison reviews NOSERING CELLPHONE by Lanny Quarles

Jean Vengua engages KATA by James Maughn and KALI'S BLADE by Michelle Bautista

Nicole Mauro reviews [LAPSED INSEL WEARY] by Susana Gardner

Kathryn Stevenson reviews TINDERBOX LAWN by Carol Guess

John Herbert Cunningham reviews THE CAMBRIDGE INTRODUCTION TO MODERNISM by Pericles Lewis, THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY edited by Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, and THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO POSTMODERNISM edited by Steven Connor

Steven Karl reviews THE STARS ON THE 7:18 PENN by Ana Bozicevic

James Stotts Engages TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF DANIIL KHARMS, Edited and Translated by Matvei Yankelevich

Eric Gelsinger reviews LETTERHEAD VOLUME 2, Eds. Eric Johnt, Bradley Lastname, Brian McMahon, Robert Pomerhn

Eileen Tabios engages PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Bill Berkson

Ching-In Chen reviews THE ALPS by Brandon Shimoda

Christopher Mulrooney reviews THE NEW YORK POSTCARD SONNETS by Philip Dacey

Fiona Sze-Lorrain reviews INVERSE SKY by John Isles

Nathan Logan reviews THE AMPUTEE´S GUIDE TO SEX by Jillian Weise

Grace C. Ocasio reviews HORSE PLAYING THE ACCORDION by Elizabeth Smither

Dave Bonta reviews TEN POEMS ABOUT HIGHWAYS AND BIRDS by Sarah Bennett

Eileen Tabios engages OPEN NIGHT by Aaron Lowinger

Richard Lopez reviews T(HERE) by Jonathan Hayes

Tom Beckett engages CADAVER DOGS by Rebecca Loudon

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews 14 BOOKS from the 2008 LONDON SMALL PUBLISHERS FAIR

Jeff Harrison reviews INCONGRUITIES by Séamas Cain

John Herbert Cunningham reviews EMERALD ICE: SELECTED POEMS 1962-1987 by Diane Wakoski

Elizabeth Kate Switaj reviews SATELLITE CONVULSIONS: POEMS FROM TIN HOUSE, Edited by Brenda Shaugnessy and CJ Evans

Craig Santos Perez reviews RIVER ANTES by Myung Mi Kim

Denise Dooley reviews THE DRUG OF ART: SELECTED POEMS by IVAN BLATNY, Edited by Veronika Tuckerová

John Herbert Cunningham reviews LITERARY THEORY: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Mary Klages and THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO FEMINIST LITERARY THEORY edited by Ellen Rooney

Ruth Lepson reviews HOUSECAT KUNG FU by Geoffrey Gatza

Angela Genusa reviews BARF MANIFESTO by Dodie Bellamy

William Allegrezza reviews DIPTYCHS: VISUAL POEMS by Nico Vassilakis

John M. Bennett reviews SUCURSAL DE ESTRELLA: POEMARIOS INICIALES Y FINALES by Alvaro Cardona Hine

John M. Bennett reviews LONGFELLOW MEMORANDA by Geof Huth

John M. Bennett review FROM THE ANNUAL RECORDS OF THE CLOUD APPRECIATION SOCIETY edited by Márton Koppány and Nico Vassilakis

Eileen Tabios engages LUNCH POEMS by Mark Young and DELTA BLUES by Skip Fox

Aileen Ibardaloza reviews THISTLES by Jack Cassinetto

Nathan Logan reviews THAT TINY INSANE VOLUPTUOUSNESS by Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney

Nicola Trumbull reviews NEVER CRY WOOF by Shafer Hall

James Stotts engages INSTANTS by Philip Metres

John Herbert Cunningham reviews GAYATRI SPIVAK: ETHICS, SUBALTERITY AND THE CRITIQUE OF POSTCOLONIAL REASON by Stephen Morton and GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAL: LIVE THEORY by Mark Sanders

Steven Karl reviews CLARITY AND OTHER POEMS by Thomas Fink

Helen Losse reviews FORMS OF INTERCESSION by Jayne Pupek

Steven Karl reviews LOST WORK BOOK W/ LETTERS TO DEER by Catherine Meng

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews A BIGGER BOAT: THE UNLIKELY SUCCESS OF THE ALBUQUERQUE POETRY SLAM SCENE edited by Susan McAllister, Don McIver, Mikaela Renz, and Daniel S. Solis

Steve Tills reviews THIS POEM/WHATSPEAKS?/ADAY by Tom Beckett

Ruth Lepson reviews (B)ITS by Joel Chace

Eileen Tabios engages PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE by Tan Lin

TAN LIN INTERVIEWED
by Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher and Gordon Tapper, with interview edited by Gordon Tapper

THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
Elizabeth Kate Switaj

FEATURED POET
Tom Beckett interviews Reb Livingston

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
John Olson reviews COMPLICATIONS by Garrett Caples

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Tiny Poetry Books Feeding the World...Literally!

BACK COVER
Boy And Dog

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2009-05-20T23:54:00.000-07:00

So I begin with the above picture because you are looking at the reason for the delayed release of this issue, as well as why 2009 will only feature two issues versus past years' four releases: my new son Michael flanked by Achilles and Gabriela! And a happy-as-a-cop-with-a-donut Abuelita and occasional GR reviewer Beatriz Tabios grinning from the back seat! Took two years of hard travelin' (with several issues edited at various airport terminals), among other things, but Moi is now a Mom! (Anyone interested in older-child adoption may want to check out Kidsave, whose "Summer Miracles" program is about to begin across the U.S.)

As to GR, thanks as ever to GR's numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. Another record count:

Issue 1: 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)
Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)
Issue 7: 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 9: 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)
Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)

Of reviewed publications, the following were generated from review copies sent to GR:

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews
Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews
Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews

I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review. Obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies HERE.

*****

As I've said before, your Editor is blind, so if there are typos/errors in the issue, just email Moi or put in the comments sections and I will swiftly correct said mistakes (since such is allowed by Blogger).

*****

The internet is multi-language, which is to say, I'm delighted to include in this issue our first non-English review: John M. Bennet's Spanish review of Sucursal de estrella: poemarios iniciales y finales by Alvaro Cardona Hine. I am open to more non-English reviews as long as an English translation of the review is available, as is the case with John's review.

*****

Last but not least, here is another photo -- for what is parenthood without photos and if I wasn't shy before at inflicting photos of moi dawgs on you, what makes you think I'd shy away now from MY SON!

With much Love, Fur, and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
May 20, 2009

237 MORE REASONS TO HAVE SEX by DENISE DUHAMEL & SANDY MCINTOSH

2009-05-20T23:50:00.000-07:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

237 More Reasons to Have Sex by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh
(Otoliths, Australia, 2009)

There are at least 237 reasons for Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh to collaborate on a long, hilarious list-poem. I’ll keep my list to two. For one thing, both have written powerful list poems before, Duhamel as early as “Assumptions” in her debut collection, Smile! (1993) and recently the chapbook length, Mille et Un Sentiments (2005) and McIntosh in the title-poem and several others in Forty-Nine Guaranteed Ways to Escape Death (2007). Further, these are two of the funniest contemporary American poets to comment in their work on sex and death. When one of them found the article, “Why Humans Have Sex,” in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, with a set number of reasons, it was a matter of time before these poets conjured up “237 more reasons.”

While one job of the poets may be to make the reader laugh, mine as critic is to dampen that humor for the time being with ponderous analytic seriousness. I must make the “instruct” in Horace’s “instruct and delight” gain temporary priority over “delight,” unless one finds such instruction delightful. (When I proposed, then taught a course called “Humor in Literature” in the eighties as a new assistant professor at City University of New York—La Guardia, I encountered much annoyance about analytic dampening. I haven’t taught the course in the last two decades.) Today, a fine way of realizing my aim is to introduce a formulation of desire as lack by the intellectually burly French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan even before citing anything from the Duhamel/McIntosh collaboration:

From the outset we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is. . . a lure. When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—You never look at me from the place from which I see you. . . .
The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack. . . . It must, therefore, be an object that is, firstly, separable and, secondly, that has some relationship to the lack (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1998. 102-3.)

“The objet a” is sometimes known as the little other (petit a), in contrast with the big Other (Autre), which indicates an otherness beyond the ego’s assimilation. Particular features of the little other entice the subject, often on an unconscious level. Sentences 86 and 87 of Duhamel and McIntosh’s collaboration provide examples of a subject being aware of what lures them without losing the attraction: “I’ve always had a thing for good boys in letter sweaters”; “I’ve always had a thing for letter carriers in blue sweaters” (16-17). A mere list of object a’s would not produce much of a poem; the two sentences are related because of a double meaning of “letter” (a key-word in Lacan’s celebrated “Seminar on ‘the Purloined Letter’”) and a repeated item of “sexy” clothing, and this goes beyond simple listing. While one object of desire wears clothing that communicates status within a school and no appreciable societal utility, the other’s uniform signifies a job not usually invested with glamour but a useful conduit for communication. This implied contrast suggests how arbitrary—hence how absurd—the workings of an objet a can seem. The idea that a differing structure of symbolic or metonymic chains would cause one person to fall for the postman/woman and one to fall for the student-athlete is funny enough, as presented, to make one see chaos take the place of pseudo-coherent narratives about predestined “soul-mates.”

Duhamel and McIntosh also exploit and mock the pandemic range of fantasies about celebrities seeping into ordinary folks’ erotic selections:

62. I pretended you were Tom Cruise playing air guitar in Risky Business. (14)
63. I pretended I was Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch.
64. I pretended I was the couch.
113. You promised me we could name our first daughter Chastity, just like Sonny and Cher had. (19)
154. There was Vaseline on the camera lens, so you looked like Warren Beatty who will only be filmed in soft lighting. (24)

Falling for a non-celebrity, one frequently makes an objet a out of a fragmentary association between that person and a star’s isolated trait. Perhaps, for the speaker in number 62, the juxtaposition of movie star looks and silly “air guitar” would involve a lowering of inhibition that seems to make the previously unattainable accessible—through pretending. In the next sentence above, ardor is derived from the identification of a role-model’s action with one’s own. Although the incident on the Oprah Winfrey Show made many star-gazers doubt Cruise’s sanity, a number of them must have been touched that he risked utter ridiculousness to express his passion publicly. Again, the very absurdity of his couch-jumping would narrow the gap between the speaker, inflamed by the televised example with a passion for an available object, and the star. In number 113, an odd chain of metonymies involves the speaker’s longing for association with celebrity through naming; physical attraction to a celebrity or his/her stand-in seems irrelevant. (Lacan makes much of metonymic “sliding” from signifier to signifier as the trajectory of desire.) The reference to Warren Beatty’s control of his represented image in number 154 demonstrates a parallel between the highly mediated desire for a non-luminary with the elaborate development of fictions that package celebrities as widespread objects or images for a desiring public.

Thus, mistaken identity can be important to sexual decisions: “14. I thought you were somebody else. 15. I thought I was somebody else” (9-10). Those who focus on attributes of fantasy that render someone an objet a may find that, after sex, less than pleasant traits come into view and displace the objet’s charms. In the second sentence, someone strives for intimacy with another in order to reinforce a particular self-image, only to find that the image s/he sees and seeks in the mirror has changed; the other person no longer fits. The fickleness embodied by these mini-“Dear John” letters is funny to the unattached reader, but not recipients of “reasons no longer to have sex.”

Some of Duhamel and McIntosh’s sentences show how a desire for power can drive erotic activity:

122. I wanted to protect myself into the future, one frame at a time, like our father Genghis Khan. (20)
123. Then you said, “Everything is about sex except sex, which is actually about power and money,” making me feel richly powerful.
150. Sure I was a money-grubber, a gold-digger, but that didn’t mean I didn’t love you. (24)
151. They told me: “She’s just using you! She’s taking you for a ride!” And I answered: “So what?”

Lacan writes:

. . . [Man’s] desire finds its meaning in the other’s desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other.
(Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006. 222.)

Acquiring a sense of power often involves meeting externally-based criteria. In number 123, the speaker is both seduced and considers himself/herself empowered by the other’s repetition of a cultural truism. The placement of an equals sign between the lust for pecuniary power and love in number 150 may be a defensive rationalization, or it could reflect a sincere conscious belief in the fusion of intrinsic and extrinsic value, a social “truth” that could have been inherited in childhood. Further, in the next entry, the “So what?” (that confirms the part of the prior statement about extrinsic value) indicates how the speaker places a higher priority on sexual satisfaction than on being loved intrinsically. Perhaps his ego is strengthened by his ability to put his power to use.

Some entries present “reasons” featuring the elimination or reduction of personal insecurity, a compensation for powerlessness: “73. There was a lull in conversation and I’m frightened by silence” (15); 236. “We did it again because we were no longer beautiful” (31). However, the decision to welcome eros risks further insecurity, as when the speaker is plied with alcohol in the ambiguously raunchy number 132: “I hate losing control, but when I put my lips to the keg and you turned the spout, I knew I’d be losing” (21). While only a handful of sentences—for example, 85, which immediately derails the quest, and 174—acknowledge a drive for higher (spiritual?) value in erotic encounters, numerous sentences sprinkled throughout the chapbook implicitly deny intimacy as a goal. In so doing, the speakers cushion themselves against a possible devastating failure of intimate contact by justifying sex as a pragmatic solution to an ordinary situation. We hear of someone’s “vibrator . . . in the repair shop” (9), a “Blue Light special on condoms,” the arrival of “the K-Y Jelly’s expiration date,” the other’s appearance with a “worn out” vibrator, the need for “an excuse to smoke a cigarette” (12), a “class” taken “in Tantric Sex” that would have been wasted without application (14), and the other’s promise to “take out the trash” (30). We are far from the objet a and recognition of actual desire.

Indeed, the chapbook’s title merrily prevaricates: pseudo-reasons, non-reasons, partial (and secondary) reasons, and reasons at several removes (from credible version of origins) comprise a majority of the 237 entries. While this confirms the massive skepticism of psychoanalysts like Lacan and his followers about the truth that can be expected from ego-driven consciousness, the poets anticipate this and not only encourage an ironic perspective on the potential for accuracy but allow various speakers to signal their own evasiveness, their resistance to “analytic truth,” with humorous flourishes. The text’s rendering of the sprightly evasion of psychological insight is insight that can lead readers to ferret out unstated relevance. However, delight and instruction in this prose-poem include an aesthetic component that is not dominated by psychological inquiry; the rationale for placing one sentence before another has as much or more to do with the play of language as with any thematic component:

82. I was in the union and under the impression I was being paid scale.
83. I was looking at the numbers on the scale and thought I’d better take the first union that came
along. (16)
100. I was intrigued by the cello you were clasping between your thighs.
101. You’ve got to admit it is well strung.
102. I loved the way you plucked the high notes. It made me whoop and holler! (18-19)

Yes, yes, Lacan’s most oft-quoted chestnut is about how the unconscious, tinged with the accidental that makes a transcendental Signified so elusive and splits the subject, and a language have comparable structuring. And his analytic method can make the analysand aware of the sliding from signifier to signifier without expecting the concrete realization of a self as mirror-image. But did Lacan sustain poetic humor half as well as Duhamel and McIntosh? Methinks not.

*****

Thomas Fink’s recent chapbook is Generic Whistle-Stop (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2009). He is the author of Clarity and Other Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2008) and four previous books of poetry. A Different Sense of Power (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001) is his most recent book of criticism, and in 2007, he and Joseph Lease co-edited “Burning Interiors”: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics. His work appears in The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s). Fink's paintings hang in various collections.

237 MORE REASONS TO HAVE SEX by DENISE DUHAMEL & SANDY MCINTOSH

2009-05-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews

237 More Reasons to Have Sex by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh
(Otoliths, Australia, 2009)

Most of my poetry students register deep suspicion when I first bring up the possibility of a list poem. They say, “A list? That’s it? I can just make a list?” Then we look at some list poems, and they see that it’s a far harder task than they first thought.

At first read, 237 More Reasons to Have Sex, by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh seems like the kind of book that would make the composition of the list poem look like an easy task. A closer read shows how complex and multifaceted a list poem can be.

The idea for this chapbook-length list poem came when one of the poets discovered this quote by Cindy Meston at the end of an article where she wrote of her research that discovered precisely 237 reasons for humans to have sex: “Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I f ound that there should be some added . . ." (Archives of Sexual Behavior, Volume 36, Number 4, August 2007). By e-mail, Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh began exchanging more reasons for having sex, and thus, this chapbook was born.

Some of these reasons seem straightforward, and perhaps rather unpoetic: “#5. My vibrator was in the repair shop.” or “#15. I thought you were somebody else.”

I love the way that these reasons are often responding to each other (and thus, some of the poetry enters). For example, reason # 16 reads, “I thought I was somebody else.” Hmmm. I love a piece of poetry that makes me stop and consider the world differently. Often these series go in startling directions: “#22. I thought you frenched the bed so I wanted to French our kiss. #23. I’d already rented the French maid’s costume, so I figured I might as well do it. #24 I yearned to play the English butler because I liked the way the butler did it.” I love the humor that’s present in so many of these poems/reasons.

I had a chance to speak to Denise Duhamel at a local poetry reading, and I asked her about the writing process that they used in the creation of this book. She said that they wrote back and forth at a furious pace, finishing the rough draft in about two weeks. Then they shuffled the order of the poems until they got the one that makes the most sense. And yet, as one reads the complete book, it’s hard to imagine that it ever would have progressed in any different order than the one that is presented.

Many of these poems make me think of sex in completely different ways, and I don’t mean in terms of position, but more in terms of symbol and meaning. Here’s reason #171: “I dreamed that night, and in my dream I watched her collect my dreams and pin them to her skirt like butterflies to a shadow box.” Reason #146 says, “The sun through the stained glass turned your face violet, my favorite color.” If I was still in graduate school, I could write pages that would explicate the symbolism and meaning. Since I’m writing a book review, I’ll let readers ponder the possibilities. In our sex-drenched culture, it’s refreshing to come across creative work that makes me see the topic anew.

Of course, the poems address more than just sex. They give us new ways to see our bodies, like #66: “I didn’t know you could see my pink taco through my skirt.” This, before # 67 which says, “And your snapping castanets, as well,” and after # 65, which says, “Perhaps it was your introspective and touchingly solipsistic Mexican Hat Dance that did the trick.”

The poems also have all sorts of delightful references to other literature, like #4: “Because of the plums / so delicious, so cold / Forgive me.” I first read this book just after Easter, so #175 spoke to me that week: “Then I rolled the stone away from our bedroom door and—Lo—you had risen and were making our tea.” There are numerous references to pop cultural markers, and the poet Nin Andrews surfaces periodically.

This book is the wonderful treat that rewards the reader who plows straight through, as well as the reader who wants to dip in and out and spend some time meditating. I often give my students the assignment to write about love in a way that makes us see love in a way that we’ve never seen before and let them wrestle with how to stay away from cliché. This book could lead to a similar assignment about the topic of sex. Of course, this book might lead students to despair, since it’s difficult to imagine that we can much new to the topic after this delightful collection by Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh.

*****

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals and was one of the top ten finalists in the National Looking Glass Poetry Chapbook Competition. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale and serves as Assistant Chair of the General Education department. Her website, which has connections to the blogs that she keeps, is www.kristinberkey-abbott.com.

BOOKS by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, JOANNE KYGER and PHILIP WHALEN

2009-05-20T23:40:00.000-07:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Coney Island of the Mind: 50th Anniversary Edition by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(New Directions Publishing, 1958/2008)

About Now: Collected Poems of Joanne Kyger by Joanne Kyger
(National Poetry Foundation, 2007)

The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen by Philip Whalen, Edited by Michael Rothenberg
(Wesleyan University Press, 2007)

In 1948, Jack Kerouac said “Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation.” And so it became but Capitalized.

The 1960s were a time of profound change: and this was reflected in the number of poetic movements taking place. On the East Coast, more specifically New York City, were the New York School of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara and the Deep Image School of Jerome Rothenberg later taken over by Robert Bly. On the West Coast, specifically centred in San Francisco, were the San Francisco Renaissance under the tutelage of Jack Spicer, and the North Beach Beats centred around the City Lights Book Store owned and operated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reviewed here are three prominent practitioners of that initially San Francisco later world poetry movement -- The Beats.

While the street usage of the term implied being broke, destitute, exhausted, etc., “Kerouac (in various interviews and lectures) was trying to indicate the correct sense of the word by pointing out its connection to words like ‘beatitude’ and ‘beatific’ -- the necessary beatness or darkness that precedes opening up to light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination.”(Alan Ginsberg, foreword to The Beat Book, xiv) He goes on, at p. xv, to list “a number of consistent themes which might be summarized as follows: An intuitiveness into the nature of consciousness, leading to acquaintance with Eastern thought, meditative practice, art as extension or manifestation of exploration of the texture of consciousness, spiritual liberation as a result. This led toward sexual liberation, particularly gay liberation, which historically had a part in catalyzing women’s lib and black lib. A tolerant nontheistic view developed out of exploring the texture of consciousness, thus cosmic anti-fascism, a peaceable nonviolent approach to politics, multiculturalism, the absorption of black culture into mainstream literature and music,...So art’s viewed as sacred practice, with sacramental approach to each other as characters.”

Anne Waldman, in her Editor’s introduction to The Beat Book, asks “What makes the legacy of the Beat writers so fiercely durable, their image tenacious and provocative? What is the wisdom that this controversial literary generation imparts through its writings?” and answers “I think the nominal ‘Beat literature canon’ endures and has such force because it holds together, through communality, a discourse that manifests a visceral relationship to language...This impulse to write is gathered and centered in magnanimity through language. Candid American speech rhythms, jazz rhythms, boxcar rhythms, industrial rhythms, rhapsody, skilful cut-up juxtapositions, and expansiveness that mirrors the primordial chaos come into play constantly. This is writing that thumbs its nose at self-serving complacency.”(xix-xx)

One of the most important practitioners of Beat poetry was Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He “was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. After spending his early childhood in France, he received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin began to publish City Lights magazine. They also opened the City Lights Books Shop in San Francisco to help support the magazine. In 1955, they launched City Light Publishing, a book-publishing venture. City Lights became known as the heart of the "Beat" movement. Ferlinghetti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in his honor. He was also named the first Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 1998. In 2000, he received the lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.” (www.poets.org)

The reader is immediately drawn into A Coney Island of the Mind through strong alliteration, rhyme and rhythm set in lines that sculpt the page:

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
                                                      the people of the world
exactly at the moment when 1
                                    they first attained the title of
                                                       ‘suffering humanity’
                  They writhe upon the page
                                                in a veritable rage
                                                      of adversity”(9)

He then proceeds to take this description and blast it upon today:

We are the same people
                                    only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
                  on a concrete continent
                                    spaced with bland billboards
                  illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness
The scene shows fewer tumbrils
                  but more strung-out citizens
                                    in painted cars
           and they have strange license plates
and engines
                  that devour America”(9-10)

We discover here another identifier of Beat poetry: the way that the language of the street (‘strung-out’) runs alongside more exalted poetic language without blushing or having an inferiority crisis.

Whitman had a profound influence on the Beats -- not just in Ginsberg’s Howl. We can see that in Ferlinghetti:

and its America
                  with its ghost towns and empty Ellis Islands
and its surrealist landscape of
                                    mindless prairie
                                    supermarket suburbs
                                    streamlined cemeteries
                                    cinerama holy days
                                    and protesting cathedrals(13)

Ferlinghetti, like all poets before or since, has moments where his sensibility escapes him and he passes off crap like poem 28 as poetry:

                  Dove sta amore
                  Where lies love
                  Dove sta amore
                  Here lies love
                  The ring dove love
                  In lyrical delight(43)

This has completely nothing to do with the poetry that came before or the poetry that will come later to complete Coney Island. It just appears in some cutesy page of its own where even the structure indicates that it just doesn’t belong.

The essence of Beat poetry is captured in the seven poems beginning on p. 49 which, as the previous page informs us, are intended for jazz accompaniment. The issue is one of orality rendering these poems in a continuous state of flux. We can sense this in “Junkman’s Obbligato” where, on p. 56-7, we read:

I wish to descend in society.
I wish to make like free.
Swing low sweet chariot.
Let us not wait for the cadillacs
to carry us triumphal
into the interior
waving at the natives
like roman senators in the provinces
wearing poet’s laurels
on lighted brows.

We can hear the hard bop in the background, the wailing of the saxophone, the thumping of the bass as the rhythm of the words carries us inexorably onwards, all in a spontaneous improvisation, an eruption of words and music filling the emptiness of some smoke-filled club, the blue haze of cigarettes and other things, where junkies shoot up in back rooms, all punctuated by the sound of the cash register. The impetus behind this poem is Eliot’s Prufrock as is made clear from the one on p. 57: “Let us go then you and I / leaving our neckties behind us on lampposts”.

We turn now to one of the female Beats, Joanne Kyger who, as Linda Russo writes at p. 25, in a short but potent introduction to About Now, was “born in Vallejo, California, in 1934, Kyger attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying with Hugh Kenner, among others. She arrived in San Francisco in 1957 during the Howl censorship trial.” Describing her poetics, Russo says “Bringing Eastern and Western influences together, Kyger, like many of her generation, was a transpacific Walt Whitman. And she incorporated the lessons of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ to articulate mind, breath and line in a manner distinct from Ginsberg’s improvisational ‘first thought best thought’ or Whalen’s inward ‘graph of a mind moving.’ Her vivid and carefully crafted poems posit connections between self and world...For Kyger, this ‘everything’ includes not only her immediate environment, but also a substratum of history, memory, and myth, a familiar ‘underworld...furnished with raw understanding.’”(26) Kyger’s writing can be divided into two, perhaps three, phases. Of the first, Kyger charts outward journeys and inward turns of mind.”(27) Of the second, “This narrative inclusiveness held sway in her poems through the early 1970s..., but Kyger’s later work trims the exposition, is the writing of a poet who ‘loves to fuss / and prune with the mythology / of under and...over tones.”(27) And finally “Kyger’s more recent poems place her among our most diligent of ecological poets.”(28)

Anne Waldman, in The Beat Book, adds that “She moved to San Francisco’s North Beach in 1957, where she was actively involved with Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and other writers of the San Francisco Renaissance...In 1960 she traveled to Japan where she married Gary Snyder. She belonged to the American expatriate scene in Kyoto...Kyger traveled to India with Snyder, Ginsberg, and Orlovsky. She returned to San Francisco in 1964...A long-time student of Buddhism, Kyger developed a dry, witty, incisive form of poetry, drawn from daily journal writing practices, among other sources.”(238)

Kyger’s first book, The Tapestry and the Web, was published in 1965. The first poem, untitled but indicated in the Table of Contents by its first line “My Mother”, is juvenilia which is readily seen in its first stanza:

My mother
Picked me from a Siennese fresco
I was riding a white horse
and wearing a red-scarlet gown
Placed on my head was a small black crown
and my yellow hair was falling down(33)

The rhyming triplet that comes out of nowhere and goes the same direction is clearly immature. Thankfully, it predated the poems in The Tapestry. The difference between this and the first poem in The Tapestry, “The Maze”, is amazing. Examining the first two stanzas:

                  I saw the
                  dead bird on the sidewalk
                  his neck uncovered
                  and prehistoric

At seven in the morning
                  my hair was bound
                  against the fish in the air
                  who begged for the ocean
                  I longed for their place(42)

we see that the writing is more assured, more lyrical, the imagery more controlled and influenced by surrealism. It’s not that she has abandoned rhyme; it’s just that she has learned to use it sparingly, much more effectively. In the “Tapestry” found at p.77 (there are several poems with that title), the use of a single rhyme in the poem makes that poem what it is: “coquettish towards / the sound of the / huntsman’s horn the / capture / then of the / unicorn.” In this first book, Kyger has not yet adopted Beat poetics and is still under the influence of Jack Spicer. This can be seen in the final series of poems titled “The Odyssey Poems”, influenced by Spicer’s serial poetry concept, which explores Homer’s The Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope.

In 1970, Kyger released Places to Go which, while retaining the classical references to Odysseus and the Greek gods such as Hermes, shows dramatic development, the influence of the Beats clearly showing through this classicist veneer and mixing with Spicer. The opening poem, “The Pigs for Circe in May” is an excellent example:

                  I almost ruined the stew and Where
is my peanut butter sandwich I tore through the back of the car
                  I could not believe
there was One slice of my favourite brown bread and my stomach and
                  I jammed the tin foil and bread wrappers into the stew
and no cheese and I simply could not believe
                                                      and you Never
                  TALK when my friends are over

This is known as camping in Yosemite.(104)

By the time of “Meandering”, Beat poetics has supplanted Spicer almost completely and the classical references have been abandoned:

This isn’t what I wanted to say, I didn’t want
to say anything, derived from 1
                                    Reason, Glory, and Splendor
I was thinking of shrimp over noodles
                                    I wish to allow great unimpeded
                  Grandeur like a rising storm
            to take over
and do the dishwashing.(165)

In their capitalized form, have reason, glory, and splendor become the gods of the American dream?

The division 1968-1974 opens with the poem “Lord Ganesha”. Although her trip to India took place several years previous, it is only now that she begins to open to the experience. We read: “The Syllable GA represents mind and speech / What is beyond is the syllable NA and by / adoring him in the combination GANA you become / Brahman. The teaching is known as the secret / of VEDANTA.”(176) Several poems in this section reflect Kyger’s journal approach to poetry which continues into the next section, 1974-1978. Beginning with the book The Wonderful Focus of You (1980), the poem “(Out the Window)” begins “April 4, 1975. Time of wonder / on how it goes together. And pausing to see / The same landscape only changed / by progression of time.”(325) Exhibited here, as elsewhere, is her humor as she opens up the quotidian to new experiences. In “Saturday Full Moon September”, which adheres to the journal approach to poetry but not as blatant, Kyger ponders her purchase of marijuana: “I seem to have paid $40 for half a lid of grass, / maybe Columbian, full of seeds / which I must plant in order to make any even claim / to responsible finances.”(331)

Just Space (1990) opens the section 1979-1989. This highlights the confused organization of this book. The full title of Just Space is Just Space: 1979-1989. But what about the poems in Man/Woman: Two Poems (1980) or Phenomenological (1989)? Are these included in Just Space or are they separate? There is just not enough information provided to justify the division by period. Do the poems in Places to Go span the first two divisions as seems to be the case? If so, then why are the poems in Joanne (1970) contained entirely within the second division -- even though the ‘Books by Joanne Kyger’ at the start of this collection lists the publication of Joanne preceding the publication of Places to Go? This arrangement defies logic and leaves the reader adrift, lost at sea. Fortunately, this strange arrangement does not affect the poetry which we can still sit down in our easy chair and enjoy

As the 80s moved into the 90s, Kyger became more and more involved in Buddhism. In fact, according to her poem “On Moving to the Naropa Campus Fall 1991”, she immersed herself in it:

Many many                   a thousand
                  hands in positions
           of compassionate
Awakening(552)

and “Dharma: the suitcase of many meanings”, possibly one of her most beautiful poems:

And it is a beauteous evening, calm and fair with broad sun
                                    sinking behind the front range
                  and the derangement of attire
             is reaping frustration for the pure soul
                                    whose heart is acceptable for naught
But cuts across the reflex of a star(553)

It is this awakening to Buddhism that probably led to her awakening to ecology. In the poem “First Nation”, we read:

Back in               First Nation time, morning of the world time
the sun has yet to arrive, keeping all in a silver keening.

Attack a chore and stay there
         Imports are tossed
                  on the compost                   This
                  is about weeding the unwanted
                                 and uninvited

plant life out of the ground
                                    A very short stop for roots to stay(639)

No one took Buddhism further than Philip Whalen. The Beat Book provides, on p. 284-5, an excellent bio:

Philip Whalen was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923...From 1946 to 1951, Whalen studied at Reed College on the G.I. bill, rooming in a house with Gary Snyder and Lew Welch. While at Reed, he discovered the writings of D.T. Suzuki and developed a lifetime interest in Asian religion, particularly Zen Buddhism. After receiving a B.A. in literature and languages in 1951, Whalen took up residence in San Francisco, where he joined Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and others for the famous Six Gallery reading on October 6, 1955. [This from Wikipedia: “The Six Gallery reading (also known as the Gallery Six reading or Six Angels in the Same Performance) was a poetry-reading ( or "-jamming"), which occurred at the Six Gallery on Friday, October 7, 1955 at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. Conceived by Wally Hedrick, this event was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation and helped to herald the West Coast literary revolution that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance.] In1967and again from 1969 to 1971, he lived in Kyoto, where he wrote Scenes of Life at the Capital. Back in the United States, Whalen moved into the San Francisco Zen Center in 1972, and on February 3, 1973, was ordained Unsui, Zen Buddhist monk, with the Dharma name Zenshin Ryufu. In 1975, he served as head monk at the Tassajara retreat center. He was a regular visiting faculty member at the Naropa Institute during the seventies and eighties...On September 14, 1991, Philip Whalen was installed as abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center, San Francisco.

As to his poetics, Paul Hoover, in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, states, at p. 80:

Whalen’s poetry embraces the world with a Whitmanesque openness and gentleness. Yet the wit of Whalen’s writing reminds critic and poet Michael Davidson of the eighteenth-century satirists Alexander Pope and John Dryden. Davidson further observes that Whalen’s ‘emphasis on the situational frame resembles the ‘personism’ of New York poets like Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, whose poetry insists on the temporary and contingent in art. ‘Poetry’, Whalen has said, ‘is the graph of the mind’s movement.’

This is added to by Leslie Scalapino in her introduction to The Collected Poems titled “Language as Transient Act, The Poetry of Philip Whalen” where, at p. xxxii, she states:

Whalen described (to me in conversation) his discovery of Williams’ poetry: It opened for him the possibility of freedom from an ‘academy’ notion of a poem, which he viewed as being narration of subject matter in a preconceived ordering bound up. Rather, he realized that a reordering of every level can take place in the line and in the sound structure of the language itself. Whalen was also influenced by Stein and Pound. He made the distinction to me that his direction was more the phenomenological undertaking of Stein then the visionary direction suggested by Blake that was taken up by Ginsberg.

Whalen expanded on the idea of poetry as ‘the graph of the mind’s movement’. As quoted by Scalapino, at p. xxxvi, he described it as “A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) exactly as wide as these lines -- ‘continuous’ within a certain time limit, say a few hours of total attention and pleasure: to move smoothly past the reader’s eyes, across his brain: the moving sheet has shaped holes in it.”

This is the way to honor a poet. Do not just put out a collected or a selected without fanfare. Give a proper introduction, a good initial analysis. You’re issuing a collected or a selected because this poet has paid her/his dues and has earned respect. Do not just throw it out there as if it were a fish left to flounder on the shore.

The one improvement that could have been made is in the organization of the poems. The editor, Michael Rothenberg, included an Appendix A which lists Whalen’s various books and the order of the poems included in each -- a very valuable addition. The poems that a poet has selected for publication in a book and the sequence in which those poems have been presented is important (even if the book’s editor may have had more or less influence on those decisions). Why not put that up front in the table of contents where the reader can immediately see it? Why not reinforce that by including throughout the book indications of where one book ends and the next begins? But enough of that. Let’s look at the actual poems.

Even Whalen’s early poetry showed significant promise. Take “The Sealion”(18-19) from 1950. The first stanza introduces us to this regal beast, its slow progress against the waves. In the second, a note of discord is introduced: “Two with rifles / Wheezed up to the cliff edge: / ‘kill it for the bounty.’” The fourth and final stanza adds a note of irony: “Their boot prints marred the beach / for six hours.”

“Sourdough Mountain Lookout” is one of Whalen’s early masterpieces. A pastiche more than a collage, he introduces quotes from Heraclitus, Empedocles, and The Buddha demonstrating the perambulations of mind as he wanders through this landscape he created beginning with a quote from Tsung Ping (375-443). During the course of this wandering, he provides a description “Morning fog in the southern gorge / Gleaming foam restoring the old sea-level / The lakes in two lights green soap and indigo / The high cirque-lake black half-open eye”(40) which opens before us an ancient, meditative Japanese print.

“A Dim View of Berkeley in the Spring” is the quintessential Beat poem. Capturing the angst of the era, it elevated the quotidian into poetry:

Leap, shout, a pattern of release that actually comes
Much later in some parked car
Trying to make out with some chick who
WON’T, she wants a home of her own to do it in
(Who can blame her?)
Then going back to the house with a stone-ache
Or gooey underwear, the tension
Relieved so they can sleep or built high enough
To be dreamed off or jacked away in the shower at 3 a.m.

Where’s the action? What’s going on?(78)

In 1959, Whalen wrote “Address to the Boobus” in which he began to explore a kinetic collational style of poetry:

with her Hieratic Formulas in reply

O Great Princess
Keeper of the Mystic Shrine
O Holy & Thrice More Holy

Prussian Blue            Dark Blue            Light Blue            French Blue

Blyni & Pyrozhki            Sapphire            Aquamarine
To Take Out            Turquoise            Zircon
                                     Lapis Lazuli

                                    Malachite, a sea-color stone

O Hidden!

                   (vested maenad baccante)
among the leaves bright & dark(143-4)

Words resonate with hidden power returning us to their mystic origins, the place where merely their sound was sufficient to invoke the gods. This is a style he would explore throughout his career. Take the 1961 “One of My Favorite Songs Is Stormy Weather”, for example:

paper                   As I walked further I grew happier
syrup                   and less nervous, although I am an
rubber                   atheist I pray all the time
kapok
chewing gum
frankincense         Acorn         Allspice         lime-flower tea
myrrh         Almond         clove         jasmine
fruit         Avocado         nutmeg         gum Arabic
&         Apricot(237)

It is the visual that captures -- a new dimension of concrete poetry.

This concept of the power of the individual word, the idea of the sacred contained within the secular, almost a pagan offering, went so far as to inform Whalen’s more ‘lyrical’ offerings. In 1963, he wrote “Spring Poem to the Memory of Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928)”:

Old woman, here in the dark of the moon
Honey milk seed falls at your feet

When will she go up the sky again?

Spirit of milk follow her and swell her body
bring star showers(282)

The spirituality of nature provided inspiration to Whalen. In “Night and Morning Michaelangelo”, which recalls Pound’s “In The Metro”, that emotion is beautifully captured:

Black thick dewy leaves, inchoate and opaque
Sun crystallizes them, an apparition of Green Jade
varying transparency, all
translucent greens(292)

Shortly before this, Whalen had begun to experiment with ‘picture poems’ -- probably influenced in this regard by Kenneth Patchen. This led to Whalen introducing concrete poem ideas and Cubism into his regular poetry leading to the creation of “Life and Death and a Letter to my Mother Beyond Them Both”(297). This is one of the most amazing poems the reader will ever read -- but is impossible to quote from. It can only be experienced in its entirety.

By 1964, Whalen had perfected his pastiche technique resulting in huge landscapes of poetry. In “The Best of It”:

I wrote ‘46’ a few days ago

                  EXCELLENT
                              HOW
GOLD                                                       IT SHINES
                  HEAVILY
                  WELLS FARGO BANK
                  & UNION TRUST COMPANY
Earthquake washing-machine
_________________________

California Belt Line Railroad crash hump freightcars
             midnight road and cool

________________________________

What other word can I comb out of my moustache?(390)

Written in Kyoto in 1966, “Ten Titanic Etudes” provides an interesting window into Whalen’s development. These ten sections owe their inspiration to Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. Whalen creates this cubist perspective while infusing his poetry with Zen. Part IV, in which he captures the essence of Buddhism – impermanence, the idea that everything is ever changing - provides the best insight:

NOW the light is all different, the air
Moving, no longer in the way
SEE THE CHANGING(511)

Shortly after this point, Whalen became less prolific. Initially, he saturated himself in writings influenced by Eastern philosophy. But, once he gained comfort in the knowledge he sought, he returned to an exploration of a wide range of subjects reflective of his earlier career. Not that he ever left the east, he just felt comfortable being able to expand this vision.

We have explored the writings of three poets who were considered part of the Beat movement that exploded onto the scene from a small art gallery, the ‘6’, in 1955 to become one of the most influential poetic movements of the 60’s. It vied for influence with a number of other movements that arose during the 50’s and 60’s. Near home, in North Beach, San Francisco, was the San Francisco Renaissance spearheaded by Jack Spicer, Robin Blazer and, a refugee from Black Mountain, Robert Duncan. On the east coast and, more specifically, New York City, was the New York School of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, et al and the Deep Image school of Jerome Rothenberg. What set the Beat movement apart and what united the three poets considered in this review, was the elevation of the quotidian, the use of journals, letters and other forms of everyday writing and the predominant influence of Buddhism.

(Editor's Note: Some of the poem-excerpts may not be shown accurately in terms of their formats, due to Blogger constraints.)

*****

John Herbert Cunningham is the host of Speaking of Poets – a half-hour radio show on Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he writes poetry, reviews and interviews. He publishes regularly in half a dozen literary magazines in Canada and the same number in the U.S. He is also a multi-instrumentalist with the free jazz group ECMW – Experimental Creative Music Workshop. He is currently studying the alto sax, the Chinese flute and the darbouka.

HARLOT by JILL ALEXANDER ESSBAUM

2009-05-20T23:35:00.000-07:00

NIC SEBASTIAN Reviews

Harlot by Jill Alexander Essbaum
(No Tell Books, Reston, VA, 2007)

Sex and Religion in Harlot by Jill Alexander Essbaum

The urge for sex and a yearning for the divine are the dark and tormented existential bases from which this complex work springs.

The book’s dedication is the first indication of the complicated ride ahead: For Rahab (the Old Testament prostitute of Jericho who gained biblical favor by sheltering Israelite spies), Tallulah (the driven flamboyant 20th century actress with a voracious sexual appetite) and Joan of Arc (the 15th century soldier-maiden who generated powerful competing myths of virginity and harlotry).

These poems contain the beginnings of an interesting exploration of the religiosity of sex or the sexuality of religion. A tension-filled mix, and it seems fitting that one of the book’s epigraphs (“Every harlot was a virgin once”) should be by William Blake, a devout Christian who argued against the repression of bodily desires in the name of religion; who considered that the urges of the body participate in the divine. And indeed, in reading the Harlot poems, the first thing that came to my mind was Blake’s simple but hugely powerful poem, The Sick Rose:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

This piece has been interpreted in many different ways, but the relevant optic here is the one that sees the rose -- symbol of freshness and innocence -- as human sexuality (thy bed /Of crimson joy is a masterful phrase) and the corrupting worm (also a recurring symbol in the Harlot poems) as the shame and guilt we attach to sexuality under the influence of religion.

Harlot is both an acknowledgement of, and a challenge to, this worldview. Even while infused by guilt and a sense of sin and damnation, these poems champion female sexuality, they reclaim it.

The manner of reclamation is through a steady, incremental reconfiguring and recalls the relationship of Hester Prynne, heroine of The Scarlet Letter, with the scarlet letter A she is made to wear publicly by her judgmental Puritan neighbors, as a consequence of adulterous behavior.

Hester accepts, then gradually appropriates her A. She refigures it, metaphorically through her steadfast lifestyle and literally through her elaborate embroidering of the A -- “so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy” ... “that the capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or anything rather than Adulteress.” Decades after her scandal has subsided, Hester returns of her free will to live in the same community that chastised her, and although none now compels her to it, chooses to continue wearing the scarlet A. It has become a central symbol of identity to her, as she herself has become increasingly complex, nuanced, and human to those observing her. As a result, “The scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma ... and became a type of something to be sorrowed over and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence, too. “

The poems in Harlot employ the beauty and power of language to assert ownership of and to recast female sexuality, as Hester used her life, her needle and her imagination to appropriate the scarlet letter. All the poems contribute to the complexity of the portrait under construction, but key elements of the mechanism Essbaum uses are powerful lists and litanies -- labels and incantations -- that challenge, refigure, recast, situate, define and always redefine their subject matter, as in the compelling poems Minx, Harlot, Whoreheart and Aphrodisia.

Add to these a deeply-felt religious backdrop and the net result is a picture of a complex, shifting, tormented, and ineffably human landscape. These poems do not represent some sophomoric debate about good versus evil or right versus wrong. The woman -- especially the religious woman -- who chooses or is compelled to base her identity in her sexuality can never be easily labeled or defined. What these poems claim for her is complexity and nuance, religiosity and -- above all -- humanity.

Men are a central phenomenon in these poems -- men as both lovers and as metaphor for the lost divine. The virgin Magdalene in Young Magdalene’s Prayer dreams of

A king, as divine
As her desires are deep.

The Christ-lover is all powerful, there is almost no existence without him:

I draw closed like a curtain in your absence (from De Profundis)

and in An Oracle Concerning the Melancholic Concubine:

When he abuses you

in his absence, when his somnolence blacks you out.

Identity lines are continuously blurred. Is ‘he’ in the poems the present-day lover, or the yearned-for Christ? Is the narrator a sexually-alive Christ-obsessed present-day woman, or is she the passionate biblical Magdalene, erstwhile ‘fallen’ woman, would-be bride of Christ? Is the continuing compulsion, the deep wanting that drives these pieces simple sexual appetite, or is it longing for God? Or both?

The Magdalene theme infuses this collection, appearing explicitly in two pieces told from Magdalene’s point of view (Young Magdalene’s Prayer and Magdalene’s Hymn) and implicitly elsewhere throughout, such as in And It Came To Pass, Crux, Bad Friday and Nightboat.

The poems cycle into a chronicle of passionate but failed sexual and religious relationships -- and indeed, what earthly man could ever realistically fulfill the role of Christ to a would-be bride of Christ, what hope for close approach to God is possible for a supplicant who believes she is damned from the outset? For these poems are haunted by a restless certitude of sin, of damnation and guilt, largely unleavened by hope of redemption:

Born again,
but with a birth defect, and broken –
for what the devil claims he rarely abandons (De Profundis)

That it ought to be know I was born this way,
With indiscriminate tendencies (The Thirty-Four Sorrows)

I am but a wasteland of worry (Bad Friday)

Into my living death, Lord, come (Despair is the Only Unforgivable Sin)

the hushed,
dim sinning of the linens (Post-)

The strophes of bleak prophecy that constitute Surely Come the Days contribute likewise to this theme, and it is also underlined by the merciless energy that goes into blistering self-excoriation, as in A Force is a Push or a Pill:

my shoddy, my so-for-nothing
self

Yet always at the base of it all are the irresistible dual compulsions that sustain forward motion -- towards God and towards sex -- born in pain and living on pain. And it Came to Pass, the first poem in the collection, lays out the nature of this yearning in shocking alliterative lines:
I wanted you
Like a wound

Aches for the dagger digging
Into it, so bloody

And brutal and black.
I wanted you like that.
The Solitary Anguish of Irreparable Regret puts the brutal despair of the dilemma in a nutshell: the narrator’s nature draws her irresistibly to the divine, yet it is her nature that keeps her from attaining the divine:

Because I want to sit down next to you,
I do not sit down next to you.

On the way to this conclusion it is interesting to observe the respective roles that woman and her lover play in the repeating cycle of lovers in Harlot. There is no victim, and no aggressor. Or rather: each is victim and each aggressor, turn about. The lovers are co-dependent peers, partners, they array themselves foot to foot: equally powerful, and equally powerless. The Assignation, for example is set up in aggressive couplets of action and counter-action -- she did/he did style:

She will dream of her maneuvers
And his rocket. How she flipped him like a lever,

how he plugged into her socket,
how he strangled her waist with the corset

of his straitjacket hands. How she surged
with urgencies

In the world of Harlot, you dish it out, but you have to be able to take it, too. One of the most striking themes in the collection is the narrator’s clear-eyed recognition of her vulnerability and her own stark need. These are facts to be faced among the facts of existence, two sides of the same coin -- she is used, but she uses. In Why Hast Thou? for example, we read:

I am the axe maid. I hack and hew.

But bleeding, I bleed freely.

In Judas Hausfrau we see the always-morphing narrator as nonetheless decisive and powerful:

I am tall
in my sins

while in Song of Bird, Dirge of Branch she acknowledges her naked vulnerability baldly:

And I want you more than I want to breathe.

and

I warble desperate melodies,
The harlot’s psalm, a martyr’s hymn.
I am naked in my beggary.

This collection does not make much of love. Strange Woman “searches the sky for a god that will reach down and love her” while the Clockmaker’s Mistress conceptualizes the act of loving as passive acceptance of the mechanism of her own destruction:

I loved you
like the wild plum loves

the teeth sinking into it,
wetly, willing, quiet as quartz

we read of Minx:

But if she says she loves you, she lies

and the narrator writes in an imaginary post-script in Post –:

Also. I forgot to love.

The hopeful reader looking for a redemptive arc in this collection is disappointed, but perhaps this cursory treatment of the role and power of love explains why this collection does not go there. A hopeful reader might also look in a collection like Harlot for not just the rescue of the erotic but for the (more audacious still) positing of the erotic -- literally and metaphorically -- as a ritualistic, mystic path to the divine. Sex as religious worship, sex as connection to the divine, building on the mystic tradition which seeks direct apprehension of the divine through the restoration in the self of a primordial state of being -- pre-verbal and pre-thought. There are some glimmerings of this direction of thought in the collection. For example, the narrator in And It Came to Pass describes herself as:

a postulant in the Church of the Kiss

and The Assignation speaks of:

How the cloister
of her thighs wept liturgies and hours

but in the end, Harlot doesn’t complete a full arc from sex as damnation to sex as potential redemption. Overall, the emotional cycle seems to move from deep compulsion to depression to defiance and back, consistently underwritten by intense passion. At the end of it all, as we read in The Nothing That’s Left:

we become great riddles to ourselves
and the devils that indwell

us.

There is little joy in this enormously courageous collection. But immense passion. Whatever the final answer -- and even if there is none -- we must never stop rising up in passion. Again, from The Nothing That’s Left, the last poem of the book:

and – god damn it – I will bleed
until there is nothing that’s left
but the nothing that’s left.

*****

Nic Sebastian hails from Arlington, Virginia and travels widely. She has two sons and a husband who travel with her as they can. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily, Autumn Sky Poetry, Mannequin Envy, Avatar Review, Anti- and other poetry journals. Her first collection, Forever Will End on Thursday, will be published in 2009 by a poetry press with a twist: http://verylikeawhale.wordpress.com/the-essbaum-sebastian-nanopress. Nic blogs at Very Like A Whale (http://verylikeawhale.wordpress.com).

ENDGAMES by MARTON KOPPANY

2009-05-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

TOM HIBBARD Engages

Endgames by Márton Koppány
(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2008)

THE LEGEND OF MARTON KOPPANY:
ENDGAMES AND THE SUMMER OF THE RIVER

"What was the significance of the tragic poets?"
--Lewis Mumford

Born of maritime winds carrying cargos of spices, sandalwood, bronze and ivory, a hope-filled feverish vision seemed to come over the city of Milwaukee for a brief time during the sunny summer of 2008. Of course, these cargos were symbolic and perhaps merely illusions. In reality they represented art shows, books, bookstores and book cooperatives, publications, neighborhoods, politics, elections, economies, crowded beaches, concerts, festivals, plant-life, farms and farmers markets, bicycles, coffee shops, hiking trails, animals, people.

These are not uncommon elements. What was surprising was their alignment into an exhilarating feeling of radical transformation, the uncovering of a way that urban living could actually regress into a life much more centered on ideas and the vivid impressions of nature. One shaping event in particular was a small Woodland Pattern book center exhibit that lasted only a matter of the month of April, containing photographs, artworks, collages, blueprints and designs for construction projects. I was able to view it only once, but fortunately a substantial booklet from the exhibit remains: "Seeing Green: Art, Ecology and Activism in Milwaukee."

The exhibit, curated by Nicolas Lampert, with work from local artists, according to the booklet was intended to serve "as a hub space, informing the viewer and the public of the many environmental projects taking place throughout the city." One of the artworks, without attribution, is a cluster of little blue diggers-hotline explorer-like-claim flags across a rocky section of beach with a limitless Surrealist waterscape background.

Another work is an artist's conception-style work by Chris Cornelius for a proposed Nature Center, titled "Oneida Maple Sugar Camp." "This is a new structure for the Oneida Environmental Services Division of the Oneida Reservation in Oneida, Wisconsin. The building will be primarily used by the students of the Oneida Elementary School....The building utilizes cordwood masonry as its primary wall enclosure system."

Several artistic photographs from the exhibit seemed to reach a new level of insight: a lake surface superimposed on a rejoicing man; unfamiliar timeless crooked alleyways; last snows; imperious birds; metal rain barrels. One yellowed black-and-white photo showed grimy crumbling old-fashioned water-cistern buildings from the city’s industrial past. One simple artwork I recall from the exhibit not included in the booklet was a small nature shack with a wind-gust of stars connecting it to galaxies just above in the night sky.

A handout with the exhibit booklet was an advertisement for a two-day suburban “Going Green” conference working for “sustainable communities and farms.” Canvassing for Barack Obama one weekend in early autumn near an arts festival, I coincidentally knocked on the door of an organizer of this conference.

The project or image that connected with the widest and highest-pitched object emotion for me was the idea, from several sources and no source, of turning the Milwaukee River into an ancient water-way, like the Nile, that would revive boat transportation, in-town fishing, reedy wildlife, perhaps coffee-shops along the bank, a river lifestyle tied to the origins of civilization, ornamented with Japanese lanterns, but steered by a new awareness, an access for urban dwellers to a mysterious purifying escape that meandered vitally right below their overcrowded repetitive hustle and bustle. “The River” was a subject of conversations; impulses were felt, dreams were dreamt about the way a complex modern urban life-style might once again look to a river for its main source of interest and sustenance.

Amidst a stack of miscellaneous saved materials, newspaper articles, copies of “Rain Taxi,” catalogues for bygone film festivals, “Bloomsbury Review,” artworks for the Day of the Dead; I retained two valued publications, the May issue of “Riverwest Currents” from a revived working-class Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee, in which the unexpected victories in aldermanic elections of Nik Kovac and Milele Coggs were reported. Kovac had wrapped up his campaigning at an open house for the one-year book co-op anniversary of People’s Books on Locust Street. The office was open because twelve-year alderman, Mike D’Amato, had decided not to run for reelection.

The other publication was from a group called “Milwaukee River Work Group.” Titled “Milwaukee’s Central Park: Land & Water,” the undated issue is called a “Vision Paper.” It’s vision is drawn up as:

“Create a Central Park along the Milwaukee River upstream of North Avenue footbridge to Silver Spring Drive. Preserve the wild aspect of the natural area while improving the habitat. Improve water quality. Restore native plant species while removing non-native invasive plants. Improve public access to this urban natural resource.”

Among the excellent photos in this twelve-page newsprint tabloid-sized publication (distributed free in the window of People’s Books) was a front page birds-eye-view of a wooded section of the picturesque muddy-looking river with downtown skyline in the background. Inside, school-outing classes and fisherman were shown wading in the river, shallow in many areas, cleaning, catching turtles and even small sturgeon in benign nets. The most inspiring photos are from an article titled “River At Risk” with some interesting new living constructions along cement wharves and especially a large group of canoers enthusiastically paddling with the current on a scenic open-water section of the river.

Meetings of the Milwaukee River Work Group are called “Visioning Sessions.” Inside the May issue of “Riverwest Currents” is a report on an MRWG Mountain Bike Visioning Session for establishing a mountain bike path along the Milwaukee River. In the MRWG Central Park issue the lead article is headlined “Imagine…Milwaukee’s Central Park.” It begins

“You walk along the Milwaukee River on a recreational path winding six or so river miles from the city limits at Silver Spring Drive to the harbor at Lake Michigan; a soft pedestrian trail uniting suburban Glendale and Shorewood to their Milwaukee neighbors. This river path then zigzags through Riverwest, along Brewers Hill and the Beer Line B, past Park East through downtown and the Third Ward to the lake front. The cool river water bubbles over the rocks through a protected park bringing our neighborhoods and communities together.”

If only people could get into canoes and paddle back into time, seeing the river and its environs as Father Marquette and Father Joliet saw this area in the 1600s, perhaps, necessarily, in a way even more understanding than they, taking out the imbalance from their eyes.

* * *

Thrown into this exhilarating pluralist chalice, in early spring, was Otoliths Books release of a collection of Márton Koppány's visual works titled Endgames. Several superficial associations made Koppány's work seem a part of the collective visioning summer-session. Koppány, a native of Hungary visited Milwaukee long ago, where, so the legend goes, miraculously he met Karl Gartung and Anne Kingsbury immediately upon disembarking from the Greyhound bus and his works were on exhibit at Woodland Pattern soon after.

Endgames is visually similar to some of the “Seeing Green” photos. Also it adds the dimension of Koppány's experienced work with visual writing themes and ideas. Characteristically Koppány's works use punctuation marks, especially periods, colons, question marks, brackets, handwriting, parentheses, formally arranged in outlined rectangular spaces, similar to Freud’s ”Mystic Writing Pad” mentioned by Derrida in his discussion of the “scene of writing.” But for this collection Koppany has added pieces of photographic-style visibility that it seems to me are intended in general to symbolize the idea of reality. The works effectively remove dimensional barriers between language and nature. One work early in the book titled “The Proofreaders Garden” has a flock of scriptive markings flying in formation across evening skies above a terra firma represented by a single oversized on-center green period. The book-cover design is made up of three hand-crafted periods, an ellipsis of black-and-white. In a work titled “Odysseus,” a crouched surfer warily plies his way on a wave, ducking his head between two periods of a colon, one above, one below.

One notable work in Endgames, titled “Forecast,” like others part of a series of variations, is an outlined rectangular collage, starting with three panels: a bottom green panel, a partial black panel above and a partial cloud-photo panel above. The black panel seems to stand for a conceptual unknown, a darkness, not of mystery but of being blocked out, excluded, perhaps, by social or political power. The cloud panel seems to stand for the indisputable truth of reality. At the top of the work, like a heading, is the same ellipsis as from the cover, the three periods, only the one period in the reality panel is yellow and the two in the blocked-out panel are white, though in this work the colors (of the periods) do not seem particularly relevant. A series of small gray punctuation marks also comes down in the cloud reality panel like drops of rain. The most prominent aspect of the work is a green apostrophe (mark of possession) that is rising up out of the green bottom panel or foreground, like a whitecap, like the first-gatherings of a coming storm. It would seem, then, that the storm is in part due to the action of reality grinding away at the enforced darkness of social power, its instinctive imbalance. The green, averse to the divisiveness that mars the work's composition, acts similarly to reality. This prophetic work has appeared in several places on the internet.

There are many works in this loose collection--with screens in Andy Warhole-like quartered panels; with unarticulated or unarticulateable photographic visuals, sketched bridges, new-moon-periods, conceptual periods, the eiffel tower, brackets inside parentheses inside brackets (“The Secret“). Another of the standard Koppány-type works is outlined space, a “space of inscription,” a canvas, with brief sentences typed on it. Since we know that visual works commonly deal with logos, these sentences then should be more than mere words. They should be like laws or commandments or requisites, which seems to be the case. Though I liked these in Endgames I thought that similar works at the online journal “Eratio” in Koppány's e-collection Waves were better. In Waves, on page 7, inside a bordered space is the phrase, “a little time to solve it.” The next page is “a little time to accept it.” The next page is “a little time.” One series in Endgames I liked began with the shadowed text, “I must lose it to find it.” Some of the series have handwritten corrections, which stand for a less conceptual more actual and temporal writing. Some are blank space.

The sense I get from Koppány's works is a message of many scattered periods of varying validity, of ellipses, of periods substituting for discovery, the resistive tendency to impose a superficial grammar upon life’s inexorable flow, its deeper ever-moving structure. But there can be no stopping, even on the surface, as long as there are generic ellipses, major ellipses, missing words and missing content, on the level of equality and headings. For Freud, in dreams (mise en scene) speech is latent content. So that what these ellipses symbolize and what reality is working to bring about (symbolized in dreams) is more than a representation, more even than a text or logos, rather a “voice,” a person, an identity.

Koppány's works contain a wisdom or knowledge that is valuable in itself. But, as I stated previously, Endgames also relates to the environment, for it is the fears and apprehensions involved in human and social interactions, especially between often hostile nations, peoples, races, that produces these blocked-out spaces of darkness, this political power, this secret power that is the root cause of our disdain for and littering of the wonder-filled habitat of freedom in which we dwell.

* * *

Perhaps these notes sound irrelevant and insignificant. As the Che Guevara poster in the window of People’s Books implied, vision is a part of being realistic. Where would we be if the Wright brothers had given up plans for a flying machine and become successful shop keepers. The most impressive of man-made edifices, the ones so-called realistic people want most to claim for their side--television, AT&T, air travel for example--were all begun by idle eccentric minds. Even Capitalists have to be rejected by society before they can be considered authentic Capitalists. Perhaps this is less true than previously.

In any case, as the manic caffeine-enhanced elation of summer waned in August and September and the primaries and Presidential election began to take center stage, as Barack Obama’s own vision was elaborated, as years of corrupt unrealistic stock-market greed and the effects of abuse of its infrastructure began to spread in the financial world, as banks like Citigroup and companies like General Motors began to list and call for bail-outs from the government, as things began to look bad for everyone else, a strange thing happened. Probably the most unlikely vision of all of them, the vision of urban farming--tomato vines in front yards, gardens on garage rooftops, cold frames and aquacultures, heating with compost--put forth by an ex-pro basketball player named Will Allen and his little-known organization Growing Power on Silver Spring Drive inside the city limits, down the street from the National Guard base, received a "genius" grant from the John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a half a million clams, greenbacks, simoleons, spondulicks. Amazing.

I had stopped in at Growing Power, with its colorful hand-painted Diego Rivera-like mural on its side, in summer. There wasn‘t much I could see of its two-acres without an appointment. A low, long breezy building, with many partitions, clotheslines, lunch tables, box elders, trailers in parking lot. A simple pipe-supported porch roof in front, sheltering vegetables and fruit on folding tables. It looked like a rehabilitated custard stand. Some kids hanging around. Potted trees. I caught a glimpse of animals being groomed in the back. Examined some small plastic bags of potent fertilizer. Bought some apples. Talked to a nice young Spanish girl at the cash register. Picked up some print-outs, took a couple of photos. That was before the grant was announced.

By the time poets David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg arrived in October for their anticipated Woodland Pattern poetry reading, the Milwaukee River was somewhat forgotten. Wesleyan University had published Rothenberg’s fantastic collected poems of Philip Whalen, which contained such exciting reading. The weather was still warm and fine. As the two started out from the Plaza Hotel coffee shop with guide Chuck Stebelton for meetings and panel discussions, the sunlit mid-day air was one hundred percent clean and the sky unblemished azure. I had hoped to show Meltzer and Rothenberg the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church--locally dubbed "The Flying Saucer"--in South Milwaukee.

The way that visions relate to their fulfillment is complicated. Real dreams don’t come true all at once. Visions are abbreviated and exaggerated versions of reality. A fad can portend something that will be part of the future but go out of style itself. The tech bubble burst, but it was only a birth-pang of the great changes that technology is bringing--in low times, in high times. Nature-trails along a river, even the river itself may prove to have been a will-o'-the-wisp. It can be maddening. Being part of a bookstore cooperative, believing people need to be awakened, pumping your effort into an idea, talking about ecology or justice--it's like a Max Beckman artwork: an unhappy and discouraged, somewhat gross woman lying on her bed in a confiningly tiny room. The phlegmatic limits of disinterest can become nearly palpable.

Koppány portrays it well again and again in his Endgames artworks: A space of inscription that is entirely opaque (except for notation about email). An unbordered space with the words "it is too late." An ocean with a Salvador Dali moustache-boat adrift on its indeterminate middle. Panels of writing surface with a pencil or piece of chalk resting on them. A chair with three legs missing. The letter "a" submerged in water. A question mark with periods for eyes. It's easy to have visions, talk about them, work for them. Perhaps the hardest part is to know when they have arrived.

With some spare time before the Meltzer/Rothenberg reading, I parked at the Michigan lake front and jotted down some description.

Oct. 11, 2008

hazy evening
with the water moving
sailboats
slow-moving motor boats
bridge in the distance
hazy sunset
long breakwater forming a harbor
with a windowed lighthouse
evening, people bicycling
yelling in spanish
black soccer team picnic
park & recreation equipment
people at picnic tables, guy playing the guitar
young trees along the shore walkway
light green, yellow, orange, dark red sunset
art museum in the background
moon coming into view
warm October evening
joggers, strollers, roller skaters
dogs with families strolling
the last kite fliers of the day
soft drinks, snacks, ice cream, candy
"segways rollerblade and bike rental"
sight-seeing boat
wind socks hanging down
lights going on in the marina

(Then, of course there are poetry readings in January in the dead of winter, which are the opposite of visions, where either nothing is representation or everything is representation and the opening and closing of doors and quiet footfalls of attendees on wooden floors can be heard in distant lands and God himself sometimes shows up on a Saturday night just to hear some good poetry.)

*****

Tom Hibbard has had many poems, translations, reviews and essays published on and off line in places such as Word/For Word, Big Bridge, Fishdrum, Jacket, Otoliths, Milk, Cricket, Moria. A poetry collection, Place of Uncertainty, is available online at Otoliths Storefront. Bronze Skull published a chapbook of Hibbard's poetry in 2008 titled Critique of North American Space. A long piece on "Linear/Nonlinear" appears at the Big Bridge archive. Upcoming publications are a review of a Jacques Derrida tract in the spring issue of Jacket (reprinted from Word/For Word) and two poems in the online "Green" issue of Jack.

OCCUPATIONAL TREATMENT by TAYLOR BRADY

2009-05-20T23:25:00.000-07:00

AMBER DIPIETRA Reviews

Occupational Treatment by Taylor Brady
(Atelos, 2006)

Some reviews of Taylor Brady’s Microclimates (Krupskaya, 2001) align the writing with Proust’s detailed attention to the minutiae of memory. This is true if one imagines Proust’s brain on quantum mechanics—a scenario in which atoms of lived experience, closely observed, are only partially inhabited as the gaze which calls them back into being simultaneously splices them into the waves and particles of variant sequences, times, and layers of subjectivity. In his newest book, Occupational Treatment, Brady continues this kind of narrative remembrance of things past, potential, present and perishing from the Florida of his childhood.

The book begins with a small play—much in the sparse, absurd style of something by Beckett; including actors such as “Occupant” and “Intruder”, three card “Players” and most notably, the “Radio”. The latter mediates a setting-less foreground through which the other characters interact and also figures as a central character in itself. The rest of the lengthy work (almost 300 pages) is made up of prose blocks set off by headers like “RADIO:” and “TELEVISION:”, long prose sections interspersed with verse fragments, epistolary passages with subtitles/lines of address such as “Dear Surveillance Photo Aged by Speculation”, and prose portions which are narrated as “transmissions” and bracketed by lines that read “...Channel open. Shutdown protocol unsuccessful....” There is also a section that consists of blank rectangles and numbered prose segments; it is a “shot list” and a series of “film stills”. Here a voice says, “Attach the feed. We are aiming at a movie.”

Amid these various modes of narrative and verse, alternately warping into and morphing from each other, “the plot”, as it were, pivots around “clumps of scrub palmetto”, the “scorched earth of redevelopment”, and “slash pine” of an expanse of land that is the “undeveloped scrub woods of Florida”. It is home to what city authorities, those who use “authorized speech,” spin as a “teeming warren of ‘squatters, terrorists, pedophiles and meth cookers”. It is also the gathering place for “the gangs of young men who, having lost their driver’s licenses in a string of DUIs, ride their little brothers’ too-small BMX bikes out under the ozone-yellowed moon for generic cigarettes, homemade crystal meth, and unprovoked assault.” But story, in terms of temporal plot, does not proceed evenly along these lines. The real “plot” exists as strata, like dirt, rocks and dust that are ground down or smoothed over. One works to “lay the plot in the story of botany. Story of waste disposal. Story of zoning. Story of markets. To market.” However, the narrative insists, “I will speak only of the bulldozed camp in terms of the strip mall that will come to stand in its place.”

In this zone of substitution, Brady breaks with Proust and the thrall of recapturing. The highly personalized narration is never trapped in, never allowed to “puke dumb factuality”. It is a story of Brady’s boyhood and, by extension, the land and the time he spent in the woods near his home, but at a cellular level beyond paradigms like personality, land use, gentrification, homelessness, low culture and cultural imperialism. The substitution comes closer to the real violence and falsifications inherent in these terms and in memory itself. This happens because of the visceral quality such substitution lends to the text. More than that of Marcel Proust, Occupational Treatment bears the trace elements of Francois Rabelais in the way that characters—as subjectivities which cling tenuously to scattered ‘I’s’, tags, initials nameless groups like the tent dwellers—become bodies in excess of particularity, aligned with the grotesque transmogrifications of the land.

There is a body-less “barbershop quartet of heads” that function like the chorus in Greek plays as they sing verses such as, “ ‘The body’s full of juices cooking down to jelly, and a jelly’s just a cube with too much heat, like tinted Lucite waiting to become a living room objet.’ ” Often, we meet a kind of main character sleeping in the dumpster amid the clippings of hair behind the beauty college that borders the undeveloped tracts of land. And, in a passage that typifies the experience of bodies in the landscape and the body of the land, there is a detailed account of expectoration.

We walked for what seemed like forever, the converging lines of small-scale irrigation and the vanishing point of our hopes in the distant intuition of the miasmic sea remaining inexhaustible until finally the tempo of value in the municipal relation to the aquifer conquered the tempo of space in our walking as the mid-day water rationing kicked in and the sprinklers went dry, and the uncloaking of infinite circuits of carefully installed desert in the midst of the growing suburb threatened to derail progress altogether until Bottom Dog hit upon the expedient of spitting onto the ground ahead of us in alternation, so that first he and then I would arc a sticky glob some few feet into the future, toward which we would trudge until even with its landing point, the air meanwhile still minimally romantic with the thin dust and ash thrown up by the impact and rendering suitably sublime any reference to a larger scope for our endeavor than that immediate ambit of a step or two, whose terminus having been reached, the spitter would stand glaring intently forward while the other stretched out full length upon the earth as if in worship, slurping up his deeded unit of moisture and thus forestalling collapse through the next repetition of the cycle which now gained a teleology against the illusion of infinity through which it had labored to this point, as we now gauged our linear movement by the approaching finite zero of dehydration, strategically counterbalancing this against the infinite zero of the vanishing point

In Rabelais, there is much revelry, excess, and corruption. He who feasts, defecates. The grotesque body, in such a society, is one that emits and one which is porous to the world around it. So here we have Bottom Dog and his companion, navigating the copiously developed, seemingly lush Floridian landscape. What they are really traversing may be the over-fished, deforested, gentrified mirage of a southern state where the wetlands dry up and the coasts erode.

“Like all them trees was just bad hair due for cutting.” muttered Bottom Dog as I lapped his precious froth, by now mostly stale air and grit, from the small hollow it had made in the dirt, frozen in the realization that the landscape suspended our recognition of its actuality precisely in this function of leveling its forward edge so as to point to what would simply be more of itself.

On one level, this is the story of land use, low income neighborhoods and those trailers and tent cities that are literally paved over, will be paved over. On another, Brady creates a textual simulation that in the thirsty spans of impossibly long sentences, bulldozes itself as it builds. The reader gropes for green spaces and finds turned-up soil, looks for bedrock and finds a jungle of dusty moss. This is Florida where it gets pinched and brittle. Somewhere along these airwaves, my transmission. Like Taylor Brady, I grew up in Florida in a town not too far from his place of birth. Toward the beginning of the book, the narrator of the moment is traveling down “Fowler Avenue” the other F street I always confused with the one that my mother’s hair salon was actually on. I spent most of my early years in the back room there while she worked. I was fascinated with the back parking lot, flanked by huge dumpsters full of matted hair clippings and bordered by the scrub woods where I was told never to go. An incidental angle, sure – and “angle of incidence” maybe, as Brady refers to it.

In Googling the author, I got to Microclimates and then from that to reviews and then from that to one librarian from Brady’s hometown who posted a review on Amazon. He writes that Microclimates is an important work which shows that “Florida is a real place and not just the simulacra one sees on the show Cops.” I agree with this statement just as fully as I concur with an opposing view. Occupational Treatment leaves me with the feeling of possessing a shakier foothold in the place where I was born and a better ear for the white n noise that emits from there. “There are figures curled beneath the speed bumps that could have told us this from the beginning. And with that I shift pronouns. We are hundreds of the previously visible crowding emptiness into your streets. Do not mistake the hiss of dead air for closure. We are all transmissions.”

*****

Amber DiPietra works as a resource specialist at the San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. She enjoys tracking the body in real time, thinking about disability as formal innovation, taking P.O.D. (Pigeon-of-the-Day) photos, editing/blog curation for Kelsey Street Press, and publishing the blink zine with co-creator Alexis Brayton. You can find out about more of her projects at: www.adipietra.blogspot.com. Her writing also appears in Make, a Chicago literary magazine, Mirage Period(ical), and Tarpaulin Sky.

MOONGARDEN by ANTHONY MCCANN

2009-05-20T23:20:00.000-07:00

REBECCA GUYON Reviews

Moongarden by Anthony McCann
(Wave Books, 2006)

It wasn’t so long ago that I was in a poetry workshop where one poet made it his mission to eradicate the word “thing” from every poem. If anyone dared to use the “t-word” you could guarantee the first discussion comment would come from him: “I just think ‘thing’ is too inexact to be in a poem.” Too bad Anthony McCann wasn’t in this workshop. In his second and most recent collection, Moongarden, “thing” comes up a lot as the poet uses this unfairly maligned word to help create the poems’ shifting worlds, blurring boundaries and looking at reality through a hazy film. There’s great anxiety in the collection over what’s real and what’s not; what takes shape and what doesn’t; what can be called a thing and what hasn’t quite reached this status. McCann explores these conflicts with tight lines, humor, and lyricism, mining these landscapes for all the strange beauty you’d expect from a collection titled Moongarden.

We can see the importance of “thinghood” in the collection’s second poem, “Ode to the Lake.” The poem begins:

I, myself, should have been a thing.

But then the things themselves appeared.

Some were called squibs.

Others, vague and old,
became the higher animals.

They were like

words painted in the lake
or like

clouds riddled through with sun.

And they were also like
some more directions to the builders.

The speaker begins by asserting, emphatically, that he should have been a thing, implying that he is not, thus setting him apart from the actual things. Within two lines it’s clear that the speaker is alone—not just lonely, but in a completely different category from every other creature. The poem quietly alludes to the Garden of Eden as creatures suddenly appear and some are classified as “higher animals,” though in this case the creatures seem to name themselves. Regardless, this allusion, though subtle, imbues the poem with a sense of mysticism and inevitability. Yet, even as the “things” come into being, the speaker describes them through simile, a tool that compares rather than creates. Furthermore, the similes compare the creatures to ephemeral sights and sounds, suggesting that even the “things” are not quite stable.

As the poem continues, the speaker plunges deeper into the mystical landscape, yet ultimately he can only reaffirm his lack of being, which began the poem.

It’s true–I should have worn protective gear.

But whether I woke up in the park
smeared in pink and yellow thread

or when I walked around the lake
damaging the geese

I stayed exactly how I am.

So when I rush along the world
it leaves a rushing in my ears

and I am placed along the water
as the lake becomes a thing.

Although “I should have worn protective gear” is a funny line, it also reemphasizes that the speaker is at risk and the use of the conditional tense suggests that something did in fact harm the speaker. Yet, immediately after bisecting the poem with this jarring line, the speaker dives back into the world of strange and ephemeral things—even something tangible, like thread, or simple, like walking around a lake, is rendered strange by the actions of smearing and damaging. And yet despite all this the speaker “stays the same”; he is still not a thing, which is reaffirmed in the last line as he sits by the lake as the lake becomes a thing. By the end, “thing” seems to be a substitute for presence; if an object, be it an animal or a lake, takes space and matters in this world, it is a thing. The speaker, who only echoes the sound of rushing, is empty; he has no presence in the world.

By viewing a thing as something that has presence, a direct connection can be made with the collection’s equal obsession over physical shape. Both “thinghood” and shape serve as proof that the object exists, which is why the speakers are obsessed with these categories. In the poem, “Miami International Airport Hotel,” the speaker mediates on this issue, jumping between physicality and thought. The three-part poem begins,

The alarm goes off—I’m still in the airport. Is it impossible to imagine my physical shape? I was dreaming of jobs again and of t-shirts that scream “Chicago!” And then I am absent, suddenly, accepting the fact: it remains impossible to imagine this hotel.

Within these opening prose lines, the speaker jumps between the physical that can be verified—the alarm, the airport—to a large question about whether he too has shape, physicality. As he can’t picture his shape, he becomes absent. The hotel, which initially looms large, succumbs to the same fate. The loss of shape becomes a loss of self; if shape cannot be imagined, then the person or place cannot exist. Placing the poem in an airport hotel fits this theme since, as anyone who has ever had the unfortunate experience of staying at an airport hotel can attest to, it is an unexpectedly eerie place; you aren’t supposed to be there, yet you are, so it’s easy to loose track of yourself, and that is exactly what happens to the speaker.

McCann doesn’t only slip between the ephemeral and the real, but also between schools of writing. In many ways McCann draws on Romantic tropes—“Ode to the Lake” is one of many odes in the collection, for example—yet he pairs them with a sense of post-modern irony, creating speakers who are aware of the trap of sentimentality and try to resist it, but ultimately are sincere in their emotions. This movement can be seen in the poem, “Ode to the Sky (Seattle).” Beyond using the ode form, this poem draws on Romantic sensibilities through its beckoning of the beloved and awe of nature. Yet, throughout the poem McCann uses vocabulary pulled from a myriad of sources and constantly undercuts any sentimentality with ironic humor, all tools taken from the post-modern tool kit. The poem begins with the sky, and then moves indoors where the speaker and his beloved are talking. (Though, I should add that McCann does not lay out the scene in such a prosaic manner.) The speaker then breaks the scene with a memory:

I remember:

we were sitting on this iron bench
above the north south interstate.

All my nerves
were stuffed
deep in your pants.

Behind us
the sky turns green, then gray
and pink and black.

This memory, recovered
by myself

working alone
without the guidance
of licensed professionals
just this very afternoon,

may not bear up under
cross-examination.

But I know the sky was blind

and my extremities were trembling.

In this passage alone the poem bounces back and forth between sincerity and irony, a veritable poetic ping-pong match. First, there is the calling of a memory, a sentimental gesture, and then the assertion of sexuality and expectation, but with great humor—how do nerves get stuck in one’s pants?— and then back to beauty, the sky’s amazing shift of color, which contributed to the importance of the moment for the speaker. Then he undercuts the whole memory with a drawn out joke that also works to question whether the moment happened at all. And yet, the speaker can’t let it go, asserting that he knows something important happened that day, asserting the moment’s sincerity. This back and forth movement between styles allows McCann to have his cake and eat it too. Lines that might seem too clever or cheesy in a poem running on either an ironic or sentimental tone become unexpected and exciting in a poem pulling from both.

Be it shifts between the real and the ephemeral or sincerity and irony, Moongarden is ultimately about being caught in transition, and what a beautiful and horrible place it can be.

====

Rebecca Guyon holds an MFA in poetry from St. Mary's College of California. Her poems are published or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, 6x6, Octopus, Parcel, Strange Machine, Avatar Review, and more. She has reviews published in The Hollins Critic and forthcoming in Anti-.

MAXIMUM GAGA by LARA GLENUM

2009-05-20T23:15:00.001-07:00

ANGELA GENUSA Reviews

Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum
(Action Books, 2008)

Prepare to read Lara Glenum's Maximum Gaga, but I will tell you now, you cannot prepare. Maximum Gaga will slit your eyeballs open like the straight razor that cuts a woman's eye in Luis Buñuel's "Un Chien Andalou." And you will find the gruesome experience pleasurable.

This monstrosity of a poetry collection – and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible – will leave you with images and phrases you cannot get out of your head, no matter how you try.

Take this excerpt from "The Sign of the Goat" for example:

I saw myself dressed in pink-eye             & tumors :             modeling
the latest vivisection device:             : I saw myself lying on a gurney

surrounded by deer in white jackets :             My spine being pulled out my
asshole :             like a string of diamonds             :

After reading the first half of the book, I found myself walking around the house, chanting some of the character's names and phrases from the book in a sing-song, sinister way: "Minky Momo! Minky Momo!" "I'm flexing my eye-pods & feeling nasty," "My squealing gristle."

Maximum Gaga is filled with a surreal, carnivalesque freakshow of grotesque characters, animals, and machines that will fuck you up, but good. Like a David Lynch movie, you will finish the book feeling violated, yet in some weird way, liking it and wondering how you were manipulated so precisely by a writer. As you read the book, you'll mutter like Minky Momo in the prose poem "Will the Real Minky Momo Please Step Forward, "This is not really happening."

Maximum Gaga is written by, through, and about the body, which is why on page 62, almost exactly halfway through the book, Glenum appropriates three statements from Michel Foucault:

The Body is the Inscribed Surface of Events!

A Volume in Perpetual Disintegration!

The Body is Always Under Siege!

The book is constructed like a play, and is also very film-like, written in Acts and Scenes, which combine poetry, prose poetry, stage directions, letters, documents, an anthem, and even what could be construed as an essay or manifesto ("Proclamation of the Visual Mercenaries"), set in sequence for maximum effect.

Glenum points out how language is a symptom of the body, which, like the rest of the body, ultimately and always fails its owner:

"How to rectify this, o dog of language? How to rectify your losses at the hands of your own tongue?"

Words, on which humans rely to communicate through our bodies, are merely another trap, painful in its limitations yet pleasurable:

"The glorious cage of language from which we never hope to escape!"

The machines in the cast of characters are but extensions of the body: King Minus's Daughters (a Hysteric machine), Ded (a Schizophrenic machine), Icky (a Paranoiac machine), the Miraculating Machine (a Desiring-machine – a simulacrum) and the Traumadrome is a maze of muscles. One never felt so claustrophic inside a body as one does while reading Glenum's book. Beautiful yet grotesque phrases in the book like "dribbling figgity," "cream-slammed oinkers," "twitching placenta paste," "cunning runalingus," ""custardy runtwort," "false tentacular udders" and "vaginaless parent worm" leave you twitching and squirming, and emphasize the claustrophobia of feeling trapped inside a flawed body.

Maximum Gaga could have only been written by a woman with a feminist perspective. In the poem "Feminine Hygiene," the narrator begins, "When I contracted 'the female disease.' " Glenum wrote about a quarter of the poems in this collection while pregnant with her second child, and the entire book was "more or less written/cobbled together in the (utterly sleepless) months right after he was born."

By email, Glenum writes, "To Bakhtin, women represent the quintessential grotesque: they are 'penetrable, suffer the addition of alien body parts, and become alternately huge and tiny.' To me this is on the right track in terms of describing the body, but it's also a fine piece of sexism because it shunts the description of the body that is out of control/forever in the act of becoming onto the female body."

"There's also this great quote from Mary Russo about how the grotesque stands in opposition to the classical model of the body:

"The images of the grotesque body are precisely those which are abjected from bodily cannons of classical aesthetics. The classical body is transcendental and monumental, closed, static, self-contained, symmetrical and sleek; it is identified with 'high' or official culture… with rationalism, individualism, and the normalizing aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The grotesque body is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple and changing; it is identified with non-official 'low' culture, and with social transformation…"

Glenum says, "Obviously, the classical body is also usually typologized as being male, white, able-bodied, heterosexual, etc., all of which is just massively oppressive."

Maximum Gaga reminds us, in the most beautiful, twisted language, that we are mere animals, that we are going to die, trapped inside deteriorating, grotesque, and failing bodies, and that along the journey to death, there are many transformations, desire, pleasure, and much violence.

*****

Angela Genusa was born in 1961 in East Lansing, Michigan. She is a writer, poet, visual artist, video/film maker, photographer, and musician.

OBSOLETE by KATIE HAEGELE

2009-05-20T23:15:00.000-07:00

Eileen Tabios Engages

Obsolete--an alphabet of poems inspired by dead words by Katie Haegele, with design by Noah Beytin
(self-published, Jenkintown, PA, 2008)

Merriam-Webster offers a service where they will email daily a word and its definition(s) and etymological history. I'm a subscriber to this service and, a few years back, wrote a series of prose poems under the constraint that each poem would be titled by the Merriam-Webster word du jour. It was a fun exercise, and a way to get past the limits of authorial intent; the results came to appear in my book I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved.

I'm reminded of this series as I read through Katie Haegele's charming chap, Obsolete. Its elucidating subtitle is "--an alphabet of poems inspired by dead words". Actually, in the Introduction, one word was described as “dying” as opposed to “dead” – an unexplained facet that leaves me tickled: how does one gauge the process of a word’s dying? Anyway, Haegele found these dead/dying words in a variety of sources: a 1936 Webster’s Universal Unabridged Dictionary bought at a yard sale for two dollars, an online collection called The Phrontisery , and the bulk of them by reading through the Oxford English Dictionary at her “small local library with a magnifying glass.” She then used the words to title/generate a poem; Obsolete contains 26 poems titled by a word beginning alphabetically, from “Accinge” to “Zodiographer.”

What's fun about Haegele's poems is the cheerfully murky link between the "dead word" title and the poem's text (at the bottom of each page, the dead word’s original definition is given but I didn’t read the definition ahead of reading the poem). One doesn't know exactly how the inspiration worked, though it is fun to guess. For example, the poem entitled with the dead word "Yemelich" offers as its first line, "Unhappy as a therapist's awkward little couch." Somehow, the transition between title and poem's first word has a logic -- it just feels like a "Yemelich" would be "unhappy"!

What makes these poems fabulous, though, is how they unfold beyond the initial constraint that birthed them. Sometimes, one can glean a link based on narrative, or meaning, as in this poem in its entirety:

Dangerful

“I don’t think it’s wise,”
her mother said. But still she
went to him, eyes bright.

Other times, as the poems unfold, one can sense the author's admirable freedom in just following where the words take her, as in the poem “Xenodochial” that begins:

“Crash the discussion board”—I want to, oh my God,
I love the idea of something exciting and modern
like that. That togetherness. But all that ever happens

is I kill light bulbs through overuse and they leave a
gray smudge at the top where their souls escaped.
Sometimes I feel scared for my life, like Little Red

Riding Hood in the city I go to parties by myself, to
places that take me forever to find, and it’s nighttime.
Then I live a thousand unhappy lives in the time it

takes me to step over the threshold….

It’s so satisfying when poems progress in unexpected and mysterious ways. Here is "Yemelich" in its entirety:

Yemelich

Unhappy is a therapist’s awkward little couch
Sad is the sore in your middle where memories flare
Unhappy is “this relationship is unhealthy”
Sad is having to think to remember the last time you were touched
Unhappy is 8:30 am
Sad is 4 am
Unhappy is issues
Sad is the headstone

It certainly makes sense that from a first line addressing unhappiness, a second line might repeat the notion by beginning with the word "sad." But the alternating uses soon come to dilute the synonymity of the two words.

One even starts to read the poem as two poems in one, with each poem comprised of the lines beginning with "Unhappy' and the second with the word "sad". If you read it that way, it's a storytelling poem with two different stories that aren't necessarily linked but are co-existent parallel strands. Which is to say, many of the poems engage by leading the reader to speculate.

Finally, in "Yemelich," the last line "Sad is the headstone" (which latter word I keep seeing as “tombstone”) is a powerful ending by manifesting ending. There's simply nothing to say or think in response to something like "Sad is the headstone" except to be compelled to nod in agreement. "Sad is the headstone" -- there's nothing more to say after a line like that. And perhaps no need to say anything either (and yet I continue to blather -- continue to speculate…).

All the poems contain mysteries and, in this way, transcend their beginnings. They unfold as unsolved mysteries, and aptly so if words are read out of their (original) contexts. Since words do not exist in a vacuum, it seems to make sense then that it is poetry's fictions that can resurrect these dead words.

Still, being a well-conceived project doesn't necessarily mean the resultant poems would be engaging. That they are attests to Haegele's talents: the poems are witty, charming, and/or beguiling. An attractive intelligence simmers from each page. It’s a delight to leave you with the poem entitled “Essomenic” which once meant “a mirror that shows things as they will be in the future.” Haegele’s “Essomenic” begins:

What if it was like this every day?
You’d blink awake, untested, your
room as still and dim as yesterday.

It’s true, the curtain is a limp and dingy
gray. But if there’s one thing I have
learned it’s that you can’t trust curtains.

There’s no reason they should get the
final word.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere: Joey Madia's review of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole over at New Mystics, and Aileen Ibardaloza's (and Aileen's mother's) engagement with The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes over at OurOwnVoice. Oh hey! And she just released her first novel (grin) : NOVEL CHATELAINE!

BOOKS by STEVE MCCAFFERY & CHRISTIAN BOK and Edited by LOUIS ARMAND

2009-05-20T23:00:00.000-07:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Contemporary Poetics, edited by Louis Armand
(Northwestern University Press, 2007)

Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics by Steve McCaffery
(Northwestern University Press, 2001)

Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science by Christian Bök
(Northwestern University Press, 2002)

These three books are part of Northwestern University’s ‘Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies’ series edited by Marjorie Perloff and Rainer Rumold. Their intention is to challenge. They succeed.

Armand, in his ‘Editor’s Introduction: Transversions of the Contemporary’, defines, at p xiii, the boundaries of this work:

Neither is the purpose of this volume to enter into a polemic as to the claims and counterclaims of various ‘schools of poetry,’ nor does it intend to suggest that there is any determinate aesthetic, formal, or philosophical dimension of ‘contemporary poetics’ that could be taken as a legitimatization of the views of one party over another. Moreover, it in no way seeks to report on what might be considered the current state of poetry or of poets writing ‘today.’ The sense of the term ‘contemporary poetics’ as it is used in this volume rests neither in the delineation of a specific period or epoch nor in a present conceived in terms of it but rather of a ‘condition’ of writing – of the poetic enterprise – which is both historical and attuned to the radical complication of poetics and the ‘present time of writing.

He then sets out an overview which whets one’s appetite for what will follow. And so we enter the realm of theory.

Following on the heels of ‘How Empty is my Bread Pudding’ where Charles Bernstein writes a poetry of language disguised as aphorism, Marjorie Perloff asks, in ‘After Language Poetry: Innovation and its Theoretical Discontents’, “And how much longer can poets keep innovating without finding themselves inadvertently Making It Old?”(16) Perloff reminds us that:

The lasting contribution of language poetries...is that at a moment when workshop poetry all across the United States was wedded to a kind of neoconfessionalist, neoromaticist discourse, a discourse committed to drawing pretentious metaphors about failed relationships from hollandaise recipes, language theory reminded us that poetry is a making [poien], a construction using language, rhythm, sound, and visual image, that the subject, far from being simply the poet speaking in his or her natural ‘voice,’ was itself a complex construction, and that – most important – there was actually something at stake in producing a body of poems, and that poetic discourse belonged to the same universe as philosophical and political discourse.(21)

Perloff then appears to wander off before reaching near to a conclusion where she indicates that in poetry today:

two important things are happening. The first is a visualization of poetic text – a visualization which is again a time-honoured mode, as in George Herbert’s The Temple or Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice), but reconfigured in important semantic ways in Johanna Drucker’s The Word Made Flesh or Susan Howe’s Eikon Basilike. The second is a form which I call, for want of a better name, ‘differential poetry,’ that is, poetry that does not exist in a single form but can vary according to the medium of presentation: printed book, cyberspace, installation, or oral tradition.(33)

In Part Two: Precursors, the things, ideas, images that led to the present epoch of post-modernity, post-romantic, post-post are examined. In ‘Getting Past Odradek’, Kevin Nolan takes us through Kafka and his Odradek, a “’star shaped cotton reel’ trailing ‘old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together’”(41) used here, whether or not used by Kafka as same, as a symbol of the things that get stuck in attempting to enter a new epoch, Donald F. Theall, in ‘The Avant-Garde and the Wake of Radical Modernism’, takes us back to 1939, the year James Joyce published Finnegan’s Wake, which he postulates as the advent of ‘digiculture’, arriving at the conclusive statement that “if new modes of electronic communication and other technologies (e.g. the railroad, the automobile, film, and the airplane) complemented by Riemann’s discovery of descriptive geometry partly transformed the nature of space and time, artists explored these new altered perceptions in poetry, mobiles, montage, and the exercise of the imaginary.”(65) leading him to say that “living within this context, Joyce organized this network of intuitions and linked them to the longer-term prehistory of the newly emerging media world which many of his fellow artists had also intuited, thus providing an even greater irony to his statement, ‘Wait till Finnigan wakes,’ for that waking would be both the transformation of dream into virtual reality and the transformation of the participants (the audience) through their understanding of the media effects.”(ibid)¨

In ‘Doctor Williams Position, Update’, Bob Perelman analyzes W.C. Williams’ ‘Asphodel’ initially through the lens of Plato’s Ion then leading us through poetic hoaxes and an examination of candor as represented by Ginsberg and Williams whereupon he briefly returns to Asphodel before launching into Paterson and saying “here speech, mimetic depiction of banality, internal didactic rant, and stumbling approaches to more illuminated states of mind are all granted equal access to the page...As the stanzas follow one another, each makes something different and a little more active out of what has come before”(91), all in imitation of an accordion without ever arriving at a place which one could call a conclusion which, by the standards of a good Language writer, avoids closure. Describing Wallace Stevens as a romantic (which is true of most poets to which the appendage ‘modern’ has been applied for Modernism is but the end of Romanticism), Simon Critchley states, at p. 106, that “Stevens is philosophically significant because his verse recasts the basic problem of epistemology in a way that perhaps allows the problem to be cast away. What we might call his ‘poetic epistemology’ can be said to place in question the assumptions behind the traditional epistemological construal of the world. This is what I think is at stake in approaching poetry as philosophy.” From there, he arrives at the conclusion regarding Stevens that “the consequence of Steven’s argumentation is that the truth we experience when the poet’s fictive imaginings are in agreement with reality is a truth of fact. But it is an enlarged world of fact: things as they are, but beyond us.”(108) And his conclusion regarding poetry and poets that “poetry is like the light which illuminates objects in the world, it is the unseen condition for seeing, unseen until seen with the poet’s eyes and then seen anew. Like light, it adds nothing but itself. Close to the heat of that light, we live more intensely. Or so we say.”(109) D.J. Huppatz, in ‘Corporeal Poetics: Kathy Acker’s Writing’, comes to the conclusion that

Acker’s corporeal poetics suggests a writing that can produce erotogenic zones. Indeed, there is a clear sense of corporeal production in reading Acker’s texts (or listening to her perform); the predominance of dialogue and multiplicity of voices take on another dimension when read aloud. While the sense of sight when reading functions by doubling and dividing, hearing functions through resonance. While visual possession of characters is difficult and the complicity of sight and speech in conventional narrative is undermined, when heard aloud, Acker’s excessive writing attains a rhythm; the repetitive scenes and speed of changes becomes cinematic ebbs and flows of desire.(123)

Finally, in ‘Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism’, Michel Delville and Andrew Norris substitute for a discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake and Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre a discussion of two of sixties’ rock’s most innovative performers/composers – Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart – reaching the conclusion that

the inside-outside on the edge laugh in Zappa, which encapsulates the maximalist body, represents the rhythm of response...with its vertiginous plunge from miraculous gain to catastrophic loss and back again, while at the same time mocking it with an audaciously recessive form of metafiction. In the light of this phenomenal laugh one might even be tempted to risk a universalizing statement and suggest that the origin of maximalist art is the antisocial impulse to go on joking regardless of the potential for real and feigned amusement.(146)

But, in the end, we are left wondering what exactly is ‘maximalism’ as it relates to poetics – unless, of course, Delville and Norris are telling us that the poetics of late 60s rock are the same poetics that informs Joyce and Beckett and other ‘maximalist’ writers. By the way, this section is a maximalist attempt at throwing everything into the soup, including the pot, of precursors to postmodernity.

We now move into ‘Conjunction’. The first article in this section, ‘Metaphor: The Color of Being’ by Ricardo L. Nurinberg, explores the concept of metaphor and its inadequacies. He initially discusses Max Black’s ‘More About Metaphors’ (1977) which sets out that the “two traditional (and inadequate) definitions are ‘substitution’ and ‘comparison.’ The former states that a metaphor substitutes for a set of literal propositions; the latter requires that those propositions present a likeness or analogy between two concepts.”(116) This definition is then extended to include the ‘interaction’ concept which applies a mathematical analysis of the ‘isomorph’ whereby “a one-to-one function between two sets A and B”(ibid) is created but which, again, proves wholly inadequate. John R. Searle’s definition is then brought into play that all words have connotations and denotations before leading to George Lakoff’s Metaphor and Thought in which his “definition of metaphor...is the same as Black’s but maimed”(158) as the concept of isomorphs is abandoned with the domain of comparison being limited to that of the conceptual, i.e. “metaphor is not a linguistic phenomenon; the mapping occurs between two sets of concepts or mental objects, in other words, between signifieds, not signifiers.”(159) An interesting discussion of the meaning of metaphor ensues during which Nurinberg looks to the Renaissance discussion of whether color or design is primary and how this relates to the idea of metaphor. Proceeding through an examination of Bertrand Russell’s concept of vagueness set against Ezra Pound’s equating of ‘good art’ to ‘the art that is the more precise’ and punctuating this prose with references to the ‘precise’ time that it is being written, Keston Sutherland, in ‘Vagueness, Poetry,’ discusses the ambit of the vague before arriving at a semi-precise statement that “In poetry this impossible defiance shines, like love as the ideal limit of hatred.”(183) Conjunction proper emerges in the collaboration of D.J. Huppatz, Nicole Tomlinson and Julian Savage who are all part of the Melbourne-based experimental writing collective Textbase. In addition to extending the parameters of Fluxus where word and image are montaged into mobiles, soup cans ala Andy Warhol, et al, they have combined their opinions in this op-ed piece on contemporary poetics, ‘AND &,’ arriving at the realization that “it was never every artist but only those of a particular order that were to be expelled from the republic...those poets leading astray the citizenry by presuming to know a thing beyond the entitlement of art – imitating second-order occurrence – traversing an indecorous, a dangerous and corrupting region of shadow – stepping beyond a constrained invocation of the presence of the gods – threatening instead to displace them – to multiply them – to obscure, cover over, or rupture the One/Idea.”(195) This section concludes with two essays – ‘Reading Notes’ and ‘Lost and Found’ – by Bruce Andrews. Andrews begins ‘Reading Notes’ with the following:

There are givens of writing open to contest, but there are also givens of reading open to contest...
...Especially when it comes to connecting the possibilities for such drastic new writing with the opportunities we take up as readers. Here, we could focus on the ways that meaning & pleasure & challenges in ideology get fashioned out of the up close experience of reading, not just from our taking in the triumph of experimental writing. We’re pulled outside of any model of straightforward communication & exchange, or of cultural capital to be appropriated as someone leans back to be impressed & entertained. Certainly it goes beyond a reading dedicated to some revelation of prepackaged content or response to an author’s prior intention: ‘include stakeouts beyond sense declension.’(197)

which leads to the following in ‘Lost & Found’: “Even the facts are pastiches – to keep you from getting demiremanded to the doxauthorities.”(209)

‘Concrete Poetry: A Manifesto’ by Augusto de Campos, originally published in Portuguese in 1956 in a Brazilian architectural magazine, opens the section on ‘Cursors’. It is immediately followed by a ‘Questionnaire of the Yale Symposium’ completed, again in Portuguese by de Campos, for submission to the Yale Symposium on Experimental, Visual, and Concrete Poetry which took place in 1995. In response to the question “Is there a poetics of concretism, or is concrete poetry a formal device rather than a conceptual device?”, de Campos responded, at p. 218:

As I see it, concrete poetry did not come about as a formal specialization in the field of modern poetry...but rather as a proposed radicalization of poetic language in which the visual aspects constitute just one of the relevant parameters. What concrete poetry sought was to recuperate the specificity of poetic language itself, the materiality of the poem and its autonomy, beginning with a revision and radicalization of the methods of modern poetry and of the elaboration of a new creative project in the context of new media.”

This analysis of concrete poetry is then followed by Darren Tofts’ ‘Epigrams, Particle Theory, and Hypertext’ in which he examines the epigram from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation, “in an intriguing, multimedia way, using images instead of text”(221), which then takes the discussion through Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Sand in which “we encounter a text that is never the same each time it is revisited, a text that never repeats itself”(223) and on to Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller which “stands for an attitude to experimental writing devoted to the problematic of the beginning, of the commencement”(225) then into particle physics and Stephen Hawking’s ‘virtual particles’ “and it is for this reason that this particle theory of hypertext is a potential literature, an Oulipean exercise in speculative possibility”(229) which takes us back to Borges as “we can temporarily think outside the pervasive cultural logic of binarism that still structures new media forms such as hypertext”(ibid) for which Tofts says “it is a theory of the text occupying a fabular space and time of the possible, parallel to our own.”(ibid) Gregory L. Ulmer’s ‘Image Heuretics’ is a fascinating excursion back into Baroque times in order to excavate the Italian concetta “the most useful feature of [which] is that it provides a form with which to compose the image-text (seeing-reading)”(249), the concept of which fascinated both Walter Benjamin and Deleuze, via Leibniz, where “what makes a concept a concetto, Deleuze stresses, is the folding of the concept into the individual”(250) leading to the individualistic form of the emblem, the impresa, a subcategory of the concetto, and arriving finally at where this essay began: the creation of the Memorial which “performing the EmerAgency...treats the disaster as a source for understanding contemporary values, specifically as a mode of self-knowledge, rather than attempting to impose on the disaster a predetermined meaning”(253) and its application to 9-11. If what you were expecting from J. Hillis Miller’s ‘The Poetics of Cyberspace: Two Ways to Get a Life’ was a discussion of hyperlinks in the use of poetry and other writings, they you’re in for a disappointment. Instead, Miller creates two hypothetical characters – Horace and Jimjim – one a ‘book person’, the other a ‘cyberperson’, discusses their hypothetical lives and arrives at “my conclusion of conclusions, the ultimate result of my thought experiment, is that it is better to be a cyberperson than to be a paper person, though I have some reservations about that.”(276) This section is completed with two articles on codework. McKenzie Wark begins ‘From Hypertext to Codework’ with the statement that “digging writing out of the prison house of ‘text’ might just be what is needed to unblock thinking about where the Internet is taking writing. There has always been more to writing that text, and there is more to electronic writing than hypertext.”(279) Wark then lists three limitations of hypertext before arriving at the conclusion that “for all the talk of the death of the author, the hypertext author assumes much the same persona as his or her avant-garde literary predecessors.”(280) Wark then wanders into codework stating that “many codework texts hover on the brink of legibility, asking the reader to question whether the author if made of flesh or silicon, or perhaps whether authoring lies at the level of writing text or coding software to write text.”(282) Although it is somewhat long, Wark, on p. 284-5, provides an excellent summation for what codework is and how it fits into the postmodernist agenda:

At the heart of the codeworking enterprise is a call for a revised approach to language itself. Many of the creative strategies for making or thinking about writing in the latter part of the twentieth century drew on Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. In the hands of poststructuralists, language poets, or hypertext authors and theorists, this was a powerful and useful place to start thinking about how language works. But Saussure begins by separating language as a smooth and abstract plane from speech as a pragmatic act. Language is then divided into signifier and signified, with the referent appearing as a shadowy third term. The concept of language that emerges, for all its purity, is far removed from language as a process.

What codework draws attention to is the pragmatic side of language. Language is not an abstract and homogeneous plane, it is one element in a heterogeneous series of elements linked together in the act of communication. Writing is not a matter of the text but of the assemblage of the writer, the reader, the text, the text’s material support, the laws of property and exchange within which all of them circulate, and so on.

Codework draws attention to writing as media, where the art of writing is a matter of constructing an aesthetic, an ethics, even a politics, that approaches all of the elements of the process together. Codework makes of writing a media art that breaks with the fetishisms of the text and the abstraction of language. It brings writing into contact with the other branches of media art, such as music and cinema, all of which are converging in the emerging space of multimedia and which often have a richer conception of the politics of media art as a collaborative practice that has been the case with writing conceived within the prison house of ‘text.’

The section ends with ‘Codeworld’ by Alan Sondheim, one of the leading practitioners of codework. We are presented with examples before being taken to Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus and the exception the codeworkers take to it leading to sentence residue.

Louis Armand’s essay ‘Strange Attractions: Technopoetics in the Vortext’ opens the final section ‘Transpositions’ with an analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake before taking us through John Cage’s chance techniques, chaos analysis, the Fraser Spiral, etc. before arriving at the following:

The seeming paradox here is that the more ‘chaos’ in a data stream, the more information that is conveyed by each new bit. Thus again, as in Cage’s mesostics and Joyce’s Wake, the elaborate models generated by means of acrostic coordinates suggest models evolved in recent chaos theories involving turbulence and nonlaminar flows in thermodynamic systems. Like these, the technopoetics of Cage and Joyce appear to function as a kind of `system` which moves from predictable behavior to unpredictable behavior, by virtue of the introduction into the system of an element of indeterminacy, or conversely the withdrawal of the possibility of straightforward or statistical `redundancy.`(315)

Steve McCaffery’s, ‘Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap’, is an extremely thought-provoking essay dealing with the concept of frames as permeable boundaries, dissipative structures that, on a quantum level, dissipate energy and matter in violation of thermodynamics through an increase ‘in small random fluctuations’, and contrasting ‘parapoetics with comparative poetics as “parapoetics does not work to constitute and defend the discrete frame of the poem but rather explore[s] how the frame can be challenged to open up a poetics without borders.”(325) After short essays by Allen Fisher, ‘Traps or Tools and Damage’, and Steve McCaffrey, ‘Discontinued Meditations’, Marjorie Perloff concludes this section, and the book, with ‘Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text’ where, early in this essay she cautions:

“But no medium or technique of production can in itself give the poet (or other kind of artist) the inspiration or imagination to produce works of art. And poetry is an especially vexed case because, however we choose to define it, poetry is the language art; it is, by all accounts, language that is somehow extraordinary, that can be processed only on rereading. Consequently, the ‘new’ techniques whereby letters and word can move around the screen, break up, and reassemble, or whereby the reader/viewer can decide by a mere click to reformat the electronic text or which part of it to access, become merely tedious unless the poetry in question is, in Ezra Pound’s word, ‘charged with meaning.’(377)

McCaffery has been at the forefront of contemporary poetics which is why two of his essays were used to close Armand’s book. McCaffery continues his explorations in Prior to Meaning. In his introduction, he states:

Prior to Meaning studies the ways in which language behaves rather than how it’s designed to function. It traces a limited autonomy of the written mark at a level both beneath and around the semantic. Collectively the twelve essays index a general shift in my thinking away from a Saussurean model of language (langue/parole, signifier/signified) to a different set of provocations found in Prigogine and Stengers, Deuleuze and Guattari, Alfred Jarry, Sade, Leibniz, Lucretius, and in the ‘other’ Saussure, the Saussure of the programmatic notebooks – provocations that led me to consider writing as a material scene of forces.(xv)

This voyage into language is a voyage even Homer would have trepidations about taking.

In his first essay, ‘Insufficiency of Theory to Poetical Economy’, McCaffery, after first briefly discussing Aristotle and Plato’s The Apology (and even more briefly The Republic) which leads him to say that “in the Apology, it is the axiomatic separation of creator from semantic determination and from all rational procedures that is called for. Poetry (in a manner Foucault later demonstrates of madness) is defined, enclosed, and then silenced. After the Apology, the poet is committed to the domain of semantic heterology.”(6) McCaffery calls up Kristeva to salvage theory:

Issuing from a ‘split’ subject divided between conscious and unconscious drives, such texts involve an oscillating tension between two discrete signifying processes that Kristeva famously terms the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘semiotic.’ The latter carries the burden of instinctual drives and forces that affect, but do not support, a social transmission. Despite the strictures of a siociolect, the semiotic is disposed in specific detectable aspects of language, especially its rhythmic and sonic intricacies. The symbolic process, by contrast, involves a disposition toward the normative modes of signification: grammar, syntax, sentence integration, and the covering rules that guarantee unproblematic, intersubjective communication. (Needless to say, textual practice valorizes the former, semiotic disposition.)(6-7)

After engaging in discussion of Bataille, Benjamin and others, McCaffery says that “the stability of substance in any poetical economy would announce itself as a provisional equilibrium in a dissipative structure, between lineal, grammatical accumulations of words that integrate into higher units and the simultaneous expenditure of the letter components into potentially infinite indexical configurations.”(14)

‘Zarathustran ‘Pataphysics’ begins its examination by determining what Alfred Jarry meant by ‘pataphysics’ leading us to an analysis of Lucretius’ concept of the ‘clinamen’ being one of the two “presidential concepts in pataphysical method”(17), the other being the syzygy, derived from astronomy and applied by Jarry in the sense that “a word must transfix a momentary conjunction or opposition of meaning” whereas the clinamen bears resemblance to a typographical error being “like a slip of the tongue...less a performance than a happening” which discussion eventually leads us through Nietzsche to Brisset and homophonic construction where “homophony registers a certain autonomy of language outside of referential constraints and systematic relations but also unleases a dynamis of vertiginous, uncontrollable transformations.”(29)

This philosophical - in particular the philosophies of Leibniz and Deleuze and Guattari - application to poetics is continued in the examination of Robin Blazer’s The Holy Forest in which McCaffery attempts to reconcile the Deleuzian fold with Leibniz concept of the monad or, as McCaffery says at p. 44 “The compound, monadic cavities of a male womb folded as a ripple in a holy sea or ocean and refolded into that sacra bosco Robin Blazer names his Holy Forest.

McCaffery, in ‘Charles Olson’s Art of Language’, provides a fascinating look into Charles Olson’s poetics dividing this examination into two quasi-discrete aspects: that of the breath and that of Mayan hieroglyphics. In each case, he slides Blanchot alongside Olson. In concluding the examination of breath, for example, he states, at p. 52:

Against Olson’s conception of the poem as a ‘high-energy construct and at all points an energy discharge,’ Blanchot offers the notion of writing as low-energy inscription whose pneumatological-physiological coordinate is asphyxiation – further suggesting that to release expression, yet keep it void (as in pain, fatigue, or misfortune) may be to stage expression within ‘the dimension of the infinity of language.’ Blanchot senses a deeper cessation than that of aesthetic silence occasioned by the space of the line-break. For him, space, silence, and lack constitute a site for the entry of a profoundly nonunifying language – the start of a struggle, in fact, toward a writing that cannot figure in language. It is that otherness – a radical alterity registered by a modality of waiting – that negotiates itself as the suppressed aspect of the Object, and permits a return to Olson in a relation other than registered by a modality of waiting – that negotiates itself as the suppressed aspect of the Object as the Other emerges nonproprioceptively in a context other than Olson’s poetics: his study of – and fascination with – the art of the Mayan language.

This then takes us into that other aspect where McCaffery says, at p. 57:

If the presidential binaries of ‘Projective Verse’ and proprioception are inner-outer and surface-depth, then Olson’s Mayan project effectively abandons them. Indeed, a somewhat modified relation to alterity might be argued: a depthless gaze on and cruising of an essentially laminar flow. The fact is, Olson is seduced by Mayan glyphs...In neither providing discursive encounters nor communicative exchange the glyphs offer themselves as the optical induction of self-encrypted meanings. One might call this the protosemantic stratum of the seductive sign – insinuating fittingly into Olson’s Mayan project with its emphasis on the ‘live stone’ and with attention fixed not on the glyph as denotation but on its connotational seduction through ‘its force as carved thing.’

In ‘Richard Bentley: The First Poststructuralist’, McCaffery examines the relationship, rivalry even, between poet and editor as it existed between Milton and Bentley. At p. 61-2, he makes a fascinating and provocative statement:

Such rivalry reduces to the simple issue, in localized aspects of the poem, of who exercises the better poetic judgment. It is at these moments where the fissure in respective taste becomes apparent. Milton’s Baroque complexity of thought, Italianate and fueled by metaphoric license, is pitted against Bentley’s uncompromising insistence on logical correctness and rational consistency. Detectable at these times is an unbreachable gap in poetic tastes, a Lyotardian differend at the root of Bentley’s assurance that, if Paradise Lost were to be established as a classic, it must be purified of what he calls its ‘romantic rubbish.’

In ‘Johnson and Wittgenstein: Some Correlations and Bifurcations in the Dictionary and the Philosophical Investigations’, McCaffery continues his eccentric but, nonetheless fascinating, excursions into the realm of language. He sums up his assessment of Johnson’s Dictionary as follows:

I hope I have shown that the Dictionary is a book that rewards scrutiny and encounter through current conceptual apparatuses, but that I have also indicated its sober aspects as a document of eighteenth-century Tory ideology. While grasping the essential turbulence and metamorphosis of living utterance, Johnson refuses to see the inherent shiftiness and intractability of quotations. Like footnotes and marginalia, quotations are by their very nature capricious objects of transfer – clinamens effecting dialogue and alterity. Yet Johnson’s dream is to assemble these instable fragments as a reservoir of absolute exemplarity. As a result, the Dictionary registers as the convulsive confrontation of a lexical list by an analogy of cultural fragments.(101)

[Note, by the way, that ‘instable’ is not incorrect but, in fact, an acceptable variant of ‘unstable’ at the time Johnson was writing.] In comparison, he says of Wittgenstein that:

Such presumption to power is absent in Wittgenstein, and the classlessness of his ordinary language paradigms retains its force as the Investigations’ instant, if evanescent, attraction. In reality, Wittgenstein remains captive to naive instances, failing to carry through a fully social articulation of those ideas and theories instantiated in his banal, interpersonal examples. As a consequence, no insights are offered into language’s noninstrumental workings and effects. For Wittgenstein, it is unproblematic to assert that ‘people use language’ and inconceivable that language might be thought of as using people. He is to be thanked for returning philosophical discourse from metaphysics and ontology back to ordinary human phrases, but the question needs to be asked – what follows from this success? The task now is to overcome the humanism that Wittgenstein sanctifies and which Johnson decants and guards.(102-3)

‘Between Verbi Voco and Visual, Some Precursors of Grammatology’ is, by itself, worth the price of admission. This chapter takes us through a variety of ‘writing’ techniques beginning with Pound’s dependence on Fenollosa and his treatise on the Chinese character as the inspiration and force behind the Cantos through scriptio continua to various medieval and renaissance techniques for visualizing the writing process including scoring as in a musical passage where the silence between words and at the end of the passage itself is notated. McCaffery’s comments on scriptio continua are fascinating, particularly for those poets who have engaged in writing without punctuation:

Scriptio continua puts language into both graphic and semantic indeterminacy, resolved only by a reader’s active intervention as the producer of periodicity and differentiation. A censura caesura, or prohibition upon pause, takes effect in which particles in void transform into a plenum. Language tropes itself as a sheet folded into nonarticulation.

By confusing secondary articulation, and thus rendering the discretion of the very articuli indeterminate, scriptio continua creates a syrrhesitic movement of the text – a flowing together of verbal discretions precipitating a more intense, libidinal encounter with the written. In passing, one might note that Lecercle demonstrates how logophiliac délire – that confluence of language, nonsense, and desire – is experienced as a kind of scriptio continua; as a process not of separation but of segmentive erasure. Because segmentive clarity is dissolved, words in continua are initially encountered as letters-becoming-words, presignificatory instabilities and uncertainties in a protosemantic continuum. Punctuation and spacing – as well as its complicated conceptual incarnation as Derridean différance – can be thought of as severing activities that slice a continuum into culturally recognizable sequences but may also be seen as clinamens.(110)

In ‘Sade’, is the following to be taken as merely applicable to the writing of Sade or is the same expandable into McCaffery’s ars poetica:

Just as the libertine functions successfully within the ideological state apparatus..;., so the imaginative transgressions of fiction must be represented through orthodox grammar and syntax...Sade’s is not a semiotic of drive à la Kristeva, effected upon the sensuous materiality of the sign, but a controlled, classical unfolding of the monstrous as a content. This eschewal of formal innovation is a masterly fraud and one worthy of his libertine heroes, for by acquiescing to the established linguistic order, a normative contract with the reader is preserved then invested into a criminal incrimination. Sade, of course, is profoundly aware of the institutional nature of the reader function and of the ideological basis to style. The criminal implication is that of the vehicular neutrality of the language, that demonstrates the same amoral, indifferent, and ultimately evil constitution as Nature itself. Through the innocuous transparency of classical language, the reader functions to reproduce – by consumption – Sade’s primary, imaginary narrative and arguments.(143)

‘Voice in Extremis’ is about just that: the voice – or, to be exact, the second of two meanings of voice as set out by McCaffery on p. 161-2:

The twentieth century presents two distinct scenarios for the voice in poetry. One is a primal identity, culturally empowered to define the property of person. This is a phenomenological voice that serves in its self-evidence as the unquestionable guarantee of presence. When heard and understood through its communication of intelligible sounds, this voice is named conscience. The other scenario – renegade and heterological – requires the voice’s primary drive to be persistently away from presence. This second is a thanatic voice triply destined to lines of flight and escape, to the expenditure of pulsional intensities, and to its own dispersal in sounds between body and language.

Following this, McCaffery sets out the history of sound poetry.

McCaffery begins the essay ‘Jackson Mac Low: Samsara in Lagado’ with a quotation from Ezra Pound: “like the lotus shells, moved by no inner being.” He uses this phrase as the jumping off point for the next, and final, two chapters, which, as he says at p. 187: “I will examine this in the next two chapters, here focusing on the ‘selfless’ productions of Jackson Mac Low and in the final chapter moving on to the ethical implications in this practice – implications that unfold in the light of Levinas’s philosophy.” And with this we shall leave McCaffery to the reader.

Completing this literary triumvirate from Northwestern is Christian Bök. ‘Pataphysics: The Study of an Imaginary Science’ represents, as stated on p. 3: “a supplement to metaphysics accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative to rationalism...the disappearance of scientificity itself when reason is pushed to its own logical extreme. Such a ‘pataphysical qualification of rational validity is symptomatic of a postmodern transition in science from absolutism to relativism.” Begun by Alfred Jarry, it is “structured as a descriptive explication, which emphasizes a theoretical perspective...Jarry has provided an often neglected but still important influence upon the poetic legacy of this century (particularly the Italian Futurists, the French Oulipians, and the Canadian Jarryites.)”(4)

In the opening chapter of this survey ‘Science and Poetry’, we are informed, without stating outright, that ‘pataphysics’ is an extension of the Platonic ‘Ideal’:

Philosophy has everywhere begun to threaten the constraints of both the real and the true in order to practice an antiphilosophy – what Jarry might call by the name of ‘pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions and arbitrary exceptions...Jarry suggests through ‘pataphysics that reality does not exist, except as the interpretive projection of a phenomenal perspective – which is to say that reality is never as it is but always as if it is. Reality is quasi, pseudo: it is more virtual than actual; it is real only to the degree to which it can seem to be real and only for so long as it can be made to stay real. Science for such a reality has increasingly become what Vaihinger might call a ‘philosophy of as if’..., wilfully mistaking possibilities for veritabilities.(8)

Declaring ‘pataphysics as the Ur of science, Bök, at p.9, compares Jarry with Nietzsche:

Jarry performs humorously on behalf of literature what Nietzsche performs seriously on behalf of philosophy. Both thinkers in effect attempt to dream up a ‘gay science’, whose joie de vivre thrives wherever the tyranny of truth has increased our esteem for the lie and wherever the tyranny of reason has increased our esteem for the mad. Both thinkers lay the ground work for an antiphilosophy, whose spirit of reform has come to characterize such alternatives to metaphysics as the grammatology of Derrida, the schizanalysis of Deleuze, or the homeorrhetics of Serres. All such antimetaphysical metaphilosophies argue that anomalies extrinsic to a system remain secretly intrinsic to such a system. The most credible of truths always evolves from the most incredible of errors. The praxis of science always involves the parapraxis of poetry.

Bök, at p. 11, refers to three “declensions of exceptions” defining them as follows:

Exception, after all, can resort to an assortment of modalities: variance (anomalos), alliance (syzygia), or deviance (clinamen). The anomalos finds a way to differ from every other thing that values the norm of equivalence; the syzygia finds a way to equate things to each other in a system that values the norm of difference; and the clinamen finds a way to detour around things in a system that values the fate of contrivance.

Regarding science and poetry, “like poetry, science is a bricolage of figures, an assemblage of devices, none of which fit together perfectly – but unlike poetry, science must nevertheless subject its tropes to a system, whose imperatives of both verity and reality normally forbid any willing suspension of disbelief.”(15) He goes on to discuss “four phases of distinct change” that the histories of poetry and science have shared: “the animatismic, the mechanismic, the organismic, and the cyborganismic” which he goes on to define as follows:

Ultimately, the conflict between science and poetry concerns this power to speak the truth, and this power has undergone four phases of epistemic transition: the animatismic phase whose truth involves interpreting signs through an act of exegesis; the mechanismic phase, whose truth involves disquisiting signs through an act of mathesis; the organismic; whose truth involves implementing signs through an act of anamnesis; and the cyborganismic, whose truth involves deregulating signs through an act of catamnesis. ...

During the animatismic phase, when papal academies divide discourse scholastically into modes of textualization and numeralization (trivium and quadrivium), knowledge is rarefied largely because of its insufficient supply. During the mechanismic phase, when royal academies divide discourse aristocratically into modes of investigation and dissemination, knowledge is rarefied largely because of its unspecialized market. During the organismic phase, when state academies divide discourse democratically into modes of ratiocination and acculturation (scientia and humanitas), knowledge is rarefied because of its specialized labor. And during the cyborganismic phase, when state academies divide discourse plutocratically into modes of totalization and optimization, knowledge is rarefied largely because of its overabundant supply.(16-17)

In the next chapter, ‘Millennial ‘Pataphysics’, we find this provocative statement: “For every solar truth of a royal science, there is the lunar truth of a nomad science – a forbidden knowledge that history must outshine.”(33) Bök goes on: “’Pataphysics confronts such a millenary conundrum with imaginary solutions, whose metaphors of exception have perhaps lent as much to Derrida as they have owed to Nietzsche, providing an unwritten intertext for postmodern philosophy.” Bök analyses Jarry’s own writings, such as Ubu, to demonstrate the approach Jarry took in exemplifying the scientific core of this anti-science, the philosophical core of this anti-philosophy. From this point, Bök brings in the concepts of anomalos, syzygia, and the clinamen. Of the anomalos, he says: “such a principle of variance does provide a pretext for postmodern philosophy about the theme of paralepsis (e.g. the supplement in Derrida or the parasite is Serres) – excesses that replace what they augment, operating against but within the limits of the system that must exclude them. The anomalos is the repressed part of a rule which ensures that the rule does not work. It is a difference which makes a difference and is thus synonymous with the cybernetic definition of interferential information – the very measure of surprise.”(38) As to syzygia, it “does provide a pretext for postmodern philosophy about the theme of syncretism (e.g. the chiasmus in Derrida or the syzygy in Serres) – conceits which conjoin as much as they disjoin, inverting, while equating, the values of the binary that must support them. The syzygia is the neglected part of a pair which ensures that such a pair is neither united or parted for more than an instant. It coincides with the laughter that erupts when we eliminate differences in order to imagine the incompossible.“(41) Finally, as to the clinamen, it “provides a pretext for postmodern philosophy about the theme of misprision (e.g. the détournement in Derrida or the déclination in Serres) – vagaries that diverge from what directs them, escaping the events of the system that controls them. The clinamen is simply the unimpeded part of a flow which ensures that such a flow has no fate. Not unlike the spiral of Ubu or the vortex of Pound, such a swerve is the atomic glitch of a microcosmic incertitude – the symbol for a vital poetics, gone awry.”(45)

In the three remaining chapters, Bök takes us through three artistic movements or occasions which attempted to further the pseudo-science of ‘pataphysics: ‘Italian Futurism’, ‘French Oulipianism’, and ‘Canadian “Pataphysics’ (note the double quotation marks). ‘Italian Futurism’ is a misnomer as Bök also addresses the Russian Futurists and the Russian Formalists as well as Duchamp’s ‘machines’. Bök looks at Futurism as an accident, as the play of the clinamen. In his excellent conclusion to this chapter, he states:

Futurism subscribes to an atomist dynamic of becoming to which the machine does not represent the universe as a mechanismic assembly of causes and effects (each event a reprise in the plan of its engineer); instead, such a machine represents the universe as a cyborganismic fracture place of forces and energy (each event a reprise to the bias of its conjurer). The universe is simply a celibate creation for finding out what happens next: it is a surprise machine.

Marinetti hopes to evoke a molecular revolution that might take the ’pataphysical epistemology of Jarry by surprise, augmenting its declensions of exception through the machinic paralogy of shock, noise, and speed...

Futurism ultimately postulates an applied science of poetic theories, in which poetry itself is an accidental instrument for a scientific experiment...Such an avant-garde pseudo-science reveals that the Future is nothing more than a poetic notion that provides an absurd domain for the epistemic fantasies of ‘pataphysics: the as if of its own science.(62-3)

Bök views the Oulipians as akin to the Futurists in that they “regard literature as a cyborganic phenomenon that results from deliberate collisions between poetic devices: the machinic paralogy of accidents. For the Oulipians, writing is automatic, insofar as it results not from an aleatory impulse (as in Surrealism) but from a mandatory purpose (as in Mannerism): writing is itself a machine to be studied methodically and guided systematically, as if by science.”(64) He goes on to say that, “working under the auspices of a speculative institution (le collège de ‘pataphysique), members of Oulipo (who include, among others, such literati as Queneau, Lionnais, Calvino, and Perec) study three unique species of exceptional eventuality: the excess of order emerging out of chaos, the chasm existing between order and chaos, and the swerve of chaos breaking away from order.” Of the Canadian “pataphysicians, firstly, Bök explains the doubling of the quotation as follows: “Canadian “Pataphysics adds another vestigial apostrophe to its name in order to make not only the excess silence imposed upon Canadians by European [note that this time we are not blaming you Americans] avant-garde but also the ironic speech proposed by Canadians against European avant-garde.”(83) This being accomplished, he goes on at the end to state:

Canadian “Pataphysics attempts to perceive the world only through the ironic window of what [bp] Nichol might call a ‘critical frame of reference’ – a clear sheet of acetate that permits the user to reach ‘new levels of philosophical and philological awareness’, since the user can simply place the FRAME (Fixed Reference and Meaning Explainer) over an area of text in order to respond to sceptical inquiries about the context for an academic argument. The FRAME differs from less expensive models sold by less reputable stores [mostly European controlled] because the FRAME lacks ‘the now obsolete black border whose funereal aspect properly announced the intellectual death of its users’; instead the FRAME has clear edges that become invisible at a distance so that, in the end, ‘the whole world fits inside the frame’, the real coinciding with its “pataphysical perspectivism.(96)

So it is clear that the Canadian FRAMEwork for “pataphysical research is the superior one.

In concluding, Bök asserts that “Science at its logical extreme appears to conduct a capricious experiment that facilitates the extinction of the species, doing so as if to facilitate the extinction of science itself. The fear of such a suicidal tendency in science has in turn spawned an array of vitally urgent but largely futile countermeasures (such as neo-Ludditism, ecoterrorism, etc.). But now ‘pataphysics has arrived like the cavalry coming over the hill to save science from its self-immolation.

This poetics excursion has led us through many exotic lands – Codeworld, Protosemantica, ‘Pataphysiconia. These lands, largely uncharted, are left for the intrepid poet/writer to explore. It is only through the efforts of these fearless pathfinders that we can bring light to these dark continents. The efforts examined here provide a rudimentary outline of the coastlines. It is those that follow that must map the interior.

===

John Cunningham resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he writes poetry, poetry and poetics as well as cultural and arts reviews, and where he has recently begun a stint as host of a half hour radio show, Speaking of Poets, of CKUW-FM 95.9 (which can be googled and downloaded or streamed for your listening pleasure). His reviews have appeared in Canada in Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead, the Danforth Review and the Northern Poetry Review, in the U.S. in Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Resurrects, and in Australia in Jacket.

FRAGILE REPLACEMENTS by WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA

2009-05-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

TOM HIBBARD Reviews

Fragile Replacements by William Allegrezza
(Meritage Press, San Francisco & St. Helena, 2007)

WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN: WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA’S FRAGILE REPLACEMENTS
There is no outside
I have abolished it
-Loren Eiseley

Materials of construction rarely resemble what is being constructed. A workbench with saw, hammer, nails, wooden boards loosely assembled within reach gives no indication of a table or book case. Construction sites often are surrounded by fences that forestall anticipation. I've seen crews make work sites look more chaotic than they really are simply to prevent inquiries about what is taking place and when is everything going to be "back to normal."

In taking office in 2009 as U.S. and the world's financial structure were falling to pieces, President Barack Obama sought to act quickly. In doing so, his concern might have been largely psychological, hoping to reassure a society in disarray. Perhaps he was mindful of F.D.R.'s famous statement that "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Obama's target was consumer confidence, the intangible though strongly evident apprehensive mood of a nation.

This anxious and indeterminate moment, this time in question, this interval, between the fragmenting of a stable structure and the reemergence of stability and prosperity, between beginning of crisis and its end is actually common in the way life proceeds and presents itself. In fact, life is a time between, a time “immemorial,” its starting and stopping points arbitrarily imposed for the sake of convenience and self-stirring approbation.

It is this indeterminacy, this unexpected ambiguity that William Allegrezza's 2007 poetry collection from Meritage Press, Fragile Replacements, is about.

* *

in the middle to restart the system
with flags full in breeze and handles turned
full forward                   to hear everything crack
tumbling off its nicely stacked shelf
                  incipit                   and so it begins in desire
tracing out a new path for memory out of
long unused space
                                    copied from a dream
in which one awaits a portal of erasure
or moves and changes and hopes and
                  finds a voice that repeats in clear
rhyme and reason.

This is the first poem of the collection, the first of forty-two roman numbered poems in the first section, titled "Go-between." It is also one of the best poems in the collection, giving an inventory of themes contained, like a table of contents, beginning of course with the phrase "in the middle." This, then, is followed by the idea of reassurance needed to "restart the system." The symbolic tokens in which reassurance is found are such as "flags" and "handles" and robust Obama-like movement going "full forward" and hearing everything crack like a whip. The poem also brings in fleeting Proustian touchstones associated with desire and memory and dream, the "momentary stay" as Robert Frost called it, sparkling with the heft of a greater reality. One might think of "a portal of erasure" as neo-Proustian, the philosophical absence and negation that give birth and shape to the substance of hope and movement. This is the absence out of which cries the human "voice" and "reason" and existence itself.

There is also a counter theme in the poem. It brings in the idea of "change" that was an emphasis in the 2008 Presidential campaign, with the phrase "Change We Can Believe In," itself a phrase tending toward reassurance. Certainly the election of the first African-American U.S. President has to be considered a change in some sense. It reflects a change in values, attitudes, laws, perhaps in demographics. A change in focus, in depth. But it is not as much a departure or tearing down as one might fear. The U.S. system of government that produced it was not changed; rather it was more strongly established. Its promise, its foundation reached a fulfillment.

Change, particularly change that can be believed in, is not piece-meal or all-at-once. Political and social change is brought about by ideas working through time. This we call progress. It is progress that at times requires reassurance, that tests confidence. So that though life is indeterminate, theoretically, forever, the indeterminacy of ideas is only until they reach fulfillment. In calling ideas "inalienable" and "self-evident," we are saying that once they are put in motion nothing can stop them. "Times of change" are time-of-construction when the materials and the tools are discernable but fulfillment is still remote.

Regarding life, we are always "in the middle." There are no times of change but only constant motion. But regarding progress with its subtle direction, there are historical moments when, in Allegrezza's words, the "silvery skin" of the present comes "tumbling off its nicely stacked shelf." The advancement of progress destroys and causes us to rebuild our societies. This process amounts to a removal of pretext, a clarification and reestablishment of the indeterminacy from which is derived the fundamental values and foundations of life. These are important ideas Allegrezza has done well to put in place for consideration.

Matter is a priori. Though we attempt to hold matter down for the sake of an instinctive predilection, for a given or psychic symmetry, it groans and protests, “do not restrain me”. We are “hampered” by diversity, contradiction, imprecision, transition. In feeling this way we forget that others feel the same, “the pain of so many happy surrounding [our] sorrow”. We are “happy/ that life seems secure/ that days seem long” once we have “unplugged the cords and/ switched off everything switchable”. Yet, in spite of happiness, “each verse is a journey” “so that/ now an argument for oneness/ seems hopelessly misguided” and so that “devotion leads to self-destruction”.

It’s these fragments from Allegrezza's stylistically fragmented poems that are the “fragile replacements“ that stand in reassuringly when worlds to which we have become attached crumble and collapse. Revealingly, Allegrezza's poems have a temporality similar to the those of Larry Eigner. Two of the poems in this first section are visual or “concrete” poems, with words, letters scattered “beyond the widest circle” on the page. Though life is indeterminate and “hard to comprehend,” the clouds, birds, sunsets, stars, new words, buildings do contain some sort of meaning, an overall meaning. Even from Allegrezza’s anti-cogency vantage, “a marvelous vision on a rainy afternoon/ signals an end”.

* *

The second section, “Under Clear Fields,” is a variation on the first. Whereas the first section takes up the idea of a go-between and reassurance during “times of change” and disruption, the second section seems more intent on making a case for accepting randomness. It yearns anarchistically. The first section is an introduction to the indeterminate, the concept of it, the workings of it. The second section is a field guide to indeterminateness, the way it appears in life, its disguises, its mistreatment, even in relation to something as pervasive and innocent as the image of "clear fields."

The first poems of the second section, titled “Rider,” is six lines long, though it covers the same amount of space on the page as a later eighteen-line poem. The difference is white space, emptiness. The poem begins with the word “lost.” The second line further down is lower case “i.” The last line at the bottom is “he moves.” Matter may be a priori. But no less so is emptiness, thought, mystery, form and formlessness. Correctly, Allegrezza gives these an equal place. Moreover, matter is only what Robert Lowell called “detritus,” parts broken off, rocks, debris. Matter is not of uniform value, or else it is uniformly valueless. Words are similar. They have their place and their power, but their power is the ability to produce a space that they themselves do not occupy.

Other titles in this section are “bits from austin,” “nominal phrases,” “glass views” “dust,” “drift,” “without vision.” They speak in sonar blips of confinement, out-of-body experience, real numbers, flowers, actuality. They have the aimless inchings of Andy Warhole movies of real-life objects, such as the Empire State Building, presented in long time spans utterly without pretension. They wash through evolutionary super-eons, where even the human form is arbitrary, where, as in some of Charles Bukowski’s poems, we are unaware of what we are witnessing. They enjoy sub-atomic word play. The strophes glide past like creatures at the bottom of oceans or objects in deep space. Perhaps they aren’t new life forms, but they are the exciting and curious forms of new life. Clumping in a primordial linguistic ooze, they evoke an exciting metaphysical renunciation of falseness. Even light, filtering through the depths, does not go unquestioned.

benbow's avenue

in a blue room
hydrants are left slowly running for birds
as though simple ashes gathered along a
single street in reverential communing
a congregation its place
like anything that moves within or moves without
all of which is taken prisoner of enlightenment

Truth to tell, Allegrezza’s indefiniteness and his poems about it reach toward a mystery that is beyond the metaphor or “theory” of evolution. This is not surprising, since as obvious as evolution’s having some merit is the fact that it leaves questions unanswered. Even if humankind were able to repeat the process of creation, it wouldn’t preclude the existence of a god. Perhaps it would vindicate those that say evolution is continuing, into an era in which Mankind becomes some sort of deity and creator. The talk of billions and billions of years seems to enhance the mystery. But for Allegrezza the Big Bang is living just down the street.

bullets surround a signal phrase like
a guiding light in the sixth circle
i stopped near a fence
reached into my coat
and pulled out oblivion

and the poem “utterance” (with its unassuming periods)

place begins
as I stop waiting
for fireflies to sweep
the city clean
as though life
could end with
no warning
the entire mechanism
finished though
so many streets
continue to run
where dreams
follow no
clear patterns.

blossoms on trees
and distance.

* *

Tielhard de Chardin says that the process of creating unites. But it could also be said that the process of creating divides. And, here, Mcluhanist ideas barge in impolitely, with the notion of divisive unity (nationalism) and tyrannical order (linearity). Visual writing, visual poetry has the ability to show us the finished logos. One might take a moment to describe some of its attributes: unassuming, humble, non-visual (non-pictorial), the “trace.” With the trace, multiplicity and diversity come through in the finished logos. Visual writing speaks with the voice of many. It represents a hidden mystery, a subdued mystery. The finished logos is a Jungian archetype. It describes not a tyrannical order but a liberating perhaps pre-existing order of system and infrastructure, an order that Allegrezza surprisingly doesn’t seem entirely to contest.

What textual writing shows us, by contrast, is the unfinished logos, which we in turn view as the unfinishable, the never-ending logos. This is the logos of “differentiation,” of “infinite content.” Though textual writing appears to tend toward hegemony, in fact it has the effect of liberation. Textual writing establishes subjectivity, endlessness.

The third section of Fragile Replacements, “Gathering Forces,” is a tempestuous envoi of various sorts of visual and textual writing, a rousing estuarial Wynton Marsalis Dixieland chorus with instruments blaring at the top of their lungs all at the same time, superimposed on one another, in a grand saturnalian march...but a march of what?

At first one wants to say “triumph.” The title “gathering forces,” the festive effect of the large and small fonts, vertically and horizontally on the pages, in black and in white lead the reader toward a sense of arrival. On the third page of the section is an unmistakable oversized bold-face "V," first letter of the ordinary sized phrase "voice returning." The section itself is introduced rather simply with a lone untitled poem, which begins,

i came into the valley to protect myself
against coming storms
                                    after i searched desolation near

racks and old schools
                                    where towers stood in
                                    dark skies and fires burned.

for clear air
i came searching
and for a voice
with which to claim
existence

Several pages later are the lines "i search/among rocks" and "poetry 'is a way of saying,/of noting how to become and unbecome'" and "i toss bits of paper in the wind" and "we cannot remain huddled/next to rock with our/words clear warnings/so we/slither into cities/and are/thrown up among signs/on buses and cars." These phrases give the sense of self-possession, summation and indeed of a "voice returning."

But some of the oversized, overarching superimposed words and phrases would not be associated with triumph: "control" "anguish & the lash" "must stand in line" "space surrounded." Nor do they especially favor unity. These are decidedly dissatisfied phrases. Phrases of repression, obstruction and of subsumed, "sullen," misunderstood selves.

What we must see in Tielhard de Chardin's idea that in creating we unite is that the unity he is talking about is not a simple or, perhaps, platitudinal unity. It is not based on the sacrifice of self. It is a unity kept vital by division. A unity based on diversity and multiplicity and subjectivity. Regarding Mcluhan: Is all unity divisive? Is all order tyrannical? Allegrezza, in this third section, says that "to write/ is to engage with an agenda". Are all agendas subversive? Cannot a writer conceive the complex and favorable agenda of a unity that is predicated on, held together by diversity? Cannot we think of an order that is not restrictive but is the fulfillment of a system of freedom? A self-balancing order, an actual order, a living order.*

In my opinion, in this third section, Allegrezza has done precisely that. He has given us the triumphal arrival that we expected, but he has complicated it with various uncharacteristic and broadening elements. For example, the title of the section, "Gathering Forces," is, I think, intended to be seen in a light without preference, as neither a good or bad thing, but only as a description. This gathering might be a society rising up or a society falling down. It is more specifically the dark cloud of a society that understands depth, complexity, responsibility, honesty. Though the visual and the textual writing clash, they do so with a tension that, like a gravitational orbit, symbolizes stable motion, a purposeful "steady-state." (Perhaps it would be helpful to interject a word from a different sort of discussion--"homeostasis.") Their clash is nothing more than a representation of society itself. This is a finished logos, a finished unfinishable logos. It could be a World War, a Depression, a Russian Revolution or a prosperous Golden Age. Any and all of these things. What Allegrezza is saying is that at bottom they are the same.

(*President Obama, in the euphoria of his inauguration, spoke daringly of unity. He even dusted off that word we have not been able to think highly of for so long, “patriotism.”)

*****

Tom Hibbard has new poems in Cricket and the special green issue of Jack just out this spring of '09. Besides poetry, Hibbard has many reviews in various journals, on and off line, especially of Philip Whalen's Collected Poems at issue 13 of Word/For Word and anthologies of Turkish poetry and Chicago poetry at the current Big Bridge. A poem and a review are scheduled for the upcoming issue 37 of Jacket.

THE HOUSE IN THE HEART by WILLIE JAMES KING

2009-05-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

KRISTINA MARIE DARLING Reviews

The House in the Heart by Willie James King
(Tebot Bach, Huntington Beach, CA, 2007)

In his first collection of poems, The House in the Heart, Willie James King offers the reader a variety of settings and landscapes, ranging from urban to bucolic. While varied, his writings continually use descriptions of the external world to convey the internal conflicts of their characters, a theme gracefully unifies the works in this collection. Filled with evocative imagery and finely crafted turns of phrase, King's book often uses these comparisons between interior and exterior to convey broader ideas about race, class, and social equality, proving at once lyrical and philosophical throughout.

In conveying these ideas, King offers several variations on this theme of dissonance between inner life and one's surroundings, allowing for a diverse collection. Although often presenting the reader with works that evoke the speaker's state of mind through cityscapes and vistas, other poems in The House in the Heart take a different approach, using the interior lives of characters to illuminate and complicate the landscapes they inhabit. A piece entitled "I've Just Heard," which King situates near the end of the collection, exemplifies this trend. He writes, for example,

...I stand transfixed
by failure's finesse; school
boys strapped to bombs;
heads severed by swords.
A city sinks fast
like a shelled ship. (65)

In this piece, the author conflates New Orleans after the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina with children traumatized by the war in Iraq. While doing so, King presents readers with a speaker who observes detachedly, perceiving such individual tragedies as part of a larger displacement of the ideals and beliefs that underlie American life. Juxtaposing the chaos of the external world with the disconcerting clarity of the individual's perception of it, this poem, like many others in the book, uses the inner life of its speaker to problematize the exterior world he or she inhabits, often while conveying substantial social criticisms.

Throughout the collection, King uses similar strategies to raise larger questions about life in the American South, which he often depicts from the culturally fraught point of view of an African-American male. In doing so, the work uses this disparity between interior and exterior to suggest both the inherent equality of all individuals and the injustice of any society that denies it. These themes prove particularly apparent in a piece entitled "Orrville, Alabama," in which he writes,

...So, I led
a small, quiet life of school
and fishing until I left. And
now folk hail me: Come home!
Come back! Times've changed,
they say, but I'm not buying it.
All I know is Christ had a cross,
King was killed, the Klans
still ride, and men's
hearts haven't changed... (42)

Throughout this piece, King juxtaposes the internal tranquility of the speaker with the violence that surrounds him. In doing so, he contrasts the speaker's peaceful inner life with destructive events, such as Martin Luther King's assassination and "the Klans" still riding, suggesting that such discontinuities between the values of the individual and the world he or she inhabits remain common in the American south. Although portraying "men's/heart's" as unchanging, King often highlights and disparages such discrimination and violence toward characters who lead "small, quiet" lives "of school and fishing," evoking the illogical nature of subjugating peaceful individuals.

Approached with these ideas in mind, the poems in The House in the Heart offer readers evocative imagery while raising significant and often philosophical questions. Frequently conveying the subjective through minute concrete details, Willie James King's debut offers such societal observations through the modest "graveled roads" and "windblown debris" of everyday life, a combination that proves striking throughout. This contrast remains particularly apparent in a piece entitled "Complaint," which depicts a farmer's lack of appreciation for the natural world from which he subsides. King writes in the poem, for instance,

...Silence will not slide
in edgewise this side
of summer, perhaps not
until long after controlled
burning's done with, and
quail and crows have
long taken the farmer's
spilled grain he himself
intended to haul home, all,
before he ended his harvest,
and set his fields on fire. (10)

This excerpt, which occurs early in the collection, uses "quail," "crows," and "grain" as a metaphor for the tendency of most to disparage the natural world, which sustains and nourishes. In doing so, King uses the character's setting "his fields on fire" as a metaphor for the modern disregard for the well-being of one's surroundings, suggesting that, just as the farmer hoards his grain and neglects the birds, these behaviors most often prove to be self-destructive in the long run. Written in terms of modest everyday imagery, the poem, like many others in the collection, uses such minutia as a vehicle for larger statements about American life, frequently while posing open questions to the reader.

All points considered, The House in the Heart is a finely crafted and thought-provoking book. Ideal for those who enjoy evocative poetry, Willie James King's new collection is a must-read.

*****

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVOX Books, 2008). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Kristina has also written on contemporary literature for The Boston Review, The Colorado Review, New Letters, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

MARTINIQUE: SNAKE CHARMER by ANDRE BRETON

2009-05-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

GARRETT CAPLES Reviews

Martinique: Snake Charmer by André Breton, with drawings and texts by André Masson, & translated by David W. Seaman
(University of Texas Press, 2008)

Surrealism’s Island

Since his death in 1966, André Breton has received more than his fair share of knocks. I’ve heard both critics and poets call him “fascist,” though, if pressed, all they cite is Breton’s sometimes dogmatic leadership of the surrealist movement. Such loose talk is tiresome and ahistorical. A staunch communist, Breton was nonetheless the first to denounce the totalitarian Stalin when the rest of the French Left turned a blind eye. He never went for Mao like the Tel Quel crowd. As leader of a left-wing movement opposed to Hitler, he was on the Nazis’ Parisian to-do list, and he only narrowly avoided arrest by Vichy authorities in Marseille, escaping to America through the efforts of Varian Fry (a sort of Schindler for lefty artists). Breton’s even occasionally criticized for fleeing the Nazis—as if it contradicted his principles—though his accusers tend to lead safe, academic lives. As we see, moreover, in Martinique, chronicling Breton’s stopover between Marseille and NYC, exile’s no picnic.

Breton had his flaws, of course, notably sexism and homophobia, yet even these were complicated, given the number of women and gays within the surrealist group. Most of his positions were politically progressive, particularly his anti-colonialism and anti-racism. Where much of the modernist avant-garde (Pound, Eliot, Marinetti, etc.) was avowedly racist, surrealism was the only movement which welcomed black artists as colleagues and innovators. In Martinique, in reference to the poet Aimé Césaire (who died only a few months ago, aged 94), Breton writes: “it is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today is capable of handling it. . . who is the one guiding us today into the unexplored” (88). (Similarly, Breton would declare the Haitian Magloire Saint-Aude the most important surrealist poet of post-war period.) Where more sympathetic artists like the Cubists exoticized Africans as the Other, Breton identifies with Césaire, “unable to distinguish his will from my own” (89). This might seem naïve in today’s political climate, yet the testimonials by the Martinican and Haitian writers who met Breton in the ’40s—translated in Michael Richardson’s Refusal of the Shadow (Verso, 1996)—suggest the feeling was mutual. Maybe it’s not so naïve, for surrealism stretches the limits of the possible.

Like many surrealist books, Martinique is a hybrid work, alternating between “lyrical language” and “the language of simple information” (40), reflecting “intolerable malaise on the one hand and radiance on the other” (39). That Breton could still pursue the poetic marvelous under such trying conditions—he’s thrown into a concentration camp on arrival by the pro-Vichy regime and, once freed, is constantly shadowed by police—is extraordinary. He was fascinated by Martinique’s natural beauty, celebrating, for example, the effect of rainfall on the island in surrealist terms: “If the light is the least bit veiled, all the sky’s water pierces its canopy, from a rigging of vertigo, water continually shakes itself, tuning its tall green-copper organ pipes” (59). Not even the uncertainty of his fate could stop Breton’s imagination.

This edition of Martinique—the first in English—is not without drawbacks, the most egregious being the reproductions of André Masson’s drawings, seemingly scanned from the French edition. But the translation is admirable, and, in a society which falsely imagines itself “post-racial,” Martinique is essential reading.

*****

Garrett Caples' most recent poetry collection is COMPLICATIONS (Meritage Press).

HUMAN CATHEDRALS by JOHN SWEET

2009-05-20T22:25:00.000-07:00

MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI Reviews

Human Cathedrals by John Sweet
(Ravenna Press, Washington, 2002)

Crucifixions Without Crosses, Resurrections
Under the steeples of John Sweet’s Human Cathedrals

Human Cathedrals assumes a certain firmness of tone, one that can be mistaken as mournful deliberation that precedes rebellion, or rebellious action. There are many passages that can illustrate this argument; but one particular passage stands out, because of the intertwined vein of courage and casualness that flows beneath its rhythm: “[o]f all the/words i own/the one i refuse/to say is/god” (58). The strongest phrases in this stanza, at least for me, are ‘i own’ and ‘i refuse’; the phrases are declarations of ownership, and a categorical declaration of something toxic in religion. The subject in question is contained in three-letter word: god. It’s crucial to underline the number of letters in the term ‘god,’ because three in Christianity stands for Holy Trinity, the sacred trio of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, summed into one Godhead.

Now quite coincidentally -- on the book’s cover -- in the black and white photograph of an old art deco building in Seattle is a suggestion of this trio; it’s a carved image in the building’s façade, of what appears like three stems: in the middle is a taller stem and to its left and right are two identical stems. On the other hand, while this image of three-some is, unavoidably, loaded with religious connotations, its presence above the title creates an ironic and un-iconic relationship with the title, because the idea of ‘human cathedrals’ presents a subversive platform; cathedrals ought to be juxtaposed on equal hierarchy with holy elements, not the one element that is beneath the sacred: the human.

Thusly, this image of three-some in the cover and the tension it creates with the title presents a gesture that frames the collection’s imagination: that the spectre of organized religion hangs over this collection like halo, not halo of sainthood, but rather that of moral introspection. In this regard, the poems in this collection become a sort of journey into the circulatory system of emotive introspection and examination, a system that doesn’t necessarily constitute or structure unified cathedrals of a specific community but rather distances itself -- as opposed to creating barriers of resistance -- from the notion of cathedrals, of structured and organized belief systems.

In many ways though, the poet’s sense of distantiation from these belief systems -- quite confidently suggested in the refusal to say the word ‘god’ -- can be viewed as the kind of distantiation hoped, exercised, or even forced among members in a family caught in a state of falling apart out of each other. Injecting the idea of family in this discussion is not incidental nor modestly relevant but rather critical, because when one discusses moral intimacies that implicate religion and religious beliefs, one steps into realms wherein the familiar becomes familial. In organized religion, belief functions as blood-line among believers; belief then, becomes critical indicator of kinship.

Now representations of distantiation, in the context of family, are often easy to recognize in amplified and theatrical simplifications: movement from one geographic location to another, absence in usual social gatherings, refusal to accept certain phone calls, refusal to assume connection with certain organizations, or, of course, explicit confession and iteration of commitment or non-commitment on something. On the other hand, when one asks to what extent these representations measure depth of separation, one starts to talk about degrees of separation, because of complexity in the process of separation. Members from any form of family-unit severing membership from that family are often aware of this complexity, because memories about being part of that unit cannot easily be severed.

The voice in this collection comes from that sort of family member, one who has tried to sever ties from a family called Christianity. This collection’s first poem convincingly takes us into that mind-space in “waiting for the day to begin”; and there are, at least, two families suggested that are intertwined here, that of the author’s and Christianity itself:

this is three degrees below
zero
and waiting for the
day to begin

am waiting for the baby
to wake up

for objects to solidify
cast shadows and i am
waiting for christ’s name to pour
like black blood from the
mouths of priests (2)

Something about this passage is almost like a chant for Christmas celebration without lights, or perhaps one transported along the River Styx. Christmas, as we know, celebrates the birth of the Christian messiah. In this birth a Savior has arrived, whose too-familiar story resists biography and history, but rather prefers to define doctrine, one that frames and colonizes world-views.

Now the gothic beauty painted in this passage rests not so much on the stand-in for baby Jesus, but rather on the baby’s duality, both as baby Jesus and the author’s son. But baby Jesus doesn’t wake up here. There is a wait, a long wait, a very cold one that takes us into the number three again, the trinity: “[…]three degrees below / zero”; this temperature somehow suggests the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are submerged below zero: frozen, powerless. No promises of messiahs here; baby Jesus appears dead. But what seals or unifies the darkness in this passage is the voice’s aspiration: “I am / waiting for christ’s name to pour / like black blood from the / mouths of priests.” The scene summoned is now the Holy Communion, the heart of Christian-church services, wherein the priest delivers the body and blood of Christ to the congregation, to God’s people, symbolically, through bread and wine, the ritual of transubstantiation. Furthermore, the idea of Holy Communion is not unique to Christianity; it has a secular dimension. Symbolism has, indeed, preserved the idea and drama behind the secular origins of the Holy Communion, sanitizing the bloodiness and violence involved in the culinary ritual: the taking in of body and blood of a human subject: cannibalism. Thus, the Holy Communion as simulacra of civilized and highly-dramatized cannibalism is holy because the body involved is not that of an ordinary human subject but that of God in human-form: Jesus; his body is the cleansing agent for the bodies and souls who take him. But then when one associates or equates the name of Christ with ‘black blood’, one stops thinking about blessings, but rather contamination, of something viral about the sacred. The equation of Christ and ‘black blood’ flowing out of the ‘mouths of priests’ further emphasizes the vampiric element and nature of the Holy Communion, not from the context of congregation but among priests themselves. Instead of being able to drink the blood of Christ first, before sharing that blood to their congregation, the priests reject Christ’s blood, and vomit it out. The vomited blood is black. The voice in the poem is waiting for this impurity, somehow expecting its flow as form of celebration; it’s not a nice vision of Christianity, because it renders Christ’s blood as toxic, and that the men who preach his gospel somehow have had enough of him, and cannot ingest and digest him anymore in their souls.

John Sweet walks on dark terrains, in this collection, without blinking. Released in 2002, within a year after September 11, 2001, Human Cathedrals can stand as epitaph for things in the human condition, too many to enumerate.

*****

Michael Caylo-Baradi lives in Southern California. His work has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, elimae, Kartika Review, Mannequin Envy, Otoliths, Underground Voices, PopMatters, and forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle.

HISTORY OF THE COMMON SCALE by EDWARD FOSTER

2009-05-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

History of the Common Scale by Edward Foster
(Texture Press, 2008)

One of the first things to notice about Edward Foster’s History of the Common Scale, aside from the historically freighted, hauntingly bare photographs (including the cover) is the pervasive iambic norm. The first two quatrains of “J. in the Snow,” for example, consist of a hypometrical dimeter, two lines of trimester, hypermetrical dimeter, trimester, hypometrical trimester, monometer, and dimeter. Late in the poem, which includes stanzas of varying lengths, the poet throws in a pinch of tetrameter and pentameter.

Author of an important critical book on Black Mountain poetry and founder and editor of Talisman, a journal that supports innovative writing from various “camps,” Foster is no “new formalist.” Perhaps he practices what Charles Bernstein terms “nude formalism,” because his complex use of iambic measures makes the artifice anything but “natural” and unobtrusive, and the work’s narrative and lyric impulses are never transparent.

“Hanging On” is a lucid evocation of ecological doom couched in the tropes of a Greek epic. Here is the first strophe:

All around, the walls that line
our city start to break.
The deadly things pass through.
We have no children left.
There’s no concern for who comes first,
just us and all this poisoned air we drink
to hold us down as we hold it. (6)

The generalities in Foster’s discourse bespeak many Americans’ awareness that global warming, etc. is very menacing yet their ignorance of scientific particulars and what really needs to be done to avert catastrophe. While the absence of “children” could signify their voluntary departure from a city of elders, it could also mean that the kids have succumbed before the adults to “poisoned air.”

The poet goes on to speak of “the deadly things” breaking down the walls as “the forces at the gate,” and these “forces” defy the “struggle” to clean up the environment for nature’s, as well as our own, benefit: “The forces. . ./ have come to end our struggle/ in their name.” Pollution is now inseparable from nature, and it exceeds human technological power; thus, polluted nature as a personification rebukes those human beings who “hang on” to the seemingly noble goal of ecological reversal and to human survival. “The forces” mock any defiance of mortality as a collective gesture and thus create an implicit link between the fact of individual death and extinction of the species, the absolute “punishment” for “crimes against nature”:

They say we mustn’t say we disapprove
or want to stay. We’re not allowed to say
our time is not yet done.

Why should we care?
We know
that everything must end.

Let poison reach us through these walls.
Be calm, let each of us be calm.
Take punishment
as if we’d really want
the forces at the gate
to be as honored
as history
must say they were. (6)

According to the poem’s logic, honoring nature would consist of eliminating those (us!) whose conduct has undermined it; therefore, “we” do not really want nature “to be. . . honored,” no matter what “we” might say. So different from Al Gore’s pro-environment, pro-economic-growth pitch in An Inconvenient Truth, the insistence upon the world’s survival without human life includes a prohibition against our allegedly sealed, imminent collective fate. However, personification’s delivery of a set of commands is not enforceable, and lyric poetry (including much enviro poetry) almost always constitutes resistance to death. Only the thorough poisoning and death of the species can make the command real, and perhaps the implicit conflict between the commands and their defiance impels us to ponder the usefulness of the rhetorical of environmental uplift and of capitulation to inaction.

Amid the poems in A History of the Common Scale, “Acedia,” a remarkable short story, presents a character seeking a perfectly stable life through the practice of a seemingly rigid, transcendentalist philosophy derived from “Plato and Thoreau” (17). Foster’s narrative and descriptive economy and precision recall the style of Clarice Lispector, the great Brazilian short story artist. Living in “a quiet town,” Jonathan relies on “checks from his family trust” to spend most of his time at home in a quest to cultivate “stillness and calm.” His tries “to slow all of his feelings and actions,” to “focus on static ‘things’ and ‘thoughts’ and avoid society, where rules and behavior were continually evolving,” and this project stems from the connection of “change” and “death,” and a desire to “live forever” (18).

Though trying to shut the door on society as much as possible, Jonathan lets a woman named Brenda into his house, as he associates her with “essence, things as they are”; she seems “unfazed by feeling or thought,” able to remain “motionless as a mannequin,” even if he has left her alone “for an hour or more” (18). Brenda is very close to a female equivalent of Bartleby the Scrivener, but unlike the perplexed lawyer in Melville’s classic story, Jonathan is thoroughly in harmony with her, until he realizes that her company is extraneous: “. . . he could have all that Brenda offered him”—that is, nothing other than “being there”—“without having the person herself. Memory was all he needed” (18-19).

Foster’s third-person narrator presents Jonathan almost entirely as the character perceives himself, avoiding any temptation to criticize the man’s psychological makeup and philosophy: “He would not have called himself lazy. What he was doing was purposeful. It was a spiritual life. . . “ (19). The sympathy permitted for Jonathan’s position not only shows how useful it might be when applied in moderation but allows the seductiveness of its absolutism to work on the reader, and this inevitably alludes to the impact of elements of American transcendentalism on our mainstream culture. Also, I sense that Foster refuses to bring the plot of his story to the point where Jonathan’s illusions about his ability to avoid change (and thus to attain immortality) are severely tested, much less vanquished, because he is enabling the reader to fill in the blank of an ominous aftermath and thus arrive herself at a much more powerful critique of asocial transcendentalism than the writer’s obvious narrative posturing could supply.

The book’s penultimate poem, “Your Somewhat Symbolic Mind,” describes a character similar to Jonathan in his single-minded devotion to a way of living but different in other respects. This unnamed “man. . . / gardened, spent his life/ cultivating things his children/ might enjoy. Flowers/ blossomed everywhere” (30). At first, a “clear, transparent” “kindness in the children” seemed to result from his cultivation, but unfortunately, “he watched their anger grow.” With a style that is both elliptical (hence tautly suggestive) and simple, literal and “somewhat symbolic,” Foster conveys the father’s emotional vulnerability to this anger and the way neighbors have learned to stay away from him. He lucidly presents an understated entity in extremely understated language:

His walls were thin.
Car doors would slam.

People hurried by.
Now no one looks.

His secrecy is fragile after all.

He never banked on that. (30)

Although the gardener “banked on” solid growth of flowers and family alike, possibilities of sharing his bounty have evaporated, and the rude sound of children’s departure cannot be hidden from the neighbors. The concluding sentence, however, resists simple closure: “And now/ there’s nothing still/ within the branches/ in his garden/ but the air” (31). “Nothing still” could mean either “nothing remaining” or “everything in motion.” If we take the second, less obvious interpretation seriously, the movement could signify growth, since wind (”air”) does not move the flowers/fruit on the branches, but it could also suggest the motion of decay.

Have the gardener’s accomplishments succumbed to eventual neglect or blight or his own death, or do these achievements persist, even in his isolation, as the defiant fulfillment of a principle, despite the failure of its “somewhat symbolic” purpose? Is there still time for him to recognize that the development of a benevolent program for his family based on his own fixed assumptions of value was a misstep? Could he now perceive that ongoing dialogue with the children might establish a mutually acceptable framework of interaction, or must he be locked into a permanent stance? Linguistically based undecidability confronting us quietly at the end makes the poem more than an intriguing character study. Like various other poems in Foster’s collection, this one encourages us to think about the “history of the common scale” of relationships within families and communities.

*****

Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Clarity and Other Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2008) and two books of criticism. He is also co-editor of a 2007 collection of essays on David Shapiro. Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs published his chapbook, Generic Whistle-Stop, in 2009. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s). Fink’s paintings hang in various collections.

DISCLOSURE by DANA TEEN LOMAX

2009-05-20T22:10:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

DISCLOSURE by Dana Teen Lomax
(Dusie Kollektiv, 2009)

Dana Teen Lomax shows her ass and makes you want to kiss it. Bear with me and I’ll explain:

I immediately fell in love with Lomax’s chap, DISCLOSURE, put out through the generously-spirited Dusie Kollektiv that is managed by the wise poet Susana Gardner (wise in part for allowing poetry to show its wide expanse). First, the way to enter this project yanks the reader immediately into its space, which is significant because, as my reading below indicates, the reader’s proactive presence is required to make this project mature. DISCLOSURE has a black ribbon tied around itself, with the knot hidden under a burgundy-red melted and stamped wax seal—to open the chap, the reader must first tear off or cut the ribbon.

But before the chap is opened, it presents its physical presence as something almost off-putting or somewhat disturbing, like a legal document—at one point as I held it in my hand, I was reminded of a will. Mystery is further evoked by how the title and poet's name are barely discernible, since the text's ink seems to be darker-black against the black cover.

You undo the ribbon and open the chap to see, after the title page, the following epigraph by Robin Blaser:

you’re not allowed to say
“kiss my ass” to anyone unless
you mean it sincerely and drop
your pants quickly to show what
you know exactly of this nakedness

So what comprises Lomax’s “nakedness”? Various documents from her life including a work and earning summary spanning 1997-2002, a Peace Corps nomination letter, a bank statement, a notice related to her student loan payment, the results of a physical examination, a direct deposit receipt for her salary, among others. I can already sense that DISCLOSURE is among new poetic investigations of the form of biography (though I am biased here as this approach is one I've taken in a number of recent books, but also something I recall done by Noah Eli Gordon in his IN BOX).

While sharing autobiographical details, DISCLOSURE also relies on reader-empathy. There are enough unexplained gaps between the documents that the reader can privilege/interpret the information in ways not controlled by the author. For example, my initial focus privileged how much this Dana Teen Lomax earns (or does not earn), versus laudable leanings as manifested by an interest in the Peace Corps. (Well, this says something about me, doesn’t it? And don’t many effective poetry projects hold up a mirror to their audience?)

After I move beyond my People Magazine type of reading, though, I can see how the “Lomax” presented in this chap becomes an example of, if you will, society’s imbalanced—unfair, unequal—social program . A 2008 direct deposit slip from her employment indicates the possibility that she possessed a job that pays nearly $30,000.00 Another 2008 document shows that she was servicing a student loan to the tune of $850 a month (the monthly basis is an assumption). Earnings are gross dollars while expenses are net dollars, further highlighting how much Lomax needs to be making in order to meet her student loan repayment obligations: one would need to earn nearly half of $30,000 just to service student loans (it wouldn’t surprise me if Lomax had more than one job as well in 2008).

I could have misinterpreted the documents—there’s enough gaps to make this a distinct possibility. And one thus might think that it’s a weakness of the project that the documents shown are not explained more neatly. But I think that actually makes the reader more involved, to imagine how Lomax is doing when the project shows that she has, relatively speaking, major life expenses. It makes the issue less specific to an individual and more general to society, to wit: have you noticed how people with a desire to work in fields helping others (exemplified, in Lomax’s case, in the Peace Corps document) tend not to be the ones earning the monies they deserve? A 2007 medical examination result does indicate that she’s working three jobs, as well as reference to stress.

The above is one example of one reading of a group of documents presented on their own without additional editorializing by the author. But in order for the reading (my involvement) to happen, Lomax had to bare details unflinchingly about her life. For example, the medical examination also reveals that she was suffering from “post-coital bleeding” (the handwriting is barely legible but I read the last word in the phrase as “bleeding”). I’m not good at reading medical records but suffice it to say that there are indications, too, of possible other health issues.

Poets have performed their art devoid of clothes. What we know, however, is revealing details about finances and health is often more exposure than unclothing our flesh. Skin still covers. Lomax wisely shows through this project that the definition of “disclosure” is not just to show one’s ass, but to show it in all its possibly cellulite- or acne-ridden glory. Dana Teen Lomax has earned to right to proclaim: KISS MY ASS.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere: Joey Madia's review of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole over at New Mystics, and Aileen Ibardaloza's (and Aileen's mother's) engagement with The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes over at OurOwnVoice. Oh hey! And she just released her first novel (grin) : NOVEL CHATELAINE!

THE HEAVEN-SENT LEAF by KATY LEDERER

2009-05-20T22:05:00.000-07:00

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews

The Heaven-Sent Leaf by Katy Lederer
(BOA Editions, 2008)

It’s About Money: The Heaven-Sent Leaf by Katy Lederer

Bearing a visually delightful title, Katy Lederer’s slim sophomore poetry collection presents a total of forty-five short works, each written in crystalline simplicity, with a sonnet-like lyrical voice. Can poetry bring beauty out of the evil — money? Invoking lines from Philip Larkin’s “Money” — “I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down/ From long French windows at a provincial town,/ The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad/ In the evening sun. It is intensely sad,” Lederer’s poems read like private pages selected from a diary, reflecting on small or ordinary moments of daily life that possibly allow us to glimpse at “a heaven-sent leaf” (i.e. her chosen icon that symbolises money).

Titles of the poems are rather intriguing, resonating, and telling, for each is well-carved out of images: “The Tender Wish to Buy this World,” “A Sad Harp,” “Brainworker,” “In the Seafold, Savings, I Have None,” “Parable of Home and Broom,” etc. Although once in a while, the overall langage risks being too light or thin, as energies drift due to a dominating absence of line density, each work contains very original images and a clear voice that co-exist within a specific moment of introspection. Because each piece is considerably economical in terms of words, many moments of silence sustain vibrantly on the page. The measure of rhythm is as sharp as the rhyme. Efficiently and effectively, Lederer chooses the nostagic theme of love to reveal what money and material desires fail to fulfil us and our never-ending list of wants — yes, we the so-called sophisticated human beings who take pride in surviving in a sophisticated civilisation. Take for instance, “In The Flower Store Next Door”:

The object in the poem you must focus on is me.
Here in the poem I am, and in the flower store next door
Are wilting daisies, cups of breakfast blend,
And dark, expensive chocolates you may purchase if you please.
We are watching in the flower store our weight, and so we do not eat,
But wrap the wilting daisies up in happy flowering trees.
In the branches of these trees, the self will grow and grow till plucked.
Once plucked, the happy self will run, the parts will move in unison, at once!
Ta-wee, ta-wee, the happy self!
And if one knows one is not free?
I love you, reader, may I say?
I’ve brought you all these presents, which I’ve placed beneath this flowering tree :
Brighr red box, bright blue box, and a small vial of Botox.
(p. 11)

Most of the book draws its inspiration from the poet’s work experience as a brainworker at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan. This probably explains why most verses relate directly to authentic observations and real experiences — lived, resolved or unresolved. Vivid instances in which materialistic concerns invade love are also cleverly depicted in “Parable of Time Square,” as an another example:

We met in this country, beneath the damp light at the world-famous fair,
Where life is meaningful and dreadful.
The conglomerates show off their wares,
Which will help us when we’re sick of work and headng for the train.
I hate to be alone. The solitude of Brooklyn.
But outside, now framed by the window, a couple.
They stare at one another over pork chops and beer.
I call you on the telephone. I call to hear
Your muffled voice. People aren’t the be-all and end-all of one another’s lives,” you say
Between these tender hemispheres, in the space of our gender, the divine reaches down like a
hook.
Must it be such a hardship, then, to hoist ourselves up to the conscious interior?
Are we so cleanly spoken, here, that all has been said by two bodies, alone in the dark,
Their brains electrified, their tongues in one another’s mouths?
(p.30)

If there is any territory yet to be explored, it will be the poet’s own naked and unhidden stance towards money — which insofar remains evocative and indirect as far as meanings and intentions are concerned. The fact that the book ends with “The Unseduced” may suggest something else less than elusive, however. That said, an extra unfiltered layer of social consciousness may give a hand in rendering such quiet observations of a fragile yet sensitive individual a stronger voice — one that may perhaps serve beyond descriptive or romantic inclinations. Yet, forthright statements such as “My mind is at ease. I will die like this, penniless” are at once realistic, idealistic and bold, all to highlight that despite youth, the tender poet — admirably and courageously — yearns for a priceless and profound interior life.

*****

Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) also publishes poetry and non-fiction under the nom-de-plume, Greta Aart. Her new works will be appearing in Caesura, Ellipsis, Sojourn, Broken Plate, Alimentum, etc. Also a musician, she is currently one of the editors of Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), and lives in Paris, France.

ALL ROADS...BUT THIS ONE by JON CONE, CLAUDIA GRINNELL, KLIPSCHUTZ & ALBERT SGAMBATI

2009-05-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

RICHARD LOPEZ Reviews

All Roads. . .But This One by Jon Cone, Claudia Grinnell, klipschutz and Albert Sgambati
(Luddite Kingdom Press, San Francisco, 2006)

The beauty of the printed word has an illustrious history but in this age of the internet, blogs, online zines and e-books it is easy to forget this fact. We do live in a time when diy publishing was never more abundant than it is today. However, most publications made with the diy ethos are printed using laser printers and so forth. As much as I am an advocate for e-publishing and chapbooks printed cheaply, and I am indeed, I still can’t help but fall in love with a gorgeous, lovingly hand-made book such as All Roads. . .But This One.

Essentially this book is a four-part anthology of chapbooks by Jon Cone, Claudia Grinnell, klipschutz and Albert Sgambati. Each poet writes in their own individual style and there is no thematic unity to the whole book. At least I couldn’t find a single thematic element that ties these four poets together. However, rather than trying to piece the poets together with a single idea I let the words travel thru me like I would as if I were watching a favorite film anthology such as George A. Romero’s revisionist essay of pre-code 1950s era E.C. Comics, Creepshow (1982). The structure of the film is cohesive enough for the disparate tales within the movie’s narrative arc, much like the poets’ work found within the pages of the book under review. What holds these poets together is the beauty of a hand-made book. The publisher loves books and loves these poets had printed and bound this book with such finesse and delicacy that I’d not be surprised to see a copy under a glass case in a museum.

I don’t want to make it appear that this book is such a rare and delicate item as to become precious. It is not. The book was made to be held, fondled and most importantly, read. No matter how beautiful the book itself might be what is of primary importance are the contents found within its pages. If that is the only criteria then this book is a huge success. Two of the four poets are previously unknown to me, Claudia Grinnell and Albert Sgambati, while Jon Cone is a personal favorite having discovered his work a few years ago and klipschutz is a kick-ass underground writer whose been on the small-press scene for a number of years now. If there are no themes uniting these poets there is a tone that each of them share and that is a quiet despair of urban and suburban life in our early century.

Despair done right can sound like a triumph. I’ve no idea why depressing works of art can create such a lift in spirits to the reader, and yet they do. Cone is a master poet, hands down. His collection is titled, Factions of Mischief, and the poems take a special care in moving outward as well as inward. Cone’s despair is like an alchemist transforming tin into gold. The poem ‘The Cosmology of My Seizures’ might appear to be a confessional piece from the school of say Lowell and Plath. Rather, Cone fuses biography into the larger realm of our veritable human being as it ends with a summation of will at odds with circumstance:

Under the gaze of orbiting strangers,
friends, family emergency technicians,
I will myself awake --
like a sun
at the center of the universe.

No wilting postures here nor does the poem strike a chord of narcissistic bravado. Instead, Cone crafted a poem of firm resolve that is necessitated by a sharp measure of nearly Zen detachment. Cone’s poems are a remarkable achievement.

Grinnell’s collection, Off Course, follows and cedes to the art of losing like Bishop had instructed Write it! in order to become a master. And like Bishop’s best poetry Grinnell offers a well-spring of generosity amply evidenced in pieces such as ‘Waiting Room’ which is, again, a generosity that is more than tinged with despair. However, Grinnell at her best conjures sensual images that offset the negatives. Take for example her poem ‘Soup Is Back.’

Soup is back, the sign says. I didn’t know soup was gone
but I am glad it is back. Soup is good for all kinds of souls,
a sort of perfection between too liquid and too solid,
a perfection of middleness: a shape on a spoon,
a few letters of the alphabet, a broken word.
The t slides off the ladle, back into primordial chicken, back
into grease eyes and anonymity. The t likes that.
Other letters rise to the surface, elbow for space.
They dance to a boil, flip and turn. They can’t see
their own metaphor, what they become in the great salty
marrow, the carrots and peas slipping and regrouping,
slipping and waiting: a shape, a coincidence, a story of heat.

The ‘perfection of middleness’ which again reminds me of Bishop at her best and thus the art of losing is so ably mastered by Grinnell.

If Grinnell is a poet of evenness then klipschutz is the poet of the zig-zag. His sardonic verse varies a great deal between being the jester and being the reporter which is best described by the title of his collection, The Grand Parade of Life Marches On. In pieces that detail such individuals such as Michael Kelly, who was the first journalist to be killed in Iraq, and ’Oliver Othello King Jr.’ whose grand name is not only the title of the poem but part of its subject as well.

As expected of a poet who writes about the particulars of a person then it is no surprise to find within klipschutz’ lines a deep empathy for the inhabitants found in our collective lives. But for me klipschutz comes alive when he is playing the jester. Word play, wit, humor and an earnest desire to change the world that is often found in top comedians are promptly demonstrated. Check for example his poem ‘The Long Goobye’ which comes from a series of poems with “Goo’ in their titles.

In haute pursuit we chase
The tails we thought we’d ditched.
Come back! we cry, to each
Species, era, birdsong, forest sound.
We challenge every word
Without a scented pedigree.
Something effable is gone,
The contrail colder
Than a glass of chilled Blue Nun.

I’ve no idea what Blue Nun might be but I would gather from the data of this text that the drink is probably similar to the fortified wine that Fred Sanford, character of the ‘70s sitcom Sanford and Son and played by the late comic Redd Foxx, favored and is, I surmise, named for its effect of taming the wild waves of our days into a mere Ripple.

Further along are the poems of Albert Sgambati whose texts are studies in the type of suburban despair the novelist John Cheever often wrote about. And like Cheever’s finest work, particularly his short stories, Sgambati’s poems imbibe in a clarity so rare as to become nearly a hallucinogen, as if suburban life was seen and refracted thru the after-image of an acid trip. The name of Sgambati’s collection is Siege of the Beau Monde.

With titles like ‘Fucking Bastard’ and ‘Portrait Of The Artist As Dead’ Sgambati features a world of dead-end jobs and the grit it takes to make it thru an ordinary day. Even more debilitating are the emotions of these characters as they graft sickness unto health. Happiness is far and away and Sgambati is keen to shout his displeasure in short sentences. However, it is a displeasure tinged with both defiance and resignation which is fully realized in his poem ‘My Kind of Town.’

A home run cleared the fence the day Chicago burned. They blamed it on a cow, which would have been a grave offense in India and is recalled by the Yankee announcer screaming, “Holy Cow!” every time the ball sails over the fielder’s head at the warning track. The city bursts into flames giving it credibility. The ball is crushed to half its size as it hits the bat. There is an instant in which it seems to stop completely but doesn’t. At moments like these it is possible to question the existence of Chicago at all. Maybe if they chopped it up and served it on a bun. Gave everyone a piece of something totally unnecessary in the middle of nowhere with its blazing lake and made them pay. A city of steam and AM radio, its closets filled with seersucker suits and porkpie hats. A place of such little hope you had always hoped a place like this could never exist the first time you see it. Then you make peace. Come to love it. Call everyone Jake and Babe and celebrate their funerals with kegs of beer and think what it all means. Put the kids to bed. Get real.

Edward Hopper would also find a home in that kind of town too. So would writers of hard-boiled detective fiction and makers of film noir. I imagine it is always night in his city and the streets are slicked with wet. Sgambati’s poems are traces of lives within the margins of hope. A happy few make their homes within these margins and these are the people Sgambati often hymns.

Finally, rounding out All Roads. . .But This One is a broadside titled One Red Cento printed in an edition of 200 copies by verdant press in Berkeley. This broadside is sleeved on the back page of the book and is a collection of the lines of all four poets found within the pages of All Roads. . .But This One and fashioned into quatrains. Like the book itself One Red Cento is a beautiful piece of printing in red ink. This collaboration of poets feels like a gift to both the poets themselves and to the reader. Every now and again a publisher will take time, money and energy to craft a gift of poetry. All Roads. . .But This One is such a gift.

*****

richard lopez has a dyslexic heart. he's published a few chapbooks and hopes to publish more. you can find him at www.reallybadmovies.blogspot.com.

POEMS FOR THE MILLENIUM VOLUME THREE edited by JEROME ROTHENBERG & JEFFREY C ROBINSON

2009-05-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews

Poems for the Millennium Volume Three edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C Robinson
(University of California Press, 2009)

1.

Reiner Schürmann, in his Broken Hegemonies, has divided the history of “The West” into three “broken hegemonies”: the Greek, the Latin, and the vernacular (which can be construed as all the stages of modernity). Each hegemony has a ruling fantasm: during the first, it was the One; during the second, it was Nature; during the third, it was Man [sic] / Consciousness / the Subjective Self; the third, of course is the one in which we (now perhaps only barely … and yet … still) recognize ourselves.

There, that mountain! There, that cloud! What in them is ‘real’? Merely eliminate from them the fantasm of any human addition, you sober ones! If only you could! (Nietzsche, The Gay Science II, 57, as quoted by Schürmann)

As Schürmann has it, “A fantasm is hegemonic when an entire culture relies on it as if it provided that in the name of which one speaks and acts …” But of course it’s “only” a fantasm (ah, that “only”!), and “Immediately it becomes clear at what price fantasms render the world livable. Life is paid for by denying the singular … [and] by subsuming it under the figure of the particular.” A singular is the unnamable as-is. A particular is “a unit or one among a number” (OED), i.e., no longer the as-is as such, but rather the as-is considered under the comforting fiction of a class. And classes struggle.

2.

Friedrich Kittler opens his Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900 with a description of an attempt to insert man [sic] / consciousness / the subjective self into “the empty slot of an obsolete discourse network”, i.e. that of the ruling Latin fantasm. He identifies this attempt with the beginning of [modern] German [and, perhaps, therefore, all modern] poetry.

The attempt, of course, is made by Faust.

His first strategy is to read a text by an author he can name. Faust attempts to conjure the author (Nostradamus) into being, via an imaginative act. Though Faust is working with an autograph MS, and hence with traces of the singular, he finds that the author has withdrawn behind the text, which consists solely of signs. Kittler: “… Faust, the interpreter of signs, is once more robbed of what his experiment meant to introduce into the configuration of early modern knowledge: Man standing behind and above all bookish rubbish.”

Kittler continues: “The second [strategy] takes the opposite path: the consuming reader, rather than a productive author, is introduced as Man into the heap of books. For once, Faust does not just glimpse and gaze at signs. The first unperformable stage direction in European theatrical history declares that ‘he seizes the book and mysteriously pronounces the sign of the spirit.’ Mysteriously indeed.” This fails, too, because “Faust’s drinking of signs is an ecstasy and production that exceeds his powers. Instead of remaining master of the conjured sign, the reader disappears into the weave or textum of the signified.”

The third [strategy] introduces “man” more subtly. Faust neither “liqu[ifies] archaic ideograms with his … orality”, nor conjures by name the authors of his text. Instead, he translates, i.e. interprets, it. “Man”, at last, is introduced by a hermeneutic act, which, for various reasons, Kittler designates a “free writing”. Thus, the transition from the second fantasm to the third is made.

I would like to suggest that the transition from an outmoded fantasm to a new one more in step with existing social conditions does indeed feel free, but it’s not.

Fantasms may make life livable; as noted, they also classify everything, and thereby structure relations. Yes, I’m talking about power. To put it negatively, that which puts at least an illusion of ground under our feet, that which turns the singular into a particular, pins it like a dead insect. So: to live under a fantasm is to die to one’s wordless being. Schürmann (and Nietzsche) suggest that the human condition is tragic, in that there’s no way out from under: “… Merely eliminate … the fantasm of any human addition, you sober ones! If only you could!” And yet … And yet … The poets in whom Rothenberg and Robinson are interested have at least this in common: they beat against the bars of the reigning fantasm. I will call this the “As if” … As if … it were possible to break free … or to at least make habitable this jail.

3.

What makes it possible for us to know this? That we’re so trapped? If we’re so trapped? Let’s turn for a moment to Werner Hamacher on Hegel’s totalizing philosophy (which, of course, comes into being at the same time Faust is hard at work), a totalization that signifies the end of history (sometimes the birth of a new fantasm feels like the end of history). When history ends we are indeed trapped, eternally trapped, aren’t we? Isn’t this one meaning of Nietzsche’s “eternal return”? Hamacher, from p. 261 of Pleroma – Reading in Hegel:

Even there where the … Logos turns from nausea and grasps itself as such, it is ‘conceptually caught up in the imminent threat of loss.’ In truth it does not lose itself – true loss would already be made good through the truth of the Logos – but [it] … is caught up in the imminent threat of losing itself to something heterogenous, something which promises no gain, something in which the absolute absolutely escapes its own grasp.

Meaning, to me at least, that any totalizing, any system (which must exist under the silent sign of the fantasm), even Hegel’s, isn’t “equal, that is, to the real itself.” And all who live under such a system know it. The ship itself is a fool. And the real is a rocking sea. (Cf. early Marx’s alienation).

4.

I think here of Zizek’s discussion of the master signifier, and his point that, well, I’m going to have to work up to it. I quote from Rex Butler’s “Slavoj Zizek: What is a Master-Signifier” at lacan.com. What is described is the limit to all ideologies under a given fantasm:

Zizek begins his theoretical project in Sublime Object by taking up Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of ‘radical democracy’. As he admits in his Acknowledgements there, it is their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that first oriented him in the use of the ‘Lacanian conceptual apparatus as a tool in the analysis of ideology’ (SO, xvi). What is the essential argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy? Its fundamental insight, following the linguistics of Saussure, is that there is no necessary relationship between reality and its symbolization (SO, 97). Our descriptions do not naturally and immutably refer to things, but – this is the defining feature of the symbolic order – things in retrospect begin to resemble their description. … it is not simply a matter of seeing which account of reality best matches the ‘facts’, with the one that is closest being the least biased and therefore the best. As soon as the facts are determined, we have already – whether we know it or not – made our choice; we are already within one ideological system or another. The real dispute has already taken place over what is to count as the facts, which facts are relevant, and so on. …

The same ‘arbitrariness’ applies not only to reality but to those [terms] by which we construct reality … meaning is ‘quilted’ or determined by [the limit to all ideologies under a given fantasm] … to which they [the terms] must ultimately be understood to be referring. … [all thought under a given fantasm plays the same game].

Here’s where it gets good:

But, again, why do all these attempts to ‘quilt’ society fail? What is this ‘impossible-real kernel’ that is a sign of their inability to attain closure? It is not, Zizek insists, a matter of some imaginary ‘fullness’ of society that is unable to be taken account of, some empirical 'richness' that is in excess of any attempt to structure it …. Rather, it is because whatever it is that quilts the social is itself only able to be defined, re-marked, stated as such, from somewhere outside of it.

The fantasm, and all who “inhabit” it, can’t quiet that rocking sea …

4.

The problem is, we don’t know how to live a-fantasmically, not really, or, to use another Schürmann-ism, an-archic praxis is non-hegemonic, and when have we ever lived non-hegemonically? But, as noted, we do have some sense that we’re inside a fiction and that it’s the (heavily-armed) fiction that keeps us (inner and outer) slaves.

And yet … and yet … As if … As if … there have always been those among us who have shouted out, “I can no longer stand this queasy feeling!”

5.

… The first we know to have tried to get out from under was, perhaps, the great Eve. And then there was Prometheus, who wanted to bring the rest of us with him …

But those shouters, let’s call them poets, let’s call them visionaries, let’s call them, yes, revolutionaries: the revolutionary doesn’t have to win … the revolutionary doesn’t have to lose, either. At least not entirely. Eve’s brave act gave us the hint that something scary called Knowledge was out there … Prometheus’s daring gave us fire …

During the epoch with which this volume of Poems for the Millennium is concerned, during the first century of so of the nightmare era of Man [sic] ruled by the hegemony of Man [sic], what happened? This is just off the top of my head: The American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, 1830, 1841, the Commune, the end of legalized slavery in the Anglophone world, the first steps in the serious organization of labor, the first stirrings of (organized) feminism … there were advances in urban sanitation, advances in medicine … not only “the horror, the horror.” Though there was more than plenty of that.

And along with all this, a suitable poetry.

Much of this, both the positive and negative, is what’s addressed and struggled with and for by the poets gathered by Rothenberg and Robinson in the three volumes of Poems for the Millennium. These poets take sides. And this third volume is really the first. From the Introduction:

Lying behind the present gathering is a sense that the most radical and experimental works of our time – in poetry and across the arts – belong to a continuity that stretches back two centuries and more …

In contrast, then, to the once standard accounts of Modernism’s dramatic break from a rebellious and chronically immature Romanticism (thus, T. S. Eliot and other “high modernists” and once “New Critics”) or from a Romanticism in its tamed and enfeebled later forms (by Russian Futurists and assorted Dadas), we are proposing that [there is no break] between the most vital strains of nineteenth-century poetry and the Modernism and avant-gardism of the twentieth century …

Indeed, any reader who recognizes us in Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (and who doesn’t?) will recognize us here as well.

6.

Though this volume is somewhat international in scope, its focus is in fact European, as has been the case, though much less so, with the other volumes. I include all non-native North American writing as (more-or-less post-colonial) European, as well as all “native writings” included, since they are, here at least, as-seen-through-EuroAmerican-eyes, in fact, many would never have been written had it not been for Europeans. That Euroslant may be inevitable, since the 19th century is the European century par excellence, the age of utmost European world-damage and domination. Asians and Africans and other “indigenes” fought back during the 20th century with much greater success than during the 19th, thus the greater world-flavor of the first two volumes. This is not a complaint. Given our present post-post colonial globalizing moment, when we are all beginning to wear the same mass-produced mind-forg’d manacles (and it no longer matters where they’re produced, they were created in early-modern Europe), perhaps its particular focus helps make this volume even more meaningful than it otherwise might be. As the editors note,

The nineteenth century begins again*: nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism, ethnic and religious violence, growing extremes of wealth and poverty, all reemerge today with a virulence that calls up their earlier nineteenth-century versions and all the physical and mental struggles against them …

*I would phrase this differently; it’s neither a case of the eternal return of the same nor of Marx’s first time tragedy, second time farce; the way I read history, “the nineteenth century” has yet to even begin to approach its end.

7.

So: these are our poems as much as are the poems written yesterday.

I would suggest that the continuity proposed by the editors persists, even into the “post-avant” and after; I would suggest that we are still governed by the man [sic] / consciousness / subjective self fantasm, even if, per my reading of Lyotard, we have no utopian “master narratives” left in which we can truly believe wholeheartedly; I mean, we may no longer quite know what’s meant by “man [sic] / consciousness / the subjective self” … and yet … and yet … we’re still underneath ...

8.

What we have here, then, are the first shouters who came to “speech” under the fantasm Faust recognized, from Rousseau, and Goya, and Blake and Burns, through the Romantics, through a concurrent “return to roots” (every attempt at forward seems to involve a look all the way back), through Hugo and Emerson and Kierkegaard, through Baudelaire and Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, through the Shakers and Martí and Akiko and Mallarmé, as far as Jarry and Apollinaire and Stein (where Volume One picks up the story) … and all stops in between, some rather surprising, but none out of place. And, as with the other volumes, a selection of “manifestos” is provided, as well as absolutely fascinating commentary.

I’m not going to bother to prove to you that this is the shit. If you need to ask what diddy-wha-diddy means …

Maybe we were better off as typical primates. “But you and I, we’ve been through that, and that is not our fate / So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”

We need these shouters more than ever, obviously. Five stars. Ten, maybe. Two thumbs up. Or three. Essential reading.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman is the author of a number of chapbooks, most recently World Zero and A Spectrum of Other Instances. He is also the author of the full-length No Sounds of My Own Making, the editor of 1000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’. His work has appeared in numerous journals and in several anthologies. His current project is Flux, Clot & Froth, which will probably top out at 700+ pages, and for which he hopes to find one reader, please. He is part of the team (title: editor or something) at Leafe Press. His ongoing efforts can be seen at Zeitgeist Spam.

TIME MACHINE by RIC BOYER

2009-05-20T21:50:00.000-07:00

ERIC GELSINGER Reviews

Time Machine by Ric Royer
(Slack Buddah Press, 2009)

Ric Royer’s new chapbook, Time Machine, is another in a line of hard-to-define works by a friend and artist who works in theater and music composition as well as written composition. Time Machine is one of these written compositions, but its idiosyncratic charm comes from the fact that it's not devised by "a writer." Writers write within genres (it's part of the professional description) and Time Machine, like Ric's previous works, does not much resemble any genre out there. Happily, though, you don't get the feeling the work is "defying genre" or "fusing different genres" because those operations reek of intentionality -- usually the intention to be novel, to do something different (and its corollary: to get attention).

Time Machine is really fun to read because it feels like play, which is the opposite of intention. He's not deliberately exploding a form or anything, he's just doing what he wants to do, or at least that's the impression. Nearly all of Ric's works are well-liked both by other artists and by normal people because they're original and playful, from his poems written as Ashton Royce, to his Anthesterian myths and histories, to his on-stage performances like a Hystery of Heat. If there's a poetry reading with a bunch of readers, and if Ric is one of them, chances are good that he'll emerge as the best remembered and most appreciated for precisely that reason. He's a real artist who doesn't work much with inherited forms: he creates out of nothing the way the most mischievous children do. (Btw, isn't it kinda remarkable how prevalent the main genres are? I mean what are the chances that one of the inveterate forms is actually just right for you? at least inasmuch as art is expression, isn't it odd the established forms are used so often as opposed to forms of an artist's own making?)

Time Machine is written in sensible and humorous prose, and divided into 7 parts. Each part is about something: saints, boxing, time travel adventures, but as a whole the book's not really about anything, which of course is ok because like newspapers aren't really about anything either, and who doesn't like reading the paper? All the book's parts include some surrealist and Dadaist sentences, but mostly the parts share in common the narrator's playful and comic tone.

When it comes to his writings like Time Machine, I am starting to think of Ric as a toymaker. My idea is simple. A toy is fun because it's a thing without a defined use, and so teases out a kid's character. It's fun and exciting because while playing, the kid gets to be his crazy kook star weirdo self. A good toy can even leverage his weirdness and make him weirder, which is for the best. So-called toys like remote controlled planes which impose an intention on the "play" aren't really toys at all, they're commodities: things with pre-defined meanings. On the other hand, a plain old ball is a near perfect toy because what on earth are you supposed to do with a ball? whatever you want, kid. Ric's works are more like toy balls than toy planes.

Time Machine is crafted yet ambiguous, and reflects the spontaneity and inspiration of the artist's play which created it. It also permits -- maybe even encourages -- the reader to do with it as he pleases. I kinda laughed many times and laughed out loud I think three times -- I was having a good time, because Ric sets the whole thing up so that a good time is possible.

In addition to the verbal content, the book includes some of Ric's great looking handwriting-drawings and a gorgeous gold-on-black cover drawn by Ric and silkscreened by Bill Howe. The chap is published by Slack Buddha Press, and is hereby recommended. Below is a pretty long excerpt from the part about the saints:

St. Cecelia (girl of the Comanche Chop)

St. Cecelia was the patron saint of live music. A judge ordered a soldier to kill her with a sword. God tried to protect her by wrapping her hands in gauze like a prizefighter. The executioner struck her neck three times, but her head did not cut off. But she did fall down with a massive wound, and died three days later. This happened in 117. She became the inspiration for what famous pop hit?

(sing)
She took three whacks
from the executioners axe
and her head
still hung
on tight
it went boing boing boing
boing boing boing boing
boing boing boing boing
boing boing boing boing
boing boing boing boing
boing boing boing boing

St. Cecelia was forced to marry a nobleman named Valerian. This much we know. In the evening of her wedding day, with sweat squirting out of every pore, Cecelia renewed the vow by which she had consecrated her virginity to God. "Although I will be prone to exhibit my crisp young body in the common areas, you are not to defile it; for my home is that distant tropical island where the documents of record have conveniently washed away."

This is why she is honored as the patroness of music.

Cecelia converted Valerian and friends to Finnish. Cecelia refused to sacrifice her multiple (6) personalities to the gods. The judge condemned her to be smothered by steam. But God protected her by wrapping her hands in gauze like a prizefighter. Did we go over this already? Then the judge ordered a soldier to kill her with a sword. He struck her three times, but it did not cut off, yeah, yeah, 117.

Cecelia was buried in the innermost circle of her concentric dream home. In 1599, when her tomb was opened her body was naked and incorrupt.

*****

Eric Gelsinger lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is a member of House Press and has a blog at www.gelsingers.blogspot.com

NOSERING CELLPHONE by LANNY QUARLES

2009-05-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

JEFF HARRISON reviews

NOSERING CELLPHONE by Lanny Quarles
(Lulu, 2008)

Lanny Quarles' blog: http://phaneron.blogspot.com

Queen Minotaur,
your hoof-textings, banalitease all,
are as frankenscience murmyrrhing, I'll confess,
but am I Nero Wolfe to tend your orchids?

Orchids, none I'll have, but Jose Wales poppies!
(And Laurel Hardy?
What of unending wayward cedars?
O, desist, abandon your wiles,
Queen Minotaur!)

Monocles dance
at the spectacle of my luggage
adorned
with JFK head portrait stickers.
The monocles
adorn
sexy amoebas
with white-haired cell-phones.
Are
they not distracted
by my suit of compressed coffee grounds
borrowed from Felix Feneon?
My muttonchops?
My cute ideas?

If "earth is now called / simply / 'aztec-style ear-canal'", then the urine of a virgin floats above geometric forms.

If "the genesis of / unending wayward cedars / is captured perfectly", then angels, in the night, commit to the werewolf's care a bronze cup.

If "a mexican-style nosering BMW / looks on / through macaroni / eyebreasts", then Theatre drowns itself with machines.

If "i cannot help / but imagine her / as a terracotta cellphone", then the earthworm is dead of shadow.

If "the language is / 'gladiola ape bar'", then even the subconscious is not patient enough for theatre.

If "your freckles / were my money / in a submarine", then Theatre, like badger, pinetree, broken water, goes.

If "my ideas / aren't cute / like cellphones", then I hate Mr. Nero.

If "today i am in phoenix", then forms float above the urine of a virgin.

The Hardy Boys
have infiltrated
my Scottsdale resort hotel
stealthy as silent fins
of fin de siècle,
not trusting the aural camouflage
of quadrille and sphinx's coloratura.
(I will not mention ring tones!)
They are here for your orchids,
Queen Minotaur.
Thus consider me a dream!
Not so much a passing fancy,
as the chance encounter of a monocle
and a scintillation of daylight.

*****

Jeff Harrison reviewed books for the past four issues of Galatea Resurrects: http://galatearesurrection11.blogspot.com/2008/12/walden-book-by-allen-bramhall.html Some of his poems can be read here and here. You are welcome to visit Antic View.

KATA by JAMES MAUGHN and KALI'S BLADE by MICHELLE BAUTISTA

2009-05-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

JEAN VENGUA Engages

KATA by James Maughn
(BlazeVOX Books, New York, 2008)

and

Kali’s Blade by Michelle Bautista
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2007)

On the Pivot Point Between Two Energies: James Maughn’s Kata & Michelle Bautista’s Kali’s Blade

I am reading two books of poetry: James Maughn’s KATA, and Michelle Bautista’s Kali’s Blade. Both books are based on their authors’ traditional martial art practice; for James, this is Okinawan Karate, and for Michelle, it is the Filipino art of Kali. Visually, KATA’s cover swirls with dancing, abstract strokes of grey; the cover of Kali’s Blade brims with color in the painting of a hand holding a blade. The former presents its poems as kata -- the forms, and their applications (bunkai); the language of the poems emerge out of the physical practice and in engagement with an other. The latter forms a contemplative pastiche of poems, prose, and even a play; its poetics and poems are porous, mythic (thus, often narrative), collaborative, at times almost painfully conscious of the social fabric within which the Kali artist moves. I find particularly interesting the manner and extent to which each poet moves between self and other, finding truth in immediate action and response, or in assuming a larger social and narrative role.

What is the line between being a writer and a martial artist, between the dancer and the dance? Between self and other, or community? Michelle says they are often interchangeable and integrated. What she does as a kali artist and poet are part of who she is. Kali, goddess of war and destruction. Kali, the martial art. Michelle’s book opens to an image of a carved wooden hilt, and a leaf-shaped blade. The objects of her art. She once gave a reading and performance for one of my classes at CAL. She brought her swords in surreptitiously, swathed in cloth, because one can’t simply walk through campus openly holding such implements. The students were quietly electrified by her discipline, intensity, and grace. When she began to move through her paces, those in the front row, closest to the swinging blade, held their ground (and probably their breaths); suddenly they were part of the performance. Their response: respect, alertness. They chose to trust.

“In my particular style of kali, one of the legends that has been passed down was about a blind woman who was influential to the style. So the artists in my particular style of kali emphasize touch over sight…” --Michelle Bautista

Reader response. To feel the movement of the line, where the words touch you. Learning how to respond. Making choices; using what the world gives you.

“ Each kata has its own unique rhythm, or cadence, and part of learning a kata is to learn to enter that cadence” -- James Maughn. How to translate action to language?

Kata. Practice. Patterns, movements, fragments, wholes -- as I see it from the perspective of an outsider. But upon opening a book, I enter the language, and respond.

Empi

Like a fist out of water

Empty

cage of swallow’s tails
a wake to catch
from ups
well to
sweep the scaffolding
clean
until dust has windows
-- James Maughn

Responding to form -- a practice, replicated. The writer’s feeling out the word, the sound of the word, movement of body, of mind; one move emptying out; making room for the next. And life passes before you, around you, with you, as you disappear into form. Jim runs a poetry reading series called New Cadence. We come to listen. He has an energetic and alert manner of speaking that makes one feel he is about to pounce on an idea. And often, he does.

Listening. Storytelling. Myth. “An old woman sits at the palengke weaving banigs with care and skill…”

                  You can feel its words
From your hips and shoulders
down your spine                   you
will find them a body floats in
the wind                   and you will
understand deadly and swift
graceful and elegant
                  Retell the story The
sound of the stones echo
Remember your mother’s words
and resonate throughout the
valley                                 The story is an
extension of you through the
river
                  This story was meant
for you like the washing stones
                  They call it a woman’s
art sloughing away the layers
                  It is your story washing
them down to begin again.
--MB (excerpted from “A Woman’s Art”)

And the breath becomes long, longer. Soft. The poet’s body lengthens outward, to touch -- the whole story. Contracts, hardens, to a point of destruction, if necessary. Tools: blades, hands, feet, touch, eyes, proprioception, laughter (bombshells of language, explosions, aimed at the cannon, a form in itself).

“Poets always lie” Michelle writes. Speaking with many voices. Through many media of communication. Email, poems, voice, letters, blogs. So often, the Filipina voice wants to merge, kapwa. “Loosely translated into English, kapwa is to be like the other. But in the Filipino sensibility it is more than that -- here is a deeper sense that one is interconnected in inseparable ways.” Knows, in fact, we are already merged.

On the “pivot point” between two energies.

The gesture bears more potential
for truth -- accuracy is important.
So the stiff edges of my palms soften
for Kali because I come
to it as a dance.
--Eileen Tabios (excerpted from Kali’s Blade)

Fragments and wholes. Michelle: “Though the kali artist may start in a structured pattern they learn to let themselves go to the movement and allow their body to simply do.”

Sho

really no other way how to walk
when you know
you’ve been all wrong doing it
breathing
the same
--JM

Reiterations. Becoming one, then spinning off. To combine and apply, to move thoroughly through the dance; pounce, when necessary / feint / faint / pivot. Turn like the tide, on a word.

II.

how to walk to get on rhythm shadows            plunge the punch
to serve what words do
                                             quick circle
handle spells           aesthetic difficulty            faint at a clean dash
turn on turns
tide pulls toe to toe

a happy ground to seep you off of
                                                       a takedown
a shaft in re )course wrong doing it
staying in the skin            threadoff            circlewalk
-- JM (excerpt from II. Bunkai: Applications)

“Staying in the skin.” In form and in movement. Bodies of work -- in flux. Merging two ways, or more.

*****

Jean Vengua's poetry and essays have appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies. With New Zealand poet, Mark Young, she has co-edited The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, and the Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II. Jean was the first winner of the Filamore Tabios Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize (2007). Her book, Prau, was published in 2007 by Meritage Press; her chapbook, The Aching Vicinities, was published by Otoliths (Australia) in 2006. She is currently near completion on her poetry manuscript, Corporeal. Her blog is http://okir.wordpress.com

[LAPSED INSEL WEARY] by SUSANA GARDNER

2009-05-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

NICOLE MAURO Reviews

[lapsed insel weary] by Susana Gardner
(The Tangent, Portland, Oregon, 2009)

Susana Gardner is like a dolphin or a bat. Not the most orthodox way to begin a review, I admit. For one, dolphins and bats are animals and Susana Gardner is a human. And two, dolphins and bats inhabit fluid worlds of unfixed shape and place—the dolphin’s water is boundless, the bat’s air is groundless, whereas poet Susana Gardner lives on solid terra firma. What all three have in common is the ability to navigate the landless, to not just find but to situate in de-contextualized space that is, because of the murk, shadow, and shade, not reliably traversable using sight, and so requires sound, more specifically echolocation, to effectively navigate.

In the coda to her first full-length collection [lapsed insel weary] Gardner uses the echo-producing typographic ears of the bracket to conclude the beginning of an ambitious feminized lyric about “manied” unnamed narrating females who have been geographically conquered, colonized and mapped territorily like islands. (In Luxembourgish and German the definition of “insel” is “island.”)

[ even as a state of being ]             [            first movement in…]             [blue
]             [is is not the ]             [is is not the said crowned beauty ]
[ I meant garnet or sad cry of ruby ]…
…[            girl            ]             [ lapsed insel weary]             [Were a woman an insel ]
(81)

The z sound in “as” reflects off the “is,” appearing four times in the second line, along with the s sound in the twice-appearing “insel,” creating murmuring, as though a group of women were speaking from a distance and we can’t quite hear them. This is a masterful and subtle effect that provides a haunting layer of subtext. As readers, we may not be certain where we are in the lyric, but because of the cadence and use of direct rhyme, we find ourselves relying on sound to move not exactly forward, which would be too linear, but toward—toward voice, expression, (her) self.

[this she must find]…[ that self ]

It’s basic survival. Given the lack of a solid landscape, neither dolphin, nor bat, nor poet, in this case, can base perception, that slippery human tool, solely on vision, which is all too often artfully fashioned out of image, or what “appears to be.”

Any statement that contains “to be” is probably an ontological one, and so is naturally one that concerns itself with “being” and whatever and all that means. Gardner successfully executes what many have attempted, and what even fewer have accomplished—poetry as ontological exploration that uses physical and metaphysical language. What Gardner understands—and this is why [lapsed] is so exquisite—is that such a poetry cannot authentically be investigated using one or the other; it must be investigated using one and the other, body and mind together. Ontological language tends to be abstract language, and so is, even when beautifully rendered, too removed—and too external—to illustrate what is, because it is felt (as opposed to perceived) visceral and internal, though the reasons for the investigation (who determines being? and, if determined by an other or an else, can that existence still be called “authentic” being?) might be mysterious and external. Because Gardner refuses other than very generally to label the labelers, we experience what her females experience, and so the heartbreaking isolation which had been emotional is now also intellectual. In skin and mind, we come to realize these women and girls have been islanded; once part of a larger mainland that has (been) broken off to finally exist in co-dependent independence with a father continent. Under the charge of a less-refined poet this paradox would read as an interesting, if not particularly new feminist poethic about the juxtaposed position the independently dependant, or dependently independent post-modern female places herself and is being placed in, and so might read as cold irony or cute paradox. There is nothing cold or cute about Gardner’s poetry. What is left in the absence of irony and paradox is optimism, empathy, and precision—an emotionally direct and brutally correct collection that upends pity, is oddly liberating and so is that much more, for the unexpected freedom it inspires, moving. From [were a woman an insel]…

[            Were a woman an insel            ]
isolate            and long in             its
standing            without            other
women

Were            a            girl            not rooted
[            &manied            ] not lapsed weary
by waves her withstory tethered
insel

Not weary in its grasp             [            in-
delibile ]             lines            denoting many
small            women            within            one,-
                       grandmany (27).

…the poem continues. As ontological investigation into female being (and who has determined it for “her”), this poem cannot, nor could, summarily conclude because it begins conditionally with “were,” which occurs repeatedly and is homophonically echoed back in “weary.” To address this visually, “her” existence (and upon what circumstances it may depend) might be illustrated using the three dots that make up ellipses, or the ever-handy Dickensonian dash to suggest continuance and/or omission. Gardner, though, chooses brackets to act as visual bookends and auditory sounding boards for image and sound of image respectively, using echolocation to show place and simultaneously that place is a linguistic and historical construct in perpetual shift, is, if it is to be named, just as dependent on the conditions making it.

Because most of the poems in [lapsed] are bracketed, we, too, must negotiate myriad emphases and de-emphases of context, especially as they apply to where women are, and, as implied by the space in and surrounding the brackets, where they are not. Dislocation, as depicted by Gardner, is a distinct and insular place that is a uniquely female one in which the “grandmany” speak from various suspended places and states of personal wreckage and psychological dislocation. Gardner could simply tell us that women have historically been defined, been categorized, by men, and there are certainly plenty of poetry stock-images she could have pulled from the misogyny folder to illustrate, but she doesn’t.

Instead, Gardner floats these females between unspecified periods of time, yet chooses to affix them to a present-tense page. She encloses and separates them from male context—and also as though by male-imposed context—and in so doing totally re-contextualizes feminine experience. She fragments, but in a way that is entire; they move, yet stay in one place. Am I them—are they me? Because I am potentially one of these females, I am not sure what pronoun set to use to describe all these narrators—use third person “them”s and “they”s, or first-person plural “us”s and “we”s? All possibilities are correct, and no answers are given. In poem XI of “to stand to sea” we are asked:

                       …what colored plume is

it that you see? Or, - as consequence

to words as stated—my foam cuts at

your feet with wax wings I fly above

you as the sea is            mine            stays

instrument            turns garnet this wave

as your hand reaches out latent in its

sweep toward the shore— this stave—

again, not of your confine or surf (55).

As reply, this is maddening, disorienting, gorgeous, staggering; dislocation, according to Gardner, is both a contrived (as in determined by the outside) and personally legitimate place, and not one where what we see (“this wave”)—or seem to see (“as your hand”)—stays the same.

In [lapsed] sense shifts. We’re shown sounds, we hear images of the every and the many. This is a poetry of amazing confluence, of wide-open eye and undiluted ear. It is not easy, but then nothing about being ever is.

*****

Nicole Mauro has published poems and criticism in numerous journals. She is the author of the chapbooks Odes (Sardines, 2003), Dispatch (co-authored with Marci Nelligan, Dusie, 2006), The Contortions (Dusie, 2007), and Tax-Dollar Super-Sonnet (Pendergast/Dusie, 2009). She is the co-editor of an interdisciplinary book about sidewalks titled Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Space (with Marci Nelligan, ChainArts, 2008). She lives in the San Francisco bay area with her husband Patrick, and daughters Nina and Faye. She teaches rhetoric and writing at the University of San Francisco.

TINDERBOX LAWN by CAROL GUESS

2009-05-20T21:25:00.000-07:00

KATHRYN STEVENSON Reviews

Tinderbox Lawn by Carol Guess
(Rose Metal Press, Brookline, MA, 2008)

Carol Guess turns insides out, and her new poetry collection, Tinderbox Lawn, exposing the raw interior of a West Coast cityscape in uncertain times and memorializing the women who navigate it, is no exception. Guess—poet (Femme’s Dictionary, Love is a Map I Must Not Set on Fire), novelist (Seeing Dell, Switch) and memoirist (Gaslight)—weaves romantic love and social criticism so lyrically that readers sense she is the archeologist of love and loss, handling like tiny bones the absurd injustices of our time, and unearthing the ways these stains propel us—to love, perhaps, or to ruin love.

In Tinderbox Lawn Guess follows American lives lived on the edge and captures moments when things reveal themselves and life itself culminates in a series of ephemeral details: the hair coming out of our barrettes, for instance.
In Guess’s poetry, words re-tell themselves (back-pocket panties are a “backhanded compliment,” doves release from “the crook of a crooked smile”), and things do what they cannot do (an abandoned house “bleeds radio,” a red light “sweats and uncrooks its elbow,” “an umbrella marries spokes from a hybrid bike”). The richly haunting effect is a world in which contours are redefined. Here, the body is everywhere: tall buildings become people, “stars pretend to be oil on water,” and “the oil refinery pretends to be stars.”

You’ll imagine the author stopped, stooped at a street corner amidst an oblivious city—somehow rubbing two streets together like rocks to produce alienation (“The corner of Prospect and Holly is empty, save for the people tall buildings become”), disappointment (“Her house faces Prospect but the address is Elm”), and terror (“You’re at the corner of Commercial and Champion when the call comes in and you turn on the siren”).

This is the uncanny—something familiar (“You’re in the living room. You’re in the living room, and I’m just no good”), something strange (“At the center of the room you drop the dead thing”). Guess covers the range of things we try to keep at arm’s length: guns, girl-killers, Empire, loveless lovers, and the irrepressible memories of our smaller selves, all the while understanding “Something beautiful gleams through the fault line.” Amidst chaos, violence, and the steady churning of incessant machines, women swell—with love, lack of love, longing, rage—like this: “Your bee-sting pout”; “My bee-sting allergy.”

On the one hand, you want her to love you like this (“the dog lay dreaming, and you were mine again”), see you like this (“You’re riding a mechanical bull. I mean—you’re beautiful”), and on the other, you are humbled by what she’ll see in the likeness between a lover and her mother (“the way you shook hands like strangers to love”). The collection rides this tension to the end, bringing solace to those who “hear the voice of the girl in the box, the voice everyone else mistakes for spring” and camaraderie to those who will be grateful “Somebody’s telling the truth in your city.”

*****

Kathryn K. Stevenson earned her doctorate in English from the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches writing classes. She is obssessed with, and writes academic essays about, "adherence," or the bonds forged between peoples under duress--a theme that appears, magnified, in her fiction, non-fiction, and songs, which can be found at myspace.com/radiochord.

BOOKS edited by PERICLES LEWIS, ALEX DAVIS & LEE M. JENKINS, and STEVEN CONNOR

2009-05-20T21:20:00.000-07:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, Pericles Lewis
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, edited by Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, edited by Steven Connor
(Cambridge University Press, 2004)

In Randall Jarrell’s 1942 essay, “The End of the Line” (included in Garrick Davis’s Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism), Jarrell denies the existence – at least as it relates to poetry -- of modernism as separate from romanticism stating “Modernist poetry -- the poetry of Pound, Eliot, Crane, Tate, Stevens, Cummings, MacLeish, et cetera – appears to be and is generally considered to be a violent break with romanticism; it is actually, I believe, an extension of romanticism, an end product in which most of the tendencies of romanticism have been carried to their limits”(214) -- an interesting concept and one that he well supports. If we accept Foucault’s concept of ‘rupture’ as the announcement of a new epoch (this concept derived from George Bataille), a concept which has definite plausibility, then we must ask ourselves “Was there a rupture that gave birth to a concept called ‘modernism’ and, if so, what was it?” If there wasn’t, then we must accept Jarrell’s assertion that this was merely an extension of romanticism. As there is a definite rupture giving rise to postmodernism (the Vietnam War, the atomic bomb, Simone de Beauvoir’s publication of The Second Sex, the chance music and poetry of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, the musique concrète of Stockhausen, ethnopoetics, Abstract Expressionism, quantum mechanics, fractals and the mathematics of uncertainty, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism, Jacques Lacan’s language-driven theory of psychoanalysis, et cetera et cetera), and if there is none with respect to modernism, then we must look at the term ‘postmodernism’ as a misnomer which should actually be ‘post-romanticism’.

It is interesting that what is referred to in the introduction to The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism is not a rupture but a crisis -- the recognition of various crises towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth:

I believe that multiple causes, some internal to the arts and others deriving from broader historical forces, interacted in the development of modernism. I hope to show how developments in literary form emerge out of a background of social, political, intellectual, and existential ferment. The relationship between literary or artistic innovations and changing historical circumstances is complex, and it is mediated by the history of ideas. The nineteenth century experienced simultaneous crises that contributed in a variety of ways to the development of modernism in the early twentieth-century. These transformations can be grouped into three major categories: the literary and artistic (crisis of representation), the socio-political (crisis of liberalism), and the philosophical and scientific (crisis of reason). (3)

In discussing the crisis of representation, Lewis pins the blame on Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) -- his life roughly coinciding with the rise of romanticism, and his opposition to Plato’s Theory of Forms. As Lewis, at p. 6, states “This dualism [between reality and appearance leading Plato to consider art in a demeaning manner as reality twice removed] came under attack in the work of Kant, who argued that we can never have direct, unmediated access to reality. Since all our perceptions come to us through our senses and our thoughts, we can never know the ‘thing in itself,’ the underlying form at which Plato aimed, but only its appearance, what Kant called ‘phenomena’.” Edmund Husserl will take this ‘phenomena’ and turn it into the philosophy of Phenomenalism upon which Martin Heidegger will build leading to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism. It was within this philosophical break with Plato that led “modern artists and writers [to turn] away from the mimetic or representational function of art” leaving them with “two obvious alternatives: the rhetorical and the expressive functions” and it was the latter, “the expressive function, the ability of art or literature to express the thoughts or feelings of the artist, [that would] become central to justifications of art in the romantic period, beginning in the later eighteenth century.” As a result, “[t]he romantics prefigured many aspects of modernism”(7). The reason why they ‘prefigured’ was because the moderns were romantics still striving to come to grips with that ‘crisis of representation’. Yet, despite this, Lewis continues to contend that modernism is separate from romanticism: “Modernism involves a much more wholesale challenge than romanticism to such systems of representation as pictorial perspective and to the ideal of transparent or mimetic language.”(8) Lewis goes on to list a variety of historical and cultural events by which he hopes to prop up his assertion that modernism was a separate and distinct era from romanticism.

The crisis of reason is approached through Paul Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, “in which the apparent, or manifest, meaning of an idea or a text is thought to need decoding in order to discover another hidden, or latent, meaning, generally unknown to the original thinker or author.”(18) From this basis, he goes on to discuss the three “masters of suspicion” -- Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud -- who “taught the twentieth century to look for hidden meanings behind the apparent surface of a text, especially a literary text”.(24) Lewis then extends this to science: “the great scientific revolution of the early twentieth century [Einstein] taught people to look for hidden suspicions of the appearances of the physical world.”

Opening with the trials in the mid-1800s of Flaubert and Baudelaire, which “offer a starting point for a history of modernism because they raise the problem of official and public incomprehension in the face of new literary techniques”(38), Lewis, in the first part of the book, explores the origins of modernism. In the first chapter -- “Trials of Modernity”, he explores “the legacy of Baudelaire and Flaubert for six movements [Realism, Naturalism, Impressionism, Decadence, Symbolism and Aestheticism] in the late nineteenth-century arts, which together demonstrate the variety of possible responses to the crisis of representation.”(38) Baudelaire and Flaubert were joined because they “shared an aesthetic sensibility in so far as both were interested in the banal, the ugly, the evil, and the stupid -- everything detestable in modern life.”(41) “Realism rejected the idealizing tendency of earlier classicism, which had sought to represent only the beautiful and the good.”(ibid) and the term, initially applied in a derogatory fashion, “subsequently became the name for a literary style that present[ed] a wide range of social phenomena from an apparently objective point of view (the perspective of the ‘omniscient narrator…).”(ibid) Lewis contends that Realism was a precursor of such modernist techniques as ‘stream-of-consciousness’ as it “tended over the course of the century to become increasingly psychological, concerned with the accurate representation of thoughts and emotions rather than of external things.”(42) Lewis distinguishes Baudelaire from Flaubert and Emile Zola, one of Flaubert’s followers and one of the key developers of Naturalism, saying that “Baudelaire had none of the political ambitions of a naturalist like Emile Zola. Nor did he attempt the detachment typical of Flaubert. Rather, he wallows in evil in order to snatch away the veil of polite manners that turns too much poetry into cliché and high sentiment. This aspect of Baudelaire’s work announces a new mood typical of some later nineteenth-century and modernist writing that Baudelaire himself celebrated as ‘decadence.’”(46) Decadence would reach its apex in the novel –Á Rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Of this movement, Lewis says that “decadence is best understood as a predominant mood near the end of the nineteenth century and a shared theme of competing literary tendencies, such as naturalism and symbolism.”(47) It was back to Baudelaire that the Symbolists looked, rather than to Flaubert. “Realism and naturalism, while fascinated with the objective world, tended to focus on what could be seen or described: the state of medical science in a given era, women’s fashions, political events. Symbolism, by contrast, concerned itself with the invisible, and with those hermetic meanings available only to the poet or the skilled reader.”(ibid) Baudelaire also inspired painters through his friendship with Edouard Manet who rebelled against the classicists of his day (Courbet and Delacroix -- never mentioned by Lewis) by determining to paint in a manner that captured the moment in which the artist lived attempting “to catch the subjective impressions of reality experienced at a particular moment.”(50)

In “Primitivists and modernizers”, Lewis explores the first decade of the twentieth-century citing Virginia Woolf’s distinction of the modern as ‘not Edwardians’. Lewis fails to provide a clear definition of who the Edwardians were. About the only thing we have to go by is in terms of novels where the modern novelist eschewed the omniscient narrator. The best we get is “The first decade of the twentieth century, then, witnessed Edwardian continuity, primitivist rejection of modernity, and futurist celebration of the modern. Although primitivism and futurism might appear to face in opposite directions, both drew on an ideological image of another time (past or future) to criticize the narrowness of the present or recent past; both also challenged the primacy of reason in human affairs, drawing inspiration in particular from Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power.”(87-8) The Fauvist and Cubist movements are discussed as examples of primitivism, as is the music of Stravinsky and Schonberg. The chapter ends with a discussion of the rise of the trade movement, the Suffragettes, Irish Home Rule and, as well, the Bloomsbury group as a bastion of modernity. The lingering question is “Has there been a rupture as yet?” and the answer must be “No!”. The primitive elements which informed some of the movements were treated as an exoticism. Society would have to wait until the rise of ethnopoetics before the non-western world stood alongside the western on an equal footing. The Suffragettes continued to view themselves as not quite equal to men. This would await de Beauvoir and her concept of “the other” from which was created the idea of androgyny. All else was a continuation, although a modified continuation, of romanticism.

Lewis, early into ‘The avant-garde and high modernism’, makes the important remark that “today, when literary critics write of ‘high’ modernism, they are usually attempting to distinguish what they see as the relatively mainstream works of the 1920s from the more radical experiments of the prewar avant-garde or of such later avant-gardes as dada and surrealism.”(96) Lewis is correct in stating that “the crucial steps towards nonrepresentational art preceded the [First World] war”(97) but it was in the aftermath of the war and its devastation that led to “many writers and artists recogniz[ing] the need for a new means of representation, one that would indeed serve the purposes of mimesis, but in a form adequate to modern reality. The development of ‘high’ literary modernism resulted largely from the attempt to apply the new art forms that had been explored by the prewar avant-gardes to the unprecedented historical experience of the war.”(ibid) Lewis recognizes the attempts and the difficulties of nonrepresentation in literature: “There is no direct equivalent in literature of the leap to ‘nonobjective’ art in painting or the rejection of tonality in music, but there were many near-equivalents. Poets sought a variety of ways to avoid the referentiality of language, its tendency to represent reality, but they could not escape the fact that words, even when arranged in abstract patterns, have meanings, and therefore inevitably refer to the world outside the poem.”(103) Often, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce are held up as the apogee of modernism but, “while sharing some of Pound’s rhetoric concerning the rejection of romanticism, these two writers also showed a greater continuity with the nineteenth-century legacy.”(116)

‘Genre’, part two of the text, consists of three chapters: ‘Poetry’, ‘Prose Fiction’ and ‘Drama.’ ‘Poetry’ is dominated by a discussion of Eliot’s poetry. For similar reasons, ‘Prose Fiction’ is dominated by a discussion of James Joyce. Both discussions are excellent. The chapter that earns the price of admission is ‘Drama.’ As there was no one playwright that dominated playwriting, the discussion begins with Pirandello, moves on to Chekov and the Russian playwrights, over to France for a slew of French playwrights, over to Ireland for a discussion of the Abbey Theatre, Yeats, Synge, et al and then back to France to conclude with a discussion of the Irish playwright writing in French, Samuel Beckett. There is a stop along the way in Germany so that the innovations of Wagner and Bertolt Brecht can be discussed. Theatrical innovations are well and entertainingly explained.

Introduction to Modernism ends with ‘Fate’, the section that concerns the political follies of the era. It is, quite frankly, an interesting read but a waste of trees nonetheless. Should we really be concerned with how misguided Eliot was, and Yeats was, and Auden was? Does this really add to the enjoyment of, or merely distract from, their poetry? This type of sentiment is what has given rise or, better yet, given excuse, to the creation of Political Correctness -- that right-wing, fundamentalist excuse for inducing self-censorship in the writer when, or so was thought, society wasn’t doing a proper job of instilling the proper moral and ethical sentiments in our elite. Let’s stick to a discussion of poetry and not politics.

Which brings us to our second book under review: The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. It is divided into three parts: ‘Contents’, ‘Authors and Alliances’, and ‘Receptions’. The bulk of the material is found within the middle part. The last part consists of only one chapter.

‘Contents’ consists of four chapters. ‘Modernist poetry in history’, by David Ayers, begins with a discussion of continental philosophers’ influence on such as Joyce, Yeats, Eliot and Pound beginning with Giambattista Vico’s Principi dij scienza nuova (1725) but dealing primarily with Hegel and Marx although “the thought of Karl Marx on modernist poetry in English lay more in its eventual outcomes than in its intellectual content.”(16) Of particular interest are the discussions of Aestheticism and Decadence in poetry with Decadence being “the form of Aestheticism under which sexual pleasure and ‘perversity’ become available to the modernist not only as a content for art but as a lifestyle in which art and life exist in a complementary state”(22) resulting in “at the turn of the twentieth century, the legitimacy of poetry...becom[ing] limited and tangential, fostered in coteries that stood at the end of a set of traditions which only with some difficulty could maintain the claims of the artistic sensibility against the realities of commerce, history and science.”(23) Why poetry had to “maintain” any claims “against” anything is poorly explained but perhaps that’s why “the poetry and essays of Ezra Pound define practices of writing poetry and being a poet which are highly conscious of the historical claims of a progress guided by commerce and science.”(24) This prepares the way for ‘Schools, movements, manifestoes’ of the early twentieth century which Paul Peppis opens with an interesting discussion of the concepts of schools and movements as defined in Renato Poggioli’s The Theory of the Avant Garde (1962). Beginning with a discussion of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurism manifesto and the English response to its widespread acceptance such as “within a month, Pound christen[ing] Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington ’Imagistes’, initiating the first ‘ism’ of modernist poetry in English.’(32) However, “despite assertions of difference from the Futurists...the Imagists could neither deny nor avoid the economic, institutional and technological changes Marinetti and the Futurists had exposed and embraced.”(33) Shortly after its formation, Pound leaves Imagism, dubbing it Amyism as a slight against Amy Lowell who took over leadership of that group, and, along with Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, created Vorticism. Leaving the machinations of Pound behind at this point, Poggioli turns to the poetries of Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy who, “though they pursue distinct paths... make defining contributions to the invention of poetic abstraction and montage poetics. Stein and Loy derive these verse modes in response to close encounters with leading European avant-garde movements -- Cubism in Stein’s case, Futurism in Loy’s.”(37) The chapter ends with a much-needed discussion of the development and poetics of the Harlem Renaissance. All of this takes us to Peter Nicholls’ ‘The poetics of modernism.’ Here, “the idea of ceding authority to ‘the words themselves’ [as Stéphane Mallarmé asserted], which would then meet not in purposeful sequence but in some kind of unexpected ’collision’, would constitute one of the deepest unifying strands of modernist poetics.”(55) This sets up the paradox of Eliot where “Eliot’s formulation assumes that the otherness that shadows poetic expression is at once the force of the new, of something that has not been thought or said before, and the voice of tradition itself which is heard again in the poet’s words.”(55) Discussion then turns to the internationalization of English and Wallace Steven’s concept of ‘hybridisation’: “The hybridity of the modern idiom and its mobility between different vocabularies and registers thus underwrite the principal structuring devices adopted by modernist poets. If their work seems difficult it is because it is paratactic and elliptical in its deepest impulse, responding to the speed and discontinuity of contemporary experience.”(56) “Mystical indeterminacies...propel us toward the larger matter of discontinuity as a founding principle of modernist poetics, for it is in this that the new decisively announces itself.”(58) This chapter concludes with a discussion of the line of American poets that extends from Marianne Moore to William Carlos Williams through to George Oppen and the Objectivists. The final chapter of this section, by Cristanne Miller, delves more deeply into the female modernist poets: Moore, Stein, Loy, H.D. as well as the masculine response to these strong female voices.

More than half of the material contained in this Companion is to be found in ‘Authors and Alliances.’ The eight chapters that make up this section develop more fully the poets merely touched upon in the preceding section. Lawrence Rainey, in ‘Pound or Eliot: Whose Era?’, creates an extremely fine piece of scholarly research and writing shattering several myths which have survived for decades regarding Pound and Eliot and the meaning of their poetry. Rachel Blau DuPlessis provides an interesting analysis of H.D.’s classicist oeuvre in ‘H.D. and revisionary myth-making’ where she states that “the word ‘revisionary’, applied to mythopoetic writing and operating as a particular ‘mythical method’, gained its currency from a feminist scholarship animated by a 1971/1979 essay by Adrienne Rich that named a cultural imperative form women as writers and critics -- to investigate, undermine, critique and destabilize ‘myths’”(116) after which she applies this concept to H.D. stating:

H.D.’s simultaneous assumption of mythological responsibility and her rupture and critique raised cultural stakes considerably, even grandly. The retelling of mythological stories, the application of such stories to contemporaneous life is hardly a new impulse in literature, but the torquing of myth had particular value as a mark of critique, not affirmation,, during an era in which discussion of gender institutions was lively and in which social location and its nuanced insights made serious claims on literary and cultural study. Propelled by the questions raised by gender analysis, the mythopoetic long poems Trilogy and Helen in Egypt were ‘rediscovered’ and analyzed with scholarly rigour, poetic empathy and cultural fortitude.(117)

Anne Fogarty’s ‘Yeats, Ireland and modernism’ considers Yeats’ uneasy alliance with modernism – something which, in his later poetry, he appears to have refuted. In supporting her claim that Yeats belongs in the modernist camp, she states, at p. 128:

W, B. Yeats fits such newly tooled, revisionist accounts of literary modernity precisely because of the unwieldy, multifaceted nature of his artistic and political career, his involvement in several different cultural spheres in Ireland, Britain and the USA and the successive phases of his poetic oeuvre. Moreover, his modernism...is the outcome of his engagement with the Irish literary revival, on the one hand, and with aspects of international and regional poetic communities, on the other hand, as mediated by his relationship with Pound in particular but also with the Rhymers’ Club and the Symbolists.

In ‘Modernist poetry in the British Isles’, Drew Milne, in his examination of Mina Loy’s obscure position in the modernist canon, writes:

While modernism was evidently a movement in which women writers were central, critical models often excluded women writers from any but social or biographical accounts. Writers of the centrality of Stein are often not even recognized as poets. The texture of Loy’s work, with its controversial sexual and social politics, resists philological commentary or any easy location within the academic study of poetry. Her Futurist feminism also resists feminist critical paradigms developed in the second half of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most paradoxical barrier to recognition of Loy’s work, however, is the extent to which her work resists nationalist or regional categories. This helps to illustrate difficulties central to any account of modernist poetry in the British Isles.(I49)

This indifference to Loy leads to an analysis of British modernism and anti-modernism resulting in the statement that “The battle between modernists and anti-modernists is continuously reworked while remaining within surprising levels of mutual indifference and ignorance. Despite being the metropolitan centre of an English-speaking ‘commonwealth’, the economic capital of the nineteenth century and a home of sorts for modernists like Karl Marx, London appears never quite to have generated the avant-garde cultures associated with Berlin, Paris or New York.”(152) Milne then proceeds on a revisionist agenda to elevate the overlooked. Near the opening to her essay ‘US modernism I: Moore, Stevens and the modernist lyric’, Bonnie Costello writes:

Moore recognized in herself the same danger she recognized in Stevens: the danger of baroque excess and romantic solipsism which would turn on itself to produce an equally inadequate bareness, a craving for the primitive or the reductive. Behind this mutual admiration was a common project, to forge each his or her own ‘individual reality’ but one ‘adequate to the profound necessities of life’ and thus cleaving to the real. Both were attempting to become, in their own distinct ways, what Moore called ‘literalists of the imagination’ who sought to create ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’”(164)

Costello explores the nature of the image as it has been transformed by Moore and Stevens. In referring to ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, she describes it as “a composition in black and white exploring a range of problems in space and perspective.”(171) She was close to being correct but didn’t go far enough: the “problems in space and perspective” which Stevens explored resulted in a Cubist panorama. Mark Scroggins explores that other lineage in ‘US modernism II: the other tradition – Williams, Zukofsky and Olson’ where he traces the development through these poets’ long poems -- Williams with Paterson, Zukofsky with A and Olson with The Maximus Poems. Sharon Lynette Jones concludes this work with ‘The poetry of the Harlem Renaissance’ where she says:

Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance represents diversity in perspectives and aesthetics. The complex connection of social, political and economic forces that created this movement left a legacy of poetry that continues to influence contemporary African-American writers. The relationship between the Harlem Renaissance and modernism is complex, illustrating the attempt by African-American writers and intellectuals to reflect an African American cultural perspective through the use of African-American vernacular (black English), jazz/blues, the oral storytelling tradition and/or Afrocentric themes. Consequently, the Harlem Renaissance symbolizes the collective voice of African-Americans (sic) authors in the era of modernism.(204-5)

She fails to include, in her summary, her earlier statement, in considering the poetry of Helene Johnson, regarding “the tendency of Harlem writers to employ traditional poetic forms, such as the sonnet, and to appropriate these forms to meditate on black life”(204)

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism provides a broad panorama of postmodernist influence. Although having a chapter on literature and postmodernism, poetry is not considered. If the reader is after an overview of the effects of postmodernist thought, this book could be considered a good introduction. However, if after an overview and introduction to postmodernist thought itself, this book is lacking and there are several others that will provide that much better. Furthermore, even in the subjects considered, much has been missed as a result of the extolling of British chauvinism.

All told, the books on modernism provide excellent introductions to their subject matter, the one on postmodernism not so much. Perhaps a guide to postmodernism is in order.

*****

John Herbert Cunningham is the host of Speaking of Poets – a half-hour radio show on Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he writes poetry, reviews and interviews. He publishes regularly in half a dozen literary magazines in Canada and the same number in the U.S. He is also a multi-instrumentalist with the free jazz group ECMW – Experimental Creative Music Workshop. He is currently studying the alto sax, the Chinese flute and the darbouka.

THE STARS ON THE 7:18 PENN by ANA BOZICEVIC

2009-05-20T21:15:00.000-07:00

STEVEN KARL Reviews

The Stars on the 7:18 To Penn by Ana Bozicevic
(Dusie and Ellectrique Press, 2009)

The Stars on the 7:18 to Penn is a two poem chapbook written by Ana Bozicevic on her daily commutes from Long Island to Penn Station. The chapbook is aesthetically pleasing as each of its pages is a train window with the text typed in the window’s space. This recreates visually the energy and movement that the poems emulate and trap. The chapbook begins with the poem “Some Occurrences on the 7:18 to Penn” which is divided into eight sections. The poem begins, “He showed me this book called “Discovering God.” And guys?/ I nearly did choke on the swanning spray of insufferable light—” This opening couplet introduces the reader immediately to the musicality of Bozicevic’s lines. Another calling card of her poems is their humor and her ability to turn from humor to serious such as in section four:

I love jewels. Don’t you just love jewels?
(Oh good, you’re my kind. She-assassin of light.)

And wouldn’t it be cool if Bloomberg were Prez?
Or wait. I know. Trump! (It would be

awesome. Now spit out those feathers—)
Rid your mouth of the sorrowing of sparrows

I tell you as a friend. In middle school already I knew I couldn’t love
light.

Bozicevic begins with a wry remark about jewels then moves onto Bloomberg and Trump. The joke works because it questions their competency, and serves as a critique on men and the structure of power, so by the time the poem ask for the riddance of sparrows’ feathers you know the speaker is serious. This poem, like most of Bozicevic’s work, demands the reader’s apt attention.

The second poem, “The Stars That Come Before The Night,” is divided into seven sections that include five prose poems. Here’s section three:

Sunset was applause. We lived in the nail castle, summered at laundry palace. Round glittered dear carpetworld- at sweet hollow diner by waterfront chiropractors you were adventureland, an edible arrangement. Now I work at men’s warehouse, sleep in home depot./ I bump into you at melting pot or pizza hut. And it’s almost nothing, the thing more than one/ dollar- an indoor lumberyard. Sunset’s just a flavor.

Since these poems are inspired by Bozicevic’s commute they have a loose meandering quality to them yet they are always moving forward like the way she begins with “sunset was applause” and ends with sunset being “just a flavor.” This chapbook is admirable for the amount of life and world captured on its pages and Bozicevic’s voice whether playful or serious remains steady and intelligent. Her lines are packed with wonder and awe and this alone warrants many repeated readings.

*****

Steven Karl’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Coconut, Boog City, Taiga, Vanitas, Barrow Street, and others. His reviews have appeared in Sink Review, Cold Front Magazine, Octopus, and Galatea Resurrects. He lives in Manhattan.

TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF DANIIL KHARMS, Ed Matvei Yankelevich

2009-05-20T21:05:00.000-07:00

JAMES STOTTS Engages

TODAY I WROTE NOTHING: THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF DANIIL KHARMS, Edited and Translated by Matvei Yankelevich
(The Overlook Press/Peter Mayer Publishers, New York, 2007)

Because of the terrible attempt after the Communist Revolution to raze history, Russia has had to recreate much of her amazing literary legacy after the fact. Yankelevich has spent his career struggling to do just that, mining and discovering invisible veins of the buried twentieth century. Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms is a landmark in that project; it is more than translation.

In his introduction, Yankelevich asks us to reconsider the ‘subversive’ label stuck on Kharms’ forehead. But the label that I attach first and then have to peel off with my fingernails is ‘children’s writer’—a special case of subversion that is both resistant to and welcoming of all the labels and comparisons it invites. Kharms reminds us of Carroll, of Seuss, of Milne, of Chukovsky and Marshak (the last two only if we were ever Russian children), as much as of Gogol, Nabokov (specifically the Nabokov of Invitation to a Beheading), Beckett, Kafka, or Ionesco. In a way, he is easily assimilable as a children’s writer. I have a Russian friend who named his own son Daniil after him, and who with his friends loved to act out Kharms’ stories and plays when he was a boy himself. In Russia, you can buy Kharms picture books. It takes a paradigm shift to think of him as a dangerous or political writer, though I think that view of him has undeniable validity, even if it is somewhat of a cliché to talk about the artist as a victim of Stalinism, as censored by terror, as a man whose hopes for the Revolution were destroyed by Soviet realities. Yankelevich tries to revise both these images for something subtler and more complex, which is natural: we never want our heroes to be clichés.

Yankelevich says he sincerely hopes Kharms will “always stay in the margins of modern literature, slightly out of reach of the omnivorous canon,” in spite of these translations. My feeling is that it is a little too late, and Yankelevich’s work here is a little too good. This book, and the work of Yankelevich and company on all the OBERIU poets, makes the case for canonization, and proves to me at least that Kharms’ work is essential. Not only that, but from my own anecdotal evidence, it seems that Kharms has become that dreaded thing—an “important writer”—here, and in Russia.

The story “The Old Woman,” at just over twenty pages, is epic compared with the rest of the one- and two-page pieces in Today I Wrote Nothing, and constitutes a legitimate milestone in the development of Russian literature, fitting almost perfectly on a trajectory from Pushkin and Gogol, through Dostoyevsky and in an ignorant foot race with Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (ignorant, because Bulgakov had a manuscript of his masterpiece completed in 1938, which he continued to edit until his death in 1940, though, as was typical, it couldn’t be published until decades later; and Kharms’ story is dated the spring of 1939). Its diverse allusiveness (in the notes Yankelevich calls it an ‘all-encompassing meta-fiction”) is overwhelming, and yet at that point in the book—“The Old Woman” comes about halfway through—only an inkling of what Kharms is capable of has been put on display. In the first half of these selected writings, we’re introduced to what I can only describe as a logic of poetics in Kharms’ fiction. One story is called “Sonnet,” and in its anecdote of a man who can’t remember if seven comes after eight or the other way around—in Russian, they rhyme—several methods of inquiry are tested out: he asks his neighbors, a cashier, tries counting trees. He’s still at a loss, but is suddenly distracted when “somebody’s child toppled off a park bench and broke both of its jaws.” This immediate counteraction and resolution, echoing the argument structure of a verse sonnet, is a vital key to Kharms’ unique vision of the absurd. In another story, a succession of violent and depraved demonstrations in the public arena marks “The Beginning of a Very Fine Summer’s Day.” Kharms wields a dark and ravenous vision against the reader. The syntactic interruptions and radical alogic that is pervasive as well are harder to describe and trace (e.g., “At two o’clock on Nevsky Prospekt, or rather on the Avenue of October 25th nothing of note occurred” hints simultaneously to a space-time confusion, and to the glorification of a most-unglorious revolution). Error shades into meaning, where ‘world’ and ‘we’ are grafted onto a typo: ‘werld.’ By the end of the book all the mistakes and disruption have worked themselves up into a virtuosic crescendo of significance at the edge of meaning, and Kharms has taken his gifts to another power, has factored his talent by imaginary figures. I was initially convinced that Kharms suffered in comparisons to Ionesco or Beckett or Camus or Carroll, or even to his friend Vvedensky. But as the work went about its task of “creating opacity, fighting against the mimetic function, battling meaning, and parrying interpretive attacks” my initial impressions were overcome by a severe reverence and love for what Kharms accomplished.

And he won me over completely when he reminded me of Büchner, and Woyzeck:

.
.
.
“The Window” by Daniil Kharms

SCHOOLGIRL:
   I stare out the window
   and see bird battalions.

TEACHER:
   You should be staring at the bottom of the mortar
   and grinding the grains with your pestle.

SCHOOLGIRL:
   I can no more grind these little pebbles:
   Teacher, they are so hard
   and my hand so tender.

TEACHER:
   Who would have thought, a princess!
   You must study the hidden warmth
   of vaporization.

SCHOOLGIRL:
   Teacher, I am worn out with exhaustion
   by this unending chain of experiments.
      Five days and nights I grind. And the result?
   My hands have gone numb,
g    one dry my chest,
   O God, o God!

TEACHER:
   Soon your torments will be done.
   Your mind will become clear.

SCHOOLGIRL:
   Oh, how my spine does creak!

TEACHER:
   Make sure the mortar keeps chiming
   and the grains cracking under the pestle…
   I see: you’ve turned green
   and crossed your legs.
   I recollect eleven cases
   similar to this. What a parable!
   The poor girl strains to make a final effort—
   and there she lies, a cold little corpse.
   How heavily this weighs on me!
   While I had clambered up the chair
   to still the pendulum and set
   the clock correctly,
   she expired, the poor wretch,
   before she could finish up her education.

SCHOOLGIRL:
   Oh, my dear teacher,
   I have grasped the hidden warmth of vaporization.

TEACHER:
   I’m sorry, but I can’t hear you anymore,
   though I’d listen gladly!
   You, my girl, have become incorporeal,
   and are mum, sadly.

WINDOW:
   I opened suddenly.
   I’m a hole in walls of buildings.
   The soul spills out through me.
   I’m the air-vent of enlightened minds.

(March 15, 1931)

*****

J.H. Stotts is a writer and photographer living in Boston and starting a family. His essays, poems, and translations have been published in Circumference, Hanging Loose, The Atlantic, and numerous e-zines. He's exhibited his photography and paintings in Boston, Russia, and Mexico. What he can't publish elsewhere he posts on his blog, The Fugue Aesthetics of J.H. Stotts. He finished an 'inauspicious' shotgun anthology of Russian poetry, from Fet to Esenin to Ryzhii, in formal and experimental translations and is currently at work on a selected poems of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, to come out in '09 from Whale and Star Press.

LETTERHEAD VOLUME 2, Eds. ERIC JOHNT, BRADLEY LASNAME, BRIAN MCMAHON & ROBERT POMERHN

2009-05-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

ERIC GELSINGER Reviews

Letterhead Volume 2 Edited by Eric Johnt, Bradley Lastname, Brian McMahon, Robert Pomerhn
(Highest Hurdle Press, 2009)

Letterhead Vol 2 is a glossy magazine of poetry and collage art out of Buffalo.

It took me a while to get into the right groove, but once I did I found myself reading the thing for a solid hour or two, and enjoying it more than I do most poetry periodicals.

What I like most about Letterhead is how uneven it is. It's got 4 editors, so the work is bound to vary. But, throw in the fact it's a journal of performance poetry, and that one of the editors might be (as far as I can tell) crazy, and what you get is a very diverting poetry easter egg hunt. I like it.

So, most poetry magazines are 100% bad, and the poems are bad boring bad. First off, Letterhead is not 100% bad, so it has that going for it. Secondly, the bad poems in Letterhead are apt to be bad good bad, sometimes thrillingly bad -- and therefore instructive. One reason campy b-movies are so super fun and exciting during intellectual puberty is they change you like a rite of passage. They draw you out of being a passive viewer -- you shout at the screen, you deride the actors, you laugh from above at the movie. It's highly edifying. Personally when I trace my, um, development as a critic, I can turn back to the golden age of friends and terrible films in the Welte basement and see myself maturing from viewer to reviewer. Likewise, more can be learned from the bad poems in Letterhead than from the so called good poems in most spd type zines. And it's not even because the poems are worse than the spd bad poems, it's because Letterhead provides a certain context and the bad poems have obvious ambition -- talking about politics, revolution, suicide -- in an overt mode, often heroic, that opens itself to criticism while lacking the protection of obscurity, theory, or mfa initiate poetics. The nakedness of the poems is the best part.

The bad poems are also instructive because they bring out the differences between oral performance and a performance on the page. You can learn a lot about songwriting and poetry by reading Bob Dylan's lyrics like a poem. The poem is god awful. The song is great. Why, exactly? Same thing here, although unfortunately there's no cd or any record of the oral performance.

Then there are the good poems, which seem especially good in the environment of Letterhead. And it's not because good among bad will appear excelsior. Rather, it's that naked ambition that marks almost every page: when the poems work, it seems nearly impossible, and therefore miraculous and especially real. The tone of the magazine is so serious and passionate-- so serious that when a poem fails it becomes ridiculous, thereby maintaining that serious air-- so when something works, it really works. Most poetry journals don't inspire in me that kind of emotional respect, and even the good poems don't mark me because they float in pages where all words are kept safe by wishy washy passionless experimentalism. Reading Letterhead, though, I feel something's at stake.

(I haven't read the whole volume yet -- it's a pretty big book -- but I want to single out Brian McMahon as one author of the good poems I'm talking about. He has real poetry in there. He's also one of the four editors, and I wonder which selections are his . . . )

As for my own poem, the magazine couldn't be a more perfect context. My piece, I think, is a microcosm of the whole issue. It is uneven, as you'd expect from a single unedited and unprepared talk into a recorder. It would likely be far more impressive if you heard it because it'd be off the tip of the tongue. Some of it is bad, some of it is boring, but then sometimes the language suddenly lights up -- just as happens in any improvisation. I recorded the poem as one of many experiments I was doing back in Buffalo before leaving for South America. The experiments were all similar in that they recorded consciousness through writing -- variations of "graphs of the mind moving." They also included time as a variable explicitly. The first poem in Nevertheless, in which I clear my mind in meditation then type without thought or interruption is another example. And, I've recently gone back into this mode with recordings of glossolalia, song, chant, and freestyle improvised under different conditions. Such experiments, transposed on the page, are a type of theater. It's possible that the good lines of my Talk Poem are better than good thanks to this theatrical magic. I mean here's how it is. You read a bunch of rather blah lines, and it sounds like somebody is just talking blah blah and then bam! something kinda brilliant and poetic, and it affects the reader more than good lines would in a poem where, the reader knows, the poet "cheated" by deliberating and editing and so forth.

So, like happens throughout the magazine, the effects of the good aren't heightened because the good's surrounded by bad. Rather, poetic power is magnified by the theater created in pages where people who are poets only for the moment are speaking, where the words are to be heard as much as read, and where words come from life, not scholarship. It's like a magazine of language that actually happened, and the theater which inheres in all documents (called history) is present, I hope, in my talk poem, and it is also present in the magazine when taken as a whole.

Thereby, Letterhead's good poems become more than just poems in the way we've come to understand the word. They become language where something is at stake, the way a human being is at stake on stage, as opposed to the character's name in the script. The words are embodied, language is embodied, and real poetry may be hard to come by, but it has a chance of being there. This can't be said for many journals of greater reputation.

So yeah it's kinda far out. I like being part of such a different magazine. Mike Basinski, Aaron Lowinger, myself: poets who could be called performance poets, but are not and are who usually published in Silliman mags. Then Name alum Brian VanRemmen, the already mentioned Brian McMahon, Zev Gottdiener, the very funny Bradley Lastname, and many slammers, and journalistic and performance poets whom I don't know.

Last point: Letterhead also has an interesting layout, which makes the hunt more fun. McMahon did a good job laying down visual art and poetry with a strong visual presence -- including my antin-spaced talk. Makes the unevenness even more fun.

*****

Eric Gelsinger lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is a member of House Press and has a blog at www.gelsingers.blogspot.com

PORTRAIT AND DREAM: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by BILL BERKSON

2009-05-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems by Bill Berkson
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2009)

Until Portrait and Dream, my encounters with Bill Berkson’s poems occurred haphazardly. So I was eager to delve into this book, especially as it bears one of the most effective titles I can recall for a selected or collected poems project.

“Portrait and Dream” -- as the back cover description notes, is “a title suggestive of both figurative and abstract.” Given the period of its making, 1959-2008, and that Berkson lives much attuned to his time’s art developments which certain critics have critiqued based on the (false) binary between figuration and abstraction, the title is purrrr-fect for capturing what comes across as the poet’s open-mindedness. The poet’s expansive view manifests itself partly in the many styles offered in the book.

Berkson’s attention also often resulted in lucid, witty, aphoristic and enjoyable results:

Nothing is more perfectly obscure than the trace of intention and no mess
(from “Lorelei”)

Many of the poems are logically open-ended, logically if one is correct in sensing that this is a poet who writes to explore as much as to manifest an idea conceived ahead of the poem's writing:

Love comes but once to a shoe
and must be stepped on
if we, any of us, are to
survive . . . in its tracks, the moth
capered like his sailor-suit photo against,
my speedy dessert season, an armistice wrested
from the trees
(from “Breath”)

Many poems bespeak light-ness, indicating the deftness of his touch:

Shadows fall from bricks
Let the sunniness of Classicism shine
You do the math
(from “She Hung Up”)

Overall, the collection offers a voice marked by, but not weighted down by, wisdom. Which is all the better for his words to sing:

No rest for liquidity
Margin of error at risk

A very modern view
History cashed in

All that
In a fabulous snit

What’s left? Poetry installer
Downloaded clicks

Right back at you
Nothing behind

None other either way
Same old same old story

One finger at a time
Formal silence presses down

A deep note boldly enters
On bended knee

The way music
Loves company

Those breathers arranged by twos after eons
At the piano

Such talk
Let’s hear it

Imperceptible downbeat
Periodic oblivion

All thought
Suspended

Like the reckless
Parallelogram

Resident glory splinters
In that great picture of sunlight

Splendor showered on a vacancy
With just your word for it
(from “As If You Didn’t Know”)

(As an aside, “As if You Didn’t Know” -- reminds me of the poems of another poet-art critic, Barry Schwabsky; results like these certainly indicate the fruitful relationships poetry can have hangin’ out with the visual arts…”As If You Didn’t Know” was written for Ed Ruscha, one of the many visual artists mentioned in this book and ranging over artists representing diverse approaches, e.g. Francis Picabia, Carlos Villa, Katie Schneeman, Willem de Kooning ….)

It’s such a treat to experience a selected or collected poems project offer the undisputable conclusion that a lifetime’s effort is not merely worthwhile for the author but also for the stranger-reader. A toast then to Bill Berkson’s life-work for being well-writ and the pleasures it generously gives.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere: Joey Madia's review of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole over at New Mystics, and Aileen Ibardaloza's (and Aileen's mother's) engagement with The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes over at OurOwnVoice. Oh hey! And she just released her first novel (grin) : NOVEL CHATELAINE!

THE ALPS by BRANDON SHIMODA

2009-05-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

CHING-IN CHEN Reviews

THE ALPS by Brandon Shimoda
(Flim Forum Press, Slingerlands, N.Y., 2008)

Notes Approaching Brandon Shimoda's The Alps

1. I attempt to write a straight-faced review of The Alps – to tackle its sliding slippery ropes of words head-on:

In The Alps, Brandon Shimoda places the body (two bodies, to be exact, of slightly blurry bunny-eared children) as the interlocutor, the greeter, the welcomer to the expectant reader before entering into a space of openings without closure, ruptures and bodily tearings:

“Upended sky, profane and bled, youth's
Unbodied land as the land is destroyed” (8)

2. Ok, a lie. The first metaphor I think of when sitting down to write:

This morning, I opened the dryer to stare at fragments of old business cards I had forgotten to rescue from an old pocket surfacing. Faded and coherent, recognizable and strange, snowflakes – melting glimpses of memory:

“a t o m r h a d ee ate m e
s e s a l ve” (126)

3. The middle section has no face. Rather, it is a frame of silence, an absent box through which the reader sees _____. The caption – something akin to family memory or momentary image or revolutionary noun or repetition or question (haiku?) -- is always there for interpretation:

“Verse made the flames dance

The people

on buffalo fat” (78)

Then, as I flip past the last poem of this section, the photo. Blurry.

4. White space, inevitable. A downshifting, a taut, a string of gravity, the folds of a mountain crumbling down, an avalanche of carefully selected pairings, or “rubbling testimonies of ice.” (36) But then the landing for brief moments into the landmass, surfacing of meanings.

5. “I love the alien abduction story too, and especially the idea of the alien face staring at you from the closed book. Maybe that face has never left, but has changed its form innumerably. There is something terrifying about a closed book, for that reason - for its ruthless silence, and for the faces and forms that you just know are lying in wait, continuing their lives despite the absence of the reader or viewer. How do you view, or think about, your own poems, or books of poems, in such moments of supposed dormancy? Have you ever confronted your own work in this way, as a particular life force that continues its activities when the lights go out, so to speak? You mention that the life that a work (or form, etc.) possesses is "supplied only by those who animate it," but have you ever been proven false in this assertion by the work itself, as it splits so fully from your intention and being that it behaves much like that alien face in the closed book? Or, does the alien face only have power because the artist, or you, allow it that? BRANDON” http://thepines.blogspot.com/

6. Almost a hint of a narrative emerged in fragments, amidst shavings from the ice:

“My father sent his first wife's
ashes to Japan with
the photographer, I have
the feeling I'm being
told a story” (71)

Juxtapose this quote introducing the section “AT FIRST the ice presented” from mountain climber John Tyndall who studied glaciers:

“an appearance of utter confusion, but we soon reached a position where the mechanical conditions of the glacier revealed themselves, and where we might learn, had we not known it before, that confusion is merely the unknown intermixture of laws, and becomes order and beauty when we rise to their comprehension” (86)

7. Yes these narratives give us no reprieve from the blown-up world. Shimoda tells us in Trinity/Neutrality/The Draft,

“The day the trinity weapon was deployed
I kept myself between the ostensible
roots loose in the melt” (101)

So how do we as readers “embrace/embrace” (87) while holding onto the violent

“And will the sky hold
our shrapnel
still


           for a sign

gesturing
the night with rifles
           raised.” (53)

or

“Armies, like newlyweds
in bushes along the port
anxiety belting the small are going to blow
likenesses overboard” (93)

How do we “without fracture            menace” (98)?

*****

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press 2009). A Kundiman Fellow, she currently lives in Riverside, California. You can find her online at www.chinginchen.com

THE NEW YORK POSTCARD SONNETS by PHILIP DACEY

2009-05-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

CHRISTOPHER MULROONEY Reviews

The New York Postcard Sonnets by Philip Dacey
(Rain Mountain Press, New York, NY, 2007)

The subtitle is, “A Midwesterner Moves to Manhattan”, and accomplishes the note missing from these poems printed individually here and there, Southern Poetry Review for example, where Juilliard was viewed a little more incisively. The impression there was of a tourist, now he is at home and less concerned with making any impression whatsoever, he’s in it for the long haul, New York is full of impressions.

Dunn & Kooser think Dacey’s superficial and great, New York satirizes itself in these verses, but not so’s you’d notice except over fifty-five sonnets.

This is how 11 in SPR becomes 6 in The New York Postcard Sonnets, by mollifying the neighbors not too obsequiously, the last four lines are changed to:

One singer to another: “Our best friends are vowels.”
Performing’s so physical; the musician as athlete.

And no student’s here because of Daddy’s dough.
You can’t buy Beethoven; hours of practice show.

*****

Christopher Mulrooney has written criticism in Small Press Review, Elimae, The Film Journal, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, and Parameter, poems and translations in The Northridge Review, Guernica, Vanitas, New Translations, and Rune.

INVERSE SKY by JOHN ISLES

2009-05-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews

Inverse Sky by John Isles
(University of Iowa Press, 2008)

Painting an Inverse Sky by Looking Sidewards

Sharp, critical and energetic, John Isles has a very precise yet bold writing style. Nothing of an excess or exuberance, each descriptive detail of the landscapes that his poems portray — the modern California, its lost nature and city heritage — contains a a rather attractive modesty, as well as a singular purpose. Every work puts forth a social statement, addressing the changes which an American public space has experienced in the wake of modernisation. Credited as a “pilgrim-poet” (i.e. borrowing his own words, “To keep oneself a stranger and pilgrim,” p. 13), Isles writes as a traveler, a stranger who wishes to understand and lay bare the reality of each spot he passes by:

The truth went out
Wandering burnt hills in the pitch
With reeds in its pockets, a herd for the hoarding
Word goes out — it’s all over
I’ve been looking for you all over

(From “Dark Pastoral,” p. 23)

As a book, the overall layout is delicately organised and comprehensive. Titles that Isles has chosen are lyrical and visually telling; for instance, “Putting the Bird Back in the Sky,” “Desperate Tender,” “Send My Roots Rain,” “Notes toward a Social Realism,” “I Know If I Find You I Will Have to Leave the Earth,” “And When I Waked I Cried to Dream Again”… Already, each suggests music. Throughout, the theme of nature versus civilisation maintains a loyal coherencet that sifts between neutral observations of exterior happenings, and the poet’s invested emotions at specific moments. Often, Isles seeks comfort in addressing the city as his lover, an effective oratory device that renders naked his kaleidoscopic and nostalgic interior world:

City of conflicting desires, passing girl in whose eyes
hurricanes germinate. Gaze arcing from the wharf
to the come-hither gull-glide. As a maiden into a cloud

of mayflies — Marry I will, Marry I will —
swallowed by the assembly around a portable mountain.

The city of climbers threading an atmospheric eye.

(From “City of Our Making,” p. 16)

What I enjoy most as a reader is Isles’ ability to strike a stark contrast between what that is being evoked and what that is not. Stanza breaks have a silence, just as line spacings. Dashes, on the other hand, convey an image that reads like a sacred ambiguity, and therefore should stay “as it is” — unspecified, or leading towards somewhere else. In several of these works, there is a tendency to mythologize self, time and space. Once in a while, the writing turns dense, as Isles reveals an ugly landscape:

I forget my country, breaking into pieces —
the recently elected — branches downed in a gust —
monarchs unclotting — frenzied in the yard.

(From “The Arcadia Negotiations,” p. 44)

if not, a dark reflection that precedes:

After the Mexican War,
Vallejo surrenders to the Bear Flag Republic.
The mission burning and he is serving

wine and eggs and chorizo the Americans
who have come to arrest him. It is time
to move on — higher ground, or lower ground.

(From “The Arcadia Negotiations,” p. 38)

And yet it is precisely this “higher ground, or lower ground” that John Isles “walked up and down upon my own skin” (p. 59). He “never returned,” as he claims by way of concluding — from an inverse life.

*****

Fiona Sze-Lorrain also publishes poetry and non-fiction under her nom-de-plume, Greta Aart. Also a musician, she is one of the editors of Cerise Press, and lives in Paris, France.

THE AMPUTEE´S GUIDE TO SEX by JILLIAN WEISE

2009-05-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

NATHAN LOGAN Reviews

The Amputee's Guide to Sex by Jillian Weise
(Soft Skull Press, 2007)

The Amputee's Guide to Sex explores and binds together two subjects that are often not even mentioned in the same sentence: disability and sex. In this debut collection, Weise explores vulnerability, passion, and pain.

Most people would not need a poem to know that the disabled might feel a bit vulnerable in a world where they are a minority. Weise transports this feeling into the bedroom. One speaker tells us this in “Abscission”:

Your favorite post-coital pastime
is nicknaming my scars.
The name for the railroad track
along my back – Engine.

This is a horrible “pastime” to have, but the speaker does not seem too concerned about the naming of scars.

Medical terms must communicate
clearly, I tell you, but that doesn't stop
you from asking what it feels like

when your hand is here, now here
over here.

While this could be a sign of the lover wanting to know if (s)he is turning “I” on, the barrage of questions seems only to be emphasizing the disability of the speaker. This is just one example of the morbid curiousity that Weise is able to channel throughout the book. But Weise's speakers are not defenseless. As the last stanza of “Nikita's Indian Restauraunt” demonstrates: “I picture Nona here with you eating / Indian food. When the man says, I want / to see her body, Nona sets him on fire.”

The Amputee's Guide to Sex is full of poetry that is on fire. Jillian Weise's charged verse not only makes for an engaging and powerful first collection, but should put her on the map as a poet to watch.

******

Nathan Logan is the editor of Spooky Boyfriend and a MFA candidate at Minnesota State University Moorhead. Some of his work has appeared/is forthcoming in No Tell Motel, pax americana, Read This, The Scrambler, and Taiga.

HORSE PLAYING THE ACCORDION by ELIZABETH SMITHER

2009-05-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

GRACE C. OCASIO Reviews

Horse Playing the Accordion by Elizabeth Smither
(Ahadada Books, Tokyo & Toronto, 2009)

Reinventing the World in Smither’s Horse Playing the Accordion

Elizabeth Smither’s poetry book Horse Playing the Accordion is a lively exploration into the ordinary instances of life. Smither alternates between revealing life’s most sublime and solemn (in the case of her funeral poems) instances. We can only marvel as Smither gathers an array of moments, placing them before us to feast on. We find, with each poem, that Smither introduces us to cultural features of Europe that highlight its splendor. Smither also engages us through the richness of her knowledge of the arts, referencing real and fictitious figures alike in several of her poems. Likewise, we cannot help but rejoice as Smither unfurls moments that are life-affirming and celebratory, showcasing those elements of life that yield harvests of meaning for the soul.

The genius of the title poem, “Horse playing the accordion,” lies in its fantastical nature. This poem is wonderfully wrought with a description of a musical horse presented in all his finery. The speaker declares the horse to be “beautiful,” possessing a “head” that is “black.” What is odd or unique about this horse is that it has “hands” with which to play the accordion. The fact that the horse has “hands” gives him a humanlike quality. We gather, furthermore, that he is rather exotic—an impressive looking creature—since he is dressed in a “tunic” that is “dried blood red’ in color and wears stockings that are “white and red.” Perhaps most astonishing of all is the effect the horse has on the speaker. She strikes an ecstatic tone by the poem’s end: “I want to give everything in my purse / to the beautiful horse and his accordion.” At first, we may deem it an absurd idea for the speaker to sacrifice her belongings for a horse. But if we truly have listened to her, we will discover that we, too, have become mesmerized by this horse’s grandeur.

In the poem “Singing in the rain,” Smither borrows from pop culture, citing icons associated with Hollywood musicals. To do so is a tricky endeavor indeed, for we tend, as average citizens, to hold artists of the cinematographic persuasion in such high esteem that anyone who dares to commemorate them we automatically doom to failure. Yet, Smither effortlessly conjures Gene Kelly in his most defining role, creating a fresh impression for us of the landmark film Singin’ in the Rain. Alongside Gene Kelly, Smither invokes the incomparable Richard Rogers. Smither’s speaker confesses, “And then I remember hearing on the radio / it’s Richard Rodgers’ anniversary and begin / to hum . . . Younger than springtime, low and sweet.” Here, the speaker’s lilting tone is infectious, allowing us to vicariously experience the magic of this moment with her. The speaker helps us to rediscover a basic truth of everyday living—that it is the simplest moments of life we often value the most.

Perhaps inspired by the fact of how her predicament nearly parallels Gene Kelly’s, the speaker draws an allusion to a fictitious character: “My skirt looks like Eliza Bennet / crossing half of Hertfordshire.” With this statement, the speaker identifies herself with one of fiction’s boldest heroines ever. Many of us will recall Jane Austen’s character Elizabeth Bennet fondly, retrieving from our memories our recognition of how defiant Elizabeth was as illustrated through her actions. The speaker’s statement, taken within the context of Austen’s text, is hilarious. We may at first be incredulous that the speaker endures, in the rain, what Elizabeth endured by walking, but then we must consider what the speaker says, leading up to her statement. She claims the rain gets “[h]eavier and heavier.” She states further that she must “stand on tiptoe to escape the overflow.” Thus, we become persuaded by the ampleness of her evidence.

“My Paris room” is a poem that champions the idea that landscape has much to contribute to one’s well-being. The speaker makes her point quickly: “Everything I desire: a balcony / a French door: black wrought iron / two panels of taut white lace.” We can easily identify with the speaker’s tastes in home design as her description of her room’s features sounds like something out of the magazine Classic American Home. For many of us, though we may dwell in comfortable enough abodes, we would be more than willing to upgrade our homes by a substantial degree. Thus, the speaker’s desires, underscored by her use of the personal pronoun “I,” become our desires. Our satisfaction as readers occurs as a direct result of knowing the speaker has obtained what she desires. It is only through hearing the speaker voice her pleasure regarding these architectural and decorative features that we become in tune to our lack of these same features.

The speaker elaborates further on the grandness of her milieu, naming other features: “roof tops / a line of chimney pots on which a crow / settles at the same time Saint-Sulpice / is ringing . . .” The speaker sets an enchanting mood in these lines. We wonder at the unplanned synchronization of the crow and the chimes of Saint-Sulpice. We find ourselves astonished, overcome with a sense of awe at how nature plays its part in the orchestration of this seamless moment in time.

Ascribing aesthetic value to people or things is not the only matter of concern for Smither’s speaker. Besides admiring the beauty of the world, her speaker testifies to the importance of intellectual pursuit. In a reflective piece, “Grown-up son, reading,” the speaker muses over the apparently communal activity of reading:

He is reading a motorcycle manual. A Kawasaki.
While I have my head in an autobiography.
He reads of pistons and fine adjustments
while I read of incidents and suppositions.
There is truth for each of us. But how
companionable it feels. Two heads lowered—

The simple eloquence of the speaker’s statement, “There is truth for each of us,” is sure to resonate for her listeners, for we are all questing for the truth, or at least some version of the truth, whenever we hasten to pick up a book. The sense of the speaker’s industry comes through as she labors in her activity of reading. “I have my head in an autobiography,” she says. We may also note how the speaker clarifies for us the distinctions in the reading material when she declares, “He reads of pistons and fine adjustments / while I read of incidents and suppositions.” There is something almost mystical in the phrasing, “[t]wo heads lowered.” This wording suggests the possibility that the two readers possess the capacity to exchange ideas even as they remain engrossed in the two discrete texts.

The poem “The Oxford comma” critiques the inner circle of literati. It begins in a spectacular fashion—“A little knot of writers at a / prize-giving ceremony, standing / uncertainly, looking at the stage . . .” From the poem’s start, its language startles. The image, “[a] little knot of writers,” is an exquisite metaphor that points to the fragility and tenacity of this clique of writers. Smither’s use of the adverb “uncertainly” is precise. The word “uncertainly” is an apt way to describe the delicacy of some writers’ egos. More telling are the speaker’s words in the second and thirds stanzas: “we discuss / to show erudition and hide fear / the Oxford comma and the use of it.” Here, the speaker implies that the world of academia is based primarily on performance; that one thrives or, in certain cases, survives according to how well or how poorly she or he elucidates her or his ideas. We also understand, courtesy of the speaker, that the “fear” factor is highly prevalent within the confines of academia. Moreover, we gain the sense that performing for others in some ways masks these individuals’ insecurity. The speaker’s statement, “we discuss / to show erudition and hide fear” may remind us of Lacanian logic. Perhaps, frail humans that we are, we are doomed because we think so little of ourselves unless the Other comes along to exalt us. Certainly, a hint of self-consciousness on the academics’ part emerges in these two lines.

Reading Horse Playing the Accordion is a sheer delight. Through her poems, Smither offers us the chance to exult in every aspect of our existence. If we neglect to do so, we alone are culpable, for Smither has set the example for us of how to prize life. We need only follow her lead.

*****

A former two-year college English instructor, poet Grace Ocasio lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Edwin. The poem “Ars Poetica” is forthcoming in the summer 2009 issue of Rattle: Poetry for the Twenty-First Century literary journal. She is an active member of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective. Poetry of hers appeared in Black Magnolias Literary Journal, Drumvoices Revue, Court Green, The Cherry Blossom Review, Poetica: Reflections of Jewish Thought, Main Street Rag, and Aries. She is also a reviewer for the Web site, The Review Review. She received her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in English from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

TEN POEMS ABOUT HIGHWAYS AND BIRDS by SARAH BENNETT

2009-05-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

DAVE BONTA Reviews

Ten Poems About Highways and Birds by Sarah Bennett
(Dytiscid Press, 2009)

Ten Poems About Highways and Birds is a very unprepossessing title, I’ll admit, and ten poems may not seem like very much — there’s a lot of whitespace in this chapbook. But birds are, among other things, almost universal symbols of aspiration and beauty, and as for highways: they are perhaps the most inescapable and enduring expression of Americans’ passionate monologue with the land. I mean, obviously this isn’t the only nation with highways; it just happens to be one of the few modern nations where even the most fervent of conservationists is still at the mercy of the road system for basic transport. I am acutely aware of this myself since I don’t own a car. (Which can make it tricky to get to Audubon board meetings, as I’ll be doing tonight.)

All ten of the poems are indeed about either highways or birds, and many are about both. Bennett hails from eastern Massachusetts, and she told me that she used to have a long commute, and would often compose poems in her head and jot them down when she got to work, “a la Wallace Stevens (without the secretary).” In that respect, this book reminds me a little of Tom Montag’s distillation of poems from his Morning Drive Journal, The Sweet Bite of Morning, a somewhat longer chapbook published by Juniper Press in 2003. Where Montag is spare and often aphoristic, though, Bennett’s poems are each about a page long, and often pack considerable emotional punch.

In the opening poem, “Early Morning on Route 128,” vehicles and wildlife are seen to share a common destiny:

Crows commute, heads down,
their line of black Fords slow
but steady. A heron keeps his Bentley in low gear.

Are we talking about birds or people here? Bennett never tips her hand.

A page later, our attention is drawn to a “beautifully named” invader of the continent.

The flank of a very large animal occasionally
flexes above me, her curves
revealed as flocks of starling.

Some of the poems tackle more personal subjects. In “Eastbound on the Mass Pike,” Bennett and an unnamed companion are having a fight as they drive, and it’s all she can do to avoid “open[ing] the door / at 75 miles per hour” and bailing out.

Above us one large hawk
and another spin round each other, connected
by a quarter mile of nothing.

Roadkill is of course an unavoidable subject, mentioned in one poem and dealt with head-on in another. But I was even more impressed with the way Bennett relates driving to flying, as in “Aloft,” where a fragment of memory about a blackbird falling out of the sky is interwoven with a story about her mother being afraid that she would forget how to play the organ until she got to church, and the narrator herself confessing that driving was always like that for her — and that in some way it helped her to remember how to be human.

More than anything, I guess, that’s what I like about this book: it’s full of ambiguities. “Love Poem for a Barred Owl,” for example, might really be nothing more or less than that. For a reader with any knowledge of the environmental consequences of sprawl or the big-woods requirements of barred owls, the poem cannot fail to awaken longing and wistfulness.

You should not be
here. The dark fields you fly
over are filled with new
cellar holes and the forest is only trees

in peoples’ back yards.

But when the call recedes into the distance, even readers who know nothing about habitat loss would be forgiven for thinking that something more than fields have been hollowed out and filled with darkness.

My favorite poem in the book involves not birds but earth-bound wildlife instructing each other “On Crossing the Highway.”

Go at night.
It is easier
at night. They give off a light of
warning and
your feet won’t burn.

I particularly like the description of the median strip: “a tiny field full of / wind and roaring.”

The book ends as mysteriously as it began, with a poem involving “of all things a bluebird / in January.” I can’t really quote any more, because, as so often with understated poetry, you have to have read and absorbed the poems that precede it to fully appreciate its impact. As I’ve been typing this review, I’ve been watching of all things a snow squall in April, and thinking that anyone who pays attention to the natural world will have to become much more conversant with anachronisms and strange bedfellows in the years to come. Ten Poems About Highways and Birds is a great place to start.

*****

Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. He's co-editor of qarrtsiluni, an online literary magazine, and founding member of the group blog Open Micro. He's been publishing his own material on the web since 2003, mostly at his blog Via Negativa. Publication credits include Pivot, West Branch, The Sun, Wind, frogpond, Bird Watcher’s Digest, Art Times, Studies in Contemporary Satire, Sawmill and Woodlot, Bamboo, and assorted other periodicals. Some of his poems are collected online at Shadow Cabinet, and he keeps a daily journal of prose-micropoems at The Morning Porch.

OPEN NIGHT by AARON LOWINGER

2009-05-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Open Night by Aaron Lowinger
(Transmission Press, San Francisco, 2008)

Befitting the first word of its title, these poems are highly-attuned to their environment. An environment whose elements share, for the purpose of this powerful chap, "night".

Yet, these poems are full of light. The "night" that I see through these poems don't contain much darkness. These poems are radiant...and they only got that way, it seems to me, because of the clarity of not just the poet's love for, but also the poet's faith in, his subject:

open night

Rain basil coins puke glasses
it's a beautiful night
just sitting out here
drinking away the summer with you
eating onion rings
applying for jobs every day
on the phone every day
I might get one of the phones
that you wear right on your ear
and then ideas will be free
this street is long like the sea
I can't see where it ends only trees

The radiance is infectious in a good (fabulous!) way, such that they make secondary the scaffolding of their beauty: fresh diction and deft narrative leaps:

open night

The wind is like a movie
mysterious and drawn out
it puts me to sleep
like bipolar streetlight
on and off
if we walk into the light
and the air ever-expanding
like the first night
drunk on pop and crab cakes
I promise when we get married
we'll have old fashioned milkshakes
the light's blacked out
I hear the river from here
where mud puppies foam
and children are covered in fur
and cigarettes make you sick

Each poem is titled "open night" and it's effective for adding a layer of mystery that wouldn't be there if one presented several of the poems as not concerned with night vs day. For example, I would read this poem differently if its title didn't bring "night" into the forefront of my attention before I read its text:

open night

If I dug you a pond
beyond the picnic tables
the wonderbread birds that say coo
back beyond where the swallows scissor
and it's a miracle every time
a creature finds food
I will find a way to make more food
and grow you out to seed
and dig dig dig
until there's nothing left but granite

The project ends appropriately with a poem on its back cover (the project ends on paper but as an opening into experience for the receptive reader)-- and it manifests what the poet clearly achieved during the writing of these poems: ecstasy --

open night

Let night sounds filter in from an incandescent street
lepers in the tree frogs summer
holy appendages keep us awake late into the night
trying without feeling
to remember or recreate any feeling
so this week can close
and I will remember it
and some of the people I talked to during it
some of the things I thought about
like using up 5 billion years of energy
in a matter of several generations
and why do I have no energy
the night pump is broken sweating water
into the walls around where we dream
and why am I always so lazy please
just forget about all that and go ballroom dance
we can't just sit around and wait for it to come back
I plan on missing Earth when we shoot to Mars

I wasn’t anticipating these poems to stick in my memory after I read them. But they did, and I’m glad. Because while reading them, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, just as I now relish their presence staying with me.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere: Joey Madia's review of Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole over at New Mystics, and Aileen Ibardaloza's (and Aileen's mother's) engagement with The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes over at OurOwnVoice. Oh hey! And she just released her first novel (grin) : NOVEL CHATELAINE!

T(HERE) by JONATHAN HAYES

2009-05-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

RICHARD LOPEZ Reviews

T(here) by Jonathan Hayes
(Phrygian Press, Bayside, NY, 2008)

Jonathan Hayes’ long poem reads like an elliptical novel about growing up and becoming a poet. The text reminds me much of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer because both texts are mostly in prose and are in essence a short novel about growing up. But as Rimbaud’s famous work moves with a linear clarity Hayes’ text says much about a singular life in fewer words and many gestures.

I found myself laughing aloud reading along because I think Hayes taps into the human comedy. Thus when a dominatrix refuses to be touched by her client and instead offers to fuck him we are treated to a worldview that is both touching and a bit touched.

She is in control. She does not get fucked.

Her asshole is off-limits.

No exchange of body fluids. If you want your dick sucked go to a prostitute.

She is an artist.

If that exchange might seem a bit odd, after all, why see her at all if there’s no warmth in the meeting between two humans, this passage is revelatory because it shows the task of the artist: to re-create an imperfect world into something beautiful. Thus the mother of this artist as a young man describes the developing poet as ‘a Brooks Brothers hippie.’ So many contradictions within that phrase that the mind spins in sheer delight for we all possess our own individual contradictions.

Even better are the contradictions of growing up a poet in a world that doesn’t prize much poetry. This book abounds in references to work, the real work of going to a daily job, every day, and still becoming a writer. I mention the work of going to a job because this poem lacks any self-pity or even grim determination of becoming a writer no matter the odds. Rather, the poem unfolds the way life does and the process of becoming a poet, which takes hard discipline, is an organic development. There are struggles in that development but it happens just the same as a boy grows into a man.

There is always a ‘here.’
The memory from, ‘there’ is the re-experience you
hold now, ‘here.’
They are inseparable.
There is no escape.

And so, I hope, is the life in poetry.

For in this life the child travels thru the United States to NYC, Boston, SF while working on fishing boats, orchards and bookstores.

Moderation is a pipe dream.

Which may or may not be true for every individual, yet the life limned within this book is a wild ride. I think this poem is a tour de force. What makes it exciting for me is not just the mixture of prose and verse or the slang spicing it up. What makes it exciting is the poet’s acute intellect and his love of living as he attempts to pack his book with the rich details of living.

Like a lot of poets who are writing excellent work today Jonathan Hayes deserves to be well-known. He has written a book of extraordinary resource and honesty. Furthermore, Hayes produced a singular vision of one poetic life. Finding a dominatrix who won’t be touched but who will transform your life perhaps is not the wish for every person. But for some the experience is a grounding in poetry.

*****

richard lopez has a dyslexic heart. he's published a few chapbooks and hopes to publish more. you can find him at www.reallybadmovies.blogspot.com.

CADAVER DOGS by REBECCA LOUDON

2009-05-20T19:50:00.001-07:00

TOM BECKETT Engages

Cadaver Dogs by Rebecca Loudon
(No Tell Books, 2008)

Putrifictions: Cadaver Dogs by Rebecca Loudon

A moment decays in its telling, tolling our evanescence. It smells unbearably sweet. Like zombie sweat.

*

we are a story problem

*

Outside our window: murderous icicles rain, points first, piercing the snow covered earth. Am I imagining the spreading red stain?

*

It's good to hide the smell
with smoke and incantations.
It even cures cancer.
Open the windows, Tom.

*

There is wildness and menace in this book. Sensuality also. I feel myself to have been addressed. I feel somewhat alarmed.

*

we'll talk again when your children
have sewn razor blades to their lips

*

These are poems palpable as blood oranges.

*

bees inside the corn husk
blatant silk
royal jelly
night swung its sugary gardenia stick

*

Not to explain or paraphrase or gloss, but to say: "Look at this!"

*

you licked yourself like a human
laughed and kept laughing

*

Cadaver Dogs howls, nips, humps and growls. It rolls in some serious shit. Sniff it out. It is a marvelous book.

+++++
(Note: the italicized segments above are all drawn from Cadaver Dogs.)

*****

In the 1980s Tom Beckett edited and published The Difficulties, a journal which became well known for its critical issues on Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, David Bromige and Susan Howe. More recently he curated the E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S website which presented 40 in depth interviews with poets. These interviews, together with supplemental texts by each interview subject, have been published in 3 handsome volumes by Otoliths. Beckett's Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978-2006 (Meritage Press, 2006) is available from Small Press Distribution and Amazon. Additionally, Otoliths has published This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day (2008), a collection of 3 longer poems.