Tarpaulin Sky Reviews & Interviews

Richard Froude’s Fabric reviewed by Megan Burns

2011-08-04T07:31:00.002-04:00

Richard Froude
Fabric

ISBN 9780982989609
Horse Less Press, 2011
107 pages, paperback
$15.00

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Fragmenting the Book of Memory

Richard Froude’s Fabric is a journey into the making of songs and the weaving of subtle textures that amuse and disorient the reader. Subtitled “A Prelude to the Last American Book,” Froude tests the edges where lyric meets narrative and where structure has the freedom to dance into disarray. The word “prelude” is a loaded starting point as the reader sets off to define this text in relation to an unknown: does prelude in this sense mean as in music, a short piece free in style, or is it a nod to Wordworth’s Preludes, or is the phantom text of the Last American Book truly haunting this book. The answers are probably all of the above as Froude’s technique is quite similar to Susan Howe’s The Birth-Mark, where disparate impressions, images, and histories are brought together to tell a story, and part of the story is how the story makes itself on the page.

What is riveting about Froude’s book is that the reader vicariously enacts the shaping of the story as Froude pulls certain threads until the whole cloth emerges into a tapestry that was previously hidden from view. If the reader was able to anticipate Froude’s map, then the whole gig would be up, but Froude moves the pieces as deftly as a chess player caging the king. Fabric is a book concerned with sequences and patterns, and so the chess metaphor is apt. Froude uses recurring moves to introduce, turn the text, and then turn it again, all the while keeping the reader engaged in this exploration of where language and memory can take us. Froude writes: “Maybe one day everything will be collected in sequence and bound with leather (10).” and later, “Any arrangement can be perceived as a sequence (18).” These lines are clues to the reader to set stake in the words as they are laid out and then repositioned on the page.

Another book that comes to mind reading Froudeis Bernadette Mayer’s Memory; Froude, like Mayer, has an ability to clearly animate the past while remaining cognizant of the layers and gaps. It is in these layers and gaps that Fabric moves beyond storytelling to create a journey into history and memory where we find links and crossovers that truly are mysterious. Many books handle subjects like suicide, death, or loss; Fabric does it by taking the reader into unfamiliar territory and then creating a landscape like a code that the reader can break: “All I want is for the echoes to find their origin…This is my affair with language (35).” The story sets out a sequence, but how we break the code depends on what we hide in our internal translations. Froude links his text to the body: “It is almost impossible to completely remove redundancies from a sequence. They are present even in coded strands of DNA (32).” Froude again here is turning sequences and codes back into the body and into the text and then allowing the reader to interpret and assemble.

If the first two sections, Type and Contexture, can be viewed as a template to reading patterns; then the last two sections, The Dashes and Oceanography, embody this thought. Earlier motifs will be stripped bare while new patterns and codes are under constant construction; it’s a straight drop from the initial dissent into Froude’s dizzying array of connections and correlations. The Dashes is described as a silent movie or a dream, and it vacillates between times describing characters that seem to shed and pick up masks: “In this instance, speaker becomes reader. Her name is Marjorie. God is a little bird (57).” Oceanography is subtitled anti-type, an antithesis to the beginning of the book, but it’s a place where familiar ideas and objects resurface only to morph into other characters or images. “Now I dream of myself as water (105),” Froude states, and like water, nothing is firm or solid. In this last section, Froude allows his text to sit on the page with gaping underlined holes. If Froude is testing the reader, then how will they pick up the pattern, and will it matter what gaps are filled and which are left empty?

Maybe Robert Duncan dreamed of Froude’s text when he said: The exclusive truth that defines any individual order, in what it excludes, may be seen as false to the larger fabric of the universe.1 Froude certainly rises to the challenge of executing this truism on the page manifesting exclusions and inclusions that keep the reader in a constant state of expectant returns. Fabric is a text that is subtle enough to consume in one sitting, but complex enough to engage the reader in a line by line dissection.

* * *

Megan Burns has a MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, YAWP Journal, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She has two chapbooks, Frida Kahlo: I am the poem (2004) and Framing a Song (2010) from Trembling Pillow Press. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! reading series.

Matthew Henriksen's Ordinary Sun reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin

2011-06-02T08:02:00.003-04:00

Matthew Henriksen
Ordinary Sun

ISBN: 978-0-9844752-2-3
Poetry / 120 pp. / pbk.
Black Ocean, 2011
$14.95

Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin

One of the most infamous images in Luis Buñuel's iconic film Un Chien Andalou is the scene in which a woman's eye is slit. Immediately, the omniscience of the narrator is shattered, opening the movie up to many interpretations and therefore many authors.

Similarly, Matthew Henriksen's Ordinary Sun opens with the line "An eye is not enough," splintering the reader's point of view before the text is even begun. "What I cannot find in the morning is most myself," concludes the third poem, further asserting the transparency of the narrator; the second line of the following poem reads "where I was beyond repair." Even the book's structure mimics that fragmentation, being comprised of many subtitled sections, including two from Henriksen's previous chapbook, Is Holy (horse less press).

In an interview with HTML Giant, Henriksen reveals that many of the poems were originally in prose and then lineated later, furthering the fractured nature of the book, the poems as once-whole paragraphs obliterated into linebreaks. In the same interview, Henriksen, describing his process, says "Just revise back and forth until no form but a formless certainty makes sense?"

And it does make sense in a book like Ordinary Sun. The anonymity of the narrator isn't a problem here—in fact, it's often an asset, for the images seep easily through the narrator's porous membrane of observation. In "Groves," the quiet self allows for the other images to rise above the din of ego:

The peach trees meant to melt under the sky,
which was the pale phantom of every sky I knew.
I questioned my arrival with the authority of amnesia.
Surely, one before me had scratched questions in the bark.

Here, the amnesiac "I" forgets itself among the melting peach trees and the pale phantoms of skies past. Many reviews have focused on the natural imagery present in Ordinary Sun, but most of the book was written in Brooklyn, according to Henriksen's wife, Katy, who wrote this essay about the Brooklyn pastoral. The Brooklyn pastoral is a concept well-deployed by Matthew Henriksen throughout these poems, wherein the so-called natural and the urban ring out with equal resonance. "Ghost" opens thus:

Heaven must subject itself to the city for
the city to lose function. A throng of sparrows
and one gutter pipe must be all that sing.
The multitudes wilt from their professions and,
thus, professing. Hollyhocks taking in light are merciless.

Here, the gutter pipe and the sparrows alike sing. Hollyhocks surround the city, the multitudes wilting (equating the urban masses with nature). In "Corolla in the Midden," Henriksen writes:

[…]where the world works out
what the world will between
fuel and flesh, as shape
precedes color, the Greek said,
but not on this lawn
without chemicals and rich down
in that city dirt. Each leaf denies
another nightmare in its scent.

Later in the same poem, Henriksen remarks that a snakeskin begins to resemble worm skin beneath a "yellow-amber spent bulb." "I see this kind of shit / often but not more often than I like," he goes on to say, implying that the symbiosis of the artificial and natural are everyday occurrences in the speaker's existence. In this poem, the world works itself out "between / fuel and flesh" and therefore between the technological and the corporeal. "When I don't sleep I can sleep / with crickets or trucks," "Corolla in the Midden" continues. In "Copse," there is a reference to "the helicopter's sigh." Here, Henriksen evokes Auden's sympathetic fallacy of city life in "In Memoriam, William Butler Yeats:"

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted[…]
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

To center some of Henriksen's antecedents with more precise geography, one also thinks of Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry:"

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

The "multitudes" of Henriksen, the "brokers" of Auden, and the "crowd" of Whitman ultimately amount to the same observation of the convergence of the urban and the natural. But Henriksen is more aligned with Whitman, for both poets question the concept of the self among the urban pastoral. Perhaps this is the true query of Henriksen's narrator posited as permeable—when in the urban landscape, one must take in both "natural" and "artificial" images with the same awe among throngs of others who absorb the same images, the same "kind of shit."

* * *

Erin Lyndal Martin is a poet, fiction writer, and music journalist, and is associate fiction editor at H_ngm_n. Her work has recently appeared in Typo, Diagram, and Bust.

Nathalie Stephens's We Press Ourselves Plainly reviewed by J. Mae Barizo

2011-05-20T06:37:00.001-04:00

Nathalie Stephens
We Press Ourselves Plainly

ISBN 978-0-9844598-0-3
5" x 7" | 120 pp. | pbk.
Nightboat Books 2010
$14.95

Reviewed by J. Mae Barizo

“I should like,” the narrator declares in We Press Ourselves Plainly “for my own name made illegible…” Indeed, we never learn the identity of the devastating speaker whose body and mind is the landscape on which violence unfolds. It is not a pleasant voice nor is it necessarily appealing, yet it enthralls in its immediacy, a distinctive intonation which begs the reader to devour it in its singular attempt to articulate the tragedy of history.

A 97-page book-length poem in the form of continuous blocks of text separated only by ellipses, Stephens endeavors neither to elucidate the source of violence nor to expose a chronological representation, therefore the fragments—some of which are complete sentences and others only partial slivers thereof—have the aesthetic of immutability and timelessness, a voice existing in the present moment yet also in the dredges of the past. “There is a room and there is a war” the speaker declares, yet the poem exists also outside of a room and concurrently in various locations: Berry Head (a coastal headland in the English Riviera), Paris, Hyde Park, Fallujah and Donostia (the Basque region of Spain). Perhaps there has been a war or there will be one. “The wars become one war” and “The wars are indistinguishable” Stephens writes, adding to the atemporality of the poem and the omnipresence of violence. The book opens with a quote by Franz Kafka: “Everyone carries a room about inside him.” which further puts forward that the location is the body itself which bears the carnage. The post-script furthers this idea of the body as an object of compression and cruelty, stating that one of “the active functions of this work is compression...of all the possible spaces pressed into that body, upon which the pressures of historical violence and its attendant catastrophes come to bear.”

This notion of compression, most prominently set forth in the book’s title, stems from the root of the word press, which harks from the early thirteenth century Old French noun presse which means “crowd, multitude.” The verb form also dates from the same century: preser, “push against”. Though Stephen’s book is titled “We Press Ourselves Plainly” (italics mine) the speaker in the book is a very convincing “I”; seldom does the “we” come into view, yet the overall sensation one derives from reading is a collective sense of calamity, as if the voice is representative for a multitude or nation, even if the experiences cited sound at once both ubiquitous and painfully intimate. “There was one country in particular…It became the particularity of every country...” Stephens writes. In other sections the voice seems to shuttle back and forth between a collective and the sentiments of a lover: “The bodies that fall unheld into the next day…I would like to kiss you…The field of vision narrows with the century…We stand on one side or another of the century”.

Notably, when the “we” comes to the forefront it is often in this context of being on one side or another. “We stand on one side or other of the glass”, “We stand each on one side or other of the crossing line”, “We stand each on one side or other of the monument and it is the same monument.” This motive repeats itself with the “we” being on one side or the other of violence (p.47), a door (p. 55), skin (p. 75), name (p. 81). The last time this motif appears is on p. 87, but the object is modified in the latter half of the sentence: “We stand each on one side or other of a pleasure and it is the same pressure” (italics mine). Here the word pressure takes on an agreeable, if not sexual connotation. This “being on one side or the other” subtly presents a type of political counterbalance which seems to be at threat throughout the entire text. The “We” seems to refer to a group of people on different but not necessarily opposing sides. Other times the “we” becomes the pronoun signaling a sexual relationship or perhaps the bond of two individuals forced into close confinement. “We slept in a single bed” (p. 11) or “We are naked for the moment…I grant you this one torment” (p. 15) and “We bear..Bury…Heart spilling blood into the weakened parts…Vomit it into me..” (p. 39).

This dichotomy between singularity and plurality, while rampant in Stephens’ book, neither weakens or undermines the integrity of the speaker, though rectitude seems to be the least of his/her concerns. Rather this contrariety points to the existential dilemma of identity and the self. “A book is less the appearance of a self than the disappearance, a grievance against self,” Stephens wrote in her 2007 book “The Sorrow and the Fast of It.” The brokenness of the language in “We Press Ourselves Plainly” insinuates a further fragmentation of the self:

…All the buried things arise…The rivers with the bodies of everyone…Each save the first one…It crawls over me…There was one language and this was the son…I refuse the offerings…There are flowers in a vase…I throw them down…We wake and are watchful…The bodies accrue and we name them…Small rashes that spread over the skins…Our languages become enlarged with the grief…

The body, in Stephen’s book, is continuously beaten, cut out or scourged by mysterious malaise like the “small rashes” in the above excerpt. Not only that, but the speaker is perpetually vomiting, as if in an attempt to purge itself of the trauma it has been subjected to. What happens to a speaker which is surrounded and inflicted with excruciating emotional and physical torture? The result for the reader is an erasure of the speaker and the self, so that the excess of remembrance that the speaker endures becomes a longing for blank space, an insistent forgetting or “a compression layered of other moments just like it.” (p. 23)

…Shorn and emaciated…I forget all of it…The disordered remembrances…There is knocking…It comes from inside…A strangulation…The tripes pulled up into the ribcage…A thick elastic band…Not breathing…

Stephens has been compared, and understandable so, with Jean Genet and Hélène Cixous, yet for me Stephens manipulation of language and form is heir to a long tradition of French (though Stephens is French-Canadian) poetic innovation that goes back to Francois Villon and makes itself manifest in contemporary writers such as Edmond Jabès and Claude Royet-Journoud. The form of “We Press Ourselves Plainly”, simultaneously litany and lament, brings to mind Alice Notley’s “The Descent of Alette” in its aesthetic and also its use of punctuation (Notley used quotation marks to separate fragments in much the same way as Stephens utilizes the ellipses). For me, however, the most obvious predecessor of the form that Stephens has chosen is the short dramatic monologue “Not I” by Samuel Beckett which features the same block text separated by ellipsis. “Not I” explores the emotional upheaval experienced by a woman after an unspecified traumatic event. In the performance of “Not I” a black space is illuminated only by a bright light focused on a human mouth, which utters in a frenetic tempo a logorrhea of angst-ridden sentences and sentence fragments, quite in the vein of an audible inner scream. This inner scream is what Stephens has articulated so skillfully.

* * *

J. Mae Barizo has reviewed for Sink Review, Matrix Magazine, Coldfront, and H_NGM_N.

Shira Dentz’s black seeds on a white dish reviewed by Jenny Gropp Hess

2011-05-20T06:23:00.002-04:00

Shira Dentz
black seeds on a white dish

Shearsman Books, 2010
ISBN: 1848611285
6"x9" | 90 pp | pbk. | $15

Reviewed by by Jenny Gropp Hess

Like most of us who reach a certain age, I’ve been close to people who have died. I’ve woken up in the night feeling as though an aneurism of grief has burst in my body and not known how to feel or write further into the sensation, though I understood it was comprised of many things: absence as the result of loss, the feeling of my own mortality, the sense that I could never, ever see that person again, and etcetera. But what to do with that ‘etcetera,’ I always wonder as my blood stills. Is that aneurism a body of its own, something I might slow and freeze-frame with the goal of finding a more understandable fact or, to quote Emerson in “Language,” “the terminus or circumference of the invisible world”?

Shira Dentz’s first full-length collection, black seeds on a white dish, allows me to witness, via a powerful, emotional command of word play and imagery, the slowing of the grief-aneurism. In writing about the death of her brother, Asher, and allowing the language-veins of that event to extend into the larger body of her life, Dentz leads us from loss to the beyond of loss, which is also, she reveals, the beyond of the imagination. Take, for example, “The Wind of Madness Has Broken a Skin”:

Something at the edge of danger
Turns into its opposite, and circles:

Frigid wind, now blue flame,
Curls a rind out of the night’s air.
Black space a springy trampoline.

The void is unusually still, like a lake
With nothing pulling on it.

Mania’s headdress
Is a thin, lilac gauze.
The back of her toes (as well as the cracks between)
Are wiggling ligatures disassembling.

Whirlwind upon whirwind upon whilwind,
A petal falls off the black-mum sky.

“Something” with unfixable qualities is rapidly approaching, but it isn’t abstract in its changing; it rolls threateningly from wind to flame, finally shirking a semblance of wholeness by becoming a rind. Here Dentz is slowing her emotional sensation, seeing it, aware and in control on the trampoline of black space. Then the sensation moves forward out of its unusual void, to recode the ‘something’—once the threat of her own grief—as her own creative and emotive ‘mania.’ Pushing through the void, she finds herself wielding only language to walk us vividly to the limit of the image she can’t fully form. Inspired by doubt and vagueness, Dentz’s manic body is one that dissembles and counters the soundness of its physical unity; it is a body that both produces verse and recoils from it: “Whirlwind upon whirwind upon whilwind”—two nonexistent winds spin out of a real one. And as language comes apart, the funereal mum begins to come apart as well, leading to a mutation of Mania’s body:

Mania’s many heads wheel around.
A spider sticks to her mind. Not something she knows.
She’s only hanging the receiver from the pay phone on the windiest hill.

As Dentz’s identity simultaneously collapses and reassembles into an uncomfortable and undeniable many-headed oneness, we witness her torrid relationship with language yet again, her mania driving her further and further away from the human form. In That This, Susan Howe writes: “Somewhere I read that relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and develops its referent without destroying or changing it—the way a cobweb catches a fly.”(13) But Dentz’s associations, in this otherworldly poem-place where there is no clear visual referent, are different. If the poet’s mind is a cobweb (which it is indeed in the poem “Numbness and shade”), it’s not catching a fly for sustenance; instead it’s got a spider—which ostensibly has the ability to spin the web—stuck to it. Thus we have the poet trapped in her own web (language) in the process of developing its “referent.” In this world, the poet threatens to feast on herself. Yet this risk is an image-giving one: Mania had a body for a moment, and the whole sky was the flower of death. We’re shown not only the grieving, craving mind’s body but also, via language, its universe; we’re able to inhabit the poem’s landscape. Then the speaker awakens and we realize the whole poem was a dream:

The day after is colorless as Antarctica. Trees static at forty-five degrees.
Just before sunset, the landscape straightens.

The pink that rubbed off my bedspread onto my pants
Has rubbed off on a cloud.
Chinese sounds are snow shovels.
French vowels, water sullied the color of cheap topaz.

Toward the end of the book, in the poem “Here,” Dentz reaffirms that this imagistic universe, one of dream and reality, resides all in herself: “My own thoughts, thumping in me like a heart.” But Dentz plays a humble god, giving language its dues in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The pink that “rubbed off on a cloud” reappears:

When verbs first rose to leave, it was for periods. I had no idea the
          matter was a part of speech when
arms could be tables; the crest of a wave, gooey.
To begin with, they didn’t just fly off;          no,

they were a flutter of birds.
Gradually there was no distance between shade of periods, and the
          stolid period itself.
Their lapses spread to clauses, picking entire sentences clean like
          leaves from trees; dry looks hairy
against a background of pink winter sky
Every vista brought on a question.
Imagine being a kid in a playground and the sky between everything.

Dentz owes her sky to language, “the sky between everything,” yet later in the poem she recognizes the conundrum and risk of language play, writing: “A letter like the sky seems to stop being a thing once it’s no longer / blue.” Again the “black-mum sky” dissembles before us; Dentz’s explorations lead us into worlds hopelessly estranged from our own world, the world in which her brother died. Her poems ask us to question the act of eulogizing: If we can’t recreate the world with language, how can we properly eulogize a body that’s passed into it? Dentz recognizes this difficulty, and thus she pays homage to language, to the fragile yet potent world of the image.

Indeed, the book contains five sections, each seeming to work more and more towards Dentz’s creation, for the reader, of her world of language, of her use of that world as therapeutic and, perhaps, less and less futile. In the fifth and final section, in “Cornucopia,” the sky takes on a more composite feel in terms of authorship:

This morning on the subway
I was trying to twist my life
to fit me, a delicate activity.
I saw the Tree

in the Garden of Chaos.
Then, my small brother’s old ghost and I,
swinging high in its branches, the sky a book,
and my feet turning its pages to the blanks after the end.

So the end result is a craft, separate from Dentz. Yet she’s not talking about twisting a poem—she’s talking about twisting life. Representation twists life, and this can be either a beautiful or marred thing; at the moment, Dentz is unsure whether or not she will honestly succeed. “Autobiography,” from the book’s fourth section, also speaks to this notion:

I want to say my life has
been a pipecleaner, beautifully twisted,
in tandem with others like it.

Or, not beautiful, a known-by-name shape;
nothing to do but let the form of things take over.

Of desire, Maurice Blanchot says: “Desire: let everything be more than everything, and still be all.” Dentz, in “Like the signature of a bald tree stump,” follows suite in her own way: “…white text sinks into water / .sduolc eht htiw derhs I // Desire like the wind out back that rustles the leaves. / I’d rather play with a ghost than all alone.” Dentz writes the ghost into the landscape and the landscape becomes her reflection; the ghost becomes old, aging solely with her and finding a stillness only in the poem. This is not an easy process, this 90+ page mixing of the specter with the real, this attempted expansion of the perceivable. One can feel Dentz struggling with the potential of her imagery as she writes lines like the following: “Fear I’m of a species that opens over and over, withering before it blossoms.” Her project is to persevere in poetic form, and even the titles of her poems give this struggle away: “Chantilly Lace,” “Origami,” “Celerity,” “Babble.” The result: still lives of energy, “black seeds on a white dish.”

* * *

Jenny Gropp Hess lives in Tuscaloosa, in case you ever want to find her. Her writing resides in or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Unsaid, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, American Letters & Commentary, Parcel, PANK, The Hat, and others. She attends the University of Alabama, where she recently finished a stint as editor of Black Warrior Review.

Jennifer L. Knox's The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway reviewed by Kat Good-Schiff

2011-05-17T10:12:00.001-04:00

[Best poetry book cover in 2010? --Eds.]

Jennifer L. Knox
The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway

Bloof Books, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9826587-1-0
84 pp. | $15.00

Reviewed by Kat Good-Schiff

As should be expected, much is strange and unnatural in The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, the third book of poems by Jennifer L. Knox. Murderers, opera singers, and coyotes rub shoulders across the varied, yet equally wild, psychic terrains of desert, suburbia, and silent movies. In the poem “Cars,” we coast downhill with the speaker and her father at night in a quietly hurtling truck, unseen animals lurking just beyond the headlights. Many of these poems have a similarly ominous and thrilling momentum. Like a freeway accident, it’s impossible not to stare at the narrator of “The Clean Underwear/Ambulance Thing,” who declares, “When I was 12, I had sex with my / stepmother. It was fantastic, / and not a bit weird.”

Many of the poems contain elements of good fiction: suspense, catharsis, and memorable characters that are at once unlikely and unquestionable. The emotional range of the book is dizzying. One of the more reflective, less narrative poems, “The Cliffs above Oswald,” explores a psychological landscape of “waist-high bramble / … the thorn sea that has / swallowed us” and “seems to seal up / behind us as we struggle by.” In contrast, the preceding poem, “You’re F*cking Crazy,” is the extreme opposite of such gentle witness and features these rock-star opening lines:

I found him in the backyard at midnight
wearing a foam rubber sun costume—no tights
or underwear on—one ball hanging out the leghole
like a jawbreaker in a baby sock.

These poems burn like road rash and are tenacious as gravel under the skin. The book combines the transgressive dramatic monologues and fantastical narrative poems for which Knox is best known with some unabashed memoir, and the interplay of fiction and nonfiction works well. The honesty of the memoir lends the fiction a deeper quality, and the outrageousness of the fiction increases the surreal quality of the nonfiction since both have been crafted by the same brave imagination.

In a 2008 interview in Bookslut, Knox said, “I’m interested in people who do and say stupid, insane or compulsive things, and finding respect for them despite that. I’m not interested in pointing out how wrong people are … it’s way too easy—like watching Cops.” In several of Driveway’s more difficult poems, she musters an impressive amount of empathy for unsavory characters, often writing in the voice of a male persona who has committed a violent crime. In “Saving Her Wasted Breath,” the narrator drives the getaway car while wearing “a new white suit (pulled the tags / off with my teeth),” and his accomplice rides in the trunk:

Mongoloid Todd’s a tougher fit—the gate was locked
at Len’s Big and Tall, so I threw his blood-soaked duds off
the pier and he climbed in the trunk bare-ass—been there
two hours. When I gas up, I’ll cop us both T-shirts and shorts.

Visceral and vivid, the third-person narrative poems are even more compelling given the incredible names and situations Knox has come up with. In “Sling and Moley,” the title characters find endless riches at the beach after Sling inhales the sea, leaving “[p]earls, / plastic, and cans … on the sand space / where ocean used to be.” Mike and Lou (“Nice ‘N Easy Medium Natural Ash Brunette”) attend “a Grow Your Own Cocaine class at the Y” before they “make love like animals, for hours, as some / wildly expensive thing in the oven burned.” Like all good fantasy, these poem-stories are ridiculous yet emotionally true and therefore entirely plausible.

The prose poem sequence “Cars” is a coming of age story set in a suburb on the edge of a desert as one car after another, along with too much alcohol and drugs, bring about a string of near-death experience for the teenaged narrator. The cars become stand-ins for the miraculously resilient self:

I blew a tire coming home from a Dead show in L.A., but because I was tripping I kept on driving … The car drove off the cliff, turned in the air, and landed 30 feet below… I ended up in a ball behind the passenger seat with nothing but a tiny scratch on my hip. Oh, how I mourned those shoplifted pants the EMTs cut off me.

The girl’s father is equally unpredictable:

I could never predict when he would get angry. But since his happiness was rarer, maybe I should say I could never predict when he would be happy.

Ultimately she believes the circumstances were skewed against her: “Every car he gave me to drive … ‘malfunctioned’ in a major way.” As father becomes car and daughter becomes driver, they hurtle down the road and she fights for both control and understanding: “ ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he’d say. ‘Why?’ ‘Because this is fairly dangerous.’ ”

So much struggle, danger, and mess transpire in these poems that it is fitting for the most tender of them, placed near the end of the collection, to put forth the act of shoveling dirt as a demonstration of affection. “Love Poem: One Ton of Dirt” is a story of horticultural triumph over a barren city lot. It portrays incautious joy (“we are badass with shoulders sore, lower backs no / doubt rainbows of pain on the morrow”) and hard-earned hope that “this’ll be the Mother / of all happy endings.” Such love is gritty and delicious.

With so much driving in these poems, one can imagine the “hidden driveway” of the book’s title as an image of home that, in the askew world of this book, might seem the stuff of legend. Many of the poems’ characters seem doomed never to find it, yet the book’s arc is hopeful. Lest we get too comfortable, it is equal parts cozy dream and accident waiting to happen.

* * *

Kat Good-Schiff is the author of two chapbooks, Curl (a finalist for the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize) and East of North, and her work has been published in various journals including Eclipse, PANK, and Twelve Stories. She lives in western Massachusetts.

D.J. Dolack’s 12 Poems reviewed by Raina Lauren Fields

2011-05-17T09:18:00.002-04:00

D.J. Dolack, 12 Poems

D.J. Dolack
12 Poems
Eye For An Iris Press, 2010
6.5×5.5, 28pp., handbound

Reviewed by Raina Lauren Fields

I think I picked the perfect day to read D.J. Dolack’s chapbook, 12 Poems, a collection of handmade: hand-stamped, hand-stapled, hand-folded, and hand-pressed poems, the first collection from Dolack since 2005’s The Sad Meal. I read the book during a rainy afternoon in early March—the rain tapping lightly against the windows, water funneling down the drain pipes and out in the puddles in the alleyway, a slow, continued flow of weather. Perhaps a better time to read Dolack’s poetry would have been in the evening or at dawn, when I imagine most of his poems are set, under the “low shelf haze” (I THOUGHT WE DISCUSSED THIS ALREADY).

If calling Dolack’s poems romantic is an insult in current American poetry, then I apologize in advance. They are romantic and quiet, but full of energy like bursts of “sick confetti” (RIGHT NOW: / FEELS LIKE:) They are sexy. That is, if you’re into unanswered voicemails (I THOUGHT WE DISCUSSED THIS ALREADY), silken letters (NYC POSTCARDS (FROM UNION HALL)), and “years of dog-eared pages on the shelves” (WHAT THEY WANT ME TO TELL YOU). There are poems when the general caresses of love becomes specific—where things enter a sort of slow-pan, zoom, and pause:

“The way you use only one ear for the phone.

A canned scene amidst the laughter.”
(ELEGY FOR POETRY’S EFFIGY; ENTROPY)

There is an overwhelming sense of intimacy in the poetry. Light plays an important role in almost every poem. These poems are filled with low light and whispers, stolen speech in bedrooms and bar rooms:

…a low

yellow moon outside
sipping back the sky.
(ELEGY FOR POETRY’S EFFIGY; ENTROPY),

…the bar room light dims
and walls come over us…
(SELF-PORTRAIT WITH INTERIOR MONOLOGUE),

“Like the curtain letting in
a thick little light,

close though not yet a halo.
(HOW A YEAR IS BORN).

In the first section of the book, light is never fully present, often clouded by something—the sky, the walls. Perhaps it is because “The light is one obscene gesture” (NYC POSTCARDS (FROM UNION HALL)), and its presence must be thwarted.

And in the same way that light is important, so is naming, or the role of names. But what is the point of naming, especially to an unnamed speaker? Is it to make what is unknown, known? To make what is unreal or imagined, real? To make what is foreign and distant, yours? Is it to foster a kind of ownership? For Dolack, discussing naming seems to create a closeness, but simultaneously helps him to understand an absence, an acute emptiness, to identify:

The light is one
obscene gesture:

people who don’t
look like their names.
(NYC POSTCARDS (FROM UNION HALL)),

The sky above all things reaches

and comes in
on a pattern of light

no less trusting than dusk
dusting our legs, saying a name

in spite of names.
(RIGHT NOW: / FEELS LIKE:),

and “There’s a nickname up against the pillowcase…” (HOW A YEAR IS BORN).

In the second section of the chapbook, which includes the poem, “WHAT THEY WANT ME TO TELL YOU,” those things that were hinted at—light, love, epiphany, understanding, are acted upon. These actions move from the previous whispers, are announced in litany, “I love you”—even once declaring:

You might say I love you, for Christ sake –

I love you out through the back window
down the fire escape

to the neighbor’s yard,

I love you
how the elderly love bakeries –

in the way they say cake.

For Dolack this is the equivalent of fireworks or skywriting, “I love you this much” in the afternoon sky. Now, the rooms are no longer shadowed, but filled “with so much light.” While this is true, the reader is still left in the clutches of generality. That is, left without a specific idea of the relationship or role of those within the poems. It seems as if Dolack is purposely subverting the reader’s expectations of getting to know these people or the situations that are presented within, which is why the final verses of the poem would somewhere that seems unexpected:

Something is not right when the clouds are like this
and everything is clear.

Night is coming in,

Or you are moving towards it.

Sugar granules
under your bare feet, roman candles

in the distance become.

I applaud Dolack for not ending in the easy space of optimism. There is something ominous, something real. And there’s something funny about much of this poetry, isn’t there?

I love you
how the elderly love bakeries –

in the way they say cake.
(WHAT THEY WANT ME TO TELL YOU)

Or perhaps, it’s the way “people mark … their lives by epiphanies.” Or perhaps it’s the fact that life is “one of those things that could go on and on.” Perhaps it, too, is a thing we writers are all “condemned to describe” (NYC POSTCARDS). The way things really are.

* * *

Raina Lauren Fields is currently enrolled in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. She has published poetry in Callaloo, Gargoyle, PANK, Diverse Voices Quarterly, 5x5, San Pedro River Review, Breadcrumb Scabs, and other literary journals. She has also published a poetry review in Rattle and is a current editor of Toad and previous General Editor of Creative Writing for The Minnesota Review.

Lucy Ives's Anamnesis reviewed by Broc Rossell

2011-03-04T14:00:00.064-05:00

Lucy Ives
Anamnesis
Slope Editions, 2009
ISBN 9780977769841
Pbk., 83 pp.

Reviewed by Broc Rossell

Anamnesis and The Harmonograph

In an essay written to accompany his recent exhibit at the Reykjavik Art Museum, regarding the relationship between a viewer and a procedural object (such as the waterfalls he built beneath New York City's bridges last year), Olafur Eliasson remarks that one alternative to the ageing Euclidian conception of space is waves. Waves, argues Eliasson, are a more helpful concept for understanding how an individual in all her complexity responds to and interacts with a work of art which itself is responding to and interacting with nature. "These can be waves of information, but also the communication of information through physical waves such as microwaves, long waves and frequency. Electricity is a kind of wave, as are my words, when they leave my mouth as condensed air, spreading radiantly, entering your ears. Also light."¹

Lucy Ives' debut collection of poetry, Anamnesis, is a procedural object, a work of art that seeks to render visible the waves of thought, perception, and revision that, together, comprise the written poem. These waves are amplified by the book's constraint; in her introduction to the Slope Prize winning collection, judge Maxine Chernoff notes that the poems "are in a constant state of revision, engendered by two refrains, the imperative 'Write' and its counter-gesture, 'Cross this out.'" These gestures contrast the third imperative, that of the speaker, the voice that is neither written nor crossed out. The effect is that multiple intentions or voices appear on the same page:

Write, "What you fear is near you"
Cross this out
Write, "What you fear is faraway"
Beautifully so
Yes, also, it is hidden
Write, "And never came near, this long decade"
Cross this out

These multiple imperatives insist that the reader participate in the process of "writing" "the poem," so that the final version of the poem is not on the page of a book, but something implied or imagined: not only the dialogue you and the speaker have imagined for each other, but what you, the reader, have read, written, and erased. The act of "reading" Ives' book leads the reader to perform an oscillation both through the text and above it, creating a relationship analogous to the three-dimensional images traced by the pendulums of a harmonograph.

While Oulipo was founded fifty years ago (I can't help but think of Marcel Benabou's Why I Have Not Written Any Of My Books when reading Anamnesis), and conceptual art has been an institution of the visual arts for more than forty years, it has only recently entered into the bloodstream of American poetry. Noah Eli Gordon's Inbox comes to mind as a rare example of a collection wholly dedicated to its concept, and of course there are the fine adventurers at Coach House Press and beyond to the north. More typically, American experimental poets have used "concept" as a generative constraint: Gillian Conoley's Plot Genie, for instance, employs a found "plot generating device" to both propel poems away from and return into each other into a kind of carnivalesque; and poetic variations, themed long poems, or poem sequences on a variation of one, are becoming ubiquitous. Perhaps the most likely comparison is of Anamnesis to Dan Beachy-Quick's This Nest, Swift Passerine. Both collections attempt a kind of extreme presence, a urgent drive to expose the very impulse to write, and do so though similar tropes (though Beachy-Quick, not striving to engage the reader to the truly radical degree Ives is, strikes out lines for us). Anamnesis, however, resists comparison. Its fusion of the modes of the utterance and address is unique.

The simple concept Ives has chosen for her collection of poems is ingenious. Anamnesis belongs not among stacks of experimental poetry, but with the ambitions of conceptual visual artists who sought to replace the object with the assumptions and intentions behind it: Rauchenberg's erasures of de Kooning or Ceci n'est pas une pipe are closer to the kind of infinite aesthetics of Anamnesis than those of contemporary poetry. Ives has replaced the book with the act of reading and response. The book does not become the book, does not become itself, until we engage with it. For the elegance of its iteration alone, it merits our attention.

And yet there are also beautiful and evocative lyrical turns, which we are not instructed to write or cross out, moments that exist independent of the reader, apart from our experience, and thus rendered powerfully vulnerable and delicate:

I had forgotten I was in love
It took a longer time to be remembered
Elsewhere
In the world
All this is just writing about what has been lost
By a person who wanted no things
About whom nothing is known save
What remains published

It is as if while walking through one of Eliasson's glowing, mirrored hallways, we were to find someone's pocketbook: a trace of a person left behind, a license and some snapshots, an small inventory of abandoned memories.

"Anamnesis" is one of those richly evocative words whose multiple meanings make it greater than the sum of its parts. The term in ancient Greek, ἀνάμνησις, translates literally as the "loss of forgetfulness." Socrates used it to describe his theory wherein all the knowledge of the universe is contained within our souls and lost in the shock of childbirth; accordingly, we spend our lives attempting to regain the perfect knowledge we have lost. And, somehow, in modern medicine the term is used to describe a strong immune response. Together these definitions suggest a hope of the author that reading this book, and engaging with it in the way it offers, one might find a new vitality, an awakening of the spirit in the rediscovery of the memories that make us who we are. That the speaker writes phrases and memories that cannot be revised, that do not invite revision, only heightens the contrast of the vast majority of memories that are constantly undermined by recollection itself.

It makes sense that formal innovation and experimentation became American poetry's preoccupation in the twentieth century, after thousands of years of rhapsodizing on love, death, God, nature, and consciousness. From Pound's fiery Cantos to Steven's orbital meditations to Objectivist breaths into Ashbury's constant digressions, our poetic tradition of the past hundred years has largely been concerned with language's ability to represent what the mind cannot render without it – with how far language can take us into the outer reaches of understanding.

But in being more concerned with form and formal innovation than content (that fraught and perilous word) today's golden age of "experimental" poetry also finds itself troubled by a pervasive lack of tone, and of voice. Ives has found one answer to this problem in conceptualism, which escapes many longstanding issues of form and formalism by acting within constraints. Remarkably, in writing within a constraint that speaks directly to the act of writing and (more essentially) of revision, she has also found a mode of enormous lyrical amplitude, a mode both highly mannered and profoundly intimate. In its ability to invest the intellectual beauty of conceptual art with the ethos of a shared, communal intimacy, Anamnesis is an act of alchemy.

_______________________
1 Eliasson, Olafur. “Your Engagement has Consequences.”In Experiment Marathon: Serpentine Gallery. Edited by Emma Ridgway. Reykjavik: Reykjavik Art Museum, 2009: 18-21.

* * *

Broc Rossell is a writer from California. He earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Harvard Review, Volt, and elsewhere

K. Lorraine Graham's Terminal Humming reviewed by Joe Atkins

2011-03-04T12:27:00.000-05:00

K. Lorraine Graham
Terminal Humming
Edge Books, 2009
ISBN: 9781890311315
Paperback
$16

Reviewed by Joe Atkins

There’s many ways to describe the poems of K. Lorraine Graham’s Terminal Humming—Gurlesque, flarf, procedural, postmodern—and likely most of them would fit in some fashion, accommodating a singular aspect of the wide range of voices, sources, and techniques within this particular appropriation of language, this particular poetics. Yet, within the pages of this compelling volume, the visions of circulation, connective tissues gone awry, there’s a sense that semantics have shifted into a collage of relativism, and what a wondrous multitude, that. Which is not to say there isn’t an underlying truth here, however elusive this truth may be, but that as the language slides from one amazing line to another, one moment to the next, the real substance is actually contained in this entertaining, leaping action.

In the fist section of the three larger poems, “If This Isn’t An Interview I Don’t Know What to Say,” the poems are quick bursts of broken thoughts. These small stanzaic moments, either titled by single lines or summarily-accented, render a fleeting autonomy before juxtaposing the next stanzaic body below. The overt presence of the tilde in between stanzas facilitates this circuit movement—the tilde indicating equivalency or similarity between two values in mathematics.

The Way We Boil

Living motion any place is some
where else to be written in, a fundraising
fax blow-job, a particular strand of un
interrupted programmatic policy making room
for messing around on the copy machine
in lieu of driving to the park in snow to
hold someone else’s mittens in the
middle of the day on a Tuesday.

~

Culture collection Staff Meeting

Academic lab possession obstacle transfer
q.p.q. dangerous radical NAM germ
commerce. Compliance control attempts
to harmonize sensitive confidence and
flesh. Devil in the undercut. Report uniform
dual use denial, radical party agents subject
to aligned malevolent non-elements. (36)

And the next, and final poem of the section:

Nuclear Socialism Staff Meeting

Fortunately there is, embedded in a forest,
not a bomb but a peaceful nuclear device. Driving recognition
in a cycle background of soft mining
paths to obviate risk. Embarking partition.

~

Ops Mounting Dialogue Staff Meeting

Ideas suited to the life
of themselves. The announcement
of position or potential position.
Where would the literal be if
I didn’t love? And might the
physical being in-place as desk
or bed or laundry room (monitor
glow in cheek) change if building
alternative families was not possible
without always an excuse for forgiving? (37)

There’s a conscious critique here of material—call it the real, call it things. This critique moves from the business world of a sexualized office setting, displaced through telecommuting, faxes of genitalia that exist prior to the plethora of online pornography, both of which co-opt the physical intimacy of actually touching another human being, subverting all of the snow-storm obstacles that real people actually face, with intimacy-tech. This thought is brought round to poetic concerns in the second poem, “Ideas suited to the life / of themselves.” In the distance we hear “No ideas but in things,” now come full circle; those things contain our ideas, now ever more difficult to access, shipped across the world for consumption: no ideas but in endless exchange. “And might the physical being in-place as desk / or bed or laundry room…” The breaking apart of the physical is also the Eros of technology—or specifically the rapid advancement of capitalism:

~

Automatic shredder joy.

~

At least headhunters understand pain. If it doesn’t blow up, I’m not
going to write about it. (17)

The tilde, persistent throughout this collection, is a metonymic device, relational proximity serves as our means of movement, of exchange. All values are equivalent, flat, superficial, slipping into one another. Fits of convulsions, then stillness; an erratic and rhythmic field. Technological innovations which rip apart whole documents, coincide with xenophobic online dialogues and neoliberal bureaucratic middle men connecting labor with employers, shaving a bit off the top of each neatly placed hourly wage—class tension slowly coming to a boil, “The subject of an essay on scrounging”(24). Ultimately we’re left with an intense hub of things colliding, a murmur which is unceasing despite the announcements of destinations and arrivals, allusions and sources, information flowing in and out. This is the terminal humming as noise, and what it signifies is a long path where the humming becomes a terminal symptom of the forces which bring so much confusion, fear, abstract hope, and monotony. Graham treats us to the sweet subjective torment of Io in the digital age (goodbye Argus Panoptes, viral times call for viral measures), “I’m a lily-white fuck toy of the patriarchy:”(69). And she poses a direct, darkly entertaining image of a contemporary kettle primed to scream, “Language / as angry form”(79).

* * *

Samuel Amadon's Like A Sea reviewed by Joe Atkins

2011-03-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

Samuel Amadon
Like A Sea
Iowa Poetry Prize Series
University of Iowa Press, 2010
6"x8.5", 100 pp., pbk

Reviewed by Joe Atkins

To get an idea of what a non-flarf, non-conceptual version of appropriation looks like, one need go no further than Samuel Amadon’s Like A Sea. The collection has a wide range of samplings sprinkled across the lines, and, since we’re such big fans of the list, here they are in all their illumination: J.D. Salinger, Pound, Walter Benjamin, Jane Kenyon, Robert Lowell, Eugenio Montale, Joris-Karl Huysmans, EA Robinson, Primo Levi, Beckett, Jackson Mac Low’s diastic reading process, Eugene O’Neil, Berryman, an appropriation of Olson appropriating Norbert Wiener, and last but not least Wikipedia. More than just a recounting of the notes, the above list provides the what of the book, it’s primary apparatus.

Effectively remixing provides the answer to how one poet might engage and simultaneously acknowledge the ghosts of those writers, thinkers, poets before her/him. As such, this recycling of language is a viable option that presents a curious set of constraints and possibilities. While the disparity between some of these figures, Mac Low vs. Lowell, Huysmans vs. Benjamin, among others we do not have the time to untangle seems antagonistic at best, there are a few similarites. Though most, but not all, of these figures converge in a single poem, “Nine At Nine,” we would point out three connections: the conflict of religion and modernism, the idyllic form of nature vs. that of the city, and the authors’ use of procedural writing. In the two former connections we find a correlation between these writers and the recursive subject of Hartford, Connecticut which Amadon narrows in upon; in the latter the larger process of Like A Sea finds a historical precedent.

The appearance of Hartford and its multiplicities is represented through the cyclical forms of the poems titled “Each H,” each numbered in its appearance. These poems are taken from Amadon’s chapbook Each H, and between them sit similarly styled works that depend on shifters and syntactical structures to up-end normative grammatical order so that new potential meanings might emerge from the abandoned forms, like so many rebuilt cities. In this fashion Amadon remixes even himself:

EACH H (VII)

I could not sound like anyone to anyone,
but often meant to almost (as
rocking is from weaving) sound

local, as there should be more
local, I started saying here, how-
ever I sounded saying

I can be here again, saying it over
in a way so it piled, in a way
piling, as we cannot see it

ending, where it is from, the reason for
it is in fact frightening
to hear so much anywhere in anyone. (39)

The importance of sounding like anyone, one of the authors noted above, himself, the multiple selves that we carry within our thoughts, and how all of this accrues, piles, is important to this work, just as the multiple appearances of Hartford are. This need for autonomy emerges immediately and consistently throughout the text: “I could not sound like anyone but me”(3); “That it could sound like him”(48); “That it could sound like us?”(49). The self blurs into the collective, into the other, and as such we find a subjectivity brimming with fragments, small pieces that fit together to form a whole, the way a city elusively takes shape in the collective consciousness of its residents. Or, how a writer might find ones ephemeral self emerging from the texts of others, “You mean, after us. He’s after us?/ No, he’s us. Well, then he’s in the wind”(35).

Time changes a landscape, seasonally, it was built up, it is abandoned. This dichotomy of past and present haunts both Amadon as poet figure and Hartford as place. Specifically the was/is binary is troubled over in “Notes From the Hartford Poems.” Later this past tense action confronts objects merging into a bodily metaphor:

__________When I broke the window

latch, when I jammed the door, when I
took to cusp, when I opened in my lip. (40)

Mundane objects continually obfuscate an idyllic natural setting in this verse, and/or greater cognitive thought. Or, possibly more importantly, how this happens within a normative grammar until confronted:

NORTH OF PROVIDENCE

Listen to the heaters & think
if they’d rise to the ceiling, we’d wish
all our objects to lift themselves

as noisily. How we live in a world
that moves without attention. Put
bells to walls. Then don’t listen. Go out

into isn’t that just a brighter not
thinking things through? (42)

There are many ambiguities and nuances to this remarkable book and it is completely worthy of the Iowa Poetry Prize. What Amadon is able to accomplish as a whirlwind of parts that float in and out of each other to form a whole is a precise display of rhythmic and technical ability. His verse never comes to rest on any one thing, leaving all parts of the fluid experience tangentially related to a variegated set of times and places. Not a poetry of the mind, not verse auspiciously concerned with circling in upon itself, but parts small and large, little fragments of language that emerge from the currents of subjectivity, the seas of history to be dusted off and reconsidered anew.

* * *

Travis Cebula's Under the Sky They Lit Cities reviewed by Nancy Stohlman

2011-03-04T10:50:00.001-05:00

Travis Cebula
Under the Sky They Lit Cities
BlazeVOX Books, 2010
Poetry
ISBN: 9781609640255
Paperback, 93 pages
$16

Reviewed by Nancy Stohlman

In his debut full-length collection of poetry, Under the Sky They Lit Cities, Travis Cebula advises: “Everyone in the city should ride the bus at least once/viscosity of a community is best measured by that stick”. From the first poem in this collection to the last, you understand that the narrator’s relationship with “city” is not one of aloof pontifications, or distant idealisms/condemnations. No, traveling through the pages of this slim volume is akin to traversing a city on foot, an anthem both to decay and the resilient life that rises among debris.

In Cebula’s hands, ossified benches look like “driftwood” or the “staved bones of an orphan” and “tattered kids pranced like royalty/their flannel shirts dangled tuxedo tails.” In the poem “Agnostic” (and not all of the poems are named) he says: “Not intending to condemn, I have/demolished the beauty of boulevards.” He later laments, “Rampant cynicism seems to/overrun my faith in alleys as playgrounds.” But he avoids the allure of judgment or polemics. Like any intimate relationship, Cebula’s relationship with City is complex, exhilarating, tragic, hypocritical, and ever changing—he frames her smog, he frames her chess tables, he frames her snowbanks, he frames her railyards. Because Cebula resists the urge to pit urban against rural, to condemn or glorify the object of his obsessions, his complicated relationship with City gains more credibility, his poetry winding us through a landscape of tragic beauty. Even Cebula says, “Don’t even try to figure out which side I’m on. From a/practical standpoint/I promise judging this is a waste of time.”

I was halfway through his “Etude for Cities (as seen by the sky)” before I realized that he had omitted the letter ‘A’ from the entire sequence. But this is not just a poetic sleight of hand, a trick to show off Cebula’s virtuosity. No, the subtle ingenuity created with the absence of “A” in this sequence of 13 etudes leaves the poetry’s “E’s” and “I’s” gritty and hard, words become visceral, like the clinking of a steel mill or the screeching of rails, the tinkling of store bells and streets of commerce, brick factories, the pounding of iron—implicating the reader into the hardness of the city.

This nod to erasure make one wonder, too, what else Cebula might feels has gone missing? Certain themes emerge in the work: “Zoos are just parks now, with taller fences,” he says, and instantly an elephant at the zoo becomes a woman longing for escape: “Dull rage at beatings/that faded years ago--/her pacing tamps ellipses into dirt.” Cebula shyly admits that “I wouldn’t have the courage to stray from/lights that haunt my days as well as nights.” Is Cebula—and by proxy, the reader, too—a tormented, willing, addicted prisoner of City? Or urban scenes of Christmas: “Mistletoe with plastic berries and a red ribbon/in a cellophane pouch/nativity scenes set out on cardboard with green felt,” complete with Santa heads that nod fa-la-la-la-la. He would seem to be condemning the dichotomy of Christmas spirit among the pollution of the city, and yet he caresses a lamppost, “loving the feel of alloy under my fingertips.”

Toward the end of the book Cebula’s narrator mumbles a mantra: “I believe in the tiptoeing heron/thin legs of willow sticks/knobbly knees and all/I believe in the creosote that drips/liquid, sticky in the sun Oh/ let me believe, too in the/stumbling, the shuffling people/on the sidewalks.” Perhaps Cebula’s narrator, myopic and enmeshed, doesn’t realize that his poetry has indeed become a hymn to those shuffling people, those abandoned steel rails and brick factories, those old prospectors rolling dice, that concrete river, foaming like a shaken can of Coors. For to write about such a landscape with such intimacy and complexity reveals Cebula’s true love even as he seems to deny it. Only the reader, with a reader’s generous distance, can see the real Cebula, framed against those streets, a tormented lover, longing both for escape and also for those dirty arms to wrap him forever in her dilapidated beauty, her gritty, poignant love.

* * *

Nancy Stohlman’s novel, Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009), was recently nominated for a Colorado Book Award. Her other books include Live From Palestine (South End Press, 2003) and Fast Forward: The Mix Tape (FF>>Press, 2010), the latest in an annual series of flash fiction released by Fast Forward Press, which Stohlman also co-founded. She’s currently on the writing faculty at Arapahoe Community College and the Community College of Denver. She’s hoping all this writing business will eventually make her enough money to pursue her real dream of becoming a pirate.

Renee Gladman's Event Factory reviewed by Paula Koneazny

2011-03-01T09:08:00.002-05:00

Renee Gladman
Event Factory
Dorothy, a publishing project, 2010
ISBN 978-0-9844693-0-7
Paperback, 136pp., $16

Reviewed by Paula Koneazny

An unnamed protagonist arrives in a fictional city-state called Ravicka where she meets people, has adventures, and then departs without, seemingly, really having been anywhere or accomplished anything. The opening epigraph from Samuel Beckett serves well as a compass : "something has to happen, to my body . . . which never . . . wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter . . . the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images." Magnifying and minifying aptly describe the challenges encountered by both narrator and reader. A visit to Ravicka becomes a tour of a land of smoke and mirrors, a Through the Looking Glass experience in which the story is as much a shape-shifter as is the sexual self. Its hard-to-pin-down quality doesn't, however, make Renee Gladman's short novel Event Factory a flawed narrative.

In Ravicka, the color yellow is pervasive; sometimes tender or empty, at others, more a green or brown. When Ravickians are healthy, they breathe yellow in and out. It's the color of the sun, but perhaps not our sun, although as the narrator reminds us, this isn't a different world than ours, since she arrived here on an airplane and that's also how she will leave. How Ravickians themselves leave remains a mystery, even though they appear to be abandoning Ravicka faster than the narrator can "stamp it" with her "tourism." (101)

The narrator is a linguist. She speaks seven languages, including several dialects of Ravic, but discovers that speaking the language isn't sufficient: "If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing and dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now." (42) She may arrive accidentally (or not), but once in Ravicka, she embarks on numerous quests. What she's looking for changes as she changes location (place is primordial here; time more incidental, except when it's time to eat or "time to fuck." 23). She is more tourist than scholar. In search of both the Old City and Downtown, where she expects to find skyscrapers (after all she's seen them on postcards and from windows), she's led astray by false directions, as well as by erroneous and discarded maps. She seeks architecture and, above all else, what she calls "convivium." (36) She finds and then loses her guide and lover Dar. She also searches for the Ravickian literary masterpiece, Matlatli Doc, hoping it will lead her to its author, and through her, a better understanding of Ravicka.

Matlatli Doc, with its title that's almost an alliteration of Melville's Moby Dick, "is famous for its pace: nothing happens, nothing happens, then everything is 'said' to happen though nothing happens around that saying, then the book ends, and throughout it all there is this shouting." (86) Substitute "gesturing" for "shouting" and this synopsis pretty nicely describes Event Factory itself. Ravic, the language spoken in Ravicka looks vaguely Slavic. The fact that its Old City has been in existence for seven hundred years, brings to mind Krakow, Poland which not long ago celebrated its 750th anniversary. Ravicka also carries traces of Ursula Le Guin's Gethen and Winter from The Left Hand of Darkness. Words like pareis (29) and concepts such as "inswept by time" (47) are particularly reminiscent of Le Guin. Other books and other imagined locations resonate here as well, such as Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the Tokyo of David Mitchell's number9dream.

Many of the features of Gladman's prose have been borrowed from her prose-poetry and the author often seems to be thinking about poetry as much as anything else. For example, the narrator muses: "I meant 'silence,' but silence is not something that moves visibly from one place to another. You simply cannot use the word this way, even in Ravic. I was saying smoke and he knew I did not mean it, but whether he knew what I actually did mean was hard to say." (70) Renee Gladman, the poet, might just as well be describing her poetics.

Event Factory's plot is summed up in its opening lines: " From the sky there was no sign of Ravicka. Yet, I arrived; I met many people." (11) Very little that happens between the narrator's arrival and her departure is causally related. Almost everything that occurs, except for language and ritual gestures, could have happened in any order. Nothing changes, other than that Ravicka continues to empty out. There is no real plot nor character development. Characters don't stick around long, with the exception of the narrator and Simon, the singing hotel/ motel receptionist without whom "there was no center. There was no hotel . . . . without him, it was a different place." (38) Ravicka may be, in the final analysis, simply a metaphor for life, where we, tourist-linguists, find ourselves for a short while, because "the plane . . . had landed and not yet taken off." (18)

* * *

Paula Koneazny lives and writes in Sebastopol, California where she earns her living as a tax consultant. Her poetry has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in OR, Interim and Bateau. Her reviews have been published in American Book Review, Verse, Rain Taxi and Tarpaulin Sky. She is currently an assistant editor of Volt. She can be contacted at paulagraphpress AT gmail DOT com.

2010-12-29T06:52:00.007-05:00

Cara Benson's (made) reviewed by Julie Joosten

2010-12-17T12:36:00.001-05:00

Cara Benson
(made)
ISBN 9781897388563
72 pp., 5.5" x 8.5", pbk.
BookThug, 2010

Reviewed by Julie Joosten

Cara Benson’s first full-length book, (made), is an active work of nouns. This collection of prose poems explores a mind at work and the way that mind opens out (into) the world. Benson’s poems deliberately inhabit a made world—a world of days, bayonets, apples, banks, cities, alphabets, roads, holidays, cars, and deserts, of glinting, surviving, shedding, holding, talking, approaching, and rushing. And they travel through that world as local inhabitants and as curious tourists engaged in its constructed contours. Exploring the possibilities of a book of definition, desire, and horizon, the poems’ titles appear below the poems in large, bold font. It is as if, moving through a poem, the reader experiences the process of arriving at a name: the title is both the poem’s destination and its production. But the titles also raise the question of perspective. Encountered horizontally, as well as vertically, the title appears in the foreground of the field of the page, and the poem unfolds in the cultivated distance behind it. Creating an archive of space, (made) insists on a multi-dimensionality that extends into the field of the reader’s body; Benson writes, “If this is in your hands, it is only here because you hold it” (55). The deictic “this” resonates as book, poem, word, and the reader’s body bears out the conditional, holding these made artifacts in her hands and mind, collaborating in a production that requires her participation for making’s resonance.

As a verb, the book’s title is in the past tense; it gestures to a completed, past making; as an adjective, it suggests something shaped in a particular way. Benson embeds “(made)” in a bold litany: “affect effect multiple handicap barn buster flipped tv dinner micro . . . cosm ready (made) meandering firefly abdomen plug caulk” (47). Parenthetically noting the process that brings this list together and that defines the items on it, Benson suggests the implicit, textured relation between made things and the act of making. The created landscapes, relations, and ideas (made) explores are constantly under construction. The book offers itself up as material of and for new makings. Thus, in (made), the present presses against the past, and a consciousness of the future anterior emerges: the poems create a future in which what will have been made is here in utero, in a present shared with a collaborating reader. A certain terror inheres in that future. In an interview with Bookthug, the book’s publisher, Benson describes (made) as “a pre-elegiac poem for the earth.”* I’m drawn to this account because it insists on the present of these poems as a necessary space of enunciation. And while pre-elegy presages elegy for a lost earth, the poems’ engagement with that present turns upon an earth that is not yet lost, that might not be lost. As Benson notes in “me-tooism,” “What the word will become cannot be known” (61); what the world will become cannot be known either. That is part of (made)’s power: it invites the reader to explore her world as the strange, beautiful, and often destructive combinations and re-workings of vibrant materials.

These materials move through time to a space of articulation. Charting an uncanny traveling, Benson writes: “Burned earth, the fire can travel through dry underground routes and spring up hundreds of feet from its source. Garden beseeched” (33). The address to “Burned earth” becomes movement through time and space: it spreads fire, shares grief. In “far, far away” Benson writes, “Premature night exposes her white teeth marks in the dark . . . A hug off the horizon while her face-mask covers desire too cold to be discovered. What she can’t hold she’ll havoc” (41). Benson draws on both the sound and meaning of “havoc” to create a sense that runs counter to the sentence’s semantic claim--“havoc” resonates as “have” and “disturbance.” The line thus suggests that disturbance is a mode of possession. Benson’s poems explore the possibility that making is both a creative and destructive act that possesses us. Her poems are plastique in the French sense of the term: they take form and destroy form. (made) explores how we and our making and made objects emerge from this paradoxical relation. In the book’s opening poem, “and the book begins,” Benson writes, “Bobbed sunflower head heavy from yearning fulfilled” (7). In a later poem, “café society,” a remaking occurs: “The kettle was boiling above and the baskets were underfilled. Yarn” (39). “Yearning fulfilled” becomes “underfilled. Yarn.” Linguistic making echoes in the poems’ deft soundwork that reworks a line or phrase, allowing sound to recreate sense.

Sound is a form of production in (made), and so is thought. Thinking is making in Benson’s work; it is a desire for understanding that is hospitable to startling perceptions and unconventional forms of knowing: “To steal a hole one must first have desire . . . Take whatever was forgotten now found in all the coat pockets of the world into your cupped hands which act as conduits into the hole” (15). (made) takes “the forgotten now found” and invites the reader into it; the book carries her along, stutters her progress, speeds her up, gives her away, recombines, and remakes her—and the world she inhabits. Benson’s poems create, from an encounter with the given world, a new world that is both dangerous and rapturous. And also, sometimes, peaceful. The poems in (made) create possibility “To enter, beside.” They offer the reader the objects of her everyday life as the materials that build a collective thought and care from the makings of a mind. Collective because of their hospitality to artifacts, objects, natural materials, animals, and weather, to readers, thinkers, empathizers, workers, armies, the outraged, the hopeful, the careful, the rigorous, the overlooked. Each and all are called in to the poems. And so to read (made) is to inhabit a radical openness that “Grant[s] light.” In Benson’s own words, “What travel will come. What standstill. Such ruckus amok. Such rendering” (26).

* “Interview with Cara Benson,” BookThug News, 3 Dec. 2010.

Michael Gizzi's New Depths of Deadpan reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

2010-12-14T09:00:00.003-05:00

Michael Gizzi
New Depths of Deadpan

ISBN13: 978-1-886224-96-4
Poetry, 72 pp., offset, smyth-sewn pbk.
Burning Deck, 2009

Reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

Michael Gizzi’s poems play it deadpan exceptionally well. Cast throughout the poems as though each page were a stage, words are his characters, shrugging off assumptions casually laid upon them and bubbling with an ever present humor that at times may be just slightly muffled.

CLOISTERED IN AN OYSTER

Another sleepless night with the top down.

He has a headache that could write its own biography. How long
can one inhabit a dumb-waiter? His mother Pearl plumps his
pillow.

Eyes lie through their teeth. Is it important to be unfortunate?

Is shucks not enough? Perhaps he could import a diver to yank
him out of bed?

Another clammy night.

Gizzi takes Leibniz’s monad viewing room out for a stroll and runs with it. “Witness the window grappling with the body.” (NIGHT-BLOOMING GRAMOPHONE) New intentions get written out via substitutions of the unfamiliar alongside the familiar, “Aliens write in puns we know are curly fries. Drive-up windows make this clear.” (THE DEEP) Every day reality gets a re-set as common experiences get blown to alternate extremes entertaining with surprising delight that refreshes without taxing one’s patience.

Rather than expressing any persona of Gizzi The Poet, full of immediate concerns of personal or other nature, these poems scamp across the page in lively play of language and imagination achieving that rare comfortably of hitting stride in new spaces. Continuity comes, when it comes, from cultural and literary references spun wildly beyond confines of previous assumptions.

ARBOR DAY

and in the sky there were glistening rails of milk
—Frank O’Hara

An armory with no army
which every summer leaves obscure.
Call it respite. Say a train wreck dreamed it,
a purchase in the blur.
Was there a split in the arborist?
A shame we ignore the same words.
Sap becomes shellac.
A hand goes up, flanked by magicians.
A tale told to pigeons.

This is play at nobody’s expense, the grubby world gets opened up and explored anew as Gizzi tests the unexpected appearance and unravels those distancing tendencies which so often hold readers back from just going there with trust in the poem. This is poetry as show-n-tell for adults and the classroom is the day-to-day world as it gets reshaped and re-defined.

STEEL MESH

Having swapped poles, I guess it’s safe to say we’re sound asleep.

Who has time for space? Euphemism’s as good as it gets (oxidized juncos).

A difference engine spooking even the shade of Houdini (particle
theory), no visible means of escape. A cage within a cage custom-made
for a wraith,

with divots left by the great head-banging auk.

Not a laugh-in but a standup coffin or comfort station for autism.
Can one say bee-keeping is useful

and Egyptology is not? How is it that buttons offer solace

softer than personalities?

That “great head-banging auk” is our self, testing the limits of our capability for wonder, finding that there really is no end to our ability to be stunned while still digging the merits of the encounter. Gizzi situates the speaker of the poem somewhere between resting on standard perceptional perspectives while also endeavoring maintain some semblance of self without resistance to being held off balance for a while. He then twists and tweaks the situation just the slightest bit to get to where words go to when they leave the comfort of home, dragging his readers with them.

Yosemite Sam upbraids a dust devil.

What does she have to say about the weather on Lesbos—or on
drugs, for that matter? Leave it to Beaver Lamarck to formulate
a batalog of cloud types. These here blew in from the French
Revolution to stack up over this canary yellow hum cover.

(“CLOUDS NINE”)

Gizzi plays his lines, fine tuning as he goes, bouncing a raucous bash of sound off sense, making such meaning as surprises himself as much as his reader. What does it MEAN is not a priority ahead of does it rise to being some fresh thing now known? Flip the assertions, change your orientation, and see where that leaves you. Gizzi’s fired up the starting vehicle, charge on out with him for the ride.

There were in him the makings of a bird, a giddy soldier, a sailor,
too. As he liked to put it, a mind can really get inside your head.

(“GILLETTE CASTLE”)

* * *

Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foreign Secretary reviewed by Robert Mueller

2010-12-14T08:00:00.003-05:00

Macgregor Card
Duties of an English Foreign Secretary

ISBN 978-1-934200-29-2
6" x 8", 112 pp.
Fence Books, 2009

Reviewed by Robert Mueller

What’s a body to do today with all this tiresome ironic chic? Look for a poet, like Macgregor Card, of wit and daring, true aplomb. Look, for example, at “Office of the Interior” from Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poets Series. Here the poet slams in enough mystery to give the dominant theme all the old leverage it needs to send us somewhere:

I hope the streetlamp will
show up tonight
in some disinterested way
once the tilted park has made it
out of view by law
Do you anticipate that it will rain?
Next volunteer
Just nod if you’re
anticipating rain

As you can see, the forbidden landscape really moves.

It is difficult for a poet of any stripe to clear away the tired pleading. My favorite among the successes is “Le soleil et le police dog.” Notice how this poem, quoted in its entirety, cuts through the menace to an exact ueber-menace:

Le soleil and le police dog
accept the offer of the road above
through the curtain of the burning geese
I hope they will not catch fire
like the nudists do in Canada
or turn my eye to fat
hot coin for dark machine
to browse on the cave-money of suicide
wet rats dicking in the rain
heaven smiles on threat elimination
and the police-dog,
and the police-dog
smiles on me
I hope I will not catch fire
Le tellement croyable police dog
Le soleil et le police dog

The full effect, and not just some of the words, is very French, now in sophistication, now in limpidity, now in sophisticated cool linearity, now in taking clear breaths, in remaining sure for what that is all worth. Plus, here is satire worthy of its pedigree, and not less sharply involving than some of Mr. Card’s longer efforts, where the fulminations are well-sustained and do not flag or strain.

Let us say that the libertine, at one time a heinous figure, is now, the poet realizes, an all-satisfying and all-neglecting father figure, suitable stand-out for the unearthly moment. Indeed the dwelling on neglect thrills, as in “I Am the Teacher of Athletes,” where a strange catalogue of heroic song-types yields to strange visions of hegemony. A kind of epinikion, the poem celebrates the Unreal World-City, makes practice of disturbed landings however beautifully evoked:

A vast ocean weed
through a private garden
Bright corona
of the zero-responsibility corral

Poems like “That Old Woolly Bloodletting” and “Gone to Earth” equally stand citizenship over on its bed, and experience a world, ours or not ours, and play the alert and sleepy tricks that keep that experience, and keep the expression and the impression (both fully honored), in the shifting movement by which to encompass a memory up to the challenge. These are good, long, engrossing poems. Suppose good writing is all you can find. Here it follows from an honest a-moral, almost a-tonal apposition to a diminished world. Another approach, a heartfelt sympathy, would not be amenable, would lend losing color. Richness should not be allowed out at ease.

How Macgregor Card does what he does, with or without regrets, is refreshing. He does not do it by any straight-line technique, however, but rather as if for each providential element you had to find a different basket. The rhythms and style of sixteenth-century lyric inform the title poem (to my ear), resulting in an awareness and polish that nevertheless deliver only one aspect of what the fuss and the trust are all about. In fact, although each new turn of the page is not always surprising, there is always some surprise when reading Duties of an English Foreign Secretary. Thus in “Rule of Hospitality,” where the shimmering logic and virtuosically plain language track a conceit of making love and not either war or international incident, these complex angles arrive unexpectedly on a lightly-textured surface. Part of the surprise is the special use of metaphor (“rule” the vehicle, “attraction” the action and “fear” the distraction), and if that were not the case, then metaphor itself might run the way of a common thread. In “Shipfilm” you can tell that the poem relies on water as metaphor, but you can also tell that the metaphor is watery, that it flows and spreads, and that its composition, as metaphor as well, is unique. In similar — and uncanny — fashion the good “Libertines’ Announcement” veers toward bottomless appeal. Upending robustly, it unwinds from a not obvious wrapping, to the end that its guiding metaphor might just be a shelf in a library stacked with all the poems of its kind, the kind it seeks to lean on.

The poems and the library of the poems: maybe such are the key and the potent modifier for a language so fierce at pushing in solider clips. So often the poetry is terse, quick; and so often the poetry becomes, what poetry can be at its best today with our revived intelligences, a mode of prescient footnoting to some book that has been written and has yet to be written. These are the actuals: a pleasant heirloom, a permutating conviction. That is to say, these sources present themselves both in real and in quandary fashion, and can be inhaled, and can be recaptured, with or without sourcing. So often here the source-hunting would be a pastime; and so often the source-feeling, a fulfillment and a paradigm. It is not as if the phrases beg for quotation marks, not that at all. Rather they have a peculiar and lovely ring, and then I want to nominate a source. And you can have your candidates, too.

One further notes that repetition of whole lines adheres to willful formalism, and then one knows of the widely differing charges that give rise to formalism based thereon, and then how skillfully Macgregor Card re-uses, or ignores and refuses, the formal charges, troubles their aspectual recurrences so as to dissolve out all the skill, and then the “Pantoum” itself that drags down and dead. So there is indeed a line from poem to poem, a certain unpleasant, even, respect for the line, even, but even this formal aspect remains in, or achieves, isolation. It is remarkable how the writing stirs to this brilliance of discrete positions and types such that you do not dismiss it — all the while that the brilliance gets washed out, even though not washed up, not that either. It may not seem exhilarating, but with the right attentiveness you will feel it move and your pulse quicken and quicken, as when the cries of “Nary a Soul” extend and extend.

Yet what is hard to make of the writing, just as it persists at the verge of disturbances, is what cannot be denied: That at times it suffers. It breaks down and suffers, with or without meaning to. Thus in a few instances the search for resonance may be difficult, stalled in a trope for affirming without sounding, detained in whiling away refreshments at late neutral zone.

What, though, of the pleasing variation of word choice, the semblance of order and mission that can so take you in? This from the opening out of “Gone to Earth” is wondrous strange metaphor and delight:

I should have slept in a balloon
gone to Earth
hissing to own the sea
it is so difficult you dear
to be an underestimated resource
with the handshake of a coward
owned in thin air
I should have made an entry—

More than clever taunt, “Gone to Earth” achieves as full poem. A haunting mystery distinguishes itself ex and pro nihilo and may represent Macgregor Card’s best claim and best true moment, though again not as defining moment strictu sensu. Definition is, by way of deflation of brilliance, strictly averted; the moves are confident, but evasive, take themselves down studiously.

To undertake the challenges of Duties of an English Foreign Secretary is to follow a fine and tricksome fashioning and not to fall beleaguered by control for control’s sake. In the meantime, would that it were true, richness will not have its way. Lord keep us from the cold!

* * *

Brenda Iijima's If Not Metamorphic reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

2010-12-13T08:47:00.004-05:00

Brenda Iijima
If Not Metamorphic
ISBN-13 978-1-934103-10-4
6" x 8", 128 pages, pbk.
Ahsahta Press, 2010

Reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

What’s both difficult and improbable to achieve with poetry these days is any hint of expression towards self-knowledge that doesn’t come across perceived as more or less a sham. Contemporary poetry shelves are densely populated by too much easily-packaged-for-reader-consumption-introspective-gleaning trite. Brenda Iijima’s writing on the other hand is a direct confrontation which playfully and directly engages questions of knowledge of self: what are the connections between perceptions and how they pass through consciousness via the body. This is exploratory writing that offers its rewards as they are come upon, self-discoveries which hold us, revealing us to our selves, active in every sense of the word. Neither self-serving nor bemoaning of uncertainty, Iijima stakes out her position as poet-explorer/inciter facing off against the challenges of a world in constant dynamic shift and does so with courage that refuses back away. Her interest in delving into just what is possible displays a vulnerability that engages by way of its immediacy.

Iijima no more knows where the poem is going than the reader does. But don’t be fooled however, for she most importantly first and foremost is excitingly aware of where she’s at in the moment of writing. Tapping into personal ecological underpinning of human perception via all the senses, the questions asked throughout the multiple sections of the long title poem are insistent, probing the condition of consciousness come aware in its moment.

Iijima is constantly moving within her writing, from out her own consciousness into that of others, thing to thing, jarring expectation of how and what words do, questing her way towards ever further revealing of perception’s foundational perspective.

In the second poem, TIME UNIONS, Iijima resists a narrative drive instead drawing upon the sympathy of sounds between words to spread out a scene of the sensuous pull vowels command upon one another.

There’s a strong sense of landscape explored, possibly lost, and the urge to resurrect and embody it forth.

This looks ahead to the closing poem of the book, PANTHERING, wherein Iijima viscerally imbues the animal swelling of place she felt during a visit to “the last remaining Native American intaglio effigy” as she “rested inside its grassy contours” and “an intense heat radiated outwardly and engulfed” her body. Iijima returns repeatedly to a near Phenomenological rendering of her body’s perception via language, physical as well as mental that is spiritual without any wishy-washy mysticism overlay. She seeks knowledge in the act of writing what happens in writing.

Iijima is all animal: conscious, reflective, thought-probing, provocative animal. She prowls through language of thought and being, every observation leading to another divergence, caught up with itself alive in the moment. Yet such branching explorations don’t lend any sense of sporadic diluting of her initial questing. Her project remains focused and driven, realizing its own work as it explores what is readily known to enter the questionable realm of what might otherwise go by missed.

There’s a return to the physical body as prime substance, and not in any sentimental sense, rather take Charles Olson’s declaration “your body / is to drop / its load” as the project/concern in which Iijima is sharing “I follow you, downward dog.”

* * *

Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version reviewed by Katie Eberhart

2010-11-29T11:02:00.003-05:00

The Russian Version
Elena Fanailova

Translated by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler
Introduction by Aleksandr Skidan
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010
ISBN 978-0939010-98-1

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

The fine thing about Elena Fanailova’s book The Russian Version is getting a poet's view of Russia in recent years. In this bilingual collection of poems time passes and some things change, and some only shift. Themes which demand attention are the presence of doubles and how both structure of the poems and the poet's interests change. Fanailova has a keen eye for details of story and scene, but also the even more complex terrain of motivations and dreams in a place where even the dead are denied peace (even from those who were closest to them). The second part of the poem The Land of the Dead (a poem in four parts from the work With Particular Cynicism, 1998-1999) begins:

...A willow sprouted from her grave.
A year later it cracked the tomb apart to the rose-colored stars.
Its roots grew through her ribs and entwined her heart.
But father took an axe and a saw
Pried out the root and chopped down the stalk.

And so it is oppositional forces of life and death that play a role and form knots of complexity and wads of questions, and everything is complicated by family and history and what each person can and can’t control.

Fanailova uses precise language. She has a handle on everything: the atmosphere and seasons, light and dark, male and female, life and death. I was frequently reminded of Osip Mandelstam's poems, the grim and gritty scenes, the use of atmosphere, ghosts and doubles—but Fanailova's images and language are thoroughly her own. The book begins with an untitled poem from The Russian Album, 1994-1997:

Already yesterday November was arriving.
Already yesterday the light had changed.
You'll wake up: a ghost stands at our window,
A lancet in the pocket of its vest.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And death has acquired such an easy style.
Her smile is like a model's out of Vogue.
Her gestures are taken from old revues,
The dry wings of ballet legs.

Death is consistently present. It would seem death is available, as in socially acceptable—what you'll see when you wake up, a ghost with a lancet, but there are two sides of a lancet (a sharp knife and a surgical tool) and two faces, or even genders, of death. In these poems Death is comfortable, Death dresses stylishly, and clearly Death is a character.

Fanailova coaxes different effects from a variety of forms, rhythms, and structure. For instance, in Shades in Paradise, the distance of the third person (“They...”), a forward-driving repetition, and short lines create the idea of a mass experience, and again there is the contradiction, the oppositional force even in the title which suggests the unexpected. Shades in Paradise begins:

They come home,
They lie down together.
They don't give a damn about anyone,

So the poem becomes a kind of map with “war” at the heart—war is generally easy to define and hard to understand. Ghosts are more of an idea or notion that is impossible to prove and yet richly imaginative—and in this poem repetition combined with forgetfulness suggests zombies, and in any event metaphor:

They kiss on the eyes,
They don't remember why,
They leave no trace.
Nothing keeps them in place:
Not honor, not valor, not duty. . .

But Fanailova uses a broad poetic brush and following Shades in Paradise is Frida's Album which is a characterization of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's work:

Frida sits coiffed (in whiteface), sits next to the canvas,
A lace underskirt, apron, earrings, braids in a wreath,
Death to her left, Diego headless on her right, . . .

Frida's Album is torment merged—Frida Kahlo's and Fanailova's—through eyes and language, a pairing of Kahlo's own injuries and pain and the cultural injuries and the pain of which Fanailova writes. This poem is a transfer of the idea (through art) of the personal to the idea (through poetry) of society or community (or anti-community). The poem is metaphor translated and amplified. Frida's Album has longer lines and more musicality than the abrupt rhythm of Shades in Paradise. The images in Frida's Album come rapid fire and crushed together, conveying a world in agony and collapsing, a very strange place laden with death and nothing is what it seems: “Frida is dressed as a boy, . . . / . . . [with] drowned women in her hair.” So again it is doubles, and shape shifting and somehow it seems as if the Fridas have split in two because one Frida can not hold everything.

Why do we read poetry of war? For the words and language? To feel lucky with our own lives? Although the theme of war underlies The Russian Version, it is not only a book of war poems. Near the end, in New Poems, I see fruit trees as a hopeful sign even as the yearning for role models continues and the world portrayed is still gritty and afflicted:

who will tell us that the world blooms like the branch of the cherry tree,
the bing cherry, the bird cherry, the apple tree, the plum tree
that the dead are rising, are alive,
like angels of glory?

As a collection, The Russian Version transforms brutal and terrifying history into a compelling story where two things matter: remembering and change—and there is change in the country and change in Fanailova's poetic style, and subjects change through place in time, and you see what is remembered and forgotten, where history and the unthinkable lodge, and how culture and memory adjust. The Russian Version* is an important book weighted with history and recent times and the poet's unflinching quest for truth.

________________________

* Fanailova’s “Notes to the Text” (endnotes) helpfully provide historical, biographical, and literary references for certain poems.

* * *

Katie Eberhart's writing and poems exploring the fine margin between people and landscape can be found in the Palmer (Alaska) Arts Council poetry anthology Voices Between Mountains and the online literary journal Plasma Magazine. Katie was selected as an Artsmith Artist Resident in 2009 and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Peter Waterhouse's Language Death Night Outside, Poem Novel reviewed by Katie Eberhart

2010-11-27T06:03:00.002-05:00

Language Death Night Outside, Poem Novel
Peter Waterhouse
Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (2009)
U.S. publisher: Burning Deck/Anyart, Providence, RI.
Originally published in 1989 as Sprache Tod Nacht Aussen (Rowohlt Verlag GmbH).
125 pp.

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

Reading Language Death Night Outside is like traveling to a foreign country except the country you travel through is not merely landscape but a web of the narrator's observations, experience, points of reference, and language. The subtitle Poem Novel suggests more freedom and fancy than a single genre but also more responsibility to deliver both story and poetry, or a poetic story. Clearly, there are multiple ways these forms coexist and Waterhouse has found many, including a narrator's view which switches between moment-by-moment observation and reflection, and investigation of what occurred in the past. The story is centered around Vienna, Austria but spreads outward to places like Chernowitz and Zagreb as well as southern Austria and Italy. On the first page the forces are established, including poetry and the death of the narrator's grandfather.

In the fall of 1984 I heard poems by Andrea Zanzotto. The poster had announced a hermetic poet. I was working on a long essay on Paul Celan. My interest jumped over. Zanzotto canceled. A bilingual reading with rough translations took place without the poet. The rough translations convinced me. Two hours. A survey of the work, I could not get the poems out of my mind. . . (7)

The narrator lives within a chain of events that is like a slow motion exploration of feelings and experience as if walking along a street and noticing everything within a rhythm of short sentences and repetition of the subject or a pronoun that imparts an urgency to encounters and observations. The narrator is both investigating history and considering where his grandfather's life intersected historical events. For example, after leaving a lecture on the “intellectual development of [Austria] since 1918” where matters of national guilt and national consciousness were hotly debated, the narrator recalls his grandfather:

. . . I sat at home. I thought of grandfather's face. I thought of grandfather's eyes. I thought of grandfather as a soldier in the army. I thought of grandfather's carpentry. . . . I thought of grandfather's flight from the family. I thought of the family of seven in the one-and-one-half room apartment, with the water faucet out in the hall. I thought of grandfather's long illness. . . . (71)

The tension within this work, besides nuances of language, exists between the larger events of history and what a person can now observe or even comprehend. For example, the peripatetic narrator ponders something that sounds simple enough, looking east:

I drove to the eastern edge of the city. I stood in the field. I looked east. In looking east I had the impression of thinking outside my language. I drove on straight highways to the eastern border of the country. The highway ended at the river. The bridge across the river lay there collapsed. I climbed over parts of the bridge. I looked at the thicket on the bank. I retreated. I walked across the wet meadows. . . . (16)

But nothing is simple. The narrator has traveled to Slovenia and the experience includes that of staying at a castle, of winter quarters for a circus in the castle yard, of children playing, of “In the evening, five fires were lit in the yard” until it becomes a matter of looking toward “the land of morning.” The narrator says “I thought of the land of morning as thought outside my language. I closed my eyes. I said a sentence. Between the words was the land of morning.” (16) The narrator is searching for ways to understand the past, and it seems possible that there is a puzzle or paradox with how we come to grips with memory, guilt, and survival that connects to language as if it is “between the words.”

Reading Language Death Night Outside, you have entered a very private space of pondering that ripples outward from the narrator's experience and world view and whatever else comes his way including three long poems (the poets are Andrea Zanzotto, Paul Celan, and Carl Rakosi). These poems act as an outside force on the narrative but also become internalized because of the narrator's efforts to find meaning in each poem. The effect is of larger ideas that remain even after the narrative continues into some other inquiry.

Waterhouse's Poem Novel is unique in style and language. The short sentences and repetition give the feeling of a long poem although the appearance is of prose. In Language Death Night Outside, Waterhouse has created a literary place where the personal and institutional intersect, where philosophy butts against history, where abstraction spreads across experience and landscape, and especially the idea of a place “between the words.” The questions in this book are interesting and crucially important and it is a book that should be read as we drift farther from times that are still difficult to talk about, but times that Peter Waterhouse has made progress in extracting from “between the words.”

* * *

Olga Tokarczuk's Primeval and Other Times reviewed by Katie Eberhart

2010-11-27T05:42:00.002-05:00

Primeval and Other Times
Olga Tokarczuk
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Twisted Spoon Press, Prague 2010
248 pp

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

This novel begins with the boldly presented idea that Primeval is both a place and more than a place. The first thing we learn is that “Primeval is the place at the centre of the universe” and I reminded myself of Primeval's exceptional location as I followed the intergenerational tableau anchored within a normal-seeming landscape in Poland of roads and forests, farms, rivers and lakes but along the borders four archangels are said to protect against certain human shortcomings.

In Primeval and Other Times each chapter or section begins “The Time of . . .” and the novel unfolds as separate but interlaced stories where characters appear, and reappear, sometimes in their own story and sometimes in another character's story. Many characters are related to other characters by family, or accidental encounter, dreams or beliefs, and the characters are staunch in what they believe, whether it is a higher power, believing that the midwife switched the babies at birth, or a game that becomes an obsession.

Written in a straightforward prose, the stories span human actions and reactions, showing the inner workings of a community, the interactions between people, causes and effects, and beliefs and desires. For instance, “The Time of Genowefa” begins in 1914 when Genowefa's husband Michał is suddenly taken away to fight in the Russian army. Misia is born while her father, Michał, is away at the war. (Misia is an adult with her own children when Primeval becomes the front during the Second World War.) As a child, Misia watched her father returning: “[her] first memory was the sight of the ragged man on the road to the mill. Her father staggered as he walked, and then often cried at night, . . .” and her father brought the grinder home from the war:

Misia's grinder came into being because of someone's hands combining wood, china and brass into a single object. The wood, china and brass made the idea of grinding materialize. Grinding coffee beans to pour boiling water on them afterwards. There is no one of whom it could be said that he invented the grinder, because creating is merely reminding yourself of what exists beyond time, in other words, since time began. Man is incapable of creating out of nothing – that is a divine skill. (44-45)

The grinder is not quite a talisman but one of its roles is to mark time because it is something which barely changes while people grow and age, wars are fought, and a lot happens. The grinder signifies endurance and continuity, much like the grist mill which, in a larger sense, anchors Primeval to the very basis of survival. But it isn't just things that have a symbolic nature, characters also achieve a larger more representative role, such as Misia:

Like every person, Misia was born broken into pieces, incomplete, in bits. Everything in her was separate – looking, hearing, understanding, feeling, sensing, and experiencing. Misia's entire future life would depend on putting it all together into a single whole, and then letting it fall apart. (42)

I was intrigued by the transformation of characters and indeed what might change a character's life, and thus story, such as Florentynka who is an old woman living alone with her dogs and the explanation of her circumstances becomes part of the myth-making effect:

People think madness is caused by a great, dramatic event, some sort of suffering that is unbearable. They imagine you go mad for some reason. . . People also think madness strikes suddenly, all at once, in unusual circumstances, and that insanity falls on a person like a net, fettering the mind and muddling the emotions.

But Florentynka had gone mad in the normal course of things, you could say for no reason at all. . . . (52-53)

Tokarczuk has tackled a difficult task, to create a place, characters, and stories that exist in their own right but also within the stream of history, where the characters are both believable and beyond belief, where the extremes are pushed farther than what most of us have experienced and yet (the terrifying part) are anchored in twentieth century history. One result is questions like How can this be? How could this happen? which are the troubling questions about the times during which events in Primeval occurred.

Offsetting all of the changes though is a constancy—of space and time—so that the mill on the river continues to exist, whether there is grain or not, and also

There are lime trees lining the Highway leading from Jeszkotle to the Kielce road. They looked the same at the beginning, and they will look the same at the end. They have thick trunks and roots that reach deep into the earth, where they meet the foundations of everything that lives. . . . (188)

Primeval and Other Times is a carefully wrought fictional exploration of the light and dark elements of being. Tokarczuk's strong voice and meticulous writing have brought these stories into existence making Primeval its own place with a compelling intergenerational drama that is set within the context of a history we know. Olga Tokarczuk's novel tells important stories that will be of interest to anyone who is a student of human nature and history and who has ever wondered how mythologies develop; and Primeval and Other Times should be read by everyone because literature is one way we remember and learn from the past.

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Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, reviewed by Megan Burns

2010-11-27T05:14:00.003-05:00

Julie Carr
Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
Coffeehouse Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56689-251-3
6x9, 74pps
$16

Reviewed by Megan Burns

A Doubled Woman: Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines

This slim volume is a meditation on birth, death, grief, and nature in a series of poems designated by Carr as fragments, lines, and abstracts. The poems echo one another in images of birds, shores, rain, leaves, salt, and honey. The subject matter of the mother, the daughter, conception, and death are also woven into the tapestry, but it is the language, the sounds themselves, that interconnect and create a whole in a book that speaks about what is in pieces. The loss of the mother, a double loss due to the mother’s Alzheimer’s, is complicated by the speaker’s pregnancy. Images of birth and death as well as daughters and mothers become blurred and confused in the poems as the voice attempts to tease out with language an order built upon internal sounds. Sounds become a mainstay, propelling an investigation into complicated gestures.

The book begins with a poem titled “Landlocked Lines,” an important departure as the poems that follow seem to flow further from the shore and into the abyss. “It would be absurd to imagine the absent person in the margins of the book” this poem tells us, and here we begin to confront the idea of elegy and how this form shapes the person who is lost. This first poem introduces ideas or images that resurface, much like memories of a lost loved one; a physical object like the “red wall,” birds, and stories about giving birth to save a life all return in later poems. Alliteration and internal rhymes ground most of these poems; they escalate to a frenzy especially when grief seems to overpower the speaker:

now rectangles of fluorescent, of bold blonde daylight on walls of old dreck now shine like gestalt or defense, like splayed hair. Now old odes or seeds of thought turned snug in gummy mugs: I’m alone here in a day like an arrow or a lance in a gash. Day, don’t say things, don’t order (12).

With a few exceptions, almost all of the poems have the words “lines,” “fragments,” or “abstract” in the title. The obvious connection is that these speak to the mother’s fragmented thoughts before her death, but they also mirror the speaker’s nonlinear thought process. The process of waiting for someone to die is ironically similar to the process of becoming a new mother. Time takes on a new meaning as it lengthens and slows; absent of logic, the mind struggles with exhaustion and an ever changing range of emotions from joy to relief to depression. Again, these poems point out the blurring of these roles, so that it is hard to pinpoint if it is grief or being a new mother that causes the emotions. The loss of the parent complicates the speaker’s new role as a parent, the loss of a mother complicates the daughter’s new role as a mother, and both death and newborns cause worry, fear, stress, disjointed thinking and exhaustion. The emotions are either confused or--as the speaker points out, “doubled”--much like the mother’s body is doubled during pregnancy. The poem “Conception Fragment” introduces the speaker’s double bind

daylight and tree buds
petro-
detritus and dust
what’s winged
in the open of your pregnancy? (17)

The poem begins to mix the metaphor of the bird imagery that is attached to the mother with that of this new addition. Birds historically have been connected to both birth and death from religious ideas of sparrows bringing in new souls, to the stork, and to references of the soul departing the body and taking flight. It’s no surprise that bird references and birds by name, quails, doves, hawks, herons, owls, gulls, pigeons, magpies and ducks, are all present in these poems. The fact that birds appear in both poems about the mother and about the child further emphasizes this doubling, this blurring of the threesome. The mother, daughter, and unborn child create a trinity, but one that is put off balance, in an earthbound sense, as the mother departs and the child enters its life.

In one of seven poems with the name “Sarah” in the title, the speaker points out, “First you had to give up the meaning of words. And then water” (24). Here, again, a doubling is suggested, as the mother loses her memory and her language, the poet/daughter is faced with the challenge of creating a language that will express this loss. For the poet, giving up language is as life-taking as giving up water; without either there is the sense of being bereft of all that nurtures and helps us to survive. By contrast the fetus survives in water and is a constant companion to the mother’s words even though they lack meaning at this point. Sound is important to the unborn baby in the same way that sound seems to carry these poems beyond meaning to a place where rhythm and rhyme provide the emotion:

Every boy with a stick, every ache of the pen, every fool’s me. The split or slit of me’s unseared, unsutured. This being’s strut rests not. Veil of rain in the leaves again. Tangle of future untried, untied. To gain my ruse, my reason, my route. Gnast’s a spark, a bit of coming, a flit or flash in the foot of it.

This is less about what the poem is saying and more about the tone: the feel of saying these hard sounds, their ability to pile up, to hold the speaker’s anger, her exhaustion, and her inability to make sense of the senseless. This is a hard book to read not only because the emotions are painful and raw, but because of the sonic density of the poems. Lines like: “Since I lost her I stored her like ore in my form as if later I’d find her, restore her” (36) or “If the soul is in the body a silence/ The silence of flames that don’t sputter don’t burn out” (38); these are lines that pierce the heart. You have to put the book down to allow the sounds to swirl in your mind. You have to put the book down because you have your own losses and your own loves that you fear to lose. It takes incredible courage to share this with the world; these poems have songs to give us as human beings.

* * *

Megan Burns has a MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter (solidquarter.blogspot.com). She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, YAWP Journal, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She has two chapbooks, Frida Kahlo: I am the poem (2004) and Framing a Song (2010) from Trembling Pillow Press. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! reading series (www.17poets.com).

Aaron Belz's Lovely, Raspberry reviewed by Joseph Harrington

2010-11-11T09:31:00.003-05:00

Aaron Belz
Lovely, Raspberry: Poems

ISBN 978-0-89255-359-4
Persea Books, 2010
80 pages, pbk.
$15

Reviewed by Joseph Harrington

“You expect me to tell you about the interior of the room/ in which I’m typing this, and connect that to my feelings,” begins Aaron Belz’ second full-length poetry collection, Lovely, Raspberry. Readers of his first book (The Bird Hoverer) needn’t be told that he won’t make that facile connection. Like some of the poems in that volume, this one proceeds to elaborately eviscerate contemporary “mainstream” poetry, with its predictable rhetorical moves and taken-for-granted subjectivity. At the same time, it dives into one of Belz’ major concerns: the ultimate impossibility of easy connections – whether between lovers, reader and writer, word and referent, subject and self. “Lets put our heads together/ and try to think up a third room unknown to either of us” – this book is that room. But by the same token, You can’t connect with I: “I cannot even begin to do it, for I am a ranch boy/ and not even a very good one; I live in El Bandito, Texas.” Like the other poems in Lovely, Raspberry, “Direction” takes a detour down the rabbit hole, to a place weird, hilarious, and utterly unexpected – even by the writer, one infers.

In “Skee Ball,” he admits that “[i]t’s true that I am experienced in the ways of freeform thought . . . I practice stream of consciousness in a professional way . . . and often enjoy observing the way other people’s minds move about unhindered by reason.” Skee balls or screw balls: Belz can toss them in rapid succession. His signature wacky humor owes as much to the Ernie Kovaks as to the New York School: there is parody of the high-fallutin elegiac poetic voice, but there is also wit, as in “Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game”: “Potatoes/ Waves/ Ghosts/ A Rorschach blot/ Fuzz/ Clouds/ A dragon head/ Chèvre,” and so on. This is a smart gag – one based on a logical gap and linguistic slippage. I could go on to talk about legibility and representation – about the fake and the real, the funny and the serious, or (as one poem title has it) “Signal versus Noise” – but I won’t, because doing so would be out of keeping with the spirit of the thing, which is fundamentally that of dark comedy and “perspective by incongruity.” “When every word sounds cliché,/ each turn of phrase derivative,/ that’s when I turn to slapstick” – and it is a strategy that works both to enliven and to defamiliarize the writing. Many of the poems are elaborate and bizarre jokes with punch lines that are even more bizarre (have you heard “The One About the Ectoplasm and the Osetoblast”?); the joke is on the joke. This book will make you laugh a lot more than most poetry books, largely due to the poems' dark, deadpan tone and debunking bent:

My Best Wand

Of all the magic wands
I’ve bought over the years,
only the steel one
with the sharp tip
really works – you point it
into someone and say
ABRACADABRA
and the person magically
becomes wounded.

The pieces in Lovely, Raspberry sound like dream narratives, chance operations, homophonic translations, jabberwockery, Beckett dialogue, logical syllogisms gone awry, or horrifying kids’ poetry. But then this is the speaking subject who, when “[t]illing Charles Reznikoff’s back yard/ brought up a dozen lions and several patches/ of wildebeest hearts.” Only Belz could find such playful imaginative richness in the backyard of the great Objectivist, and he doesn’t even need to cut-and-paste Google search results to do it. Sometimes that richness takes the form of verbal riffs for their own sake:

The heat-soaked hexes from Mexico
rowed north in boats. The white
Texan vixens came sailing in too, on brooms.
The place was full of hicks in tuxes.

Brad, that’s enough. Play it somewhere else.

OK – but Aaron, please don’t. This fanciful, rick-a-tick-tunk hullabaloo is just the antidote for capital P Poetry. There is indeed some subtle rhyme and meter in here, but just enough to make you do a double-take. Indeed, stanzas in the same poem sometimes don’t seem to have much connection to one another, beyond variations-on-a-theme – which is enjoyable, if you can take your reasonable hands off the verbal steering wheel for a bit. “Do not express yourself mildly: do it wildly.” Lovely, Raspberry does it.

* * *

Joseph Harrington is the author of Things Come On: an amneoir (Wesleyan University Press 2011), Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan 2002), and the chapbook earth day suite (Beard of Bees, forthcoming). His creative work also has appeared in Hotel Amerika, The Collagist, Otoliths, Fact-Simile, and P-Queue, amongst others. He teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

John Dermot Woods's The Complete Collection of people, places and things reviewed by Lindsey Drager

2010-11-10T09:56:00.004-05:00

John Dermot Woods
The Complete Collection of people, places and things
BlazeVOX, 2009. 178 pp, pbk.
$16

Reviewed by Lindsey Drager

John Dermot Woods’s epigraph to The Complete Collection of people, places and things comes from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. It reads:

By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before.

While the obvious allusions to Anderson’s book don’t reach far beyond the opening chapter, it is difficult to ignore the gaping ambiguity in this sentence; that is, there is no referent for “it”. It can be argued that opening a book as such is a risky move, but here it seems more an experiment in the cannon as archive. In other words, you have to look it up.

Anderson’s quote surfaces in the first chapter of Winesburg, in a section entitled “The Book of the Grotesques”. In it, an elderly writer composes the book in response to “a dream that was not a dream” in which “all of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques”(Anderson, 24). The “it” of Woods’s epigraph refers to the narrator’s summary of this writer’s book which he recalls as such:

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. (Anderson, 25)

There is no better introduction to Woods’s The Complete Collection of people, places and things, which can be read as a modern day reimagining of “The Book of Grotesques”. Woods’s novel is a practice in the art of defamiliarization, outlining a world that is only vaguely recognizable, in which the existence of water has not yet been proven and sleep is induced through force; “a place where people ended up remembering, when all they wanted to do was regret” (pg.100). The book functions as both ethnography of our-world-estranged as well as instructions for navigating it, centered on characters named Glo-worm, Voltron, Punky Brewster, Danger Mouse, Rainbow Brite, and Optimus Prime who are embarrassed to admit in public they haven’t used game cartridges and protect their party favors and switchboards with as much fervor as their pride. The attempt here is catalogue, as it is the concision of each tale that defines the person’s role not as an individual, but in accordance with or opposition to, others. It is in this way that the story revolves rather than progresses linearly, arguing along with Anderson that history is both fractured and circuitous.

Though the “people” and “places” are effectively rendered here, it is the “things” that are particularly alien and therefore steal the spotlight of this book; manuals, chopsticks and Velcro all adopt a value that is both deeply personal and—or maybe therefore—profoundly political when the behavior associated with such tools is deemed improper.

In fact, this is a world that functions because of law, though perhaps corrupt and certainly alien and Woods’s tone and register support this. For example, consider this case study in Velcro:

It was something that touched people where it meant the most. People cherished their Velcro when they were alone—or sometimes with their immediate families. Velcro was solemn; it was usually found in kitchens. For years, people had been doubting if real innovation was possible; Velcro seemed so fully realized. It was admitted that change might come—but acknowledged only in whispers—between thundering knocks on wood and the grating dirge of the head side of a one-bit coin scraping against the tailside of another. People like their Velcro exactly the way it was; they just didn’t trust that is would stay that way. (pg.79)

Reflective of the comic melancholy that permeates the book, this description of what in our world might be a merely pragmatic tool heightens Woods’ project to a performance of high burlesque. Such is also the case with kiosks and stilts, both of which are rendered through the simple language and distant tenor characteristic of a guidebook or instruction manual and are presented as items to be lauded.

The degree to which Woods’ Collection is “complete” is a point worth discussing as the commitment to succinctness and brevity suggests we learn about these characters, spaces and objects through what could be deemed profile. This argument is supported by the truly stunning illustrations that accompany each of these thirty-two 500-700 word “stories”, as each profile becomes both literally and figuratively a character sketch.

In an age in which the meaning of “profile” has been intimately linked with the ethically complex task of self-representation, it is easy to forget the word’s literal definition; an outline, or: a drawing within the frame of one dimension. In other words, the profile stands antithetical to completeness, as it is the very lack of total knowledge that defines it.

Yet the narrator claims that the collection is not “just a recounting, or some sort of a Manual; it was complete” (pg. 4). The question raised is what to do with past: how to keep it; how to keep it safe; who should care and/or care for it.

The Complete Collection reminds us that it is fiction that transcends the dichotomy of profile and complete tale, as it is discrimination in presenting the events of a characters’ life on the page that constitutes story; this is, in fact what designates the map from the territory. In the realm of story, the world is only what it is on the page. Woods’ book simultaneously critiques and embraces the very storiness of history, an edifice we tend to confuse with The Truth. It is this thin volume, an artifact that is itself referenced in the beginning of the tale, that is the complete life of this world, and in the end, to echo Anderson, all the truths are beautiful.

In the introduction entitled “A Village Beyond Approach” (the play on words here stands as joke initially, but bears thematic meaning as the section concludes, as does most of Woods’ humor throughout the book), the question of a full and accurate depiction of history through the medium of text is addressed eloquently in a discussion the narrator overhears between a young man and the town’s scribe:

The collector admitted that there were times his pen lost the shape of the world he intended to craft. He was once part of a league (he thinks it was organized by the local Policemen’s Benevolent Association). It was a whole collection of collectors who pooled their efforts. They compared, contrasted, refined and traded their doubles. But, over the years, trends kept changing, and, as such, the process of transcribing history became more taxing. Most of his compatriots found more ephemeral subjects to collect and quickly discard. When he was left alone, his words faltered and he fell silent. (pg. 3)

In an effort to fulfill his former commitment in recording the world, the scribe produces The Complete Collection by means of (not insignificantly) erasable pen. But, and importantly, it is the narrator’s recalling of the collector’s text that we as readers are provided. This triple removal further underscores Woods’ commentary on the meaning of making; that the collector’s belief in reaching a singular history and accurately recording such is a myth that escapes him implies our sympathy should lie with the collector.

But it is with the people, places and things that I share sympathy, as their history is a history particularly—and perhaps cruelly—not their own. In a moving metaphor in the penultimate chapter Woods gathers his cast under a tent. “It might have been an awe-inspiring sight,” the nameless narrator tells us, and we know what is coming next because we are these people, places and things, yet the line devastates; “but there was no one outside to witness it” (pg. 174).

_________________
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Viking Press, 1960.

* * *

Lindsey Drager is an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois where she teaches creative writing and holds a graduate assistantship with Dalkey Archive Press. She has work published or forthcoming in Artifice Magazine, PANK, Dislocate, Redivider and elsewhere on the web.

Joseph Massey’s Areas of Fog reviewed by Elizabeth Moore

2010-11-09T07:34:00.005-05:00

Joseph Massey
Areas of Fog
Shearsman Books, 2009
ISBN: 9781848610521
Paperback, 116 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Elizabeth Moore

At first glance, Joseph Massey’s Areas of Fog appears tediously Minimalistic, and indeed, with his affinity for brevity, Massey risks accusations of pretentious purism. But linger on Massey’s poetry and the suspicion proves vastly misconceived. Far from supercilious, Massey seems almost humbled, struck by the unassuming beauty of ordinariness. Whereas other Minimalists exert control through perfected precision, Massey uses concision to allow space for thought. Massey, who quotes Clark Coolidge’s idea that “[t]he line is an assemblage of broken smaller pieces,” follows in form. Divided into five parts, the book threads together impressionistic observations and subtle commentary – a fluid merging of shadowy existence and vibrant life. Massey drifts with focused intensity, and readers hover on the edge as witnesses to a quiet confrontation with the world.

The poems are perhaps best described as linguistic place constructions. Sparsely but meticulously crafted, they evoke the essence of Humboldt County, California, where Massey lives and works. Massey captures the county not only through subject matter but also through careful attention to structural form. “Empty” space becomes active space in that it plays a primary role in creating atmosphere. Not only does it allow for a wandering, unpressured reading of the poems, but it also reflects the openness of the county. It also complements the poems’ fragmentation, a characteristic founded on Massey’s skeletal diction and reinforced by his meditated enjambments. Massey’s pauses force readers to slow their pace. At first the spaces make for labored reading, but eventually they create an entrancingly hypnotic rhythm. Readers feel that they are there beside Massey, or perhaps floating in a soothing sensation of dejà vu.

And this is the effect of the book – that although the poems recall Humboldt County, they also remind readers of their hometowns, wherever they may be. Thematically, the poems are simple and approachable. The clipped lawns, stained coffee cups, and pockets of light could be anywhere. The poems easily slip into readers’ memories just as if they reflected readers’ own experiences – because they could be, or maybe they are. “[H]ere, the one speaking/& the one/ listening, is you,” Massey writes in “Bramble.” Readers and writer share a common voice.

Massey’s recognition of elegance in simplicity gives the book its charm. His book highlights the world as a quiet marvel where existing beauty is regrettably overlooked. Even the commonplace and the ugly become poetic: a television’s light shines mysteriously over the grass; weeds sway rhythmically in a cinder block; a spider web sags gracefully under the weight of a receipt. Already assigned significance through the sheer act of having been extracted from the jumble of the world, they also gain impact through form. Massey’s master craftsmanship reveals itself in his use of space, which he employs to force lingering concentration, even, at times, dividing words and stretching them to multiple lines. In “Bramble: A Gathering of Lunes,” for instance, he highlights the rare laziness of a bee, emphasizing the odd sleepiness of the moment with careful enjambment:

                    yellow-striped bumble-
     bee bends slow-
                    ly into sunlight

Massey often uses haiku-like forms, and appropriately, he pays particular attention to sensory perception. He explores the world as actively alive: “A neighbor’s/voice (is)/strained to a/thin thump,” a honeysuckle scent recalls “an open vowel,” a “tree/stammers/through fog.” Sensory stimulation transforms the normally distasteful to something surprisingly beautiful. In ¨Property Line,¨ for example, Massey describes the musicality of street litter, writing that ¨Glass/crushed/by a garbage/truck/cracks the/room’s/silence in/half.¨ Massey reprocesses and reevaluates the world, and readers can delight in his recognition of undiscovered splendor.

Massey’s magnifying of detail hints at latent meaning in a world readers thought they knew. Gradually, it emerges that Massey observes the world not for pure enjoyment but in an attempt to better understand how one experiences life. He seems to feel an incompleteness, and it’s as if his enlargement of detail reflects an aching need to find answers by reexamining what he formerly overlooked. He seems particularly puzzled by what is versus what could be. In “Property Line,” he admits to unfulfilled hope in the aid of words in comprehending the world. Either he loses what small grasp he had, as when he writes, “what words I/wrote with/dissolve,” or he remains trapped within self-construction: “Words occur to gather/a world–/not the world.”

The themes of perception and reality also extend to memory. Memory seems fleeting and fundamental, sometimes “stifled/by the day’s/lapse,” as in “Pulse,” other times caught “skid(ding) across/daylight’s/edges,” as in “Without a Field Guide.” Massey recognizes the temptation of the ideal, referring in “Reading,” for example, to “a world/behind the glass,/within whose/insistence/we drift, forget.” Indeed, many of his poems recall an episodic memory in which he remembers without the burden of analysis. And yet Massey also hints at a darker memory, a memory frustrated by confusion and unpermitted denial. A muddling of identity often results. The bewilderment following mistaken identity that Massey expresses in “Greyhound, North Through Sonoma County,” where “a mirror of –/(his) face/supplants/the landscape,” later returns prominently and drives the section “Out of Light.” There the speaker mistakes branches for fingers and watches as light patterns change shape across skin. Emptiness and nothingness overwhelm the poems. “Is there anything here/to say we’re anywhere/at all?” Massey writes in “Plein Air.” Just as the speaker in “Clyfford Still” “walks (himself) wordless,” so does Massey use his poems to dissolve into the unknown what he had previously clarified in precise detail. Objects disband into abstract shapes and silence absorbs voices, leaving “a stilted vacancy.” In his apparently fruitless struggle for comprehension, Massey seeps into “areas of fog.” Gone is the comforting clarity of the opening poems. “Here at the/margins,” he writes, “it’s all said/illegibly.”

And yet readers feel otherwise. Indeed, the book’s effect stems from Massey’s exposure of the margins, a poetic exploration that pushes beyond literal diction and evokes feeling. At the margins, Massey can meander through a world too complex to be received all at once. While meaning may not always be immediately comprehensible, it’s there. That there’s often no apparent resolution matters little. It’s enough for readers to revel in this re-presentation of the world. Readers sense that they’re on the brink of something quietly momentous. The book’s lasting impact comes from Massey’s indulgence in extant possibility: Brilliance can stem from anything – something ordinary, or extraordinary, or both.

* * *

Elizabeth Moore is currently working on a series of short stories that capture how communication affects the experience of place. She is from San Francisco.

Feminaissance reviewed by Megan Milks

2010-10-19T08:40:00.004-04:00

Feminaissance
Edited by Christine Wertheim

Poetry | Prose | Essays | $20
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-17-2
Size: 6“x9”, 132 pages, pbk.
Les Figues Press
Contributors: Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng, Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, and Lidia Yuknavitch.

Reviewed by Megan Milks

“Another anthology of experimental women’s writing!” Feminaissance opens with both jubilant announcement and weary defense. While editor Christine Wertheim’s choice of exclamation point over question mark or interrobang might slightly privilege the jubilance over the fatigue, her dedication is equal parts celebration and justification of the collection of texts it precedes. Wertheim insists, in dedicating the anthology to “all of the-M-others everywhere,” that despite historical strides in our understanding of gender (and other identity categories) and power, the Others “still don’t have their share of discursive space” (vii). It is on these grounds, Wertheim suggests, that an all-women’s anthology, a collection of what Dodie Bellamy calls “tiny revolts,” is justified.

As Wertheim and publishers Teresa Carmody and Vanesa Place explain further in their foreword, this justification requires enunciation in the context of recent conversations in the literary press purporting the obviation of women’s poetry anthologies. Feminaissance necessarily begins on the defensive, countering those who would spurn such a project and the (always already bad bad) essentialism it presumably relies upon. Wertheim addresses and opposes the malignancies attached to essentialism in her eloquent introductory essay, which makes a case for socio-historical essentialism while placing the anthology in the context of a “more ambiguous, more refined notion of gender” and a dynamic and unstable feminist politics.

From here, the book’s pages are divided into three parallel sections that represent visually the complexity of the anthology’s discussion of gender and writing. A thin banner, two lines deep, runs across the top of the book, reproducing Juliana Spahr’s and Stephanie Young’s essay “Numbers Trouble,” which interrogates claims that representative equality has been reached in contemporary anthologies. The second and third strands of the book present, as the editor and publishers put it, a “plurality of voices” that demonstrate the diversity of approach and content of women’s experimental writing. With Spahr’s and Young’s paper providing a kind of inverse anchor to the other texts, the anthology simultaneously recognizes the importance of the numbers game while departing from it to attend to other issues pertaining to gender, writing, and feminism.

These texts, which originated in papers and readings given at the Feminaissance conference held by Cal Arts in 2007, are occasionally academic, occasionally theoretical, often personal, often performative, often out of or between and across genres, often addressing féminine écriture with or without Hélène Cixous, frequently concerned with sex, sexuality, and the body, sometimes approaching space and time, transposition, utopia, a/the social imaginary, always exciting, often surprising, occasionally familiar but more often strange, wonderfully.

A sampling: Maggie Nelson reads Sylvia Plath and Alice Notley as poets who in their embrace of the antisocial bring out transformative psychological change. Bhanu Kapil addresses monstrosity, mobility, transposition, continuity, hybridity, and the quest to get to an experience of desire: “an ‘unseen but recorded’ experience of desire…desire in its vestigial state” (84). Eileen Myles theorizes gender in language as productive of gender in the world, calling her writing a “utopian gendered imaginary” that anticipates a coming actuality (105). Meiling Cheng returns to Cixous, putting her notions of writing the body into a framework of change and transformation, of beginning and beginning again. Vanessa Place & Carolyn K. Place’s “The First Gurgitation is a Sentence” performs with intratextual enjambment a mad linguistic body lurching to contrasting rhythms. Lidia Yuknavitch’s “psalm,” divided into fragments, punctuates the texts it separates to provide a kind of meditative space.

Interested more in curation than in representation but necessarily engaging with both, Feminaissance is, as Wertheim writes, “less a demonstration that women can do the same avant-garde, experimental, innovative and conceptual works as men….[as] it is a display of the many different avant-garde, experimental, innovative and conceptual modes that women themselves conceive” (vii). If these texts are bodily, if they are ‘feminine,’ as a collection they both insist upon and radically complicate essentialism and gender as categories of analysis and literary production. Moreover, as a community of texts, Feminaissance claims a belonging to a genealogy of women’s experimental writing that it recognizes as being as necessary as it is polymorphous.

* * *

Megan Milks lives in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Everyday Genius, and Pocket Myths, among other journals. She co-edits Mildred Pierce Magazine and co-hosts Uncalled-for Readings Chicago. She blogs at montevidayo.com.

On Kristen Nelson’s and Noah Saterstrom’s "Ghosty" (Drunken Boat, 2010)

2010-10-04T11:54:00.011-04:00

The Fictions of Memory ( / Loss), "Getting It Right," and I-Forget-What-Else¹

By Christian Peet

We pack the physical outline of the creature with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him that we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

--Proust, Swann's Way. Translator unknown; quoted in Donald S. Spence's Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (W.W. Norton, 1982).

A few weeks ago, the online magazine Drunken Boat published a collaboration between Kristen Nelson and Noah Saterstrom², entitled "Ghosty." Noah's drawings accompany Kristen's spare but moving account of the death of the narrator's father, with whom she had a conflicted, troubled relationship. While the story suggests that her father's remains will likely end up as ashes, what "remains" for the narrator is a host of unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions, and an inability to articulate even the simplest of responses to a question about what sort of life he had lived--though, she says, "an unspoken answer fills up my mouth. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger."

Accompanying this passage is one of my favorite drawings in the series, depicting a ghost that has ballooned in size so that it not only fills the house it inhabits, but fills it to bursting. The sheathing is gone from the walls of the house, leaving only a gabled roof and the stick frame of two-by-fours.

I can't help but wonder if, regardless of the ghost's overwhelming size--or, perhaps, because of it--the ghost is invisible to the inhabitants of the house. Rather than standing in a doorway or at the foot of a bed, for example, as a "normal" ghost might, the ghost is so large as to contain the whole of the house's livable space. In a sense, the ghost has swallowed the inhabitants. In any case, to live inside the house means necessarily living inside the ghost. Or, to mix metaphors: rather than the proverbial "elephant in the room" (i.e., the thing that everyone is thinking about but no one will discuss), here the elephant is the room.

An old writing-workshop adage also comes to mind: "You have to have some distance from your subject in order to write about it”--a theory that is helpful in examining why, for instance, poems written in the throes of a high-school breakup don't quite translate in "great literature," that sort of thing. But the theory also recalls, for me, Maslow's "hierarchy of needs," inasmuch as it implies that one is not in the position of relative safety necessary to create art, to render a subject "artfully," when the subject is actively traumatizing the artist.

This theory of necessary authorial/artistic distance, however, also implies that, someday, the writer/artist will "look back" with some new clarity and perspective etc., which in turn implies that the event at which we "look back" is a fixed point in time--unlike us, whose lives have continued; we who remain, we who are present, we who are reading this; We, the Living, upon whom poet Robert Pinsky once bestowed the title, "the unfallen lords of life."

And yet, drawing on a bit of insider knowledge--not fair, I know--I can’t help but think: The narrator of “Ghosty” is not so unlike the author, whose own father passed away just months ago. I can’t help but think, Dang, Kristen. Good work. And I can’t help but think: Maybe an author doesn’t necessarily have to wait, doesn’t necessarily need distance.

The operative word being "necessarily," of course; we each have our own routes, processes, requirements for our art. Some write with a kid on their lap, others need a room of their own, etc. Some write at work, others wait until they are home. Some live in vans down by the river. Some, like myself, apparently, require years, while others, like Kristen, are able not only to live through this (to quote Hole), but are also able to create through this.

I think what appeals to me about creating work during acute pain is this thought: Do it now, even while you’re hurting, in case the pain just flat-out fucking kills you in the future.

Besides, the pain may go away but the literal and metaphorical scars will not. One way or another, we will always be reminded of this time, this loss, this pain. “This” is never going anywhere. “This” is our life. We live inside it. We can never have any “distance.” We’ll never “get it right.”

This essay, for example, uses a lot of italics and words in quotations, and doesn't always do it well, but, just for today--as they say in AA--I couldn't care less. Also, look at this picture:

What could be more wrong than that picture? And in the context of "Ghosty," the picture and the stuffed unicorn to which it refers, are simply heartbreaking. So much so, I wanted to laugh. I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh to stave off all the terrible, terrible tears.

Moreover, even if we did "get it right," today, we’ll never remember it the same way. I’m acutely aware of this, as I’ve been reading a rather brutal amount of books and research on the topic of memory, particularly where memory intersects with “unpleasant” experiences, from the merely unappealing to the horrific and traumatic.³ Though the books focus on a variety of things in relation to memory, all of them, in one way or another, evidence the importance of “narrative” in “making meaning” of what we tend to think of as the “facts” of our lives: our memories. And though we like to think of our memories as static, like the events to which they refer, our memories are constructed anew every time we attempt to recall them. Thus, anything we write today will be different from what we write tomorrow about the same event.

So I ask myself today, after reading and thinking about “Ghosty”: Why not just write all along the way? And I respond: Good idea, Christian. You have nothing to lose and at least one thing to gain: your present construction of this memory. Your own narrative. Your own fiction. After all, we were discussing fiction, right? Or was it nonfiction? I forget. Good thing I wrote it down! Let me check. . . .

Maybe this confusion, this malleability, is why Noah literally drew frames around each of the the images in “Ghosty.” Rather than seeing visual representations of scenes or ideas discussed by the narrator, maybe we are seeing snapshots, portraits, family photos taken of those scenes. Or maybe the narrator is trying, against the odds, to place some sort of frame around these scenes, to create a snapshot-memory.

I don’t know if the narrator has succeeded in this attempt. But I know that Kristen and Noah have succeeded. The ghost may keep shifting, growing, changing over time, but “Ghosty” is now fixed, a series of snapshots in a larger album, snapshots that leave out whole persons, include only the elbow of another, but will be appreciated in the future for having "captured" dress and hairstyles as much as for having "captured" the intended subjects. The work itself, “Ghosty,” by virtue of existing, is now part of the larger narrative of the ghost. The ghost that is our life. Our life that is, somewhere in time, already someone else’s memory. Or so we hope, taking our snapshots along the way. . . .

____________________

¹ Not really a review, since Christian does not write real reviews. TSky's Reviews Editor is on leave, however, and Christian has unfettered access to the reviews blog and can post reviews-that-are-not-really-reviews all he wants.

² Full disclosure: Kristen and Noah are Christian's friends. See footnote #1 + Christian's not trying to sell you anything: "Ghosty" is free to anyone with an internet connection.

³ Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory (St. Martins Press, 1996); Paul McHugh, Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (Dana Press, 2008); Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (University of California Press); Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (W. W. Norton, 1984)

Twofer Tuesday: Travis Macdonald’s N7ostradamus reviewed by Charles Freeland and by Michael Leong

2010-09-28T08:20:00.004-04:00

Travis Macdonald
N7ostradamus

BlazeVOX [books] (2010)
ISBN: 978-1-60964-009-5
168 pages

Reviewed by Charles Freeland

A mere twenty-five years separates the first printing, in 1555, of the quatrains of Nostradamus and the first printing, in 1580, of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne, an astonishing number, really, when you consider these two Frenchmen seem to come from not just different ages, but entirely different planets. Nostradamus, sitting on his brass tripod, scribbling his obscure predictions with the assistance of some candles, herbal stimulants and, of course, the “divine spirit”, strikes me as emblematic of the last throes of a medieval Europe that gloried in witch hunts and alchemy, in angels dancing on the head of a pin. The direction of all such God-haunted attention is forward – toward coming millennia and raptures and whatever else might cleanse the present cesspool the true believer finds himself immersed in. And its attitude is inevitably one of certainty, of Knowing with a capital K. This from Nostradamus’s Preface to his quatrains: “ … the divine spirit has vouchsafed me to know by means of astronomy.” Twenty-five years later, Montaigne’s attention, something of an entirely different nature than his countryman’s, is focused occasionally on the present, the religious wars that are tearing France apart, but more especially on the past – that enormous fund of classical scholarship and erudition-- the Plutarchs and the Senecas -- that assists Montaigne in his every attempt to forge some understanding of what is happening around him, and ultimately within. The attitude required here is, of course, in direct opposition to the overweening certainty of Nostradamus and his ilk. It is a skepticism mined from the original source of that long list of classical antecedent, from Socrates himself. This is Montaigne’s version, from the Essais: “I determine nothing. I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.”

One man trying desperately to foretell revolutions while immersing himself in a static, dead way of being. And another ushering in actual revolutions of the mind and spirit (nothing is ever the same after Montaigne) while talking calmly of the past.

Which brings us to Travis Macdonald’s remarkable N7ostradamus, a re-shaping and re-examination of some of Nostradamus’s quatrains using a surrealist tactic having its origins in the “trials”, in the experiments first inaugurated by Montaigne. It is a book that asks by virtue of both its approach and its subject matter the fundamental questions: Where should our attention be aimed? What is it will we allow ourselves to know?

Macdonald subjects a selection of the quatrains to a technique known as N + 7, first created by Jean Lescure of the Oulipo group (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentiellle, which included as well Queneau, Perec, and Italo Calvino). This technique replaces the common nouns in a given text with the noun appearing seven places later in a dictionary. So, for instance, Nostradumus’ eighth quatrain from the first “century” (he labeled each collection of one hundred quatrains a “century”) states:

How often will you be captured, O city of the sun?
Changing laws that are barbaric and vain.
Bad times approach you. No longer will you be enslaved.
Great Hadrie will revive your veins.

After its N + 7 touch-up, Macdonald’s version becomes:

How often will you be captured, O clairvoyant of the sundry?
Changing layers barbaric and vain.
Bad tinges approach you. No longer will you be enslaved.
Great Hate will revive your ventriloquists.

For any poet, or just any twenty-first century human being who has been paying the slightest bit of attention, that last line of Macdonald’s is a miracle, an improvement on every level over the original. It beats Nostradamus at his own game, creating an enigmatic, image-driven line that will carry almost any meaning you decide to give it after the fact. And it does so not through a heavy-handed, mystical or esoteric “Knowledge”, but through pure chance, through the artist saying, like Montaigne before him, “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” It’s a surrendering beforehand to vicissitude and arbitrary form that still manages to suggest some kind of meaning which is more powerful and ultimately more believable than that of the original because it does not demand it. Gerard Genette in Palimpsests declares Oulipian procedure like the N + 7 “… the transformation of a text for purely playful purposes”, and it is certainly the sense of play, the replacing of the deadly serious by the light and unexpected that makes Macdonald’s creations so much more satisfying than those from which they were derived.

And how wonderful the world is that this sense of play creates – a world dominated by perch, seals, clairvoyants, goggles and yeast. A world where “Certainty” (the N + 7 replacement for Nostradamus’s unwieldy “centuries”) is always followed by “Questions” (the replacement for “Quatrains”). Macdonald’s book is stuffed full of self-contained and absolutely delightful poems like these:

Certainty I Question 56
Sooner and later you will see great chapels made,
Dreadful hoses and vengeances.
For as the mop is thus led by the ankle
The hedgehogs draw near to the Ballerina.

And

Certainty IV Question 26
The great sweatshirt of beetles will arise,
Such that one will not know whence they have come;
By nightlight the amour, the sequence under the violins
Clairvoyant delivered by five babblers, not naked.

Of course, anyone who enjoyed Mad Libs in childhood or owned a magnetic poetry set knows the thrill of discovery and play involved here, but he also recognizes a question that must be addressed. Where in all this does the current writer or artist fit? What exactly, at the end of the day, has Macdonald or Lescure accomplished? Much of the Oulipo crowd was fascinated by mathematics and machinery and seemed focused on, at least when it comes to techniques like the N + 7, marginalizing the artist as a means of heightening the art, of making the technique at least as important as the finished product and more so than the individual who happens to be wielding the technique. And the N + 7 is finally a technique, a machine – you can find algorithms on the internet that will perform the N + 7 (or N + any number between 0 and 20) on a text you copy and paste into the window. And some of them will even provide you a choice of original texts to be altered.

Perhaps the point, then, Macdonald is making is just this – the writer (whether Macdonald, Lescure, or even Nostradamus himself) doesn’t ultimately matter. And if so, I’m all for that. Certainly, we have all become personally acquainted with enough writers over the years, well-known or otherwise, to have similar suspicions.

But I think something more is going on. The Oulipo fascination with mathematics and machinery harks back to another Frenchman, and a truly daunting artist, Marcel DuChamp. DuChamp had been filling his canvases and glass with machinery of all sorts – coffee grinders and robot bridegrooms – as well as various experiments with chance, before he unleashed what I take to be the direct ancestors of the Oulipo experiments --his readymades. In Network of Stoppages (1914), for instance, he lets drop pieces of thread onto a board from a certain height, one after another, and then glues each to the board in the exact position it took when it landed. Chance for DuChamp, though, was not simply play. It was a very powerful means of self-expression. “Your chance is not the same as mine, is it?” he said once in an interview. “If I make a throw of the dice, it will never be the same as your throw. And so an act like throwing dice is a marvelous expression of your subconscious.”

This process led him to ask a key question: “Can one make works which are not works of art?”

Is my N + 7 rendering of a Nostradamus quatrain somehow other than Macdonald’s because we have brought separate subconscious realities to the process even if we used the same machine? Is Nostradamus’s Century I Quatrain 56 really the N - 7 rendering of Macdonald’s Certainty I Question 56 that appeared four hundred and fifty years later? Is Nostradamus’s work therefore of greater aesthetic merit than perhaps it has been given credit for previously (because let’s be honest – no one who reads Nostradamus is doing so for aesthetic reasons – at least not until Travis Macdonald’s book comes along)?

Some of DuChamp’s readymades seem designed to answer his question with a definite “No.” Bottle Rack, 1914, for instance, is simply a rack for drying wine bottles, something someone had discarded and DuChamp subsequently found on the street. He gave it a name and it became a work in his Oeuvre. The piece suggests that in fact almost anything made by a human being is a form of art and we just haven’t been defining or observing things properly if we fail to see this. Other readymades were more complicated, though. They engaged in commentary by virtue of context and it’s these I see as the true precursors to what Macdonald has done in his book. DuChamp’s Fountain, 1917 – a urinal mounted upside down – has to be seen as more than just found art given that it was exhibited (or almost exhibited) at the Society for Independent Artists’ initial exhibition, what amounted to a second Amory Show in New York. And the commentary is certainly evident in his most famous readymade – L.H.O.O.Q., 1919 -- the Mona Lisa with a mustache. In both of the latter, the artist is active; he makes choices and the choices matter. His genius is in choosing what should be reformulated and why.

Similarly, Macdonald’s genius is in choosing the material to be subjected to the N + 7, in creating commentary through context. I really can’t imagine a more fitting subject for his approach than the work of Nostradamus. There is obvious irony in demonstrating how arbitrary most of Nostradamus’s imagery actually is. But what’s truly remarkable is that Macdonald has managed to create a very American document by subjecting the work of a French seer to what was originally a French stratagem. Ours is a country that from the very first has expressed its vital interest in progress, in the future, in what’s going to happen next, often to our own detriment and certainly to the detriment of our understanding of history. When was the last time you saw a History Channel broadcast concerning Socrates or Michel de Montaigne? But then, how many times a month do they air one concerning Nostradamus? I would be willing to bet that in the winter of 2003, just before the start of the second Iraq War, significantly more Americans “knew” that Nostradamus had somehow “predicted” the attack on the towers of the World Trade Center than knew the difference between a Shi’ah and a Sunni Muslim.

It’s here, in such commentary through context, that N7ostradamaus strikes me as a truly indispensible American text, something having almost unlimited implications for how we think about the present and the past, how we go about knowing what we know. And there is a definite lesson here, as well, for all avant-garde (or post avant or post-post avant) artists and writers who are almost always trying desperately to figure out, predict, and inaugurate the next big thing, trying to outdo that falsest of all false prophets, Nostradamus, and usually producing similarly dreadful results. Take a page from Montaigne, from Travis Macdonald: look backward once in a while. Leave the future to its own devices. It is going to get along just fine without us.

* * *

Charles Freeland lives in Dayton, Ohio. A two-time recipient of the Individual Excellence Award in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council, he is the author of Eros & (Fill in the Blank) (BlazeVOX Books, 2009) and Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro (Otoliths, 2009). His website is The Fossil Record.

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N7ostradamus
reviewed by Michael Leong

If we can allow ourselves, for a moment, an imprecise analogy based on the popularly perceived distinction between the “hard” and “soft” sciences, then Travis Macdonald surely writes a “hard” kind of poetry: it is rigorous, methodical, almost clinical, and conspicuously free of the “soft,” gushy sentimentalism one associates with certain enduring incarnations of lyric poetry. Yet even if this analogy is flawed from the get-go and the binary between impersonal proceduralism and subjective expressivity is ultimately reductive, it goes some ways in capturing the bold experimental spirit of Macdonald’s work as we imagine him in his poetic laboratory, getting his hands dirty with the words of others, performing intensive operations (as if in an intensive care unit) on appropriated texts, and reading them through different, and eventually rewarding, lenses.

For example, his first book, The O Mission Repo [Vol. 1] (Fact-Simile Editions, 2008), ingeniously runs The 9/11 Commission Report through a set of blurs, strike-throughs, and erasures to create a legitimately moving response to the national tragedy and its aftermath. His next venture, Bashō’s Phonebook (E·ratio Editions, 2010), creatively and anachronistically “translates” the work of Matsuo Bashō into a performative score for the cell phone, giving a witty twist to the term “tone poem” (the first line of the last poems reads, “666:555:3: 7:666:66:3:”).

Now we have N7ostradamus, a painstaking work that cleverly embeds its own compositional procedure into its nearly unpronounceable title. N + 7 is a procedure invented by Jean Lescure that requires choosing a pre-existing piece of writing and — according to the indispensible Oulipo Compendium — “replacing each noun (N) with the seventh following it in a dictionary.” For all intents and purposes, any N + 7 text retains a modicum of interest merely because of the inevitability of some fun lexical disruption. Regarding the success of the procedure, Raymond Queneau has said, “The results are not always very interesting; sometimes, on the other hand, they are striking. It seems that only good texts give good results. The reasons for the qualitative relation between the original text and the terminal text are still rather mysterious, and the question remains open.” Whether or not Nostradamus’ quatrains constitute “good” (in Queneau’s sense of the word) poetry is debatable, but, on a purely conceptual level, Macdonald’s choice of The Prophecies as the source text is brilliant. The number seven has, of course, been imbued with much religio-mystical significance, and it had obvious importance for Nostradamus’ prophecies. One of his final apocalyptic quatrains begins (I had wished, in fact, that Macdonald had included it in his selection),

“Au revolu du grand nombre septiesme…”
[At the turning of the great number seven…].

This, alone, adds a numerological layer of significance to Macdonald’s book, but before I delve more into the conceptual payoff of N7ostradamus, I’d like to first explore the strange and colorful fabric of the text itself. Among some quarters, it seems a truism that a conceptually based text must sacrifice its pleasure and readability for the animating idea itself; this is certainly not the case with N7ostradamus.

As can be expected with this kind of procedure, portions of the book tend toward the absurd or the ridiculous and certain moments are luminously outrageous or laugh-out-loud funny —sometimes both at the same time. Here are just a few of my favorite bons mots: “rumination aquariums”; “the patisserie of the hollow moustaches”; “curlew scrofula”; “uterus roadhouses”; “the pimps of Hercules.” And surely the phrase “seahorse beatnik” rivals the ludicrous “ickle wickle prawn kittens” (Sharon Mesmer) or “rogaine bunn[ies]” (Drew Gardner) of the notorious Flarf movement. To adapt an exquisite Hugh Kenner phrase regarding William Carlos Williams, we have the experience of language lifted completely out of the zone of things said.

The continuance of this effect throughout the text is due to the fact that Nostradamus’ quatrains are noun-heavy, so the frequency of substitution (and therefore semantic collision) is quite high. For example, here is a “treated” quatrain whose original, according to commentator Mario Reading, refers to the tumultuous year of 1698:

At the forty-eighth climactic delicatessen,
At the enema of Canine, very great dryness:
Fist in seal, roadhouse, lamentation boiled hectic,
Bearn, Bigorre in dither through firecracker from the slacker

Among other things, Reading maintains that the “fire from the sky” (hilariously transformed in Macdonald’s rendering into “firecracker from the slacker”) refers to the Leonid meteor shower of 1698, a year which also witnessed a drought in southwestern France (“Bearn, Bigorre”).¹ I argue that Macdonald’s N7ostradamus puts all such commentaries into question by procedurally coding an already obscure and “coded” text (Queneau observes that “the inverse of S + 7 is cryptography”): what crucial meanings are lost in the adaptation? It seems to be all in the eye of the exegete.

In fact, it may be hard to distinguish the strangeness of the N + 7 lines from the strangeness of the “originals” (here, again, I’m using Reading’s translation). See for yourself if you can discern which lines come from Nostradamus and which lines come from N7ostradamus (the answers are in the endnotes):

The leapers of Lake Lemán will be well and truly stripped naked

When the lunar default is near

Aries doubts his non-bastard pole

A young onion will destroy his future

An umlaut, cruel, giving wean to one worse.

In Venice he will lose his proud glue

The barman will be made on the brig at Sorgues²

Whether Nostradamus was a legitimate practitioner of “poético-oraculaire,” as Anna Carlsted argues in La Poésie oraculaire de Nostradamus: langue, style et genre des ‘Centuries’ (2005), or a clever charlatan and inept astrologer, as Pierre Brind’Amour suggests in Nostradamus astrophile (1993), is not really at issue in Macdonald’s book (and such categories are, of course, not necessarily mutually exclusive).³

Ultimately, N7ostradamus is a utopian book that grapples with the quintessentially modernist problematic of being imprisoned by history; “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus famously proclaimed. Rather than trying to write a poem that “contains history,” as Pound tried to do in his Cantos, Macdonald has playfully “shifted” history — or at least past and future history according to one of the most (in)famous prophets of the West — by seven degrees. So in a quatrain that refers to global war in 2070 (this is Reading’s interpretation), the word “war,” by virtue of N + 7, wonderfully becomes “wardrobe” in Macdonald’s version:

…the landmarks will be inhabited peacefully.
Perch will travel safely through the slacker (over) landmark and seals:
Then wardrobes will start up again.

So despite the “dry enema” of 1698, I consider this a utopian poem of peace. When I read in the pages of Macdonald’s text that “[t]he firecracker by nightlight will take hold in two logics,” that “the nonsense of dachshunds, trustees and bellyaches / Will restore the sentries of the senseless laggard,” and that “[a] spaceman printing will be born of an infamous woodcutter,” I only hope that such fantastic events have not yet happened.

N7ostradamus is a timely text, not only because we are inexorably approaching 2012, a year so overdetermined, hyped, and sensationalized by History Channel-style prophecy, but because this November will mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of Oulipo — surely one of the more significant occasions in the history of experimental literature. What better way to celebrate such an event than reading a book that so astringently scrutinizes the way we mark time, the way we consider the past with biased retrospect, and the way we face the future with charged anticipation?

_______________________

¹ Mario Reading, The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus (London: Watkins, 2009), 410.

² The first four lines are from Reading’s translation; the last three are from N7ostradamus.

³ On Carlsted, see Agnès Conacher’s review in French Studies 61.4 (2007), 501-2. On Brind’Amour, see Anthony Grafton’s essay-review “Starry Messengers: Recent Work in the History of Western Astrology” in Perspectives on Science 8.1 (2000), 70-83.

* * *

Michael Leong is the author of two books of poetry -- e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail) -- and three chapbooks -- The Great Archivist’s / Cloudy Quotient (Beard of Bees Press, 2010), Midnight’s Marsupium (Forks, Knives and Spoons Press [UK], forthcoming), and State-of-the-Art Poem Machine (Splitleaves Press, forthcoming). His translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All, was published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2009.

Out for review

2010-09-10T10:39:00.006-04:00

Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea (University of Iowa Press, 2010)
Oana Avasilichioaei, Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009)
duncan b. barlow, Super Cell Anemia (Afterbirth Books, 2007)
Laynie Browne, The Desires of Letters (Counterpath Press, 2010)
Melissa Buzzeo, Face (BookThug, 2009)
Juliet Cook, Fondant Pig Angst (Slash Pine Press, 2009)
Kate Durbin, The Ravenous Audience (Black Goat, 2009)
Elena Fanailova, The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)
K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009)
Rachel Levitsky, Neighbor (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009)
Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times (Twisted Spoon Press 2010)
Peter Waterhouse, Language Death Night Outside. Poem. Novel. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (Burning Deck, 2009)
John Dermot Woods, The Complete Collection of People, Places, & Things (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Brandon Downing's Lake Antiquity reviewed by Lucy Ives

2010-09-07T13:17:00.007-04:00

Brandon Downing
Lake Antiquity

Fence Books, 2009
182 pp. full color, 9"x11"

Reviewed by Lucy Ives

Lake Antiquity is a large and very nice kingdom adjacent to but not nearby where you live. Ruled by a proto-fascist space lord from the year 3016, it resembles nothing so much as nineteenth-century London. At the shores of its eponymous lake, view such floral marvels as the talking “Navel Orange Tree” (see page 10) and cheery “Fungo Adulto” with characteristic red cap (page 33), as well as decorative bouquets and twining flourishes too numerous to mention. Thrill to the sight of live muppets dozing amidst Roman ruins (pages 61, 185), as flocks of massive disembodied heads float blithely across the horizon (pages 54, 70, 84, 86, 105, 120, 122, 142, 153, 182, 184)! The nearly unspeakable beauty of the people of this land is matched only by the glory of their ancestral songs, many of which are included here for the first time in painstaking and effective translation. Just take a listen to one excerpt:

“Quatrième Partie. Fourth Part”

What does O.K. mean? What is a cinematograph? do Chinese books begin?
How long is the “Span of Life”? What is the Seeing Eye? What is a poncho?
What is our national sport?
What are milk teeth?
Who wrote “Black Beauty”?
Who was “goddess of the chase”?
What is the color of a live lobster?
What is the abbreviation of noon?
Of what metal are needles made?
What is a marionette?
What is meant by anti-clockwise?
In what play do we find Wendy?

Or, as it appears on the page:

More than an artifact among others, this verse is the gleaming funereal mask of one all-but-lost civilization—and, yet, gentle reader, there is even more. Did I mention the technology? It’s gadgets and gears and billion-lire space probes galore in the land of Lake Antiquity (every page)! Why, you can barely walk across the street without tripping over some Victorian scientist or kindly sports celebrity who can’t wait to explain to you the intricacies of fissile atoms or sex customs amongst the Pruni Amygdali, a certain genus of fruit-bearing tree. Indeed, with frothy weather systems to spare and profound respect for the post-industrial parade event, Lake Antiquity is sure to delight and amaze even the most jaded connoisseur of print ephemera. To the more naïve it is certain to present nothing less than a watershed moment in the history of collage arts:

[Detail:]

In the end, however, it must be said that the reader of this new lyric visual guide owes a great deal to its modest compiler, Brandon Downing, without whose semi-slavish devotion it would never have been possible to gauge the full extent of the development of culture around and within Lake Antiquity. Downing’s full-color illustrations verily burst with machismo, and the more than decade’s worth of anthropological research he has devoted to his study has clearly paid off in spades. Debunking once and for all the notion that canoes cannot be propelled into interstellar flight by the swift current at the top of a raging Canadian waterfall, Downing proves himself the eagle-eyed master of the twin spirits of inductive reasoning and intuitive montage. Not since David Macaulay’s 1979 monograph, Motel of the Mysteries (or, arguably, even Breton’s Nadja), has there been so triumphant a send-up of evangelical philosophy and the mores of the post-post-post-colonial encyclopedia. In many respects the elephant in the room of contemporary American poetry, Lake Antiquity deserves a spot on every coffee table and a place in the hearts of all would-be schoolgirls and major poets.

* * *

Lucy Ives is the author of the book-length poem Anamnesis (Slope Editions, 2009). A second collection, Essays, is forthcoming from Emergency Press in April, 2011.

Arkadii Dragomoshenko's Dust, Reviewed by John Muckle

2010-08-30T07:52:00.007-04:00

Arkadii Dragomoshenko
Dust
Dalkey Archive Press 2008
94pp, pb, $10.95

Reviewed by John Muckle

Essays, stories, dreams, aphorisms – this book of meditations on memory and writing is a densely-woven tapestry of aperçus, story-fragments, personal and cultural narrations which begin, break off, and are – sometimes – taken up again, philosophical speculations on time and perception, and disquisitions on its own oblique but exquisitely judged cut and shuffle methods. This serpentine course – which gives Dust the feel of a book many times its length – offers, among many other things, a brief glimpse of Gertrude Stein’s theory of identity, the amazing story of Sarah Pardee Winchester’s labyrinthine Californian spirit-house, designed to appease, or elude, the ghosts of all those killed by her husband’s repeating rifles, a beautiful essay on reading Paul Bowles (these both parts of the book’s longest excursion, ‘Do Not A Gun’), and, at the heart of Dust, reflections on the two cities which govern its dream-like structure: Dragomoshenko’s native St Petersburg, a place of cafes, lovers, and birds, and New York, a workplace and sometime adoptive home, a multiplying Chinese box of a place through which he experiences America and its cultures. Here, straying from his office at NYU on Washington Square, he notices one day on a class list that Walter Benjamin is enroled as a student.

Lyn Hejinian, a friend and correspondent of Dragomoschenko, compares him, among others, to Nietszche and Kierkegaard, but his writing is neither particularly dialectical nor concerned to negate any other system, although it is existential and sometimes anguished. He writes out of the distensio of St Augustine’s eternal present, a condition he finds amplified by the age of the Internet. He is indeed Benjamin-like, but not the sharp cultural commentator of the twenties, not the political and aesthetic radical of the thirties essays, neither the complex cartographer of nineteenth century Paris nor the writer of anguished meditations on history; and not the mystic or the seer either, but the cannabis-sodden meanderer around the backstreets of Marseilles and the byways of his own childhood: the Benjamin who always sat near the band and doodled an incomprehensible diagram of his life on a table-napkin.

Where would you escape to and why? Stay where you are. Everyone is calm and in a good mood. Besides, multiple perspectives require the utmost precision of finger, eyeball, and muscle, dragging memory along the word’s orbit from one layer of fog to another.

Some people fix their gazes on the grid of a misty window, others stand by a statue, and still others look through viewfinders, while a fourth kind leans over an open book at night, turning pages with a consecrated knife. Their mouths are filled with Cambrian clay, their ears – with dreams of opium.

Dust never quite settles. It celebrates a life of idleness and botanising, of elusive remembered loves, the love of literature for its own sake – Dragomoshenko is a translator of American poetry into Russian – and the cultivation of cultural jet-set sensibilities. But what remains of such a life as one gets older? Of what are memories made and what use are they? These are questions he poses and probes with a superbly acute, unwavering attention, in a landscape where nothing is securely possessed: “But nothing was mine. Not even the pronoun ‘he.’” Perhaps a good way into this nihilistic and occasionally frustrating book would be to read the last section first. ‘Dust’ supplies a few pages of free-standing notebook fragments which offer up his gists and piths:

Aporia, motto, paradox, etc – a condition of thought where the answer continually outstrips the question.

In the end pleasure turns out to be something that excludes happiness, the labor to experience joy, a redundancy of knowledge and so on.

When I hear “You should work” from a person, whose eyes project the uncertain melancholy of an idiot, I realise that my idleness is lost virtue.

Tarpaulins, by Marcus Ted

2010-08-27T01:35:00.001-04:00

To Whom it may Concern,

Am interested in ordering some tarpaulins and will like to know the types you do have in stock now together with the prices or you can also include your direct website where i can view all those that you have in stock.Also let me know if you do take a surcharge when accepting either master cards or visa.Hope to hear from you soon.

Regards,
Marcus Ted
tarpaulins Purchase.....

Dora Malech's Shore Ordered Ocean Reviewed By Gregory Lawless

2010-08-25T16:14:00.006-04:00

Shore Ordered Ocean
By Dora Malech
The Waywiser Press 2009

Reviewed By Gregory Lawless

Dora Malech is a poetic contradiction of the best sort: a hyper-productive perfectionist. There’s a surplus of brilliant poems in Malech’s ninety-one-page debut, Shore Ordered Ocean, a book that showcases a rare talent. And while I hope that someday soon her work will need no introduction, I think the opening lines from “A Way” will, for the time being, provide a nice preview of Malech’s cartwheeling lyrical voice:

Without you I am making up an ocean.

Any resemblance to real oceans living or dead
is purely coincidental.
_______________I’m calling it Swimmingly
but I lie.
______Distance and its usual glitter.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

These lines feature many of Malech’s signature obsessions: exploring the origins of art and writing; using aphorisms to contort and subvert clichés; teasing the difference between observation and invention, among others. “A Way” focuses its attention on how we write (or invent) the world while perceiving it and trying to describe it. But despite this theme, which is one of Malech’s fundamental aesthetic fixations, the poem doesn’t succumb to wheel-spinning self-consciousness. Instead, the speaker campaigns for order and articulation even as she grinds toward Romantic breakdown in the poem’s final line: “My ocean is trying to say nothing.”

Thus, “A Way” probes the ethics of representation—that post-structural no-man’s land of reference—without losing sight of human (and humanizing) analogy: “No one / can marry an ocean although anyone can propose.” And, despite inevitable rejection, the author proposes again and again to marry the world (to unite self and other, word and referent) out of fidelity to the notion that we define ourselves primarily through our failures to achieve the objects of our desire. There is a world out there, after all, and both describing it and reinventing it have their consequences. Malech’s mindfulness of this dilemma is what gives her poems their unique blend of playfulness and tragic weight—so unusual in contemporary poetry, where young poets often choose either solemn or ironic modes, as though these are their only options.

Malech, on the other hand, opts for a poetic middlepath. Her poetry is full of intellectual oscillation and charming bursts of ambivalence. In her beautiful poem “Makeup,” for example, Malech test-drives another Romantic preoccupation: ageless beauty. Makeup is an ambivalent topic for the speaker since it simultaneously perfects and perverts appearance. Creepily, it even “Renders the dead living / and the living more alive,” thereby distorting our sense the ‘natural’. And while this perversity might beg for Shakespearian invective (“Slandering,” as it does, “creation with a false esteem”) the speaker nonetheless moves from skepticism to a guarded endorsement of makeup’s expressive functions—how it can provide a material manifestation of emotions that are otherwise difficult to portray: “Even the earth claims color / dressed in red leaves / as the trees play Grieving.” Costuming, in other words, can save us from mute suffering by giving voice to our pain. By acknowledging this, Malech highlights the therapeutic and pragmatic functions of her poetry’s essentially elegiac project. What this poetry wants to figure out is how to survive one’s love of mortal things.

The poems of Shore Ordered Ocean are everywhere imbued with loss. This tonal undercurrent doesn’t leash the poems but rather puts forth an emotional given that Malech toys with to the reader’s delight. Take this opening couplet from “Missive”: “My everything I say but don’t be silly. / How could everything possibly be mine?” Malech corrals her amorous outburst in the first line by asserting an ironic sense of control over the uncontrollable before she comes clean in the second. Hence the pain and frustration born of language’s expressive limitations turns into a game the poet plays by extending then retracting/revising meaning. Malech also uses a Hopkinseque crashing of sound devices to transform woe into joy: “a tisket, a tasket, last picnic, last basket— / a tisket, a turbine, a tisket, a target, / a tisket, a towline, a tisket, a tomb” (“Witness”). Both “Missive” and “Witness” take up the problem of discussing emotions without perverting/distorting them, and this concern underscores the book as a whole. Malech’s work is both philosophical and theatrical, in that she tests the limits of knowledge and representation through the performative fictions of her poems.

Malech’s commitment to what Yeats would call “the quarrel with oneself” gives the reader (or me, at least) the sense that the poems never travel in a linear fashion just to arrive at predictable conclusions. In the poem “Push, Pull,” for example, the speaker somersaults through a series of musical couplets toward a conclusion that seems less premeditated than organically achieved. This poem instills a number of martial images with sonic beauty (“Chrysanthemums of copper wire”), a technique that makes it clear that the poet wonders how to rectify the ugliness and violence of certain human artifacts when they can simultaneously give rise to such splendor. Here are the final six lines:

Doused the dovecotes with gasoline.
Slipped the last dowels from the cask.

Couldn’t we call the crash a birdbath?
Couldn’t we call the coffins gift wrap?

Must have been some misunderstanding.
Shore ordered ocean but sent it back.

Misunderstanding is an inherent part (and, truly, a virtue) of Malech’s poems, since she thrives on conflict and contradiction in order to engender the beautiful dialectics of her work. For this reason she appeals to frustrated humanists—those of us who want to make humans the heroes of the universe even though we are too conscious of our shortcomings to do so in good conscience. Hence, the shore initially thinks it wants the ocean, but at second glance decides to send it back and (fruitlessly, endlessly) try again. It can’t, of course, and Dora Malech’s Shore Ordered Ocean gives voice to this predicament—of wanting anything but the given—and makes the sad business of being human seem so worth it, at least while reading these poems.

Amy King's Slaves to Do These Things, reviewed by Ana Božičević

2010-08-01T08:02:00.008-04:00

Blazevox
96pp.
$16.

[Ed's note - Amy and Ana are partners, but I'm a big fan of both as people and poets, so that's trumping any pretense of objectivity. And this is an awesome book besides.]

Alone in a Crowd: A Tragicomedy of Pronouns in Slaves to Do These Things by Amy King

I am one. The first time one gives Slaves to Do These Things a read, one circles every pronoun in the manuscript. Who are these Is and wes and hes and shes, and why does one so badly care to know? One circles and wonders: they turn, a key. The book’s epigraph quotes from Baudelaire’s “Beauty,” where “all poets” shipwreck against beauty’s stony breast, “mute and noble as matter itself.” Is this book’s multiplicitous troupe of characters really an army of slave-poets doing beauty’s magnetic bidding, all punished because they made an attempt to attain it? (In this scenario, beauty is the kind of siren whose absence of voice is lure: she tempts one to imagine the words she would sing, if only she could, that poor “soul that suffered from being its body” sans merci.) Or are the pronouns of Slaves just you and me and other people-next-door in the desert of “office boxes/that cloister us apart?” America’s historical agency of slavery casts a long root-shadow across one’s conjectures. In his Coldfront Magazine review of King’s last book, I’m the Man Who Loves You, Matt Hart writes: “one such complication is in how the book’s ‘I’ and ‘you’ are constantly shifting positions, clanging and banging against one another, and at times even disappearing altogether.” In Slaves, this rhetorical tool grows out of antinarrative’s special effect into a thesis, an MO: the lyrical you and I weld into a plural us and they: and then they’re given tools. Everyone’s implicated and put to work. In a book of five Acts, one hears from soldiers, teachers, journalists, terrorists, Kerry and Miller, Claude Cahun, photographers Cindy, Nan and Diane, Miss California (“opposite marriage”), the philosopher, people of many cities, your mother. Along the way, rhetorical propaganda, decoy-definitions, and streams of Oscar-Wildish oxymorons with a laughing void at their center, attempt to explain away and divert one from what’s really happening (and what’s that?):

The actor is a second life

of people drawn

on the achievable with fiction.

The characters are fleeting

when an actor’s flame

blows the shortest immortality.

…

But the audience pants on.

(“State of a Nation”)
The poems behind King’s titles – “Miracle on the Hudson,” “Stimulus Package,” “Brooklyn White Party” – deliver, betraying their promise of hip bombast, the kind of clarity that only a puzzle thrown in the air can attain. But never do they fully elect a hierarchy wherein the author makes her pronoun-actors slash word-animals do all the dirty work. From poem one, in which the I’s bosom suckles “the world’s new adults,” the populist poet accomplishes what Baudelaire’s immortal Beauty, that classicist goth femme, cannot: she accepts her characters into her body, and allows herself to be populated. The flâneuse rolls up her sleeves and joins the chain gang. This is the kind of ego-nixing, egalitarian authorship Baudelaire and Poe were both pleasantly sickened to envision: King is the (wo)man of the crowd. As signaled by her titles (“The Psalms called ‘Breath’,” “The Memory Skin,” “The Taste of Light & Our Digestive Tracts,” “When the Bread Is in My Body”), the membrane between the outside world of light, others’ noise, bread and symbols, and the body’s bowels and breath, is tenuous and permeable. Their landscapes intermingle as the poems’ speakers travel “ear canals,” “the scalp of dirt lots and sand,” “the harbor’s sinew:” “the coming America” knit by slaves and itinerants. Flesh is a setting, a history continually rebirthed and resuffered, and a meal:

People are friends,

as are all animals. In memory of this,

I bake them into shapes and a spoon-

shaped cake to taste the world with.

(“The Taste of Light & Our Digestive Tracts”)
In the same poem, King delivers her version of Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes”: “I’m portable. My mind travels/ the verse and valleys of whole people.” As she shudders from one life to the next “on the people’s chariot,” the author shoulders the burden of her pronouns’ narrative misfortunes and ecstasies: story-fragments swirl around her body like human bacteria. And profoundly, this book is about sickness. One happens to remember that Slaves was written in and through a year of illness; its populism can be read as a sickbed out-of-body experience, its lists of things and people as ingredients in the soul’s diet regimen:

sea sick, salt off, flesh sag,

liver dip, bile wish, throw soap,

row out, hope vest, that’s all

I know, dyed rose, spoon light.

(“Doctor Starch”)
In Slaves, King’s familiar cosmopolitan epicurism is tempered by a body-imposed humility:

But you don’t know how

much you love

the sun until you find

you’re dying beneath it…

(“Brooklyn White Party”)
But this book doesn’t settle for simple salt-of-the-earth platitudes. The soul (a word that appears in it ten times – outranked by “God,” with fifteen apparitions) is sickened not just by the muteness and symptoms of the body, but from not being allowed to inhabit other bodies with whom she suffers as witness, their double and echo chamber: her inverse of to colonize is to love. The body’s separateness is itself a symptom, and ultimately an illusion, as the poet makes like “the same electron…in two places at once.” And bodies are alchemical cauldrons designed to digest “grief, through [their] / voids, trimmed with wind:” physics’ evolving definition of matter changes the consistency of Beauty’s breast from rock to air. King’s poems enact a history-conscious, fierce, funny, and ecological body politics in which the queer ability to refashion identity is just what America, and her grammar, need: “a unisex of truth bearing” to replace “those granite masters/of needlepoint” when “they mirage America back.” We don’t need masters or a god; and in fact, as the epigraph to Act III makes clear, “Selling one’s soul to God: is to betray the Other.” In “The Fear of Hope Is Also Beautiful,” God is a sugar daddy: to love him is to become “deadline,” an object of commerce. Slaves proposes a joyous cross-identification that, though sometimes painful, is never a transaction. Where her previous books tended to breathlessly pack experience into textual blocks, Slaves allows for more air and reverberation: it listens as much as it speaks until, at its end, funnel-like, a unified we “sing for the love we bring,” back to a childhood of art and “happy, in fact.” So the inclusiveness and porousness of King’s lovemaking with her country heightens with her each new book, and one wonders with whetted appetite which state her troupe will next elect to pitch its tent in, and play its selves out.

David Wolach's Occultations Reviewed by Nicky Tiso

2010-07-24T05:10:00.014-04:00

Black Radish Books
ISBN: 9780982573129
RRP: $15.00
168pp.

Reviewed by Nicky Tiso

Occultations is a fiercely intimate, original, and complex work. Written thru carefully constructed somatic/corporeal rituals (such as feeding words to a fire and covering oneself in the ash, being fed another's writing while writing, writing thru one's recorded intercourse) that articulate the body as it assumes various postures of existence, from the tortured detainee to an infomercial to one's own ghost. Using elements of tonalism and objectivism, like a jazzier George Oppen, these movements in actual space-time get rendered typographically as well as sonically in beautifully layered syncopations. We see and hear the narrator producing and restricting their own subjectivity in a cycle of surveillance that mimics today's invasive security culture, where neoliberal paranoia has us policing our own behavior and clinging to fascistic norms out of fear of persecution. The book searches for a home, an authorship, within this new age of empire that has us exiled from our own bodies, where not even our interiors are safe, by purging what biopowers arrest it. Where others resist, Wolach submits, but does so as a form of protest, of exorcism, that makes for a highly erotic read.

The lines of the opening poem transit, written with the intensity of Celan and the puzzlement of Jabes, contain "shift nouns" that "modify how / we hear" to create "immigrant innuendo / a talmudic / ethos managed by a / sensational logos." This management takes the shape of an exigent analysis into its own immobility, giving it both sacrosanct and slapstick moods that together deform whatever meaning emerges until sense is sound, and what we hear is "the bone cries, then marrow. as if our shapes exhausted shape." There's no whimsy here; the stakes stay high and the bombs keep dropping, just like real life. The rhythm continues to "rattle corridors at different pitch," giving it all the unanchored liveliness and enigma of a flame:

you said i believe you said
silence is not the absence
of narrative
the fugue state talks, is pushed to say
when emergent broken the body
defies occupation
and occupation
by the drowning
method
it says on and on, lung
squeezed bottle, bank flame and limp
round a yet living sphere

How the book maintains a rebellion against its own origins, concerns itself with using its own exhaustion, and finds inspiration in a dispossessed tongue, raises the now faded Jewish question. How contemporaneous it makes these issues, how it turns today into a world war by superimposing past European fallout onto present Americana landscapes, is a savage juxtapose worthy of much greater consideration than can be done here, suffice to say the act convinces.

Later in the section riverfire the book moves into "particular matters" and reads only as the excised scraps of a story ("i am the conditional in your hands") making us the collector ordering the scattered pieces (an excess of indexicals), only we have no plan. This apparent disorder does frustrate readerly expectations, but we are asked to account for the logic behind such a reaction: "why do you hesitate at the covered parts. why do you hesitate at the non identical flesh. why do you begin with the hand that is its scab." Every step of the way the book has predetermined itself, becoming its own interpretation, such that our impassive witness is not so benign: to watch this suffering is its own violence, as every metaphor reminds us of the material, the humanity, it backs (and lacks):

Now is a sleep, complicit sprawls
In some illicit dream-
Its signal is picked up
By my neighbor's microwave

The book proceeds in a crude dialectic to refashion itself according to imposed ideologies and emerging dreams. One sees its consciousness getting liquidated, where even within the book its voice, like ours, has no public place to gather and be heard, or even finish its thought without some mediation retrofitting its language with the state's dictates:

we collect like coughs on glass. stains, your mouth runs to the pane
with furious. breath to [wipe off] breath. [a preferred] breath. with
thumb and. compulsion. what orgy. fragile stains. whose

[ The common areas are where we meet but don't meet. ]

This is a polyvocality where voices veil, rather than empower, one another, and we are left to witness a censorship in progress. The book doesn't seek to resolve these issues of agency but to endure them. It ends in an "aftershock of knowledge" coming off the prior "Distraction Zone Staging" exercises that use punishing bodily procedures to create texts bound to the environments of their production, or, to put it more frankly, an abused lyric:

the flesh of your precious
carnage drapes over my molar
"3 days central booking
bread brake back to bulk
forming lax max interior
null by sat morning"
a piece of the hunger artist is caught
in my empowerment zone

Note how unauthentic and enjambed these lines read, twisting from observation into confession such that we see a subject from two perspectives: inside and outside. Does this make us as audience sympathizers or sadists? A little of both. These pieces can't be read apart from their staging, and yet they are. We are left to re-imagine the situation that gave rise to these words and feel the inevitable dislocation between the record and the happening. What can we do with this inequality, this temporal lapse? The book suggests we "push from the periphery" and "learn the ugly algorithms," given in this context "something inaudible / is still a fence," and that we do so by making vulnerable our private selves to realize what we have in common: a body that desires. The book's center is a question mark challenging us to undermine the way our vision is framed by social orders scarring others.

It remains to be seen how Wolach's future projects and politics can adduce their authenticity by outsourcing the living forms here played with into a wider reality so as to be more socially applicable, or does such a proposition exceed art's capability? Would this be the next natural extension of the book's own momentum, where the wound it holds open can contain a multitude without regimenting them, or does this inclusiveness weaken its spirit? I sense a touch of hesitancy here, where a coterie threatens to form, and with good reason: questions of trust and betrayal come into play, questions that, if pursued, could create a remarkable unfolding that Wolach has shown himself capable of narrating in the most passionate and uncompromising ways possible.

Myung Mi Kim’s Penury, Reviewed by Ross Brighton

2010-06-22T23:44:00.010-04:00

Omnidawn
128 pages (5.5” x 8.5” Paper)
ISBN: 9781890650377
$15.95

Myung Mi Kim’s Penury, like much of her previous work, centres as much, if not more, on silence and the not-said. There is a poverty of language, which is worn with miss-use, like the book on the cover, the pages of which have been torn from their binding, leaving just the boards. Beckett’s Malone says “there is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle”. Yes, yet suspicion of their emptiness comes creeping in, and when they have been the tools of violence, one has difficulty forgetting Celan’s “one hundred years of death-bringing speech”.

As with Celan, Kim writes with an obsessive precision that at times verges on the violent. The silence of the copious white space is broken by speech that is quiet, yet also loud. At this limit of language the word is stretched to its breaking point.

_______mp
_______lm
_______ks
_______nc
_______lk
_______lp
_______nh
_______gy
_______td
_______nc

_______you speak English so well transcript (29)

Kim manifests a paratactic stutter that crystallises, then falls away in humility at language’s inadequacy, an awareness of the lie of omission in every speech-act, of narrative in the face of the vast, heterogeneous sprawl that is humanity’s shared experience. Sometimes there is unspeakable horror, sometimes unutterable beauty. That one can come from the other seems in itself unconscionable, as with the invocation of silence and violent censorship in the cover image, itself cast aesthetically, and with a calm beauty.

It is these contradictory states of muteness or glottal penury and strange beauty that Kim is, against all odds, able to conjure. In a way Kim‘s work is similar to Susan Howe’s tracts of settlement, wilderness and violence. However there is much difference; there is no ghost-of-a-story, or if there once was, it has since been erased. Kim’s language breaks on the point of articulation, falling away:

_______________________salute

__________to brethren _ red

__________wash

__________ret_

__________clear burn (8)

As with her previous books, Penury engages with violence and injustice, and the seeming impossibility of action in the face of their vastness, on the level of language – the manifestation of the difficulty of saying becomes the one driving imperative, to the point where either there is no text, only slashes (a wicked pun indeed, 104), or text printed over text (90). While some may take issue with opacity, this is not game-playing, and for those who look there is deep beauty in the seeming turmoil. Penury does what poetry should – it says that which cannot be said any other way, yet which needs saying with a driving urgency.

Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country, reviewed by Min Jung Oh

2010-06-21T23:55:00.005-04:00

Brandi Homan
Bobcat Country
Shearsman Books Ltd., 2010
79 pages, $15.00
ISBN 978-1-84861-085-9

Reviewed by Min Jung Oh

When I first picked up Brandi Homan’s second collection of poetry, Bobcat Country, I could not have been less prepared for this vital text. Its cover, smeared with a rainbow of construction-paper colors, reminded me of a first-grade classroom’s spring bulletin board. Upon closer examination, I realized that the awkward animal emerging from a rainbow sprinkled with stars is actually a collage of various everyday objects and quickly understood the cover. With her deft use of vibratory repetitions within the density of collage, Brandi Homan has brought a brilliant, crucial work to us who live within a commercialized culture.

In the commercial landscape mirrored in Bobcat Country, community and identity have been replaced with the plastic gimmickry of mass-produced objects. “Everyone so weird and desperate and alone,” is prevented from authentic relations by the body-wrap of a generalized, media-fed prototype (22). For example, in the wistfully poignant “Down Home,” Homan identifies the cause of a mother’s depression in an inability to assert herself against others’ expectations determined by her socially determined role as reinforced by marketed products. This mother and all the text’s characters, stripped of their agency and community by commercial substitutions, are forced to “scream into a koala bear-shaped cookie jar, a butterfly canister” (35). Even one’s relationship with the self is mediated through the channels of commercialized masks, as in “Games We Play,” where Homan humorously describes the process of identifying oneself with characters in the TV show, Sex and the City. The individual’s “mask” is derived from objects representing commercialized fantasies, which can never be authentic for they inherently exclude the particular, instead imposing a universalizing prototype incompatible with actual identities and realities. Such a community made up of identities ungrounded in reality can only exist within artifice: “It’s past the point where I’m allowed to go without makeup” (12).

But this text is not simply a collective pointing towards problems in commercial culture that are impervious to change. Even while brutally criticizing the cultural landscape, her text is predominantly a fierce refusal to accept the supposed impossibility of authentic relation within it. Her certainty that it is in fact possible is grounded in community itself and, even more fundamentally, the language which makes community possible. Language, and only language, can catalyze lasting social transformation for it is language that creates the world and makes community possible. In “Maturity,” the poem’s persona becomes a “grown-up” when she is able to consciously give this name to herself because it is language’s always-already grounding within relation that can change identity. Conversely, it is only through community, despite its commercialized latency, that “all the women in my family” can find a language for their “oppression, repression, depression” (18). After all, “How to pull through rough weather? / Together, strapped to the hood” (18). In Bobcat Country, as with any text of social change, language and community are inextricably linked.

Homan’s genius in actualizing language’s potentiality for social transformation lies in her deconstructive process’ strict correspondence to that of the original construction, which mimics object accumulation with collage. In one of my favorites, “Drugstore Cowgirl,” she writes of this technology: “Pastiche, pastiche. Collage away. / I am not a poem-writer. I am a poem-MAKER! Cut / and paste” (50). In a reiteration of the necessitated parallel between the processes of construction and deconstruction, she writes in that same poem: “I’m out of mascara, I need to make me some masks” (50) and later, in “Recurring Dream House”: “To get everything out, I pile on stocking caps, Grandpa’s hunting vest, four-odd pairs of moonboots. Mismatched mittens” (30). These collaged lists flatten the text, sufficiently slowing the movement to maintain the conscious presence of relational absence. The interruption of repetitions, which counteract the lists’ flattening effect, coupled with her searing vivacious language with its unique emphasis on commercial details, prevent the monotony that often threatens the collaged lists of other texts. Homan’s repetitions, however, are not to be confused with a refrain, functioning instead with fragments where duration is established via parallels rather than exact repetitions of entire phrases. For example, in “Welcome to Bobcat Country,” the rhythm originates from a shifting predicate with only the repetition of “we” (15), while in “Good China” it is a shifting subject who “bought it piece by piece” (13). With this combination of collagist and durational technologies, the text awakens relations repressed by the masks of commercial accumulation from within their irreparability.

Homan’s brilliant use of collage, accumulation, and repetition are also responsible for perhaps the most impressive achievement of this text. I have long been wary of humor and irony in texts attempting to speak the unspeakable of women. Too often humor functions merely as the lemon in my fish oil: a dilution to help one swallow and prevent gagging. Humor’s increase of accessibility, by its very nature, too often demands a correspondent loss. But must it always? This text proves otherwise in its astonishing ability to utilize humor for greater readability without diminishing the work’s clarion impact. In “Are You Gonna Wake Up,” her repetition of “I’m just saying” successfully shocks the reader with the blatant substitution of authentic individualism with commercially determined images because it is inherently humorous as a colloquialism. It is possible for us to confront the cultural problematic addressed in this text without reducing it to a swallowable, inauthentic adulteration stripped of its possibilities for social change. In Bobcat Country, Brandi Homan not only asserts herself as an extraordinary voice in the genre of experimental prose poetry, but also as an inspiration for those of us who write from a desire to activate the transformative capacities of language even in this socio-cultural landscape where mass-produced objects still color our speech.

Bruce Russell's Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009, reviewed by Ross Brighton

2010-06-21T23:17:00.005-04:00

Bruce Russell

Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009
Clouds: Auckland 2009. 115pp. NZ$35.

Bruce Russell has been an important contributor to sound/noise internationally for the past two and a half decades, both under his own name and as a member of the Dead C and Handful of Dust. However during this time he has also been publishing widely on the theory and practice of noise/sound/music, to which the contents of this volume attest.

The book is beautifully presented in matt wine-coloured covers with French flaps, and the title and author embossed in gold both on the front and the back. I have a weakness for handsomely produced books, and this, together with my great respect for Bruce’s sonic work, meant that I had great expectations upon opening this volume. I was not disappointed and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

The book contains essays and dialogue pieces on a variety of topics loosely grouped around the concept of sound as creative endeavor. These vary from discussions of creative practice with Alistair Galbraith (of Handful of Dust) and Danny Butt (New Media Theorist/Critic and member of Rain, Flies Inside the Sun and Tanaka Nixon Meeting). The dialogues are especially illuminating on the practice of noise/sound art in New Zealand, and the essays vary from the polemics of “What is Free?: A Free Noise Manifesto” to the incredibly interesting philosopho-cultural pieces “Contra-Fludd/Contra-Kepler: the Disharmony of the Spheres Extolled in Ten Theses” and “To Think is to Speculate with Images: Rosicrucian Linguistics Revisited as a Semiological Discourse” – the second of which I found particularly informative.

I never knew Russell was such a theory buff. There’s a lot in here – especially the Frankfurt School. Lots of Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno; as seen from the title of “Contra-Fludd…” Robert Fludd and Johannes Kepler; and a fair bit of Guy DeBord to boot. Some may take issue with this (A recent review in The Wire described it as dense), but I’m all for it – perhaps because I’m the same way inclined myself.

Some people may also take issue with the polemicism of some of these pieces. They often mirror the tone of, for instance, the Toronto Research Group, or early tracts published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Open Letter, Poetics Journal et cetera, like Bruce Andrews “Writing Social Work & Political Practice”. However to criticism these pieces for such would be either to miss the point – misunderstand what they are doing – or contradictorily, to do what Russell is asking. As with much writing on fringe work the polemicism of these pieces operates in a similar fashion to a volume knob. The extolling of an extreme position allows the transmission or instigation of a discourse that would otherwise be sidelined or silenced. As such, those who take issue with aspects of this collection are allowing it to function in the manner intended – as Russell states, “this book is not an attempt at a coherent totalising theory” (1). It is the beginning of what I hope will be a fruitful discourse on noise both in New Zealand and elsewhere.

Gizelle Gajelonia's Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus Reviewed by Janna Plant

2010-05-24T21:34:00.005-04:00

Gizelle Gajelonia
Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus
Tinfish Press, 2010
RRP $12.

Reviewed by Janna Plant

“The Dumb-Tourist Antidote”

I lived on O`ahu from 1996 through August of 2009. During that time, I spent many hours on the 52 Wahiawa Circle Island bus that features prominently in Gizelle Gajelonia’s debut collection of poems, entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus. I also worked with tourists, giving them my own version of a tour, the beach by horseback at the Turtle Bay Resort. Tourists are such parasites, and I never wanted to be one myself again. Bumper stickers saying things like, “If it’s Tourist Season, why can’t we shoot them?” and “Slow down. This ain’t the Mainland,” directed the residents’ communal bile at the entity of the tourist, a being that could not truly engage in a conversation. When tourists asked me, “Where do the natives live?” I answered by offering a list of books. I felt that, if I ever wanted to travel again (yes!), I needed some way to not feel like the dumb-tourist, vampiring away at a body that I did not truly respect. To O`ahu visitors, I suggested Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawai`ian Nation to 1887 by Jonathan Kamakawiwo`ole Osorio, anything by Haunani-Kay Trask, Hawai`i’s Story by Hawai`i’s Queen, and Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture by Lee Tonuchi, among others. If I were still circling the loop trail, providing my memorized commentary, Gajelonia’s text would be included. If you want to experience some of the grit of O’ahu, not just the pre-packaged version that the Hawai`i Visitors and Convention Bureau would offer, read Gizelle Gajelonia’s book and ask questions. She infiltrates the dream and lets some exhaust in.

Using the bus as a metaphor, she routes through languages (English, Filipino, Pidgin H.C.E., and Hawai`ian), geography, history, American poetry, as well as the polarity between perceptions of Hawai`i and the realities. The title piece, the first of the book, revises Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Of the thirteen poems in the book, seven of them are revision poems, five of those are such American canonical classics as Stevens’ aforementioned poem, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” and most notably, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” While it is not essential that the reader know the originals, familiarity with them does increase the richness of her art. The intertextuality, in some cases, polarizes the contrast between the American base of the revised poems and the Hawai`ian base of Gajelonia’s poems.

From T.S. Eliot:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

Gajelonia’s revision:

Real Unreal City
Under the gray vog of a winterless dawn,
A crowd flowed over Waikiki Beach, so many,
I had always thought Hawai’i had fucked so many.

Waikiki is unreal in the sense that it now exists solely as a performance space for commodified culture, for tourists to pose in their simulacra photos—“Caught candidly frolicking on the beach in Hawai`i!!”--, for Dog the Bounty Hunter, for pimps and prostitutes, for the drugs that lubricate all of it. The beach itself is not even real. Manmade soft sand is brought in, and continually gets pulled out to sea with the tides, suffocating whatever coral is left after the tourists trample it. Later, Gajelonia haunts the space of Eliot’s poem with the voice of Lili`uokalani, Hawai`i’s last queen, who was overthrown by American businessmen. Her ghost illuminates “The Waste Land,” of modern-day Hawai`i. Gajelonia occupies the space of these canonical American poems, performs a parasitic gesture on them, and inserts her own references to them. This echoes the overthrow, annexation, and eventual Statehood of Hawai`i by America.

As problems sprung from that, so do problems—though few--spring from this text. The parasitic gesture is not maintained throughout the text, as she does have six (very strong) poems that are not intertextual. Also, two of the revised poems are from fellow Hawai`i writers Jill Yamasawa and Eric Chock. But as this is indeed a metaphorical bus route that we are on—one that transfers people from one place to another--the translation from their experience of O`ahu to her experience of O`ahu does seem fitting. The island has many personalities.

Language also has many personalities. In pidgin (Hawai`ian Creole English) words that appear to be English are not. The usages migrate and spelling migrates. For example: “den” is the English, “then;” “bus” or “buss” is “bust-up,” which means messed up, either from drugs, alcohol, or a well-place punch in the face; “one,” is akin to the English “a;” and “never” does not mean the English “ever never,”—though sometimes it does—but mostly it refers to a specific time. An example from “Nana on theCurb”:

The bus driver never see her waiting/so he leaves without her

In this instance, this specific instance, the bus driver drove past her. Also, the word “like,” is sometimes a shortened form of the English, “Would you like to?” As in, “Like oof?” that refers to sex. No glossary is given here, so for the outsider there are many iterations that will be lost, but this is very much like an actual ride on TheBus (enjambment emphasis due to the actual logo painted on the buses). One must immerse themselves, grab at context, ask questions, and keep observing.

My (very subjective) problem with the text arrived in “TheMongoose.” Gajelonia discusses a route through the North Shore and lists the beaches in an order so jumbled that I had to wonder why she did it. She also refers to Happy Trails Hawai`i as if that is an establishment that the bus route actually passes—(thrillingly) describing the sunset as shining off “the horses’ manes/like passion orange guava juice.” But I must defer here to art’s tweaking of fact in the service of a more supreme fact. Be sure to stop and appreciate “AllBusiness,” and “DearGod: A Prayer in Six Parts.” These poems interrogate grim realities of consumerism, domestic violence, drug use, teen pregnancy, and the fight for the simple joy of jumping off the rock at Waimea. The book’s design opens with the first page stating, “Depart,” and the last page staying, “Arrive.” One does feel that they have been on a journey, arriving after some bit of transformation, the mind stimulated, the heart enriched. This tour must be taken.

Leslie Scalapino's Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows reviewed by Jason Calsyn

2010-05-18T20:15:00.007-04:00

Leslie Scalapino
Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows
Starcherone Books 2010.
164 pages.
RRP $18.

Reviewed by Jason Calsyn

Alexia and Simultaneity:

Leslie Scalapino’s Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows is a brilliant, confusing, occasionally maddening, tour-de-force of a book. Written through the lens of “alexia”, a neurological disorder which causes patients to be unable to comprehend written language, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows presents itself in a mutated, almost-indecipherable prose. The reader is presented with a state of approximated alexia, a text which intentionally eludes meaning and chronology. Words and sentences fracture mid-thought, causing the far-reaching narrative to spin off in unexpected directions. The “narrative” jumps from the chaos of the Iraq war to the mountains of Tibet, from the jungles of Africa to the flooded city of New Orleans, and from India to Afghanistan, seemingly at random. Yet Scalapino weaves a strong enough thread throughout that these sudden shifts of locale flow seamlessly into one another, and once the reader gives in to fractured nature of the text, a brightly-lit world of contradiction and painful beauty opens up.

Alexia usually arises from traumatic brain injury, and though the narration of Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows isn’t restricted to the perspective of one character, there is an implication that the disorder as presented has been caused by some violence of war. Bloody images abound, explosions and machine guns and corpses. Helicopters assault marketplaces full of people, orphans stagger from wreckage. War and death predominate, and the trauma invoked by this violence provokes an urge to turn away from the carnage. The text, too, turns away continually, as if the disembodied narrator can’t stand to look at the unfolding scenes. Suddenly we’re confronted with an image of Venus Williams playing tennis, or a cheetah evading poachers. Sometimes these transitions occur mid-sentence, and it is a tribute to the strength of Scalapino’s language that such jumps happen smoothly.

A concept embedded in the framework of the book is that of simultaneity. Scalapino repeatedly expresses a disdain for concepts of past and future, insisting that we exist in an eternal present in which all events are occurring at once. In this light, the kaleidoscopic imagery can be seen as fractured aspects of a single moment, different faces of the same beast. The constantly shifting frame of reference makes sense from this perspective, and Scalapino’s focus on distilled images rather than narrative blocks add to the sense that the book as a whole should be seen as one continuous event seen from different angles, different points of view. Thus, if a sentence begins with an investigator trying to hunt down rare animal poachers, then jumps to an image of a horse making its way through flood waters in New Orleans, the juxtaposition is harmonious rather than jarring; the events are part of the same matrix.

All this is made possible by Scalapino’s bizarrely flowing lyricism. The underlying theme of alexia manifests itself in half-recognizable words and fractured grammatical structures. The structure of language itself is under assault here, and in this respect Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows shares much in common with the work of William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. The reader is not necessarily meant to understand every line. A haze of confusion and disorientation is created, a fog which makes individual images all the more striking when they surface. The reader is made to experience the inability to make sense of words, a confusion which lends a sense of triumphant discovery when a line clicks and substance breaks through. These moments happen often enough that there is a continual sense of novelty which allows the reader to navigate the text without relying on such concepts as plot or character development to move the “story” forward.

Some readers will undoubtedly have difficulty with the broken structure of the text: any book which relies on causing confusion in the reader will undoubtedly frustrate many. And this is a difficult text. The greatest strengths and failings of Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows arise from the alexia concept, because, while allowing Scalapino the freedom to twist and distort language as she pleases, it also puts the reader in the uncomfortable position of often not understanding what is happening in a given scene. The idea of miscomprehension of words is fascinating on a conceptual level, but a given reader may decide that, in practice, he or she is more interested in understanding the material than understanding what it is to not understand.

So, risks are being taken here. But all worthwhile literature takes risks. Scalapino has faith in her material, and her willingness to risk alienating a certain percentage of readers in order to express a perspective of confusion is admirable. To Scalapino’s great credit, she ably pulls off the task of creating a text which is at once comprehensible and incomprehensible, flowing and static, opaque and crystalline. The reader who isn’t repelled by the lack of linearity in the text is richly rewarded with insights into the nature of war, suffering, and pleasure. Though much of the subject matter is harsh, there is an aching beauty to the images here that cuts through the darkness and brings both understanding and appreciation. Many of these images, such as a horse in water, chrysanthemum flowers, and the phrase “dark night in the heart’s lake”, recur in such a way that the image conjured rotates each time, revealing itself from different angles. Since the idea of a continuous present is front and center throughout, the lens of the text becomes a kind of cubism, an opportunity to view the represented events from multiple perspectives at once.

In the end, it will be up to the individual reader to decide if Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows is rewarding enough to justify wading through its often-frustrating pages. This book is not a novel in the traditional sense. There aren’t clearly defined characters to embody the concepts of the book. Nothing truly happens here, or rather nothing ever stops happening. There are no edges, only a continually evolving and mutating single event, scattered across the corners of the earth. This philosophy is illustrated beautifully in the unfolding pages of Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows. Whether one agrees with Scalapino’s concepts or not, they make for fascinating art. Expect to be challenged, expect to have moments of wanting to throw the book out the window, but expect above all to be interested. What happens “after” is anyone’s guess.

Jill Magi’s Torchwood Reviewed by Robert Mueller

2010-05-10T23:11:00.005-04:00

Jill Magi
Torchwood
88pp.
RRP $15
Shearsman Books

Reviewed by Robert Mueller

"History and Grace and All Forms Needful"

Dialects, specialty literary languages, character typologies and the self-effacing poetry-form personality; rhetoricity for its own ironic consequence and the occasional languid lacquered effetism — they all serve one purpose, to hone the expectant transparency. Jill Magi’s strange verse-writing, becoming one moment crisp, another moment aleatory, amnesiac, deft or drippily-awkward,1 as it may and it will, seeks to unsplash this whitewash. By careful jutting it Xes-out or routs the traces of veneer rather than streaking the shadows; shows not edge but rather wholeness, depositing dappled dents and shallows rather than this other’s retread face. What does that mean to her readers whose fascination these scrubbings likely sustain? What does it avail, her pleasure in forms that are anything but shapeless, and that, if they do not pulsate wildly, still live in cross- and hatch-rhythms?

Toward these fleshed tendencies will veer the answers in the splendid and odd touches comprising Torchwood (Shearsman, 2008). So we get talking and telling into the mix, without smothering veils either, as in the plain omelette, “A Stone,” that places inaugurally (and why not?):

You are in the company of your twin sister

and another schoolmate

crossing a common in the city of Portland, Maine

in the 19th century.

This is heading to a foundling’s founding tale, and it aptly presents its dangers when it tells you that “A stone is thrown and this stone hits you, / Ellen Harmon, on the nose.” — resulting (according to the sonnet’s chasing couplet) in “The origin of the religion you invented and I was born into. / ‘Because a stone was thrown.’”

Hence the real religious sonnet is not that pretty and deep meditation cast in a pretty form, but rather a plainly documented, driven foray into the religion’s becoming of itself. Magi’s religious sonnets mark one of a series of sections devoted to poems in particular forms, broadly defined.2 In this section the form is specific, but it is clear that Magi goes out of her way to specify unfamiliarly. She ordains and she enjoins, and she portends a subject of history, in fact documenting a personal and family connection with Seventh Day Adventism, into frames of 14 lines a-piece. In, not out of, history, therefore, the form she shelters thus proves its use, its practice lyrical, and its practice material. It buttresses communal belief by naming, as it were, its sufficient adequation. Of a credo, of a comity and a commitment, the sonnet burnishes its strange and thundering objections to and fro over that hard-torn, that handwrung spiritual peace, heralding someone’s sectarianism a time and a day ago, someone’s once and future home and thralldom.

Often discussions of strong poetry recount the scheming, by invasion or by misdirection, against accepted discourses. The strength of Magi’s poetry has a less obvious appeal, so that looking at her forms may progress to wonder, and may halt too swift, too primed an explication. Some may even say that poetic discourse and its appendages could be forbidden for a pregnant time. Not under duress, a subversive poetics, seeking to undermine the structures it would oppose, might seem easy to prosecute these days. Bravado, courage might lie in so many fashions of opposing, and might seem not so much false as impotent. What Magi attempts, to her less presupposing credit, is never less than difficult. Though aware of “a counter-hegemonic narrative,” she passes it a little by, letting difference find its own sweet pitches. The poems in Torchwood gravitate to find the lay of their eventful questioning. They have their sway in Magi’s protocol, because perhaps not so violent nor so unfriendly; and perhaps this is how Magi prevails against a suspended hearing. We may put it mildly and thus truly engage the result. Her gestures, we may say, simply overturn or upend expectations, leaving you with just what you have, and with some of the joy and challenge along with a strangeness that appears on the surface but will not blot, inkily, with designations fervently to deplore and then restore. 3

And thus, while Magi’s religious sonnets do not strike one as possessing a sonneteer’s reach and flair, in the same breath her questioning what “thinking the kite” (in a later section) means does not strike out in boldness. Yet it is not as if it were clever but somehow dull or lusterless or pedestrian. After all, this thinking, which is a doing thinking, is about a form of soaring. And the device delights in the open space, as do the other book’s procedures. An assurance bred of this openness comes to transfigure anytime, and it comes to rest by a clear sinking in these phrases of thinking otherwise:

Thinking answers

Thinking a scratch

Thinking to register the sound means

how to under thinking

buckled or pockets

Thinking sour while not so

I feel to say, walking

I feel against it, pressing

I feel toward today

I feel story

I feel sense

So “thinking a kite” runs along down the page and urges and flirts with its theme unthreateningly. So the subject entertains its negative structures of fresh embrace. It says “I,” and it says “willingly.” The absorption is apparent, and though it results in a page of suggestion that does not argue and cause the reader to fight back, and is formatted strangely as a mere flip, or pure element of arrangement, indeed intended for our notice but consisting of just this right wing for margin justification rather than the left; and though right and left are not these fierce rivals they vaunt themselves to be, and the experiment with syntax is not so much a strident challenge as just what it is, and what it appears; nevertheless we read from left to right and right to left and we read not wisely, we encounter, we must a little.

So another question hovers. How will the poetry and its revolutionary basis of this thinking language seek to transform? How will, in fact, thinking writing proceed? Can writer, reader and teaching and learning inhere to easy parlaying of misconstructions, mindful and accepting on the one hand, and divided truth-attentions, inquisitive by simple attraction on the other? Poetry of a world thrown against it extends what Magi calls “constructing a grammar,” surveils by unwitting writ a project of citizenship, of a particular slated citizenship of a particular shared subject, in which the poet pays honor to her task and lets the self-seriousness of language experimentation in all forms have its days elsewhere (perhaps). Some of the new grammars are both tidy and intricate; the challenge Magi accepts, though met with care, allows for her cleanly Untidiness. A poetics not filtered but slightly helter-skelter in midst of probing occupation in this barmy sentence untracks, it resurrects a strange ordinariness and nearness of all problems’ factors. An unveiling in tow, Magi can draw gruffly on her sensitivity to language acquisition, with all of its less than overwhelming and cute (but not too cute) troubles. She can employ the questioning thus quizzically to demi-urge a get-around and a go-around performance of writing and thinking. By her finalizing forms she can thus instruct in the ethics of social behavior and action, can prompt through subtlety sans trickiness. She can think to achieve that cultural form to inform, somehow realize a time-honored privilege of strong and secure poetics.

It is remarkable how each choice of form marking each section in Magi’s book declares its own direct embrace of its own needs. The pungency of the writing, always a “how-to” and uncanny art of writing and of speaking, sets you out to take the plunge, not scurry from style to style in great slap-stick carousel of competing, but immerse voluntarily in that very own element. Skirting some risk and some action and all lovely pizzazz, the quality of engagement boasts a sure-footed emphasis, all the while diapasoning intellect and clothing its otherwhere in secret, emerging action.

Consider for this purpose the amazing daily poems (the section titled “2002”), and their pedigree of the short poem in image or adage or spot-reportage, and note in the entry for “10/12” the theme of bridging, here so anguished as if almost ghostly:

long seeing

bridge-through, I don’t

migrating on the train

courageous our

fundamental goodness

free-floating

I theory inside

the experienced

Bridging is just one of many possible metaphors, and a homespun figure in the bargain, as it comes into play when training for speaking. Just what speaking, just what home experience, continues to be the wonder. Syntactical displacement is equally apparent; equally at hand the poet sorts through her inquiries. Still and still more holding in place, her writing conveys installing progress to natural growth. An effect of tactful, well-honed and yet well-enacted receptivity plucks along the courage to see and feel and affirm as if once again, on a stage that covers more precariously than you might think.

New York City

February 2009

and

Urs Allemann interviewed by Elizabeth Hall

2010-04-30T07:45:00.007-04:00

What prompted you to write Babyfucker? Did it start as an idea, a sentence, question, challenge?

It wasn’t an idea. It was an image. An image in my head. A vexing image. An image that was just suddenly there. Without reminding me of anyone or anything. Without eliciting any feeling in me. That’s what was vexing. A challenge. And then suddenly the sentence was there. As a response to the image? As an escape? As self-defense? I don’t know. “I fuck babies.” And then there was the decision to attempt to extract something like a story from this terrible sentence.

Your prose is often hypnotic. Babyfucker evokes its own associative logic by which words generate further words, creating a dazzling rhythmic trip. Yet the beauty of your prose is offset by the disturbing nature of the text. Everything hinges on the monstrous “I fuck babies.” Why did you choose that sentence specifically?

I’m very happy to hear you use the word “beauty” to describe my prose. Because, as strange as it may seem, it was in fact my intention to make something beautiful out of this monstrous material. To write a beautiful story. In this anything but obvious intention a certain idea played a role: the idea that beauty as an aesthetic category can only have relevance today if it passes the endurance test represented by the most un-beautiful, revolting material thinkable. I had the somewhat megalomaniacal idea that I could transform shit into gold by writing. And there was the quite crazy corollary idea: only gold made from shit is true gold.

Ten years after Babyfucker I wrote an ode titled “Censure.” It opens with the verse “The black bar in front of the sex organ.” And the first verse of the second strophe reads: “The axe that – chop now! – that shatters beautifully in your hand.” There’s a similar crazy notion at work here: the notion that a murder weapon is transformed into its opposite in the last second, before the deadly blow, right when the axe holder is ordered to act. The axe, it is claimed, doesn’t just shatter, no, it even shatters “beautifully.” Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Few concrete details are given about the narrator or his surroundings. The reader must navigate the narrator's grunts, groans, stutters, and mumbles. He repeats “O I am babbling.” It’s unclear whether his activities are a fantasy, dream, real-life telling, or all three, all at once. The instability of the narrator’s mental world mimics the physical world he perceives. Was the structure of the text set from the first draft or did it come to you through the writing process itself?

The character, the first person narrator only has one thing: his sentence. The problem with the sentence – beside the fact that it’s monstrous – is that it has no context. The only thing that the narrator does, and he does it incessantly, is this: he attempts to invent something like a context for this context-less sentence. Not to remember, but to invent. Babbling away, he produces and discards his “reality.” It’s meaningless to decide in this context whether something is a dream, a fantasy, or reality. Reality is simply what is narrated. And what’s narrated is only what could correspond to the sole certainty that is alleged to exist: “I fuck babies.” The “few concrete details” that the narrator tosses us are, at closer examination, just as fantastic as his grotesque hallucinations.

Take the very first sentences in the narrative. Sentence one: “I fuck babies.” The foundational sentence. The theme. The challenge. A sentence that isn’t just monstrous, but also fantastic. A sentence that no living person could ever say. The verb’s timeless present and the noun’s plural make the sentence one of trans-real monstrosity.

Sentence two: “Around my bed there are creels.” An attempt to invent a place for the first sentence where either A) the sentence is spoken; B) the narrated event occurs ; or C) the sentence is spoken AND the narrated event occurs. This sentence, read by itself, in version A, might be a “true story.” A realistic story could begin in this way: a real man lies on a real bed surrounded by real creels. For reasons that we expect to learn in the course of the story, the man utters THE monstrous sentence: “I fuck babies.”

Sentence three: “They’re crawling with babies.” This sentence has no place in a realistic story. A situation in which four creels surround a bed and in which each of these creels “crawls with babies” cannot occur in reality. CANNOT occur. A baby in each creel, ok. Two babies? Maybe, whatever. Three babies? Oh come on, stop already. Four babies? Shut up, you idiot. What does exist is: cans that crawl with worms (on fishing boats). But creels that crawl with babies? Definitely not.

But what if they were there, these babies? Dozens of them? Twelve in every creel? Ok, we are prepared to picture the impossible and against our better judgment accept the assurance offered by sentence four: “They’re all there.” But sentences five and six finally, definitively exceed every notion of reality that claims to be adequate to reality. “Always have been. Always will be.” These sentences create a context that corresponds perfectly to the timeless present of the sentence “I fuck babies.” In reality however NOTHING always has been and NOTHING is for always.

I don’t know if that’s an answer to your question. Hopefully it is. Reality is annulled after six sentences. At that point one can no longer distinguish “from the first draft” and “through the writing process itself.”

The narrator is someone who has lost his identity, is unsure if he even exists. There is the hint of a Linda and a Paul, but their reality is tenuous: “Linda. What if she asked me to substitute a stuffed dog for the dog. If she asked me something. Anything. Could I then claim she exists.” Throughout the text, the narrator struggles to regain his existence through his sentence: “I fuck babies. Therefore I am, maybe.” Repetition-as-comfort. He relies on his sentence to save him, yet by the end, he is unsure whether “I fuck babies” was ever "his" to begin with: “And what if its a mistake. A mix-up. What if I’ve been saying that Paul’s sentence the whole time. Because someone somewhere put in the wrong tape for me.” Can you talk a little about your intentions here?

That’s correct: the narrator has been afflicted with a feeling of total derealization. The world’s presentness, the existence of others, his own existence: nothing is guaranteed for him. Only one terrifying sentence - “I fuck babies” - is vested beyond any doubt for him with the reality index that the cogito had for Descartes. That’s why it’s “his” sentence. That’s why he clings to it as if it could save him and catapult him into existence. AS IF – that is the decisive point. It’s IMPOSSIBLE that a sentence like “I fuck babies” can help bring a human being into existence. Because it is necessarily an UNTRUE sentence. The person for whom it would be a true sentence – if we want to admit for a moment that such a creature exists – someone who would actually “fuck babies” serially, on a conveyor belt, many of them one after the other, many times a day: such a person would NEVER SAY this sentence.

To whom for heaven’s sake would he say it? On what occasion? For what reason? When the narrator says, “And what if it’s a mistake,” he begins to realize that “his” sentence, despite the index of reality it bears for him, might be the wrong sentence. He begins to realize this. He has already begun to realize this when he arrives at this “maybe” conclusion: “I fuck babies. Therefore I am maybe.” But it’s no more than the beginning of a realization. The narrator doesn’t get any further. It’s not even possible for him to pose a question about what problems the phenomenon of the “untrue sentence with reality index” might cause for understanding. WE, you and I, can of course come up with some thoughts about it. An idea might be: the sentence is not the thing that is vested with the reality index. Instead, it adheres to the sentence’s components, the individual words. To the fact that they come together in a constellation. It’s enough that a sentence occurs to the narrator (that a sentence is foisted on him) that brings together “I,” “fuck,” and “babies” – and that’s enough for the feeling of security – secure because it promises something like reality – to come about for him. But it’s also imaginable that the sentence “I fuck babies” connects the CORRECT words in a grammatically INCORRECT way. False presence. False plural. False voice (active instead of passive). And who would be responsible for the narrator’s blunder or parapraxis? Well, me of course, the author. Maybe I put the wrong tape in for him. Maybe on purpose.

Can you discuss the influence of Beckett on Babyfucker, and your writing as a whole?

I read Beckett intensively ten or twelve years before I wrote Babyfucker. But Beckett’s prose – the novels more than anything, and The Unnameable more than any other – has remained the non plus ultra of modern narration for me. Modern in an emphatic sense. Narrating as not narrating. No narrative as narrating in quotation marks. No “I,” no place, no time. Only this tentative speaking and writing movement that hints at a speaker, a place, a time only to immediately revoke them, hint again, and again revoke them. This tracing out of a trail left behind by a successive writing down and crossing out, by a crossed out writing down and a writing down crossed out. This textual tracing that is NOTHING (thus: “Texts for Nothing”), and, yet, no, absolutely NOT NOTHING. The incomparable, inimitable about Beckettian blackness is: this black is not just the blackness of a message, as black as it may be. It’s more that this black meaning turns into a black syntax. Into a meandering of sentences knotted together. Into a flowing, branching out, uprooted, blocked rush of black sentences. Phew. Such abominably imprecise metaphors! Sorry, Ms. Hall.

When Babyfucker won the second prize in the 1991 Ingborg Bachmann Competition, the book became one of the biggest literary scandals in recent years. Specifically, Jörg Haider claimed that the text was “inexcusable” and a “sexual perversion.” Were you surprised that many misinterpreted the book, focusing on the title rather than the subject matter? Has your view shifted over the years?

Here we are again with the contradiction of “beauty” and “monstrosity.” I really thought that everyone would clap and say: this author does such a wonderful job of making us forget how dreadful his topic really is. The aforementioned shit-gold-thing. That was A) naïve of me; B) but also a misjudgment of the text. Perhaps I even underestimated the “Babyfucker” by minimizing for myself the antagonism between beauty and monstrosity. Monstrosity can’t be beautified away by skillful prose pirouettes. Beauty doesn’t sublate monstrosity. And today I understand much better those people who find that there’s nothing beautiful there, nothing at all, just a triumph of monstrosity. However: the fact that there were people who read the text in all seriousness as “Confessions from the Life of a Pedophile” – that baffles me to this day.

How did you get involved in writing? As a young writer what books were especially influential? What texts do you continue to revisit?

I’ve always written. But intermittently, with long breaks. At first, poems and plays (when I was eight or nine). Then poems again (at sixteen, seventeen: Celan imitations, with poorly measured doses of obscenity). Then once an isolated prose text, under the influence of Proust: “An Attempt by Martin T. to Remember.” Then poems again (at twenty-five, twenty-six: undoubtedly imitations, I just don’t know anymore what of). Then during a long stay in Tuscany in 1978-1979 once again an isolated prose text: “The Condition of Mö or What and how a Story” (now, instead of Proust, Finnegan’s Wake, a book that, unlike the Recherche, I never read). I’ve only written regularly (more or less) since 1983. 1983-1988: poems. 1988-1995: prose. 1999-2010: poems.

I read most enthusiastically (idiotic superlative!) Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett. And as far as poets go: Benn, Rilke (despite everything), and, more than anything, Hölderlin. And not to forget the “experimentalists”: Ernst Jandl, Oskar Pastior. Right now I’m reading Kleist.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’d like to return to prose after a fifteen-year hiatus. An epistolary novella maybe. A man went into the mountains fifteen years ago to write the following letter to a woman: “Dear B., I’d like to strike you down with an iron rod. Maybe I love you. If you feel the same way and your wishes conform to mine, then please please get in touch with me posthaste. We’ll discuss this matter together and make the necessary arrangements if everything works out. With warm wishes, Your Bernd.” The letter is, however, never mailed and never written. In further letters to B. from Bernd, he pursues, among other things, the question: why? The last letter could be the one in which Bernd lets B. know that the matter has been settled since he has just been struck down by a group of women with iron rods.

* * * * * *

Translated by by Peter Smith, the 2009 German/English edition of Babyfucker is available from Les Figues.

nick-e melville's Selections and Dissections reviewed by Stephen Nelson

2010-04-30T00:09:00.004-04:00

nick-e melville
Selections and Dissections
Otoliths
$14.95

Reviewed by Stephen Nelson

One of the great joys of reading poetry for me is that initial encounter with the text where eye meets page and explores the way words have been shaped and arranged on a blank canvas. It's a purely visual experience but somehow impacts upon the way we approach and subsequently read the text. Are we looking at a thick fat block of language to be chewed over like a choice steak, or a long thin stream of words rolling down white space, like a dark burn through a snowy field? Or, is something more unusual, something more intriguing going on? What happens when the poet leaps at the idea of first contact and starts to twist and turn and play with language in order to highlight meaning with visual dexterity or through subtle shifts in the shape and material of language? Well, I suppose we get visual language, or, more specifically, concrete poetry.

nick-e melville has a magician's sleight of hand, or perhaps a musician's love of an instrument he is just about to pick up and blow into for the very first time. Either way he takes us back to first encounters, the joys and risks of play; discovery; games! His book "selections and dissections" has a series of poems entitled "child and adult hood games" which somehow acts as a marker through the collection - the way a kid has a series of familiar haunts he or she will return to from which to head out on new, sometimes dangerous, adventures. A thick rectangular box surrounds a bold block of text naming the kind of games children or predatory adults might play. The games are as serious as your life - Kiss, Cuddle and Torture (with TORTURE looming large); The Strategy of Desire; The Engineering of Consent. The thick band encompasses the text, shutting out the world, forcing us to play the games as obsessively as any child or adult on the hunt, on the prowl, in the zone.

The number of verbo-visual tricks employed in these poem-games is impressive. Visual puns - dips and gaps in text; word play - language repeated, twisted, reversed, turned upside down to create new words; interplay of title and poem - a "celebration" or "cerebration" of language. melville flips the eye, opens the mind, turns us into verbal adventurers discovering the wonders of text, the shades and shapes of meaning in the shades and shapes of language as pagescape. He uncovers the hidden, shadowy regions of text, revealing negative space between line and letter, particularly in the series "alphabits", where the shapes between each letter of the alphabet are explored and given a title which prompts a smile at the absurdity of making substantial that which is generally insubstantial. A similar technique is used in the opening poem, "mid-life crisis", where the eye flickers between the white space of the word "LIFE" and the occult shapes between each letter.

In another series (and how apt that we are led along trails from one poem to another), "homage to I H F", each limb of the letters I H F is moved slightly and recombined to form playful patterns, which, strangely enough, reminded me of the movement of graphics in primitive video games. Again, that first encounter, that brand new experience. The poem of course pays homage to one of the chief movers in the international concrete poetry movement of the 50s and 60s, and it seems totally fitting to me that melville carries the torch of that movement in Scotland and is able indeed to extend the reach and scope of Ian Hamilton Finlay and his peers by adding elements of irony and dark humour.

Elsewhere, melville uses tiny, seemingly insignificant sections of text, the tittle of the letter "i", the dot at the foot of an exclamation mark, and makes poems as delicate and refreshing as summer rain. The "eight rain poems" take those dots and fashion beautiful sky-filled pitter-patterns from a series of words and phrases - "holiday rain", "spring rain", "spitting" - that have the feel of concrete haiku, a Japanese quality reflected in the dedication to Niikuni Seiichi (another traveller from the international concrete poetry movement), and reflect a vein of minimalism running through the book whereby the slightest gesture opens up a world of possibility and meaning. In the poem "mor(t)al dilemma" for instance, the tiny addition of an "s" magnifies the tension between existence and non-existence, experience and non-experience, showing how minimalism can address the biggest concerns with cruel wit and ingenuity.

In other poems, melville zooms in on the substance of the printed word/image, taking us deep into the dark heart of inky matter where we discover a sub-atomic world of splash marks and drips. He plays with the DNA of language, genetically modifying meaning with the tiniest incision or insertion, and explores the inner space of text with a playful precision, leading us beyond the vanishing point.

These poems were made in Scotland, like the bags of cement melville borrows for his three "concrete poems", but his mix of concrete minimalism is a delicious twist on Scotland's encounter with the innovations of international concrete poetry. It investigates that first contact and expands upon it by widening the spaceways between eye and mind. Beyond that, it shows a distinct and unique approach to text which anyone interested in language as a visual event has to experience.

Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton reviewed by Micah Ling

2010-04-29T20:20:00.005-04:00

Douglas Kearney
The Black Automaton
Fence 2009
ISBN: 9781934200285
80pp.

Reviewed by Micah Ling

As a thing to hold: a gift, an object, an item, this book is attractive. It has the feel of a manual—some collection of diagrams and instructions—for something precious and complicated. Right away, this collection takes hold to teach you a few things—go ahead and be schooled by it. With “Radio,” Kearney reminds, “the first black you met was on the radio. / this is true even if you lived with blacks.” The repetition in this poem makes it sure of itself, and by the end, “the first blacks to change radio’s / meaning from love back to blood are still here // and want to fuck you. They are doing so on the radio / right now. you don’t like it but go to sleep.” Kearney isn’t messing around—he says it true and stark and beautiful.

This is a performance: a show. This is steeped in recorded history, and unrecorded history. This is lyrics and beats and hand-jives. In, “The City vs. John Henry,” Kearney dissects the very notion of a steel man. The jarring notion of the hardworking hero. “Mr J Hammer Henry / with your black /as rail spike neck / mallet muscled Mr J Bama / Henry outlantish from station / could barely fithammer / poking from stowage like / natural man’s poke…” New versions of old stories seem somehow, finally told right.

In the interspersed “Black Automaton…” poems and “Floodsong” poems, it’s hard not to think that Kearney is investigating, if not playing with, how we read. These poems direct the eyes with arrows and slashes and oversized brackets. These poems dance and stumble and crash down the pages. There’s sound here—beats and echoes and reverberation. And it’s not arbitrary; the blatant emphasis turns out to be on the words that are jarring or “offensive” even if they weren’t 20 font sizes larger. The format is commentary itself.

A lot of what’s in these pomes is commentary: the poet looking at poets and looking at language. From “The Cruel, Cruel City,” Kearney gives us, “cruel and cruel city, nigger manhood / --rather, that damned hat, thus passed betwixt a lion / and a riverboat, and bloody ditty doo-wah, / structured row of doo wop gennimens and afflicted ballet of diddy / bop thugs to this wanksta-ass poet who can now: / 1) eat a ton of dog shit without getting sick / 2) dance underwater and not get wet / 3) fuck hot pussy until it’s cold. or / fortify that old time vita.” Kearney’s mockery of the system and strange, strange world of literary things is reminiscent of Amiri Baraka.

These are poems, yes; but they’re also hip-hop songs and graffiti tags and the one-man band on the corner who changes your night for the better, so listen up.

Christopher Higgs’ The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney reviewed by J. A. Tyler

2010-03-25T02:08:00.004-04:00

There is No Book

‘Welcome Visitor #0134457

Marvin K. Mooney left strict instructions detailing his desired method of organization for what he frequently referred to as his “Complete Works.” (Humility was never one of Mooney’s strong points.) He presumed the popularity of his work would surely grow exponentially following his death.’

Authorship is the heart of Christopher Higgs’ debut novel The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney. In its 352 pages, Higgs and Mooney are a tandem of writers working in collaboration to disappear, to relinquish all responsibility to the word, to the title, to the notion of authorship as a whole.

Sator Press, literary newborn from writer / editor / actor Ken Baumann began its walking legs with this first title – but before that there was a simple splash page and a posting on the esteemed htmlgiant simply asking – ‘what is this?’ Months later Marvin K. Mooney began appearing in blog post commentary, enticing writers, readers, and the like to ‘join him’, that they ‘were needed’. The links of these posts led to a Marvin K. Mooney Society webpage (themarvinkmooneysociety.com), which housed very little information but several videos of static laden scenic views or unintelligible groups in seeming prayer or chant. This dialogue opened even further when on the final days before the book’s release many top lit blogs like htmlgiant or bigother were engaged in conversations about the aim or validity of these Marvin K. Mooney publicity stunts. And then, on a day like any other day, the Sator Press website went live and announced The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney by Christopher Higgs – the first official mention of his authorship and the release of the title in paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats. All of this, and the book was not even at our doorsteps, was not yet opened to page one, where the destruction of authorship begins in earnest.

‘This is nothing like my real life. I did not base this story on myself or anyone I know. I used something children call imagination. Past the age of eleven, most people don’t have one, so I understand if you’re one of them. But unlike you, I still use mine. Instead of recapping tidbits of my boring real life, like most fuckwads who call themselves writers, I sit and imagine stuff and that’s where the “story” comes from. There is never any truth in anything I type. My name is not Marvin K. Mooney. In real life, my wife is nothing like the man’s wife in this story. My wife and I never visit the cave anymore. To be honest, I haven’t seen my wife in months. Goodbye cavelight.’

The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney masquerades as exactly what its title describes, a collected framework to reference a single author: Marvin K. Mooney. Composed of notes from Mooney, blurbs and mentions about him from other writers, last pages and guesswork on his disappearance as well as philosophical statements, cut and past lit theory and recovered or re-published stories from Mooney’s supposed literary career, The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is a book to wade through. By page ten my cuffs were wet, and by the mid-point, my belt was missing underneath a sea of textual scatter.

‘ “Hey, what’s that you’re reading?”

You could answer a number of things, one of them being: “It is a new work of creative nonfiction by Marvin K. Mooney.”

In follow-up, you may be asked:

“What’s it about?”

To which you can safely reply: “It is a text about itself. It is a pretentious, egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, and hardly worth my time; but for some reason I continue to read it – perhaps I am being forced to at gunpoint, perhaps I am slightly enjoying it” ’

And this is what is most fascinating about the book: how it manages to discuss, to live within, and to subvert the notion of meta-fiction, all at once. There are shouted moments to the reader, enticements and goads to us, followed by three-part fictional narratives and prefaced by philosophical interjections and the planting of literary theory seeds. And Higgs, playing at Mooney (and sometimes at himself) does a tremendous job finding the exact moments of lull, of hush, where the text threatens to overwhelm itself and collapse, and uses those exact moments to change the pacing of the text, to break into a new dialogue, or to switch to another mode.

There are places where the wading through of The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney is deep or rough or super complex, where it takes something other than a simple read to find Higgs’ meaning and willingly subvert the text alongside Mooney, but in the end, the mud-stuck footsteps through the lake of this book are worth it, every page, to come out with Mooney or Higgs, or without them perhaps, on the other side of literature.

Shya Scanlon's _ In this alone impulse, _, reviewed by Jac Jemc

2010-03-15T17:58:00.008-04:00

In this alone impulse,
Shya Scanlon
Noemi Press (2010)
ISBN-13: 9781934819104
Paperback: 68 pages, $15.00

reviewed by Jac Jemc

I like a book that’s willing to let me in on its process, or, at the very least, let me think I’m watching something first hand. In this alone impulse, does just this. The reader can gather the constraint: seven lines and from there, wide open space. Work is allowed to double over on itself and eat its own tail.

On the first page the reader discovers the permission Shya Scanlon has given himself. The poem (kind of), “A Bargain,” moves quickly, trying out different combinations and meanings. It jumps from the logical beginning, “I have a house,” to the incomprehensible belly, “A have now house about me anymore,” and cycles back on to the first line on the last, “I have a house. Not my house. Not any house.” I’ll be honest: I was skeptical on the first page. I thought, “Okay, macramé poems. Time to read 59 more.” Luckily, Scanlon has a masterful concept of play, not just twisting and tying words up in knots, but creating Chinese handcuffs out of rhythm and image as well.

As I moved through this collection, I was constantly situating myself, but the most acquainted I could get, was telling which stone I’d just hopped from and to which stone I would hop next. That’s a terrible metaphor, considering the beautiful ones that populate this book (“You came and I’m a mumbled number”; “We’re guns aren’t we you said and I said maybe”; “Cry. You are a calendar,” to name just the handful I flipped to quickly). Let’s try again. Let’s say it’s like sex: I know where his hand just was, you can feel the direction his hand is heading, but I don’t want to know where his mouth will be in five minutes: it would ruin the fun. That metaphor’s at least a little more entertaining than an effing shallow stream.

In perhaps my favorite poem in the collection, “Rock ‘n’ roll,” Scanlon explores the excitement of boredom with riffs on hackneyed expressions:

fffffIs bored something? More great. No stop now, yes, but stopping
ffffffffffcannot
fffffis. Is an. Is sparrow. A bored not better flyer. Is minnow. A bored
ffffffffffnot
fffffbetter fish. Stop mixin’, Nixon. You old fruit to fly. Dead one.
ffffffffffRinger.
fffffI’ll ply your pull like nonedunnit. A winsome thensome. A bored
ffffffffffno
fffffbatter. You old fish-to-fry. Don’t speak no stop no, sneaky
ffffffffffservice. K?
fffffOld phony. Simple Spanish. Paz, baby. Spare me. Be more than, is
fffffthan. Be a more great beginning. Be stiff as a bored.

I’m such a sucker, when it’s done well, for a good play on words. Scanlon connects the dots I normally ignore or forget about. He moves deftly between the soft-edged “sparrow” and “minnow,” and transitions seamlessly to the joy-buzzer, “Stop mixin’, Nixon.” Everywhere in this book, I felt that stellar combo of tongue and teeth.

It’s been a long time since I took such joy in alliteration and assonance, like in the poem title, “Danger dagger bladder blood,” or the line in “Stub toward” that reads, “I’m callow, caw. I’m cork.”

I procrastinated writing this review as I do everything. The initial approach I’d thought of was to start with a Beckett quote that kept sounding in my head while I was reading In this alone impulse, “Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute.” I felt like the quote was an easy way out for some reason, and was trying to find another way into the review. Then, on the day I sat down to finally write this, Scanlon posted that quote on the website, BigOther.com. The coincidence was too great not to recognize. Sometimes, it seems, our impulses are not so very alone.

In “Surprise, surprise,” the narrator says, “We’ll […] speak softly until our mouths organize, and refuse.” Exactly.

****

Jac Jemc lives in Chicago. Her chapbook, This Stranger She'd Invited In, is coming out this year from Greying Ghost Press, and her first novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming in 2012 from Dzanc Books. She is the poetry editor of Decomp, a fiction reader for Our Stories, and a bookstore liaison for Tarpaulin Sky. She blogs regularly at bigother.com, literago.com and jacjemc.wordpress.com

Chris Emery's _ Radio Nostalgia _, reviewed by Ezekiel Black

2010-03-06T22:35:00.006-05:00

Radio Nostalgia
Chris Emery
Arc Publications (2005)
ISBN: 1-904614-19-1
Paperback: 92 pp, £8.99

reviewed by Ezekiel Black

Radio Nostalgia is an approachable title. It summons the Golden Age of Radio, a time when Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats led the country out of the Great Depression, a time when the candid address, “Good evening, friends,” could win support for aNew Deal—but why would the state of media today elicit radio nostalgia? With the advent of CNN, of twenty-four-hour-television news, viewers were fed a real-time Gulf War Coverage that revises Vietnam-era epithets of The Living Room War, of The Television War. The dominant medium of World War II coverage and thought was a radio and newsreel that regurgitated European news, due to a lack of American war correspondents. The newsreel was at heart military propaganda while the war’s underbelly remained hidden to the public. Why does the work look to one form of such mediation as remedy to another? Don’t think this discussion is all for naught, as this is the skeleton of the book, and as you read into the face of Radio Nostalgia, you begin to see the skull emerge, to see how the poetry is mere sheath for war, politics, hunger.

Radio Nostalgia is cover-to-cover quality, also dense and disparate, so the first several poems throw the reader into a dark room. Until you recover your Night Vision, these poems will escape you, until you see the ashen, moonlit strains that shoot through the book. The martial and the political come gradually into focus, poem after poem, and at their most keen the poems indict a particular mayor, governor, political candidates in general, a British Parliament and Prime Minister. In “The Wolves are on the Dark Beef”: “Tony lift your hand / and share this blanket now your burning feet // can go ahead and walk the border.” And later:

ffffffffffone measure is a form of rent
ffffffffffanother is escarpment

ffffffffffbut calmer now we count the beads
ffffffffffand touch the cysts of Islam

Given this political crescendo, excerpted, you can assume that “Tony” is Tony Blair, as “the cysts of Islam” help locate the name. Another protest poem, “Clan Tinnitus,” employs anaphora to caricature right-wing political discourse:

ffffffffffBurn the bishops and those of our children sour
ffffffffffffffffffffand blind
ffffffffffAnd the Oracle DBAs burn them
ffffffffffBurn the police and those who crack spines
ffffffffffffffffffffof rosters

ffffffffff[…]

ffffffffffAnd of course
ffffffffffThe whispering rags
ffffffffffOf the Left

These are only a sample of the work’s political grievance. As for the martial, though, one excerpt in particular speaks to it—and, perhaps to the entire book—one that suggests Manifesto:

ffffffffffI hear the war drum and the scissors of men
ffffffffffSo let this ink pool of the gods explain
ffffffffffOur designified wounds

ffffffffffOur lack of monuments in this final order
ffffffffffMy military effort can host no creed
ffffffffffNo glaze or feature except the posture

ffffffffffAnd rancor we hold to be just
ffffffffffFor in this local output deficit we may trade
ffffffffffThe chaos of our meals for a white cage.

When you begin Radio Nostalgia, these strains are not evident. After your eyes adjust to its lexicon, lack of punctuation, allusion, and overall density, martial and political motifs slowly materialize, like Furniture in your Night Vision. Although these motifs are hinted from the title page, Nostalgia’s idiosyncrasies won’t allow you to immediately grasp beyond the language and style its brass tacks, to see beyond the smooth face a skull below, that loathsome Reality Found within the Summer Glow.

Why does the work look to one form of mediation as remedy to another? Radio Nostalgia seems its own dream.

If you don’t want to dive through the surface, the book can occupy you with its ripe poetry, technical skill, and bravery. Not all of the complaint is as overt as the excerpts given above. Indeed, often its political dissent is subtle, tucked behind lines that seize your sensual and imaginative attention. Every poem in the book is over two pages, and almost every poem contains a moment of pause, the reader stopping to savor its Invention: “Let’s kill this mealy city / We are royal insects and fabulous lux.” Or later:

ffffffffffffffffffffTogether we are a modern fog,
ffffffffffthe idea of the better dead, immortalised grey
ffffffffffeyes above subtitled totally idealised dialogue.

ffffffffffNo one adheres to the precise terms any more.
ffffffffffThe streets shiver like windows this afternoon of very
fffffffffflarge government. We’ll ape out the speeches
ffffffffffof the age. This country is his artery.

Radio Nostalgia hulks with bizarre yet somehow appropriate locution and word choice. Aside from the words-qua-word, the evolution and movement of the language will surprise the reader, as when the work adopts a performative quality: “Outside the shop of our / Arc-lit Tin-Tin singalong / Is moon-yellow youth.” Or: “In the white forest / shaving shaving loyal shaving / forest of the head.” With sprung rhythm and epizeuxis, repetitions of a single word, these stanzas glow against the stark political undertones of the book, forming odd islands of intermission, pause, until the juxtaposition of slam-line construction and politics becomes an apt marriage.

One feature of Radio Nostalgia is hard to place, the repetition of the word “black.” You would imagine that the book would arrive at “black” though circumlocution, some figurative reiteration of the word. When most poetry is trying to Make It New, as with the Elliptical, Radio Nostalgia subverts that logic by somehow remaining beyond the abstruse word-material of “black,” perhaps an approach Romantic, e.g. Shelly’s skylark and Keats’s nightingale, sites of symbolic largesse, involuntary hosts to what conceptions lay beyond their own purviews, the Idea and unapproachable Bird all at once. Perhaps the repetition of “black” is simply an attempt to load the word with new connotations; perhaps “black” is shorthand for the twilight of Empire, fin de siècle, decadent swallowing of all actual color. Or, perhaps “black” is Chris Emery’s experiment with something personal; synesthesia; instead of “black” as ominous color, maybe a particular sound or taste turns black for Emery, reminiscent of Rimbaud’s kaleidoscopic Vowels. Romantic or symbolic, the metamorphic quality of “black” is indicative of Radio Nostalgia. You can look into the face of the poems and find quality work, or you can peer through that and find the skull politik.

****

Ezekiel Black teaches composition at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, Georgia. Before this appointment, he earned his MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His poetry and reviews have appeared in Verse, Sonora Review, can we have our ball back?, GlitterPony, Skein, and Invisible Ear.

Jonathan Hayes's _ T(HERE) _, reviewed by Francis Raven

2010-03-01T13:36:00.009-05:00

T(HERE)
Jonathan Hayes
Silenced Press (2010)
ISBN-13: 978-0979241031
Paperback: 72 pages, $14

reviewed by Francis Raven

“The title wishes not to be pronounced.” Perhaps because there is too much to say.

We need confessional poems for our own era. They don’t last. It’s like certain kinds of thriller, certain comedies; these just become dated, but that’s not a criticism, they are in the boat, out at sea, while it is being repaired, trying to describe it. It’s common to want art to last forever, but I like art that expires. T(HERE) is just such a collection of confessional poems, though they may not at first be read that way (or even want to be read that way). T(HERE) is a splintered memoir of poetry that asks what the use of voice is in our postmodern times and goes on to use it quite effectively. Basically, these poems are fragmented and funny enough to earn the emotional payout that confessional poems guarantee. We’ve been tricked by confessional poems too many times before; we know their maudlin answers and have become a cynic to emotion on the whole, which is why we need to be surprised all over again. Hayes’s poems, at their best, both resonate with our experience and shock us out of our emotional complacency.

The book is composed of shards of prose poems (perhaps a new genre: not the prose poem, but the fragment knocked off of it), juxtaposed meaningfully. It’s a perfect form for the content: there is usually too much space in memoirs, too many empty words, too much plot. What we really want are the emotions, the sadness, the feeling of poignancy, of regret, sorrow, and perhaps progress (which is also why graphic memoirs work so well: their relative lack of words). However, this fragmentation places a very real constraint on the poems themselves: they don’t have natural endpoints. It seems that each couplet could be taken as a complete poem just as the entire book might just as effectively be taken as a fragment, but a fragment of what? Of consciousness. Hayes’s earlier work was marked by much shorter amusing rants; the extension of these poised shards has the feeling of full-fledged consciousness and this is why it resonates
with the reader.

After outlining his personal narrative of being uprooted and finding meaningful details in a variety of not particularly memorable places, the author writes, “What follows is of this cycle. / The economic soil. Winter recession. / And employment up again in the spring… / The subway will not break down.” That is, it will be us who are forced to move, we who are forced to bend in light of current market forces. But it is as a result of these forces that the world is held together. We must bend our voices as we make our way through. It’s a crisscrossing road book that takes place largely in San Francisco about which it is precise, but not descriptive, largely evocative.

Along the road there is the mention of a suicide, the repetition of someone’s suicide, “the fact that / suicides are just / statistics, that / makes me want / to love you, while / i still exist…” It’s not a stretch to say that Hayes is a little too close to this and to the instances of death in the book in general. The best parts of T(HERE) never fully reveal themselves, yet they are not wholly abstract. They lift into emotion from something particular. The parts about death, perhaps because death is not known to the living, at least not from the inside, cannot lift from the particular to the universal; they must float in the abstract without any string to tie them down. Perhaps the book needs some reason to end, some resolution. That is, perhaps a collection of fragments lacks completeness and just wants to continue just as consciousness lacks completeness and desires nothing more than to continue.

***

Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University. His books include Provisions (Interbirth, 2009), 5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible (Blue Lion Books, 2008), Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems (BlazeVOX, 2005), and the novel Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005). Frances lives in Washington, D.C.; you can find more of his work at www.ravensaesthetica.com.

Vanessa Place's _ La Medusa _, reviewed by Janice Lee

2010-02-13T06:03:00.000-05:00

La Medusa
Vanessa Place
Fiction Collective 2 (2008)
ISBN-13: 978-1573661454
Paperback: 616 pages, $22

reviewed by Janice Lee

The Phenomenological Landscape of La Medusa (City as Monster/ City as Literature/ City as Consciousness)

In 1832, Louis Albert Necker described a "sudden and involuntary change in the apparent position of a crystal" during his observation, his perception having spontaneously shifted while the observed object stayed unchanged.

In 2008, Vanessa Place likened the epic narrative of the city of Los Angeles to "the modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions."

What Necker's cube and La Medusa relate is the idea that the original presentation of reality itself is metaphorical, that what is seen is always inextricably bound up with how one sees. What Necker's cube offers as a metaphor for consciousness is also a metaphor for a difficult text, recalling the consequences of facing the creation of an impossible perceptual world occurring in a physical one. La Medusa takes on the impossible challenge: to write a book about the legendary city of Los Angeles, a city so de-centered that no book could possibly encompass its vastly different representations, no book could avoid the ephemerality of an attempt at a concretization of LA, no book could represent the gaze, tame the city as monster and insert it into the artificially rendered pages of a book. But this is why La Medusa can, and does, knowing that the city is something that is constantly becoming but never is.

Los Angeles is a city that is there and here, a city constantly remaking itself and artificially rendered as well, so that the various consciousnesses that make up Place’s epic novel are not meant to be definitive, rather artificial versions of artificial realities that have left some feelers behind in the "real world."

Vanessa Place's La Medusa is described as a "polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness," yet this novel is more than just a return to a Joycean experience, as Michael Silverblatt comments, and it is more than just a theoretical description of the phenomenal properties of consciousness in narrative. Rather, the novel resists Daniel Dennet's famous claim that consciousness is simply a kind of illusion or epiphenomenon and provokes the reader into a consideration of the wages of consciousness and the agency we so fervently believe it comes along with—that is, consciousness is often taken for granted as innately tied to everyday perception but is something rather more artificial and flexible. Not only does the novel offer a literary enactment of the kind of consciousness that drives the dream of Los Angeles, the reader must construct her own phenomenological self-model during the process of reading.

Vanessa Place has written elsewhere, "Ergo no single story can be told because there is never just one." Yet there is an ontological paradox of quantum physics, as she continues, "for it is only the single observer who can create wholecloth reality from piecemeal particles—the singular consciousness in all its individual multiplicity transforms the multiplicity of the quantum flux." Place's own book is an ambitious architecture of human consciousness mapped over the vast landscape of a sprawling city. Yet, as the reader delves in and out of the minds of characters (a doctor, a trucker, an ice cream vendor, a corpse—to name a few), what they learn to see is not the world through another character's eyes, but to see the world differently through their own again. The reader's own process of narrativizing-as-reading becomes mapped onto the narrative architecture of the multimodal world of the page. The text is fragmented into bursts of language and emotion, for as Max Planck discovered, on the quantum level, energy works in bursts, not in a steady Joycean stream.

So how does this text operate, on a quantum level or on a greater one? How does it look to the history of literature, mending the broken bodies of texts, tattered from history and time? It is easier to repair a broken pump than it is to heal a broken metaphor, especially when we have forgotten the difference. La Medusa maps a sprawling metropolis and metaphor for an artificial consciousness, ultimately asking the reader to reconsider their own preconceptions of the way their own minds work. It is in the constellation of lack, built upon the intrusions and disruptions of an architectural narrative, that we as readers realize that none of us are really in complete control of our own perceptions. In reading a text where we must learn how to read again, where does the dream of Los Angeles lie? La Medusa echoes softly: We are in the dream, and yet the dream is inside us.

****

Janice Lee is interested in metaphors of consciousness and theoretical neuroscience. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Big Toe Review, Zafusy, antennae, sidebrow, Action, Yes, Joyland, and Black Warrior Review. Her first book is KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2009), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains, and the stakes of consciousness. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts and currently lives in Los Angeles where she is a co-curator for the feminist reading series Mommy, Mommy!, co-editor of the online journal [out of nothing], and co-founder of the interdisciplinary arts organization Strophe.

Susan Wheeler's _ Assorted Poems _, reviewed by Greg Weiss

2010-02-12T12:00:00.002-05:00

Assorted Poems
Susan Wheeler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-25861-0
Hardcover: 143 pp, $25

reviewed by Greg Weiss

Susan Wheeler’s Assorted Poems is noteworthy for its excellence and stylistic trajectory, and the symbiotic relationship between the two. It contains selections from Wheeler’s four volumes of poetry—Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, Smokes, Source Codes, and Ledger—and charts a course from Ashbery-esque serious winking through, to quote Wheeler’s own allusion, “fractured fairy-tales,” before arriving, as of Ledger, at linguistically sparse but visually and thematically expansive poems that place Wheeler’s self and contemporary American capitalism/consumerism in a relationship not unlike that of C.P. Cavafy to Greek history. In a blurb for X.J Kennedy’s In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007, Donald Hall asserts that “many of Kennedy’s poems are wit itself. His wit is his way of understanding.” I agree with Hall, and would also spell out the implied mirror-image: “And understanding is his [Kennedy’s] way of wit.” Cavafy and Wheeler enjoy the same reciprocal relationship as Kennedy to “wit” in their treatments of “Greek history” and “money in contemporary America,” respectively.

To be perfectly honest, although the structure, language and punctuation in the poems from Bag ‘o’ Diamonds is standard, I often could not comprehend them effectively. (Or if I did comprehend them effectively, they didn’t affect me.) As is often the case with the poems in first books, the poems from Bag ‘o’ Diamonds are harder to comprehend and not as strong as the poems in the following volumes, which, although it sounds like a criticism (and is), is what I mean by the symbiotic relationship between the evolution of Wheeler’s style and her excellence. “Peanut Agglutinin,” like many of the poems in Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, features an intentionally difficult to decipher narrative which an appreciation of the poem depends on that does not seem to attempt to deliver a payoff which would justify its difficulty:

ffffffffffThe gore being chili sauce and rice didn’t mitigate
ffffffffffthe way she died. Done in,
ffffffffffcurtain furled at sunset then, the cat arced
ffffffffffand sped off behind the Donut Hut and we
ffffffffffsee against the tar curbside one lone foot splayed.
ffffffffffAnd what a plan it was, though most missed the boat—
ffffffffffthis way to the sawmill, inspector!

ffffffffffNell too fell victim to his terrible design.
ffffffffffOut in the ever woods where the tree trunks stood
ffffffffffthe blood seeped from plastic bags
ffffffffffand the crew had to make another ketchup run.
ffffffffffLissa was tired of peeling grapes for eyeballs,
ffffffffffand Buck of scooping mayonnaise into insulated gloves.

ffffffffffYeah, well here’s what she liked: hair, and lots of it,
ffffffffffpeanut brittle—when suddenly, a frost of cicadas,
ffffffffffrising like Lucifer, hums up the clouds—an
ffffffffffevening beside you: Do-right, do right again.

The poems from Smokes are more intellectually realized and less ostentatious, and represent a clear step forward. The narratives are less talky, more cryptic, and often bring to mind folksongs and nursery rhymes. For instance, “Meeting Again, After Heine”:

ffffffffffThe moon rose like a blooming flower.
ffffffffffThe tin in the hand clattered its charge.
ffffffffffWe walked by in the wavering hour,
ffffffffffI looking away, you chattering hard.

ffffffffffMet by luck, with like destinations,
ffffffffffWe startled again at what ended in pique.
ffffffffffStrollers out, seeing, had no notion;
ffffffffffA car alarm cycled its querulous shriek;

ffffffffffEighth Street sank in the crack of its nightfall;
ffffffffffYou pressed your satisfactions on me.
ffffffffffYou in your urgency remarked after all
ffffffffffKindling your passions was enmity;

ffffffffffPassions had finally erased your calm,
ffffffffffMade composure a prop of the past.
ffffffffffI mugged that street noise, din, bedlam
ffffffffffPrevented my hearing your story at last.

ffffffffffAs I walked home the strollers were thinning,
ffffffffffThe moon bobbed above roofs like a ball,
ffffffffffThe shade at the bus stop waved to me, beckoning.
ffffffffffAnd I nodded fast in the fast nightfall.

With poems featuring running into an old boss, clock-radios, and furniture warehouses, and “Ezra’s Lament” with its initial refrain of “I owe, I owe, I owe,” money and its family tree are in Smokes’s DNA. And while some of the almost uniformly excellent poems from Source Codes could have been written by Charles Bukowski, Frederick Seidel, Arthur Vogelsang, or Mark Levine, a few treat commerce, or trade, and its relationship to the world uniquely. My favorite lines in Assorted Poems open the final stanza of “Quincy in Lagos”: “How did we know what we see, we saw through the mind? / What citizen without cummerbund could Columbo yet find?” Whereas the poems from Bag ‘o’ Diamonds are very serious about being offhand, these lines are offhandedly serious—Wheeler gets at how severely limited our individual knowledge and experience is, and the effect that those limitations have on us as individuals and collectively, through a pitch-perfect analysis of Columbo (and I say this as a big fan of the show). And in “Rite Two: Two,” Wheeler understands an impending death in commercial language:

ffffffffffIt is my work that waits, not yours.
ffffffffffIt is my clock that ticks, not hers.
ffffffffffI have reason to undertake an expiry report.
ffffffffffThe dead will die, nonetheless.

It is Wheeler’s suffusion, in this stanza/poem and others primarily in Source Codes and Ledger, of American and global commerce, the personal and the more universal—“The dead will die, nonetheless”—that brings Cavafy to mind. Death, the personal and the more universal are similarly intermingled in the opening stanzas of “The Funeral of Sarpedon”:

ffffffffffZeus mourns deeply:
ffffffffffPatroklos has killed Sarpedon.
ffffffffffNow Patroklos and the Achaians rush on
ffffffffffto snatch up the body, to dishonour it.

ffffffffffBut Zeus doesn’t tolerate that at all.
ffffffffffThough he let his favorite child be killed—
ffffffffffthis the Law required—
ffffffffffhe’ll at least honour him after death.
ffffffffffSo he now sends Apollo down to the plain
ffffffffffwith instructions about how the body should be tended.

Both Wheeler and Cavafy begin their account of the death of an acquaintance by emphasizing the personal nature of the loss. Wheeler makes the emotional connection in the contrast between “my” and “yours” and “hers,” and Cavafy in his straightforward assessment of the depth of Zeus’ mourning, as well as Zeus’ level of tolerance. Wheeler and Cavafy’s tones imply that the emotional nature of impending and recent death precludes ornamentation. And as Cavafy places that emotion in embattled history (“Now Patroklos and the Achaians rush on / to snatch up the body, to dishonour it”), Wheeler does in the humdrum of commerce: “I have reason to fill out an expiry report.” And then both conclude, at least momentarily, in a combination of pragmatism and fatalism: “The dead will die, nonetheless…So he now sends Apollo down to the plain / with instructions about how the body should be tended.”

There are poems in Ledger that could have possibly appeared in the previous three, but there are also poems that are notably different in regards to their scope, length, and appearance on the page. Ledger brings Tom Sleigh to mind in the same way that Bag ‘o’ Diamonds invokes Ashbery. In both instances, Wheeler adopts a distinctive aspect of an influence’s poetry—Ashbery’s whimsical half-narratives and Sleigh’s sense of time and space on the page—and adapts it to her own needs. The result is poetry that advertises a lineage to which it is tangential. For instance, while Sleigh often presents, within a single poem, disparate snapshots that have the effect of identifying with both those captured moments and the vast scope of time and space that they belong to, Wheeler is concerned with presenting that belonging, the relationship between those moments and the vast scope of time and space. The manner in which narrative, thematic, and linguistic coherence and moral, emotional, and intellectual scope suffuse each other in the poems from Ledger is difficult to capture in excerpt, but the first three stanzas of “Short Shrift” provide at least some idea:

ffffffffffffffffffffI was at and about everything, nodding through the mall lot,
ffffffffffffffffffffffffcutting through the yard with quick, light steps.

ffffffffffWhen the rains came,
ffffffffffthey left the hillside
ffffffffffand moved to the high ground
ffffffffffwhere a quilt scrap sustained them
ffffffffffin late, dark readings from
ffffffffffIsaiah, bright
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff“and they

ffffffffffregard the objectivity of the market as a disguise for an abdication of
ffffffffffffffffffffvalues and of intellectual dependence” WM PFAFF, 1981

The poems from Ledger seem, to me, those of a poet who has “found her voice.” I put “found her voice” in quotes to acknowledge the banality of the sentiment and phrase, but also to indicate that I don’t believe Wheeler’s voice to necessarily be wed to consumerism. It is tempting to view the confluence of new, or newly explicit, subject matter and one’s appreciation of a poet as a causality, but it is just as nearsighted to conceive of Wheeler as a “poet of consumerism” as it is to conceive of Cavafy as a “poet of Greek history.” What strikes me about both Wheeler and Cavafy, at their best, is their apparently effortless enactment of the oft-attempted but rarely successful combination of the personal and epic. Susan Wheeler’s Assorted Poems is excellent, gets better as it goes along, and is the rare volume that exhibits ambition while exuding quality.

****

Greg Weiss’s criticism and poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Humanities Review, Cricket Online Review, Blue Fifth Review, Now Culture, The Columbia Review, The South Carolina Review, The Oklahoma Review, The Margie Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Mississippi, and others. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Eric Raschke's _ The Book of Samuel _, reviewed by John McCaffrey

2010-02-08T16:51:00.007-05:00

The Book of Samuel
Eric Raschke
St. Martin's Press, 2009
Paperback: $9.99; 264 pages.

reviewed by John McCaffrey

Like all good fiction, Eric Raschke’s debut novel, The Book of Samuel, both captures and transcends time, meaning it provides readers with a detailed depiction of a particular place and moment in history, while exploring themes that have given men and women pause since antiquity. In this case, it is the suburban, ranch-house tundra of 1980’s Denver that serves as a fixing point for Raschke’s subtle yet steady probe of spirituality, family life and societal movements.

The book is narrated by Samuel Gerard, an adolescent whose view of the world – whether it be from the banana seat of a huffy or the bended knee of his Christ-obsessed father – falls somewhere between Tom Sawyer and the Terminator. More accurately, Samuel is Beaver Cleaver (his family actually lives on Cleaver Street) with an edge, a wide-eyed innocent who bathes each night with floating battleships and by day ignites dumpster garbage with found lighters. With his mother and father in a marital holy war and perched (negligently so) at polar ends of his ideological development, Samuel must find his own way in life. Like a tortoise without a shell, he inches forward from one calamitous experience to the next, absorbing the pains of maturation without protection, emotional blows that leave no trace on the skin but on his soul.

Raschke’s writing style is crisp, conversational and magnetic. The story in the Book of Samuel is told in a linear, forward-moving fashion, with short chapters broken into quick-hitting sections. Yet the book is not fast paced, it is calm and constrained, in parts methodical, but without repetition and always full of quirky surprises and sharp contrasts. For example, Samuel’s immediate family includes a far-left liberal mother who is working to test ground water pollution in the area, his father, a former professor and author who believes himself to be a messiah-like instrument of God and spends time mapping out bible passages in a backyard tent, and a holocaust-surviving racist grandmother who denigrates the T.V. Jefferson’s and their right (and all black people) to “move on up.” Samuel is also influenced in his thinking by a cadre of broken-home, bike-riding misfits who wage battle against Mexican immigrants and nubile girls who spark his hormones and provide his inquisitive brain with alternative ideas then what arises from his dysfunctional family.

While one can imagine connection between The Book of Samuel and South Park, the popular animated television series and satire on conservative and religious mores set in central Colorado, Raschke’s tome is a much more blunt and effective instrument in smashing down societal walls. Yet this destruction is never mean-spirited – Samuel is without guile and absorbs knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and hate, all what life has to offer, like a sponge. It is when twisted and constricted, put through the proverbial ringer, that the essence of the story drips out and Samuel, acting as a human distiller, taking in all that is good and bad around him and releases, to the reader, the truth.

*****

John McCaffrey received his Master's Degree in Creative Writing from City College of New York. His short stories and reviews have been published in numerous literary journals and have been anthologized in Flash Fiction Forward. He recently completed his first novel, "The Book of Ash." To see more of his published work, access www.jamccaffrey.com

Derek Beaulieu's _Square Root_, reviewed by Ross Brighton

2010-02-04T00:55:00.003-05:00

Derek Beaulieu
√¯¯¯
Default Publishing for Dusie Kolektiv year 3 (2009)
(pdf here)

This is a wonderful example of the book as an object, proving that the book-noun is not restricted to, or synonymous with, the codex (though this is often assumed to be the case – see Keith Smith's "The Book as Physical Object" in A book of the Book, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (Granary 1999). This has obvious implications for the future of the e-book, which as of yet has mostly consisted of codex-simulation.)

The endeavours of many of the presses involved in the Dusie Kolektiv move beyond (or improvise upon) the codex’s generally accepted mode of existence as a semantically invisible vehicle for text, as is the case with this series of visual poems.

The concept of the codex is exploded here in a burst of multidirectional physicality, with the usual single, chronologically regulated trajectory replaced by a series of flaps, each operating as a breach or rupture in the book’s planar field, and containing one of the pieces in this series (constellation?).

This rupturing is not contained to the idea of the book, but also takes place on the graphemic level. Each of the four pieces that comprise this work exhibit a futurist/vorticist dynamism, exploding textual normalcy, which signification is made subordinate to the jouissance of visual dynamics. This bears resemblance to the calligraphy of graffiti artist’s bombs, or the logos of metal bands, where typographical aesthetics and excess subsume signification (take as an example of the latter the Xasthur logo, which, after the insertion of the central sigil, has become completely illegible). Like both of these, there is the remnants of a typeface, yet they are scattered, superimposed upon one another. There is no previous text to decipher, no history. There is just what this text will become in collaboration with a reader.

As such the flower-like opening of this work serves a similar function, while also telling of the potential existent in folds and cuts – I’d love to see what could be achieved in the collaboration of a visual poet and publisher doing something like Jack Ross’ Borges translations (especially with the beautiful production values of someone like Peptic Robot).

The only complaint I have is small, and that is the quality of the poems’ printing – they’re a bit blurry. However interesting issues arise here concerning reproduction, distribution, and the existence of the image; and thus the poem/book: where/what is the original? And if this lurks somewhere on a computer, as an intangible sequence of ones and zeroes – what, then, are the implications?

Jessica Bozek's_The Bodyfeel Lexicon_, reviewed by Natalie Lyalin

2010-02-02T23:35:00.007-05:00

The Bodyfeel Lexicon
Jessica Bozek
Switchback Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9786172-4-0
Paper: 101 pp, $14

Reviewed by Natalie Lyalin

The Bodyfeel Lexicon, the first single author collection from Jessica Bozek, begins by presenting us with an introductory letter from a figure simply known as the editor. This letter serves as a compass of sorts, describing the contents of The Bodyfeel Lexicon as a set of found letters and documents, and giving these items a name—The Peary Assemblage. The finding of The Peary Assemblage, “while exploring a former wolf den in a rocky outcropping” (1) reminds me of the history surrounding the 1946 discovery of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, by Muhammed edh-Dhib, and his cousin, Jum'a Muhammad. edh-Dhib fell into an ancient cave only to emerge with one of the greatest textual recoveries of the 20th century. The finding of the scrolls—a collection of communal regulations, mystical treatise, and ancient Biblical manuscripts—was an exciting religious, archeological, and anthropological event. In recent years, however, a veritable industry has been created around the mystery of the discovery—with almost total disregard for the scrolls’ content.

What’s the point here? It is partially this: there is a great power in the mysterious discovery. This mystery generates a myth that transcends the contents of the discovered. Our minds turn to the hidden authors—in the case of Lexicon they are the shadowy figures of Wolf and Leon Szklar. Who were they? What were their lives like? Wolf and Szklar are tucked so deeply beneath the layers of an entire history-cum-myth created by Bozek. It may seem easier to overlook them and gallop away on the excitement of what we imagine is a true re-discovery of their past than to stay in the present narrative of Lexicon. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Bodyfeel Lexicon finds its start with an act of recovery. But the book quickly leaves the scrupulous details of that recovery behind. The mystery of The Peary Assemblage draws us in, and Lexicon’s strange and obscure narrative and fearless language-play keep the reader hooked.

There is a pleasantly grand set up to Lexicon: an opening letter that creates as many questions as it sets out to answer, the mysterious editor, and the authors of The Peary Assemblage, the opaque lovers: Leon Szklar and Wolf. The act of correspondence serves as the outline of The Bodyfeel Lexicon. The Szklar-Wolf correspondence is fragmented, liminal, shifting in and out of the realm of human possibility. Lexicon’s sections provide moments of great linguistic leaps and fantastical imagery.

Leon Szklar writes:

ffffffffffFar enough now to be vitric remembrance, another figure to ignore
ffffffffffup on a ledge. Would you have me pressed, carnival, or etched?
ffffffffffHobnail or crown? (17)

Wolf writes:

ffffffffffWe can’t tap a hole in the side of a head, stick a milkshake straw in,
ffffffffff& simply film. (18)

And later, Szklar:

ffffffffff…as rough rounds corkscrew the sky
ffffffffffthe grounds of my love—sweat-peel, tragus-ring smatter, cuticalia—
ffffffffffair-lit by the replica moons of a three-hole punch (43)

And later, Wolf:

ffffffffffPlease, miss, bring me a blanket for conjuring claws & the pups’ fast
ffffffffffclinging licks, as if they could shape me into a wolf with their
fffffffffftongues. (56)

After reading Lexicon’s two sections written in a letter format (the other sections contain documents and “exhibits” that resemble poems) I got the sense that Wolf and Szklar are somehow morphing—from human to nonhuman, perhaps even from male to female. Though Wolf is presented as female and Szklar as male, this is not a concrete fact. After all, if one can shift from human to non, the shift from male to female seems like a tiny transition. The correspondence between Wolf and Szklar is a long way from being a traditional set of linear letters and documents that create a coherent history of a relationship. The assemblage is deconstructing the traditional notion of communication. If one were, for example, to remove the salutation and valediction from all of the letters we would be left with few markers to identify the text as a means of communication. And yet, Bozek makes it so that we trust that there is a form of communication taking place. Wolf and Szklar speak to one another in imagery, in the absence of a typified experience, in the lack of banal emotion. It is not the typical exchange one would expect from a set of letters or documents—questions are posed but not answered, comments are made but not reciprocated. It is as if Wolf and Szklar are more interested in the act of writing rather than actually communicating with one another, as if the act of creating is more important than understanding and responding. Or, theirs is a communication of code that the reader is not privy to. But their project is interesting, shocking, and unusual, and the reader is compelled to keep reading because the intention behind the non-linear nature of the entire assemblage is almost irrelevant in comparison to the beauty and weirdness of the writing within it.

I return to the notion of deconstructing communication rather than establishing a traditional set of facts and ideas. Because of Wolf’s (and possibly Szklars) shifting abilities it seems a miracle that they have a way to communicate anything at all. At which point in time and space can half-human-half-non / male-female figures find a way to say something to one another? And what are they saying? Bozek does not seem interested in providing an explanation for these questions. Her focus appears to be on the language’s slippery and exciting acrobatics. In a poem titled “EXHIB. 6A” we see the language seemingly straddling the line of obscurity and familiarity.

fffffffffflow with others

ffffffffffwe lend heater-limbs shed a party to slouch into a solidity
ffffffffffffffffffffof down/save the first pick for alpha

fffffffffftunnel-moan then I knew how (76)

There is a somewhat hypnotic s sound here, and a variety of e and o sounds that in combination make the mouth move around pleasantly. There is a rolling sonic quality that is also very pleasing to the ear. This poem, like the others, sounds really good and is fun to say out-loud. There is perhaps desire to obscure meaning and to propel the sound of the language. These lines are akin to the howl of an animal, meaningful to some, but impossible to understand for others—difficult to fully understand, but chilling and exciting to hear.

Lexicon works hard to establish itself not only as a collection of correspondence, but also as an exhibit of Szklar and Wolf’s collaboration. In other words, Lexicon is both the correspondence and an exhibit of the correspondence. Bozek achieves this difficult feat by compiling numerous items within Lexicon. The book is comprised of seven sections, an opening letter and poem, and appendices. Two of the seven sections are the Wolf and Szklar letters, two sections, titled “The Matchbook Fragments” appear to be Wolf and Szklar’s collaborative poems, the section titled “The Transport” is authored by Szklar, and the section titled “An Airborn Torpor” is authored by Wolf. Between the sections Bozek provides illustrations of bones, cells, teeth, etc. taken from actual zoological tomes. The appendices include photos of the actual matchbooks on which the sections titled “The Matchbook Fragments” are written, a glossary of terms that establish their unique definitions within Lexicon, and an appendix titled “Some Proposals for the Bodyfeel Repository.” All of these materials are used to ground the myth of Szklar and Wolf in our reality. With the inclusion of these items Lexicon acts as a museum catalog, as proof that Wolf and Szklar existed and collaborated to create The Peary Assemblage. Lexicon pushes the boundaries of “book” and locates us in a myth told beyond the pages. It takes us into a museum, where just like a skeleton is a partial reference to hidden prehistoric time, so too are the illustrations, appendices, and photos a reference to the exhibit of Wolf and Szklar’s collaborative myth. (It is interesting to note that the three of the four men credited with the illustrations that appear in Lexicon, Richard Owen, William Henry Flower, and Sidney F. Harmer, were at one time director of the Natural History Museum in London.)

Of course it is not necessary to know who authored what to appreciate the writing, but Bozek seems intent on underlining the collaborative and individual efforts in Lexicon. There is a need on her part to highlight the act of collaboration and to differentiate it from individual writing. As a reader I was glad for the careful explanations and identification provided by the introductory letter. But I have to wonder what my reading experience would have been like had I not known the background to the assemblage. I spent a lot of time flipping back to the introductory letter to find out an author of a section or to ponder the importance of the discovery of The Peary Assemblage. Similarly, I am not sure of the role of the appendices in Lexicon. Their mere presence implies that they are necessary to the understanding of the book, but there is so much information in these sections that I wish they were more present in the main part of the book rather than at the end. However, I do appreciate their being included and find them to be impressive and interesting. They nicely round out the grand scope of Bozek’s project in placing The Peary Assemblage into the reader’s reality. I come away from Lexicon being deeply impressed with Bozek’s careful efforts in gathering, providing, and shaping information for her reader.

The idea of the creation of a myth hovers in Lexicon but it is not concrete or tangible. There is no obvious parable in this book, no warning or instruction to believe one thing or to avoid another. Instead, Bozek creates a narrative where the perceived distinction between human and nonhuman is blurry. Where the language play is most exciting yet only slightly illuminating of the protagonists’ concealed inner-landscapes. This is exciting and much more interesting than the alternative—I am not looking to read a simple fairytale imbedded with moral lessons. I prefer the complex weirdness of Wolf and Szklar’s correspondence. In Lexicon, language is used to create a bridge, as a plan for preservation, and as always, a way to communicate. In the end, Szklar and Wolf’s work amounts to an insistence on a textual survival—they were alive, they had thoughts, and they communicated. These documents and letters are evidence to this. Jessica Bozek’s writing pushes the reader around, turns its back, says weird things, and shocks with startlingly beautiful images. There is mystery in the pages, but it is the language, the illusive breath of Wolf and Szklar that propel us forward.

*****

Natalie Lyalin is the author of Pink & Hot Pink Habitat. She is the co-editor of GlitterPony Magazine. She is spending a part of this year in Jerusalem, Israel, but will soon return to Philadelphia, PA.

Laura Sims' _Stranger_, reviewed by Ross Brighton

2010-01-17T00:05:00.010-05:00

Stranger
Laura Sims
Fence Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-934200-23-0
Paper: 88pp, $15.

Reviewed by Ross Brighton.

for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
- e. e. cummings, “since feeling is first”

This collection is a song of loss, an elegy to a departed mother. It is a coming-to-terms through language with both this death and the pseudo-presence of memory, and mother-in-daughter.

Somewhere Artaud proposes that the process of reading summons an ur-presence, a conjuration of that which is part-reader and part-author. In this text the epistemological questions arise: am I knowing Sims, or my construction of her? And what of her mother, who has departed into that ultimate (in every sense of the word) alterity?

Sims does not shy away from these issues of epistemology and metaphysics, nor does she presume to offer any answers. Instead the text functions as an investigation into the trauma of the death of a loved one, and the questions raised by their absence and yet-presence in the traces of memory and genetics. As such another level of existence is created within the matrix of the poem: a textual haunting.

Foremost, however, the poem is a record of loss. Syntactically broken, the fractures and stutters mirror the interruption of death, and its calling into question of the grammar/epistemological framework of the text of existence. Here the mimetic logic of grammar stumbles and breaks down, as any attempt at narrativisation or representation is doomed to failure as an attempt to write the unwriteable – to make sense of that which is essentially other. Here we find Derrida’s aporia (closely aligned with the concept of death), the logical misstep, a no-place or unreachability[i]

This is where cummings’ metaphor (which he disowns, yet still implies by stating/creating it) becomes untenable. The parenthetical, while housing a (semi-) discrete unit, does not entail a sentence, much less a paragraph – the presence of the signifiers between which said unit is housed embed it within the larger sentence-unit, which is in turn existent within the larger paragraph (or as a paragraph of its own – though the set ‘paragraph’ denotes a wider field or category than ‘sentence’). Furthermore, the designation of these as parenthetical statement, sentence, and paragraph imply the continuation of the text beyond them (at the very least as a logical possibility, if not in actuality). The death, or life, of an individual may be described as such, but only when witnessed/experienced from outside, and even then it maintains an intrinsic alterity, and can never be fully comprehended: as Derrida states, one’s own death is the one thing that can be claimed/experienced as truly and solely one’s own, yet still this remains unthinkable and unexperienceable until it has already happened – a non-event[ii]. As such, to return to the textual metaphor, death would be better described as the back cover to the book, where the turning of another page is an impossibility.

Sims’ book, with its almost-narrative of stutters, breaks, and false starts is an attempt to make sense of the literally unthinkable, and the implication of one’s own mortality (for if a mother, the ultimate bearer of life, can die, then so too can the daughter, who carries part of the mother within herself). As such Sims takes up the responsibility given in such events, to write what little that can be written. As such she creates “records of consequence” (37), drawing from the past “Those hidden things/ From the previous / Margin” (27), that are catalogued, yet remain “[blank]” (41).

These records take the form of an inscription of fractured moments, images and memories collected from the detritus of the past, “bring[ing] to mind /// yellow(s)* / (sunlit) – /// her myriad past” (11). But which is this “her”? The third person implies that it is not Sims (the younger); however, the recollection of memory implies that it is indeed the poet. This ambiguous use of the pronoun creates a link between mother and daughter, however tenuous – the sharing of a surrogate name.

Links are created, but “there is no such thing as a copy”(44). As Deleuze asserts[iii], repetition only occurs through difference; and these ‘hers’ are not the same. This difference is reinforced by one having become “[blank]”, the other left to “catalogue” this absence, and dispel the void through inscription. For the blank, through the inscription of its name between those brackets, becomes something other than the nothing it signifies, and thus Sims asserts herself, “two stories deep” (68, note the pun). As she states in the same poem (“From her mud plateau”), and once again with the ambiguous pronouns:

__She is twofold
__A compound
__[…]
__That shape am I

Through inscription the “I” can take shape; and there, in the stillness of the white between the lines, something can coalesce. And this space, in its silence, also plays a large part in the poem (though this is more meditative than the sometimes shocking, traumatic silence of Myung Mi Kim). One is never sure what can come from death, if anything; but here there is something, and it comes, quietly, and with a beauty.

[i] See Jacques, Derrida. Aporias, Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

[ii] Ibid; see also The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007 (2^nd ed.).

[iii] Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press 1995.

***

Ross Brighton is the author of the chapbook A Pelt a Shrub a Soil Sample. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Catalyst, Side Stream, Otoliths (Aus), Reconfigurations (USA), No Tell Motel (USA) and Action Yes (USA). He is reviews editor for Tarpaulin Sky, and blogs on poetics and contemporary art at ignoretheventriloquists.blogspot.com

Eileen Myles's_The Importance of Being Iceland_, reviewed by Genevieve Manset

2010-01-16T17:41:00.013-05:00

Eileen Myles
The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays on Art
ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-066-8
Semiotext(e) 2009
Paper: 366 pp; $17.95

reviewed by Genevieve Manset

The same poetic heat that Eileen Myles brings to her performances can be found in her first collection of essays, The Importance of Being Iceland. Not shy about a disruption of form, what starts as an art review or a travel memoir morphs into riffs on language, modernity, sex, gender identity and politics. Associated since the 1970’s with the New York writing, art and queer communities, Myles gets the word out from the cultural edges.

In the opening essay, Myles writes that she went to Iceland in part because of her “interest in small things.” Her writing appears inspired much in the same way. Her recollection of Hans Unrich’s neo-fluxus multimedia project Do It is of the possible postmodern meaning in one piece—a wooden crate of apples. When searching for the illusive Icelandic writer Kristin Omarsdottir, she ends up reporting instead on picking blueberries in the rain with Kristin’s girlfriend’s family. Discussions of Icelandic culture, history and geography also make their appearance here, as does a persistent cold rain.

ffffffffffThe rainy days in Reykjavik were great for art. I sat on beanbag
ffffffffffchairs in a museum with Kristin and Haraldur. The walls around
ffffffffffus were saturated with soft pink balloons like the gentlest most
ffffffffffgigantic breasts. Three of us bobbing in the darkened screening
ffffffffffroom. It was amniotic feeling.

While most of the essays are not about travels in Iceland, they still contain that same traveler’s heightened perception. Because Myles’ writing is heavily weighted with unique specifics, the moments when it becomes expansive and universal are both well earned and profound, as in this from the essay about the poet Tory Dent, who was HIV positive:

ffffffffffThe sirens we hear, women, homosexuals, and all the pioneers of
ffffffffffour time, are calling for a culture big enough to contain or embrace
ffffffffffor encompass the shapes and needs of all our bodily destinies.

Much of her writing is of this bodily destiny we are all born into. In one of her talks Myles worries over a reading she gave the night before in a church: “…now here I was again, that woman, about to read something else disturbing: my poem ‘Mr. Twenty’, is full of scatological language.”

This worry transfers to a discussion on what women are allowed to talk about, especially when it comes to their bodies. She also speaks to a fear women share about being considered out of control. After a series of venues including the Times and Village Voice refuse her piece on her experience with menopause, she admits to feeling gross and ashamed. It’s this, her willingness to be vulnerable, that invites an intimacy between reader and author that could otherwise be lost in writings about the hip world that Myles navigates.

In a tribute to the poetry she’s devoted her life to, Myles writes that it’s “a live thing, this invention, the avant-garde poem.” Myles breathes life as well into the essay, introducing new creative possibilities into the genre. If you appreciate being drawn out and tossed about by a talented writer’s cognitive riptide, The Importance of Being Iceland is sure to carry you off and leave you on some distant shore.

*******

Genevieve Manset is a poet and writer from Bloomington, Indiana. She is currently a MFA student in Creative Writing at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and is part of the Boxcar Books collective, a volunteer run, non-profit bookstore and community center.