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

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.

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

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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)

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

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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.”

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

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?):

Timothy David Orme’s _ Catalogue of Burnt Text _, reviewed by Jodi Chilson

Catalogue of Burnt Text
Timothy David Orme
BlazeVOX Books, 2009

$16

Reviewed by Jodi Chilson

“Self made an object as words on the page”

Introduction

Catalogue of Burnt Text is a rumination of creation and absence, in which a young apprentice poet attempts to find a place for himself in the canon. In this the speaker calls on the muses—his master—to help in the writing of the work. However, in the act of writing the poet/speaker becomes poet and master both.

The poet/speaker inhabits the master’s cloak, attempts to be the poet’s own muse, and thus attempts to break the divide of the page: of the reader and writer, of the writer and speaker, and thus the master and poet: the writer and the written thing, the poet and the self.

I. Muse/Master—A Calling Forth

The master and self are called forth through the written thing. Orme writes:

ffffffffffff To Ipsentius

ffffffffffff How can I climb you down the clouds

ffffffffffff Rounding mind eye wide

ffffffffffff I call for your sight & strength

ffffffffffff Sky

ffffffffffff No other eye through only mind do you have seams

ffffffffffff Down into & call up the one who colors the sea

ffffffffffff Sky how wide the world is

ffffffffffff (10)

The speaker harks to Ipsentius, as master and as muse: “Oh Roman poet,” the speaker beckons, “I write to you because you are all that appeases my mind” (11).

The speaker writes to the master and through the act of writing beckons the master to exist; the act of writing engages the act of creation. The master exists because the “I” names him into existence: “I wrote you not enough—for now you only exist when I write your name.” (9).

The “you” easily could be the master, but is just as easily the self. The poet having not written the self/speaker enough on the page is in danger of losing the self, “for now you [I] only exist when I write your name” (9).

Part II: The Empty Cloak

Beginning before “Summer Song,” the work acts not only as a call to the muses but a creation song, bringing the muse, the master, into existence, so that the apprentice has a body to sing to, has a voice to reach from.

ffffffffffff “voice from throat / it begetth fathoms” (37)

ffffffffffff “space relateth into song” (37)

In this, the second part of the work becomes the vain attempt of the apprentice to sing to the master. The attempt is in vain simply because the master does not exist, and the apprentice knows clearly his creation of the master is nothing but that, an empty cloak.

The Latin phrases permeating the book act to enforce this engagement with the master; however, these phrases are, as the speaker admits:

ffffffffffff another re fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff turn to the ancients

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff (for solidity – or the

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff impression thereof

ffffffffffff (42)

“pointing out the apparent contradictions” (43). Thus, the Latin reveals the façade; the speaker/poet self-consciously reflects, including the ancients as a means of revealing the false-front of the attempt: the “impression” of “solidity.” Socrates chastises his apprentice, and thus chastises the apprentice/poet:

ffffffffffff you are trying to mislead us, [...]

ffffffffffff ffffffffffffffffffff —and at the same time you have not

ffffffffffff ffffffffffffffffffff grasped the truth of the book

ffffffffffff (43)

And through this act, perhaps it is also the reader that is being chastised; the speaker warns that we “have not / grasped the truth of the book” (43), and are in danger of missing the work completely. The speaker warns us in the words of the ancients:

ffffffffffff Nemo aliquid reco recognoscat, nos mentimur omnia. (60)

Which Orme translates for us:

ffffffffffff No one should take this seriously, for it is all a lie. (62)

We are made aware that the master does not exist. This is something the speaker obsesses over and worries about. What is the apprentice without a master? And thus, the speaker creates a master: a Roman poet, Ipsentius—the absent self (in Latin, ‘ipse’ = himself; ‘absentis’ = absent).

ffffffffffff ffffffffffff [what was not a turning point

ffffffffffff ffffffffffff was merely a point – a spire

ffffffffffff ffffffffffff I hung my shoe on]

ffffffffffff ffffffffffff (44)

The speaker points out the lack of the master and thus the existence of the apprentice as master. What began as a calling of the muses, a calling forth of the master to exist, instead is a calling forth of the poet into existence through the written work.

Part III: Motion—The Entrance of Speaker/Reader

The speaker contemplates motion as a means of existing, as a means of maintaining the setting of existence:

ffffffffffff If I stand here long enough even these mountains shall fall.

ffffffffffff Motion does not stop because you cannot see it.

ffffffffffff [(Surely) I am somewhere exaggerating.]

ffffffffffff (58)

The “mountains” exist as a setting so long as they are written and sustained in the narrative/poem; but if the speaker pauses on a separate topic, or if the narrative wastes away into silence, the “mountains shall fall.” The motion becomes a mathematical thing denoting existence as x:

ffffffffffff One says there is no time for x, and immediately begins explaining time

ffffffffffff as existing on an immeasurable plane consisting in motion and the

ffffffffffff human self revolving around a particular location in the universe that

ffffffffffff will continue to exist only as long as both motion and the self exists—

ffffffffffff all of which one says is (of course) inexplicable with words and does

ffffffffffff not stop the arms from reaching. (10)

The speaker attempts to solidify the self through acts of gesture and setting: “these mountains” he notes as though pointing out the mountains in the distance to the reader. In other instances, the speaker indicates the act of walking—another sort of motion with which we can associate the self written to a bodied-self. In one of these instances, the speaker laments the words in which the self is forced to beg for attention though the silence of the page:

ffffffffffff Walking through the woods I hear the cry of the song sparrow which I

ffffffffffff associated with the written word and its loathsomeness, its long notes

ffffffffffff drawn out, its cry for attention. (59)

The speaker hears the cry—thus has body. The written thing is loathed—as all it can do is but beg for attention. On the page, the highest form of existence is for the self to become an object, and through objectification, perhaps the self can invoke breath. And, thus, through the invocation of breath, perhaps the self can achieve an existence beyond the “written word.”

ffffffffffff The journey does not stop because of the movement [of the individual]

ffffffffffff ffff stops.

ffffffffffff I cannot separate movement from light. Mine inspiration. Round me.

ffffffffffff What more or better to do but watch the light moving: differently over

ffffffffffff ffff the same stone?

ffffffffffff (45)

Thus, motion/emotion breathe the self existent, spoken; the tears once solidified as textual on the page communicated the subject self: “interdum lacrimae pondera vocis habent”(15) [“tears sometimes have the strength of spoken words” (62)].

The reader calls forth the poet into existence through the reading of the leaves (words) on the page; the poet/speaker recognizes the impermanent existence of the words as they fade as leaves do in fall, changing color and descending to the ground, decaying into non-existence.

ffffffffffff what is the body fffffffffffff (but) fffffffffffff an extension of the mind

ffffffffffff imagine the body fffffffffffff(and) fffffffffffff watch it vanish

ffffffffffff (40)

The speaker/poet becomes/is the “self made an object” (12).

Conclusion:

Timothy David Orme dares us to exist, to become part of the motion, part of the plane his speaker inhabits; he dares us to take up the absence in the work and fill it with the speaker-self and our-self engaged in motion, through the act of reading becoming accomplice to the act of creation.

The reader/writer relationship is a mathematical equation; a thing of space and time bent by a spine, open-faced and splayed.We—the reader—exist, and in the act of reading allow the page existence; thus, redefining the “taking of two for one to exist” (50).

The Catalogue of Burnt Text is a contemplation of the written thing, which is simultaneously destroyed and made to exist through the complacency of the reader and writer both.

ffffffffffff I have watched a hand write words at its will. Its curve and movement

ffffffffffff ffff determines:

ffffffffffff creation or destruction in one firm line. Self made an object as words on

ffffffffffff ffff the page.

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff A removable object.

ffffffffffff (12)

***

Jodi Chilson graduated with an MFA from Boise State University in the Spring of 2006. Recent publication of poems includes those appearing in Left-Facing Bird (April 2008; editors: Lucas Farrell, Greg Hill Jr., and Brandon Shimoda). Jodi Chilson currently lives in Boise, Idaho with her husband and daughter, and teaches poetry at Boise State University.

Skip Fox's _ For To _, reviewed by Megan Burns

Skip Fox
For To
ISBN 1934289728
BlazeVOX [books], 2008

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Skip Fox’s newest book For To is nearly three hundred pages of various and intricate poems detailing the poet’s search for quantitative answers in what is understandably an oroboric quest. In fact, the image of the oroboros arises several times throughout the book, less a symbol and more a totem animal—a conundrum in form that parallels the poet’s wrestling with language. In his search for “straight answers,” Fox asks the hard questions and seldom lets up in his relentless gaze. His verse focuses on the smallest and most obscure human details, the odder the better. Fox is especially enamored with the absurd; language is paraded out to perform acrobatic acts of saying all and then some. The poet muses on the mouth of his sock as much as he does on the delicate rays of dawn punctured by the groans of bullfrogs on a southern Louisiana morning.

Fox tells us early on: “Even the boy raised by wolves had a language” (15). He wavers between presenting language as quintessential to the human condition and also limiting and laughable in its design. In witty aphorisms and slingshot asides, Fox pokes fun at us, the users of language, who think we know what we’re talking about when we do talk. “Reason is one thing that happens,” (61) he quips. Mathematical precision as a trope recurs throughout his examination into the accuracy of words. Fox’s poems read like math problems found in the school of ultimate knowledge. If we could solve them, the kingdom of bliss could be ours they seem to proffer. Take “30-31 Curriculum for the New Millennium: Basic Oblivion” that asks:

What is the nominal ‘distance’ between what you think you should feel and what you do feel, and all the supple calibrations gliding across your skin, touching with their tiny bare feet all the tender deposits of lives, the kinds of families, relations you may have had, and those you didn’t.

These questions have the ability to send the reader into paroxysms of doubt questioning all they thought they knew or more accurately all they never thought about at all.

Fox brings to the surface those items often overlooked; “very delicate, a word,” (36) he tells us as he celebrates the magic in the obscure. He manages to tilt our eyes downward and inward uncovering the invisible chemical reactions that make up our existence and laying them out in figurative language often reserved for fiery sunsets and lover’s laments. Fox describes the predicament of being human in all its flawed and messy compartments. All the while he is cognizant of the fallible tools in his toolbox: “all measure is metaphor” (52). In the same vein that a mathematical equation seeks solutions, these poems also seem to be searching for answers. In truth, Fox reveals, the search itself is the process and the pleasure: “I’d not miss it for the world” (127).

Form is a net that Fox refuses to be caught within; his poems throughout the book range from concrete poems to prose poems to lists and pages of notes and footnoted texts. At his most sublime and romantic, Fox muses:

insects passing my ears, cars
on the curve, rusty hinge
of bird in the field, cricket
frogs again,…once they
opened a door and I
walked in. It
seemed simple. (150)

These tranquil reflections are interspersed with wild “Sure Shots” as Fox calls them, a random recording of thoughts and witticisms such as: “Actually you can catch more flies with a corpse. (Sticka for the Godz!)” (199) or the flippant multi- choice option: “Eat what you fuck. Sticka for a. cannibals, b. cattle ranchers, c. post-feminists, d. ADM” (200). There is even the occasional Zen koan: “Zero is nothing realized, nothing beheld, not even absence, requires no article.” (199). It’s hard to pin down where Fox’s leanings are poetically, when he is constantly pushing the subject on what poems can say or how they should even look like while they are saying it. In “Forty Titles,” Fox will serve up the titles for poems that should probably never be written while a few pages later, he begins a concrete poem almost shaped like a heart with, “That little fuck, what was his name?” (217). Fox has the ability to unhinge the reader’s steadiness by vacillating between lyrical verses that lean towards the more familiar use of images and allusions to explicitly raw and hysterically funny lines that you won’t find in the pages of the New Yorker in any near future.

Occasionally, Fox manages that oldest of poetic tricks, to sum it all up in a line so poignant that all other lines seem superfluous as in the poem “Monday Nights: Ode to Mom”:

This should be titled “Miles to Go” with a trumpet solo that would blow into your notions of existence such ripe conception that you might live it again, all over from the beginning, as they say, only this time without the hardship.

The reader can see the nostalgic snowy paths of the past sounded out as a long horn solo calling us all to a place we will never venture again, except for here in the poem. Maybe that is the answer to the puzzling title of Fox’s book; whoever it is “for” and whoever it is “to,” they will know when they enter into the exchange with this poet that promises never to offer the expected.

Fox is not afraid to let his poems laugh or even laugh at him, and they reward him by revealing a lexicon that measures out our own careless joys from childhood. In lessons long forgotten, we see here again how playful language is and how mindful it can be of our own precarious conditions. Fox takes both the serious and the futile, compressing time into moments caught in his various forms for getting the words down. Far from simply playing with language like a toy, Fox confronts the reader with the open-ended question that rejects the neat closure in exchange for the messiness of life.

* * *

Megan Burns has a MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Callaloo, Constance Magazine, and YAWP Journal as well as online at horseless press, shampoo, trope_5, Exquisite Corpse and BigCityLit. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! reading series.

James Sanders' _ Goodbye Public and Private _, reviewed by Rachel Daley

James Sanders
Goodbye Public and Private
ISBN: 1934289973
BlazeVOX Books 2008
$16

Reviewed by Rachel Daley

“Like Public but Fluffier:” James Sanders’ book is unreadable. (And I mean that in the nicest way.)

Goodbye Public and Private is James Sanders’ first full-length publication, published on BlazeVOX Books out of Buffalo, NY in 2008. It is also, I will argue, basically unreadable.¹ Unreadable, I will argue, in the sense that it is a collection of verbal assemblages intended to function for the reader (who is in this case, I will argue, more of a user in relation to the book) as instructions for or templates of or guides to performance, or as literary records of pictures or portraits constructed in or by the records’ oral performances. It’s not really possible to read the book from cover to cover, from page to page experiencing the lyrical subjectivity of James Sanders, although the book is certainly an immersion into a particular vocabulary and inflection and universe of things and foods and colors and friendly relationships. It’s true for many of the poems, though, for example the “Days” series, that to attempt to read them in the get-across-and-down-the-page-like-Gutenberg style would be silly. In using or doing this book in the manner in which it guides you to use or do it, in reading it, you actually get to participate in the making of poems, in real-time, in the activity of putting language together rhythmically and thematically and experientially to create what we generally understand and recognize as poems.

The following is a list of descriptors of what Goodbye Public and Private is, given that I’ve simply decreed its status as an unreadable thing to read. (I should note that these descriptions are based solely on how this book has actually been used – by myself, either alone or in the company of my one and a half-year old son.)

1) It’s viewable.

And I don’t mean that poems in the book paint unusually vivid images or settings or scenarios for the reader. I mean that many of the pages are to be viewed as projections on a screen are viewed. Many of the poems/pages are constituted by “lattices” or words or phrases which are linked to other words, phrases, or footnotes. Several of the poems include actual graphics, either hand-drawn or photographic pictures. The “Days” series (comprised of 21 poems), the “Autobiographies of Klimchak” and the two “Meta” poems are all accompanied by instructions or guidelines for how to proceed with them, for how to go about doing them. I realize that the mere presence of instructions for how to use something doesn’t make it viewable (usable ? viewable). What makes them viewable is that the poems are constellations laid on top of the pages, and are not meant to be windows into the life and/or times of James Sanders. They aren’t windows inviting you to look into the mechanisms of James Sanders’ brain; in Goodbye Public and Private, you’re not asked to become voyeuristically engaged in how one person makes sense of experience of in or with the world. This is not a record of how someone orders experience. The book is more or less 138 pages of opportunity for the creation of experience. And the first experience in coming to many of the book’s pages is that your eyes have to go all over the page. So, you view the page and, really, you view yourself viewing the page, because this experience strikes you as so very unlike almost all other experiences in coming to a book’s (or other printed matter’s) pages.²

But, this issue of being an un-voyeur, of being confronted with the surface of the book’s pages, is additionally significant – is not just a novelty – because the experience mimics that bestowed by another kind of page-looking which is quite popular as of late: viewing web pages. The reality of viewership on the web goes something like this: as a viewer, you are among hundreds of millions of people looking with fluttering attention onto images very conscientiously constructed for viewership by any one of hundreds of millions of people who have the capacity to produce and post pages for viewing. Despite the sense you get when using the internet that you are alone and are conducting your business in the privacy of your home with the bodily commiseration only of your computer keyboard and monitor, you are also actually quite publicly sharing each keystroke, also sharing your eyes, with the rest of the internet-inhabiting world. And since the internet was born, it’s been a habitat that was and is there always, waiting for you to get back on board.

And this goes directly to the issue of the book’s title: in using Goodbye Public and Private, as when using the internet, the clear demarcation between your life in public and your life in private breaks down. It’s not that one or the other is lost, so much as one’s involvement in both can occur simultaneously. When using the internet, and when using Goodbye P & P, you’re not only not getting someone’s record of inner experience, but you are actually, in real-time and in actual bodily presence, doing the book, i.e., you are going through your own inner and outer experiences by way of partnership with the book . In accessing or using or doing or reading this book, you mutter or speak the poems and plays out loud, under your breath or fully-voiced – publicly, to yourself, in the privacy of your own home, or else maybe privately in the confines of a public institution.

And your presence, in real-time, has been anticipated by this book. There are suggestions for the amount of time you should spend with many of the poems, and suggestions for how to use them. The poems and plays in Goodbye Public and Private are very much aware of being used or viewed. And this brings us back to the instructions or guidelines in accompaniment. Finally, it’s the presence of these guidelines and instructions that force the would-have-been reader to be more than simply a viewer, as one might simply view the Weather Channel or the French Open results on ESPN.com, and to become at the very least a user of the book. And this is really an important point to understand about Sanders’ book. He’s not just hoping you might be able to sense theoretically that in a more poetically-enlightened land or time, presumably forthcoming, you the reader might feel inspired to give voice to these lyrics. The structure of his poems actually necessitates that you do something with them, with your actual body (at the very least, with the movement of your eyes) and/or your voice.

(Note: I won’t attempt to reproduce the “lattices” of the above-cited poems, which I would try to reproduce here if I wanted to give examples and generally explicate in more-referenced depth what I’m talking about , but here is a sample of the words and phrases by which they are constituted: erased somehow, stick Oreos about, our felt of, again, municipal funbags, as with tenet, we reject so little, instead of stop, evidence of, unrubbed chocolate, you alone, Jedi quarter pound er with cheeks, as stage out, almost none left, bats or birds, in him, handrails made out of handrails and shouldn’t the gloves, the plants of usable English, whipped teen chow, certainly is a curve, from the exit. However, to get a taste of what the lattices do, or what you can do with the lattices, you would only need to print/cut out the above words and phrases and then arrange some or all of them however you wanted to all over a table, and then read some or all of them in order of the words’ adjacency to each other, within a certain time frame – say, 33 seconds. )

2) Who’s zoomin who.

So, the poems and plays know you are out there, and they ask you to do things with them which you might not normally do with your poems and plays, like construct them, in real-time, aloud, and this really up-ends one’s usual relationship with a book. In short, this book distinguishes itself from other consumable media in that it is actually manipulate-able. The fact that the poems tell you what to do with the words and phrases on the page means, for the most part, that they are not telling you how or what to think about them. James Sanders is interested in the creation of activity, not spectacle, and this approach to poetry-making results in a book that does not subject you to it and which you are not subjected to. You are not presumed to lie prostrate while a bunch of poems and voices pour out all over you. You are in fact charged with performing much of the book, with your own voice or what have you. So, the book is not so much something you get through and put back on your shelf. It’s more Slinky™-fun than that:

“Guidelines: Even though these guidelines are at the beginning, feel free to skip them.

This piece is designed for three voices (numbered) and one percussionist (P). If two people are performing this piece, then I suggest that one person take voice one, the other person take voice two, and both perform voice three. If only one performer is involved,...”
(from “Autobiographies of Klimchak”)

3) Got A Great Beat.

and yes, you can dance to it. Sure, some of the poems are actually dubbed “Muzak For...,” but it’s the still-lifes and the portraits – e.g., “ SelfStillife with Another Person,” “Portrait of Spanky,” “Ed Ruscha/Portrait of Jeff Dahlgren,” “Portrait of Anonymous with Baked Potato and Landscape,” “Portrait of Mark Prejsnar as a Woman” – that are actually highly sonic. These poems are overwhelmingly characterized by chants, stutters, repetitions, interruptions of one voice by another, restatements and rewordings, all of which give the poems existential/categorical status as transcriptions or scripts of things said, to be said, and heard (or overheard).

For example:

Portrait of Spanky
meat rainbow hash marks indoor meat rainbow voice. hash marks hash marks soaked. aim indoor voice. indoor voice soaked aim I am alive to.

Portrait of Spanky
some meat rainbow hash marks some indoor but meat rainbow some voice. hash marks but some hash marks soaked. aim some indoor but voice. indoor some voice soaked aim but some I am alive to....

Someone is surely thinking something about the possibility or impossibility of using indoor voices in reading this poem, but I won’t spell it out. Suffice it to say that it’s more fun to read

rugs subtitled bright rain seat cushion or not bright rain loaded baked potato
rugs startling elasticized scans in which way should I turn or not subtitled seat
(“Portrait of Anonymous with Baked Potato and Landscape”)

when sitting, as I do, on a bouncy ball (with or without a baby on my lap). And what about the fact that these are pictures (still-lifes and portraits) made out of words that when you look at them/say them make music? The overall effect is visceral, palpable, corporeal in the doing of things simultaneously aural, oral, and visual. Maybe this is all a meticulously-choreographed experience of the distinct components which comprise the very basis of what it means to be verbal.

But basically, it’s a very friendly and familiar universe of things and sounds which allows you the freedom to view, use, do, perform, and/or voice this book. What I’m considering to be GP&P’s universe is the composition of essential stuff of the book, the words and phrases that to me and me alone were emphatically resonant, felt like they had been written particularly for me, but for me in the sense of me as All of Us. I’m thinking about things like the “ice cream truck you never hear or see,” or “the human figure in tuning and per[you the of juice perspective]spective,” or “a growing of little slows,” or “The national nagging has data fondness/lensing us out in the world.” The creation of a record of his highest thoughts is not among James Sanders’ concerns, I don’t think. But his attention to language and what one can do with language, including the cobbling together of experiences and emotions, bestows on this book a profundity that looks rather gracious.

And there’s a lot of fun theoretical stuff I thought about while reading this book: like how the whole book enacts and represents a space between the life processes of oral tradition-making and -preservation and the kind of innovation that open-source programming invites; and how the book’s copyright status (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike) makes you suspect that James Sanders really does hope that you use this book for your own purposes; and that how in doing the poems, you start to get a sense that you really are a participant in the world of poetry-making, and that if you used GP&P enough, you could really get a sense of what kind of poet you would be. You get to see not only your own reading patterns, but you get to see your writing patterns too. But all of those potential-critical-essay topics are kind of boring compared to what fun you can have in just going through the book, with someone or by yourself, in public or in private, preferably a little bit at a time.

Someone once suggested to me that a good rule of thumb in writing is to write things that you would actually like to read. This advice doesn’t really work out for me on a day-to-day basis, when I’m just trying to harness enough time and energy to write something that I like to write, but I was reminded of this when James Sanders answered, in a round-about way, my question as to how he would sell his poems, if called upon to do so: “i guess the poems i enjoy are the ones that provide as much material interaction with the least amount of labor possible.” GP&P is actually not that of-the-moment; it’s not terribly concerned with economizing. It’s actually quite generous in its ingenuous extension of arms and hands and probably legs too, welcoming participation. And it’s obvious that a lot of work went into the creation of a variety of methods for bringing the reader in. But the hospitality of GP&P, its charm, rests in how it has negotiated its frank interest in making things with language – an interest that when expressed to the exclusion of other interests gets poets tagged as solipsistic or narcissistic or (gasp) rather too language-poety – with a to-the-core desire to connect up with actual people doing actual things. In this case, this drive to hook up is translated as a user manual for, dare I say, dialing up into a set of song and story and portrait prompts that will be accessed by, dare I say, thousands of other people. It’s neat to think of yourself sharing an act of creation with anonymous others if only for 33 seconds, by way of the same 33 words and phrases appearing in this book. It hardly matters that “hotel eyes at the motel pool, your source, demano, who Porcine Claus, grasses over duration since in the stickers, handrails made out of handrails and shouldn’t gloves, and which.”

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¹ One must ask oneself, of course, if one really knows how any reader, including oneself, reads. For example, am I confident that the experience of reading is grounded in some shared physical experience (obviously this could be researched), one which becomes habituated to the extent that there are texts that enable this experience and others that can so distinctly not enable this experience that they represent what amounts to a new genre of writing? I don’t think it’s going out on treacherously shaky limb to suppose that my reading habits, indeed significantly rocked by this book, resemble the reading habits of many others. And anyways, duh, it’s a book review.

² I’m not really using much of his work on voyeurism vs. viewership in this essay, but I feel I do owe a debt to David Foster Wallace’s discussion of teleholic addiction and contemporary US fiction in “E Unibus Pluram,” published in A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

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Rachel Daley is a poet, teacher, and mother living in Burlington, Vermont. Her first poetry collection, Plasmos, is forthcoming from 3rdness Press in 2010.