Sidebrow Anthology #1, reviewed by AD Jameson

Sidebrow Anthology #1
Sidebrow, November 2008
Anthology, 235, 7 x 9 perfect-bound
ISBN: 0-9814975-0-0
$15

Reviewed by A D Jameson

Fifty-odd years ago, John Cage—whose influence remains contradictory and very much misunderstood—sought to expand art’s material by allowing in noise, but he is mainly remembered today for having championed chance operations as valid working tools. A little while later, Donald Barthelme’s claim “Fragments are the only form I trust” (later repudiated) broke off from its original story and gained stubby legs of its own, providing a piquant slogan for a shaggily-assembled avant-garde: Language Poets, New Narrativists, Avant-Pop, hypertext, plus their progeny and post-permutations. Those writers, aligned not with one another but against their common enemy, Grand Narrative, used randomness and fragmentation to battle hegemony, patriarchy, tradition, late capitalist ideology—and simple writer’s block.

Today, randomness and fragmentation are easier than ever—partly thanks to technology and our accelerated pace of life, and partly because the practitioners’ of chance-based fragmentation have widely disseminated their methodologies. Websites will cut up your texts for you; Babelfish will gladly render any writing charmingly incomprehensible. Spammers will send you found poetry 24/7! And that’s if you’re looking for more open-ended, dis-integrated work. Everyday life, filled in by ad-creep and ubiquitous media, provides a steady onslaught of bits and memes without any effort on any writer’s part. In short, the current infrastructure encourages such work. Word salad becomes commonplace.

I find the omnipresence of—and the unquestioned insistence on—terse, haphazard work fairly maddening. Even over on the realist, “perennial” side of things, the vaunted return of the short story spawned flash- and micro-fiction. More recently, 250-word blog posts have been chopped down into tweets and Facebook pokes. A fragmented, chance-generated postmodernist malaise has settled in, to the point where even TV sitcoms are collaged, alienated bundles. Irony’s easy, it’s vogue not to care, commitment is for chumps. Parataxis rules triumphant. Our modern world is random-tandem, loosey-goosey, disconnected.

In such a sea/desert/swamp of disembodied, disjointed content—fragmented ruins drifting farther from the shore—the drawing of connections and the synthesizing of disparate information is necessary and valuable work. Other fields understand this: the New Urbanism seeks to contain sprawl, and to encourage integration and reuse. Politics has seen the rise of the grassroots and Obamamania, both of which spring from a widespread desire for synthesis and collective meaning—connections that don’t erase difference, but that hold despite it. Contemporary literature’s most pressing challenge is how well we, too, can learn to reconnect. In the absence of large presses and arts funding—even readers—can writers and editors provide pathways for meaningful communal experiences? And will those pathways still allow for aleatory sprints through the hedge maze? Can we prop up the crumbling infrastructure of our art with stairwells and ramps leading elsewhere without shutting out those who want to go on walkabout, or on a dérive?

Sidebrow is one young journal attempting to map out different trajectories. Starting from the foundation of their website, its editors have established seven different ongoing projects (epistolary; post-hole; mother, i; page 24; litopolis; our fathers; and ghost). Each project was initially rooted in a single work by a single author, which contributors were invited to respond to. Writers have been responding since 2005: they have been revising, replying, continuing, messing with, and detourning the original works—or submitting unrelated projects that the very act of inclusion redefined. They have been making connections, and over time, the seven projects have grown into sprawling, multi-author collaborations.

Take, for example, “post-hole.” The seed story, Derek White’s “Post-Holing to the Flesh Temple,” has been followed by fifteen other works. These additions are not strict continuations of the original story, but alternate versions, possible sequels, even revisions and contradictions. They are separate works that ask to be read together, inviting the reader to imagine connections between them. Thus, White’s crazed physics professor and chess master Dr. Slatoris, “convicted of a crime against reality,” and who stabs holes in a blackboard with a pair of scissors, later rambles on congenially to a grocery delivery boy in Norman Lock’s “The King and the Cotter-Pin.” The Dr. Slatoris of that story explains over cookies that White’s narrative is just a story, and that “stories are the least real thing in the world.” Later still, in a contribution by A.K. Arkadin, the doctor is supplanted by Robert Blake—an actor famous for having been tried for murder (though not convicted). But Arkadin’s Blake is an abusive father who threatens his son with dismemberment unless he delivers notes to attractive women at parties, and who “gave me a walkie-talkie when I was 7 and made people talk to me only through that until I was almost 12.” Surely, then, this depraved man is White’s Slatoris, after all, “kibitzing a divine source we could not see”! All three stories are enriched by these fanciful connections.

The “page 24” project (itself a spin-off from “epistolary”) “aspires to create a chapbook-length work comprising single-page contributions, each of which will be numbered page 24.” (This good-natured purposelessness is indicative of Sidebrow’s attempts to keep the proceedings coherent yet accidental, not to mention fun.) The editors proceed to note that “the concept is open to interpretation,” only one of which is for a contributor to submit the actual 24th page of his or her book or manuscript (as some have done). These pages lie scattered throughout the anthology, like interruptions or regressions, but frequently making an odd, accidental kind of sense. A poem by Daniel C. Remein in the “mother, i” series ends with the image of “cross-teamed horses with light”; the next work, Sandy Florian’s “24,” begins: “for example, turn more quickly than horses, horses more quickly than stags, […]” The continuation invites the reader to wonder whether Remein’s poem is also a page 24. (Furthermore, its title, “Film Professor with Beautiful Hands,” echoes an earlier “page 24” work, a story by Amina Cain featuring a character who’s apparently missing a hand.)

Sidebrow, obviously, is not adverse to randomness or to fragmentation. (I should clarify that neither am I.) However, as the above examples show, Sidebrow follows guidelines, and is curated. This powerful basic concept allows contributors to experiment and take great liberties with the original works, and with what has grown and is growing from them—but the project as a whole can be shaped and coaxed in different directions. To date, the most random, most open-ended Sidebrow project might be “epistolary,” which thus far has been characterized by teasing responses from one collaborator to the next. About this project, the editors have stated: “we aim to cull from submissions a somewhat manageable set of characters, themes, settings, & time lines to provide shape & direction to the collective work. As these pieces fall into place, we will post excerpts & will provide parameters on which to base future work.” This potential is built into the overall project’s structure.

Nor is the enterprise in any way shy of employing new media (which has been sold to us, remember, with the promise that it will orient us, network us, keep us in constant touch). The “litopolis” project uses Google Maps to affix fragmented texts to specific urban locations, slowly peppering the streets of San Francisco and New York City with scattered impressions. At the moment it resembles a more avant-garde version of Yelp. However, later on, the project can be re-imagined, its resonances and overlaps teased out and given further coherence and direction: “Once a sufficient number of Litopolis entries have been cataloged, efforts will be taken to engender new literary works based on the established map & catalog.”

Sidebrow began as a website, but late last year it produced its first print anthology. This handsome volume collects all of the writing from the website until then. Unlike the website, it’s fixed, sure, but it’s also portable, and easier on the eyes than any computer screen. It invites you to pick it up, to read and reread it in different ways. You can carry it around the streets of SF and NYC, bringing it to the spots marked out in “litopolis.” It encourages slower reading and digestion than the online edition, and a deeper exploration of connections real, accidental, and imaginary—to which end, it’s rigorously cross-indexed in a fashion simultaneously practical and whimsical.

Meanwhile, the original site remains online, Google-searchable and hyperlinked; it continues to publish new installments in the still-growing seven projects (work that presumably will be published in Sidebrow Anthology 02, 03, and onward). More and more words will gradually accrue there, fragment by fragment, connections sparking by chance—but also guided, accidentally or purposefully, by gentle nudges.

***

Denise Newman's Wild Goods, reviewed by Aidan Thompson

Wild Goods
Denise Newman
Apogee Press, 2008
ISBN: 9780978766726
$14.95

Reviewed by Aidan Thompson

In Denise Newman’s Wild Goods, one is not only brought to the edge of language but kicked off and sent head long into the fathoms beyond what can be named. “[N]ow it’s as though her skin’s coming off,” Newman writes, “filmy sheets she holds up to view the world through/ though it’s gone meaning she’s in falling husks of/ light she won’t care whose.” Like the subject in this passage who loses her skin or boundary, which separates her from the world, the reader is decentered, pulled away from the defining nature of language. Yet as Newman’s subject is held as she falls in “husks of/light,” the reader’s descent is circumscribed by dynamic oppositional forces initiated by the text.

The title Wild Goods hints at this antipodal strain—which is also underlined by the cover image of a squirrel with a chain around its neck in Hans Holbein’s A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling—and Newman is relentless in holding that tension taut throughout the text. One of the ways she accomplishes this is through a structural foundation that contrasts references to past religious concerns to current secular impressions. (Newman notes in the book that titles and her inspiration came from St. John of the Cross, 16th century; St. Benedict, 6th century; and Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, early 20th century.) For example, in the section “The Beginning of Perfection” inspired by The Rule of St. Benedict, she writes, “it’ll happen again/ outside the casino having paid to lose” and later, “I’ve paid to pee in the subway bathroom/ where a woman’s just shot up—now where?”

Oppositional tension is also created by associations to birth and death. For instance, in “Three Cants” based on St. John of the Cross she writes, “she’s got baby passing the strong/ men…” and later, “wild goods snapped alert—cries—milk lets down/ defoliated by exhaustion joy welling up can’t extinguish.” In the last section of “Ground,” she writes, “[m]otors of the mouths will eat the tit/ when milk runs out…passersby and doors passing/ in likeness with passage/ we must hurry, hurry/ and please, no leaking.” However, interspersed throughout the poems references to birth are countered by allusions to death. For instance, in “The Beginning of Perfection” death in various ways is referred to nineteen times (e.g.: “tomb,” “killing,” “blood,” “drown,” “slaughter,” “devil,” “bones,” “rotting rat,” “die”).

Even at the level of the line, one senses the antipodal strain. For instance, her koan-like sentences taunt us to make meaning, yet, at the same time, refuse any kind of closure. Consider the following lines: “Out to see/ being likeable, flirting with the mechanic so as not to be cheated—/ nothing a threat wouldn’t do quietly—removing the engine and the/ likeness of a hole straight through to my deathbed saying: words/ are not nets,” or “[i]t is dark in the tree of the heart but the/ forest has no inside to be pushed out of.” A death happens because we have to let go of control and knowing definitively. Instead, through a negotiation of the irreconcilable, we fall into the sensational, physical world as we traverse our unsettled responses to paradoxes and the seemingly impossible, creating something new.

Reading Newman’s work, I am reminded of Empedokles’ understanding of language and the world, a perception that, as Anne Carson elaborates on in Eros the Bittersweet, challenges the idea of edges. The oppositional fixity of self and other dissolves into a dynamic interaction and becomes the world—“the filmy sheets” of skin inhaling and exhaling the sensational emanations of things in the universe. Wild Goods is a beautifully written and indispensable book.

* * *

Aidan Thompson's work appears in journals such as Five Fingers Review, P.F.S. Post, Sidereality, 26, Poetry Flash, Paragraph, Tarpaulin Sky Journal, and Bay Poetics, the Faux Bay Book. She is the author of Particle and Probability (Potes & Poets Press, 2002) and a chapbook, So Earnest to Have a Green Point (Palimpsest Press, 2006).

Anne Blonstein's memory's morning, reviewed by Kathrin Schaeppi

memory's morning
Anne Blonstein
Shearsman Books, 2008
ISBN 9781905700769
$15

Reviewed by Kathrin Schaeppi

memory’s morning is a collection of 71 condensed poems that bridge the years 2000 to 2003. The collection was released shortly after the author’s fiftieth birthday in May 2008. In their original state these poems were glued to the back of postcards and sent out at regular intervals as “poemcards” to a wide range of friends. These poetic “diaries” document a specific historical/autobiographical moment. The poems were written over a four-year period—as many as 250 were sent—and can be distinguished by their annually changing forms. The changing themes and approaches make it difficult to make any comprehensive statements except regarding the form, which is broken-sonnet.

Blonstein, a British poet (and ex-geneticist) living in German-speaking Switzerland, is influenced by world poetics and by word creation. There is an exciting friction as the author brings together different planes—neologisms, hybrid vocabularies, current events from interdisciplinary fields (the arts, history, biology...)—on the surface of her cards where the contents meet and rub against one another.

Tucked in the poems are clues on how they may be read. One such clue is that “she strings words caught in what/ isn't what it seems” (43).

Trompe-l’oeil
The image on the book cover is a trompe-l’oeil. Three heads rest on a cloud-pillow. A lawn-green bedcover is fringed with a railroad track and brick border. Focusing on one face, your eye will vacillate between a mouth with lime lipstick and an eye with lime shadow. Depending on your focus the face looks either towards the center of the image or towards the margin. By turning the picture on its head, a yellow face also moves (in)voluntarily. Wittgenstein named this phenomenon a gestalt-shift. Like a trompe–l’oeil, Blonstein’s poetic vocabulary is full of shifting words and phrases.

---------------------------my language. it operates. it
cleaves and it cleaves. (57)

Cleave means to separate and to resist separation. The first poem is titled “lashing mauve”. Lashing means both lacerating and binding. As words “waver” the poems reveal multiple, ambiguous and contradictory layers.

The last poem in the collection is titled “lemur-orange”. By creating a small crack between letters, lemur, the animal, transforms into le mur, French for the wall. The connection and break between lemur and le mur is that most lemurs are endangered or threatened species about to hit the dead-end wall of extinction. Orange, the universal danger sign, signals the irreversible break where deforestation and hunting lead to loss of habitat, which leads to lost species, which lead to lost memories. And this is all happening now, this morning.

Pun-rocking word creations
mindscapes, heartscapes, phraseskins, moontripped, hysteroglyphs, lyographies, logorhythms, soundmesh, driftwords, antibodily, x-raged, becoming-dermal maps

These unique pun-rocking neologisms sliced and spliced from different disciplines let us experience their vulnerable gaps and breaks as they open and cross linguistic borders and boundaries. Driftwords travel spaces differently. In reading we become as nomadic, alive and sensitive as the word creatures we engage with. This language breaks from routine patterns of abuse and overuse:

-------------what to do with the overworked words?
the burnt ones. send them on vacation
or offer them child support? for example—silence. (64)

Notarikon
Blonstein has been establishing notarikon—a form of reverse acronym—as a poetic interpretative process. Here is an example from the poem “still life grey ground”:

------------------------------------------my fingers
on your pulse. your body reads the lyographies i form
in languages i cannot decipher (her eyes breach rivers
elegizing westward). in my mouth your tongue finds
a speech i was never taught (you interpret disappearance).
the walls of my utterness break—and shed hysteroglyphs.
end at a beginning. reframe it in your want. (25)

Encoded in the parentheses we find the acronyms Hebrew and Yid (short for Yiddish). Here notarikon encodes a longing for a language lost to the author who is an assimilated Jew never taught Hebrew or Yiddish, though her grandparents spoke Yiddish (17). In the notarikon contained within parentheses—a symbol for lips, womb and also for wound—an incision is made to mourn lost languages.

Soundmesh and logorhythm
In German, dichten, the process of writing poetry, also means “to condense.” In these poems messages are tightly packaged in lyrical phrases punctuated by endstops that resemble the end of a measure. Short first lines mimic pick-up notes and syncopations. The poem “diez rosas de azufre débil,” composed “after lorca / cohen and others” is an adaptation / interpretation of “Take this Waltz” by Leonard Cohen, which in turn is based on Federico García Lorca’s poem “Little Viennese Waltz.”

------------------------------------in a remote attic
the children may be writing legends with pinions
from a romanian song. while this poem is condensing
behind a mirror of ash. (36)

And to underline the link to music, the poetry in this collection is infused with onomatopoeia and musical terminology: grave, clef, note, scale, strings, logorhythm. The first poem in the collection is a soundmesh of local and international, daily and atrocious sounds that create a polyphonic world music.

jangling wrist to elbow on the arm of a girl whose arm
was blown off by a landmine. the music of church bells
and of central heating. the songs of lena horne. and
war symphonies. the archives echoing from kabul

-----------------------------to leningrad (9)

Jangling, bells, clangs, vocal jazz, and explosions of destruction and their echoes. The author composes consonant melody with dissonant accents where atrocious reality strikes as crescendo.

Each sound bite unfolds a piece of history. In line three above, the songs of lena horne refers to the iconic jazz singer and actress born in 1917, alive today, who is a symbol of overcoming racism. Horne was the first African-American to sing in a purely white orchestra. She became famous for her role in the all-black cast of the movie Stormy Weather in 1943. The phrase war symphonies connotes Shostakovich’s Symphonies Four to Nine (1936–1945), which were a musical counterattack against Stalin. The phrase the archives echoing from kabul signifies archeological, material and human disappearance. Each phrase has the potential to unfold a longer story embedded in world events.

In some poems, stanzas “bridge” as in musical compositions. The space appears to the eye as a gap, and to the ear as silence. This space and what follows accentuate a smooth, abrupt or unexpected “turn.” In the above poem themes bridge seamlessly from racism, to war and destruction and then to feminism, in the third stanza, where the poem returns to Basel and to a local specialty, a three kings' cake served on January 6th that contains a hidden object. This cake has mutated into a three queens’ cake with a hidden question.

Egalitarian language
Authors have often reverted to writing exclusively in lower case letters, such as Elfriede Jelinek in “women as lovers.” Jelinek did so to force the reader to break reading patterns and thus create awareness for oppressive structures in language. Blonstein writes in lower case to “bring down” the egotism of the capital I. Also, a connection is made with Hebrew, which does not distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters.

In some poems Blonstein strings together parallel constructions linked with clauses beginning with articles, prepositions and conjunctions that coordinate, rather than subordinate.

Cone and tear
The last line of the last poem ends with a cone and a tear:

fir cone and tear. the memory of glaciers. (82)

The fir cone, the spore-bearing and seed-producing cones of a fir tree, are endangered by warming climates. The extinction of glaciers is linked to the extinction of the fir cone is linked to the extinction of the tree of life is linked to the tear-shaped water droplet is linked to the tear in continuity is linked to the conservation of our world is linked to this conversation about words.

end at a beginning. reframe it in your want. (25)

***

ellectrique press editor Kathrin Schaeppi lives in Basel, Switzerland where she writes literary reviews, fiction and poetry. Her work has been published in Interim, Jacket, Dusie, Sous Rature, AWP Pedagogy Papers, OSL Verlag, Horizon and Pitkin Review.

Dmitry Golynko's As It Turns Out, reviewed by Eireene Nealand

As It Turns Out
Dmitry Golynko
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008
ISBN 9781933254364
$15

Reviewed by Eireene Nealand

I might make a joke and call the Russian postmodernist poet and critic, Dmitry Golynko, a nature poet—although it’s human nature that he writes about or rather what has come to replace it in this, our era of late capitalism. The life behind the lives of fictitious humans like the “scum of the superego” and “scab of the I”—has little in common with what we have previously know of the structures associated with the Kantian sublime. Once the cheap plastic “arm of help from on high” gets broken, every “desperate gesture” that can even be imagined turns out to be “dried up in the cartridge”—i.e. co-opted by the structures of capitalism. “Elementary things” and “revered categories” are the actors worthy of notice on the poem’s globalized stage. Figures like the “whatever category,” “the sincerity category,” the “pity” category, “condensation” category, “seemlikeliness category,” and the “stuckiness” category are amongst the “faun[a]” that turn up as the available roles. All of them lead to “pathetic” existences. Even the form of the serial poem is implicated in Golynko’s depressing vision.

Although there are heady philosophical references in As It Turns Out, libraries of reference books are not needed in order to feel the poem’s effect. It is helpful, however, to know that Golynko came of age as a writer during Russia’s Perestroika period in the mid-1980’s and 1990’s when an almost chance meeting between Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Lyn Hejinian resulted in the exposure of the young poet to work by American writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Charles Olsen, Michael Palmer, Robert Duncan and John Ashbery. In the poem, “Passing the Church of the French Consulate,” we can readily see Golynko’s engagement with American Language poetry’s project of deconstructing the standardized grammars that constituted one of the deep structures that upheld a dominant white male bourgeois form of identity.

I’ll have neither the ire (caesura)—nor the dark force, nor the gesture
at the decline of life to wank off the fattening, pock-marked period
with a schismatic’s pointing dieresis: “Here is my bride!”
and so turn her into a comma, glaucoma, coma

The meta-references to language and the sonic play between “ire” and “caesura,” “comma, glaucoma, coma” in this poem disrupt the easy flow of referential meaning and cast readers into a realm in which they have to keep moving forward in order to derive sense from words and sounds just as much as from things.

This forward movement becomes a theme in Golynko’s middle and late period poems, which make up the bulk of As It Turns Out. His references to language as reality are much less obtrusive than in his early work but that is not to say that they aren’t there.

the elementary thing heads for the market of discounted trash, purchases
something pleasant and practical at a sale
anathema or love
the goods satiate with unprecedented speed

Still, something has happened in between the writing of Golynko’s early Language poetry and his middle and later poems. Just what has happened is not hard to see. Golynko lived through the Soviet Union’s transition into capitalism. He entered the poetry world amidst a period of cynicism about the state’s social constructivist (Orwellian) use of language and matured under the pressures of an influx of new institutions, words, phrasings, lifestyles and values—including an entirely new economic system.

Because Golynko’s poems speak directly about capitalism they, more than many other post-language works, expose the connection between economics and the structure of desire. While Language poetry put its hopes in the liberation of the subconscious, once desire like gender was shown to be socially constructed—as arbitrary and artificial as the meanings attached to words and sounds—capitalism took advantage of this new realization by shaping desire in forms advantageous to it. The process is perhaps most vivid in Golynko’s depictions of sexuality and gender. His elementary things don’t always have the sexual configuration of the human woman: “blood showing on an elementary thing/isn’t a problem—they don’t get periods.” They do, however, universally find themselves behaving in a manner traditionally allotted to the degraded female, doing the “goody-goody, nice-nelly…ferrety-poo, the tinny sniveler…[and the] plow” for their “symbolic papa.” These elementary things, in other words, are forced to reproduce the structures of capital at quite intimate levels. Ambitions “can’t be killed like cockroaches,” Golynko tells us. The old slogan: “the personal is political” has been disarmed by collapsing both into the realm of the banal.

the elementary thing has brains and tact
a well-tended house of brains
flowers in pots, all sorts of crapola

ET 6 of “Elementary Things” shows how even the serial poem aligns with the formula of the “object petit a”—an endlessly unsatisfying attempt to fill one’s originary lack with one “good looking” commodity after another. Golynko’s middle period technique, which is no longer the disjunctive cramming together of phrases that might be found in his early Language poetry, also takes a capitalist turn by pulling cliché’s together so seamlessly that each common phrase is made incomplete by the image that follows it.

Whip it out, yeah, take a bite
a man in a black raincoat
watches the swimmer
thrashing in ice, the jacked up gangster
organizing the market, white bread
crumbled for pigeons, lips pressed
to…

Episodic images flash by so quickly that readers cannot help developing in themselves a desire to overshoot each line and run on to the next one. Eugene Ostashevsky, one of the three quite excellent translators of As It Turns Out, has called this technique “idiom surfing.” When he, himself, speaks about what he is doing, Golynko says: “I’m constructing the bricolage from the decontextualized fragments of the alienated expressions without any subject behind it” (Interview in Caleque).

This “process without a subject”—here I will bring in philosophy just a little lest we fall into despair—was written about in Althusser’s Philosophy of the Encounter. It tells how history is produced through a chance conjunction of multiple factors that happen to come together contingently rather than through any grand plan (although grand plans can also be amongst the pieces of the encounter). Because capitalism, like any historical event, is made up of a joint presence of multiple factors, its continued existence depends on a significant number of these pieces repeatedly being reproduced in a certain relational tempo. It is for this reason that capitalism, like nature, contains so much redundancy. It is also why capitalism is so forceful in injecting everyone and everything with the drive to reproduce its form.

But if capitalism is so omnipresent and efficient in reproducing its cycles of iteration, how is it that Golynko’s last poem, “For the checkmark or For,” stops short of completing its line? In an exciting rewriting of deconstruction’s overly romantic notion of Lacan and Derrida’s postcards to nowhere, Golynko’s “post-it note” about nothing stays on the fridge reminding us of its own inability to remind us about anything meaningful. Because the post-it note is empty whether it is filled up or not, we are saved from an important dilemma—that of making a choice. So much the better since in this post-human world, we perhaps are no longer creatures who hold onto free will—our subconscious is too deeply colonized for that; we are too pushed about by our material conditions. We might say, with the same indifference, that we don’t care or notice the difference between filling up our own time by reading Golynko’s straightforwardly depressing lines, or leaving them empty by doing the same; the real question, however is will they have any effect?

Rebecca Bella, another of the quite eloquent translators of As It Turns Out comments: “while he must never admit to intentionality and never states any moral position regarding post-perestroika late-capitalism, by producing in poetry the cheapest, emptiest, most jarring, strung out, amped-up picture of capitalism, [Golynko’s] sharply-focused jump-cut images elicit protest.…[The poetry] strikes a nerve, makes us twinge, even repulses us.” One of the reasons for connecting Golynko’s early and late works is that in every newly proclaimed age there still remains some emotional debris from times long past. Those nerves, Bella insists, lie in romanticisms of the past: the poetry community, that is. When we read lines in Golynko’s work like:

your heavy gaze everywhere depraved vision
of past experience, and behind it an inventory
of boxes, checked in order to make it easier
to work out who’s bottom dog and who’s boss.

or:

the elementary thing feels sentimental about power
the reverse is questionable.

we may not be able to behave any differently than we did before. According to Althusser’s theory, however, if the recognition of our own relationship to power can be made to produce even a slight cringe (or swerve) that small involuntary tremor can easily have a ripple effect in the interlocked tissues of reproduction that hold capitalism together. Because it depends on multiply interlocked cycles small shifts in capitalism can spread in a cancer-like manner, eventually producing changes on a much larger scale. This, I think, is the role that As It Turns Out proposes for the serial poem in our times. With all of its emphasis on iterability the serial poem might easily become a good place for working out larger questions around repetition and structure. But perhaps Golynko already does not need to tell Americans about the instabilities inherent in capitalism.

***

Eireene Nealand’s short stories have been published in Sidebrow, Fourteen Hills, Vagabond, Transfer and ZYZZYVA, among other places. She recently won an Elisabeth Kostova Foundation Fellowship to attend a fiction seminar in Sozopol, Bulgaria. In 2004 she was the Ivan Klima Fellow in Fiction at the summer literary seminars in Prague. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in contemporary Russian literature.

Kaisa Ullsvik Miller on Unspoiled Air, interviewed by M. Perel

Unspoiled Air
Kaisa Ullsvik Miller
Fence Books, 2008
ISBN: 9781934200124
$15


Interview by M. Perel (via e-mail), August - October 2008


Perel: What or who has been influential on the writing for Unspoiled Air? I could see a discourse on the public self that bears resemblance to strands of Language (L=A...) poetry. It reminded me of Happily by Lyn Hejinian. What was the impetus for this discourse? Where you were in your life that brought you to this particular space of writing?

Miller: Well, I am definitely interested in how language creates meaning and how this relates to personal/communal identity, what you refer to as “a discourse on the public self”. How is identity defined by language, and particularly, how does this keep us from one another, from ourselves? How does disjunctive language break down our commitments to identity? Two of my favorite poets are Juliana Spahr and Harryette Mullen – their ability to explore this idea has certainly been of inspiration to me. When I first encountered Harryette Mullen, I was fascinated by her “projects”. This was definitely a turning point in my writing practice. Once I began to assume projects, I found I could let go of intention. The words would rearrange themselves and when I would complete a piece, I could look at it and still see the strands of my own perception of the world/of my self.

My project was the result of a lot of cut up and massaging of the Daily Om e-mail meditations. The tone of these messages are so publicly directive, yet are suggested as intimate for the individual. “Learn to forgive”/ “Breathe deeply”/ “Act childlike," etc. etc. The “direction” doesn’t give you anything unless you direct it somewhere. Taking the language itself and reconstructing it offered a far greater meditation for me.

Perel: That makes sense - when you're looking at anything so abstract for direction, identity, or avoiding folly, you have to make your own connection to the language to take something from the text, like the popularity of the I Ching among Westerners at the outset of the New Age.

Miller: That is a compelling idea…I haven’t studied the I Ching a great deal, but I think you actually could think of the practice of interpreting the I Ching as similar to how we, as individuals (or collectively), interact with language. Even when you apply random methods (as a project) to create a piece of poetry, for example, the thing that brings it to life is the poet’s intuition, the personal interpretation or internal connection to the language itself. Once you begin to become aware of your interpretation of something, when you “deconstruct” your interpretation while deconstructing the language, then you begin to see how your interaction, your social and cultural context and daily experience is skeletal of the language.

I think figuring your “self” out is sort of like analyzing poetry. You have to deconstruct and look at all of the various parts…and for me, most of them are seemingly unrelated beyond their relationship within myself (within the piece) and then when you look at the whole as the composite of all of these parts – that is when you begin to understand “how things work”…how you function or how a poem functions, perhaps. In a greater sense, this idea helps me to remember that people are so complex – you can begin to forgive their inconsistencies and your own.

Perel: And this concept of "project" you found in Mullen reveals a process of interpretation. How can there be purity of advice within such a constructed, even gimmicky presentation of meditative language like the Daily Om? As if "learning to forgive," for instance, prevents awkwardness or disappointment within a relationship. What I like about your text is that it brings the awkwardness into reflective awareness and uses this "self-help" language as commentary on a social condition. Like in "The Elements" (p. 24) for instance, "the universe is popular these days/ many of us don't know what this means/ However, it is clear/ that a universe provides for us/ we often have a hard time doing it/ we cannot control matter/ and visions/ cannot provide for our story..."

Miller: I am attracted to awkwardness. I find that wading through life can be quite awkward sometimes. I find it difficult to comment on something without being aware that I am making a commentary – how awkward - a commentary is created and fixed, but your own perspective changes. I think this is indicative of how most language/art falls short in capturing life. I strongly agree with Hejinian’s view that language lacks an ability to capture the scope of human experience. Life changes and grows… but only certain works of art or literature or theory have the ability to change and grow…while remaining fixed (in a book, on a canvas, etc.).

I guess I enjoy trying to find a way to make the syntax more reflective of the semantics. I like when humans and language are not afraid of embracing awkwardness, and this shows some awareness of self…language that is reflective and shows awareness that it is language – capable of misgiving, misleading and mistaking.

Perel: It does seem like you are speaking to/from an unconscious space in daily life that few can perceive or give language to - like a seam or fold in the continuation of the mind and the personality.

Miller: Collective consciousness / the collective unconscious fascinate me. The interesting thing about these words is that no matter how you conceive of them, they refer to a public self that bears down upon the individual self. What is all tangled up in our collective that affects, particularly, our inability to liberate ourselves as individuals or be open to the new? This was a question I carried through the writing – I think the way that our individual selves manifest in the public self indicates that there are some repairs to be made, some in order to be free and be happy.

Perel: Please tell me more about these "repairs," give me some examples.

Miller: I guess I mean that we’re so disconnected within ourselves that it is difficult to function together. I’m talking about the repairs made within yourself…like when you really begin to have patience and kindness toward yourself so that you can begin to live in a way that is sustainable. The way we treat ourselves is reflected in society and vice versa. I’m pretty sure we all desire kindness and patience, but we barely manage to provide these things for ourselves. And we’re concerned about throwing waste into the environment, but we feed on toxic foods and relationships and negative energy. I think the repairs we make within benefit and direct our collective experience.

Perel: How do you feel about the separation between the private and public realms? Do you see them as basically irreconcilable states of being? Is this work an attempt to create a reconciliation between them?

Miller: I think the public and private realms are undeniably connected, yet “self-help” sometimes encourages more self-absorption. It furthers the disconnect between the public and private realms. In my writing, I like to blur the language between who I am and who "we" is, and I guess maybe it is an attempt to reconcile this separation. However, it is also an attempt to reconcile the separation between the selves within myself. I think that we are always struggling between the "me" who wants to be and the sabotaging ego. That is one journey that I definitely meditated on as I wrote this collection.

Perel: In Unspoiled Air it appears as though the ego and id take turns playing the role of Other, which is somehow linked with how the writer is perceiving another person, the choice between living for another's expectation, or living up to one's own, and the disjunct there. Has any particular life experience led you to question your own basic assumptions and start to deconstruct them?

Miller: I actually think in some ways my desire to deconstruct my own assumptions and the id-ego dance is related to my upbringing in the Midwest. I think that many Midwesterners - or many in the environment where I was raised, which was Scandinavian-Lutheran/think Garrison Keillor, struggle with societal expectations, the desire to please other people, make other people feel comfortable, and bear the utmost humility while at the same time wanting to be true to themselves and their own pursuits. I think it can lead to a confused sense of self and a lack of confidence or inability to determine/a need to question your “own basic assumptions,” as you say.

Perel: I meant to ask you further about the influence of the unconscious on your writing. In reading Unspoiled Air, I thought about how information can be taken in and understood on so many levels, but how it is rarely equally understood on all levels. Like, if it is taken in emotionally, the body might not know how to sit with the information. If it is taken in intellectually, there might be space where the emotions can't connect, or disconnect from an old desire or belief. What do you think of these speculations? Do they resonate with you as a response to the book?

Miller: I think those are very interesting ideas. They speak to the disconnect within the self that I mentioned earlier. However, just as with the public/private realm – I do think that the different internal “levels” are undeniably connected. It is just that we often don’t have the awareness to recognize that unconscious understanding. For example, if you experience something/someone with intense emotion, you may focus on the confusion of emotions and not recognize that your body has a very distinct and telling visceral response…and that is perhaps related to an old desire or belief (as you mention). The blur between these speaks to that awkward complexity of living.

Perel: Well, it seems like you do have refined perceptual tools that enable you to recognize an unconscious relationship or understanding and write about it. Does that stem from a practice you have?

Miller: (Laughing) I don’t have any refined perceptual tools. I just over-analyze everything! I do try to maintain a contemplative practice though it is awfully flexible in format and frequency. I have a tendency to be overly rigid and feel guilty if my practice isn’t perfect, so I write and meditate when I feel the real need within myself and not the need to do something because someone says this is the best or proper way to be disciplined.

Perel: Tell me more about the language relationship between the New Age culture and postmodern poetics (such as that of Spahr and Mullen) as you see it.

Miller: I have heard from people who connect with a sort of New Agey element in this book, but the label makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m definitely influenced by spirituality and humanity though, and I can explore how this is relevant to my relationship and interest in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E type poetics, specifically. The extent to which I see a connection between New Age culture and post-modern poetics is in the way both attempt to innovate language to further connect and enhance the self and society. To me, this innovation makes poetry and art relevant and worthwhile.

I think postmodern poetics challenges and explores societal and political constraints through new construction and interpretation of language. I know both Spahr and Mullen may be informed by language poetics, but both of their work is autobiographical in that it is shaped by their experience, their cultural experiences or interpretation. Both are innovative in the way that they engage gender and race.

When reading Mullen's poetry, I gain a different insight into racial experience than through than an essay on this subject because the shape and feel, the sound, the signs and syntax of her work all embody the experiences she seeks to convey. Here, life is reflected in a holistic and encompassing way. It is autobiographical and relates to the self, but it is also community building. Perhaps one doesn’t think of Language poetry as being particularly autobiographical but Lyn Hejinian certainly has crossed the exploration of self and community and “living.” Her work is living and reflective of living.

I don’t have the ability to read all the theory I want to, or even all of the poetry I want to, or know as much about postmodern art or research spiritual texts to the extent I desire. I am lost in trying to figure out all of the connections, but I do connect deeply to those that mean something to me and my experience, and then they become a part of me, and get expressed through my work.

The disconnected parts within us can collaborate and shape our way of living and moving forward. I think that if we look for the cohesiveness within seemingly disparate parts that I’ve been talking about – whether in language or in our perceptions – then we can experience reality fully. Through this "collaboration" within, we are able to accept society's awkward disjunctions, and embrace one another with greater ease.


***


Kaisa Ullsvik Miller's debut collection of poetry, Unspoiled Air, won the 2008 Motherwell Prize (Fence). Some of her other work can be found in Ploughshares (forthcoming), Fence, Bombay Gin, and HUNGER. She lives and makes art in Madison, Wis.

Due to her interdisciplinary approach to artistic practice, M. Perel can be called a performance artist, though often she is cited as a choreographer or poet. She has a BA in Writing and Literature from Naropa University, and is currently working toward her MFA in performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her current projects are Workout Girl and Freedom of Information (freedomofinformation2008.blogspot.com).

Susan Briante's Pioneers in the Study of Motion, reviewed by Paula Koneazny

Pioneers in the Study of Motion
Susan Briante
Ahsahta Press, 2007
ISBN: 139780916272937
$16

Reviewed by Paula Koneazny

Susan Briante’s Pioneers in the Study of Motion opens with a quote from Roland Barthes’ “The Jet-Man”: “motion . . . has become a kind of vertical disorder . . . an unnatural perturbation, a motionless crisis of bodily consciousness.” A study of motion suggests an investigation into modes of human locomotion and, indeed, these poems circulate along and alongside networks of highways and tracks. But the motion Briante concerns herself with here is not that horizontal rush from coast to coast that in earlier centuries defined Americans’ notion of travel and the movement of goods and services across a continent, but rather the vertical movement of money, labor, culture, and anguish across the borders that separate North from South, especially the ultra-politicized U.S. / Mexican border. “Love in the Time of NAFTA,” the title of the second poem in the book, would make a fitting subtitle for the whole collection, as Briante continually juxtaposes private and public reality, making a connection between love and economics. Her poems inhabit a world where “Routes fall upon us” (55) and, at the same time, a world where poetry traffics in fraught border-crossings between bodies, the sensual transactions between lovers who lie down for each other in corrupted landscapes.

Pioneers in the Study of Motion is divided into three sections, “Eventual Darlings,” “Pioneers in the Study of Motion,” and “How Cities Get Founded.” The first section interweaves a series of “Eventual Darling” poems that take us to Galang Island, Kinshasa, Mexico City, Brasilia and Kanpur with a series of “Day of the Rainy Season” poems involving an American woman, perhaps pregnant, who is living in Mexico. Also included in this section are two poems, “Cintas (1)” and “Cintas (2),” derived from translations of Aztec poetry.

“Eventual Darling (Galang Island)” transports us to a detention camp for Vietnamese boat people in Indonesia where detainees spend their time constructing a model of the Statue of Liberty out of “Pure products of mother boards and strip mines. Welding and machete.” This replica fabricated from debris “clutches a crude pine bouquet instead of a tablet, a parrot where she should hold a torch” (6). The Statue of Liberty reappears in the final section of the book in the poem “Clutch” as the “lady with her pedestal, mockingly” (65). This is Lady Liberty gone awry, quite different from the icon that welcomed the “refuse of your teeming shore” (65) to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The quote from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” stands in stark contrast to the debased contemporary idol whose dignity has perhaps been auctioned off under orders from the World Bank or as a consequence of a Free Trade agreement.

Susan Briante’s poetic “I” rarely settles. She is a present-day nomad, an avatar of globalization, a Westerner (presumably American) who relocates to various non-Western (what we once called Third World) locations. The ease with which her “I” moves around the globe mirrors the irresistible incursion of World Bank, IMF, and NAFTA policies into traditional, local economies. Perhaps her tourism is a positive by-product of the global marketplace. Or merely the other side of the coin. Just as Mexicans enter the United States to find work, this poet-speaker crosses borders to acquire language and experience, raw material for her poems.

In the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 12th, 14th and 15th “Day of the Rainy Season” poems the speaker does settle, at least temporarily, as she relocates to Mexico and becomes engrossed with a pregnant and material body that reiterates the fecund tropics. Here the body is sensual but not romantic. Despite the lushness of her surroundings, she remains solitary. Her lover is offstage and the people around her are not intimates (with the one exception of “Sara’s baby” [22]). On the “12th Day of the Rainy Season” she contemplates “the number of heartbeats per minute within this pasture of traffic” (19). On the “14th Day of the Rainy Season,” she catalogs the types of possible love, at least those available to her as a foreigner:

Selfish love, anxious love, detached love, primarily Western love.
The power goes out with a thud.
A drum is an indigenous referent reinforcing nationalist sentiment.
Water murmurs through the pipes.
Physical union, writes André Tridon, is probably the neutralization of 2
electric currents.
A statue of Emperor Cuauhtémoc falls into a slate silhouette.
Whole neighborhood’s dim; Sara’s baby tugs at the collar of my shirt.
Unstable love, detached love, underperforming love, neo-liberal love.
40 percent of retail shopping in Mexico occurs at a Wal-Mart owned outlet. (22- 23)

Love and trade in a post-global world may be “free,” but they are also fraught with contradictions. Mexicans can now, if they have the means, shop at Wal-Mart just like Americans do. At the same time, the lights dim in their neighborhoods. Sex takes place disengaged from feeling, merely a “neutralization of 2 electric currents.” This wasteland theme of detachment and disengagement runs throughout the book. Isolation is now normal. Only a baby’s playful tug at a collar (satiated after breast-feeding in a way that one can never be satiated after shopping at Wal-Mart) and an “indigenous drum” allow us to glimpse the possibility of a more engaged and satisfying future, one nourished by a pre-market past.

The poems of the middle section of the book, “Pioneers in the Study of Motion,” may be the least essential in the collection. Most of these poems, rather than break any new ground, simply amplify or add detail to the “Eventual Darling” poems. At times, such amplification is fruitful, as in “The Missionary’s Pupil” where we are asked to consider “How much/ damage is done in touch? In debt and obligation?” (31) One highlight of this section is the series of intriguing titles that reference occupations or statuses; for example, “The Typist” and “The Pornographer’s Father.” This alternation between job and relationship seems to imply that in the global economy, one may be an illustrator, a typist, a groom, a bride, a domestic or a money changer, but only related to (son of, father of, pupil of, lover of, daughter of) a cartographer, a missionary, a pornographer, an archaeologist or a dressmaker. This list of occupations invites us to think of the poet too as having a job. She is certainly a typist and may be an illustrator or even a domestic; she may well be a student or lover of cartography, archaeology or pornography. There are tools to her trade like “a key pressed to paper” (61) and occupational hazards, such as “a kink at the back of your neck” (61). She writes books that once published circulate through the marketplace. Unlikely as it seems, her books may even be for sale at Wal-Mart.

In the final section of the book, “How Cities Get Founded,” we return to a speaker who resembles the woman we met in the “Eventual Darling” and “Day of the Rainy Season” poems. Many lines in the earlier poems, such as “Romance plays no part” (3) and “we make love: eyes swollen, palms wide. And it is like clear cutting” (6) are echoed in these last poems, for example, in “Song with Typewriter and Bleating Sheep” where “for a while there was so much/ give: the laying beside, the pulling at one another like crows” (61). The image of sex as a tearing apart, as a form of greedy combat that ends in isolation is a harrowing one. The lover’s body is at best a skittish location. In “Tracks, Unconjugated, Trees,” the protagonist disengages, “unsentimental, because I roll out from under him”(68), and remains the unromantic observer: a body observing and an observer of her own body. A woman “adjusts her hem against a backdrop of heavy yellow machinery” (68), her sexual body moving across a stage set with urban detritus. She is wrapped up in an individuality dictated by location and history. In “Roanoke” she notes, “Entire swaths of a nation encircle the frail white farmhouse of my throat” (66). Susan Briante implies that there is no difference to be found along the Pan American Highway or Hiway 75 South, or Routes 9 and 22. No amount of mileage seems to avail her. Wherever she goes, New York is the same scene as Mexico, just minus the tropics. Her poems prompt us to consider what has been lost in such a world where space appears to be swallowing time, where syllables and vowels are dropped and “whole letters . . . slip from your name” (66).

***

Paula Koneazny lives and writes in Sebastopol, California where she earns her living as a tax consultant. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Volt: The War Issue and Pool and is forthcoming in Aufgabe. Her reviews have been published in American Book Review, Verse, and Rain Taxi. She has a chapbook, The Year I Was Alive, out from dpress.

Interbirth Books & Wolverine Farm Publishing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZWWhYLTKSk&fmt=18


Matter #11: "The Woods"
Wolverine Farm Publishing, 2008

2008. Screen-printed box containing Charles Malone's Tree Climbing in Fort Collins, A Lyric Guide; a scroll of poetry; and a 230 page journal of poetry, fiction, interviews and art, featuring work by Kathleen Willard, Felicia Zamora, B.R. Bonner, Jack Martin, Sarah Morgan, William Wylie, and Cej Tank, among dozens of others.

Published by Todd Simmons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3IKEhpPkT4&fmt=18

A Partial Handbook for Navigators
Mary Burger
Interbirth Books, 2008

From the Interbirth website: "In A Partial Handbook for Navigators, Mary Burger explores the dynamic relationship between natural space, the human body, and the fabricated structures and environments that modify the nature of our interaction with the external world. . . ."

One hundred books were hand bound using a traditional Coptic stitch. Fifty books are numbered and signed by the author. This edition includes a removable screen-printed wrap by Clifton Riley and cover art by Amy Trachtenberg: Rift Zone, 2008.

47 pages -- 6 in. x 6 in. x 0.5 in. -- $25 + shipping at Interbirth Books.

Spencer Dew's Songs of Insurgency, reviewed by Benjamin Buchholz

Songs of Insurgency
Spencer Dew
Vagabond Press, 2007
ISBN: 0975571648
$12

Reviewed by Benjamin Buchholz

Spencer Dew’s Songs of Insurgency tempts, at the onset, a reader to regard it as pulp fiction, with all the trash, horror, urban decay and inanity of modern life ladled in a roux prose of fragmented thoughts basting among loosely simmered run-ons. He starts with phone sex in the story “Blow,” imagines a camp for teaching the finer points of suicide in “The Exit Colony,” and flows through other snapshots of noir, sadism and numbness until reaching his peroration in the longish tale “At the Darfur Bake Sale.” Songs of Insurgency tempts the reader, but does not wholly convince the reader to accept it as pulp because underpinning it, throughout, in varying levels of sublimity, the work circles but never quite states that it isn’t actually about 9/11, or about Darfur, or about phone sex. It’s about cliché. And saturation. And how our perceptions as Western readers and intellectuals cannot easily be divorced from the media in which we live.

This line from “Darfur Bake Sale” most perfectly captures the juxtaposition of smut within the larger contemplation of cliché and media saturation:

When I fuck, I fantasize about fucking. Maybe that’s a paradox, but then I come, hard, and can be done with the whole thing. The revolution must not be like that.

Throughout, the meta-conflict Dew establishes by writing low and thinking high finds its embodiment in the consistent voice of the narrator: a man, often represented as an art school graduate, always speaking/writing in haute terms, words like "multivalent" and "solipsism" and "very romantic in that De Quincey kind of way," while at the same time caught red-handed amongst mounds of American kitsch: rubber reproduction tomahawks, Victoria’s Secret catalogues, Pokemon 2000 posters.

This double-layer of pretension surrounds the narrator: language and environment. He can’t seem to think with clarity despite his desire to bring forth a manifesto. To add to the drowning effect, Dew’s protagonists are often lost within this milieu, unable to realize they are lost. For example, in “The Heart of It All” the protagonist is Kim, a yoga teacher who has realized that Vedic eating includes meat. Her thoughts spill over the pages as the narrator follows her through the supermarket, encouraging her towards discussions on tainted etymologies – "domestic" having been co-opted by "domestic terrorism" so that "homey" fabrics purchased for a Halloween costume are imbued with hints of extremist destruction. The narrator fails. Kim rattles on, buying bags of "googley eyes, popsicle sticks free-of-ice-cream . . . sequins and rhinestones, star-shaped confetti and glitter-glue, adhesive-backed Velcro tabs, doll arms and doll legs." It’s all excess, an aggregate of materialism that keeps Kim cocooned from thinking or acting in a way that might matter. The reader feels for Kim, likes her because of her escapism, dislikes the narrator for his cerebral, cold and imperfectly formed theories of life and art and language. Yet, in the balance, Dew succeeds to show us the tremblingly thin veil that obscures the cesspit of the American ideal.

As a reader you might choose to enjoy scenes of violence that read like retellings of violence, vicarious experience layered on vicarious experience. If so, read Tom Clancy. But, in Songs of Insurgency, little episodes of fantasy and horror, of real life excess layered over academia, capture the numbing cycle of repeated media immersion, this perpetuation of a mythology of cleanliness in war (and in life generally) that most have never experienced but often considered, seen on CNN, on the front pages of Newsweek, embroidered in our collective American unconsciousness and embedded in our language: we react to simulacra of stimulants. We read Clancy to get clean stimulation when in reality we are surrounded by dirty stimulants, never clean except when packaged in McDonald’s Happy Meals or Reality TV. There is no possibility of reality in "story." But there is the possibility of reality behind "story" once disabused of cliché.

Two ways exist to gain the capacity to see (and live) beyond this ethical dilemma in our media-saturated culture. The first is to go there yourself, where the media isn’t, and come back from it changed, with a new quiet ringing inside you. For this, I know not where you will find your particular peace: deep in the Vermont woods, trekking a desert, in ashram or at altar? It doesn’t matter where, really, though the reach of media and language and vicarious experience extends deeper daily. The second way, though, is to form an opinion of it by touching the common darkness itself. This requires no particular meditative calm, but only a keen desire to see/feel/know and a guide to help you in your knowing. For that, I highly recommend a book like Songs of Insurgency where the author cloaks his revelation behind the very things he reviles.

Then, you might laugh aloud when reading what Kim, the protagonist in “The Heart of It All,” says to the war-wounded narrator as she stops shopping for a moment to give him a "constipated smile":

“We’re all so glad you’re OK,” she says, “I mean, assuming you’re OK. OK on the outside. We’re all so glad you’re alive, let’s say. I hope you’re OK. Are you OK?”

***

Benjamin Buchholz is a US Army Officer. His work has received a lot of kind attention lately, including the pieces "Nowords" and "Mailcall" originally published in Tarpaulin Sky. His story "The Cabalfish" appers in the 2008 edition of The Best of the Web. He received four Pushcart nominations last year. For a full bio see http://benjaminbuchholz.blogspot.com/.

Ken Rumble's Key Bridge, reviewed by Joseph Harrington

Key Bridge
Ken Rumble
Carolina Wren Press, 2007
ISBN: 9780932112545
$14.95

Reviewed by Joseph Harrington

One of the pleasures of Ken Rumble’s Key Bridge is the variety of writing styles and poetic forms under the same cover. He can write gorgeous poems whose content is more or less representational:

the herons fly solo low back up
the river inland into land into
the pools, rivers, lakes the glaciers left –
the herons’ long sweep & lope with Zed necks up
the river – pull up in trees –
huddle under wings at the edge
of Roosevelt Island where
roots break the bank, turn in
to the water

But a similar topic can also prompt a more material play of light upon words:

shadow squirrel shadow runs
shadow life in your shadow pants
shadow arms play shadow games

shadow names give shadows aim
water’s shadow like shadow’s shadow
shadow day like shadow gaze

He includes cut-ups and syntax-scrambles, memoiristic free-verse, and even little imagist poems: “the blossoms/ fall it/ feels as if/ walking/ underwater petals.”

But what really attracted me to the book in the first place was that it was a book-length poem about Washington, D.C., because I’m interested in book-length poems and in Washington, D.C.

I was disappointed at first, because Key Bridge refused to give me either. There were some reminiscences of slumming as a teenager, nostalgia over Fugazi concerts, and some bragging about fucking in parking lots. A liberal white suburbanite reflected on his privileges, vis-à-vis the African-American community just over the D.C. line. Fair enough. But is any of that really Washington?, I wondered. Like other poets who have written about the capital, this one seemed to reduce it to maps, buildings, and traffic.

But after reading the book again, I realized that this is precisely the point. “[T]he view that metaphor can make anything anything” is the problem with historical or “social” poems. There is always the danger – maybe unavoidable – of a poem’s aestheticizing whatever it touches. Key Bridge is not The Bridge; it won’t stand unproblematically as the Great Symbol. Key Bridge is a specific place; it’s the bridge from the Northwest – the wealthier, whiter part of town – into “Chocolate City.” It’s the bridge Rumble crossed as a kid to get from Chevy Chase, Maryland to the thrift shops in Anacostia or the clubs downtown.

But this specificity, paradoxically, is the very thing that suggests all the metaphorical resonances of this bridge. Rather than fall prey to that, Rumble plays with that: “the bridge bridged the bridgeable river,/ bridgely bridging the bridged river/ . . . Bridge be./ Bridge be bridging.” It’s a real bridge that refuses to be a metaphor, even though it can’t help it. Metaphor “falls short” – doesn’t “carry over” – because trope can’t bridge event and account. “The city/ waiting/ for content” is waiting for satisfaction, but also waiting to take on substance. It’s like a guidebook to Washington written by Robbe-Grillet. D.C. is “the center”; there’s an important city of some sort, but there’s no there there – and Rumble knows it, even if the talking heads don’t. “To look at a landscape without describing it”– he wants to describe it, but he doesn’t really believe in description. In that sense, the book reminds me of Cecil Giscombe’s writing about British Columbia.

Rumble’s language is rather looser, more relaxed, more playful than Giscombe’s lyrically dense long poems. This bridge is not supposed to be Crane’s – as dense or as wrought – because the book is a diary; the poems have dates instead of titles, and the “entries” often have the offhanded, informal quality of a journal. Indeed, some of the best ones read like epigrams: “An other, an out there, away.” “There’s more evidence than words/ (worlds.” Or this little note-to-self: “write what’s gone” – then leave blank space.

I was grateful that a book covering May 2000 – October 2002 forbears to even mention 9/11. Moreover, I have to admire the way that many of the “entries” deal with events that happened years before the dates in question; the interpolation of later entries (from 2003) into the linear chronology of the text; and the restraint that can end the book at the time of the DC sniper killings – most of which happened in Rumble’s own suburban Maryland – without doing it to death. So to speak. (The mask of metaphor just won’t come off, revealing race.)

Race, class, “current events,” and history are always present in Key Bridge, just offstage – which, in fact, is often how they function for upper-middle-class white people, for whom “the police are an island/ you can choose not to visit.” History seems like a half-forgotten national park. There are “Civil War earthworks” – but you’re not sure, because they’re remembered from childhood – or they’re in a “bad neighborhood” the speaker won’t stick around in. Rumble is not afraid to report what white people say to each other:

Northeast: oh, it’s sketchy
Anacostia: that place is scary
Southeast: you don’t want to be there at night
Capitol Hill: it’s dangerous
Capitol Heights: Section 8
Mount Pleasant: in a few years this neighborhood will be great

This racialized real estate is always there, precisely because it’s not talked about.

If not all these poems refer to home rule, urban renewal, or the early republic, it is because these were only some of the things that went through the poet’s consciousness in the first years of the century. And that’s a good thing, for both him and us.

***

Joseph Harrington is the author of Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern US Poetics (Wesleyan). Harrington's work has appeared in LOCUSPOINT, First Intensity, and Tarpaulin Sky, amongst other venues. He teaches at the University of Kansas.

Kristin Prevallet's I, Afterlife: Essays in Mourning Time, reviewed by Megan Burns

I, Afterlife: Essays in Mourning Time
Kristin Prevallet
Essay Press, 2007
ISBN: 9780979118913
$12.95

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Kristin Prevallet delves into loss and grief in this collection of essays and poems I, Afterlife: Essays in Mourning Time, where a stunning precision in language cracks open the elegy exposing both its limitations and its necessity. Prevallet begins by turning first to another poet, Alice Notley, allowing Notley’s “At Night the States” to function as an echo that reverberates around the edges of this text. Notley’s dedication to poetry and her direct handling of death become a springboard in this book, launching Prevallet into her uncovering of how the elegy performs on the page. Prevallet boldly confronts the reader’s expectations by heading straight into the burning core of this text: how to make sense of the suicide of her father, if such a process can even be approached. “Preface” begins the book with a narrative that outlines the events surrounding her father’s suicide and tries to define how sublimation works in regards to grief: “this is elegy,” the poet announces. In part one, “Forms of Elegy” Prevallet tries to understand the language of grief, exploring how emotion is handled within the form and how solid words try to capture the inexplicable. She even questions the function of poetry to communicate this at all:

There is a connection between the insect and my father that goes
----------beyond the physical presence of one and the absence of the other.
I know precisely what that connection is.
But you, in reading this, may never know.
I may refuse to reveal the truth of what I am mourning.

This statement forces the reader to examine what exactly is being revealed and what is being withheld; the loss of the father and the violence of his suicide become the surface for whatever murky waters lay beneath. This is how elegy speaks, Prevallet says, again and again throughout the text, but she also asserts that the voicing of grief does little to fill the holes in the story or to bring light to that which remains veiled in mist.

Prevallet’s spatial relation to grief is sharply condensed in this text as the reader is forced to confront at a rapid pace a movement that took the author several years to express on the page. The effect is startling and troubling; Prevallet’s language tears into the body and then seeks to keep the wound from healing. Visually, the layout of the book is jarring as black pages stand out starkly against the white space surrounding her text reminding the reader not only of the traditional Western mourning color but constantly drawing the eye of the reader back to the illusion of black and white interpretations. As well, the images that accompany, “Crime Scene Log” unnerve and throw the reader off balance. The grayscale, grainy images are presented as though they reveal something about the text directly below them, but what that is remains unclear. Are we seeing the crime scene or the lack of the crime, and what can be contained within these precise squares with their varying hues? Prevallet challenges the reader to “see,” and the lack of clarity is as frustrating as the author’s desire to know her father’s mind the day of his suicide. In these squares, Prevallet suggests that there are large spaces that are neither black nor white, and by looking into them the reader experiences the mind’s desire to make sense where there is none. One may discern a square, a grave, an asphalt lot, an ultrasound, a ghostly mirage, but how does the interpretation match the description of the police officer’s report about the crime given below each picture. Ultimately, the images and the words speak two different languages.

“What is the language used to describe a person who has deceased?” Prevallet asks bringing the reader’s attention to language’s ability to create a gap between experience and communication. Words literally are abandoned within part two’s poem “The Distance Between Here&After” as Prevallet tries to talk about the “unspeakable,” but she returns to words acknowledging that these are her tools for navigating through the gaps in her life:

------------------------------Commence. Again.
One more Time. Start over. Here.

This text is an investigation into the elegiac form and its context within the process of grieving; it offers no solution, but instead circles like a season haunted by loss that turns into another with no pause for the particulars of death.

***

Megan Burns holds an MFA from Naropa University. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was recently released by Lavender Ink(http://www.lavenderink.org/). She has poems in Exquisite Corpse, Constance Magazine and YAWP Journal. She co-hosts the 17 Poets! reading series in New Orleans (http://www.17poets.com/) and runs Trembling Pillow Press with poet Dave Brinks.

Pentti Saarikoski's The Edge of Europe: A Kinetic Image, reviewed by Summer Block

The Edge of Europe: A Kinetic Image

Pentti Saarikoski, translated by Anselm Hollo
Action Books, 2007
ISBN 0-9765692-6-4
$16

Reviewed by Summer Block

"Call me whatever you want," Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski riffs in his highly allusive, frequently sardonic prose journal The Edge of Europe. His compatriots settled on "The Blond Beatle of the North," and for a time in the 1960s and 70s Saarikoski was Finland’s rock star poet, voice of the "Generation of ’68," living in a region described by translator Anselm Hollo as a "‘buffer zone’ country whose political climate in the Cold War years presented far greater ambiguities than that of the major Western countries."

The Edge of Europe, published in Finland in 1982 and available now in English from Action Books, is a sort of personal diary or highly autobiographic novel that Saarikoski wrote in the odd spaces while working on his final major poetic work, the three-volume Trilogy. At this time Saarikoski had left Finland, setting himself up with his partner Mia Berner and a cat named Heraclitus on the small island of Stavanger off the west coast of Sweden. From this old house he made forays around the Western edge of Europe, traveling through Norway, Brittany, and Dublin, teaching himself Breton, and meeting a lot of lonely people.

The Edge of Europe can be considered stream of consciousness, a series of apparently disordered meditations that proceed nimbly one from the next, from housecats to saunas to Kierkegaard to Brigitte Bardot, a sort of frontier of the mind that echoes Saarikoski’s peripatetic frontier-hopping out at the edges of his troubled continent, in fishing villages in stark Norway or among the surly Bretons in France. Yet the stream of consciousness feeling is deceptive: behind the apparently aimless meandering of Saarikoski’s thoughts lies a tight series of causes and effects laid out in a style as mannered and artful as T.S. Eliot’s. Saarikoski always seems very much in control of his mind and of his writing, even when incapacitated by drink or by pity.

As he wanders, Saarikoski muses on Munich, Chagall, etymology, James Joyce, Odysseus, and the long, strange history of Europe’s wild places, including Vladimir Lenin’s own roots in "Chuvash territory." Yet the poet’s engagement with the physical world servers as a constant corrective to his corrosive intellect, throwing up lines like, "To my mind, the spruce is the most beautiful tree. It is the only tree that seems to know what it is," or "A cloud floats across the sky. Somehow, curiously, it looks as if it were lying on its back," or at last, more bleakly, "the sky is blue and turns the water blue as well, but when you look at them closely, neither is any color at all."

The nineteen-eighties at the edge of Europe were a politically charged time, and Saarikoski’s wide-ranging intellect finds the usual targets. Many of his observations on Lenin and Marx have not aged well; they have become commonplaces. His teasing of Reagan and that president’s dangerous, disordered agedness now seems trite, or perhaps even a little mean-spirited. He is cynical and tired. He muses, "Thinking about important things such as for instance this Falkland Islands crisis is just a pain in the ass, trying to think about it gets you nowhere." His weariness threatens to make the reader weary. He is always failing to make love, or failing to bake bread, he is impotent.

And yet, he is right more often than he isn’t. Saarikoski muses on the First of May about those Communists who claimed, as the Nazis before them, that they didn’t know what they were supporting, "What is one to think of a human being who works, often selflessly and in a spirit of sacrifice, for a party that won’t let him/her know what is going on, what it wants, what its aims are?" As good a piece of common sense then as now, and as relevant, in this age of furtive security operations and willful blindness.

Saarikoski can come off unremittingly bleak: "In a life," he says, "no one has time to develop into anything other than what he had managed to develop into when he joined the work force, it is futile to think that there is anything to a short human lifespan except for decay and death, first there are these twenty years and then you start taking them apart again, there isn’t room for more in a human life, in a backpack, there they are, your memories, your clothes, your t-shirt, shorts and pants, all the knowledge and experience you’ve gathered, and you carry that backpack so that when you arrive you might understand that the whole trip was in vain, it didn’t get you anywhere."

He can also be a dilettante, a complainer, a curmudgeon, and a misogynist. Nevertheless, he turns towards the world a diffuse, steady sympathy. Like a true intellectual, he is open to experience, to meeting new people and seeing them for who they are, for letting go of his preconceptions. "Visitors thought he was a local guy and the locals thought he was a stranger," he images his wife saying about himself in an extended metaphor. (His conceits, and there are many of them, never get away from him; you can be assured that pages of winding metaphor will tie together neatly at last.)

The Edge of Europe is a raw, bawdy book, and not opposed to a touch of vulgarity, though often of the smart sort – musings on Joyce’s onanistic tendencies, for example. There are few things Saarikoski is not willing to say, personal or political. In this "anything goes" atmosphere he uses ellipiticism to great effect. The careful domestic details of Saarikoski’s life are shy and lovely. He says of his partner, "It occurred to me that we just might, after the sauna, being clean and all, but after we were done and she had berated me for using her towel, thus causing it to reek of my sweat forever, I no longer thought about it." Everything unsaid here is heartbreaking. Saarikoski’s willingness to be combatitive, fatalistic, a pedant and a pugilist, make his unexpected tenderness all the more affecting. He earns the right to say, "That’s the way it is in a marriage, when two clocks show the same time, that is the correct time for them even if all the other clocks in the world begged to differ," and inspire no wincing. He is tough-minded, with a great heart.

A novella is rarely the best introduction to a poet’s work, or a private journal to an artist’s more polished successes, but The Edge of Europe serves as a fine introduction to Saarikoski, the man as well as the poet. This slim volume is a fine example of a great mind at work on his life’s long project: "I was reminded of the spring evenings of my youth in Helsinki, lonely walks and rambles by the seaside, when it had already become clear that something in my life had gone irrevocably wrong. I started writing books in order to find out when and where that had happened, and writing I found out many things, but not that one."

***

Summer Block has published essays, short fiction, and poetry in a variety of publications, including McSweeneys, Small Spiral Notebook, DIAGRAM, the San Francisco Chronicle, Monkeybicycle, Stirring, ALARM, Identity Theory, January Magazine, and Rain Taxi. Find her work at http://www.summerblock.com/.