CONTENTS: Interview with a Poet * Reviews * Visual Art * Video * Special to SoFloPoJo * SUBMIT * POETRY ISSUES: #1 May 2016 * #2 Aug 2016 * #3 Nov 2016 * #4 Feb 2017 * #5 May 2017 * #6 Aug 2017 * #7 Nov 2017 * #8 Feb 2018 * #9 May 2018 * #10 Aug 2018 * #11 Nov 2018 * #12 Feb 2019 * #13 May 2019 * #14 Aug 2019 * #15 Nov 2019 * #16 Feb 2020 * #17 May 2020 * #18 Aug 2020 * #19 Nov 2020
South Florida Poetry Journal's staff reviewers choose the books they want to review. Neither management, nor editors, assign books to review. Poets & Writers however, has a list of journals that considers reviews. Click here to go there.
February 2021
An Alchemy of Forms and Desire:
A Review of The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, by Jesse De Long
(Baobab Press, 2021, $16.95)
—by Michael Hettich
Jesse De Long’s debut collection, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, teems with formally-dexterous, invigorating poems whose subjects, verse-forms
and tonal shifts range from intimate, deeply-personal lyrics to outward-looking, scholarly meditations--yet manages to braid all these disparate voicings into a coherent,
satisfying whole. The best poems here wake us to an alertness that is one of the salient functions of true art. We leave this book as we leave a gallery after viewing a
challenging, powerful exhibition: for a while we walk around with freshly-cleared eyes, marveling at the teeming details and shadings of light we rarely attend to. That is: for
a few moments, we see the world fresh.
The essence of good poetry lies in its formal thinking, the way the forms the poet employs lead him or her to revelations that would be otherwise
unavailable. Such formal thinking has little to do with traditional structures except insofar as the good poet must have craft, and to have craft one must have steeped oneself
in the time-honored practices of one’s art. But the task of true craft is to somehow go beyond the merely traditional into the personal, innovative, and genuinely new. The
best poets teach us how to read their work, and in many of the poems here, De Long is an exemplary teacher. The tonal shifts and voices of his poems startle at first, then
draw us closer, to listen and see:
You spoke:
The shallows are murky
where your feet floundered.
your spine a river
& my chest a cutbank.
Drawing your hands
from the current, you drape water
down your hair so strands
Your ribs stone pillars
& my mouth constant wind.
settle on your neck. As you turn
to me, a thread dissects
your forehead. Skitter bugs
My hand a shovel
& your stomach hard earth.
crackle over the sound
of a river falling from you…
(“Floret as Bird”)
In other poems De Long employs journalistic techniques and scientific notation along with lyric, pastoral, confessional and “organic” forms to create a wide
array of voices, textures and content – autonomous utterances welded into a coherent whole. While some poems employ columns of prose next to verse fragments and
factual notation, others employ chunks of unbroken prose to render the figures, voices—and thinking—of such disparate figures as Isaac Newton and John Donne:
Picture Newton as an older boy, almost a man. This would be during some summer at his family’s farm in Woolsthorpe. While he was digging an
irrigation ditch, he noticed a girl amble up the road, holding a parcel of letters & a package wrapped in brown paper. When she neared him, she
rested beside three makeshift graves… From the paper, the girl unwrapped an apple. As Isaac strained under the meeting strengths of shovel &
earth, he watched her eat the fruit to its core. When she finished, she allowed their eyes to meet & placed the core on top of the grave & continued
up the road…
(“Newton and the Law of Grave Eating”)
Such cinematic depictions are juxtaposed against moments of lovely intimacy:
Because my side of the sheet has lost light’s warmth, I scoot close, press my stomach to your spine. We share what makes us visible.
(“Light Withdrawals/Experiments in the Field of Light”)
The fact that this book is difficult to render through snippets of quotation is a testament to the richness of its ambitions, its richness of observations, and the exuberance of
its linguistic thrill. It should also be noted that, despite its aspirations, this is a deeply unpretentious book; the poet’s enthusiasms are wide; his embrace of the big world, of
the intimacies of daily life and of history--as well as of the possibilities of his art--saves his work from both pretention and obfuscation while allowing him to reach beyond
the more well-trodden and familiar paths of contemporary poetry. The Amateur’s Scientist’s Notebook is, in short, a pleasure.
Jesse DeLong teaches Composition and Literature at Louisiana State University, but he grew up in Northern Idaho and Western Montana. He holds a B.A.in English from the University of Montana and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Alabama. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner as well as the journals Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Typo. With book artist Sonja G. Rossow, he has published several artist’s books and chapbooks, including Tearings and Other Poems, and Earthwards, both through Curley Head Press. Other than traditional academic settings, DeLong has taught Literature at Donaldson Correctional Facility and has worked as a Case Manager at a Reentry Services Center, teaching hard-and-soft-skill courses, such as Anger Management and Parenting, to parolees and probationers. He resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book is To Start an Orchard (Press 53, 2019). A new book, The Mica Mine, Is forthcoming. Hettich is SoFloPoJo’s official reviewer.
A Review of The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, by Jesse De Long
(Baobab Press, 2021, $16.95)
—by Michael Hettich
Jesse De Long’s debut collection, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, teems with formally-dexterous, invigorating poems whose subjects, verse-forms
and tonal shifts range from intimate, deeply-personal lyrics to outward-looking, scholarly meditations--yet manages to braid all these disparate voicings into a coherent,
satisfying whole. The best poems here wake us to an alertness that is one of the salient functions of true art. We leave this book as we leave a gallery after viewing a
challenging, powerful exhibition: for a while we walk around with freshly-cleared eyes, marveling at the teeming details and shadings of light we rarely attend to. That is: for
a few moments, we see the world fresh.
The essence of good poetry lies in its formal thinking, the way the forms the poet employs lead him or her to revelations that would be otherwise
unavailable. Such formal thinking has little to do with traditional structures except insofar as the good poet must have craft, and to have craft one must have steeped oneself
in the time-honored practices of one’s art. But the task of true craft is to somehow go beyond the merely traditional into the personal, innovative, and genuinely new. The
best poets teach us how to read their work, and in many of the poems here, De Long is an exemplary teacher. The tonal shifts and voices of his poems startle at first, then
draw us closer, to listen and see:
You spoke:
The shallows are murky
where your feet floundered.
your spine a river
& my chest a cutbank.
Drawing your hands
from the current, you drape water
down your hair so strands
Your ribs stone pillars
& my mouth constant wind.
settle on your neck. As you turn
to me, a thread dissects
your forehead. Skitter bugs
My hand a shovel
& your stomach hard earth.
crackle over the sound
of a river falling from you…
(“Floret as Bird”)
In other poems De Long employs journalistic techniques and scientific notation along with lyric, pastoral, confessional and “organic” forms to create a wide
array of voices, textures and content – autonomous utterances welded into a coherent whole. While some poems employ columns of prose next to verse fragments and
factual notation, others employ chunks of unbroken prose to render the figures, voices—and thinking—of such disparate figures as Isaac Newton and John Donne:
Picture Newton as an older boy, almost a man. This would be during some summer at his family’s farm in Woolsthorpe. While he was digging an
irrigation ditch, he noticed a girl amble up the road, holding a parcel of letters & a package wrapped in brown paper. When she neared him, she
rested beside three makeshift graves… From the paper, the girl unwrapped an apple. As Isaac strained under the meeting strengths of shovel &
earth, he watched her eat the fruit to its core. When she finished, she allowed their eyes to meet & placed the core on top of the grave & continued
up the road…
(“Newton and the Law of Grave Eating”)
Such cinematic depictions are juxtaposed against moments of lovely intimacy:
Because my side of the sheet has lost light’s warmth, I scoot close, press my stomach to your spine. We share what makes us visible.
(“Light Withdrawals/Experiments in the Field of Light”)
The fact that this book is difficult to render through snippets of quotation is a testament to the richness of its ambitions, its richness of observations, and the exuberance of
its linguistic thrill. It should also be noted that, despite its aspirations, this is a deeply unpretentious book; the poet’s enthusiasms are wide; his embrace of the big world, of
the intimacies of daily life and of history--as well as of the possibilities of his art--saves his work from both pretention and obfuscation while allowing him to reach beyond
the more well-trodden and familiar paths of contemporary poetry. The Amateur’s Scientist’s Notebook is, in short, a pleasure.
Jesse DeLong teaches Composition and Literature at Louisiana State University, but he grew up in Northern Idaho and Western Montana. He holds a B.A.in English from the University of Montana and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Alabama. His poems have appeared in the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner as well as the journals Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and Typo. With book artist Sonja G. Rossow, he has published several artist’s books and chapbooks, including Tearings and Other Poems, and Earthwards, both through Curley Head Press. Other than traditional academic settings, DeLong has taught Literature at Donaldson Correctional Facility and has worked as a Case Manager at a Reentry Services Center, teaching hard-and-soft-skill courses, such as Anger Management and Parenting, to parolees and probationers. He resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book is To Start an Orchard (Press 53, 2019). A new book, The Mica Mine, Is forthcoming. Hettich is SoFloPoJo’s official reviewer.
I Wish My Father by Lesléa Newman
(Headmistress Press, 2020, $15)
Reviewed by Freesia McKee
One of Lesléa Newman’s lifelong projects is to write books that start community conversations. Her newest collection, I Wish My Father, would be useful to anyone processing the challenges of eldercare, especially in a society that often renders this work invisible.
The book, published by Headmistress Press (full disclosure: my chapbook was also published by Headmistress), chronicles the final years of a father’s life through the eyes of a daughter who is trying to balance keeping him safe and respecting his autonomy. Achieving this balance becomes especially tenuous because the father is a spunky, headstrong lawyer who still takes the train to his office in Brooklyn as an octogenarian, “too proud to accept the seat/that surely someone must have offered/the bedraggled 89-year-old businessman.”
I Wish My Father is funny as hell, driven by Mr. Newman’s seemingly endless wise-ass comments like, “I was supposed to drop dead/at my desk when I was 75/maybe 80, and leave your mother/a million bucks.” The way the daughter tells it, it seems that this humor is an essential part of her dad’s personality, but it’s also the manner in which he’s processing the recent loss of his wife (the inciting incident of the book) and his declining capacity to practice law, inability to live independently, and deteriorating health.
One of the things that makes family eldercare so difficult is that it morphs familial roles: the child manages decisions for the parent while the parent is forced to face their loss of power. Accepting this can be difficult for both parties, and I Wish My Father addresses many aspects of the grueling nature of this transition. Newman shows us day-after-day worrying and coaxing and the exhaustion of needing to remain on one’s feet. “…I am the daughter/who takes care of everything./I am the daughter/who fixes everything./I am the daughter who doesn’t/have the heart/to tell her disturbed/and disturbing father/there are no people next door,” Newman writes of her father’s nightly hallucinations.
Because this memoir-in-verse is relayed with a nuanced honesty, we become endeared to the feisty, full of life father even though we know from the beginning that we have “finally drop[ped] down//into a seat beside him/to wait and wonder/when on earth he’ll be called.”
The daughter, of course, knows this, too. But she is equally hilarious, or—dare I say—funnier than the father because of the decades she’s spent honing her observation skills and, maybe, watching him joke. She takes a page from his book as she uses humor to process her inevitable grief.
After her father’s decline, entry into assisted living, and ultimate death, in one of the many poems where the title slides into the first stanza, Newman writes, “My Father Was Never,” “on time once in his entire life./We could always count/on him being a good 20 minutes/early.”
She builds example after example of her father’s compulsive timeliness, including the text of a thank you note he received: “Dear Mr. Newman,/Thank you for coming to my Bar Mitzvah./You were the first one there.” In a loving jab her father would surely have approved of, Newman finishes the poem, “I wonder just how early he was/and how on earth he would feel/to learn that from this day forth//for all time he will always/and forever be known/as the late Mr. Newman.”
I Wish My Father is the sequel to Newman’s I Carry My Mother, which I reviewed for another publication in 2016. I would recommend both books for any person interested in a thoughtful reflection on how eldercare changes the roles in a family and how to commemorate beloved parents in all their beauty, comedy, and complication.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap. She is also Guest Editor for SoFloPoJo's November 2020 issue.
Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
(Headmistress Press, 2020, $15)
Reviewed by Freesia McKee
One of Lesléa Newman’s lifelong projects is to write books that start community conversations. Her newest collection, I Wish My Father, would be useful to anyone processing the challenges of eldercare, especially in a society that often renders this work invisible.
The book, published by Headmistress Press (full disclosure: my chapbook was also published by Headmistress), chronicles the final years of a father’s life through the eyes of a daughter who is trying to balance keeping him safe and respecting his autonomy. Achieving this balance becomes especially tenuous because the father is a spunky, headstrong lawyer who still takes the train to his office in Brooklyn as an octogenarian, “too proud to accept the seat/that surely someone must have offered/the bedraggled 89-year-old businessman.”
I Wish My Father is funny as hell, driven by Mr. Newman’s seemingly endless wise-ass comments like, “I was supposed to drop dead/at my desk when I was 75/maybe 80, and leave your mother/a million bucks.” The way the daughter tells it, it seems that this humor is an essential part of her dad’s personality, but it’s also the manner in which he’s processing the recent loss of his wife (the inciting incident of the book) and his declining capacity to practice law, inability to live independently, and deteriorating health.
One of the things that makes family eldercare so difficult is that it morphs familial roles: the child manages decisions for the parent while the parent is forced to face their loss of power. Accepting this can be difficult for both parties, and I Wish My Father addresses many aspects of the grueling nature of this transition. Newman shows us day-after-day worrying and coaxing and the exhaustion of needing to remain on one’s feet. “…I am the daughter/who takes care of everything./I am the daughter/who fixes everything./I am the daughter who doesn’t/have the heart/to tell her disturbed/and disturbing father/there are no people next door,” Newman writes of her father’s nightly hallucinations.
Because this memoir-in-verse is relayed with a nuanced honesty, we become endeared to the feisty, full of life father even though we know from the beginning that we have “finally drop[ped] down//into a seat beside him/to wait and wonder/when on earth he’ll be called.”
The daughter, of course, knows this, too. But she is equally hilarious, or—dare I say—funnier than the father because of the decades she’s spent honing her observation skills and, maybe, watching him joke. She takes a page from his book as she uses humor to process her inevitable grief.
After her father’s decline, entry into assisted living, and ultimate death, in one of the many poems where the title slides into the first stanza, Newman writes, “My Father Was Never,” “on time once in his entire life./We could always count/on him being a good 20 minutes/early.”
She builds example after example of her father’s compulsive timeliness, including the text of a thank you note he received: “Dear Mr. Newman,/Thank you for coming to my Bar Mitzvah./You were the first one there.” In a loving jab her father would surely have approved of, Newman finishes the poem, “I wonder just how early he was/and how on earth he would feel/to learn that from this day forth//for all time he will always/and forever be known/as the late Mr. Newman.”
I Wish My Father is the sequel to Newman’s I Carry My Mother, which I reviewed for another publication in 2016. I would recommend both books for any person interested in a thoughtful reflection on how eldercare changes the roles in a family and how to commemorate beloved parents in all their beauty, comedy, and complication.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap. She is also Guest Editor for SoFloPoJo's November 2020 issue.
Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
Guest Reviews
A review of We Know Each Other By Our Wounds by Jude Marr
—by Judy Ireland
Having read Jude Marr’s earlier chapbook, Breakfast for the Birds, I expected to find finely-wrought poems in their new volume, We Know Each Other By Our Wounds. I was not disappointed. Every line of every poem hits home. The expert wordplay that makes Marr’s poems so pleasurable when read aloud is put to good use in addressing unifying themes in this new book: embodiment, identity, language, freedom, privilege, and nature along with the dumb violence committed against it.
The wounds uncovered in these poems are universal. They come with the territory when one is embodied, made of matter, and especially when one’s embodiment is confined and labeled by social structures that do violence to the psyche. Marr suggests in “Taxonomies” that “taxonomy is death”, and later in the poem declares, “I must deviate”. In the poem after which the collection is titled, we find the poet acknowledging their privilege and their strictures, but still creating through the wounds, not from them or because of them:
when a poet’s lips are sewn
with twine, a scissor or a razorblade
may interstice
(sound dribbles through--
The family not only does violence to the individual in Marr’s poem, “Family Values”, it also acts as an agent of society to enforce the concepts of gender that are assigned to bodies without regard to their persons. The speaker asserts, “relatively speaking I am matter’s child, and matter/still: keep/my fucking family: keep/your binaries: I am me: not/a theory not a girl.” Humans are required to perform their perceived gender in “Dysmorphia in Drag,” which leaves one feeling “wrong-fleshed”.
Damaged humans find their corollary in fragile forests that are destroyed by fire. The entire human family does so much violence to the earth in later poems that the speaker in “Cognitive Dissonance” declares, “we broke the planet”. Containment and enclosure stunt the growth of a potted maple in “Horticulture as a Cure for Loneliness”, and we are told that being made of matter matters. Our embodiment dooms us, in a way, and I believe the author is showing us that the only way forward is through creation.
In the first poem of this collection, “Public Service Announcements”, the speaker says they are “only a seeker/after light—“. While the reality in these poems is often grim and hardening, I also found the light in poems such as “To the Man Who Left a Jar of Bees at the Bookstore”, in which the bookstore staff not only feed the bees that are forgotten but show them art prints, and set them where they can read through the glass. Similarly, I take heart from the determined but futile action described in the final image on the beach in “Old Womxn Take to the Road”, where the reader sees “womxn, just/catching waves in buckets, bowls and cups.”
Jude Marr has created images that are often cinematic and always vivid. They embody complex truths, and will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading these poems. We Know Each Other By Our Wounds will speak to the sense of being exiled or being “other” that almost every reader harbors within, for whatever reason, and the sheer beauty of language put to work in interesting new ways will offer you an experience you’re unlikely to forget anytime soon.
—by Judy Ireland
Having read Jude Marr’s earlier chapbook, Breakfast for the Birds, I expected to find finely-wrought poems in their new volume, We Know Each Other By Our Wounds. I was not disappointed. Every line of every poem hits home. The expert wordplay that makes Marr’s poems so pleasurable when read aloud is put to good use in addressing unifying themes in this new book: embodiment, identity, language, freedom, privilege, and nature along with the dumb violence committed against it.
The wounds uncovered in these poems are universal. They come with the territory when one is embodied, made of matter, and especially when one’s embodiment is confined and labeled by social structures that do violence to the psyche. Marr suggests in “Taxonomies” that “taxonomy is death”, and later in the poem declares, “I must deviate”. In the poem after which the collection is titled, we find the poet acknowledging their privilege and their strictures, but still creating through the wounds, not from them or because of them:
when a poet’s lips are sewn
with twine, a scissor or a razorblade
may interstice
(sound dribbles through--
The family not only does violence to the individual in Marr’s poem, “Family Values”, it also acts as an agent of society to enforce the concepts of gender that are assigned to bodies without regard to their persons. The speaker asserts, “relatively speaking I am matter’s child, and matter/still: keep/my fucking family: keep/your binaries: I am me: not/a theory not a girl.” Humans are required to perform their perceived gender in “Dysmorphia in Drag,” which leaves one feeling “wrong-fleshed”.
Damaged humans find their corollary in fragile forests that are destroyed by fire. The entire human family does so much violence to the earth in later poems that the speaker in “Cognitive Dissonance” declares, “we broke the planet”. Containment and enclosure stunt the growth of a potted maple in “Horticulture as a Cure for Loneliness”, and we are told that being made of matter matters. Our embodiment dooms us, in a way, and I believe the author is showing us that the only way forward is through creation.
In the first poem of this collection, “Public Service Announcements”, the speaker says they are “only a seeker/after light—“. While the reality in these poems is often grim and hardening, I also found the light in poems such as “To the Man Who Left a Jar of Bees at the Bookstore”, in which the bookstore staff not only feed the bees that are forgotten but show them art prints, and set them where they can read through the glass. Similarly, I take heart from the determined but futile action described in the final image on the beach in “Old Womxn Take to the Road”, where the reader sees “womxn, just/catching waves in buckets, bowls and cups.”
Jude Marr has created images that are often cinematic and always vivid. They embody complex truths, and will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading these poems. We Know Each Other By Our Wounds will speak to the sense of being exiled or being “other” that almost every reader harbors within, for whatever reason, and the sheer beauty of language put to work in interesting new ways will offer you an experience you’re unlikely to forget anytime soon.
A Review of Cynthia Atkins’ Still-Life with God
—by Judy Ireland
There is religion in Cynthia Atkins’ Still-Life with God, and then there is God. God is not confined in these poems but embodied in the objects of life, existing under our very noses. Religion is a clergyman fondling a church organist, but God is something much greater: a wishing well, a treasure hunt, an alibi, a medicine cabinet, a library, an editor, a shock jock, a bullet, a butter dish, a myth. God is active in everyday lives but is clearly not a flawless deity. God is a rapist, and Mother Nature the victim, who then responds by conjuring Art.
One of the miracles of Atkins’ book is her ability to give us a mythic God and an ordinary god, as well as a Goddess who is folding sheets in a laundromat, “pink curlers of baroque/in her hair, singing and creasing/a t-shirt with sequins.” The poem, “A Goddess in Purple Rain”, is an homage to Prince, but it is also one of many poems pointing to other forces that make up this existence to which we all belong. “We are all in the body of this night,” the speaker of the poem says. “The stars allow/me to follow her….”
There is something abundant and universal about this collection of poems, even beyond the theological and artistic concerns indicated by the book’s title. Atkins’ poems explore the nature of the self, of the body, of family relationships including childhood and marriage, as well as the ubiquity of violence in all aspects of life. Her images harken back to an earlier time with S&H green stamps and phone booths, but they also point to our own century, full of the internet, selfies, and “alt-sleuths”.
Images of enclosure are rife throughout all four sections of this collection. We are introduced to the “spare room of loneliness” in “Anorexia Nervosa”, and to “the empty room of never” in “Phone Booth”. There are “polite rooms/where I keep my hands folded and mouth shut” in “God is My Alibi”, and the speaker in the same poem says, “I am dizzy in a room/with many doors”. In addition to rooms, there are phone booths and photo booths and people inside metal cars in the middle of a traffic jam. The emotions of sorrow, loss and longing are paramount within and outside of these enclosures, and in many poems, there are an abundance of shadows.
Cynthia Atkins’ Still-Life with God feels important and essential, and not at all as heavy as one might expect from a collection of poems built around such heavy topics. The fact that joy is often followed by violence in these poems does not discount the fact that the joy is there. The sound of these poems pleases the ear, and their titles surprise and intrigue the reader. It is possible to go into this volume of poems again and again to gather the “little chicks/hatching like word of mouth/in a town where the streets/are nouns….” in “Type”, or to listen to “the bird paying rent with song” in “Cuckoo Clock”. These poems deserve our close attention as readers and as human beings, engaged with the big questions of life and with its smaller but most intriguing details.
To buy a copy of this book, visit: https://bookshop.org/books/still-life-with-god/9781733023306?aid=63
—by Judy Ireland
There is religion in Cynthia Atkins’ Still-Life with God, and then there is God. God is not confined in these poems but embodied in the objects of life, existing under our very noses. Religion is a clergyman fondling a church organist, but God is something much greater: a wishing well, a treasure hunt, an alibi, a medicine cabinet, a library, an editor, a shock jock, a bullet, a butter dish, a myth. God is active in everyday lives but is clearly not a flawless deity. God is a rapist, and Mother Nature the victim, who then responds by conjuring Art.
One of the miracles of Atkins’ book is her ability to give us a mythic God and an ordinary god, as well as a Goddess who is folding sheets in a laundromat, “pink curlers of baroque/in her hair, singing and creasing/a t-shirt with sequins.” The poem, “A Goddess in Purple Rain”, is an homage to Prince, but it is also one of many poems pointing to other forces that make up this existence to which we all belong. “We are all in the body of this night,” the speaker of the poem says. “The stars allow/me to follow her….”
There is something abundant and universal about this collection of poems, even beyond the theological and artistic concerns indicated by the book’s title. Atkins’ poems explore the nature of the self, of the body, of family relationships including childhood and marriage, as well as the ubiquity of violence in all aspects of life. Her images harken back to an earlier time with S&H green stamps and phone booths, but they also point to our own century, full of the internet, selfies, and “alt-sleuths”.
Images of enclosure are rife throughout all four sections of this collection. We are introduced to the “spare room of loneliness” in “Anorexia Nervosa”, and to “the empty room of never” in “Phone Booth”. There are “polite rooms/where I keep my hands folded and mouth shut” in “God is My Alibi”, and the speaker in the same poem says, “I am dizzy in a room/with many doors”. In addition to rooms, there are phone booths and photo booths and people inside metal cars in the middle of a traffic jam. The emotions of sorrow, loss and longing are paramount within and outside of these enclosures, and in many poems, there are an abundance of shadows.
Cynthia Atkins’ Still-Life with God feels important and essential, and not at all as heavy as one might expect from a collection of poems built around such heavy topics. The fact that joy is often followed by violence in these poems does not discount the fact that the joy is there. The sound of these poems pleases the ear, and their titles surprise and intrigue the reader. It is possible to go into this volume of poems again and again to gather the “little chicks/hatching like word of mouth/in a town where the streets/are nouns….” in “Type”, or to listen to “the bird paying rent with song” in “Cuckoo Clock”. These poems deserve our close attention as readers and as human beings, engaged with the big questions of life and with its smaller but most intriguing details.
To buy a copy of this book, visit: https://bookshop.org/books/still-life-with-god/9781733023306?aid=63
November 2020
Grace Amidst Confusion: a review of Avalon, by Richard Jones (Green Linden Press, $16)
—by Michael Hettich
In this disjunct time, when cynicism and lies swarm the air like gnats, it’s a great solace to find a poet whose work is suffused with what can only be called love, a poet whose vision, though fully engaged with the fractures and griefs of this moment, is imbued with a sense of wonder, humor and compassion for all, including himself. Richard Jones has been writing such poems for many years. His numerous books published by Copper Canyon Press as well as stellar chapbooks from Adastra Press and other small publishers, to say nothing of his translations or of his work editing Poetry East, have distinguished him as one of our most valuable poets. His new book, Avalon, from Green Linden Press, is as strong as anything he has previously written, a work of great tenderness and vision.
Many of the poems in Avalon take the reader on spiritual journeys through realms of confusion and sorrow leading toward a sense that, somehow, amidst our existential bewilderment, the wonder of our very being holds transcendent truths we’ve yet to plumb, truths that might enthrall us were we to embrace them. A citizen of our time, Jones is nevertheless a kind of visionary, a poet who risks vulnerability to achieve the kind of innocence that makes revelation possible. His poems often start in the particulars of his own life to seamlessly move into fable-like narratives in which the ineffable is glimpsed, the unsayable (almost) whispered. And though what’s glimpsed eludes the speaker’s full grasp, nevertheless he knows it’s there, that moment out of time when the truth of each moment is revealed. In short, these poems simultaneously enact and document instances of grace, blessings in the midst of confusion:
I want the rain to tease open the seed
of my heart, to nourish the little flowers
of the mind, so they’ll blossom and grow…
So I go outside and the hard rain soaks me,
soaks me and blesses me down to the bone.
(“Rain”)
*
Then a blessing came from the fields
or the sky—it was all the same now--
and I gave myself over to the blizzard,
driving unhurriedly, listening to Vivaldi,
one hand on the wheel, relaxed, calm,
looking ahead and seeing nothing at all.
(“The Blizzard”)
The fact that he is willing to take the risk—of sentimentality and bathos--implicit in lines like these shows Jones as a poet of rare artistic courage: the courage to be open, tender and vulnerable without displaying one’s particular wounds or distancing oneself with cynical wit or contrived complexity. If in their forthright vulnerability these poems are anything but fashionable, many of them sing with the ache of lasting art. The best of them speak with the timeless truth of parable.
Jones has a beautifully-modulated ear; his clear, uncluttered free verse has the authority of good prose and the lyricism of classic blank verse:
Astronomy
The white-haired astronomer is walking
across the quad with his colleague, talking
about the universe, the unseen order of things
swirling to the farthest reaches of the cosmos.
His young colleague, a nuclear physicist,
recognizes the subatomic constituency of reality
and sees in the smallest neutron the truth
of his friend’s rhapsodies. They walk along--
talking, gesticulating, excited. People in love
should be so excited, eyes bright, full of genius
and madness, knowing they are on the right path,
they can feel it, they believe it, and more importantly,
they can prove it on a blackboard with a piece of chalk.
Though never “confessional” in the conventional sense of that word, all of Jones’s poems are deeply personal, exploring not regrets and losses but rather yearnings—for the deepest connections to his family, to the world, to himself and, finally, to his God: “a praying mantis/ lands on my left forearm, / turns his head, and studies me. / The spiritual way he folds/ his long green wings/ makes me believe he’s here/ on a heavenly mission…” (“Avalon”).
How many contemporary poets can write convincingly of grace, or of being blessed by the world’s very challenges and confusions? Our blessings, for Jones, are located exactly where our confusions and griefs most pain us as feeling, yearning, tender-hearted humans. Often that grace is provided by poetry itself:
Grace
The task of the poet is to provide poems
that will help people live, as city workers
sawing storm-downed trees into stove-length
chunks provide firewood we need to survive
another winter. For a winter will come when
we will have no fire, no home, a winter when
people will walk two or three long, cold miles
for a roof, a modest meal, a metal folding chair
on which to sleep. There will come a time we
will have to rely on men debating unwritten laws,
laws governing fortune and fate, where we live
or die. The senate will meet, people will be
wandering from shelter to shelter, there will be
referendum after referendum. In those days
people will need poems of joy and happiness,
poems at least as useful as wildflowers--
corn poppy, cosmos, and feverfew picked
from summer roadsides and placed in halls
on long tables where widows and orphans
bow their heads to give thanks before eating.
Such poetry as this is always nutritious food, but it is particularly so in these ravaged, profoundly confusing times. For those that read them carefully and with an open heart, the poems of Avalon will provide not just aesthetic pleasure but a kind of solace as well.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems, To Start an Orchard, was published in September, 2019, by Press 53. A new book, The Mica Mine, won the Lena Schull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society and will be published by St Andrews University Press in 2021.
—by Michael Hettich
In this disjunct time, when cynicism and lies swarm the air like gnats, it’s a great solace to find a poet whose work is suffused with what can only be called love, a poet whose vision, though fully engaged with the fractures and griefs of this moment, is imbued with a sense of wonder, humor and compassion for all, including himself. Richard Jones has been writing such poems for many years. His numerous books published by Copper Canyon Press as well as stellar chapbooks from Adastra Press and other small publishers, to say nothing of his translations or of his work editing Poetry East, have distinguished him as one of our most valuable poets. His new book, Avalon, from Green Linden Press, is as strong as anything he has previously written, a work of great tenderness and vision.
Many of the poems in Avalon take the reader on spiritual journeys through realms of confusion and sorrow leading toward a sense that, somehow, amidst our existential bewilderment, the wonder of our very being holds transcendent truths we’ve yet to plumb, truths that might enthrall us were we to embrace them. A citizen of our time, Jones is nevertheless a kind of visionary, a poet who risks vulnerability to achieve the kind of innocence that makes revelation possible. His poems often start in the particulars of his own life to seamlessly move into fable-like narratives in which the ineffable is glimpsed, the unsayable (almost) whispered. And though what’s glimpsed eludes the speaker’s full grasp, nevertheless he knows it’s there, that moment out of time when the truth of each moment is revealed. In short, these poems simultaneously enact and document instances of grace, blessings in the midst of confusion:
I want the rain to tease open the seed
of my heart, to nourish the little flowers
of the mind, so they’ll blossom and grow…
So I go outside and the hard rain soaks me,
soaks me and blesses me down to the bone.
(“Rain”)
*
Then a blessing came from the fields
or the sky—it was all the same now--
and I gave myself over to the blizzard,
driving unhurriedly, listening to Vivaldi,
one hand on the wheel, relaxed, calm,
looking ahead and seeing nothing at all.
(“The Blizzard”)
The fact that he is willing to take the risk—of sentimentality and bathos--implicit in lines like these shows Jones as a poet of rare artistic courage: the courage to be open, tender and vulnerable without displaying one’s particular wounds or distancing oneself with cynical wit or contrived complexity. If in their forthright vulnerability these poems are anything but fashionable, many of them sing with the ache of lasting art. The best of them speak with the timeless truth of parable.
Jones has a beautifully-modulated ear; his clear, uncluttered free verse has the authority of good prose and the lyricism of classic blank verse:
Astronomy
The white-haired astronomer is walking
across the quad with his colleague, talking
about the universe, the unseen order of things
swirling to the farthest reaches of the cosmos.
His young colleague, a nuclear physicist,
recognizes the subatomic constituency of reality
and sees in the smallest neutron the truth
of his friend’s rhapsodies. They walk along--
talking, gesticulating, excited. People in love
should be so excited, eyes bright, full of genius
and madness, knowing they are on the right path,
they can feel it, they believe it, and more importantly,
they can prove it on a blackboard with a piece of chalk.
Though never “confessional” in the conventional sense of that word, all of Jones’s poems are deeply personal, exploring not regrets and losses but rather yearnings—for the deepest connections to his family, to the world, to himself and, finally, to his God: “a praying mantis/ lands on my left forearm, / turns his head, and studies me. / The spiritual way he folds/ his long green wings/ makes me believe he’s here/ on a heavenly mission…” (“Avalon”).
How many contemporary poets can write convincingly of grace, or of being blessed by the world’s very challenges and confusions? Our blessings, for Jones, are located exactly where our confusions and griefs most pain us as feeling, yearning, tender-hearted humans. Often that grace is provided by poetry itself:
Grace
The task of the poet is to provide poems
that will help people live, as city workers
sawing storm-downed trees into stove-length
chunks provide firewood we need to survive
another winter. For a winter will come when
we will have no fire, no home, a winter when
people will walk two or three long, cold miles
for a roof, a modest meal, a metal folding chair
on which to sleep. There will come a time we
will have to rely on men debating unwritten laws,
laws governing fortune and fate, where we live
or die. The senate will meet, people will be
wandering from shelter to shelter, there will be
referendum after referendum. In those days
people will need poems of joy and happiness,
poems at least as useful as wildflowers--
corn poppy, cosmos, and feverfew picked
from summer roadsides and placed in halls
on long tables where widows and orphans
bow their heads to give thanks before eating.
Such poetry as this is always nutritious food, but it is particularly so in these ravaged, profoundly confusing times. For those that read them carefully and with an open heart, the poems of Avalon will provide not just aesthetic pleasure but a kind of solace as well.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems, To Start an Orchard, was published in September, 2019, by Press 53. A new book, The Mica Mine, won the Lena Schull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society and will be published by St Andrews University Press in 2021.
The Burning Where Breath Used to Be by Jen Karetnick
2020, David Robert Books
by Freesia McKee
“Or I could catalog our traumas, our long/list of overripe injustices,” the speaker offers in Jen Karetnick’s The Burning Where Breath Used to Be. “Storms/have mostly now to do with what we have/done, how much worse they get depending/on what—or who—we burn…This might take a while.”
In the late October of 2020, near what many of us hope is the end of the four-year blare of a spinning siren of hate, it can feel like those in power have been playing wack-a-mole with the populace. Who just got hit? Who will be next? The writer is at once a documenting witness and experiential participant, both implicated in and targeted by the harsh blows of power.
The Burning Where Breath Used to Be is about belonging. When do I fit? When am I left out? The speaker of these poems deals with (un)belonging as a daughter, a Jewish American woman surviving the Trump era, a teacher in charge of keeping the perils of the modern classroom at bay, and an artist observing the world. Karetnick also discusses the sense of (un)belonging in a body, that body each of us is given, that body which will inevitably fail us through genetics, aging, or other elements of fate.
A number of the poems in the book are direct cultural criticism, such as the arresting “What We Did”:
We did handstands and YOLO leaps at the Holocaust Centers.
We photo-bombed other tourists at the Holocaust Centers.
We fish-lipped into selfies at the Holocaust Centers…
Other poems pay keen attention to scientific language, especially genetics. I pulled out my dictionary more than once while reading this book to look up epigenesis, anthropogenesis, eukaryotic, gastroparesis, and more. Readers will wonder what they remember of high school biology class as they come to understand the cool role of this vocabulary in poems.
Not limited to one cultural well, Karetnick also invokes classic Americana. An ekphrastic poem addressed to Normal Rockwell’s iconic painting “Freedom From Want” invokes the “Irish maid” who’s depicted placing the opulent Thanksgiving turkey on the table while everyone is oblivious to her presence and her labor. What does she want? Why have I never wondered this?
Giving voice to women who are usually regarded as bystanders instead of central actors is a signature move in Karetnick’s work. These poems center the kid sister teased during a neighborhood game, the adult sister berated in the car over Bluetooth, the young professional sexually harassed by a colleague, the English teacher trying to make sense of a world in which high school students die. We see her, we hear her; she speaks to us.
In “Nobody Dies Because They Don’t Have Access to Health Care,” the title a direct quotation from a republican member of congress, Karetnick personifies “Nobody” in the spirit of Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” The results are yet another effort to give voice to a woman.
…Nobody only pre-exists
before what is not likely
to be a grand exit
but the kind few
notice…
Karetnick is skilled at creating her own formal containers for poems. Her poems often provide readers with formal conceits that build the kind of reader-writer trust necessary to take on so many social issues in a single collection. I found myself willing to open every door Karetnick set up in front of me. Listing is also a signature move of this poet—she is obsessed with building her case through providing many examples so that we cannot help but sign onto the message of the poem. Using the litany, she is addressing power through language. She asks how we might use language to map power structures. She asks us to use language to find justice.
No matter what happens this fall, The Burning Where Breath Used to Be will be a sure bet for readers because it addresses concerns that extend beyond a single candidate or administration: gun violence, sexism, xenophobia, brutal arrogance, and how we can address risks and fears, our familiar strife, through language.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap. She is also Guest Editor for SoFloPoJo's November 2020 issue.
Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
2020, David Robert Books
by Freesia McKee
“Or I could catalog our traumas, our long/list of overripe injustices,” the speaker offers in Jen Karetnick’s The Burning Where Breath Used to Be. “Storms/have mostly now to do with what we have/done, how much worse they get depending/on what—or who—we burn…This might take a while.”
In the late October of 2020, near what many of us hope is the end of the four-year blare of a spinning siren of hate, it can feel like those in power have been playing wack-a-mole with the populace. Who just got hit? Who will be next? The writer is at once a documenting witness and experiential participant, both implicated in and targeted by the harsh blows of power.
The Burning Where Breath Used to Be is about belonging. When do I fit? When am I left out? The speaker of these poems deals with (un)belonging as a daughter, a Jewish American woman surviving the Trump era, a teacher in charge of keeping the perils of the modern classroom at bay, and an artist observing the world. Karetnick also discusses the sense of (un)belonging in a body, that body each of us is given, that body which will inevitably fail us through genetics, aging, or other elements of fate.
A number of the poems in the book are direct cultural criticism, such as the arresting “What We Did”:
We did handstands and YOLO leaps at the Holocaust Centers.
We photo-bombed other tourists at the Holocaust Centers.
We fish-lipped into selfies at the Holocaust Centers…
Other poems pay keen attention to scientific language, especially genetics. I pulled out my dictionary more than once while reading this book to look up epigenesis, anthropogenesis, eukaryotic, gastroparesis, and more. Readers will wonder what they remember of high school biology class as they come to understand the cool role of this vocabulary in poems.
Not limited to one cultural well, Karetnick also invokes classic Americana. An ekphrastic poem addressed to Normal Rockwell’s iconic painting “Freedom From Want” invokes the “Irish maid” who’s depicted placing the opulent Thanksgiving turkey on the table while everyone is oblivious to her presence and her labor. What does she want? Why have I never wondered this?
Giving voice to women who are usually regarded as bystanders instead of central actors is a signature move in Karetnick’s work. These poems center the kid sister teased during a neighborhood game, the adult sister berated in the car over Bluetooth, the young professional sexually harassed by a colleague, the English teacher trying to make sense of a world in which high school students die. We see her, we hear her; she speaks to us.
In “Nobody Dies Because They Don’t Have Access to Health Care,” the title a direct quotation from a republican member of congress, Karetnick personifies “Nobody” in the spirit of Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” The results are yet another effort to give voice to a woman.
…Nobody only pre-exists
before what is not likely
to be a grand exit
but the kind few
notice…
Karetnick is skilled at creating her own formal containers for poems. Her poems often provide readers with formal conceits that build the kind of reader-writer trust necessary to take on so many social issues in a single collection. I found myself willing to open every door Karetnick set up in front of me. Listing is also a signature move of this poet—she is obsessed with building her case through providing many examples so that we cannot help but sign onto the message of the poem. Using the litany, she is addressing power through language. She asks how we might use language to map power structures. She asks us to use language to find justice.
No matter what happens this fall, The Burning Where Breath Used to Be will be a sure bet for readers because it addresses concerns that extend beyond a single candidate or administration: gun violence, sexism, xenophobia, brutal arrogance, and how we can address risks and fears, our familiar strife, through language.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap. She is also Guest Editor for SoFloPoJo's November 2020 issue.
Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
August 2020
Of Love and Revelation: A Review of Bonfire Opera, by Danusha Lameris
(Pitt Poetry Series, 2020, $17)
—by Michael Hettich
Denusha Lameris’s Bonfire Opera, a book of surprising, deeply moving personal lyrics, is a stellar example of what’s best in contemporary mainstream American poetry. Published in the ever-more-impressive and various Pitt Poetry Series, the poems in this book are masterfully crafted, emotionally challenging, and accessible--capable of speaking powerfully to both poets and general readers alike. While her poems break no new ground, the news Lameris brings us is intimate, timely, and often profoundly revelatory.
Bonfire Opera is built mostly of short autobiographical lyrics in uncluttered, nicely modulated free verse; their revelations arise from the most ordinary of human experiences, often without any strain or histrionics:
“My arm is so brown and beautiful,” is a thought I have
as I’m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep.
I look at it a moment in the soft glow, and see it, briefly,
as though it belonged to someone else...
(“O Darkness”)
Many of these poems reveal the ever-present magic embedded in ordinary life:
It was late afternoon and we were standing
on the deck overlooking the grey swath
of the Pacific, when my friends’ daughter,
then four, turned to me and pointed at the hawks
flying in the distance. I can call them if I want,
she said, tilting back her head to let out a long,
fierce caw which floated up over the marsh
and above the trees. At first, nothing. Then--
a slash in the distance...
(“Hawks”)
The clarity of cadence and diction here is characteristic of the poems in Bonfire Opera; this is poetry whose expert craft calls little attention to itself. And when Lameris delves into the almost unspeakable personal tragedies that have darkened her life, her self-effacing, understated art deepens our response:
No one wants to talk about the hilarity after death--
the way the week my brother shot himself,
his wife and I fell on the bed laughing
because she couldn’t decide what to wear for the big day,
and asked me, “Do I go for sexy or Amish?” I told her sexy.
And we rolled around on the mattress they’d shared
for eighteen years, clutching our sides...
(“Dressing for the Burial”)
In other poems, the very matter-of-factness in the simple understatement of grief moves us as lived experience does, in poems that feel like our own felt paths through the darkness:
Sometimes I can almost see him,
skinny legs, a striped shirt,
black hair tucked under a baseball cap.
He’s running through the backyard
with the other kids—my son--
chasing chickens, throwing a ball
against the fence...
(“Ghost Child”)
As the first of the above selections shows, Lameris is an expert in humor—not necessarily the kind that elicits laughter but instead that deeper species born of confusion and loss mixed with amazement at the world and the complexities of our human predicament. Her humor communicates a fully-earned consolation in the face of pain and suffering, a way of clearing a path for the soul’s journey forward. It is humor, certainly, but it’s more than simply that:
In those days, there was a woman in our circle
who was known, not only for her beauty,
but also for taking off all her clothes and singing opera.
And sure enough, as the night wore on and the stars
emerged to stare at their reflection in the sea,
and everyone had drunk a little wine,
she began to disrobe, lose her great bosom
and the tender belly, pale in the moonlight,
the Viking hips, and to let her torn raiment
fall to the sand as we looked up from the flames...
(“Bonfire Opera)
If some of the volume’s later poems strain a bit mechanically toward their insights, still this is a book that matters, full of poems that give pleasure and move us, poems of authentic need and craft. Finally, despite the profundity of grief at its core, Bonfire Opera is a book of affirmation: This poetry reminds us that life aches with beauty; each day is potent with small miracles, if we open our eyes and hearts to them. The best poems here are vehicles to that opening:
I lie on the ground and let the sun fall across my back,
as I’ve been doing for the past hour, listening to the distant traffic,
to the call of birds I cannot name. Once, there was so much
I thought I needed. Now, all I know is that I want
to get closer to it: the rocky slope, the orange petals
of the nasturtium adorning the fence, the wind’s sudden breath.
Close enough that I can almost feel, at night, the slight pressure
of the stars against my skin...
(“Stone”)
Truly words to live by in these troubled, disjointed times.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems, To Start an Orchard, was published in 2019.
(Pitt Poetry Series, 2020, $17)
—by Michael Hettich
Denusha Lameris’s Bonfire Opera, a book of surprising, deeply moving personal lyrics, is a stellar example of what’s best in contemporary mainstream American poetry. Published in the ever-more-impressive and various Pitt Poetry Series, the poems in this book are masterfully crafted, emotionally challenging, and accessible--capable of speaking powerfully to both poets and general readers alike. While her poems break no new ground, the news Lameris brings us is intimate, timely, and often profoundly revelatory.
Bonfire Opera is built mostly of short autobiographical lyrics in uncluttered, nicely modulated free verse; their revelations arise from the most ordinary of human experiences, often without any strain or histrionics:
“My arm is so brown and beautiful,” is a thought I have
as I’m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep.
I look at it a moment in the soft glow, and see it, briefly,
as though it belonged to someone else...
(“O Darkness”)
Many of these poems reveal the ever-present magic embedded in ordinary life:
It was late afternoon and we were standing
on the deck overlooking the grey swath
of the Pacific, when my friends’ daughter,
then four, turned to me and pointed at the hawks
flying in the distance. I can call them if I want,
she said, tilting back her head to let out a long,
fierce caw which floated up over the marsh
and above the trees. At first, nothing. Then--
a slash in the distance...
(“Hawks”)
The clarity of cadence and diction here is characteristic of the poems in Bonfire Opera; this is poetry whose expert craft calls little attention to itself. And when Lameris delves into the almost unspeakable personal tragedies that have darkened her life, her self-effacing, understated art deepens our response:
No one wants to talk about the hilarity after death--
the way the week my brother shot himself,
his wife and I fell on the bed laughing
because she couldn’t decide what to wear for the big day,
and asked me, “Do I go for sexy or Amish?” I told her sexy.
And we rolled around on the mattress they’d shared
for eighteen years, clutching our sides...
(“Dressing for the Burial”)
In other poems, the very matter-of-factness in the simple understatement of grief moves us as lived experience does, in poems that feel like our own felt paths through the darkness:
Sometimes I can almost see him,
skinny legs, a striped shirt,
black hair tucked under a baseball cap.
He’s running through the backyard
with the other kids—my son--
chasing chickens, throwing a ball
against the fence...
(“Ghost Child”)
As the first of the above selections shows, Lameris is an expert in humor—not necessarily the kind that elicits laughter but instead that deeper species born of confusion and loss mixed with amazement at the world and the complexities of our human predicament. Her humor communicates a fully-earned consolation in the face of pain and suffering, a way of clearing a path for the soul’s journey forward. It is humor, certainly, but it’s more than simply that:
In those days, there was a woman in our circle
who was known, not only for her beauty,
but also for taking off all her clothes and singing opera.
And sure enough, as the night wore on and the stars
emerged to stare at their reflection in the sea,
and everyone had drunk a little wine,
she began to disrobe, lose her great bosom
and the tender belly, pale in the moonlight,
the Viking hips, and to let her torn raiment
fall to the sand as we looked up from the flames...
(“Bonfire Opera)
If some of the volume’s later poems strain a bit mechanically toward their insights, still this is a book that matters, full of poems that give pleasure and move us, poems of authentic need and craft. Finally, despite the profundity of grief at its core, Bonfire Opera is a book of affirmation: This poetry reminds us that life aches with beauty; each day is potent with small miracles, if we open our eyes and hearts to them. The best poems here are vehicles to that opening:
I lie on the ground and let the sun fall across my back,
as I’ve been doing for the past hour, listening to the distant traffic,
to the call of birds I cannot name. Once, there was so much
I thought I needed. Now, all I know is that I want
to get closer to it: the rocky slope, the orange petals
of the nasturtium adorning the fence, the wind’s sudden breath.
Close enough that I can almost feel, at night, the slight pressure
of the stars against my skin...
(“Stone”)
Truly words to live by in these troubled, disjointed times.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems, To Start an Orchard, was published in 2019.
Guest Reviews
Obscura by Frank Paino Orison Books $16.00
Poems In a Dark Time
by Deborah DeNicola
Amidst the global threat of Corona 19, what many have deemed a “dark time,” I recently discovered a book of poems by a man who surrenders his imagination into a total submergence into dark but astonishing material. Frank Paino’s latest book, his third collection of poems, is titled Obscura, a word whose meaning, among other definitions is “a dark chamber with a lens through which an image is projected.“ One thinks of 19th century photography. And perhaps, the word “concealed,” a derivative of “obscure,” applies as well, since the poet reminds and reveals to us story after story of many lost or forgotten moments in history where some tragic, fascinating or horrifying event occurred.
Just a quick glimpse into the table of contents invites us to shine a flashlight in these dark corners of obscurity, and assures us of a deep dive into one poet’s obsessive scrutiny of subject matter we might otherwise try to avoid—These are poems of mummification, stake burnings, suicides by drowning and jumping, Edison’s death, Houdini’s Ghost, a Recording Angel, a dog sent into space, taxidermy, taxonomy, abused animals, among others—even a tapeworm in the belly of Maria Callas! As well as demons, devils, hell, Lucifer and Armageddon . . .
This splendid and ghoulish array of lyrical narratives draws us into Paino’s twilit world the way the telling of scary stories attracted us around campfires when we were kids. But there is nothing to scream about, only a mind to be blown by his stunning gift of imagery that causes us to marvel. I will admit the poems sent me to Google and Wikipedia where I could verify their astonishing veracity. He knows his facts as well as his myths and renders them in a lyricism so naturally seductive, our appetite for darkness grows “curiouser and curiouser” as we turn each page.
Paino’s image-making is startling, for example, the poem “Plunder,” which is introduced with an epigraph of a “Victorian Mummy Unwrapping Party Invitation,” sets its stage in an enticing environment of match tips flaring sulfur, “candlewicks” and “Egyptian amulets” in a brocaded drawing room with “the scent of amber resin” “buffed mahogany” and “palm wine . . . sweet and primitive as lust . . .” Here women in too-tight corsets hover to peer at the unveiled thing “black as delta mud” or a concealed figure we can imagine crumbling to “biblical dust.” This gathering ends with those same women who “leaned so near/death they could kiss it” heading home to ready themselves for their lovers, to “open themselves/ . . . like long-hidden tombs that glisten/and beckon for plunder.”
Two poems with the theme of “falling” reinforce the themes of not only heartbreaking destruction but the seemingly casual normality of deliberate acts. In “Falling” we’re told in 1827 the owner of a hotel in Niagara sent live animals in a schooner over the falls while a crowd of brides, grooms, and assorted tourists observed and applauded. Those in the well-dressed crowd “cheer as the keel screams over upthrust/boulders,” and a fox blurs into “white turbulence” then is gone into an “airless fate,” the boat itself becoming “ripped timbers” as chained creatures meet the rocks below. The poet shows the brute cruelty in all its spectacle by a series of speculating questions--what if the buffalo, raccoon , lioness or bear—might have mauled the hotelier rather than find themselves caged in this “reverse Noah’s arc” as “startled/ freight over the lip of eternity.”
And in a kind of elegy, Paino honors the famous photograph by Robert Wiles of a young bookkeeper who in 1947 threw herself off the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. Time Magazine named her “The Most Beautiful Suicide” and Paino has created a litany for the day of her fall. Attuned to the anaphora of the poet’s structure, we follow her in “rose dress & makeup” entering the “Empire’s lobby/ with its strata of gold” into the elevator and onto the deck where she would “fold her tan coat just so” until the moment she will “step off the ledge as if/beneath each scapula/she feels the itch of wings,” down to her journey from the sky “that cannot hold her” where she lands with one shoe among “each pedestrian gaze” as “glass & steel become/her catafalque.” But it is in the last words of the poem that we share the sin of our morbid surveillance when we wish to “be absolved for finding beauty/ in such broken truth/ . . . powerless to turn away.” Indeed—the photograph, which I looked up, shows an astonishing peace in the body’s posture as she lands on the roof of a limousine, missing one shoe, her hand on her pearls while supine, she lies in a bed of glass.
The majority of these poems about true incidents relay empathy on the poet’s part. There are several ekphrastic pieces as well as re-imaginings. Paino describes Mata Hari, shot as a spy in the Vincennes woods in 1945 dressed in her signature clothing right down to the “tricorn hat, the color of /deep bruises, atop raven hair . . .” She fastens “each pearl button/on her ankle-high boots” and “scorns both bond/and blindfold . . .”
The scene is brought to life in such a way that we understand how this woman lived her eccentric life and died with the same wild courage blowing “a ruby kiss” to her firing squad.
The sheer range of topics draws us into these truly beautiful and amazing poems. Although he claims to have no allegiance to a God, Paino is interested in ontology, the nature of being. In “Taxonomy,” Adam, who names himself and grows weary of naming the animals, finds “After a while, all the whiles/congealed like blood” and his loneliness is answered when “a fist /like iron enter{s} his side” and Eve “bloom{s}” into existence. By the end of the poem however, the couple escapes the withered garden “having rolled/the thing they named freedom/across their tongues” finding “it sweet/Like spoonfuls of milk and honey.”
And the poem “Cephalophores” is like something out of Dante’s Inferno, a parade of decapitated saints carrying their heads in their hands, their “grisly freight held up/like a child’s first lost tooth.” In “The Astronomer” on Vermeer’s painting, the scientist “leans toward the celestial globe,” observing the constellations as “perhaps some diety’s/brilliant arithmetic that breathed life into the skies.” And in “Armageddon” the mythical patterns of the stars begin to tumble so that “Orion’s club is poised above some lesser beast/and the jeweled dippers are honed to demitasse . . .”
In one of my favorites, a defense, dedicated “To Lucifer,” the poet is concerned with the familiar fall of the rebellious angel to be “crushed under the heel of Michael,/the heel of Mary, and made to twist/along your shingled belly . . .” Paino claims that the dark angel offered humankind, another type of freedom similar to the legacy of Genesis, “the gift/of agency,/which granted us choice—"
Overall, this book stands out as an important testament to—and imaginative witnessing of—the miraculous. If you haven’t found a recent book of poetry that pushes the edges of language and insight while lighting up the dark, you must get your hands on a copy of Frank Paino’s Obscura.
Deborah DeNicola has authored two poetry collections, Original Human, and Where Divinity Begins and her memoir The Future That Brought Her Here. (Nicholas Hays/Ibis Press 2009) Deborah compiled and edited Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology (University Press of New England 1999). Among other awards, she has been a recipient of a National Endowment Fellowship.
Poems In a Dark Time
by Deborah DeNicola
Amidst the global threat of Corona 19, what many have deemed a “dark time,” I recently discovered a book of poems by a man who surrenders his imagination into a total submergence into dark but astonishing material. Frank Paino’s latest book, his third collection of poems, is titled Obscura, a word whose meaning, among other definitions is “a dark chamber with a lens through which an image is projected.“ One thinks of 19th century photography. And perhaps, the word “concealed,” a derivative of “obscure,” applies as well, since the poet reminds and reveals to us story after story of many lost or forgotten moments in history where some tragic, fascinating or horrifying event occurred.
Just a quick glimpse into the table of contents invites us to shine a flashlight in these dark corners of obscurity, and assures us of a deep dive into one poet’s obsessive scrutiny of subject matter we might otherwise try to avoid—These are poems of mummification, stake burnings, suicides by drowning and jumping, Edison’s death, Houdini’s Ghost, a Recording Angel, a dog sent into space, taxidermy, taxonomy, abused animals, among others—even a tapeworm in the belly of Maria Callas! As well as demons, devils, hell, Lucifer and Armageddon . . .
This splendid and ghoulish array of lyrical narratives draws us into Paino’s twilit world the way the telling of scary stories attracted us around campfires when we were kids. But there is nothing to scream about, only a mind to be blown by his stunning gift of imagery that causes us to marvel. I will admit the poems sent me to Google and Wikipedia where I could verify their astonishing veracity. He knows his facts as well as his myths and renders them in a lyricism so naturally seductive, our appetite for darkness grows “curiouser and curiouser” as we turn each page.
Paino’s image-making is startling, for example, the poem “Plunder,” which is introduced with an epigraph of a “Victorian Mummy Unwrapping Party Invitation,” sets its stage in an enticing environment of match tips flaring sulfur, “candlewicks” and “Egyptian amulets” in a brocaded drawing room with “the scent of amber resin” “buffed mahogany” and “palm wine . . . sweet and primitive as lust . . .” Here women in too-tight corsets hover to peer at the unveiled thing “black as delta mud” or a concealed figure we can imagine crumbling to “biblical dust.” This gathering ends with those same women who “leaned so near/death they could kiss it” heading home to ready themselves for their lovers, to “open themselves/ . . . like long-hidden tombs that glisten/and beckon for plunder.”
Two poems with the theme of “falling” reinforce the themes of not only heartbreaking destruction but the seemingly casual normality of deliberate acts. In “Falling” we’re told in 1827 the owner of a hotel in Niagara sent live animals in a schooner over the falls while a crowd of brides, grooms, and assorted tourists observed and applauded. Those in the well-dressed crowd “cheer as the keel screams over upthrust/boulders,” and a fox blurs into “white turbulence” then is gone into an “airless fate,” the boat itself becoming “ripped timbers” as chained creatures meet the rocks below. The poet shows the brute cruelty in all its spectacle by a series of speculating questions--what if the buffalo, raccoon , lioness or bear—might have mauled the hotelier rather than find themselves caged in this “reverse Noah’s arc” as “startled/ freight over the lip of eternity.”
And in a kind of elegy, Paino honors the famous photograph by Robert Wiles of a young bookkeeper who in 1947 threw herself off the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. Time Magazine named her “The Most Beautiful Suicide” and Paino has created a litany for the day of her fall. Attuned to the anaphora of the poet’s structure, we follow her in “rose dress & makeup” entering the “Empire’s lobby/ with its strata of gold” into the elevator and onto the deck where she would “fold her tan coat just so” until the moment she will “step off the ledge as if/beneath each scapula/she feels the itch of wings,” down to her journey from the sky “that cannot hold her” where she lands with one shoe among “each pedestrian gaze” as “glass & steel become/her catafalque.” But it is in the last words of the poem that we share the sin of our morbid surveillance when we wish to “be absolved for finding beauty/ in such broken truth/ . . . powerless to turn away.” Indeed—the photograph, which I looked up, shows an astonishing peace in the body’s posture as she lands on the roof of a limousine, missing one shoe, her hand on her pearls while supine, she lies in a bed of glass.
The majority of these poems about true incidents relay empathy on the poet’s part. There are several ekphrastic pieces as well as re-imaginings. Paino describes Mata Hari, shot as a spy in the Vincennes woods in 1945 dressed in her signature clothing right down to the “tricorn hat, the color of /deep bruises, atop raven hair . . .” She fastens “each pearl button/on her ankle-high boots” and “scorns both bond/and blindfold . . .”
The scene is brought to life in such a way that we understand how this woman lived her eccentric life and died with the same wild courage blowing “a ruby kiss” to her firing squad.
The sheer range of topics draws us into these truly beautiful and amazing poems. Although he claims to have no allegiance to a God, Paino is interested in ontology, the nature of being. In “Taxonomy,” Adam, who names himself and grows weary of naming the animals, finds “After a while, all the whiles/congealed like blood” and his loneliness is answered when “a fist /like iron enter{s} his side” and Eve “bloom{s}” into existence. By the end of the poem however, the couple escapes the withered garden “having rolled/the thing they named freedom/across their tongues” finding “it sweet/Like spoonfuls of milk and honey.”
And the poem “Cephalophores” is like something out of Dante’s Inferno, a parade of decapitated saints carrying their heads in their hands, their “grisly freight held up/like a child’s first lost tooth.” In “The Astronomer” on Vermeer’s painting, the scientist “leans toward the celestial globe,” observing the constellations as “perhaps some diety’s/brilliant arithmetic that breathed life into the skies.” And in “Armageddon” the mythical patterns of the stars begin to tumble so that “Orion’s club is poised above some lesser beast/and the jeweled dippers are honed to demitasse . . .”
In one of my favorites, a defense, dedicated “To Lucifer,” the poet is concerned with the familiar fall of the rebellious angel to be “crushed under the heel of Michael,/the heel of Mary, and made to twist/along your shingled belly . . .” Paino claims that the dark angel offered humankind, another type of freedom similar to the legacy of Genesis, “the gift/of agency,/which granted us choice—"
Overall, this book stands out as an important testament to—and imaginative witnessing of—the miraculous. If you haven’t found a recent book of poetry that pushes the edges of language and insight while lighting up the dark, you must get your hands on a copy of Frank Paino’s Obscura.
Deborah DeNicola has authored two poetry collections, Original Human, and Where Divinity Begins and her memoir The Future That Brought Her Here. (Nicholas Hays/Ibis Press 2009) Deborah compiled and edited Orpheus & Company; Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology (University Press of New England 1999). Among other awards, she has been a recipient of a National Endowment Fellowship.
Shades & Graces—Michael Salcman, Spuyten Duyvil Publishing
(June 1, 2020) ISPN-10: 195241914X ISBN-13: 978-1952419140, 110 pages
by Robert Cooperman
Michael Salcman’s latest collection, Shades & Graces, winner of Spuyten Duyvil’s inaugural Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize, is a wondrous work, combining his love of poetry, music, and art, along with his years as a brain surgeon, and finally his love for family. Salcman’s interests are legion, from classical music to jazz, from high art to playing pinball as a kid, from the freedom of sailing in Chesapeake Bay to cataloging all the things that can go wrong in a surgical theater.
Indeed, it’s this knowledge that all medical fixes are temporary that creates the dominant mood in this collection, it’s minor key sense of elegy, of loss, of remembrance of things past and gone: parents, poetry mentors and friends, even an old Baltimore neighborhood, as in “Howard Street Rhapsody,” which reads more like an elegy than the more exuberant musical form. As Salcman takes us for a stroll along Howard Street, he points out various once vibrant businesses that are gone and the empty storefronts with their boarded up windows, antique stores decamped, as well as antiquarian bookstores. Yes, far more a lament than a rhapsody, and he concludes with these lines:
Howard dead ends at Johns’ Hopkins and Museum Drive,
in a neighborhood without neon or signs, music or poetry,
a jazz-free leafy Eden without words or rhymes,
without poems written by the unknown many,
when every man was an Adam and the city Eve.
I find it interesting and telling that Salcman concludes the poem with a glimpse of prelapsarian Eden, as a way to contrast the street now, after its glory days. But also interesting is the music of his lines, especially his internal slant rhymes of “signs” and “rhymes.” And then there’s the wonderful assonance of “leafy” and “Eden.” An altogether bravura performance.
But even more than concrete, cement, and wood, it’s people whom Salcman grieves and misses, and no more so than in the longest poem in the collection and its heart, “Father Sleeping.” Here, Salcman remembers his 99-year-old father’s last days, his decline and leave taking. But more than just an elegy, the poem is also a mini medical dissertation on the shape and function of the “locus coerulus,” “the blue spot in the brain/where a bright dot of pigment controls our mortal waking”. I confess, the medical jargon used had me scratching my head, but I’m guessing that was intentional on Salcman’s part, the locus coerulus, and all that adversely affect it, becoming a metaphor for life ebbing away, though this is only a guess on my part. But the non-technical, non-medical prose parts of this poem are incredibly moving:
The legends say no tears for the dying
lest you impede them on their way to heaven,
my eyes so dry at your bedside they cancel my yearning
that you stay.
Salcman chronicles his father’s condition, “…he lies beyond distress…not yet oblivious to his rapid decline/nor fooled by our hopes for recovery.” Here, Salcman shows himself both the loving, caring, dutiful son, but also the trained medical professional, knowing not to give himself false hopes that this isn’t the end of a long, loving road. And though his father seems not to be in great physical pain, there are the emotional, psychological hurts: the Shoah years of hiding from the Nazis, the growing mental confusion of the present, which Salcman puts this way: “My father at night is not the same man I know by day,/his inner Kurz comes out in a shadow land of foreign shores/and prisons.” I love that reference to Kurz, the crazed and dying anti-hero/villain of Conrad’s diatribe against colonialism, Heart of Darkness.
There’s also the sense in this poem that Salcman is juggling the highly technical medical jargon (that gives me too much of a headache to reproduce samples of) with a tradition other than our Western, rational one. The poet makes reference to other cultures in which “people sleep on floor-bound mats.” He calls his dying father “a Polynesian now, afraid of…the lie down and die model,” so he “…drifts in and out of slumber/gets up to dance or sing or stays on guard.” The poem’s penultimate prose lines are on the function of the locus coerulus and how its neurons are lost to Alzheimer’s Disease, and then concludes with these lines that remind me of the last lines of W.B. Yeats’s final poem, “Under Ben Bulben”: “Cast a cold eye on life,/On death,/Horsemen pass by.” But here, it’s “Death or its simulacrum:/the L.C. blue eye of the brain--/my father’s hurricane.”
But lest you think this collection is entirely taken over by a sense of loss, there are some lovely, witty, even very, very funny poems, my favorite of these being, “When Bach Was Street.” This is a kind of pop biography of the magisterial composer’s earlier, authority flouting years, when he “had pimples and hormones and undiffused anger,” and apparently did what he wanted, when he wanted, such as:
Bach often went absent without leave,
like the time he asked for a month
to visit Buxtehude in Lubeck
and took three to walk there and back.”
Alas, in a bit of dramatic/historical irony, Bach never did meet his organ playing and composing idol, for Buxtehude had died in the interim. Salcman makes the connection that even a great classical composer can be a rebel, in comparing Bach’s innovations to music to the jazz great, John Coltrane, who also turned the musical world on its head by inventing a new style of improv. And the poem concludes with this great little line, “That man was phat.”
Shades & Graces makes a fine addition to Salcman’s already terrific oeuvre. This is a collection to savor, to let it play with the mind and the heart, at once appealing to the intellect and to the heart and senses, poems to make you laugh, even as a lot of them will make you cry. But either way, you’ll to read them again and again.
Robert Cooperman's latest collection is THE GHOSTS AND BONES OF TROY (Kelsay Books). Forthcoming from Finishing Line Press is ALL OUR FARE-THEE-WELLS, a love letter to the Grateful Dead. Cooperman lives in Denver with his wife Beth.
(June 1, 2020) ISPN-10: 195241914X ISBN-13: 978-1952419140, 110 pages
by Robert Cooperman
Michael Salcman’s latest collection, Shades & Graces, winner of Spuyten Duyvil’s inaugural Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize, is a wondrous work, combining his love of poetry, music, and art, along with his years as a brain surgeon, and finally his love for family. Salcman’s interests are legion, from classical music to jazz, from high art to playing pinball as a kid, from the freedom of sailing in Chesapeake Bay to cataloging all the things that can go wrong in a surgical theater.
Indeed, it’s this knowledge that all medical fixes are temporary that creates the dominant mood in this collection, it’s minor key sense of elegy, of loss, of remembrance of things past and gone: parents, poetry mentors and friends, even an old Baltimore neighborhood, as in “Howard Street Rhapsody,” which reads more like an elegy than the more exuberant musical form. As Salcman takes us for a stroll along Howard Street, he points out various once vibrant businesses that are gone and the empty storefronts with their boarded up windows, antique stores decamped, as well as antiquarian bookstores. Yes, far more a lament than a rhapsody, and he concludes with these lines:
Howard dead ends at Johns’ Hopkins and Museum Drive,
in a neighborhood without neon or signs, music or poetry,
a jazz-free leafy Eden without words or rhymes,
without poems written by the unknown many,
when every man was an Adam and the city Eve.
I find it interesting and telling that Salcman concludes the poem with a glimpse of prelapsarian Eden, as a way to contrast the street now, after its glory days. But also interesting is the music of his lines, especially his internal slant rhymes of “signs” and “rhymes.” And then there’s the wonderful assonance of “leafy” and “Eden.” An altogether bravura performance.
But even more than concrete, cement, and wood, it’s people whom Salcman grieves and misses, and no more so than in the longest poem in the collection and its heart, “Father Sleeping.” Here, Salcman remembers his 99-year-old father’s last days, his decline and leave taking. But more than just an elegy, the poem is also a mini medical dissertation on the shape and function of the “locus coerulus,” “the blue spot in the brain/where a bright dot of pigment controls our mortal waking”. I confess, the medical jargon used had me scratching my head, but I’m guessing that was intentional on Salcman’s part, the locus coerulus, and all that adversely affect it, becoming a metaphor for life ebbing away, though this is only a guess on my part. But the non-technical, non-medical prose parts of this poem are incredibly moving:
The legends say no tears for the dying
lest you impede them on their way to heaven,
my eyes so dry at your bedside they cancel my yearning
that you stay.
Salcman chronicles his father’s condition, “…he lies beyond distress…not yet oblivious to his rapid decline/nor fooled by our hopes for recovery.” Here, Salcman shows himself both the loving, caring, dutiful son, but also the trained medical professional, knowing not to give himself false hopes that this isn’t the end of a long, loving road. And though his father seems not to be in great physical pain, there are the emotional, psychological hurts: the Shoah years of hiding from the Nazis, the growing mental confusion of the present, which Salcman puts this way: “My father at night is not the same man I know by day,/his inner Kurz comes out in a shadow land of foreign shores/and prisons.” I love that reference to Kurz, the crazed and dying anti-hero/villain of Conrad’s diatribe against colonialism, Heart of Darkness.
There’s also the sense in this poem that Salcman is juggling the highly technical medical jargon (that gives me too much of a headache to reproduce samples of) with a tradition other than our Western, rational one. The poet makes reference to other cultures in which “people sleep on floor-bound mats.” He calls his dying father “a Polynesian now, afraid of…the lie down and die model,” so he “…drifts in and out of slumber/gets up to dance or sing or stays on guard.” The poem’s penultimate prose lines are on the function of the locus coerulus and how its neurons are lost to Alzheimer’s Disease, and then concludes with these lines that remind me of the last lines of W.B. Yeats’s final poem, “Under Ben Bulben”: “Cast a cold eye on life,/On death,/Horsemen pass by.” But here, it’s “Death or its simulacrum:/the L.C. blue eye of the brain--/my father’s hurricane.”
But lest you think this collection is entirely taken over by a sense of loss, there are some lovely, witty, even very, very funny poems, my favorite of these being, “When Bach Was Street.” This is a kind of pop biography of the magisterial composer’s earlier, authority flouting years, when he “had pimples and hormones and undiffused anger,” and apparently did what he wanted, when he wanted, such as:
Bach often went absent without leave,
like the time he asked for a month
to visit Buxtehude in Lubeck
and took three to walk there and back.”
Alas, in a bit of dramatic/historical irony, Bach never did meet his organ playing and composing idol, for Buxtehude had died in the interim. Salcman makes the connection that even a great classical composer can be a rebel, in comparing Bach’s innovations to music to the jazz great, John Coltrane, who also turned the musical world on its head by inventing a new style of improv. And the poem concludes with this great little line, “That man was phat.”
Shades & Graces makes a fine addition to Salcman’s already terrific oeuvre. This is a collection to savor, to let it play with the mind and the heart, at once appealing to the intellect and to the heart and senses, poems to make you laugh, even as a lot of them will make you cry. But either way, you’ll to read them again and again.
Robert Cooperman's latest collection is THE GHOSTS AND BONES OF TROY (Kelsay Books). Forthcoming from Finishing Line Press is ALL OUR FARE-THEE-WELLS, a love letter to the Grateful Dead. Cooperman lives in Denver with his wife Beth.
Tony Gloeggler’s What Kind of Man
(New York Quarterly Books, 2020)
by Michael Minassian
Tony Gloeggler’s collection of poems opens with “This Kind of Room” and expresses what we all seem to want: to be young again. But there’s always a catch: the pleasure and pain of life. Throughout this impressive selection of narrative poems, those emotions and the fleeting present flash by in a complex and honest look at what it means to be a man (or woman). That’s exactly what the reader is about to find out as Gloeggler writes about existence in all its messiness, joy, despair, loss, illness, and love in his new collection What Kind of Man.
There’s an aching awareness of love and how it can nourish and elude us, whether dealing with personal or professional relationships, passing acquaintances or complete strangers.
Family also looms large as the stories reveal both compassion and loss. We may not always want to face hard truths, but in his poems, Gloeggler lays them bare for the reader to see, savor, and perhaps learn to face without fear. Rooted in the neighborhoods of New York City the poems manage to turn and twist in surprising and satisfying ways, as if they suddenly turn down a narrow and unfamiliar street.
Reading the poems, you will be reminded of the poet’s own struggles with illness, loss, and regrets, while showing a great capacity for love and compassion for others in dealing with their individual struggles with pain, disappointment, and in some cases disabilities.
In an early series of poems, “Renal Sonogram,” “Dialysis Shuffle,” and “A Little Music” the narrator speaks about the numbing nature of waiting for dialysis as one lab tech gives instructions in a monotone. The patients are mainly men, older, and black: “more worse off than me” as he fits on headphones and recounts his playlist, a commentary of those “music moments” in his life: girls, cars, Coney Island. “A Little Music” has the narrator riffing on another technician whose son was killed and how he shares his headphones with her, leading to the lovely image at the end of the poem as she listens to the music.
Gloeggler’s poems should probably be read while listening to the songs he mentions along the way, a fitting companion or soundtrack as a reminder that music and our lives are intertwined. One of my favorite poems in this section of the book is “Legacy,” an honest and touching look at the memory of his father: how we can miss a person yet not grieve, and the narrator’s realization that he is more like his father than anyone else in the family. Another poem, “Family,” starts by musing on relationships, as the poet fantasizes about being adopted “they took you in,/looked at you as a gift or burden/from god and did their best/to nurture you, torture you/in the name of family.” The poem then skillfully segues to health issues and the kidney transplant that provides an arc throughout the book. Other poems look at the things we take for granted as the poet turns his discerning eye outward to take in the Post Office, neighborhood kids, a wedding, and the Death of John Lennon to name a few.
There’s a vulnerability and tenderness in the poems, even as old, painful memories surface, scorching the page, and the imprint of old loves erupt out of the poem when you least expect it. In “Last Love Poem” the narrator speaks about the memory of a mugging and the bringing down of the Twin Towers and how life somehow, slowly goes back to something like normal, then in the last stanza recalls the memory of a former love gone too over thirty years and how he still yearns for “the one woman I never stopped loving.”
My favorite poem in the collection, one which I never tire of reading is “Crying” – as the narrator, riding in the NYC subway, sees a “well dressed black man across the car/crying quietly,” then watches the reactions of the other passengers. It’s a poem that forces you to take a look at your own humanity, broken hearts and memories, and how we do or don’t comfort each other. In the last stanza we read “all day that man’s tears stay with me” as the speaker describes the end of a relationship and how he “tried not to cry when she decided/she was better off, happier without me.” Loneliness or heartbreak, in the present moment, in the past, can touch us all.
The poems in What Kind of Man let us see the poet’s response to the world around him, and his own pain, joy, and regrets. How do any of us face the truths that are handed to us: with grace or do we turn away and pretend they are not there? Gloeggler allows the reader to enter the poem and experience place and sensations for themselves, holding up a mirror to our own lives. You will want to read these poems and then read them again.
Michael Minassian’s most recent book of poems Time is Not a River (2020) is available on Amazon. His website is: https://michaelminassian.com
(New York Quarterly Books, 2020)
by Michael Minassian
Tony Gloeggler’s collection of poems opens with “This Kind of Room” and expresses what we all seem to want: to be young again. But there’s always a catch: the pleasure and pain of life. Throughout this impressive selection of narrative poems, those emotions and the fleeting present flash by in a complex and honest look at what it means to be a man (or woman). That’s exactly what the reader is about to find out as Gloeggler writes about existence in all its messiness, joy, despair, loss, illness, and love in his new collection What Kind of Man.
There’s an aching awareness of love and how it can nourish and elude us, whether dealing with personal or professional relationships, passing acquaintances or complete strangers.
Family also looms large as the stories reveal both compassion and loss. We may not always want to face hard truths, but in his poems, Gloeggler lays them bare for the reader to see, savor, and perhaps learn to face without fear. Rooted in the neighborhoods of New York City the poems manage to turn and twist in surprising and satisfying ways, as if they suddenly turn down a narrow and unfamiliar street.
Reading the poems, you will be reminded of the poet’s own struggles with illness, loss, and regrets, while showing a great capacity for love and compassion for others in dealing with their individual struggles with pain, disappointment, and in some cases disabilities.
In an early series of poems, “Renal Sonogram,” “Dialysis Shuffle,” and “A Little Music” the narrator speaks about the numbing nature of waiting for dialysis as one lab tech gives instructions in a monotone. The patients are mainly men, older, and black: “more worse off than me” as he fits on headphones and recounts his playlist, a commentary of those “music moments” in his life: girls, cars, Coney Island. “A Little Music” has the narrator riffing on another technician whose son was killed and how he shares his headphones with her, leading to the lovely image at the end of the poem as she listens to the music.
Gloeggler’s poems should probably be read while listening to the songs he mentions along the way, a fitting companion or soundtrack as a reminder that music and our lives are intertwined. One of my favorite poems in this section of the book is “Legacy,” an honest and touching look at the memory of his father: how we can miss a person yet not grieve, and the narrator’s realization that he is more like his father than anyone else in the family. Another poem, “Family,” starts by musing on relationships, as the poet fantasizes about being adopted “they took you in,/looked at you as a gift or burden/from god and did their best/to nurture you, torture you/in the name of family.” The poem then skillfully segues to health issues and the kidney transplant that provides an arc throughout the book. Other poems look at the things we take for granted as the poet turns his discerning eye outward to take in the Post Office, neighborhood kids, a wedding, and the Death of John Lennon to name a few.
There’s a vulnerability and tenderness in the poems, even as old, painful memories surface, scorching the page, and the imprint of old loves erupt out of the poem when you least expect it. In “Last Love Poem” the narrator speaks about the memory of a mugging and the bringing down of the Twin Towers and how life somehow, slowly goes back to something like normal, then in the last stanza recalls the memory of a former love gone too over thirty years and how he still yearns for “the one woman I never stopped loving.”
My favorite poem in the collection, one which I never tire of reading is “Crying” – as the narrator, riding in the NYC subway, sees a “well dressed black man across the car/crying quietly,” then watches the reactions of the other passengers. It’s a poem that forces you to take a look at your own humanity, broken hearts and memories, and how we do or don’t comfort each other. In the last stanza we read “all day that man’s tears stay with me” as the speaker describes the end of a relationship and how he “tried not to cry when she decided/she was better off, happier without me.” Loneliness or heartbreak, in the present moment, in the past, can touch us all.
The poems in What Kind of Man let us see the poet’s response to the world around him, and his own pain, joy, and regrets. How do any of us face the truths that are handed to us: with grace or do we turn away and pretend they are not there? Gloeggler allows the reader to enter the poem and experience place and sensations for themselves, holding up a mirror to our own lives. You will want to read these poems and then read them again.
Michael Minassian’s most recent book of poems Time is Not a River (2020) is available on Amazon. His website is: https://michaelminassian.com
Interview With A Poet- 5 Questions, 3 Poets, Each Month 2016-2020
May 2020
The World at Large: A Review of Empries,
by John Balaban (Copper Canyon, $17)
by Michael Hettich
John Balaban is one of the finest poets of his generation, and indeed one of the best poets at work today. When I say “fine,” I mean just that: his poetry communicates a discernment of eye and ear attuned to nuance, subtle variation, and the truths embedded therein. These qualities, coupled with a rare intelligence, a deeply informed worldview and a resistance to navel-gazing or rhetorical pomposity, combine to invest his work with a Classical tenor that has the clarity of good prose and the heft of well-made poetry. As with all of his previous books of poetry and prose, his new book, Empires, is an engaging, invigorating, expertly crafted collection that manages to speak simultaneously to and of our time as well as of the great span of history that has brought us to this moment.
Balaban’s widely admired body of work includes seven previous books of his own poetry, translations from the Vietnamese, works of fiction, and works of non-fiction and memoir. Remembering Heaven’s Face (1991), his memoir of serving as a conscientious objector working for the International Voluntary Services in Vietnam during that war, has been called “one of the most beautifully written books ever published about Vietnam.” Of Locusts at the Edge of Summer, his selected poems (1997), Maxine Kumin said, “Balaban seems to me to be our moral spokesperson, our lyricist, exhorter, and consoler: in short, the poet we need.” These words apply equally to his new book. Here his wide-reaching worldview is matched by an equally capacious empathy that refuses to flinch, dissemble, or turn to idiosyncratic rumination. As in his earlier work, Balaban is acutely aware of the extent to which our present is determined by the past, and as such his unadorned, carefully crafted poems present a larger and more incisive, politically informed worldview than most poets of our time—politically engaged or not—can pretend to. In this he strikes me as a uniquely prescient and important voice. Here, in the opening lines of the opening poem in the book, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 feels eerily predictive of our particular moment, some twenty years hence:
After most of the bodies were hauled away
and while the FBI and Fire Department and NYPD
were still haggling about who was in charge, as smoke cleared,
the figures in Tyvek suits came, gloved, gowned, masked,
ghostly figures searching rubble for pieces of people,
bagging, then sending the separate and commingled remains
to the temporary morgue set up on site.
This is where the snip of forefinger began its journey.
(“A Finger”)
The searing intensity of this poem is followed by the quieter but equally powerful “After the Inauguration, 2013,” which recounts the author’s train trip back home to the South after having attended the second inauguration of Barak Obama. Balaban’s speaker here watches the post-inauguration revelers and ordinary citizens in the car with him as the train passes “graves/ of Confederates from Petersburg’s nine-month siege, men/ who survived neither battle nor makeshift hospital...” and towns where “a black GI was shot to death,” aware all the time that, despite the hopeful, jubilant occasion they’ve shared, “the past hovers like smoke or a train whistle call.” And with brilliant and audacious assurance, Balaban follows this poem of the immediate past with one in the voice of the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes, which closes with these equally prescient lines:
Such is Xenophanes, aged rhapsode and lover of wisdom,
who looked into all things of earth and heaven
and made of them a song, sung in a time of barbarians.
(“Gods and Empire”)
Adding further nuance and depth to this book’s overall thematic arc, Balaban has included several expertly rendered translations of the 20th century Romanian poets Benjamin Fondane and Stefan Augustin Doinas. Fondane, a poet and philosopher who occasionally wrote under the name Fundoianu, perished in Auschwitz in 1944. Balaban’s translation of what is probably his final poem, “Preface En Prose,” forms one of the thematic and emotional centers of this book:
Like you I read all the newspapers, the books,
and understood nothing of the world,
understood nothing about men,
though often I may have claimed to.
When death, when death came, perhaps
I pretended to understand but, really...
when all of death entered my astonished eyes
I was stunned by how little I had understood.
If these translations fit seamlessly into the central thematic and formal vision of Empires, Balaban’s crisply detailed elegies and portraits of friends form a poignant counterpoint, deepening the overall vision of the book and imbuing it with a tender and nicely modulated intimacy:
Last night, as dials of dune grass marked time in the sand
and while the summer’s clock of stars circled the Pole
a fox curled in a hollow, snug in the sea-oat dunes.
A huge green turtle struggled ashore to nest...
(“At Nora’s House, Shepard’s Roost, Atlantic Beach, NC”)
Central to the power of this deftly edited and carefully sequenced book is the aforementioned Classical clarity and exactness in Balaban’s lines and verse forms. Even in his most intimate, tenderhearted poems, the writing, almost self-effacing in its poise and balance, is well-wrought and clear. Balaban’s gaze turns always outward. Wherever he looks and whatever he writes about, he is ever-aware of the moral implications embedded in history and in the way we respond to what we understand—or refuse to understand--of that history.
Finally, one of the great pleasures of Empires is in the sheer excellence of its writing. Many of these poems have the sure of touch of a master. Here, in full, is “Coyote Past Sunset”:
Finally, after a whole day of trailing trucks,
the highways loud with tire whine and bumper glare,
he got onto a blacktop running south to Mexico,
just him on the road, and off in the desert, dust devils
swirling over greasewood and yucca spikes,
ruffling the vultures sunning on fence posts
and whipping up grit around the odd horse
or pronghorns grazing with cattle, as he sped on
past hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fences.
After dusk, when he was nearly there, the moon
rose over the Chinati Mountains lighting cottonwoods
as he crossed the dry arroyo at the town limits.
Everything felt good, he thought. It was good to be alone.
That’s when he saw the coyote trotting the berm,
turning its head to give him a haggard look, licking the air,
then padding out toward the high desert, past a house
with its TV flickering, the family at its meal.
This is thrilling poetry of high craft and artistry, work that will last--and in doing so, communicate to future readers that perhaps ours wasn’t wholly an age of barbarians.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems is To Start an Orchard (2019). His website is michaelhettich.com
by John Balaban (Copper Canyon, $17)
by Michael Hettich
John Balaban is one of the finest poets of his generation, and indeed one of the best poets at work today. When I say “fine,” I mean just that: his poetry communicates a discernment of eye and ear attuned to nuance, subtle variation, and the truths embedded therein. These qualities, coupled with a rare intelligence, a deeply informed worldview and a resistance to navel-gazing or rhetorical pomposity, combine to invest his work with a Classical tenor that has the clarity of good prose and the heft of well-made poetry. As with all of his previous books of poetry and prose, his new book, Empires, is an engaging, invigorating, expertly crafted collection that manages to speak simultaneously to and of our time as well as of the great span of history that has brought us to this moment.
Balaban’s widely admired body of work includes seven previous books of his own poetry, translations from the Vietnamese, works of fiction, and works of non-fiction and memoir. Remembering Heaven’s Face (1991), his memoir of serving as a conscientious objector working for the International Voluntary Services in Vietnam during that war, has been called “one of the most beautifully written books ever published about Vietnam.” Of Locusts at the Edge of Summer, his selected poems (1997), Maxine Kumin said, “Balaban seems to me to be our moral spokesperson, our lyricist, exhorter, and consoler: in short, the poet we need.” These words apply equally to his new book. Here his wide-reaching worldview is matched by an equally capacious empathy that refuses to flinch, dissemble, or turn to idiosyncratic rumination. As in his earlier work, Balaban is acutely aware of the extent to which our present is determined by the past, and as such his unadorned, carefully crafted poems present a larger and more incisive, politically informed worldview than most poets of our time—politically engaged or not—can pretend to. In this he strikes me as a uniquely prescient and important voice. Here, in the opening lines of the opening poem in the book, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 feels eerily predictive of our particular moment, some twenty years hence:
After most of the bodies were hauled away
and while the FBI and Fire Department and NYPD
were still haggling about who was in charge, as smoke cleared,
the figures in Tyvek suits came, gloved, gowned, masked,
ghostly figures searching rubble for pieces of people,
bagging, then sending the separate and commingled remains
to the temporary morgue set up on site.
This is where the snip of forefinger began its journey.
(“A Finger”)
The searing intensity of this poem is followed by the quieter but equally powerful “After the Inauguration, 2013,” which recounts the author’s train trip back home to the South after having attended the second inauguration of Barak Obama. Balaban’s speaker here watches the post-inauguration revelers and ordinary citizens in the car with him as the train passes “graves/ of Confederates from Petersburg’s nine-month siege, men/ who survived neither battle nor makeshift hospital...” and towns where “a black GI was shot to death,” aware all the time that, despite the hopeful, jubilant occasion they’ve shared, “the past hovers like smoke or a train whistle call.” And with brilliant and audacious assurance, Balaban follows this poem of the immediate past with one in the voice of the ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes, which closes with these equally prescient lines:
Such is Xenophanes, aged rhapsode and lover of wisdom,
who looked into all things of earth and heaven
and made of them a song, sung in a time of barbarians.
(“Gods and Empire”)
Adding further nuance and depth to this book’s overall thematic arc, Balaban has included several expertly rendered translations of the 20th century Romanian poets Benjamin Fondane and Stefan Augustin Doinas. Fondane, a poet and philosopher who occasionally wrote under the name Fundoianu, perished in Auschwitz in 1944. Balaban’s translation of what is probably his final poem, “Preface En Prose,” forms one of the thematic and emotional centers of this book:
Like you I read all the newspapers, the books,
and understood nothing of the world,
understood nothing about men,
though often I may have claimed to.
When death, when death came, perhaps
I pretended to understand but, really...
when all of death entered my astonished eyes
I was stunned by how little I had understood.
If these translations fit seamlessly into the central thematic and formal vision of Empires, Balaban’s crisply detailed elegies and portraits of friends form a poignant counterpoint, deepening the overall vision of the book and imbuing it with a tender and nicely modulated intimacy:
Last night, as dials of dune grass marked time in the sand
and while the summer’s clock of stars circled the Pole
a fox curled in a hollow, snug in the sea-oat dunes.
A huge green turtle struggled ashore to nest...
(“At Nora’s House, Shepard’s Roost, Atlantic Beach, NC”)
Central to the power of this deftly edited and carefully sequenced book is the aforementioned Classical clarity and exactness in Balaban’s lines and verse forms. Even in his most intimate, tenderhearted poems, the writing, almost self-effacing in its poise and balance, is well-wrought and clear. Balaban’s gaze turns always outward. Wherever he looks and whatever he writes about, he is ever-aware of the moral implications embedded in history and in the way we respond to what we understand—or refuse to understand--of that history.
Finally, one of the great pleasures of Empires is in the sheer excellence of its writing. Many of these poems have the sure of touch of a master. Here, in full, is “Coyote Past Sunset”:
Finally, after a whole day of trailing trucks,
the highways loud with tire whine and bumper glare,
he got onto a blacktop running south to Mexico,
just him on the road, and off in the desert, dust devils
swirling over greasewood and yucca spikes,
ruffling the vultures sunning on fence posts
and whipping up grit around the odd horse
or pronghorns grazing with cattle, as he sped on
past hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fences.
After dusk, when he was nearly there, the moon
rose over the Chinati Mountains lighting cottonwoods
as he crossed the dry arroyo at the town limits.
Everything felt good, he thought. It was good to be alone.
That’s when he saw the coyote trotting the berm,
turning its head to give him a haggard look, licking the air,
then padding out toward the high desert, past a house
with its TV flickering, the family at its meal.
This is thrilling poetry of high craft and artistry, work that will last--and in doing so, communicate to future readers that perhaps ours wasn’t wholly an age of barbarians.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems is To Start an Orchard (2019). His website is michaelhettich.com
Unprotected Lexicon
Alexa Chrisbacher
2019, Vegetarian Alcoholic Press
978-1-7326827-6-4
by Freesia McKee
There are so many places I could start, but I think the most exciting of these is a punk show. Stepping over the venue’s bruised threshold, you are fourteen or seventeen or twenty-two. You are twenty-seven or twenty-nine or maybe you are punk forever; it’s not about your age, but that feeling of freedom when you see someone performing who seems beyond giving a damn, who is “mic feedback and torn denim.” This person is telling the truth, providing a manifesto of belonging, and you have “dreams of her, being with her. Dreams of herself, of becoming” in the crowd.
Community is a human need. No woman is an island, not even a trailblazer. Language is a kind of built community because we use language to organize our worlds. If we speak the same language, we have, in some ways, a shared understanding. But what do you do when your mother tongue doesn’t have a way to describe you? This is why we turn to punk shows, to poetry.
Alexa Chrisbacher’s Unprotected Lexicon is at its core an examination of how, for so long, our language hasn’t provided a place for queer women. Often, we are only “visible from very far away.” Women are typically reduced to the relational. We are “flesh defined by our movement through others,” which is why we’re raised to view finding a future male partner as the act of our completion. Queer women are proof that women don’t need male protectors. Sometimes, it feels like those of us who are queer women writers spend our careers trying to find ways to tell our stories that doesn’t require exhaustive reiteration of our apartness. But Chrisbacher has rendered it succinctly: all queer women are unprotected lexicons.
Unprotected Lexicon is doing the work of “mapping a lexicon” through the punk show, through roller derby, through zines, through surreal convivial gatherings with famous feminist icons, and through time spent in queer community. The collection’s speakers welcome the protagonist, Lex (yes, I would say this poetry book has a protagonist—and it’s no mistake that Lex is short for “lexicon”), through a cathartic portal and into a place of belonging where “you can fly” on your derby skates and “alter ego is/more real than secret identity.”
Consisting of a book-length, sectioned poem that begins and ends in roller derby, a sport as dangerous and thrilling as the life of a queer poet searching for language, Unprotected Lexicon takes up space. Many of the pages have just a few triple-spaced lines, and some of these remote lines appear as Sapphic fragments. These lines are runaway derby jammers, language deliciously unprotected. Throughout the text, the unnamed speakers share their thoughts as a collective, first-person “we,” addressing Lex in third-person.
I interpret “we” as a crew of honorary roller derby teammates, a lineage of rogue women and non-binary queer people:
“We are rescuing each other.”
“We are not born, we are made.”
“From our laundry lines hang leather catsuits and pantyhose, capes,/bloomers, chest binders, nipple tassels, rusting armor, and fishnet/stockings.”
“All we know is what we have words for,” Chrisbacher writes, which is why, I believe, we often feel our feminist forebearers are important to bring into the room. Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, Kathleen Hanna, and Amelia Earhart make appearances in Unprotected Lexicon, showing Lex a way though an imperfect landscape of language.
We are talking with performance artist Kathy Acker about genital piercings. We are wearing skates and practicing derby, “pain pressing against pleasure.” We see Lex who “sips a gin and tonic with Amelia, presses the toe of her boot into an ankle under the table, and asks why she disappeared.” Bittersweet irony, grief mixed with bliss, a full-contact sport like derby is the perfect metaphor for the authentic emotional tenor of these poems.
Unprotected Lexicon also repurposes the language itself of roller derby—“jammer,” “blockers”—and applies it in the context of lexiconic freedom. Disruption, collision, strategy in motion, “nuanced inertia”: this book plays by the rules of an unconventional sport.
“She doesn’t want to be a boy or a girl, she wants to be a tear,” the narrators say of Lex. “She deserves this as much as the figurines on a tiered vanilla cake.”
“If being an athlete is a feminist act, what is a brawl? Can our bodies be/a striking fist?” We are the political striking fist taking to the streets. We are the writer’s hand holding the pencil in protest. A lover’s body is a striking fist. “We are safe here.” We are bloody, beautifully unprotected.
But the long corridor of the book’s white space feels like entering a gymnasium alone. Roller derby practice happens in the “Barn.” My internal experience of reading Unprotected Lexicon made me conjure up fumbling for the lights and practicing alone in the Barn, so to speak, before other players arrive, a solo echo filling out the dream of a community that would carry us. And then, when the others slowly file in, each screech and fall and crash helps us find new names.
Come for the derby girls and feminist punk aesthetic, stay for the incredibly thoughtful discussion of finding a home in language.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
Alexa Chrisbacher
2019, Vegetarian Alcoholic Press
978-1-7326827-6-4
by Freesia McKee
There are so many places I could start, but I think the most exciting of these is a punk show. Stepping over the venue’s bruised threshold, you are fourteen or seventeen or twenty-two. You are twenty-seven or twenty-nine or maybe you are punk forever; it’s not about your age, but that feeling of freedom when you see someone performing who seems beyond giving a damn, who is “mic feedback and torn denim.” This person is telling the truth, providing a manifesto of belonging, and you have “dreams of her, being with her. Dreams of herself, of becoming” in the crowd.
Community is a human need. No woman is an island, not even a trailblazer. Language is a kind of built community because we use language to organize our worlds. If we speak the same language, we have, in some ways, a shared understanding. But what do you do when your mother tongue doesn’t have a way to describe you? This is why we turn to punk shows, to poetry.
Alexa Chrisbacher’s Unprotected Lexicon is at its core an examination of how, for so long, our language hasn’t provided a place for queer women. Often, we are only “visible from very far away.” Women are typically reduced to the relational. We are “flesh defined by our movement through others,” which is why we’re raised to view finding a future male partner as the act of our completion. Queer women are proof that women don’t need male protectors. Sometimes, it feels like those of us who are queer women writers spend our careers trying to find ways to tell our stories that doesn’t require exhaustive reiteration of our apartness. But Chrisbacher has rendered it succinctly: all queer women are unprotected lexicons.
Unprotected Lexicon is doing the work of “mapping a lexicon” through the punk show, through roller derby, through zines, through surreal convivial gatherings with famous feminist icons, and through time spent in queer community. The collection’s speakers welcome the protagonist, Lex (yes, I would say this poetry book has a protagonist—and it’s no mistake that Lex is short for “lexicon”), through a cathartic portal and into a place of belonging where “you can fly” on your derby skates and “alter ego is/more real than secret identity.”
Consisting of a book-length, sectioned poem that begins and ends in roller derby, a sport as dangerous and thrilling as the life of a queer poet searching for language, Unprotected Lexicon takes up space. Many of the pages have just a few triple-spaced lines, and some of these remote lines appear as Sapphic fragments. These lines are runaway derby jammers, language deliciously unprotected. Throughout the text, the unnamed speakers share their thoughts as a collective, first-person “we,” addressing Lex in third-person.
I interpret “we” as a crew of honorary roller derby teammates, a lineage of rogue women and non-binary queer people:
“We are rescuing each other.”
“We are not born, we are made.”
“From our laundry lines hang leather catsuits and pantyhose, capes,/bloomers, chest binders, nipple tassels, rusting armor, and fishnet/stockings.”
“All we know is what we have words for,” Chrisbacher writes, which is why, I believe, we often feel our feminist forebearers are important to bring into the room. Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, Kathleen Hanna, and Amelia Earhart make appearances in Unprotected Lexicon, showing Lex a way though an imperfect landscape of language.
We are talking with performance artist Kathy Acker about genital piercings. We are wearing skates and practicing derby, “pain pressing against pleasure.” We see Lex who “sips a gin and tonic with Amelia, presses the toe of her boot into an ankle under the table, and asks why she disappeared.” Bittersweet irony, grief mixed with bliss, a full-contact sport like derby is the perfect metaphor for the authentic emotional tenor of these poems.
Unprotected Lexicon also repurposes the language itself of roller derby—“jammer,” “blockers”—and applies it in the context of lexiconic freedom. Disruption, collision, strategy in motion, “nuanced inertia”: this book plays by the rules of an unconventional sport.
“She doesn’t want to be a boy or a girl, she wants to be a tear,” the narrators say of Lex. “She deserves this as much as the figurines on a tiered vanilla cake.”
“If being an athlete is a feminist act, what is a brawl? Can our bodies be/a striking fist?” We are the political striking fist taking to the streets. We are the writer’s hand holding the pencil in protest. A lover’s body is a striking fist. “We are safe here.” We are bloody, beautifully unprotected.
But the long corridor of the book’s white space feels like entering a gymnasium alone. Roller derby practice happens in the “Barn.” My internal experience of reading Unprotected Lexicon made me conjure up fumbling for the lights and practicing alone in the Barn, so to speak, before other players arrive, a solo echo filling out the dream of a community that would carry us. And then, when the others slowly file in, each screech and fall and crash helps us find new names.
Come for the derby girls and feminist punk aesthetic, stay for the incredibly thoughtful discussion of finding a home in language.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
Guest Review
Spells and Signs: A Review of Lorette C. Luzajic’s Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems
(Mixed Up Media, 2020)
by Devon Balwit
Midway through Lorette C. Luzajic’s new collection, her narrator crows, “Yeah, baby. We made it to middle age” and observes, “I should always have had more respect for plumbers and electricians than I had for addicts and revolutionaries.” By this point in our reading, we realize why. Having outlived many friends, roommates, and relatives, she can congratulate herself on the workaday fact of continuing to exist. “We conflate pain with genius,” Luzajic notes, and become caught up in self-destructive ways of blunting family trauma. Younger, she awakened from OD-ing only to ask if someone could cut her another line. Older, she ruefully notes that she has ten one-month clean tokens from NA and now indulges in nothing stronger than wine. Older still, she revels in mentoring a child, in the daunting task of teaching her to survive. Throughout the collection, we are treated to numerous last words: Hart Crane’s “Goodbye, everybody,” uttered before jumping into the Gulf of Mexico; Joseph Cornell’s virginal lament: “I wish I had not been so reserved.” However, as her ghostly self reminds her, her own last words have yet to be said: “not everything is written already, all stories begin without an ending, even yours.”
In one poem, Luzajic shares that her favorite animal is the camel. An astute reader can recognize the ready metaphor. This is an artist / poet who stockpiles all that she has lived through—the traumas, the deaths, the recoveries, the misses and near-misses, the love-making, the substance abuse, the sensuous appreciations of food, architecture, music and art—for later use. The book itself serves as a sort of camel’s hump, rich and sustaining, each prose poem usually headed by either or both a painting attribution and a quote. The epigraphs come from artists, singers, writers, and philosophers, each evocative enough for meditation. One can read, laptop open, using the website created for the book to access the images that inform the poems. I did additional research, eager to learn more about the featured artists and see more of their work—the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the curiosity cabinets of Joseph Cornell, and the macabre cadaver art of Joel Peter Witkin among them.
Luzajic’s prose poems lose nothing of poetry’s music for being extensive lists or large blocks of text. In a poem, titled Figment, she speaks to her illusory companion thus: [Y]ou were tiny and jumpy, a rickety rinkydink of a trinket, with sparks coming off your lips and your frenzied hands.” In Bergamot, she muses: “If loss can loom, then it is grief in advance, you note, making note of the uncanny jammy snap on your palate from the shiraz.” In Disappointment, she writes: “I imagined Monet in his mist, shrouded by morning’s last eight. Claude evaporating with the water, pushing pond lilies to the side of the progue with a tender oar, lifting the slimy pads to new light with a lover’s hand.” These poems stand up to being read aloud.
In Pretty Time Machine, we not only travel through the Luzajic’s life, but through space. Her poems take us to Cuba, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Serbia, Columbia, Spain, Canada, the Holy Land, the U.S. and more. We contemplate questions of ethics and aesthetics, death and what comes after, while never far from the sensual and erotic. It is a hefty collection, bringing together two hundred poems of unsparing stock-taking of herself and others. While perhaps a handful remain too internal for the reader to grasp, a dwelling on a memory or an encounter that stays Luzajic’s alone, the majority hold the reader’s interest and work together as an organic unity. What Luzajic declares in a fellow artist’s studio serves as an apt closing comment on the reading of this book: “You will not forget again these things…You will be remade, and you do not have any say in this.”
Devon Balwit's work can be found here as well as in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Borderlands, Tampa Review, Apt (long form issue), Tule Review, Rattle, Sugar House Review, Poetry South, saltfront, and Grist among others. For more, visit her website: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet
(Mixed Up Media, 2020)
by Devon Balwit
Midway through Lorette C. Luzajic’s new collection, her narrator crows, “Yeah, baby. We made it to middle age” and observes, “I should always have had more respect for plumbers and electricians than I had for addicts and revolutionaries.” By this point in our reading, we realize why. Having outlived many friends, roommates, and relatives, she can congratulate herself on the workaday fact of continuing to exist. “We conflate pain with genius,” Luzajic notes, and become caught up in self-destructive ways of blunting family trauma. Younger, she awakened from OD-ing only to ask if someone could cut her another line. Older, she ruefully notes that she has ten one-month clean tokens from NA and now indulges in nothing stronger than wine. Older still, she revels in mentoring a child, in the daunting task of teaching her to survive. Throughout the collection, we are treated to numerous last words: Hart Crane’s “Goodbye, everybody,” uttered before jumping into the Gulf of Mexico; Joseph Cornell’s virginal lament: “I wish I had not been so reserved.” However, as her ghostly self reminds her, her own last words have yet to be said: “not everything is written already, all stories begin without an ending, even yours.”
In one poem, Luzajic shares that her favorite animal is the camel. An astute reader can recognize the ready metaphor. This is an artist / poet who stockpiles all that she has lived through—the traumas, the deaths, the recoveries, the misses and near-misses, the love-making, the substance abuse, the sensuous appreciations of food, architecture, music and art—for later use. The book itself serves as a sort of camel’s hump, rich and sustaining, each prose poem usually headed by either or both a painting attribution and a quote. The epigraphs come from artists, singers, writers, and philosophers, each evocative enough for meditation. One can read, laptop open, using the website created for the book to access the images that inform the poems. I did additional research, eager to learn more about the featured artists and see more of their work—the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the curiosity cabinets of Joseph Cornell, and the macabre cadaver art of Joel Peter Witkin among them.
Luzajic’s prose poems lose nothing of poetry’s music for being extensive lists or large blocks of text. In a poem, titled Figment, she speaks to her illusory companion thus: [Y]ou were tiny and jumpy, a rickety rinkydink of a trinket, with sparks coming off your lips and your frenzied hands.” In Bergamot, she muses: “If loss can loom, then it is grief in advance, you note, making note of the uncanny jammy snap on your palate from the shiraz.” In Disappointment, she writes: “I imagined Monet in his mist, shrouded by morning’s last eight. Claude evaporating with the water, pushing pond lilies to the side of the progue with a tender oar, lifting the slimy pads to new light with a lover’s hand.” These poems stand up to being read aloud.
In Pretty Time Machine, we not only travel through the Luzajic’s life, but through space. Her poems take us to Cuba, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Serbia, Columbia, Spain, Canada, the Holy Land, the U.S. and more. We contemplate questions of ethics and aesthetics, death and what comes after, while never far from the sensual and erotic. It is a hefty collection, bringing together two hundred poems of unsparing stock-taking of herself and others. While perhaps a handful remain too internal for the reader to grasp, a dwelling on a memory or an encounter that stays Luzajic’s alone, the majority hold the reader’s interest and work together as an organic unity. What Luzajic declares in a fellow artist’s studio serves as an apt closing comment on the reading of this book: “You will not forget again these things…You will be remade, and you do not have any say in this.”
Devon Balwit's work can be found here as well as in The Worcester Review, The Cincinnati Review, Borderlands, Tampa Review, Apt (long form issue), Tule Review, Rattle, Sugar House Review, Poetry South, saltfront, and Grist among others. For more, visit her website: https://pelapdx.wixsite.com/devonbalwitpoet
February 2020
Have You Seen This Man: The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney
edited by Jim Cory
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019
978-1-943977-68-0
By Freesia McKee
freesiamckee@gmail.com
Picture this: a gay man moves from Arkansas to San Francisco. A talented writer, he publishes poetry in esteemed journals. The poet happens to come to San Francisco in the early 1980s in the midst of what would grow to become one of the most egregious public health crises of our era. The poet documents the emotional tenor of gay San Francisco at that time. At some point, the poet himself is infected with HIV. He signs up for a potentially successful treatment, but he is mistakenly told he is no longer eligible. Facing a death sentence, the poet jumps off of a bridge. Have you seen this man?
No book of his work has been produced until now. Twenty-five years later, the story of this poet is as compelling as his poetry itself. The poet is Karl Tierney.
Collected for the first time, Tierney’s poems themselves are stories of beauty, plague, cynicism, loneliness, anger, desperation, intelligence of the body, sex, community, and dystopia. As Jim Cory writes in an introduction that brought me to tears, “…Karl [Tierney] had arrived at a conclusion many gay men reach, which is that simply finding your way into this world of like-minded beings, which in the ‘70s and even in the ‘80s took some work to do, guarantees no satisfaction in and of itself…” How can a person be so lonely when surrounded by so many others with shared queer experience? It is too familiar a queer feeling: to be criticized, ignored, or even loathed by one’s peers. Perhaps the only way out (at least for a poet) is through documentation and the humor that comes through honesty.
Tierney’s poems are direct, frank, and true. Such an authenticity takes some work for a poet, and Tierney achieves this through his very interesting crafting of a declarative, unapologetic speaker who’s reliant on incision rather than pattern. There is not really a Dionysian idealization or gay activist yell, but a speaker “buy[ing] you a sneering drink…/returning the naked cruelty.” I have spent a lot of time with this book and continue to be unable to locate where the speaker is situated. Is he above me? Behind me? Beside me? The speaker is no tour guide, but he isn’t a friend, either; he’s not a particularly trusting fellow. No, this speaker knows too much for trust anymore. There’s a fine line between cynicism and insight, and this speaker has me acutely aware of it. From “Postcards from Abroad”:
“I must tell you, I lied.
Everything is not okay,
my disturbance deeper than anxiety.
I’m afraid of owing the world something.
From the picture you can see his tomb.
Paris so grand, but all roads
lead to Rome, making a neat seam.”
Who is this speaker and what can he teach me about loneliness? Tierney derived his speaker from a gay landscape which was becoming, literally, more and more lonely due in large part to governmental contempt of gay people. Cory writes in his ever-contextualizing introduction of a friend who said of another man in the late ‘80s, “He said I was the only person he knew who’d tested negative for the virus.”
Tierney writes about incredibly intelligently about “…years of never making muscle, then presto—/a powerhouse of loneliness!...” In “Envy,” he writes, “In your loneliness, you dwell on what you lack.” Elsewhere, the speaker says, “The rest of us…/are essentially nincompoops lonely at the core.” And this: “When you’re dying of thirst, you’ll drink from a mud hole.”
Straight culture finds it easier to reduce gay people to a few flat and tired tropes even as it has started to “accept” us. I find the refreshing absence of a straight gaze in Tierney’s work. This may not be revelatory for readers who’ve engaged with more 1980s gay poetry than I have, but in 2020, I often observe (and write with) an awareness of the straight reader, which often leads us to lionize our community defensively instead of plumbing its flaws. (This is, of course, another kind of respectability politics.) This new kind of queer self-consciousness in poetry is a product, I think, of the way in which straight culture has claimed to start subsuming us.
Tierney writes, “Oh, take me home. You’re dumb and homely but still warm,/unique in every way.” Separated by time, crisis, gender, and experience, I find so much to identify with in these poems.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
edited by Jim Cory
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019
978-1-943977-68-0
By Freesia McKee
freesiamckee@gmail.com
Picture this: a gay man moves from Arkansas to San Francisco. A talented writer, he publishes poetry in esteemed journals. The poet happens to come to San Francisco in the early 1980s in the midst of what would grow to become one of the most egregious public health crises of our era. The poet documents the emotional tenor of gay San Francisco at that time. At some point, the poet himself is infected with HIV. He signs up for a potentially successful treatment, but he is mistakenly told he is no longer eligible. Facing a death sentence, the poet jumps off of a bridge. Have you seen this man?
No book of his work has been produced until now. Twenty-five years later, the story of this poet is as compelling as his poetry itself. The poet is Karl Tierney.
Collected for the first time, Tierney’s poems themselves are stories of beauty, plague, cynicism, loneliness, anger, desperation, intelligence of the body, sex, community, and dystopia. As Jim Cory writes in an introduction that brought me to tears, “…Karl [Tierney] had arrived at a conclusion many gay men reach, which is that simply finding your way into this world of like-minded beings, which in the ‘70s and even in the ‘80s took some work to do, guarantees no satisfaction in and of itself…” How can a person be so lonely when surrounded by so many others with shared queer experience? It is too familiar a queer feeling: to be criticized, ignored, or even loathed by one’s peers. Perhaps the only way out (at least for a poet) is through documentation and the humor that comes through honesty.
Tierney’s poems are direct, frank, and true. Such an authenticity takes some work for a poet, and Tierney achieves this through his very interesting crafting of a declarative, unapologetic speaker who’s reliant on incision rather than pattern. There is not really a Dionysian idealization or gay activist yell, but a speaker “buy[ing] you a sneering drink…/returning the naked cruelty.” I have spent a lot of time with this book and continue to be unable to locate where the speaker is situated. Is he above me? Behind me? Beside me? The speaker is no tour guide, but he isn’t a friend, either; he’s not a particularly trusting fellow. No, this speaker knows too much for trust anymore. There’s a fine line between cynicism and insight, and this speaker has me acutely aware of it. From “Postcards from Abroad”:
“I must tell you, I lied.
Everything is not okay,
my disturbance deeper than anxiety.
I’m afraid of owing the world something.
From the picture you can see his tomb.
Paris so grand, but all roads
lead to Rome, making a neat seam.”
Who is this speaker and what can he teach me about loneliness? Tierney derived his speaker from a gay landscape which was becoming, literally, more and more lonely due in large part to governmental contempt of gay people. Cory writes in his ever-contextualizing introduction of a friend who said of another man in the late ‘80s, “He said I was the only person he knew who’d tested negative for the virus.”
Tierney writes about incredibly intelligently about “…years of never making muscle, then presto—/a powerhouse of loneliness!...” In “Envy,” he writes, “In your loneliness, you dwell on what you lack.” Elsewhere, the speaker says, “The rest of us…/are essentially nincompoops lonely at the core.” And this: “When you’re dying of thirst, you’ll drink from a mud hole.”
Straight culture finds it easier to reduce gay people to a few flat and tired tropes even as it has started to “accept” us. I find the refreshing absence of a straight gaze in Tierney’s work. This may not be revelatory for readers who’ve engaged with more 1980s gay poetry than I have, but in 2020, I often observe (and write with) an awareness of the straight reader, which often leads us to lionize our community defensively instead of plumbing its flaws. (This is, of course, another kind of respectability politics.) This new kind of queer self-consciousness in poetry is a product, I think, of the way in which straight culture has claimed to start subsuming us.
Tierney writes, “Oh, take me home. You’re dumb and homely but still warm,/unique in every way.” Separated by time, crisis, gender, and experience, I find so much to identify with in these poems.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee.
Of Clarity and Grace: A Review of Heaven Lake, by Bob Arnold
(Longhouse, 2018; $18; 151 pp)
by Michael Hettich
michaelhettich01@gmail.com
I’ve admired the poetry of Bob Arnold since the day we met, in 1982, when he gave me a copy of one of his first books, Thread, as we stood talking in the snowy street in front of a Laundromat in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont. The poems, spare, sparsely-punctuated, precise and drawn directly from Arnold’s life as a stone and wood builder in the hills of southern Vermont, moved me for their clarity of detail, authenticity of voice and profound but lightly- worn knowledge of place, tools, and—most moving to me—love for his wife, Susan. Arnold had (and has) a gentle eye and a sure knowledge of how to make things solid and plumb. Beyond these felicities, he was obviously a deeply-read, profoundly educated poet, someone who had navigated not just the main rivers of American and world literature but had actually worked those flows upriver to their springs and sources, and on into the deeper woods beyond. These qualities were manifested in the clear-eyed forms of his poems, in the sophisticated ways he handled their turns of phrase and subject.
A serious student of poetry myself, I admired Arnold’s craft; what I loved though was the presence of the man himself in the work. These were poems whose art served to illuminate a life, and they did so in ways that felt very different from most poems I encountered, which seemed glittering but shallow by contrast. The best work here communicated a clarity of mind (and heart) reminiscent of ancient Chinese hermit poets—deeply personal, intimate, even idiosyncratic evocations landscape and self. Unlike his mostly aristocratic Chinese masters, however, Arnold actually worked the land—with his hands—to make his living. Also unique, and uniquely satisfying: all of Arnold’s writing was undergirded by that aforementioned love for his wife, Susan, and later for his son, Carson. Once gleaned, these qualities were evident in every line he wrote. Here’s a poem from that early book:
December
She’s supposed to be land clearing
Heaping the brush to be burned in first snow
But the pale yellow ghost of the tall
Summer grasses she sweeps down
Is instead caught in her hand
And placed that way in a kitchen vase
Showing a warmth to last us thru winter
(from Thread, 1982)
Since the late 1970s, Arnold has published at least thirty books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, and he and Susan have served as literary executors of the estates of poets Cid Corman and Janine Pommy Vega. Through their Longhouse imprint, they have maintained an extensive bookstore, publishing venture, website and lively blog. All of these enterprises are well worth our attention. Still, it is Arnold’s writing that holds my primary interest. Heaven Lake, published by Longhouse in 2018, explores subject matter that has been central to Arnold’s work since the beginning: ordinary life transformed into vivid illumination through the power of loving attention and craft. The best of these poems seem to have arisen naturally, like grace, from moments of respite from the day’s work, or simply from stepping outside to look up at the stars; they have an unforced immediacy and beauty—and many of them sing like rivers and wind: reminders of the vividness of our singular lives:
Many years married please know
Is many years loved
A small bird with flashing orange wings
Sang from a tree that grew to our window
In this hut we made from our own hands...
(“Floating World”)
Heaven Lake contains many such beauties. Arnold’s best work reminds us of vital strains in American poetry that have been largely overlooked in our present moment, distracted as it sometimes seems to be by fashion and careerist clamor. Obvious non-Chinese mentors include Thoreau and Snyder. Equally deep and perhaps more central to Arnold’s work, though, are lesser-known figures such as Corman, Loraine Niedecker and James Koller, among many others. As widely as Arnold’s influences range, though, his best poems remain always and only his own, rooted in his home ground and family. His work never devolves into obfuscation or mere irony. We never scratch our heads perplexed, and we’re not asked to admire the poet’s rhetorical flourishes. Instead we revel in authentic observation that often feels like a form of communion:
How trusting, relaxed!
Daddy-Longlegs moves
Inches from my hammer blows
(“Framing the Barn”)
For me, the only sour moments in this fine volume describe the aftermath of a hurricane and resultant flood that washed out roads and wreaked devastation on Arnold’s backwoods Southern Vermont community. In these longer poems, the poet occasionally embraces a condescending and judgmental tone that may well have been a justified response to the actual circumstances but comes across as self-righteous and small-minded in the poems. The modulations and clarity of Arnold’s best work are all but nonexistent here:
...so things became unfortunate
we broke apart the campsite ourselves
dealt with the young men and all that ugly
further worse with the mother, never mind
the majority who live on our road, siding
against us and believing people should be
able to do as they wish
except of course when you wish to do it to them
overnight the world had become rotten
or to be kinder—confused...
(“The Hurricane and Its People”)
Although this poem attempts a note of grace in its closure, that grace fails to rise organically from what has preceded it, and thus it feels tacked-on and forced. Further, as we can see from the quoted passage, the writing is uncharacteristically tangled—and it’s not the kind of tangle this reader feels inclined to pull apart and reweave into useful rope.
Such small flaws in abeyance, Heaven Lake is a book to savor and reread, as are all of Bob Arnold’s books of poetry. The clarity, honesty, deep knowledge and love in his work are hard to find the likes of in contemporary poetry—or in the world at large—and resonantly valuable, a drink of icy spring water on a hot day of work, a glimpse into the very soul of a well-lived life, moments of lovely gentle intensity, caught on the page:
On the coldest day of winter
25 below...
we took the two largest empty potato chip bags
in the house and fit them over our heads
making us
two feet taller
scaring all
our cats
(“Cabin Life”)
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems, To Start an Orchard, was published in September, 2019 by Press 53. Other books include Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Books, 2018), The Frozen Harbor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2017) and Systems of Vanishing (U of Tampa Press, 2014). His website is michaelhettich.com.
(Longhouse, 2018; $18; 151 pp)
by Michael Hettich
michaelhettich01@gmail.com
I’ve admired the poetry of Bob Arnold since the day we met, in 1982, when he gave me a copy of one of his first books, Thread, as we stood talking in the snowy street in front of a Laundromat in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont. The poems, spare, sparsely-punctuated, precise and drawn directly from Arnold’s life as a stone and wood builder in the hills of southern Vermont, moved me for their clarity of detail, authenticity of voice and profound but lightly- worn knowledge of place, tools, and—most moving to me—love for his wife, Susan. Arnold had (and has) a gentle eye and a sure knowledge of how to make things solid and plumb. Beyond these felicities, he was obviously a deeply-read, profoundly educated poet, someone who had navigated not just the main rivers of American and world literature but had actually worked those flows upriver to their springs and sources, and on into the deeper woods beyond. These qualities were manifested in the clear-eyed forms of his poems, in the sophisticated ways he handled their turns of phrase and subject.
A serious student of poetry myself, I admired Arnold’s craft; what I loved though was the presence of the man himself in the work. These were poems whose art served to illuminate a life, and they did so in ways that felt very different from most poems I encountered, which seemed glittering but shallow by contrast. The best work here communicated a clarity of mind (and heart) reminiscent of ancient Chinese hermit poets—deeply personal, intimate, even idiosyncratic evocations landscape and self. Unlike his mostly aristocratic Chinese masters, however, Arnold actually worked the land—with his hands—to make his living. Also unique, and uniquely satisfying: all of Arnold’s writing was undergirded by that aforementioned love for his wife, Susan, and later for his son, Carson. Once gleaned, these qualities were evident in every line he wrote. Here’s a poem from that early book:
December
She’s supposed to be land clearing
Heaping the brush to be burned in first snow
But the pale yellow ghost of the tall
Summer grasses she sweeps down
Is instead caught in her hand
And placed that way in a kitchen vase
Showing a warmth to last us thru winter
(from Thread, 1982)
Since the late 1970s, Arnold has published at least thirty books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, and he and Susan have served as literary executors of the estates of poets Cid Corman and Janine Pommy Vega. Through their Longhouse imprint, they have maintained an extensive bookstore, publishing venture, website and lively blog. All of these enterprises are well worth our attention. Still, it is Arnold’s writing that holds my primary interest. Heaven Lake, published by Longhouse in 2018, explores subject matter that has been central to Arnold’s work since the beginning: ordinary life transformed into vivid illumination through the power of loving attention and craft. The best of these poems seem to have arisen naturally, like grace, from moments of respite from the day’s work, or simply from stepping outside to look up at the stars; they have an unforced immediacy and beauty—and many of them sing like rivers and wind: reminders of the vividness of our singular lives:
Many years married please know
Is many years loved
A small bird with flashing orange wings
Sang from a tree that grew to our window
In this hut we made from our own hands...
(“Floating World”)
Heaven Lake contains many such beauties. Arnold’s best work reminds us of vital strains in American poetry that have been largely overlooked in our present moment, distracted as it sometimes seems to be by fashion and careerist clamor. Obvious non-Chinese mentors include Thoreau and Snyder. Equally deep and perhaps more central to Arnold’s work, though, are lesser-known figures such as Corman, Loraine Niedecker and James Koller, among many others. As widely as Arnold’s influences range, though, his best poems remain always and only his own, rooted in his home ground and family. His work never devolves into obfuscation or mere irony. We never scratch our heads perplexed, and we’re not asked to admire the poet’s rhetorical flourishes. Instead we revel in authentic observation that often feels like a form of communion:
How trusting, relaxed!
Daddy-Longlegs moves
Inches from my hammer blows
(“Framing the Barn”)
For me, the only sour moments in this fine volume describe the aftermath of a hurricane and resultant flood that washed out roads and wreaked devastation on Arnold’s backwoods Southern Vermont community. In these longer poems, the poet occasionally embraces a condescending and judgmental tone that may well have been a justified response to the actual circumstances but comes across as self-righteous and small-minded in the poems. The modulations and clarity of Arnold’s best work are all but nonexistent here:
...so things became unfortunate
we broke apart the campsite ourselves
dealt with the young men and all that ugly
further worse with the mother, never mind
the majority who live on our road, siding
against us and believing people should be
able to do as they wish
except of course when you wish to do it to them
overnight the world had become rotten
or to be kinder—confused...
(“The Hurricane and Its People”)
Although this poem attempts a note of grace in its closure, that grace fails to rise organically from what has preceded it, and thus it feels tacked-on and forced. Further, as we can see from the quoted passage, the writing is uncharacteristically tangled—and it’s not the kind of tangle this reader feels inclined to pull apart and reweave into useful rope.
Such small flaws in abeyance, Heaven Lake is a book to savor and reread, as are all of Bob Arnold’s books of poetry. The clarity, honesty, deep knowledge and love in his work are hard to find the likes of in contemporary poetry—or in the world at large—and resonantly valuable, a drink of icy spring water on a hot day of work, a glimpse into the very soul of a well-lived life, moments of lovely gentle intensity, caught on the page:
On the coldest day of winter
25 below...
we took the two largest empty potato chip bags
in the house and fit them over our heads
making us
two feet taller
scaring all
our cats
(“Cabin Life”)
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems, To Start an Orchard, was published in September, 2019 by Press 53. Other books include Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Books, 2018), The Frozen Harbor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2017) and Systems of Vanishing (U of Tampa Press, 2014). His website is michaelhettich.com.
November 2019
Empathy and Revelation: A Review of Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare
by Lola Haskins (Pitt, 2019; $17) and
Every Ravening Thing,
by Monica de la O (Pitt, 2019; $17)
by Michael Hettich
For the past half-century or so, North American poetry has been experiencing a minor Renaissance. While there are few if any towering figures among us, there are countless first-rate artists—smaller in ambition (or hubris) perhaps, but nevertheless astonishing in their intelligence and craft. There is no dominant mode in our current poetry, and what “schools” there are exert little influence on the practice of most mainstream poets. So, while there may be few era-defining poems being declaimed, the ground is rich with undergrowth and the woods are dark and deeper than they’ve (almost) ever been before. There are many reasons for this rich and interesting state of affairs, ranging from the nightmares of our politics and impending climate change, to the increasing proliferation of MFA programs, and to the ever-smaller base of readership across all modes of literature. Whatever the reasons, we are in a rich and interesting time in poetry.
Two excellent examples of the rousing vitality of our poetry have been published this year in the prestigious Pitt Poetry series. In Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare, Lola Haskins presents the kind of spiritual journey John Clare might have taken in 1841 if, when he escaped the madhouse, he’d been traveling in his head rather than on his feet. Haskins’ work here is spare, honed to a sharp and flinty precision. She travels deep into Clare’s mind and spirit to reveal profound and deeply moving illuminations about his—and her own—spiritual core. Monica de la O’s Every Ravening Thing embraces quite a different strategy toward empathy and revelation: Her poems tend toward the lush and oracular, embracing, in the words of Chase Twichell, “a profound empathy for human suffering of all kinds.” Thus, while both poets look beyond their own lives to find their subjects, Haskins’ gaze is essentially inward and intimate while de la O’s is outward and public. We might even say—imprecisely—that these two poets manifest and reify the two great strains in North American poetry—that flowing from Dickinson on the one hand and from Whitman on the other. Even at her most widely-embracing and outward-looking, Haskins is essentially a poet for whom less is more, a poet whose very line breaks carry nuance and revelation. de la O’s more raucous and less exacting work offers a wider, wilder embrace in which the poet yearns “to walk alone at night/beneath the skirts of leaves and reach up//to touch the hem, just close enough/as darkness sharpens the moon’s golden knife” (“The Essence of Water”). Both books are exemplary in their control of craft, tone, and form, and both books are full of fully-realized poems, unique and beautiful contributions to our literature.
Haskins’ Asylum is framed by quotes from the diary John Clare kept in 1841, “describing his escape from Dr. Matthew Arnold’s private insane asylum...and his subsequent struggle to find his way home, where he hoped to reunite with Mary, who’d been his childhood sweetheart” (ix). Haskins considers these poems “improvisations...I see Clare’s changing mental states as matches and my poems as the resulting fire” (ix). Asylum is composed of four distinct sections or movements. In the opening section, Haskins embarks on her journey with as little direction as Clare had, and yet, after wandering literal and figurative paths, she finally reaches her destination, having learned from Clare that she can “be homeless at home and half-gratified to find I can be happy anywhere” (55). In essence, Haskins evokes the voice and spirit of John Clare in order to more fully enter her own core being, her own true voice. This astonishing act of ventriloquism allows her access to deeper regions of her own psyche than she would otherwise find her way to, regions where she can truly inhabit “herself” and, by being lost, find her truest home. Thus Haskins’ book, though made up of beautifully crafted individual poems, must be read as a book to be fully comprehended. Still, the individual poems are exquisite in their exactness and understated power. Haskins’ ear is perfect-pitched:
Serenade
Soon your small yellow leaves
will become meteors
falling through the dark as
each of us will fall
no matter how hard we love,
no matter how close we come
to composing a line that the angels
would recite, if only there
were such a perfect line,
if only there were angels.
(pg 12)
In In Every Ravening Thing, Monica de la O’s empathy works in a different, equally powerful if more conventional and familiar manner. Her empathy extends outward, toward the suffering of others--humans as well as sentient and non-sentient beings. She has described her work as “a reclamation from silence, a reckoning with the far-ranging consequences of violence, from the war on women and girls to the freight carried by veterans to the assault on the natural world in this epoch of the sixth extinction” (“Book News”). The fact that this astonishing ambition for her poetry is actually realized in many of the poems in the collection is testament to this poet’s courage, conviction and artistry. This is poetry meant to open hearts and change attitudes in fundamental and necessary ways, poetry of witness and utility. It is also often deeply moving:
For a Young Woman Dead at Twenty
She liked to slow-walk, heat-held, alone in groves behind the dorm
a sultry September night, lonely girl,
green-growing inside, tongue-tied in English class.
All those tongues tolling the bell, the knell, the gong: gone...gone...gone.
All that speculation, yawp and pang,
those letters home to our parents.
I keep my mouth shut, but the pang hammers away like a clock
wrapped around three sticks of dynamite,
heart sproketed, wheels engaged.
To walk alone at night for sweet relief
when heat clamps us in a vise,
they warn us to never.
I’m all haywire, blast-bound, rocked:
another trashcan fire, another girl defaced, defrocked,
and then comes grief.
Her name is Lois.
(pg 26)
De la O’s is a poetry of ravenous witness, while Haskins’ is one that might be called empathetic ventriloquism. Neither of these summations captures their rare and haunting work though, as Haskins’ precision evokes universal themes and insights through her very restraint while de la O’s more oracular voice often captures the nuances of the particular. As different as these two poets are, both are profoundly Romantic in the best and most “American” sense of that word. Like Emerson, Dickinson and Whitman in their different ways, Haskins and de la O articulate a shared sense that poetry possesses a kind of transcendent power—capable of transforming lives by awakening a kind of non-denominational grace: that sense that the whole world is numinous, as vivid as we are, and as alive. We are humbled and made larger by their songs.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poetry is To Start an Orchard, published in September 2019 by Press 53.
by Lola Haskins (Pitt, 2019; $17) and
Every Ravening Thing,
by Monica de la O (Pitt, 2019; $17)
by Michael Hettich
For the past half-century or so, North American poetry has been experiencing a minor Renaissance. While there are few if any towering figures among us, there are countless first-rate artists—smaller in ambition (or hubris) perhaps, but nevertheless astonishing in their intelligence and craft. There is no dominant mode in our current poetry, and what “schools” there are exert little influence on the practice of most mainstream poets. So, while there may be few era-defining poems being declaimed, the ground is rich with undergrowth and the woods are dark and deeper than they’ve (almost) ever been before. There are many reasons for this rich and interesting state of affairs, ranging from the nightmares of our politics and impending climate change, to the increasing proliferation of MFA programs, and to the ever-smaller base of readership across all modes of literature. Whatever the reasons, we are in a rich and interesting time in poetry.
Two excellent examples of the rousing vitality of our poetry have been published this year in the prestigious Pitt Poetry series. In Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare, Lola Haskins presents the kind of spiritual journey John Clare might have taken in 1841 if, when he escaped the madhouse, he’d been traveling in his head rather than on his feet. Haskins’ work here is spare, honed to a sharp and flinty precision. She travels deep into Clare’s mind and spirit to reveal profound and deeply moving illuminations about his—and her own—spiritual core. Monica de la O’s Every Ravening Thing embraces quite a different strategy toward empathy and revelation: Her poems tend toward the lush and oracular, embracing, in the words of Chase Twichell, “a profound empathy for human suffering of all kinds.” Thus, while both poets look beyond their own lives to find their subjects, Haskins’ gaze is essentially inward and intimate while de la O’s is outward and public. We might even say—imprecisely—that these two poets manifest and reify the two great strains in North American poetry—that flowing from Dickinson on the one hand and from Whitman on the other. Even at her most widely-embracing and outward-looking, Haskins is essentially a poet for whom less is more, a poet whose very line breaks carry nuance and revelation. de la O’s more raucous and less exacting work offers a wider, wilder embrace in which the poet yearns “to walk alone at night/beneath the skirts of leaves and reach up//to touch the hem, just close enough/as darkness sharpens the moon’s golden knife” (“The Essence of Water”). Both books are exemplary in their control of craft, tone, and form, and both books are full of fully-realized poems, unique and beautiful contributions to our literature.
Haskins’ Asylum is framed by quotes from the diary John Clare kept in 1841, “describing his escape from Dr. Matthew Arnold’s private insane asylum...and his subsequent struggle to find his way home, where he hoped to reunite with Mary, who’d been his childhood sweetheart” (ix). Haskins considers these poems “improvisations...I see Clare’s changing mental states as matches and my poems as the resulting fire” (ix). Asylum is composed of four distinct sections or movements. In the opening section, Haskins embarks on her journey with as little direction as Clare had, and yet, after wandering literal and figurative paths, she finally reaches her destination, having learned from Clare that she can “be homeless at home and half-gratified to find I can be happy anywhere” (55). In essence, Haskins evokes the voice and spirit of John Clare in order to more fully enter her own core being, her own true voice. This astonishing act of ventriloquism allows her access to deeper regions of her own psyche than she would otherwise find her way to, regions where she can truly inhabit “herself” and, by being lost, find her truest home. Thus Haskins’ book, though made up of beautifully crafted individual poems, must be read as a book to be fully comprehended. Still, the individual poems are exquisite in their exactness and understated power. Haskins’ ear is perfect-pitched:
Serenade
Soon your small yellow leaves
will become meteors
falling through the dark as
each of us will fall
no matter how hard we love,
no matter how close we come
to composing a line that the angels
would recite, if only there
were such a perfect line,
if only there were angels.
(pg 12)
In In Every Ravening Thing, Monica de la O’s empathy works in a different, equally powerful if more conventional and familiar manner. Her empathy extends outward, toward the suffering of others--humans as well as sentient and non-sentient beings. She has described her work as “a reclamation from silence, a reckoning with the far-ranging consequences of violence, from the war on women and girls to the freight carried by veterans to the assault on the natural world in this epoch of the sixth extinction” (“Book News”). The fact that this astonishing ambition for her poetry is actually realized in many of the poems in the collection is testament to this poet’s courage, conviction and artistry. This is poetry meant to open hearts and change attitudes in fundamental and necessary ways, poetry of witness and utility. It is also often deeply moving:
For a Young Woman Dead at Twenty
She liked to slow-walk, heat-held, alone in groves behind the dorm
a sultry September night, lonely girl,
green-growing inside, tongue-tied in English class.
All those tongues tolling the bell, the knell, the gong: gone...gone...gone.
All that speculation, yawp and pang,
those letters home to our parents.
I keep my mouth shut, but the pang hammers away like a clock
wrapped around three sticks of dynamite,
heart sproketed, wheels engaged.
To walk alone at night for sweet relief
when heat clamps us in a vise,
they warn us to never.
I’m all haywire, blast-bound, rocked:
another trashcan fire, another girl defaced, defrocked,
and then comes grief.
Her name is Lois.
(pg 26)
De la O’s is a poetry of ravenous witness, while Haskins’ is one that might be called empathetic ventriloquism. Neither of these summations captures their rare and haunting work though, as Haskins’ precision evokes universal themes and insights through her very restraint while de la O’s more oracular voice often captures the nuances of the particular. As different as these two poets are, both are profoundly Romantic in the best and most “American” sense of that word. Like Emerson, Dickinson and Whitman in their different ways, Haskins and de la O articulate a shared sense that poetry possesses a kind of transcendent power—capable of transforming lives by awakening a kind of non-denominational grace: that sense that the whole world is numinous, as vivid as we are, and as alive. We are humbled and made larger by their songs.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poetry is To Start an Orchard, published in September 2019 by Press 53.
Sunshine State
by Gregg Shapiro
NightBallet Press, 2019
978-1-64092-963-0
by Freesia McKee
As a transplanted Midwesterner, the longer I live in Florida, the more I realize there might be, indeed, a certain school of Florida poetry. We’re not as well-known as the New York School, but we can perhaps claim the mantle of “Most Quirky.”
Gregg Shapiro’s new chapbook Sunshine State (NightBallet Press, 2019) shouts a confident “Here!” during roll call at the local meeting of the Florida Observers of the Zany. Readers will recognize Aventura Mall, I-95, the Wynwood Walls, Fort Lauderdale, and North Miami—not to mention televised weather news, the “dryly discreet/language” of palm trees, sawgrass, palmetto bugs, termites, and “grinning realtors, tan and sexy mortgage/lenders.”
Shapiro’s poems outline typical Floridian joys and worries—hurricane prep, the fear associated with life in a gun-toting Red State, losing sleep in the subtropics, and marveling at the kind of outdoor art possible only in a place where it doesn’t snow. These narrative poems are a documentary of Florida life, but they also go beyond the peninsula. Shapiro’s speaker mixes humor and gravity whether he’s eating peas, enraptured in a Proustian, gustatory memory; giving away the artifacts of a beloved late dog; or analyzing the propensity to overshare on Facebook.
As I write this review, I am sitting at a bar in North Miami listening to a pair of bro’s say the same sentence over and over: “Women shed hair.” (I decided against revealing that women do not shed—most of us shave, or in the case of South Florida, wax.) Hours earlier, I laughed heartily at a dark joke about a car and an iguana. What I see so acutely in Shapiro’s poems are these strange Florida moments, increasingly familiar the longer I live here: “Tony thinks he saw Katy Perry on a Broward/County transit bus but was unsure of how to approach her” or “The last-minute purchase of floor-model generators/plastic gas cans, 10W-30 oil, waterproof power cords,//and where to safely and dryly store receipts for easy access.”
Or, how about these, lines that make me consider the possibility of a reptilian makeup tutorial on YouTube: “Down here, lizards of varying sizes and shapes, capable/of assorted velocities, offer camouflage tutorials, blending/brown as roots, vivid green as sawgrass palm fronds,/verdant foliage. But what if there’s nowhere to hide…”
The detailed descriptions of decoration and scenery have always shined for me in Shapiro’s poetry. Sunshine State never leaves readers in want of a fuller picture, a more complete scene.
Every semester, I tell my students that no matter what one is writing about, there is a way to make it interesting. Even laundry, I say to my students. But it isn’t, until now, that I have had a poem to illustrate my example. Shapiro, dear reader, writes compellingly, yes, even about laundry: “The laundry/basket, full of clean, unfolded clothes in the walk-in closet is empty, drawers/and shelves and racks neatly overflowing. Your high concept of alphabetical/t-shirt organization by color is unexpectedly a reality.” It’s the depth of description, the exactness, that appeals to me.
Shapiro isn’t a formalist, per se, but he is paying attention to form. Octets, tercets, and more: he’s unearthed the special shape each poem demands. “Goodnight Poltergeist” is composed of two thirteen-line (spooky!) stanzas. “Following Hurricane Erika” unfurls in unsettling tercets. “Peas for Breakfast” takes the shape of a pleasing stack of six five-line aluminum stanzas.
If stanza shape and size are closely attended to, I should also mention the book itself as object. Published in a small run by NightBallet Press, Sunshine State’s paper is sandy, beachy, textured. The cover art by Timothy Gaewsky is groovy—a sunburst, a kaleidoscope—and a nod to the aforementioned Wynwood Walls. This level of attention to tactile and visual detail is one of the special aspects of small press chapbooks.
Bringing some levity to typical Floridian worries, Sunshine State is Gregg Shapiro at his best. Funny, observant, political, and descriptive, the sun sets somewhere over the Everglades in this collection of seventeen poems after a long, bright day of antics.
It’s time for me to end this review. Shapiro’s not lying; Florida is a strange and variegated place. At the next table, the same two men are arguing over whether their friend’s butt is “real.” Social media photos are being considered and exchanged.
I need to get out of here, finish my drink, eat the last of these greasy potato skins. Shapiro is a long-time entertainment and restaurant critic for the gay press and beyond. I’m not sure what he’d think of this dubious bar food, but I know he would describe it well. I’m also sure that, ever the poet, he’d look beyond the watery tables at the palm trees, the skittering geckos, these dilapidated high-rise apartment buildings, and the crescent moon.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
by Gregg Shapiro
NightBallet Press, 2019
978-1-64092-963-0
by Freesia McKee
As a transplanted Midwesterner, the longer I live in Florida, the more I realize there might be, indeed, a certain school of Florida poetry. We’re not as well-known as the New York School, but we can perhaps claim the mantle of “Most Quirky.”
Gregg Shapiro’s new chapbook Sunshine State (NightBallet Press, 2019) shouts a confident “Here!” during roll call at the local meeting of the Florida Observers of the Zany. Readers will recognize Aventura Mall, I-95, the Wynwood Walls, Fort Lauderdale, and North Miami—not to mention televised weather news, the “dryly discreet/language” of palm trees, sawgrass, palmetto bugs, termites, and “grinning realtors, tan and sexy mortgage/lenders.”
Shapiro’s poems outline typical Floridian joys and worries—hurricane prep, the fear associated with life in a gun-toting Red State, losing sleep in the subtropics, and marveling at the kind of outdoor art possible only in a place where it doesn’t snow. These narrative poems are a documentary of Florida life, but they also go beyond the peninsula. Shapiro’s speaker mixes humor and gravity whether he’s eating peas, enraptured in a Proustian, gustatory memory; giving away the artifacts of a beloved late dog; or analyzing the propensity to overshare on Facebook.
As I write this review, I am sitting at a bar in North Miami listening to a pair of bro’s say the same sentence over and over: “Women shed hair.” (I decided against revealing that women do not shed—most of us shave, or in the case of South Florida, wax.) Hours earlier, I laughed heartily at a dark joke about a car and an iguana. What I see so acutely in Shapiro’s poems are these strange Florida moments, increasingly familiar the longer I live here: “Tony thinks he saw Katy Perry on a Broward/County transit bus but was unsure of how to approach her” or “The last-minute purchase of floor-model generators/plastic gas cans, 10W-30 oil, waterproof power cords,//and where to safely and dryly store receipts for easy access.”
Or, how about these, lines that make me consider the possibility of a reptilian makeup tutorial on YouTube: “Down here, lizards of varying sizes and shapes, capable/of assorted velocities, offer camouflage tutorials, blending/brown as roots, vivid green as sawgrass palm fronds,/verdant foliage. But what if there’s nowhere to hide…”
The detailed descriptions of decoration and scenery have always shined for me in Shapiro’s poetry. Sunshine State never leaves readers in want of a fuller picture, a more complete scene.
Every semester, I tell my students that no matter what one is writing about, there is a way to make it interesting. Even laundry, I say to my students. But it isn’t, until now, that I have had a poem to illustrate my example. Shapiro, dear reader, writes compellingly, yes, even about laundry: “The laundry/basket, full of clean, unfolded clothes in the walk-in closet is empty, drawers/and shelves and racks neatly overflowing. Your high concept of alphabetical/t-shirt organization by color is unexpectedly a reality.” It’s the depth of description, the exactness, that appeals to me.
Shapiro isn’t a formalist, per se, but he is paying attention to form. Octets, tercets, and more: he’s unearthed the special shape each poem demands. “Goodnight Poltergeist” is composed of two thirteen-line (spooky!) stanzas. “Following Hurricane Erika” unfurls in unsettling tercets. “Peas for Breakfast” takes the shape of a pleasing stack of six five-line aluminum stanzas.
If stanza shape and size are closely attended to, I should also mention the book itself as object. Published in a small run by NightBallet Press, Sunshine State’s paper is sandy, beachy, textured. The cover art by Timothy Gaewsky is groovy—a sunburst, a kaleidoscope—and a nod to the aforementioned Wynwood Walls. This level of attention to tactile and visual detail is one of the special aspects of small press chapbooks.
Bringing some levity to typical Floridian worries, Sunshine State is Gregg Shapiro at his best. Funny, observant, political, and descriptive, the sun sets somewhere over the Everglades in this collection of seventeen poems after a long, bright day of antics.
It’s time for me to end this review. Shapiro’s not lying; Florida is a strange and variegated place. At the next table, the same two men are arguing over whether their friend’s butt is “real.” Social media photos are being considered and exchanged.
I need to get out of here, finish my drink, eat the last of these greasy potato skins. Shapiro is a long-time entertainment and restaurant critic for the gay press and beyond. I’m not sure what he’d think of this dubious bar food, but I know he would describe it well. I’m also sure that, ever the poet, he’d look beyond the watery tables at the palm trees, the skittering geckos, these dilapidated high-rise apartment buildings, and the crescent moon.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
August 2019
Full-Metal Indigiqueer
by Joshua Whitehead
Talonbooks, 2017
978-1-77201-187-6
by Freesia McKee
Joshua Whitehead is “a resistant reader, a resurgent writer[period]” and goes on to ask, “what does it mean to be an indigiqueer[questionmark] queer, digital, futuristic, punk, cyber, bio, antiessential, scientific, traditional, reactionary, revolutionary, theorizing chaos, materializing worlds.” He poses this question in the acknowledgements of his 2017 collection Full-Metal Indigiqueer.
After getting about halfway through the book, I turned to my partner and said, “I haven’t read poems like this before.” I kept opening the pages of the book and exclaiming Look! I wanted her to see the ways the text is arranged across the page, the multitude of graphic illustrations and photographs, the dynamic and unconventional uses of punctuation, and the successful experiments Whitehead conducts when he eliminates spaces between words.
For me, the reading experience of Full-Metal Indigiqueer was thrilling, invigorating, and provocative. It’s not just that the book is linguistically experimental, though it is:
iam
the beating of my heartdrum
iam:wonderously amused
iam:[injun]
iam:[unity]
iam:myshame&thatsokay
iam:wheremisery
becomes:[my]story
iam --
iam
iam
It’s not just that Full-Metal Indigiqueer is political. Whitehead discusses the ways that bodies are automatically culturally-politicized targets of violence:
heygranheygranheygranheygran
ill let you be
& stop being sickning
I bet youre busy
cooking macaroni&tomatosoup
for more than twelve hundred missing murdered women,
girls & 2S folk
And it’s not just that that the book is deeply intertextual, though it is. The Sources section at the end takes up three pages and the list ranges from Seinfeld to Hannah Arendt to RuPaul to James Baldwin to Jennifer Hudson, Tim Burton, George R.R. Martin, Truman Capote, Edward Spenser, Zora Neale Hurston, Rihanna, Matt Groening, Sylvia Plath, and CBS News. This is the canon from which Whitehead pulls.
It’s also the keen attention to cyberspace as place, as territory, and as a site of belonging and alienation. This examination of cyberspace as territory and place allows us to think about physical land and the terrains of the body in new ways.
This is not an easy book to read—not only is the text experimental, but most of the poems live inside of trauma and pain related to shame, homophobia, genocide, and the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.
As I write this review, I am thinking about the way that the poet Audre Lorde would famously walk into a room or start an event by naming her identities: “I am a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” There is power in naming and claiming all of oneself, and among other points of notable significance, naming the truth is one role that poetry has in making social change.
Full-Metal Indigiqueer starts with white dot on a black page. The dot gets bigger and bigger over the next pages like a flipbook. “H3R314M” (HERE I AM), we see within the growing dot. Whitehead writes, “iam”/”I am”/”14M” repeatedly throughout the poems.
Whitehead is naming and claiming. However, he also problematizes this act, noting that names can exist for other people’s comfort:
i am my own best thing
my name[questionmark]
i have no need for names
Many of us think about cyberspace as a potentially anonymous space, a space where we can name ourselves anew or have no name at all. Many of us will remember the days when we first used screenname pseudonyms. We remember when popular wisdom dictated we not include our government names in our email addresses. Whitehead maintains a historicity of digital existence in poems where the speaker becomes almost a computer.
A sequence later in the book begins each poem with a kind of coding that clues readers in to Whitehead’s sources and what is to come:
: :: : :: :: : : :: :: :: :: ::: ::::: : ::: :: ::: :::[instealling miltonsoftware]:: :: :: ::::: : :: :: :::: : : :: :press: :: :::: ::x: :: ::: :: :: :: :::: : :: ::[instealling. . .]: :: :: :: : ::[instealling. . .]: :: :: :::: :: ::: : [insteallation complete]: :: :: :: :::::: ::::[runningpro(1,0)zoaprogram]: :::: ::: : ::: :: ::
:[target] : ::: ::: : :::[re|decolonizing]: :: :::: :: ::::: :: ::: :: :: :: : :[indigenizationcomplete]:
Whitehead computes/quantifies/creates new language for social issues and indigiqueer identities. I am reminded of the phrase “this does not compute” and how that reflects on the human coder, the input, and the established program alike.
Interestingly, Whitehead’s physical-digital transmogrification reaches readers through a paper book. As a reader, this multi-modal collection of poetry allowed me to think about voice and anonymity in new ways. I closed the book having listened to a new language of existence and resistance.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
by Joshua Whitehead
Talonbooks, 2017
978-1-77201-187-6
by Freesia McKee
Joshua Whitehead is “a resistant reader, a resurgent writer[period]” and goes on to ask, “what does it mean to be an indigiqueer[questionmark] queer, digital, futuristic, punk, cyber, bio, antiessential, scientific, traditional, reactionary, revolutionary, theorizing chaos, materializing worlds.” He poses this question in the acknowledgements of his 2017 collection Full-Metal Indigiqueer.
After getting about halfway through the book, I turned to my partner and said, “I haven’t read poems like this before.” I kept opening the pages of the book and exclaiming Look! I wanted her to see the ways the text is arranged across the page, the multitude of graphic illustrations and photographs, the dynamic and unconventional uses of punctuation, and the successful experiments Whitehead conducts when he eliminates spaces between words.
For me, the reading experience of Full-Metal Indigiqueer was thrilling, invigorating, and provocative. It’s not just that the book is linguistically experimental, though it is:
iam
the beating of my heartdrum
iam:wonderously amused
iam:[injun]
iam:[unity]
iam:myshame&thatsokay
iam:wheremisery
becomes:[my]story
iam --
iam
iam
It’s not just that Full-Metal Indigiqueer is political. Whitehead discusses the ways that bodies are automatically culturally-politicized targets of violence:
heygranheygranheygranheygran
ill let you be
& stop being sickning
I bet youre busy
cooking macaroni&tomatosoup
for more than twelve hundred missing murdered women,
girls & 2S folk
And it’s not just that that the book is deeply intertextual, though it is. The Sources section at the end takes up three pages and the list ranges from Seinfeld to Hannah Arendt to RuPaul to James Baldwin to Jennifer Hudson, Tim Burton, George R.R. Martin, Truman Capote, Edward Spenser, Zora Neale Hurston, Rihanna, Matt Groening, Sylvia Plath, and CBS News. This is the canon from which Whitehead pulls.
It’s also the keen attention to cyberspace as place, as territory, and as a site of belonging and alienation. This examination of cyberspace as territory and place allows us to think about physical land and the terrains of the body in new ways.
This is not an easy book to read—not only is the text experimental, but most of the poems live inside of trauma and pain related to shame, homophobia, genocide, and the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.
As I write this review, I am thinking about the way that the poet Audre Lorde would famously walk into a room or start an event by naming her identities: “I am a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” There is power in naming and claiming all of oneself, and among other points of notable significance, naming the truth is one role that poetry has in making social change.
Full-Metal Indigiqueer starts with white dot on a black page. The dot gets bigger and bigger over the next pages like a flipbook. “H3R314M” (HERE I AM), we see within the growing dot. Whitehead writes, “iam”/”I am”/”14M” repeatedly throughout the poems.
Whitehead is naming and claiming. However, he also problematizes this act, noting that names can exist for other people’s comfort:
i am my own best thing
my name[questionmark]
i have no need for names
Many of us think about cyberspace as a potentially anonymous space, a space where we can name ourselves anew or have no name at all. Many of us will remember the days when we first used screenname pseudonyms. We remember when popular wisdom dictated we not include our government names in our email addresses. Whitehead maintains a historicity of digital existence in poems where the speaker becomes almost a computer.
A sequence later in the book begins each poem with a kind of coding that clues readers in to Whitehead’s sources and what is to come:
: :: : :: :: : : :: :: :: :: ::: ::::: : ::: :: ::: :::[instealling miltonsoftware]:: :: :: ::::: : :: :: :::: : : :: :press: :: :::: ::x: :: ::: :: :: :: :::: : :: ::[instealling. . .]: :: :: :: : ::[instealling. . .]: :: :: :::: :: ::: : [insteallation complete]: :: :: :: :::::: ::::[runningpro(1,0)zoaprogram]: :::: ::: : ::: :: ::
:[target] : ::: ::: : :::[re|decolonizing]: :: :::: :: ::::: :: ::: :: :: :: : :[indigenizationcomplete]:
Whitehead computes/quantifies/creates new language for social issues and indigiqueer identities. I am reminded of the phrase “this does not compute” and how that reflects on the human coder, the input, and the established program alike.
Interestingly, Whitehead’s physical-digital transmogrification reaches readers through a paper book. As a reader, this multi-modal collection of poetry allowed me to think about voice and anonymity in new ways. I closed the book having listened to a new language of existence and resistance.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
Of Mentors, Friends, and Kin: A review of To Float in the Space Between, by Terrance Hayes
(Wave Books, 2018, $25.00)
by Michael Hettich
Terrance Hayes’s To Float in the Space Between is a deeply personal examination of the work and life of the poet Etheridge Knight presented through a collage of short essays, poems, drawings, and lists that vividly evoke Knight’s searing art and fractured life as well as the profound effect these things have had on Hayes, one of the most vital and interesting poets at work today. Simultaneously funny, moving, insightful and just plain entertaining, this book manages to be both a critical/academic analysis of Knight’s work, an homage to that work and life, and a meditation on family, race, influence and love. Drawn from the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, To Float in the Space Between has the feel of deeply-engaged improvisation both in its individual sections and in the juxtaposition of these sections across the arc of text. It is in fact that rare critical text that is itself an original work of art, a book of literary analysis that thinks and moves like a poem. In short, it is an astounding achievement.
Opening with a wide-ranging discussion of “The Idea of Ancestry,” a poem from Knight’s first book, Poems from Prison (1968), Hayes asks his readers to “consider this collection of essays as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself,” a poet who remains both “a muse and a mystery” to the author. In the same opening essay, Hayes provides a precisely-articulated statement of his approach: “The scholar looks upon his subject as if through a window...A clear pane of logic, interpretation, and appreciation separates him from his subject. Conversely, a poet looking upon the poetry of another poet sees something of himself reflected in the pane...A poet looks upon the work of another poet not only through a window but also through a mirror.” Then, going further and evoking Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Hayes suggests that, at least for a poet whose engagement with his subject is as personal and complex as is his with Knight, “the window is a mirror.” He might “lift the window and climb, as a Peeping Tom (or Goldilocks) would, into the lines of his subject.” He closes this passage by ruminating over whether imagination can be a form of critical study and ends with, “For more than a decade I have been imagining my way into the slants and shades of Etheridge Knight.” Such is the complex but absolutely accessible methodology of this book, and the source of its originality and delight.
To Float in the Space Between is about many things, but at its core it is about poetry as a life-force, a means of being fully present in the world. For Hayes, poetry is a hugely-various, multi-faceted source of personal and cultural energy. Hayes’s embrace is discerning, enthusiastic, engaged and, indeed, life-affirming. Among the poets discussed here are such diverse voices as Amiri Baraka, Robert Bly, Fran Quinn, Robert Lowell, Henry Taylor, Wislaw Szamborska, Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks and William Wordsworth—and there is an equal number of figures from the worlds of criticism, politics, pop culture and philosophy, among them Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born philosopher and critic whose concept of “liquidity” Hayes considers from various angles and applications. The aesthetics of “liquidity” provides the basis for one of the central concepts of the book, as well as some of its most beautiful passages:
The poetics of liquid is the poetics of wind. The poetics of liquid is the poetics of escape, the poetics of doors and windows. The poetics of liquid is the poetics of hallucination. It is the poetics of blood...
Poetics, like voice, can hold multiple registers and experiences and interests; poetics, like a voice, is more than a reflection of identity...Poetics is a reflection of being being.
Its originality, verve, open-minded embrace and overall capaciousness make To Float in the Space Between tremendously difficult to encapsulate in a short review. Much of the book sings like “a moment of poetry so diverse no particular philosophy could hold it” and yet it is full of philosophy, useful and exciting ideas applied and adjusted and reapplied. Like the best moments of improvisation, when the small self seems to be lost to the music and the music an expression of the self beneath and beyond the “self,” this book sings with its subjects and with its own language, reaching toward something larger than can ever be grasped, whose pleasure, whose largeness, whose very being is enacted in the reach. The multitudes it contains are truly breathtaking, simultaneously grounded and soaring--like a flock of rare birds we squint to admire just as they disappear into the blue...
To Float in the Space Between is a book to read and re-read, to ponder, to argue with, and to emulate. It is also a book of sage advice: “Be honest, be stupid, be brave.”
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems is Bluer and More Vast, published by Hysterical Press in 2018. A new book, To Start an Orchard, is forthcoming.
(Wave Books, 2018, $25.00)
by Michael Hettich
Terrance Hayes’s To Float in the Space Between is a deeply personal examination of the work and life of the poet Etheridge Knight presented through a collage of short essays, poems, drawings, and lists that vividly evoke Knight’s searing art and fractured life as well as the profound effect these things have had on Hayes, one of the most vital and interesting poets at work today. Simultaneously funny, moving, insightful and just plain entertaining, this book manages to be both a critical/academic analysis of Knight’s work, an homage to that work and life, and a meditation on family, race, influence and love. Drawn from the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, To Float in the Space Between has the feel of deeply-engaged improvisation both in its individual sections and in the juxtaposition of these sections across the arc of text. It is in fact that rare critical text that is itself an original work of art, a book of literary analysis that thinks and moves like a poem. In short, it is an astounding achievement.
Opening with a wide-ranging discussion of “The Idea of Ancestry,” a poem from Knight’s first book, Poems from Prison (1968), Hayes asks his readers to “consider this collection of essays as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself,” a poet who remains both “a muse and a mystery” to the author. In the same opening essay, Hayes provides a precisely-articulated statement of his approach: “The scholar looks upon his subject as if through a window...A clear pane of logic, interpretation, and appreciation separates him from his subject. Conversely, a poet looking upon the poetry of another poet sees something of himself reflected in the pane...A poet looks upon the work of another poet not only through a window but also through a mirror.” Then, going further and evoking Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Hayes suggests that, at least for a poet whose engagement with his subject is as personal and complex as is his with Knight, “the window is a mirror.” He might “lift the window and climb, as a Peeping Tom (or Goldilocks) would, into the lines of his subject.” He closes this passage by ruminating over whether imagination can be a form of critical study and ends with, “For more than a decade I have been imagining my way into the slants and shades of Etheridge Knight.” Such is the complex but absolutely accessible methodology of this book, and the source of its originality and delight.
To Float in the Space Between is about many things, but at its core it is about poetry as a life-force, a means of being fully present in the world. For Hayes, poetry is a hugely-various, multi-faceted source of personal and cultural energy. Hayes’s embrace is discerning, enthusiastic, engaged and, indeed, life-affirming. Among the poets discussed here are such diverse voices as Amiri Baraka, Robert Bly, Fran Quinn, Robert Lowell, Henry Taylor, Wislaw Szamborska, Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks and William Wordsworth—and there is an equal number of figures from the worlds of criticism, politics, pop culture and philosophy, among them Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born philosopher and critic whose concept of “liquidity” Hayes considers from various angles and applications. The aesthetics of “liquidity” provides the basis for one of the central concepts of the book, as well as some of its most beautiful passages:
The poetics of liquid is the poetics of wind. The poetics of liquid is the poetics of escape, the poetics of doors and windows. The poetics of liquid is the poetics of hallucination. It is the poetics of blood...
Poetics, like voice, can hold multiple registers and experiences and interests; poetics, like a voice, is more than a reflection of identity...Poetics is a reflection of being being.
Its originality, verve, open-minded embrace and overall capaciousness make To Float in the Space Between tremendously difficult to encapsulate in a short review. Much of the book sings like “a moment of poetry so diverse no particular philosophy could hold it” and yet it is full of philosophy, useful and exciting ideas applied and adjusted and reapplied. Like the best moments of improvisation, when the small self seems to be lost to the music and the music an expression of the self beneath and beyond the “self,” this book sings with its subjects and with its own language, reaching toward something larger than can ever be grasped, whose pleasure, whose largeness, whose very being is enacted in the reach. The multitudes it contains are truly breathtaking, simultaneously grounded and soaring--like a flock of rare birds we squint to admire just as they disappear into the blue...
To Float in the Space Between is a book to read and re-read, to ponder, to argue with, and to emulate. It is also a book of sage advice: “Be honest, be stupid, be brave.”
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems is Bluer and More Vast, published by Hysterical Press in 2018. A new book, To Start an Orchard, is forthcoming.
May 2019
American Letters: works on paper
by giovanni singleton Canarium Books,
Ann Arbor, Michigan 978-0-9969827
by Freesia McKee
I’m teaching a workshop later this summer on how poets use found material, erasure, and epigraphs, so when I picked up giovanni singleton’s American Letters: works on paper at an AWP off-site event table this year, I knew I had to get myself a copy.
As singleton notes in the forward to the first sequence of poems, she is writing into “a lineage of African American and African Diasporic avant-garde/experimental/oppositional writing.” Expanding even the idea of the poetic line itself, singleton uses illustration, diagram, collage, and other visual tools that take advantage of the page’s full plane.
This first sequence uses call numbers to create concrete poems in the shape of a cross and a flag. The third in the sequence is a poem without any body at all, just a blank page titled “EXHIBIT C: American Letters.” These works make a statement about who is allowed in the hegemonic “American letters” and who is left out.
“American letters” is a term that has been used to refer to this country’s artistic canon of merit. Unfortunately, “American letters” can be a problematic term because what’s included in the canon is influenced by racist, sexist, and other exclusionary attitudes. There are also issues of access and myopia. “how many inscriptions and nouns/come to believe only themselves” singleton writes.
singleton’s American Letters reclaims the term for Black experimental creators and uses a variety of experimental techniques to bring these creators into the “room” of the book. If the word “stanza” means “room,” singleton has broken down all four walls, lifted off the ceiling, and busted in the floor. This is how expansive these poems are.
The book is divided into thirteen chapters with tributes to Black experimental artists throughout the text. For instance, “cagedbird” refers to, of course, Maya Angelou, but also Charlie “Bird” Parker. “bird bird Ju Ju bird drum bird Charlie bird Parker bird i'm for the/birds not the cages people put them in bird john john bird cage bird” one poem reads called “PERFORMANCE SCORE for cagedbird.” Handwritten text and typed text leapfrog over each other. At the bottom of the page is a note: “*Every occurrence of ‘bird’ acts as a site for improvisation.”
Improvisation is a huge theme in the book. Another untitled poem in the sequence “worldview(s)” has a similar note, that “Every occurrence of ‘mu’ acts as a site for improvisation.”
mu mu mu mu mu mu mu
no no no no no no no
does a dog does a dog does a dog does a dog does a dog does a dog does a dog
mu mu mu mu mu mu mu
The poem continues on for a full page, with some text actually written over other text like a palimpsest. Alice Coltrane is also a prominent figure in the section. An “eternity” clock made of her name reminds readers of her 1975 album Eternity.
The next sequence involves several “mesostic” poems. Misostic poems like similar to acrostics, but the letter of significance bisects anywhere in the line, not necessarily at the beginning. There are tributes to Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Nina Simone, and Bob Kaufman and several of Bob Kaufman’s books. “chambeRs/illuminAte/jupIter’s feverish/daNce” goes the last poem in the sequence, “The Ancient Rain: a mesostic after Bob Kaufman.”
There are poems that riff on the notion of the square root, placing words and illustrations (in one case, the American flag) within the equation. It’s exciting to me that math plays a role, touching on the idea that what some consider the objective truth of “American letters” is actually subjective.
One poem’s a bingo card, another’s a honeycomb made constructed of the word “be,” other poems are trees, and others are prose poems consisting of “dad” and synonyms like “dada,” “father,” and “daddy.”
One page reads, simply, “Some identification, please…” and is followed by several concrete poems in which words create 3-D boxes on the page. Terms like “African-American,” “feminist,” “straight,” and “workingclass” are typed over and over in lines that form these boxes, bringing to mind what it means to be out of the box, boxed in, boxed out, right-angled, right, etc.
Because of the way many of us are trained in high school English classes, there can be a pressure to understand experimental work through traditional (even, perhaps Eurocentric) analysis. We’re taught that there’s one right answer, and that it’s the reader’s job to find it.
However, I have gotten to a place where I don’t find that as satisfying as being present with the questions experimentation brings up. What stands out about American Letters is the range of techniques singleton uses. It’s sort of like going to a great art exhibition—there is tremendous texture and provocation. When you step away from the book—the exhibit—your mind is filled with images, not just words.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
by giovanni singleton Canarium Books,
Ann Arbor, Michigan 978-0-9969827
by Freesia McKee
I’m teaching a workshop later this summer on how poets use found material, erasure, and epigraphs, so when I picked up giovanni singleton’s American Letters: works on paper at an AWP off-site event table this year, I knew I had to get myself a copy.
As singleton notes in the forward to the first sequence of poems, she is writing into “a lineage of African American and African Diasporic avant-garde/experimental/oppositional writing.” Expanding even the idea of the poetic line itself, singleton uses illustration, diagram, collage, and other visual tools that take advantage of the page’s full plane.
This first sequence uses call numbers to create concrete poems in the shape of a cross and a flag. The third in the sequence is a poem without any body at all, just a blank page titled “EXHIBIT C: American Letters.” These works make a statement about who is allowed in the hegemonic “American letters” and who is left out.
“American letters” is a term that has been used to refer to this country’s artistic canon of merit. Unfortunately, “American letters” can be a problematic term because what’s included in the canon is influenced by racist, sexist, and other exclusionary attitudes. There are also issues of access and myopia. “how many inscriptions and nouns/come to believe only themselves” singleton writes.
singleton’s American Letters reclaims the term for Black experimental creators and uses a variety of experimental techniques to bring these creators into the “room” of the book. If the word “stanza” means “room,” singleton has broken down all four walls, lifted off the ceiling, and busted in the floor. This is how expansive these poems are.
The book is divided into thirteen chapters with tributes to Black experimental artists throughout the text. For instance, “cagedbird” refers to, of course, Maya Angelou, but also Charlie “Bird” Parker. “bird bird Ju Ju bird drum bird Charlie bird Parker bird i'm for the/birds not the cages people put them in bird john john bird cage bird” one poem reads called “PERFORMANCE SCORE for cagedbird.” Handwritten text and typed text leapfrog over each other. At the bottom of the page is a note: “*Every occurrence of ‘bird’ acts as a site for improvisation.”
Improvisation is a huge theme in the book. Another untitled poem in the sequence “worldview(s)” has a similar note, that “Every occurrence of ‘mu’ acts as a site for improvisation.”
mu mu mu mu mu mu mu
no no no no no no no
does a dog does a dog does a dog does a dog does a dog does a dog does a dog
mu mu mu mu mu mu mu
The poem continues on for a full page, with some text actually written over other text like a palimpsest. Alice Coltrane is also a prominent figure in the section. An “eternity” clock made of her name reminds readers of her 1975 album Eternity.
The next sequence involves several “mesostic” poems. Misostic poems like similar to acrostics, but the letter of significance bisects anywhere in the line, not necessarily at the beginning. There are tributes to Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Nina Simone, and Bob Kaufman and several of Bob Kaufman’s books. “chambeRs/illuminAte/jupIter’s feverish/daNce” goes the last poem in the sequence, “The Ancient Rain: a mesostic after Bob Kaufman.”
There are poems that riff on the notion of the square root, placing words and illustrations (in one case, the American flag) within the equation. It’s exciting to me that math plays a role, touching on the idea that what some consider the objective truth of “American letters” is actually subjective.
One poem’s a bingo card, another’s a honeycomb made constructed of the word “be,” other poems are trees, and others are prose poems consisting of “dad” and synonyms like “dada,” “father,” and “daddy.”
One page reads, simply, “Some identification, please…” and is followed by several concrete poems in which words create 3-D boxes on the page. Terms like “African-American,” “feminist,” “straight,” and “workingclass” are typed over and over in lines that form these boxes, bringing to mind what it means to be out of the box, boxed in, boxed out, right-angled, right, etc.
Because of the way many of us are trained in high school English classes, there can be a pressure to understand experimental work through traditional (even, perhaps Eurocentric) analysis. We’re taught that there’s one right answer, and that it’s the reader’s job to find it.
However, I have gotten to a place where I don’t find that as satisfying as being present with the questions experimentation brings up. What stands out about American Letters is the range of techniques singleton uses. It’s sort of like going to a great art exhibition—there is tremendous texture and provocation. When you step away from the book—the exhibit—your mind is filled with images, not just words.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
American Surreal: A Review of Collected Poems, by Robert Bly. Norton, 2018. $39.95
by Michael Hettich
For over fifty years, Robert Bly has been one of our essential poets, a writer who has transformed the landscape of American poetry through his editing, translations, anthologies and, of course, his own poetry. Starting in the early 1950s with The Fifties, the magazine of poetry and poetics that later became The Sixties and The Seventies, Bly challenged the orthodoxies of Modernist and New-Critical verse, arguing for the more surrealist-influenced approaches of the Latin-American, Eastern-European and Scandinavian poets he translated and published. His passionate arguments for a poetry employing mythology, Jungian psychology and pre-Christian religion, a poetry of wild juxtapositions and imagery, seeded the ground for the “Deep Image” school of American poetry, which transformed the poetics of such major figures as WS Merwin and James Wright as well as a host of lesser figures. He also published a number of influential anthologies and books of criticism, including American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (1990), which further opened the field. In fact, the “Deep Image” poetry that Bly pioneered was matched only by that of the Beats and the Confessionals in its influence on American poets in the mid-1960s and later. That influence resonates to this day.
Starting in 1963, with Silence in the Snowy Fields, Bly has published 15 full-length books of poetry along with substantial (and best-selling) works of cultural analysis including Iron John (1990) and The Sibling Society (1996), books that, along with his flamboyant, histrionic reading style, made him in later years something of a pariah in the insular world of academic American poetry. Now, at over 500 pages, Collected Poems reifies his position as a major figure in American poetry if not quite a major poet himself. It is essential reading for anyone interested in postwar American literature.
From the outset, Bly’s writing has been unapologetically messy. For every fully-realized poem he has also written two howlers and one near-miss. He has the clumsiest ear of any important American poet, and many of his poems feel as though they would need a few more revisions to fully find themselves. This was true in his first book, and it is true in his most recent. In fact, he is the most deeply flawed near-major poet I can think of. He is also one of the most popular, that rare poet with a large readership. Reading through his work now is an exhilarating, frustrating and satisfying in equal measure. Collected Poems is a profound and essential book as much for its flaws as for its strengths. It should be read, discussed and argued over for years.
Although many of his concerns and enthusiasms have remained constant over the years, this collected volume allows us to see Bly’s poetry-writing life as falling into roughly three periods. In the first, which spans Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), the National-Book-Award- winning The Light Around the Body (1967) and two books he published in 1973, Sleepers Joining Hands and Jumping out of Bed, Bly weds surreal imagery with images of rural solitude and activist politics, specifically against the war in Viet Nam. The poems are often breathtaking in their risks and achievements:
The cry of those being eaten by America,
Others pale and soft being stored for later eating
And Jefferson
Who saw hope in new oats
The wild houses go on
With long hair growing from between their toes
The feet at night get up
And sun down the long white roads by themselves
The dams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert...
(“Those Being Eaten By America”)
Who can deny the power, weirdness, and awkward charm of such poetry? The very fact of his strange accessibility gave lines like these great power to younger writers, and encouraged a generation to “find their way into the stone”—a place as different from the poetics of “academic” poets of the time as it was from the work of the Beats or the Confessionals.
Because his work changed formally after Jumping Out of Bed, it was not fully apparent at the time that the majority of Bly’s poems of his middle period, which extends from The Morning Glory (1975) to Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) repeat many of the quieter, more personal concerns of his earlier books. Many of the poems of this period, particularly the prose poems, begin with observation of ordinary objects and then “leap” into territories familiar from those chartered in the earlier work:
This body offers to carry us for nothing—as the ocean carries logs—so on some days
the body wails with its great energy, it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides. Someone knocks on the door; we do not have time to dress. He wants us to come with him through the rainy streets to a dark house...
(“Finding the Father).
Bly’s masterpiece of this middle period, The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), written after the death of his father and his divorce from his first wife, is rich with moving and powerful verse:
I walk on a gravel path through cut-over
Woods. November’s bare light has arrived.
I come at dusk
Where, sheltered by poplars, a low pond lies.
The sun abandons the sky, speaking through cold leaves.
(“My Wife’s Painting)
Somehow, here, a new voice begins to assert itself, one that feels present and vulnerable, less likely to leap off into peripheral worlds. More honest and transparent than his earlier work, Bly’s poems here show a new openness, a new kind of courage. They form, too, the seeds of his later work.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Bly’s development is the late resurgence of vitality, starting with Morning Poems (1997) and extending to his most recent book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011). These late poems are absolutely some of his best, deeply moving and original. In many of these late poems, Bly employs a form he invented called “the ramage,” an eight line stanza reminiscent of the octave of a sonnet:
What is sorrow for? It is a storehouse
Where we store wheat, barley, corn and tears.
We step to the door on a round stone,
And the storehouse feels all the birds of sorrow.
And I say to myself: Will you have
Sorrow at last? Go, be cheerful in autumn,
Be stoic, yes, be tranquil, calm;
Or in the valley of sorrows spread your wings.
(“What is Sorrow For?”)
These poems are enlivened by a self-effacing humor—different from anything seen earlier in Bly’s work—and many carry a faint echo of Whitman:
Who is out there at six a.m.? The man
Throwing newspapers onto the porch,
And the roaming souls suddenly
Drawn down into their sleeping bodies...
(“I Have Daughters and I Have Sons”)
The majority of these late poems are written in Bly’s Americanized version of the Mideastern ghazal form, which is loose enough to suit Bly’s wide-ranging imagination yet controlled enough to rein him in and lend coherence to his wild-and-woolly imagination. With this form, he has found himself in all his ripeness; he has become a master-poet.
Though one could easily name a dozen more inherently “gifted” poets of Bly’s generation—one of the greatest in all of American poetry—it would be difficult to name more than a handful who have achieved Bly’s largeness of vision or exerted his range of influence. His work still inspires impassioned debate amongst poets and poetry readers and is read by many who otherwise ignore the art. Reading these poems, I couldn’t help thinking (again) of Whitman: “Who touches this touches a man.” The best of these poems are permanent additions to our literature.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems is Bluer and More Vast, published by Jay Snodgrass’s Hysterical Press in 2018. A new book, To Start an Orchard, is forthcoming from Press 53. His website is michaelhettich.com
by Michael Hettich
For over fifty years, Robert Bly has been one of our essential poets, a writer who has transformed the landscape of American poetry through his editing, translations, anthologies and, of course, his own poetry. Starting in the early 1950s with The Fifties, the magazine of poetry and poetics that later became The Sixties and The Seventies, Bly challenged the orthodoxies of Modernist and New-Critical verse, arguing for the more surrealist-influenced approaches of the Latin-American, Eastern-European and Scandinavian poets he translated and published. His passionate arguments for a poetry employing mythology, Jungian psychology and pre-Christian religion, a poetry of wild juxtapositions and imagery, seeded the ground for the “Deep Image” school of American poetry, which transformed the poetics of such major figures as WS Merwin and James Wright as well as a host of lesser figures. He also published a number of influential anthologies and books of criticism, including American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (1990), which further opened the field. In fact, the “Deep Image” poetry that Bly pioneered was matched only by that of the Beats and the Confessionals in its influence on American poets in the mid-1960s and later. That influence resonates to this day.
Starting in 1963, with Silence in the Snowy Fields, Bly has published 15 full-length books of poetry along with substantial (and best-selling) works of cultural analysis including Iron John (1990) and The Sibling Society (1996), books that, along with his flamboyant, histrionic reading style, made him in later years something of a pariah in the insular world of academic American poetry. Now, at over 500 pages, Collected Poems reifies his position as a major figure in American poetry if not quite a major poet himself. It is essential reading for anyone interested in postwar American literature.
From the outset, Bly’s writing has been unapologetically messy. For every fully-realized poem he has also written two howlers and one near-miss. He has the clumsiest ear of any important American poet, and many of his poems feel as though they would need a few more revisions to fully find themselves. This was true in his first book, and it is true in his most recent. In fact, he is the most deeply flawed near-major poet I can think of. He is also one of the most popular, that rare poet with a large readership. Reading through his work now is an exhilarating, frustrating and satisfying in equal measure. Collected Poems is a profound and essential book as much for its flaws as for its strengths. It should be read, discussed and argued over for years.
Although many of his concerns and enthusiasms have remained constant over the years, this collected volume allows us to see Bly’s poetry-writing life as falling into roughly three periods. In the first, which spans Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), the National-Book-Award- winning The Light Around the Body (1967) and two books he published in 1973, Sleepers Joining Hands and Jumping out of Bed, Bly weds surreal imagery with images of rural solitude and activist politics, specifically against the war in Viet Nam. The poems are often breathtaking in their risks and achievements:
The cry of those being eaten by America,
Others pale and soft being stored for later eating
And Jefferson
Who saw hope in new oats
The wild houses go on
With long hair growing from between their toes
The feet at night get up
And sun down the long white roads by themselves
The dams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert...
(“Those Being Eaten By America”)
Who can deny the power, weirdness, and awkward charm of such poetry? The very fact of his strange accessibility gave lines like these great power to younger writers, and encouraged a generation to “find their way into the stone”—a place as different from the poetics of “academic” poets of the time as it was from the work of the Beats or the Confessionals.
Because his work changed formally after Jumping Out of Bed, it was not fully apparent at the time that the majority of Bly’s poems of his middle period, which extends from The Morning Glory (1975) to Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) repeat many of the quieter, more personal concerns of his earlier books. Many of the poems of this period, particularly the prose poems, begin with observation of ordinary objects and then “leap” into territories familiar from those chartered in the earlier work:
This body offers to carry us for nothing—as the ocean carries logs—so on some days
the body wails with its great energy, it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides. Someone knocks on the door; we do not have time to dress. He wants us to come with him through the rainy streets to a dark house...
(“Finding the Father).
Bly’s masterpiece of this middle period, The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), written after the death of his father and his divorce from his first wife, is rich with moving and powerful verse:
I walk on a gravel path through cut-over
Woods. November’s bare light has arrived.
I come at dusk
Where, sheltered by poplars, a low pond lies.
The sun abandons the sky, speaking through cold leaves.
(“My Wife’s Painting)
Somehow, here, a new voice begins to assert itself, one that feels present and vulnerable, less likely to leap off into peripheral worlds. More honest and transparent than his earlier work, Bly’s poems here show a new openness, a new kind of courage. They form, too, the seeds of his later work.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Bly’s development is the late resurgence of vitality, starting with Morning Poems (1997) and extending to his most recent book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011). These late poems are absolutely some of his best, deeply moving and original. In many of these late poems, Bly employs a form he invented called “the ramage,” an eight line stanza reminiscent of the octave of a sonnet:
What is sorrow for? It is a storehouse
Where we store wheat, barley, corn and tears.
We step to the door on a round stone,
And the storehouse feels all the birds of sorrow.
And I say to myself: Will you have
Sorrow at last? Go, be cheerful in autumn,
Be stoic, yes, be tranquil, calm;
Or in the valley of sorrows spread your wings.
(“What is Sorrow For?”)
These poems are enlivened by a self-effacing humor—different from anything seen earlier in Bly’s work—and many carry a faint echo of Whitman:
Who is out there at six a.m.? The man
Throwing newspapers onto the porch,
And the roaming souls suddenly
Drawn down into their sleeping bodies...
(“I Have Daughters and I Have Sons”)
The majority of these late poems are written in Bly’s Americanized version of the Mideastern ghazal form, which is loose enough to suit Bly’s wide-ranging imagination yet controlled enough to rein him in and lend coherence to his wild-and-woolly imagination. With this form, he has found himself in all his ripeness; he has become a master-poet.
Though one could easily name a dozen more inherently “gifted” poets of Bly’s generation—one of the greatest in all of American poetry—it would be difficult to name more than a handful who have achieved Bly’s largeness of vision or exerted his range of influence. His work still inspires impassioned debate amongst poets and poetry readers and is read by many who otherwise ignore the art. Reading these poems, I couldn’t help thinking (again) of Whitman: “Who touches this touches a man.” The best of these poems are permanent additions to our literature.
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems is Bluer and More Vast, published by Jay Snodgrass’s Hysterical Press in 2018. A new book, To Start an Orchard, is forthcoming from Press 53. His website is michaelhettich.com
May 2019 Guest Review
Deaf Republic
by Ilya Kaminsky,
Greywolf Press, 80 pages
by Grace Cavalieri
Former Soviet citizen Ilya Kaminsky writes of authoritarianism, military invasion, and resistance in a harrowing tale involving puppets, puppeteers, lovers, and children. The writer writes what we don’t want to hear; and makes it something we cannot live without hearing. The villagers’ resistance is to make up a language the soldiers cannot understand, using deafness as a weapon of power. This is so true of many stories where victims coalesce to be victors — yet, with oppression and violence in enemy occupation, there’re no human aspiration — only whose blood flows and when. Especially effective are Momma Galya’s puppeteers, who strangle soldiers (after sex) with puppet strings.
Kaminsky’s written a work that’s a symbol of all times when one dominant force overtakes a people. Throughout history, victims will always develop a codified message to endure and sustain. Kaminsky’s writing is one percent sociology and 99 percent poetic genius, making explosive realities manageable — even when writing of cruelty — and giving us lines that are so gorgeous, and original, and breathtakingly visual, we marvel at the human being who wrote them.
Value added. In the notes at the book’s end is this: “ON SILENCE: Deaf people don’t believe in silence. It is the invention of the hearing.”
Firing Squad
On balconies, sunlight. On poplars, sunlight, on our lips.
Today no one is shooting.
A girl cuts her hair with imaginary scissors --
the scissors in sunlight, her hair in sunlight.
As soldiers wake and gape at us gaping at them,
what do they see?
Tonight they shot fifty women on Lerna Street.
I sit down to write and tell you what I know:
a child learns the world by putting it in her mouth,
a girl becomes a woman and a woman, earth.
Body, they blame you for all things and they
seek in the body what does not live in the body.
by Ilya Kaminsky,
Greywolf Press, 80 pages
by Grace Cavalieri
Former Soviet citizen Ilya Kaminsky writes of authoritarianism, military invasion, and resistance in a harrowing tale involving puppets, puppeteers, lovers, and children. The writer writes what we don’t want to hear; and makes it something we cannot live without hearing. The villagers’ resistance is to make up a language the soldiers cannot understand, using deafness as a weapon of power. This is so true of many stories where victims coalesce to be victors — yet, with oppression and violence in enemy occupation, there’re no human aspiration — only whose blood flows and when. Especially effective are Momma Galya’s puppeteers, who strangle soldiers (after sex) with puppet strings.
Kaminsky’s written a work that’s a symbol of all times when one dominant force overtakes a people. Throughout history, victims will always develop a codified message to endure and sustain. Kaminsky’s writing is one percent sociology and 99 percent poetic genius, making explosive realities manageable — even when writing of cruelty — and giving us lines that are so gorgeous, and original, and breathtakingly visual, we marvel at the human being who wrote them.
Value added. In the notes at the book’s end is this: “ON SILENCE: Deaf people don’t believe in silence. It is the invention of the hearing.”
Firing Squad
On balconies, sunlight. On poplars, sunlight, on our lips.
Today no one is shooting.
A girl cuts her hair with imaginary scissors --
the scissors in sunlight, her hair in sunlight.
As soldiers wake and gape at us gaping at them,
what do they see?
Tonight they shot fifty women on Lerna Street.
I sit down to write and tell you what I know:
a child learns the world by putting it in her mouth,
a girl becomes a woman and a woman, earth.
Body, they blame you for all things and they
seek in the body what does not live in the body.
February 2019
Bluer and More Vast
by Michael Hettich
Hysterical Books, Tallahassee Florida
978-0-940821-08-8
by Freesia McKee
How do you write a book of words about silence? Michael Hettich’s Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Books, 2018) seeks to answer this elegant contradiction. As the title indicates, the book’s journey takes place in water. There is a “seaweed-covered boulder,” “a rack of antlers jutting from the dead-low tide,” “a bottomless wilderness,” and “a stone dropped into the ocean.” There is a woman who wants to try to “fit a river into her body” among the “days of rain.”
In one poem, the speaker swims with a school of mullet fish in the bay, himself transforming into a member of the school. There are kayaks and lily pads, flower vases of water, hurricanes and flooding and imaginary sons on surfboards. Indeed, these poems are the liquid lyric.
Bluer and More Vast is composed of 40 prose poems. The book is divided into four sections, with the very last poem further separated as a final nocturne. The first section of the book is associative, fluid, and floating. The second section provides characterization. These poems are more interpersonal, more based in place. There’s a brother, a son, a wife, a mother, a grandma, and the Everglades. The third section plunges readers deeper into surrealism, and the fourth section focuses on the first-person personal.
As I read the collection in a silent room, I found myself reading lines out loud just to hear the language. How could I have helped it? “We buried him beneath the banana trees, heavy with bunches of finger-sized fruits we hardly ever noticed until they’d turned soft and were eaten with gusto by the squirrels and the wasps,” goes one line about a beloved, stray, poisoned cat. Or this: “The rain stopped then, like an unfinished sentence, and the sudden silence roused her.”
“This man, my silence” is a thread that weaves throughout the book. In Hettich’s poems, silence is a cardinal value. The self can be silent; the world can be silent; even, amazingly, the fierce ocean has a dimension of silence. Silence is used as a metaphor for observation.
Silence takes on additional roles in Hettich’s surreal poems, some of them dystopian. In “Duet,” silence becomes a social privilege instead of a universal right. Other poems draw us further into dystopia, as when the bones of children are pulverized and dumped into the sea, families in a neighborhood move out of their homes and into the trees, or a man suddenly melts into a creek, leaving only clean clothes behind.
Here’s another question these prose poems seek to answer: What is underneath? Water seems like the natural metaphor for hidden-ness. We want to know about whales and giant octopi, about magnificent schools of silvery fish, about how deep icebergs carve into the water
If we are operating in Hettich’s world, we are also interested in how to cease the human-caused, global-warming-driven destruction of such irreplaceable wonders.
Artists are interested in discovery because there is an associated ecstasy, a transcendence. The poet uses image to communicate glimpses of this transcendence, and the glimpse is well-expressed in the lyric. We may have come to operate this way because discovery often occurs only in glimpses, and because our consciousness is all-too-often obscured by living in such a noisy world. “So I hold myself still,” Hettich’s speaker says, “just to listen.”
Fiction and narrative nonfiction insist on nailing down specific times and places, but prose as poetry allows us to remain unmoored, to swim in the vastness of its blocks, to discover, as we read silently, what lies underneath. All poets seek to keenly observe and create image. This is, after all, the lyric imperative. I think that in prose poetry, though, we are immersed in a different way. We enter prose poetry as submersibles, surrounded by text on all sides.
Seeds, windows, oceans, and tides are just a few of the metaphors Hettich cultivates in Bluer and More Vast that allow the self to step outside of the self for that ecstatic experience. “That Stranger’s Continent” reads, “I’d bet there are more creatures inside each of us than there are people in the world. Imagine finding yourself somehow amongst that crowd, inside your own body shrunk to their size.” Microcosm and macrocosm collide in these poems. Bluer and More Vast stands in a floating boat at nighttime, peering both at the moon and through the microscope.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
by Michael Hettich
Hysterical Books, Tallahassee Florida
978-0-940821-08-8
by Freesia McKee
How do you write a book of words about silence? Michael Hettich’s Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Books, 2018) seeks to answer this elegant contradiction. As the title indicates, the book’s journey takes place in water. There is a “seaweed-covered boulder,” “a rack of antlers jutting from the dead-low tide,” “a bottomless wilderness,” and “a stone dropped into the ocean.” There is a woman who wants to try to “fit a river into her body” among the “days of rain.”
In one poem, the speaker swims with a school of mullet fish in the bay, himself transforming into a member of the school. There are kayaks and lily pads, flower vases of water, hurricanes and flooding and imaginary sons on surfboards. Indeed, these poems are the liquid lyric.
Bluer and More Vast is composed of 40 prose poems. The book is divided into four sections, with the very last poem further separated as a final nocturne. The first section of the book is associative, fluid, and floating. The second section provides characterization. These poems are more interpersonal, more based in place. There’s a brother, a son, a wife, a mother, a grandma, and the Everglades. The third section plunges readers deeper into surrealism, and the fourth section focuses on the first-person personal.
As I read the collection in a silent room, I found myself reading lines out loud just to hear the language. How could I have helped it? “We buried him beneath the banana trees, heavy with bunches of finger-sized fruits we hardly ever noticed until they’d turned soft and were eaten with gusto by the squirrels and the wasps,” goes one line about a beloved, stray, poisoned cat. Or this: “The rain stopped then, like an unfinished sentence, and the sudden silence roused her.”
“This man, my silence” is a thread that weaves throughout the book. In Hettich’s poems, silence is a cardinal value. The self can be silent; the world can be silent; even, amazingly, the fierce ocean has a dimension of silence. Silence is used as a metaphor for observation.
Silence takes on additional roles in Hettich’s surreal poems, some of them dystopian. In “Duet,” silence becomes a social privilege instead of a universal right. Other poems draw us further into dystopia, as when the bones of children are pulverized and dumped into the sea, families in a neighborhood move out of their homes and into the trees, or a man suddenly melts into a creek, leaving only clean clothes behind.
Here’s another question these prose poems seek to answer: What is underneath? Water seems like the natural metaphor for hidden-ness. We want to know about whales and giant octopi, about magnificent schools of silvery fish, about how deep icebergs carve into the water
If we are operating in Hettich’s world, we are also interested in how to cease the human-caused, global-warming-driven destruction of such irreplaceable wonders.
Artists are interested in discovery because there is an associated ecstasy, a transcendence. The poet uses image to communicate glimpses of this transcendence, and the glimpse is well-expressed in the lyric. We may have come to operate this way because discovery often occurs only in glimpses, and because our consciousness is all-too-often obscured by living in such a noisy world. “So I hold myself still,” Hettich’s speaker says, “just to listen.”
Fiction and narrative nonfiction insist on nailing down specific times and places, but prose as poetry allows us to remain unmoored, to swim in the vastness of its blocks, to discover, as we read silently, what lies underneath. All poets seek to keenly observe and create image. This is, after all, the lyric imperative. I think that in prose poetry, though, we are immersed in a different way. We enter prose poetry as submersibles, surrounded by text on all sides.
Seeds, windows, oceans, and tides are just a few of the metaphors Hettich cultivates in Bluer and More Vast that allow the self to step outside of the self for that ecstatic experience. “That Stranger’s Continent” reads, “I’d bet there are more creatures inside each of us than there are people in the world. Imagine finding yourself somehow amongst that crowd, inside your own body shrunk to their size.” Microcosm and macrocosm collide in these poems. Bluer and More Vast stands in a floating boat at nighttime, peering both at the moon and through the microscope.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
February 2019 Guest Review
Oculus
by Sally Wen Mao
Graywolf Press 96 pages
by Grace Cavalieri
This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books
Reprinted with permission of the author
Mao is a poet of conscience, passion, advocacy, and theater. Put them into the compression of poetry and there’s a power that extends outward and doesn’t stop when the poem is finished. Among her remarkable human testaments, are two sets of poems about the early Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong. The persona poems are where satire meets tragedy meets irony. The intention however is clear: to reveal what price is paid for celebrity without respect; to be almost invited to the party, but not quite. Poems showcasing this Chinese-American idol are real and surreal, factual, futuristic, imagistic, with sharp smart language unifying the core of each event. It’s holy work to create a character who will never be gone from these pages, a character spun from real cloth, now large, meaningful, a sector of Hollywood made permanent — for Wong’s longing and perhaps for her despair. But there’s bravery here, as well. And the poet sings her characters to the top with words that are alive — here to stay — a public trust.
I told you she was fearless:
The Death of Robot K-456
The robot opera sends us to space.
We look down. We don’t miss our lovers.
Instead, we’re nostalgic for gravity.
Permutations of ground: cement,
grass, parquet, soil. Premonitions
of sound: crash, pow, shriek.
Down on earth, we saw the tragedy --
the machine cracked under slow wheels.
His cords and his bowels, twitching.
The machine defecated on itself,
spilling all its beans. We looked away.
In another time, we would mourn.
But for now, we hover, above patrols,
above surveillance, above the borders,
like migrants to a black hole, a Xanadu
where no one dreams of finding us.
Even if we cut off a limb or leap over an edge, no eyes watch us. We are free.
by Sally Wen Mao
Graywolf Press 96 pages
by Grace Cavalieri
This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books
Reprinted with permission of the author
Mao is a poet of conscience, passion, advocacy, and theater. Put them into the compression of poetry and there’s a power that extends outward and doesn’t stop when the poem is finished. Among her remarkable human testaments, are two sets of poems about the early Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong. The persona poems are where satire meets tragedy meets irony. The intention however is clear: to reveal what price is paid for celebrity without respect; to be almost invited to the party, but not quite. Poems showcasing this Chinese-American idol are real and surreal, factual, futuristic, imagistic, with sharp smart language unifying the core of each event. It’s holy work to create a character who will never be gone from these pages, a character spun from real cloth, now large, meaningful, a sector of Hollywood made permanent — for Wong’s longing and perhaps for her despair. But there’s bravery here, as well. And the poet sings her characters to the top with words that are alive — here to stay — a public trust.
I told you she was fearless:
The Death of Robot K-456
The robot opera sends us to space.
We look down. We don’t miss our lovers.
Instead, we’re nostalgic for gravity.
Permutations of ground: cement,
grass, parquet, soil. Premonitions
of sound: crash, pow, shriek.
Down on earth, we saw the tragedy --
the machine cracked under slow wheels.
His cords and his bowels, twitching.
The machine defecated on itself,
spilling all its beans. We looked away.
In another time, we would mourn.
But for now, we hover, above patrols,
above surveillance, above the borders,
like migrants to a black hole, a Xanadu
where no one dreams of finding us.
Even if we cut off a limb or leap over an edge, no eyes watch us. We are free.
November 2018
Wade in the Water: Poems
by Tracy K. Smith
Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota
ISBN: 978-1-55597-813-6
by: Freesia McKee
I got curious, earlier this year, about how many collections of resistance poetry had been published since the 2016 election. I already knew of a handful, one of which I’d reviewed for this publication. After a few hours of casual research, I came up with a preliminary list that pushed 100 titles.
I wasn’t sure of my purpose for making this list. I suppose it confirmed something many of us already knew: thousands of poets have come out in full force against 45’s hatred. And still, it can feel like it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough. DT and his ilk continue to roll out harmful policies and political (dis)appointments. The language of hate he uses encompasses some of the worst of it. Somehow, he is still the president.
But the sound of America is composed not only of the voices of tyrants. We are a country of poets laureate, too. Tracy K. Smith’s new book Wade in the Water approaches the bitterness of our current moment through remembering painful histories. It’s a deft move for the United States Poet Laureate in the age of Trump. Let’s leave this narcissist out of the picture, this book implies, let’s have a conversation with those who will listen.
If by definition, resistance is reactionary, Wade in the Water is anything but. The book takes a long view, and we finish reading knowing that resistance, per se, may not be the right tactic. When I look up “resistance” in my dictionary, I see that the word’s antonyms include “peace,” “cooperation,” and “liberation.” When we are “resisting,” are we also working against what we actually want? Are we in the palm of someone’s hand? Perhaps we need a different word, a different method. There are many ways to freedom.
The text of Wade in the Water is reflective, formal, and calm. Smith uses erasure poetry, found material, and ponders god and our planet. As a collection, these poems together are diamond-shaped, which is to say that the book begins with the personal, expands wide into history and the cosmos, and narrows back again to re-examine the magic of the familial quotidian.
In light of its shape, the journey begins, appropriately enough, with a poem titled “Garden of Eden.” Instead of an original garden, we learn that this “Garden of Eden” is a Brooklyn bodega near where the speaker used to live. For a moment, the speaker pines to return, but she quickly move on.
God is personified as a character throughout the book. As a non-religious person, I did not feel put off by this because the god of this book is just that, a character. We read of god interacting with the world as an object. For me, that figure becomes a kind of Atlas.
There are questions of power. Smith writes about god showing off the world as he lets it “dangle between you like a locket on a chain.” The speaker continues, “Swinging it/Gently back and forth, he’ll swear he’s never shown it/To anyone else before.”
The god in this text seems (at least to me) creepy and predatory. We are left with many questions. How did god get this world? Why does he have it? Who is the “you”? Who is the speaker? Who and what politically (and personally) does this interaction between god and the “you” bring to mind? What could it mean for one to live amongst or beside one’s own troubled creation? A new kind of trinity—god, the speaker, and “you”—upsets the way we are used to hearing about a higher power. It disrupts the power dynamic.
The second section of Wade in the Water begins with what was for me one of the most striking pieces in the book, an erasure of the Declaration of Independence. “He has/sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people” the poem begins. “—taken Captive/on the high Seas/to bear—” the poem ends. Poets Solmaz Sharif and Chase Berggrun have written about how careful the one who is the eraser must be because erasure can be empowering or violent, depending on what is being erased and who is doing the erasing. However, Smith’s poem is an example of an erasure that works.
Some source texts erase groups of people. The poet’s erasure, then, can work as a double-negative, drawing attention to those left out. The Declaration of Independence is one example of a problematic source text, as the founding fathers were unwilling to confront the evils of slavery. Most of the signatories were slave owners. As they fought for their own liberation, they actively participated in the enslavement of other people. By erasing parts of the source text, Smith unearths truths too often ignored.
Many of the poems that follow this erasure include letters written by African American veterans of the Civil War. These poems powerfully convey fraught circumstances. Smith examined numerous letters during her research, and her epistolary poems are composed of synthesized historical text. The writer zeroes in on the challenges posed to black Civil War veterans as they attempted to collect their pensions, reunite with family members, and forge new lives. The original spelling and the punctuation of the letters has been respected. “Mr abarham lincon/I wont to knw sir if you please/whether I can have my son relest/from the arme,” the speaker writes in “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It.” The poems honor these important voices. Travelling through time and space, this section of the book is the widest part of its diamond-shaped narrative.
The next section transports readers forward to the present day. In “Theatrical Improvisation,” Smith incorporates more found text, this time from contemporary reports about hate crimes and online hate speech. “Among viewers, there is the dawning sense/That this is mere rehearsal, that the performance/Has not yet been contracted, nor scheduled,/Nor agreed upon, nor even cast,” Smith adds. She reminds readers that America’s current faculties for hate are not really improvisational; they are a tired riff on an old tune.
In “Watershed,” Smith writes about DuPont, a corporation that’s released enormous amounts of the carcinogenic chemical PFOA (used in non-stick kitchenware coatings) into the Ohio River. Nearly every living person carries toxic PFOA in their blood, thanks to DuPont. Smith writes, “PFOA detected in:/American blood banks/blood or vital organs of:/Atlantic salmon/swordfish/striped mullet/gray seals/common cormorants/Alaskan polar bears/brown pelicans/sea turtles/sea eagles/California sea lions/Laysan albatrosses on a/wildlife refuge in the/middle of the North/Pacific Ocean.” Like any good storyteller, Smith simply gives us the facts and we are left to draw our own conclusions.
In a literal sense, “Watershed” returns to the book’s title. Wading in the water was a strategy to gain freedom, but what about when the water is poisoned? What does it mean when a threshold across which many people escaped from slavery, the Ohio River, is poisoned with tons of a toxic, cancer-causing chemical? I am thinking about the tune after which this book is named, especially its last line, “God’s gonna trouble the water.” Enter the water to break the scent trail, the song says, and god will make the water stir.
What else could this verb mean? “To trouble” is to mix things up, to agitate. “Trouble” is derived from the Latin turbidus, as in “turbid.” This particular etymology brings to mind another biblical reference: “Let justice run down like water, And righteousness like a mighty stream.” Trouble is justice is water over stone. Troubling: a liquid upset of the balance of power.
“Is this love the trouble you promised?” Smith writes in the book’s title poem, dedicated to the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters. As she addresses history and questions of power, Smith consistently conveys a sense of deep love. The last section contains personal themes: memories of a four-and-a-half year old daughter, a sibling watching Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s, a mother in “Montgomery,/Alabama, walking to campus/Rather than riding the bus.” Families, friends: these are the people fought for.
I return to the antonyms of “resistance”: peace, cooperation, liberation. Smith teaches us that perhaps our role, as readers, as poets, as activists, is not to resist, but to trouble in the service of love.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
by Tracy K. Smith
Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota
ISBN: 978-1-55597-813-6
by: Freesia McKee
I got curious, earlier this year, about how many collections of resistance poetry had been published since the 2016 election. I already knew of a handful, one of which I’d reviewed for this publication. After a few hours of casual research, I came up with a preliminary list that pushed 100 titles.
I wasn’t sure of my purpose for making this list. I suppose it confirmed something many of us already knew: thousands of poets have come out in full force against 45’s hatred. And still, it can feel like it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough. DT and his ilk continue to roll out harmful policies and political (dis)appointments. The language of hate he uses encompasses some of the worst of it. Somehow, he is still the president.
But the sound of America is composed not only of the voices of tyrants. We are a country of poets laureate, too. Tracy K. Smith’s new book Wade in the Water approaches the bitterness of our current moment through remembering painful histories. It’s a deft move for the United States Poet Laureate in the age of Trump. Let’s leave this narcissist out of the picture, this book implies, let’s have a conversation with those who will listen.
If by definition, resistance is reactionary, Wade in the Water is anything but. The book takes a long view, and we finish reading knowing that resistance, per se, may not be the right tactic. When I look up “resistance” in my dictionary, I see that the word’s antonyms include “peace,” “cooperation,” and “liberation.” When we are “resisting,” are we also working against what we actually want? Are we in the palm of someone’s hand? Perhaps we need a different word, a different method. There are many ways to freedom.
The text of Wade in the Water is reflective, formal, and calm. Smith uses erasure poetry, found material, and ponders god and our planet. As a collection, these poems together are diamond-shaped, which is to say that the book begins with the personal, expands wide into history and the cosmos, and narrows back again to re-examine the magic of the familial quotidian.
In light of its shape, the journey begins, appropriately enough, with a poem titled “Garden of Eden.” Instead of an original garden, we learn that this “Garden of Eden” is a Brooklyn bodega near where the speaker used to live. For a moment, the speaker pines to return, but she quickly move on.
God is personified as a character throughout the book. As a non-religious person, I did not feel put off by this because the god of this book is just that, a character. We read of god interacting with the world as an object. For me, that figure becomes a kind of Atlas.
There are questions of power. Smith writes about god showing off the world as he lets it “dangle between you like a locket on a chain.” The speaker continues, “Swinging it/Gently back and forth, he’ll swear he’s never shown it/To anyone else before.”
The god in this text seems (at least to me) creepy and predatory. We are left with many questions. How did god get this world? Why does he have it? Who is the “you”? Who is the speaker? Who and what politically (and personally) does this interaction between god and the “you” bring to mind? What could it mean for one to live amongst or beside one’s own troubled creation? A new kind of trinity—god, the speaker, and “you”—upsets the way we are used to hearing about a higher power. It disrupts the power dynamic.
The second section of Wade in the Water begins with what was for me one of the most striking pieces in the book, an erasure of the Declaration of Independence. “He has/sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people” the poem begins. “—taken Captive/on the high Seas/to bear—” the poem ends. Poets Solmaz Sharif and Chase Berggrun have written about how careful the one who is the eraser must be because erasure can be empowering or violent, depending on what is being erased and who is doing the erasing. However, Smith’s poem is an example of an erasure that works.
Some source texts erase groups of people. The poet’s erasure, then, can work as a double-negative, drawing attention to those left out. The Declaration of Independence is one example of a problematic source text, as the founding fathers were unwilling to confront the evils of slavery. Most of the signatories were slave owners. As they fought for their own liberation, they actively participated in the enslavement of other people. By erasing parts of the source text, Smith unearths truths too often ignored.
Many of the poems that follow this erasure include letters written by African American veterans of the Civil War. These poems powerfully convey fraught circumstances. Smith examined numerous letters during her research, and her epistolary poems are composed of synthesized historical text. The writer zeroes in on the challenges posed to black Civil War veterans as they attempted to collect their pensions, reunite with family members, and forge new lives. The original spelling and the punctuation of the letters has been respected. “Mr abarham lincon/I wont to knw sir if you please/whether I can have my son relest/from the arme,” the speaker writes in “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It.” The poems honor these important voices. Travelling through time and space, this section of the book is the widest part of its diamond-shaped narrative.
The next section transports readers forward to the present day. In “Theatrical Improvisation,” Smith incorporates more found text, this time from contemporary reports about hate crimes and online hate speech. “Among viewers, there is the dawning sense/That this is mere rehearsal, that the performance/Has not yet been contracted, nor scheduled,/Nor agreed upon, nor even cast,” Smith adds. She reminds readers that America’s current faculties for hate are not really improvisational; they are a tired riff on an old tune.
In “Watershed,” Smith writes about DuPont, a corporation that’s released enormous amounts of the carcinogenic chemical PFOA (used in non-stick kitchenware coatings) into the Ohio River. Nearly every living person carries toxic PFOA in their blood, thanks to DuPont. Smith writes, “PFOA detected in:/American blood banks/blood or vital organs of:/Atlantic salmon/swordfish/striped mullet/gray seals/common cormorants/Alaskan polar bears/brown pelicans/sea turtles/sea eagles/California sea lions/Laysan albatrosses on a/wildlife refuge in the/middle of the North/Pacific Ocean.” Like any good storyteller, Smith simply gives us the facts and we are left to draw our own conclusions.
In a literal sense, “Watershed” returns to the book’s title. Wading in the water was a strategy to gain freedom, but what about when the water is poisoned? What does it mean when a threshold across which many people escaped from slavery, the Ohio River, is poisoned with tons of a toxic, cancer-causing chemical? I am thinking about the tune after which this book is named, especially its last line, “God’s gonna trouble the water.” Enter the water to break the scent trail, the song says, and god will make the water stir.
What else could this verb mean? “To trouble” is to mix things up, to agitate. “Trouble” is derived from the Latin turbidus, as in “turbid.” This particular etymology brings to mind another biblical reference: “Let justice run down like water, And righteousness like a mighty stream.” Trouble is justice is water over stone. Troubling: a liquid upset of the balance of power.
“Is this love the trouble you promised?” Smith writes in the book’s title poem, dedicated to the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters. As she addresses history and questions of power, Smith consistently conveys a sense of deep love. The last section contains personal themes: memories of a four-and-a-half year old daughter, a sibling watching Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s, a mother in “Montgomery,/Alabama, walking to campus/Rather than riding the bus.” Families, friends: these are the people fought for.
I return to the antonyms of “resistance”: peace, cooperation, liberation. Smith teaches us that perhaps our role, as readers, as poets, as activists, is not to resist, but to trouble in the service of love.
Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2017). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia's poetry is forthcoming in CALYX, Apalachee Review, and Flyway. Her book reviews have appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia is the winner of the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap.
November 2018 Guest Reviews
A Hundred Years Among the Daisies
by George Wallace
Stubborn Mule Press
by Michael Minassian
This was my first encounter with the poems of George Wallace, but once I started to read this collection, I wanted more. Wallace uses long lines with unusual but effective line breaks, generating a deep look into the mind of the speaker whether the speaker is a person, child, lake, or the mysterious voice of a mythological figure, and we are drawn into the poems effortlessly, entering a surreal world of swirling images.
Whether he is referencing Parnassus or the Black Sea, New York or Paris, or alluding to Miles Davis, Moses, or the Jolly Green Giant, it all works together, holding tight, never unraveling. Several of the poems, based on legend and myth, take on the shape and tone of ancient works yet manage to sound original and new:
“Before the first snow comes, I mean, before my body is gone forever, before there is nothing left of me but voice, voice to sing away absence, I in my turn taken in, like air, and given back to the world freely, imperfect son of the earth whose song is grief, whose love is Eurydice, the fecundity of earth… /It passes, seasons and sufficiencies, beauty of song, the limits of power given us by the gods, and all taken back by them, as I pass by on my way to the sea.”
Other poems have the feel of folk tales brought into the age of the New World, immigrants, and the not so distant relatives who escaped to our shores as in the poem “The Dancing Cottage” which begins:
“Before she came to America your grandmother served three sisters in a cottage in Russia, a dancing cottage that turned and turned among the trees”
and ends on a note of hope:
“and your grandmother stood outside the door of the dancing cottage, dreaming of America
Dreams and magic, hope and despair breathe life into the poems and the reader experiences the sense that the world will have a chance to begin anew:”
In “If you could remove the dead from the dead” the poem seems to mock the very idea, yet hold the thought as a way of easing the harshness of death, especially in the name of god, country, and greed:
“no more disillusionment, no more oblivion”
bringing the reader to a vision of rebirth and redemption as the speaker asks:
“And am i so stupid as to suggest it, am i so stupid as to imagine it, all their faces in the mist of civilizations and idiotic rain, the dead separated from the dead, bullet by bullet, eye by eye, walking again, hand in hand, like the walking sun”
Throughout, Wallace manages to let the reader catch a glimpse of the interconnectivity of time and space:
“This water, which is glint of sun that rose in Sumeria and Jordan and Cincinnati”
The poems move on, seeming like a conversation with a friend, the kind of friend who will tell you the truth no matter what. A conversation where it is hard to get a word in edgewise, but then you think to yourself: let him (or her) go, this is too interesting and unusual to interrupt, becoming a non-stop ride of connections and images, cutting us with words and images we cannot look away from.
“This is why a pothole is a handshake with heaven and a conspiracy against the machine. because it/is beneath us to worship the machine. because we are human, and the city is a beat virgin wreathed with mist and steam and artificial light.”
Also included is a sequence of poems “Letters from Vincent” centered around Van Gogh which manages to be fresh, taking us deep into the mind, observations, anguish, and aspirations of the artist. Not an easy task given the wealth of material written on one of the world’s most famous and popular painters. Based on Van Gogh’s paintings and letters, the poems show us new insights and at the same time stand on their own as works of art.
This is a collection of poems worth time and study, to be read and savored again and again.
George Wallace is editor of Poetrybay, author of 33 chapbooks of poetry, and writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.
Michael Minassasin is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online magazine. His
chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist (2010) and photography: Around the Bend (2017). For more information: https://michaelminassian.com
by George Wallace
Stubborn Mule Press
by Michael Minassian
This was my first encounter with the poems of George Wallace, but once I started to read this collection, I wanted more. Wallace uses long lines with unusual but effective line breaks, generating a deep look into the mind of the speaker whether the speaker is a person, child, lake, or the mysterious voice of a mythological figure, and we are drawn into the poems effortlessly, entering a surreal world of swirling images.
Whether he is referencing Parnassus or the Black Sea, New York or Paris, or alluding to Miles Davis, Moses, or the Jolly Green Giant, it all works together, holding tight, never unraveling. Several of the poems, based on legend and myth, take on the shape and tone of ancient works yet manage to sound original and new:
“Before the first snow comes, I mean, before my body is gone forever, before there is nothing left of me but voice, voice to sing away absence, I in my turn taken in, like air, and given back to the world freely, imperfect son of the earth whose song is grief, whose love is Eurydice, the fecundity of earth… /It passes, seasons and sufficiencies, beauty of song, the limits of power given us by the gods, and all taken back by them, as I pass by on my way to the sea.”
Other poems have the feel of folk tales brought into the age of the New World, immigrants, and the not so distant relatives who escaped to our shores as in the poem “The Dancing Cottage” which begins:
“Before she came to America your grandmother served three sisters in a cottage in Russia, a dancing cottage that turned and turned among the trees”
and ends on a note of hope:
“and your grandmother stood outside the door of the dancing cottage, dreaming of America
Dreams and magic, hope and despair breathe life into the poems and the reader experiences the sense that the world will have a chance to begin anew:”
In “If you could remove the dead from the dead” the poem seems to mock the very idea, yet hold the thought as a way of easing the harshness of death, especially in the name of god, country, and greed:
“no more disillusionment, no more oblivion”
bringing the reader to a vision of rebirth and redemption as the speaker asks:
“And am i so stupid as to suggest it, am i so stupid as to imagine it, all their faces in the mist of civilizations and idiotic rain, the dead separated from the dead, bullet by bullet, eye by eye, walking again, hand in hand, like the walking sun”
Throughout, Wallace manages to let the reader catch a glimpse of the interconnectivity of time and space:
“This water, which is glint of sun that rose in Sumeria and Jordan and Cincinnati”
The poems move on, seeming like a conversation with a friend, the kind of friend who will tell you the truth no matter what. A conversation where it is hard to get a word in edgewise, but then you think to yourself: let him (or her) go, this is too interesting and unusual to interrupt, becoming a non-stop ride of connections and images, cutting us with words and images we cannot look away from.
“This is why a pothole is a handshake with heaven and a conspiracy against the machine. because it/is beneath us to worship the machine. because we are human, and the city is a beat virgin wreathed with mist and steam and artificial light.”
Also included is a sequence of poems “Letters from Vincent” centered around Van Gogh which manages to be fresh, taking us deep into the mind, observations, anguish, and aspirations of the artist. Not an easy task given the wealth of material written on one of the world’s most famous and popular painters. Based on Van Gogh’s paintings and letters, the poems show us new insights and at the same time stand on their own as works of art.
This is a collection of poems worth time and study, to be read and savored again and again.
George Wallace is editor of Poetrybay, author of 33 chapbooks of poetry, and writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.
Michael Minassasin is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online magazine. His
chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist (2010) and photography: Around the Bend (2017). For more information: https://michaelminassian.com
Esperanza and Hope
by Esperanza Snyder
Sheep Meadow Press,
(plus a bonus poem in dialogue with the book by Stanley Moss)
by: Grace Cavalieri
This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books
Reprinted with permission of the author
A great idea begins the book. Esperanza (Hope) Snyder writes a 12-page précis disobeying usual formats, to give us an honest conversation as context for the poems. This fine-grained exposition of a life strongly lived reads with energy lifting the page. Had this not served as intro, the poems might be appreciated as illuminations, but maybe more like fireflies that need a backdrop to be seen exactly.
What strikes me most is that this isn’t a dream journey as with many other poets. It’s a real journey from Columbia, Madrid, Italy, West Virginia — a strange progression you might think but you’ll see Snyder’s storytelling forms as barrages of truth. A poem is only as good as the poet, only as thoughtful, as meaningful. Snyder is an accomplished poet and consummate scholar, speaker of languages, on a constant quest for meaning. This makes up the tumult beneath each poem leveled by spices of earnest emotion.
Page after page, I kept going as if in a fairytale/drama — such an inveterate woman on her own, as child, as young person, as single mother and wife. How she delivers this true hearted passage is completely without self-pity. It’s a strong expressionistic commitment to tell each piece of the puzzle. The sensuality of place, taste, scene and color is a gift from the author and innate in her nature. I’m completely taken with this book, worthy of our best attentions. It’s bold and reaches deeply. Rilke says, “I was seeking who I was…” Snyder has found herself, handsomely, in this collection.
Pianura Padana
That year, I traveled five thousand years to Tuscany,
to live with a man from Fiesole who sold door handles
to Ferramenta stores. We went to Assisi, San Gimignano,
Milano, Ferrara, drove to Arezzo through cypress trees-lined
roads, saw Petrarch’s home, drank brunello, decanted
and slightly warmed. One weekend in February
we walked along paths on top of city walls
that Ercole d’Este commissioned in Ferrara.
From our hotel balcony I watched a woman bike
along the Po, her legs hidden by fog. I remember
her long hair, red bike handles, torso floating on clouds.
We hadn’t been together centuries, the lying had not
started yet, though I already felt like getting on an eagle
and flying home, except there was no “nest” for me,
not with my mother and her second husband, not
with my first husband and his anger. The lying
had not yet started, but part of me, like the woman
on the bike — felt invisible, polluted like the waters of the Po.
ESPERANZA SNYDER was born in Colombia and lives in West Virginia. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Manchester. Mother of three children, she is currently the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Sicily and poet laureate of Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
by Esperanza Snyder
Sheep Meadow Press,
(plus a bonus poem in dialogue with the book by Stanley Moss)
by: Grace Cavalieri
This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books
Reprinted with permission of the author
A great idea begins the book. Esperanza (Hope) Snyder writes a 12-page précis disobeying usual formats, to give us an honest conversation as context for the poems. This fine-grained exposition of a life strongly lived reads with energy lifting the page. Had this not served as intro, the poems might be appreciated as illuminations, but maybe more like fireflies that need a backdrop to be seen exactly.
What strikes me most is that this isn’t a dream journey as with many other poets. It’s a real journey from Columbia, Madrid, Italy, West Virginia — a strange progression you might think but you’ll see Snyder’s storytelling forms as barrages of truth. A poem is only as good as the poet, only as thoughtful, as meaningful. Snyder is an accomplished poet and consummate scholar, speaker of languages, on a constant quest for meaning. This makes up the tumult beneath each poem leveled by spices of earnest emotion.
Page after page, I kept going as if in a fairytale/drama — such an inveterate woman on her own, as child, as young person, as single mother and wife. How she delivers this true hearted passage is completely without self-pity. It’s a strong expressionistic commitment to tell each piece of the puzzle. The sensuality of place, taste, scene and color is a gift from the author and innate in her nature. I’m completely taken with this book, worthy of our best attentions. It’s bold and reaches deeply. Rilke says, “I was seeking who I was…” Snyder has found herself, handsomely, in this collection.
Pianura Padana
That year, I traveled five thousand years to Tuscany,
to live with a man from Fiesole who sold door handles
to Ferramenta stores. We went to Assisi, San Gimignano,
Milano, Ferrara, drove to Arezzo through cypress trees-lined
roads, saw Petrarch’s home, drank brunello, decanted
and slightly warmed. One weekend in February
we walked along paths on top of city walls
that Ercole d’Este commissioned in Ferrara.
From our hotel balcony I watched a woman bike
along the Po, her legs hidden by fog. I remember
her long hair, red bike handles, torso floating on clouds.
We hadn’t been together centuries, the lying had not
started yet, though I already felt like getting on an eagle
and flying home, except there was no “nest” for me,
not with my mother and her second husband, not
with my first husband and his anger. The lying
had not yet started, but part of me, like the woman
on the bike — felt invisible, polluted like the waters of the Po.
ESPERANZA SNYDER was born in Colombia and lives in West Virginia. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Manchester. Mother of three children, she is currently the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Sicily and poet laureate of Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
August 2018
Reading Queer: Poetry In A Time Of Chaos
Maureen Seaton & Neil De La Flor, Editors
Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, FL
ISBN: 978-1-934695-52-4
By Freesia McKee
I have started this review many times, attempting to connect Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos to the current administration’s continued acts of violence. Every day, it seems, something newly egregious happens. According to the foreword by editors Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor, Reading Queer was not conceived as a resistance anthology, but it became one. Two tragedies happened on the book’s journey to publication: the massacre at Pulse and the election of 45.
Reading Queer inhabits a place in the mosaic of resistance anthologies published in the last sixteen months. We write, edit, publish, and read resistance anthologies to be heard, to be multitudinous, and to answer the invitation of resilience. Poetry shows me how I am alive, that I want to be alive, and that our connections matter.
I’ve spent a long time with this compendium of 50 poets. I attended release readings for Reading Queer at the AWP Conference in Tampa and at The Betsy Hotel in South Beach. The atmosphere of these readings felt something like a reunion of chosen family. When I got home, I put some of Reading Queer’s poems on repeat, so to speak. I woke up with them stuck in my head.
I began to wonder if queer poetry is a time of chaos. After all, queer poems aren’t straight. Queer poetry is the arc of the brick thrown to smash the window. Queer poetry is loud, spontaneous, a dance. Queer poetry is the book splayed facedown mid-poem, the loud baroque twirl, the drag king running his tongue across his mustachioed upper lip, a gathering. In contrast, the machine of oppression is a highly engineered, blueprinted, right-angled industry. Systems of state-appointed killers are bureaucratic, aimed at non-chaotic, inorganic, insular un-feeling.
Adrienne Rich wrote that writing and reading about “lesbian existence” is a revolutionary act. I will expand this idea here to “queer existence” or “LGBTQIA existence.” Reading Queer’s poets are experts in the desire for revolutionary queer existence. Celeste Gainey writes in “in our nation’s capital,” “We’re not supposed to be here//doggie-style in our nation’s capital.” Bryan Borland echoes, “my body still politicks.”
In a time when some mistakenly believe that marriage equality means we have achieved full equality, Reading Queer contains declarations about the importance of many kinds of love, including self-love. From “Why we wander” by cin salach: “This is the story of a woman who loved to live.” Nicholas Wong writes in “When the light no longer illuminates, illustrates, or is ill, or I,” “When I try not to understand this paradox: let there be light, then lampshade that enclaves the sweep of light//When I dance with the light and the light is me//When we both lick and lack the body of a shade//When we want something to lean on.”
Gregg Shapiro writes in “My Mother’s Vanity” about a child delighting in his mother’s “powdery terrains of rough, blush and eye shadow.” He writes, “Did I feel cute? Desirable? Seductive? Glamorous? New each time? Indestructible? Older than my single digit age? You bet I did.”
Reading Queer’s poets write about the contradictory constrictions of identity. Gem Blackthorn writes about bisexuality and the invisibility many bi people experience in “Dissociative Sexuality Disorder”: “I’m a maligned heterosexual.//I’m a maligned homosexual.//That I splinter into multiple identities,//like tree branches, whenever//I take up a new lover.”
Cheryl Clarke writes in “Coterie,”
Resist totalizing
essentializing
and truth.
Provisional queerness
no formalist gestures
narcissistic privates made public
these poetries
these ingroup associations
a coterie of signifieds
systematic chance.
JP Howard writes in “M R
A K it UP”: “let me enter the room on my terms.”
Queer poetry is being seen in the chaos of self-definition. Self-definition is a lifelong pursuit, and our culture at large has much to learn from the queer fight for and celebration of self-definition, a fight and celebration that by their nature are never complete. In one of my favorite poems, “For Muriel,” Jen Benka writes the lines, “To be found out.” and “To find.” Benka continues, “I didn’t know how to look for you until I learned I was looking.” This “looking for” addresses the self.
Jericho Brown writes in “To Be Asked for a Kiss,” “Whenever I read a poem, I read for what it doesn’t say.” Looking for “what it doesn’t say” is especially crucial in queer poetry. For centuries, queer poets had to hide or encode the queer and trans content in their work. Many still do. But poetry is an art form that, to some extent, requires disruption or obfuscation. This is not to say that poetry must be mysterious, but that a poem by nature must leave some of itself behind the curtain. I think this is why there has always been such a strong queer presence in our poetic traditions. We have never had enough language to define ourselves, but we also must sometimes—for our very survival or just for the sake of the poem—limit the language we do share. “How can I know everyone here,/but still feel so alone?” Cathleen Chambless writes.
If queer poetry is chaos, it is antithetical to right-angled walls of 45’s imagination. This is an anthology for the time after 45’s rise to the global stage, a world right-angled after Pulse.
Justin Torres writes in “In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club,” “Maybe you’ve yet to come out to your family at all, or maybe your family kicked you out years ago. Forget it, you survived.” Torres continues, “You didn’t come here to be a martyr, you came to live, papi. To live, mamacita. To live, hijos. To live, mariposa.”
Dear queer poets: Do you remember what we did the day after tragedy? We ate soup together. We made protest signs. We checked in, and some of us escaped for a few hours if we could. And we wrote. Some of us couldn’t stop writing. Some of us couldn’t write for a long time, struck silent. We began to organize, to compile resistance anthologies. The work we were already involved in was imbued with new meaning.
Maureen Seaton & Neil De La Flor, Editors
Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, FL
ISBN: 978-1-934695-52-4
By Freesia McKee
I have started this review many times, attempting to connect Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos to the current administration’s continued acts of violence. Every day, it seems, something newly egregious happens. According to the foreword by editors Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor, Reading Queer was not conceived as a resistance anthology, but it became one. Two tragedies happened on the book’s journey to publication: the massacre at Pulse and the election of 45.
Reading Queer inhabits a place in the mosaic of resistance anthologies published in the last sixteen months. We write, edit, publish, and read resistance anthologies to be heard, to be multitudinous, and to answer the invitation of resilience. Poetry shows me how I am alive, that I want to be alive, and that our connections matter.
I’ve spent a long time with this compendium of 50 poets. I attended release readings for Reading Queer at the AWP Conference in Tampa and at The Betsy Hotel in South Beach. The atmosphere of these readings felt something like a reunion of chosen family. When I got home, I put some of Reading Queer’s poems on repeat, so to speak. I woke up with them stuck in my head.
I began to wonder if queer poetry is a time of chaos. After all, queer poems aren’t straight. Queer poetry is the arc of the brick thrown to smash the window. Queer poetry is loud, spontaneous, a dance. Queer poetry is the book splayed facedown mid-poem, the loud baroque twirl, the drag king running his tongue across his mustachioed upper lip, a gathering. In contrast, the machine of oppression is a highly engineered, blueprinted, right-angled industry. Systems of state-appointed killers are bureaucratic, aimed at non-chaotic, inorganic, insular un-feeling.
Adrienne Rich wrote that writing and reading about “lesbian existence” is a revolutionary act. I will expand this idea here to “queer existence” or “LGBTQIA existence.” Reading Queer’s poets are experts in the desire for revolutionary queer existence. Celeste Gainey writes in “in our nation’s capital,” “We’re not supposed to be here//doggie-style in our nation’s capital.” Bryan Borland echoes, “my body still politicks.”
In a time when some mistakenly believe that marriage equality means we have achieved full equality, Reading Queer contains declarations about the importance of many kinds of love, including self-love. From “Why we wander” by cin salach: “This is the story of a woman who loved to live.” Nicholas Wong writes in “When the light no longer illuminates, illustrates, or is ill, or I,” “When I try not to understand this paradox: let there be light, then lampshade that enclaves the sweep of light//When I dance with the light and the light is me//When we both lick and lack the body of a shade//When we want something to lean on.”
Gregg Shapiro writes in “My Mother’s Vanity” about a child delighting in his mother’s “powdery terrains of rough, blush and eye shadow.” He writes, “Did I feel cute? Desirable? Seductive? Glamorous? New each time? Indestructible? Older than my single digit age? You bet I did.”
Reading Queer’s poets write about the contradictory constrictions of identity. Gem Blackthorn writes about bisexuality and the invisibility many bi people experience in “Dissociative Sexuality Disorder”: “I’m a maligned heterosexual.//I’m a maligned homosexual.//That I splinter into multiple identities,//like tree branches, whenever//I take up a new lover.”
Cheryl Clarke writes in “Coterie,”
Resist totalizing
essentializing
and truth.
Provisional queerness
no formalist gestures
narcissistic privates made public
these poetries
these ingroup associations
a coterie of signifieds
systematic chance.
JP Howard writes in “M R
A K it UP”: “let me enter the room on my terms.”
Queer poetry is being seen in the chaos of self-definition. Self-definition is a lifelong pursuit, and our culture at large has much to learn from the queer fight for and celebration of self-definition, a fight and celebration that by their nature are never complete. In one of my favorite poems, “For Muriel,” Jen Benka writes the lines, “To be found out.” and “To find.” Benka continues, “I didn’t know how to look for you until I learned I was looking.” This “looking for” addresses the self.
Jericho Brown writes in “To Be Asked for a Kiss,” “Whenever I read a poem, I read for what it doesn’t say.” Looking for “what it doesn’t say” is especially crucial in queer poetry. For centuries, queer poets had to hide or encode the queer and trans content in their work. Many still do. But poetry is an art form that, to some extent, requires disruption or obfuscation. This is not to say that poetry must be mysterious, but that a poem by nature must leave some of itself behind the curtain. I think this is why there has always been such a strong queer presence in our poetic traditions. We have never had enough language to define ourselves, but we also must sometimes—for our very survival or just for the sake of the poem—limit the language we do share. “How can I know everyone here,/but still feel so alone?” Cathleen Chambless writes.
If queer poetry is chaos, it is antithetical to right-angled walls of 45’s imagination. This is an anthology for the time after 45’s rise to the global stage, a world right-angled after Pulse.
Justin Torres writes in “In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club,” “Maybe you’ve yet to come out to your family at all, or maybe your family kicked you out years ago. Forget it, you survived.” Torres continues, “You didn’t come here to be a martyr, you came to live, papi. To live, mamacita. To live, hijos. To live, mariposa.”
Dear queer poets: Do you remember what we did the day after tragedy? We ate soup together. We made protest signs. We checked in, and some of us escaped for a few hours if we could. And we wrote. Some of us couldn’t stop writing. Some of us couldn’t write for a long time, struck silent. We began to organize, to compile resistance anthologies. The work we were already involved in was imbued with new meaning.
May 2018
Jack Tar's Lady Parts
by Charles Rammelkamp
Main Street Rag, Charlotte, North Carolina
ISBN: 978-1-59948-655-0
by: Francine Witte
Charles Rammelkamp’s “Jack Tar’s Lady Parts” is a tight little ship of a chapbook. And like any good captain, Rammelkamp begins with a description of the voyage we are about to take. The prologue poem, “Jack Tar,” explains the title.
They called us Jack Tars,
the seamen of the British Empire,
Royal Navy or Merchant, either one.
We tarred our clothes before going to sea
to waterproof them; tarpaulin as well…
Now that we know what a Jack Tar is, we learn what the “Lady Parts” are.
…most of them Jacks but some of them Jills.
It is, indeed, the Jills who we will be reading about. Who were the women on these journeys or associated with the Jack Tars on shore leave? Why were they there, and how did they feel?
Neatly divided into three sections, Wives, Prostitutes, and Transvestites, we have a chance to hear fascinating details of life at sea. Rammelkamp has combined historical accounts which were, in part, influenced by Suzanne J. Stark’s book Female Tars, with his own imagination to produce a series of persona poems.
We can only wonder how a woman might feel like in the cramped, dangerous quarters of a ship on a temperamental sea, far from the comfort of home and the hard security of land. Through Rammelkamp’s finely sketched poems, we can more fully understand the hardships these women endured.
In the “Wives,”section we meet, among others, Mary Ann, the coxswain’s wife (glossary in back of the book) who takes up with a seaman as revenge for her husband being too busy, and Sarah Bates, a powder monkey, who keeps on attending to the wounded even after her husband has been killed. My favorite poem in this section is“ Tommy Phelan and the Goat.”
It seems that Tommy was born on the ship, his parents both killed during an attack.
…She rushed to the main deck,
through all the choking smoke, across the gore-slick planks,
to where Joe lay, soaking in his blood.
She took her husband in her arms,
but as she tried to comfort him,
a shot from the Reynard took her head clean off,
and then Joe died almost immediately after.
Of course, all of Joe’s messmates, me included,
worried about little Tommy,
still just a nursing baby,.
How would he be nourished?
That’s when we remembered the Maltese goat
the officers got their milk from .
The officers agreed to lend us the goat,
so Tommy could suckle at her teat,…
This closes the section on Wives. Next we meet the Prostitutes.
There are many reasons why the Jills turned to the oldest profession. We get a chance here to listen to some. In “Fleet Marriage, 1750” a conventional “respectable” life seemed like a good idea:
Jack’s ship’d just come in.
He’d been away at sea most of a year
and he was ready to be jolly.
We met at a public-house at Radcliffe,
one thing leading to another
we was soon on our way
with four other sailors and their women
to a quick-marriage chapel in Mayfair,
over the Fleet Prison.
I won’t say it was the best marriage ever,
but no worse than me mam’s and pa’s;
we got along fine for a while
until Jack got restless and went back to sea.
Me, I had to go back to whoring,
It was either that, begging, or public charity,
and I sure wasn’t going to work
no ten-and twelve-hour days at no factory job…
The theme that prostitution is preferable to scullery-level work is echoed in “Betsy Pool Changes Her Mind.” She is a prostitute who, trying to reform, goes to prison, gets re-packaged for a life of mending and washing and, in the end, decides “…Fuck that. After three weeks, I sneaked away one night,/went back to the ships to take up whoring again.”
The final and longest section of the book is Transvestites. Here we meet the women who disguised themselves as men to be Jack Tars. In “William Brown of the Queen Charlotte, 1815” we understand how little a woman’s life was worth:
I come from Edinburgh, an African women,
went back to sea after my husband and I quarreled.
He treated me like a farm animal.
I couldn’t take it any more,(sic) ever –
at best all it was was cupboard love –
so I joined the Royal Navy in 1804,
served as a seaman almost a dozen years
before anybody learned my secret.
Rated Able in the books of my ship, the Queen Charlotte,
I even served as captain of her foretop –
the upper section of the foremast –
leading the others assigned to the section,
working the sails from both deck and aloft,
taking them in in stormy weather,
the deck rolling us around like drunks in a tavern.
Now that no-good husband of mine
threatens to take all my prize money,
and he can do it too,
since I really am just a farm animal;
the husband controls the wife’s earnings under law.
He’s gone to the Pay Office in Somerset Place
down in London to stake his claim.
Hell, even my name’s not my own.
All I can do is go back to sea.
The transvestite poems continue with woman whose breasts are exposed during whippings, or their true gender revealed while being caught in the bathroom.
All of the poems in this chapbook highlight the difficulty of being a woman, whether married, prostitute, or passing herself as a man because a hard life at sea is better than a life lived as a woman. Happiness, it seems, is only achieved when going against the societal norm of the role a woman should play.
By the time you finish this chapbook, you will have met some characters with unique and urgent stories. “Jack Tar’s Lady Parts” is history, imagination, and poetry to produce a beautifully cohesive journey that you won’t soon forget.
by Charles Rammelkamp
Main Street Rag, Charlotte, North Carolina
ISBN: 978-1-59948-655-0
by: Francine Witte
Charles Rammelkamp’s “Jack Tar’s Lady Parts” is a tight little ship of a chapbook. And like any good captain, Rammelkamp begins with a description of the voyage we are about to take. The prologue poem, “Jack Tar,” explains the title.
They called us Jack Tars,
the seamen of the British Empire,
Royal Navy or Merchant, either one.
We tarred our clothes before going to sea
to waterproof them; tarpaulin as well…
Now that we know what a Jack Tar is, we learn what the “Lady Parts” are.
…most of them Jacks but some of them Jills.
It is, indeed, the Jills who we will be reading about. Who were the women on these journeys or associated with the Jack Tars on shore leave? Why were they there, and how did they feel?
Neatly divided into three sections, Wives, Prostitutes, and Transvestites, we have a chance to hear fascinating details of life at sea. Rammelkamp has combined historical accounts which were, in part, influenced by Suzanne J. Stark’s book Female Tars, with his own imagination to produce a series of persona poems.
We can only wonder how a woman might feel like in the cramped, dangerous quarters of a ship on a temperamental sea, far from the comfort of home and the hard security of land. Through Rammelkamp’s finely sketched poems, we can more fully understand the hardships these women endured.
In the “Wives,”section we meet, among others, Mary Ann, the coxswain’s wife (glossary in back of the book) who takes up with a seaman as revenge for her husband being too busy, and Sarah Bates, a powder monkey, who keeps on attending to the wounded even after her husband has been killed. My favorite poem in this section is“ Tommy Phelan and the Goat.”
It seems that Tommy was born on the ship, his parents both killed during an attack.
…She rushed to the main deck,
through all the choking smoke, across the gore-slick planks,
to where Joe lay, soaking in his blood.
She took her husband in her arms,
but as she tried to comfort him,
a shot from the Reynard took her head clean off,
and then Joe died almost immediately after.
Of course, all of Joe’s messmates, me included,
worried about little Tommy,
still just a nursing baby,.
How would he be nourished?
That’s when we remembered the Maltese goat
the officers got their milk from .
The officers agreed to lend us the goat,
so Tommy could suckle at her teat,…
This closes the section on Wives. Next we meet the Prostitutes.
There are many reasons why the Jills turned to the oldest profession. We get a chance here to listen to some. In “Fleet Marriage, 1750” a conventional “respectable” life seemed like a good idea:
Jack’s ship’d just come in.
He’d been away at sea most of a year
and he was ready to be jolly.
We met at a public-house at Radcliffe,
one thing leading to another
we was soon on our way
with four other sailors and their women
to a quick-marriage chapel in Mayfair,
over the Fleet Prison.
I won’t say it was the best marriage ever,
but no worse than me mam’s and pa’s;
we got along fine for a while
until Jack got restless and went back to sea.
Me, I had to go back to whoring,
It was either that, begging, or public charity,
and I sure wasn’t going to work
no ten-and twelve-hour days at no factory job…
The theme that prostitution is preferable to scullery-level work is echoed in “Betsy Pool Changes Her Mind.” She is a prostitute who, trying to reform, goes to prison, gets re-packaged for a life of mending and washing and, in the end, decides “…Fuck that. After three weeks, I sneaked away one night,/went back to the ships to take up whoring again.”
The final and longest section of the book is Transvestites. Here we meet the women who disguised themselves as men to be Jack Tars. In “William Brown of the Queen Charlotte, 1815” we understand how little a woman’s life was worth:
I come from Edinburgh, an African women,
went back to sea after my husband and I quarreled.
He treated me like a farm animal.
I couldn’t take it any more,(sic) ever –
at best all it was was cupboard love –
so I joined the Royal Navy in 1804,
served as a seaman almost a dozen years
before anybody learned my secret.
Rated Able in the books of my ship, the Queen Charlotte,
I even served as captain of her foretop –
the upper section of the foremast –
leading the others assigned to the section,
working the sails from both deck and aloft,
taking them in in stormy weather,
the deck rolling us around like drunks in a tavern.
Now that no-good husband of mine
threatens to take all my prize money,
and he can do it too,
since I really am just a farm animal;
the husband controls the wife’s earnings under law.
He’s gone to the Pay Office in Somerset Place
down in London to stake his claim.
Hell, even my name’s not my own.
All I can do is go back to sea.
The transvestite poems continue with woman whose breasts are exposed during whippings, or their true gender revealed while being caught in the bathroom.
All of the poems in this chapbook highlight the difficulty of being a woman, whether married, prostitute, or passing herself as a man because a hard life at sea is better than a life lived as a woman. Happiness, it seems, is only achieved when going against the societal norm of the role a woman should play.
By the time you finish this chapbook, you will have met some characters with unique and urgent stories. “Jack Tar’s Lady Parts” is history, imagination, and poetry to produce a beautifully cohesive journey that you won’t soon forget.
May 2018 Guest Reviews
Voices in the Air, Poems for Listeners
by Naomi Shihab Nye
an introduction by the author.
Green Willow/HarperCollins. 208 pages.
by Grace Cavalieri
reprinted with permission from Grace Cavalieri and Washington Independent Review of Books
Naomi Shihab Nye’s book is one waited for by 20th- and 21st-century readers and writers: now ready to be introduced to the next generation. She’s an American icon — not the marble pillar kind or one of those in portraiture — but an active teaching citizen of the poetry world who is moving us forward word by word. This time she’s inspired by “Yutori” (life space) found from teaching poetry workshops in Japan. The book’s introduction leads us from this moment of stillness — to listen, and then to hear. This book comes from listening to many people — some great and some unknown. The poems are elegiac, reverential and celebratory; addressing more than 75 individuals in 100 new works. Each character suggests an idea within an historical story. It’s a streaming of cultural happiness observing others.
Emily Dickinson is featured in a poem called “Emily”: “What would you do if you knew/that even during wartime/scholars in Baghdad/were translating your poems/into Arabic/still believing/in the thing with feathers? /You wouldn’t feel lonely/that’s for sure. /Words finding friends/even if written on envelope flaps/or left in a drawer.” Coincidentally, Naomi Shihab Nye also has poems saved and read in prisons, halfway houses, schools, therapeutic institutions; and why is this? Because she writes sharply and clearly of a wholesome reality where we find something to like in each line. Her work is completely understandable while maintaining a high level of language and poetic identity. She presents a reality without artifice and lets a poem speak for itself without getting in its way. These poems seem to say: this is what I saw -- this is what I heard -- I stopped long enough in (life space) “Yutori” to hear. Just take a look at people and places — each is a portal you can see into.
A gentle rebuke is in the poem Oh. Say Can You See it begins, “I’d like to take Donald Trump to Palestine, /set him free in the streets of Ramallah or Nablus/amidst all the winners who never gave up/ in 69 years. /… I’d wrap a keffiyeh around his head, /tuck some warm falafels in his pockets, /let him wander alleyways and streets, / rubble and hope…”
I love the prose piece where the author, at age 20, visits Jack Kerouac’s widow (whom she barely knew via telephone) and grieves with her. Her parents drove from Texas to Florida to deliver her to this visit. We see early on the meaning of tenacity.
Naomi Shihab Nye is an intermediary between the reader and a language that dignifies ideas. There’s moral leadership here in an excellent book where on every page poetry subordinates the bad in this world. This is why she’s one of our country’s most beloved poets.
In Transit
I mailed a package to myself, it never arrived.
Months later, wondering what it contained…
the package was oversized, I paid extra.
Mailed it from a place under trees. Surely shade
and sunlight was in the package. Mailed it
from a place compassionate to refugees.
Unopened envelopes inside the package,
poems from kind students hoping for response.
How do we answer without knowing
who they were or what they said?
This is why you must smile at everyone,
living and dead, everywhere you go.
You have no idea what has been lost
in transit.
Grace Cavalieri is celebrating 41 years on public radio, with “The Poet and the Poem” now from the Library of Congress. She holds AWP’s “George Garret Award.” She’s the author of 20 books and chapbooks and 26 produced plays, short-form and full-length. She’s poetry columnist/reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Her new book’s a compendium of poetry, plays and interviews, Other Voices, Other Lives (2017.)
by Naomi Shihab Nye
an introduction by the author.
Green Willow/HarperCollins. 208 pages.
by Grace Cavalieri
reprinted with permission from Grace Cavalieri and Washington Independent Review of Books
Naomi Shihab Nye’s book is one waited for by 20th- and 21st-century readers and writers: now ready to be introduced to the next generation. She’s an American icon — not the marble pillar kind or one of those in portraiture — but an active teaching citizen of the poetry world who is moving us forward word by word. This time she’s inspired by “Yutori” (life space) found from teaching poetry workshops in Japan. The book’s introduction leads us from this moment of stillness — to listen, and then to hear. This book comes from listening to many people — some great and some unknown. The poems are elegiac, reverential and celebratory; addressing more than 75 individuals in 100 new works. Each character suggests an idea within an historical story. It’s a streaming of cultural happiness observing others.
Emily Dickinson is featured in a poem called “Emily”: “What would you do if you knew/that even during wartime/scholars in Baghdad/were translating your poems/into Arabic/still believing/in the thing with feathers? /You wouldn’t feel lonely/that’s for sure. /Words finding friends/even if written on envelope flaps/or left in a drawer.” Coincidentally, Naomi Shihab Nye also has poems saved and read in prisons, halfway houses, schools, therapeutic institutions; and why is this? Because she writes sharply and clearly of a wholesome reality where we find something to like in each line. Her work is completely understandable while maintaining a high level of language and poetic identity. She presents a reality without artifice and lets a poem speak for itself without getting in its way. These poems seem to say: this is what I saw -- this is what I heard -- I stopped long enough in (life space) “Yutori” to hear. Just take a look at people and places — each is a portal you can see into.
A gentle rebuke is in the poem Oh. Say Can You See it begins, “I’d like to take Donald Trump to Palestine, /set him free in the streets of Ramallah or Nablus/amidst all the winners who never gave up/ in 69 years. /… I’d wrap a keffiyeh around his head, /tuck some warm falafels in his pockets, /let him wander alleyways and streets, / rubble and hope…”
I love the prose piece where the author, at age 20, visits Jack Kerouac’s widow (whom she barely knew via telephone) and grieves with her. Her parents drove from Texas to Florida to deliver her to this visit. We see early on the meaning of tenacity.
Naomi Shihab Nye is an intermediary between the reader and a language that dignifies ideas. There’s moral leadership here in an excellent book where on every page poetry subordinates the bad in this world. This is why she’s one of our country’s most beloved poets.
In Transit
I mailed a package to myself, it never arrived.
Months later, wondering what it contained…
the package was oversized, I paid extra.
Mailed it from a place under trees. Surely shade
and sunlight was in the package. Mailed it
from a place compassionate to refugees.
Unopened envelopes inside the package,
poems from kind students hoping for response.
How do we answer without knowing
who they were or what they said?
This is why you must smile at everyone,
living and dead, everywhere you go.
You have no idea what has been lost
in transit.
Grace Cavalieri is celebrating 41 years on public radio, with “The Poet and the Poem” now from the Library of Congress. She holds AWP’s “George Garret Award.” She’s the author of 20 books and chapbooks and 26 produced plays, short-form and full-length. She’s poetry columnist/reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Her new book’s a compendium of poetry, plays and interviews, Other Voices, Other Lives (2017.)
Irish Poets Plus Beer a Hit at The Betsy Hotel
A review of an O, Miami Poetry Festival reading on April 27, 2018
By Chauncey Mabe
“Galway and Belfast are centers of poetry... It’s so uplifting to see a good turnout
for a poetry reading. And on a Friday night in Miami Beach.” (Colette Bryce, Poet)
In America, and probably other parts of the English-speaking world, Ireland casts an outsized shadow as the home of a particularly rich and lovely form of speech and literature—James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and all that. Perhaps this is what brought a standing-room-only crowd to the Betsy Hotel on a recent Friday night for a reading by Irish poets, Julie Morrissy and Collette Bryce. There was to be a fourth, Paul Perry, the one writer on the bill with a Miami connection, having graduated from the University of Miami in 1997 with an MFA in poetry. Alas, Perry had been snared by the ever-tightening U.S. Customs dragnet, attempting to board a plane in Ireland with only a tourist visa, instead of a business one.
Despite sorrow over Perry’s absence—in addition to local friends, he was missed by Julie Morrissy, a former student of his at University College Dublin—the atmosphere was light in the tightly packed BBar, an elegant underground venue at the Betsy often given over to literary events. The mood was not hurt by the presence of Wynwood Brewery in the back of the room, where it handed out tastings of its signature La Rubia beer.
The evening opened with a welcome from Jonathan Plutzik, owner of the Betsy Hotel on South Beach. “We’re coming to the end of poetry month and our last collaborative event with O, Miami for 2018,” Plutzik said as he acknowledged poet P. Scott Cunningham, founder and director of the Festival. “The Betsy has been the host hotel of O, Miami since the beginning, and has supported its vision along with the Knight Foundation.” Since reopening the venerable boutique hotel in 2009, The Betsy has become a year-round haven for literature and the arts, inspired by Jonathan’s father, Hyam Plutzik, a mid-century poet who was a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Of course, an Irish accent is always a crowd-pleaser on these shores, but alas, several years living and working in the United States and Canada have softened Morrissy’s brogue. She read first, forced to get by only on personal charm and the quality of her verse. She is a young poet, with a much lauded pamphlet (or “chapbook” as we say here), I Am Where, and a first full poetry collection, Where, the Mile End.
Morrissy began by apologizing for the intentionally abstruse grammar in the title of her collection, and by praising Miami. “I’ve already written a poem since I got here,” she declared. She gave Paul Perry credit for turning her into a poet. Before she studied with Perry at UCD, she had been set on becoming a fiction writer. “I wrote a lot of poems as a child,” she said afterward. “Then I moved on to fiction. I took Paul’s class with no real interest in writing poetry. I made the switch and I haven’t looked back.”
Morrisy’s poems, the ones she read, at least, are less obviously political, less rooted in Irish history, than the ones Colette Bryce read later in the evening. Her poems are often pitched in a minor key, with a deceptive simplicity. Consider the opening lines of “Looped:”
there is a twist that creeps around me
that drags me back to the north strand
where I have never been before
to a park called St Anne’s
a saint I never saw before
a branch, a tongue
a child I never had before
These are poems that reward repeat reading. That’s not to say Morrissy’s poems lack in concrete detail, in energy, or in political intent. After all, she admires American poets the likes of Claudia Rankine and StaceyAnn Chin. Sometimes she combines these elements with a slap of humor, as in these lines from “Kookee:”
I really beat up on some cookie dough today
battered it with a wooden spoon
historically I find them hard to hold
the rough unfinished handle
feels like some crusty piece of felt that was left to rote
but today
I wrapped my boney fingers around it
rammed its roundness into
some recipe from a bag
that’s so easy
“even my husband could do it”
Colette Bryce took the microphone as a more established Irish poet, with four collections and several prizes to her credit, including the Ewart Briggs Award in honor of Seamus Heaney. She has been called “the Irish Elizabeth Bishop.” Bryce speaks in a full Irish accent, like you’d expect an Irish poet to have, and her poems have a ready music that fits into it naturally. Born and raised in Derry, in the north of Ireland, her poems are rooted in a place, and in the sectarian violence and politics of that place. She explains the word “Brits” in her poems refers not to the English people but to the English Army.
Yet Bryce also spoke with a warm wit, remarking with amazement at how everyone drives in America and confessing she did not learn until she was in her 30s. “It took seven goes to get my license,” she said. She steps easily from the political to the personal (and sometimes back again), often in the same poem, as with “Don’t Speak to the Brits, Just Pretend They Don’t Exist:”
Two rubber bullets stand on the shelf,
from Bloody Sunday - mounted in silver,
space rockets docked and ready to go off;
like the Sky Ray Lolly that crimsons your lips
when the orange Quencher your brother gets
attracts a wasp that stings him on the tongue.
‘Tongue' is what they call the Irish language,
‘native tongue' you're learning at school.
Kathleen is sent home from the Gaeltacht
for speaking English, and it's there
at the Gaeltacht, ambling back
along country roads in pure darkness
that a boy from Dublin
talks his tongue right into your mouth,
holds you closely in the dark and calls it
French kissing (he says this in English).
Bryce’s lasting connection to Derry notwithstanding, she had to leave home to find her place in the world, as seen in her poem, “The Full Indian Rope Trick,” with its image of a child climbing a magical rope and disappearing into the sky. Still, though she has spent very little time in the United States, this was not her first visit to Florida. Thirty years ago she was sent here as part a delegation of children, 20 Catholic and 20 Protestant. The idea was “to mix for three weeks in normal society.” But there were unintended lessons, as well.
“I was astonished to learn that Florida had her own problems,” said Bryce, whose host family included a raving bigot. “I had never heard of racism.” She read the poem that came out of that earlier trip, “And They Call It Lovely Derry,” which goes in part like this:
The husband sat at the head of the table
holding forth hot and bothered.
He couldn’t decide on the right word
himmed and hawed between Blacks and Coloured,
whatever, his point? They were bone idle,
wouldn’t accept the jobs they were offered.
“Now I’ll have to write another Florida poem about this trip,” Bryce said brightly.
After the reading, Bryce welcomed admirers and friends near the head of the room, a striking space with illuminated portraits of famous pop, rock, and country stars painted in a neo-primitive style. The ceiling is low, but it also has a mirrored surface, lending an illusion of height. She remarked on both the youth and the size of the audience. All too often, poetry readings are sparsely attended, and mostly by older people.
“Ireland values its poets very much, and not just in Dublin,” Bryce said. “Galway and Belfast are centers of poetry, too. It’s so lifting to see a good turnout for a poetry reading. And on a Friday night in Miami Beach.” It is, she allowed, all good PR for Irish poetry.
In point of fact, the event was in part a PR gesture by the Irish government. The idea for Irish poets visiting Miami arose in a pub conversation between Campbell McGrath, an award-winning Irish-American poet who teaches at Florida International University, and Maureen Kennelly, director of Poetry Ireland. McGrath gave credit to Poetry Ireland for bringing the idea to fruition, the Irish government for funding the event, and to P. Scott Cunningham and O Miami. “It’s hard to sell poetry in America,” McGrath said. “Scott knows how to make it happen.”
Shane Stephens, the tall and youthful Irish Consul for the Southeastern United States, was on hand. American lovers of the arts doubtless felt a twinge of envy when he mentioned almost in passing a $1.2 billion infrastructure and educational initiative called Creative Ireland. “By 2022,” Stephens said, “all children in Ireland will be learning art, drama, music, literature, and coding.” Yes, at a time when bridges and roads, not to mention arts funding, are crumbling in America, Ireland is making a major investment in its cultural institutions. The difference, Stephens said afterward, is the scale and stature of the two countries on the world stage.
“We are a small country,” Stephens said, “so for us to have an impact internationally, we have to use our creativity. There’s no place in the world for start-ups like the U.S. For us, we are very excited to use one of our greatest resources, creativity.”
Among the young adults who made up roughly half of the audience, Peter Trethowan and Ayssa DiPietero were there in part to support friends, and in part for the poetry itself. “I studied the humanities,” said Trethowan. Added DiPietero, “We enjoyed the poetry very much. The beer was a plus.”
Chauncey Mabe is a seasoned arts critic who has written for a variety of South Florida publications. He can be reached at cmabe55@yahoo.com
A review of an O, Miami Poetry Festival reading on April 27, 2018
By Chauncey Mabe
“Galway and Belfast are centers of poetry... It’s so uplifting to see a good turnout
for a poetry reading. And on a Friday night in Miami Beach.” (Colette Bryce, Poet)
In America, and probably other parts of the English-speaking world, Ireland casts an outsized shadow as the home of a particularly rich and lovely form of speech and literature—James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and all that. Perhaps this is what brought a standing-room-only crowd to the Betsy Hotel on a recent Friday night for a reading by Irish poets, Julie Morrissy and Collette Bryce. There was to be a fourth, Paul Perry, the one writer on the bill with a Miami connection, having graduated from the University of Miami in 1997 with an MFA in poetry. Alas, Perry had been snared by the ever-tightening U.S. Customs dragnet, attempting to board a plane in Ireland with only a tourist visa, instead of a business one.
Despite sorrow over Perry’s absence—in addition to local friends, he was missed by Julie Morrissy, a former student of his at University College Dublin—the atmosphere was light in the tightly packed BBar, an elegant underground venue at the Betsy often given over to literary events. The mood was not hurt by the presence of Wynwood Brewery in the back of the room, where it handed out tastings of its signature La Rubia beer.
The evening opened with a welcome from Jonathan Plutzik, owner of the Betsy Hotel on South Beach. “We’re coming to the end of poetry month and our last collaborative event with O, Miami for 2018,” Plutzik said as he acknowledged poet P. Scott Cunningham, founder and director of the Festival. “The Betsy has been the host hotel of O, Miami since the beginning, and has supported its vision along with the Knight Foundation.” Since reopening the venerable boutique hotel in 2009, The Betsy has become a year-round haven for literature and the arts, inspired by Jonathan’s father, Hyam Plutzik, a mid-century poet who was a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Of course, an Irish accent is always a crowd-pleaser on these shores, but alas, several years living and working in the United States and Canada have softened Morrissy’s brogue. She read first, forced to get by only on personal charm and the quality of her verse. She is a young poet, with a much lauded pamphlet (or “chapbook” as we say here), I Am Where, and a first full poetry collection, Where, the Mile End.
Morrissy began by apologizing for the intentionally abstruse grammar in the title of her collection, and by praising Miami. “I’ve already written a poem since I got here,” she declared. She gave Paul Perry credit for turning her into a poet. Before she studied with Perry at UCD, she had been set on becoming a fiction writer. “I wrote a lot of poems as a child,” she said afterward. “Then I moved on to fiction. I took Paul’s class with no real interest in writing poetry. I made the switch and I haven’t looked back.”
Morrisy’s poems, the ones she read, at least, are less obviously political, less rooted in Irish history, than the ones Colette Bryce read later in the evening. Her poems are often pitched in a minor key, with a deceptive simplicity. Consider the opening lines of “Looped:”
there is a twist that creeps around me
that drags me back to the north strand
where I have never been before
to a park called St Anne’s
a saint I never saw before
a branch, a tongue
a child I never had before
These are poems that reward repeat reading. That’s not to say Morrissy’s poems lack in concrete detail, in energy, or in political intent. After all, she admires American poets the likes of Claudia Rankine and StaceyAnn Chin. Sometimes she combines these elements with a slap of humor, as in these lines from “Kookee:”
I really beat up on some cookie dough today
battered it with a wooden spoon
historically I find them hard to hold
the rough unfinished handle
feels like some crusty piece of felt that was left to rote
but today
I wrapped my boney fingers around it
rammed its roundness into
some recipe from a bag
that’s so easy
“even my husband could do it”
Colette Bryce took the microphone as a more established Irish poet, with four collections and several prizes to her credit, including the Ewart Briggs Award in honor of Seamus Heaney. She has been called “the Irish Elizabeth Bishop.” Bryce speaks in a full Irish accent, like you’d expect an Irish poet to have, and her poems have a ready music that fits into it naturally. Born and raised in Derry, in the north of Ireland, her poems are rooted in a place, and in the sectarian violence and politics of that place. She explains the word “Brits” in her poems refers not to the English people but to the English Army.
Yet Bryce also spoke with a warm wit, remarking with amazement at how everyone drives in America and confessing she did not learn until she was in her 30s. “It took seven goes to get my license,” she said. She steps easily from the political to the personal (and sometimes back again), often in the same poem, as with “Don’t Speak to the Brits, Just Pretend They Don’t Exist:”
Two rubber bullets stand on the shelf,
from Bloody Sunday - mounted in silver,
space rockets docked and ready to go off;
like the Sky Ray Lolly that crimsons your lips
when the orange Quencher your brother gets
attracts a wasp that stings him on the tongue.
‘Tongue' is what they call the Irish language,
‘native tongue' you're learning at school.
Kathleen is sent home from the Gaeltacht
for speaking English, and it's there
at the Gaeltacht, ambling back
along country roads in pure darkness
that a boy from Dublin
talks his tongue right into your mouth,
holds you closely in the dark and calls it
French kissing (he says this in English).
Bryce’s lasting connection to Derry notwithstanding, she had to leave home to find her place in the world, as seen in her poem, “The Full Indian Rope Trick,” with its image of a child climbing a magical rope and disappearing into the sky. Still, though she has spent very little time in the United States, this was not her first visit to Florida. Thirty years ago she was sent here as part a delegation of children, 20 Catholic and 20 Protestant. The idea was “to mix for three weeks in normal society.” But there were unintended lessons, as well.
“I was astonished to learn that Florida had her own problems,” said Bryce, whose host family included a raving bigot. “I had never heard of racism.” She read the poem that came out of that earlier trip, “And They Call It Lovely Derry,” which goes in part like this:
The husband sat at the head of the table
holding forth hot and bothered.
He couldn’t decide on the right word
himmed and hawed between Blacks and Coloured,
whatever, his point? They were bone idle,
wouldn’t accept the jobs they were offered.
“Now I’ll have to write another Florida poem about this trip,” Bryce said brightly.
After the reading, Bryce welcomed admirers and friends near the head of the room, a striking space with illuminated portraits of famous pop, rock, and country stars painted in a neo-primitive style. The ceiling is low, but it also has a mirrored surface, lending an illusion of height. She remarked on both the youth and the size of the audience. All too often, poetry readings are sparsely attended, and mostly by older people.
“Ireland values its poets very much, and not just in Dublin,” Bryce said. “Galway and Belfast are centers of poetry, too. It’s so lifting to see a good turnout for a poetry reading. And on a Friday night in Miami Beach.” It is, she allowed, all good PR for Irish poetry.
In point of fact, the event was in part a PR gesture by the Irish government. The idea for Irish poets visiting Miami arose in a pub conversation between Campbell McGrath, an award-winning Irish-American poet who teaches at Florida International University, and Maureen Kennelly, director of Poetry Ireland. McGrath gave credit to Poetry Ireland for bringing the idea to fruition, the Irish government for funding the event, and to P. Scott Cunningham and O Miami. “It’s hard to sell poetry in America,” McGrath said. “Scott knows how to make it happen.”
Shane Stephens, the tall and youthful Irish Consul for the Southeastern United States, was on hand. American lovers of the arts doubtless felt a twinge of envy when he mentioned almost in passing a $1.2 billion infrastructure and educational initiative called Creative Ireland. “By 2022,” Stephens said, “all children in Ireland will be learning art, drama, music, literature, and coding.” Yes, at a time when bridges and roads, not to mention arts funding, are crumbling in America, Ireland is making a major investment in its cultural institutions. The difference, Stephens said afterward, is the scale and stature of the two countries on the world stage.
“We are a small country,” Stephens said, “so for us to have an impact internationally, we have to use our creativity. There’s no place in the world for start-ups like the U.S. For us, we are very excited to use one of our greatest resources, creativity.”
Among the young adults who made up roughly half of the audience, Peter Trethowan and Ayssa DiPietero were there in part to support friends, and in part for the poetry itself. “I studied the humanities,” said Trethowan. Added DiPietero, “We enjoyed the poetry very much. The beer was a plus.”
Chauncey Mabe is a seasoned arts critic who has written for a variety of South Florida publications. He can be reached at cmabe55@yahoo.com
Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom
by Rebecca Aronson
by Brian Burmeister
John Keats wrote, “The poetry of earth is never dead.” The recent collection Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom is a testament to that. Poet Rebecca Aronson, whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and the Georgia Review has a superb skill for showing the relationships between persons and their landscapes in this Orison Poetry Prize-winning book. Aronson explores the life-giving, life-taking worlds we find ourselves in, and the life-affirming meaning we build in those worlds with the persons in our lives. Though devoid of an overtly political agenda, Aronson’s poems are deeply environmental—truly spiritual in their reverence. Through each poem’s content and beautiful use of language, Aronson develops the deep connections between nature and humanity in a way few authors could hope to achieve.
From the opening poem—in which a girl sets a field on fire—we see the impacts one can have on our environment are profound. Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom is in a great sense a meditation on nature. Whether in content or metaphorical imagery, Aronson never loses sight of the connectedness of life and landscape. In one poem she directly asks the deep question, “What am I to sand?” She writes of deserts and forests and mountains, of drought and rain and snow, of cats and cows and rabbits, of bats and birds and moths. There is even a gorgeous, profound insect metaphor for human intimacy in the poem “Dinner Party”:
Maybe we are a wing and a wing
these nights, a cricket
sawing a song from its one whole body.
Humanity and earth are as one in poems like “Teacup,” in which Aronson writes:
She is a tiny landscape,
the tremendous peak of her hair,
her Matterhorn, rising in the bold distance.
In “Buried City” the human-earth linkage is both ancient and powerful:
This is how they found us, frozen in mud casts,
our bodies dissolved down to bone and cloth.
No one who saw the imprints would know
we were the ones who named the world. Hallowed
the mountain which formed us, yes, but forgot
the hungry dirt that would someday call us back.
Here and in many of Ghost Child’s 46 poems, the human bond to the land is thoughtfully explored.
Aronson’s skill as a writer shines in her vivid, clear descriptions. In “My Father Robs an Etruscan Grave,” we see the invisible turned tangible:
the breath in my throat rushing out
like bats.
In “Shadow” a delicate gesture is painted in concrete ways:
faintly, tiny hairs rising under her touch
in a reversed domino effect.
In “Dream Dictionary Abecedarian,” plant, animal, human, and water images intermix for great impact:
Weeds
tentacle my legs, fingers of slippery grass slide
under my body where I am stretched out
viewing that pond, which beckons me
with its water arms.
Here, and throughout the collection, Aronson’s graceful language always finds a way to balance beauty with clarity.
Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom is accessible, thoughtful poetry. If you are drawn to reflections on nature, this collection is for you. If you love thinking about our inter-connected world, this collection is for you. Aronson brilliantly highlights the beauty of this world. This collection, like Aronson writes about experiencing nature itself, is “a reason and a reason and a reason for joy.”
Brian Burmeister teaches communication at Iowa State University. He is a regular contributor at Cleaver
Magazine, and his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He can be followed on Twitter: @bdburmeister.
by Rebecca Aronson
by Brian Burmeister
John Keats wrote, “The poetry of earth is never dead.” The recent collection Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom is a testament to that. Poet Rebecca Aronson, whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and the Georgia Review has a superb skill for showing the relationships between persons and their landscapes in this Orison Poetry Prize-winning book. Aronson explores the life-giving, life-taking worlds we find ourselves in, and the life-affirming meaning we build in those worlds with the persons in our lives. Though devoid of an overtly political agenda, Aronson’s poems are deeply environmental—truly spiritual in their reverence. Through each poem’s content and beautiful use of language, Aronson develops the deep connections between nature and humanity in a way few authors could hope to achieve.
From the opening poem—in which a girl sets a field on fire—we see the impacts one can have on our environment are profound. Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom is in a great sense a meditation on nature. Whether in content or metaphorical imagery, Aronson never loses sight of the connectedness of life and landscape. In one poem she directly asks the deep question, “What am I to sand?” She writes of deserts and forests and mountains, of drought and rain and snow, of cats and cows and rabbits, of bats and birds and moths. There is even a gorgeous, profound insect metaphor for human intimacy in the poem “Dinner Party”:
Maybe we are a wing and a wing
these nights, a cricket
sawing a song from its one whole body.
Humanity and earth are as one in poems like “Teacup,” in which Aronson writes:
She is a tiny landscape,
the tremendous peak of her hair,
her Matterhorn, rising in the bold distance.
In “Buried City” the human-earth linkage is both ancient and powerful:
This is how they found us, frozen in mud casts,
our bodies dissolved down to bone and cloth.
No one who saw the imprints would know
we were the ones who named the world. Hallowed
the mountain which formed us, yes, but forgot
the hungry dirt that would someday call us back.
Here and in many of Ghost Child’s 46 poems, the human bond to the land is thoughtfully explored.
Aronson’s skill as a writer shines in her vivid, clear descriptions. In “My Father Robs an Etruscan Grave,” we see the invisible turned tangible:
the breath in my throat rushing out
like bats.
In “Shadow” a delicate gesture is painted in concrete ways:
faintly, tiny hairs rising under her touch
in a reversed domino effect.
In “Dream Dictionary Abecedarian,” plant, animal, human, and water images intermix for great impact:
Weeds
tentacle my legs, fingers of slippery grass slide
under my body where I am stretched out
viewing that pond, which beckons me
with its water arms.
Here, and throughout the collection, Aronson’s graceful language always finds a way to balance beauty with clarity.
Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom is accessible, thoughtful poetry. If you are drawn to reflections on nature, this collection is for you. If you love thinking about our inter-connected world, this collection is for you. Aronson brilliantly highlights the beauty of this world. This collection, like Aronson writes about experiencing nature itself, is “a reason and a reason and a reason for joy.”
Brian Burmeister teaches communication at Iowa State University. He is a regular contributor at Cleaver
Magazine, and his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He can be followed on Twitter: @bdburmeister.
February 2018
Falling Landscape
by Silvia Curbelo
Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, Florida
ISBN-978-1-934695-42-5
by: Francine Witte
All too often, the title of a poetry collection can seem somewhat arbitrary. Perhaps the poet chose the title for no other reason than it sounded catchy. Trouble is that the title might not capture the essence of what she/he wants us to walk away with once the book is put down.
Such is not the case in Silvia Curbelo’s fourth collection of poetry, Falling Landscape. The title here is truly a guide to the reader, a reflection of the poems. In the end notes, Curbelo gives credit to the painter, William Pachner, whose painting of the same name, Curbelo says, had a great influence on many of the poems here.
One thinks of a landscape as solid, fixed. How then can it fall? Earthquake, maybe. But how else? And, of course, in a collection of poems, we venture into the metaphorical. What emotional factors go into shaking the foundation of who we think we are? Curbelo asks and re-asks this question. And she does so quite successfully.
The poems themselves are written with the kind of straightforward elegance that remind me of William Stafford. No nonsense, no overwriting, just words and lines that vibrate from within. In “Hurricane Watch,” a prose poem, she shows us a landscape being chipped at:
Sometimes in the night a hole had opened up in the air of the
room. It made a small wound at the center, but painless, a
palpable lack. She thought it might be a kind of window, or
a door, but she wasn’t certain. What wasn’t there beckoned
to what was left. Absence became a kind of weather to her.
Wind darker than the road. The slowness of the hours was
a mirror in which she saw herself. The clocks kept going.
Tap water sitting around in an old glass. Somewhere miles
away, thick clouds gathered and stalled. Trees moved the
notion around like something broken. She thought she could
make a story fall from the pieces. Something with windmills and
numbers. Boredom. Rain.
Here, she shows the power of absence to destroy what seems solid.
Another, very pleasing aspect of Curbelo’s writing is her ability to examine, the smallest moment through a jeweler-like lens. She turns a moment over and over to catch its exquisite detail. This is beautifully demonstrated in “Something Whispered Your Name”
In the first flare of sun along the water
In the uppermost leaves of the dogwood.
In the dirt road and the chainlink.
In the theater of the rain
and the lake’s shattered surface.
In the thin light of the history books.
In the bowl of dark fruit.
In bread, in salt, in memory.
In a dream’s borrowed weather
in the tender lies of morning
like a glass slipper
at the bottom of the well.
And once, with warning, the smallest
breeze on the back of my hands
passing through.
Curbelo’s thread of breath, of breezes, of whispers is repeated throughout the collection. In “Snow is Falling On Our Good Intentions,” we feel the wind again:
Someone has left the window open
and a cold wind parts the
quiet air as delicately as hands
lifting a veil, turning
the darkness over, a few late
stars still left in the sky.
In some rooms the mirror
never sleeps. Snowflakes
live behind glass for days,
holding themselves up
through any weather.
On nights like these any prayer
is an island. The way it keeps
everything hopeful and
surrounded. The voice
blooms at the corners
of the mouth and begins
its version of an answer, faith
tugging at the seams of
the familiar, bold as any
flower, not braver than this
kiss.
As in the previous poem, Curbelo’s technique is almost cinematic in how she sets a scene, with all of its particular elegance, only to zoom in to a tiny moment at the very end. I found this to be a very satisfying structure.
The title poem “Falling Landscape” has the question of the book, “What sound shattered/the brick and mortar of that moment?” For Curbelo, it seems that the world, both the physical and the emotional world of the soul only seem intact and are not destroyed after all, by the catastrophic events, but rather worn down by a whisper, a touch, a breath.
This book is filled with quiet wisdom and sure observation. I found myself quickly drawn to each poem, both in its easy form and language, not at all pretentious or off-putting, only to be stunned again and again by the power of a line.
And the landscape falls again and again. Everything sturdy until it’s not, as in “Remembering the World As Children Once,” she says,
Now you see him, now
you see him less clearly,
Coins of light filter down
through the trees.
by Silvia Curbelo
Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, Florida
ISBN-978-1-934695-42-5
by: Francine Witte
All too often, the title of a poetry collection can seem somewhat arbitrary. Perhaps the poet chose the title for no other reason than it sounded catchy. Trouble is that the title might not capture the essence of what she/he wants us to walk away with once the book is put down.
Such is not the case in Silvia Curbelo’s fourth collection of poetry, Falling Landscape. The title here is truly a guide to the reader, a reflection of the poems. In the end notes, Curbelo gives credit to the painter, William Pachner, whose painting of the same name, Curbelo says, had a great influence on many of the poems here.
One thinks of a landscape as solid, fixed. How then can it fall? Earthquake, maybe. But how else? And, of course, in a collection of poems, we venture into the metaphorical. What emotional factors go into shaking the foundation of who we think we are? Curbelo asks and re-asks this question. And she does so quite successfully.
The poems themselves are written with the kind of straightforward elegance that remind me of William Stafford. No nonsense, no overwriting, just words and lines that vibrate from within. In “Hurricane Watch,” a prose poem, she shows us a landscape being chipped at:
Sometimes in the night a hole had opened up in the air of the
room. It made a small wound at the center, but painless, a
palpable lack. She thought it might be a kind of window, or
a door, but she wasn’t certain. What wasn’t there beckoned
to what was left. Absence became a kind of weather to her.
Wind darker than the road. The slowness of the hours was
a mirror in which she saw herself. The clocks kept going.
Tap water sitting around in an old glass. Somewhere miles
away, thick clouds gathered and stalled. Trees moved the
notion around like something broken. She thought she could
make a story fall from the pieces. Something with windmills and
numbers. Boredom. Rain.
Here, she shows the power of absence to destroy what seems solid.
Another, very pleasing aspect of Curbelo’s writing is her ability to examine, the smallest moment through a jeweler-like lens. She turns a moment over and over to catch its exquisite detail. This is beautifully demonstrated in “Something Whispered Your Name”
In the first flare of sun along the water
In the uppermost leaves of the dogwood.
In the dirt road and the chainlink.
In the theater of the rain
and the lake’s shattered surface.
In the thin light of the history books.
In the bowl of dark fruit.
In bread, in salt, in memory.
In a dream’s borrowed weather
in the tender lies of morning
like a glass slipper
at the bottom of the well.
And once, with warning, the smallest
breeze on the back of my hands
passing through.
Curbelo’s thread of breath, of breezes, of whispers is repeated throughout the collection. In “Snow is Falling On Our Good Intentions,” we feel the wind again:
Someone has left the window open
and a cold wind parts the
quiet air as delicately as hands
lifting a veil, turning
the darkness over, a few late
stars still left in the sky.
In some rooms the mirror
never sleeps. Snowflakes
live behind glass for days,
holding themselves up
through any weather.
On nights like these any prayer
is an island. The way it keeps
everything hopeful and
surrounded. The voice
blooms at the corners
of the mouth and begins
its version of an answer, faith
tugging at the seams of
the familiar, bold as any
flower, not braver than this
kiss.
As in the previous poem, Curbelo’s technique is almost cinematic in how she sets a scene, with all of its particular elegance, only to zoom in to a tiny moment at the very end. I found this to be a very satisfying structure.
The title poem “Falling Landscape” has the question of the book, “What sound shattered/the brick and mortar of that moment?” For Curbelo, it seems that the world, both the physical and the emotional world of the soul only seem intact and are not destroyed after all, by the catastrophic events, but rather worn down by a whisper, a touch, a breath.
This book is filled with quiet wisdom and sure observation. I found myself quickly drawn to each poem, both in its easy form and language, not at all pretentious or off-putting, only to be stunned again and again by the power of a line.
And the landscape falls again and again. Everything sturdy until it’s not, as in “Remembering the World As Children Once,” she says,
Now you see him, now
you see him less clearly,
Coins of light filter down
through the trees.
February 2018 Guest Reviews
SCRIBBLED IN THE DARK
by Charles Simic
by Alec Solomita
The title is literal. In a recent interview with the online journal Literary Hub, the brilliant, prolific poet Charles Simic said, “I scribble in little notebooks or on pieces of paper … words, images, lines of poetry wherever I happened [sic] to be. At night … I do so in the dark.” But it’s metaphorical as well, referring to the ubiquitous darkness in Simic’s work. Almost every one of his hundreds of poems, it seems, throws a black shadow, however narrow, of the writer’s young boyhood in Belgrade during World War II, starting with Germany’s “Operation Retribution” in 1941, a blanket bombing of the city, and ending in 1944 with a series of devastating Allied aerial attacks. Several times, Simic’s family had to scurry from their home through this long nightmare. But anyone familiar with his work knows that, while it is often as dark as war where only “the knife lights the way,” his brief, savage poems are repeatedly illuminated by blades of light — bursts of astonishing metaphor, dazzling humor, and a survivor’s delight in the natural world. Charles Simic’s poems are fun to read. Norman Mailer wrote of one of his characters, “He had the kind of merriment a man sometimes knows when events have ended in utter disaster.” For Simic, that’s how events began.
At 16 he moved to Chicago with his family, “I came here in my youth,/A wind toy on a string,” he writes in “Seeing Things,” the second poem in this latest collection, a somewhat atypical piece because of its ballad-like repetition, although his images are characteristically vivid and original.
Saw a street in hell and one in paradise.
Saw a room with a light in it so ailing
It could’ve been leaning on a cane.
Saw an old man in a tailor shop
Kneel before a bride with pins between his lips.
Saw the President swear on the Bible
while snow fell around him.
It continues, ending with the lines
Saw a homeless woman berating God
And a blind man with a guitar singing:
“Oh Lord remember me,
When these chains are broken set my body free.”
“Seeing Things” is a fitting introduction, a lyrical description of the journey of a life displaced in America — madness, marriage, JFK’s inauguration — ending with a refrain from Ruthie Foster’s haunting gospel song. It shows off Simic’s expansiveness, imagination, and mastery of the American voice.
The other poems in this slim volume are shorter, sharper, and more surprising, more Simic-like. Although a humorous morbidity is characteristic of even his earliest work, his last two books, The Lunatic and Scribbled in the Dark, are more explicitly about death and loss, and infused with a sort of pacific despair. At nearly 80, Simic’s concerns have become more focused and rife with black humor in a world where there are few if any existential comforts. Except, perhaps, poetry:
ILLEGIBLE SCRIBBLE
These rags the spirit borrows
To clothe itself
Against the chill of mortality.
O barbed wire of crossed-out words,
Crown of thorns,
…
My footholds in the abyss.
The first and last of the four sections of Scribbled in the Dark are mostly about the swift, iterating passing of time and the end not just of one or several human lives but of the whole human experiment. Simic’s prose pieces, often seen in the New York Review of Books, reveal a thoughtful, angry man full of disgust for gluttony, corporate greed, and Republicans, all the bogey men of the liberal intellectual. His poetry, less direct yet more tactile, is also more effective.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
. . . the sight
Of a boarded up public library,
The rows of books beyond its windows
Unopened for years,
The sickly old dog on its steps,
And a man slumped next to him,
His mouth working mutely
Like an actor unable to recall his lines
At the end of some tragic farce.
But he still has his sadistic fun. His ruminative lists like “That Elusive Something,” and “Uninvited Guest” are witty, playful, and scary. A series of “uninvited guests” includes in a familiar tonal sequence “Dark thought on a sunny day/Languid miss in distress/Everyone’s blind date/ … A crow flying round my head/ … Hell’s night nurse/Bending over a cradle.”
Simic’s poems beat with internal rhymes and subtle, beautiful rhythms, which can go unnoticed because of their cunning content. Here is how “The Week” begins:
Monday comes around with a new tattoo
It won’t show us and here’s Tuesday
Walking its latest nightmare on a leash
And Wednesday blind as the rain tapping
On a windowpane and Thursday sipping
Bad coffee served by a pretty waitress …
Just lovely, his quiet sibilance and feminine endings.
It’s not only abstractions like the days of the week that Simic brings to stirring life. His embracing of those species who don’t drop bombs and starve the poor is more than just personification or apostrophe; it’s identification. Simic’s empathy is uncannily deep and wide — it includes cockroaches, flies, and the cricket on his pillow.
His emaciated head and legs
Speak of long fasts, frantic prayers,
Dark nights of the soul,
And other unknown torments,
Before he found refuge in our home
From that madman out there
Who threw over his bed
A heavy blanket of snow.
Simic’s world is numinous. His earliest published poems about knives, spoons, and forks (“This strange thing must have crept/Right out of hell./It resembles a bird’s foot/Worn around the cannibal’s neck.”) revealed not only an Eastern European delight in antic menace but also a real connection to a living, writhing world of things – animate and not. The second section of Scribbled in the Dark is a kind of tour of a strangely animate America, starting with moments like this one — at home with a “Winter Fly,” “You ought to live in a palace like a king/And not shiver on my kitchen wall.” Then transporting the reader over a trembling landscape. In “Bare Trees,” we watch a wood reflected in a pond, “The bare branches moving in it,/Are like the fingers of the blind/Reaching to touch the face of someone/Who’d been calling out to them/.” We also pay a call to Simic’s roadhouses, a farm or two, a white cat, a stray hen.
The following section contains surprisingly gentle pieces, several about sex, courtship, and marriage. Yet even affectionate poems like “My Goddess” slant sideways with sly details:
Dearest, it’s true you deserve
Far better than this rotgut
I found under the kitchen sink.
Still go ahead and take a swig,
In “The Lucky Couple,” a man and a woman sit on a bench, “With eyes closed and sunlight on their faces,/Listening to children in the playground.” But the idyll ends with, lest we forget, an image of those familiar other couples:
The people hurrying by must think
How lucky these two must be without
A care in the world, unlike that bunch
Looking pissed as they exit the courthouse.
Whatever the mood of Simic’s poems, one finds throughout the kind of shift that makes the reader’s stomach drop. “This street calm as a sharpshooter/Taking his aim in the bright sunlight,” “… Saturday flashing/ Like a pinball machine in the morgue,” “The watermelons … /Falling out of a truck and breaking/ Into bloody chunks on the highway,” “When the evening silence that lingered /Under a tree listening to a bird,/ Strolls over to the village church/And then waits on its stone steps/.”
Simic’s sensibility throughout is as strange and thrilling as his phrasing. He writes like a man
Stepping out after a long illness
Who can’t help but see the world with his heart
And hopes not to forget what he saw.
by Charles Simic
by Alec Solomita
The title is literal. In a recent interview with the online journal Literary Hub, the brilliant, prolific poet Charles Simic said, “I scribble in little notebooks or on pieces of paper … words, images, lines of poetry wherever I happened [sic] to be. At night … I do so in the dark.” But it’s metaphorical as well, referring to the ubiquitous darkness in Simic’s work. Almost every one of his hundreds of poems, it seems, throws a black shadow, however narrow, of the writer’s young boyhood in Belgrade during World War II, starting with Germany’s “Operation Retribution” in 1941, a blanket bombing of the city, and ending in 1944 with a series of devastating Allied aerial attacks. Several times, Simic’s family had to scurry from their home through this long nightmare. But anyone familiar with his work knows that, while it is often as dark as war where only “the knife lights the way,” his brief, savage poems are repeatedly illuminated by blades of light — bursts of astonishing metaphor, dazzling humor, and a survivor’s delight in the natural world. Charles Simic’s poems are fun to read. Norman Mailer wrote of one of his characters, “He had the kind of merriment a man sometimes knows when events have ended in utter disaster.” For Simic, that’s how events began.
At 16 he moved to Chicago with his family, “I came here in my youth,/A wind toy on a string,” he writes in “Seeing Things,” the second poem in this latest collection, a somewhat atypical piece because of its ballad-like repetition, although his images are characteristically vivid and original.
Saw a street in hell and one in paradise.
Saw a room with a light in it so ailing
It could’ve been leaning on a cane.
Saw an old man in a tailor shop
Kneel before a bride with pins between his lips.
Saw the President swear on the Bible
while snow fell around him.
It continues, ending with the lines
Saw a homeless woman berating God
And a blind man with a guitar singing:
“Oh Lord remember me,
When these chains are broken set my body free.”
“Seeing Things” is a fitting introduction, a lyrical description of the journey of a life displaced in America — madness, marriage, JFK’s inauguration — ending with a refrain from Ruthie Foster’s haunting gospel song. It shows off Simic’s expansiveness, imagination, and mastery of the American voice.
The other poems in this slim volume are shorter, sharper, and more surprising, more Simic-like. Although a humorous morbidity is characteristic of even his earliest work, his last two books, The Lunatic and Scribbled in the Dark, are more explicitly about death and loss, and infused with a sort of pacific despair. At nearly 80, Simic’s concerns have become more focused and rife with black humor in a world where there are few if any existential comforts. Except, perhaps, poetry:
ILLEGIBLE SCRIBBLE
These rags the spirit borrows
To clothe itself
Against the chill of mortality.
O barbed wire of crossed-out words,
Crown of thorns,
…
My footholds in the abyss.
The first and last of the four sections of Scribbled in the Dark are mostly about the swift, iterating passing of time and the end not just of one or several human lives but of the whole human experiment. Simic’s prose pieces, often seen in the New York Review of Books, reveal a thoughtful, angry man full of disgust for gluttony, corporate greed, and Republicans, all the bogey men of the liberal intellectual. His poetry, less direct yet more tactile, is also more effective.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES
. . . the sight
Of a boarded up public library,
The rows of books beyond its windows
Unopened for years,
The sickly old dog on its steps,
And a man slumped next to him,
His mouth working mutely
Like an actor unable to recall his lines
At the end of some tragic farce.
But he still has his sadistic fun. His ruminative lists like “That Elusive Something,” and “Uninvited Guest” are witty, playful, and scary. A series of “uninvited guests” includes in a familiar tonal sequence “Dark thought on a sunny day/Languid miss in distress/Everyone’s blind date/ … A crow flying round my head/ … Hell’s night nurse/Bending over a cradle.”
Simic’s poems beat with internal rhymes and subtle, beautiful rhythms, which can go unnoticed because of their cunning content. Here is how “The Week” begins:
Monday comes around with a new tattoo
It won’t show us and here’s Tuesday
Walking its latest nightmare on a leash
And Wednesday blind as the rain tapping
On a windowpane and Thursday sipping
Bad coffee served by a pretty waitress …
Just lovely, his quiet sibilance and feminine endings.
It’s not only abstractions like the days of the week that Simic brings to stirring life. His embracing of those species who don’t drop bombs and starve the poor is more than just personification or apostrophe; it’s identification. Simic’s empathy is uncannily deep and wide — it includes cockroaches, flies, and the cricket on his pillow.
His emaciated head and legs
Speak of long fasts, frantic prayers,
Dark nights of the soul,
And other unknown torments,
Before he found refuge in our home
From that madman out there
Who threw over his bed
A heavy blanket of snow.
Simic’s world is numinous. His earliest published poems about knives, spoons, and forks (“This strange thing must have crept/Right out of hell./It resembles a bird’s foot/Worn around the cannibal’s neck.”) revealed not only an Eastern European delight in antic menace but also a real connection to a living, writhing world of things – animate and not. The second section of Scribbled in the Dark is a kind of tour of a strangely animate America, starting with moments like this one — at home with a “Winter Fly,” “You ought to live in a palace like a king/And not shiver on my kitchen wall.” Then transporting the reader over a trembling landscape. In “Bare Trees,” we watch a wood reflected in a pond, “The bare branches moving in it,/Are like the fingers of the blind/Reaching to touch the face of someone/Who’d been calling out to them/.” We also pay a call to Simic’s roadhouses, a farm or two, a white cat, a stray hen.
The following section contains surprisingly gentle pieces, several about sex, courtship, and marriage. Yet even affectionate poems like “My Goddess” slant sideways with sly details:
Dearest, it’s true you deserve
Far better than this rotgut
I found under the kitchen sink.
Still go ahead and take a swig,
In “The Lucky Couple,” a man and a woman sit on a bench, “With eyes closed and sunlight on their faces,/Listening to children in the playground.” But the idyll ends with, lest we forget, an image of those familiar other couples:
The people hurrying by must think
How lucky these two must be without
A care in the world, unlike that bunch
Looking pissed as they exit the courthouse.
Whatever the mood of Simic’s poems, one finds throughout the kind of shift that makes the reader’s stomach drop. “This street calm as a sharpshooter/Taking his aim in the bright sunlight,” “… Saturday flashing/ Like a pinball machine in the morgue,” “The watermelons … /Falling out of a truck and breaking/ Into bloody chunks on the highway,” “When the evening silence that lingered /Under a tree listening to a bird,/ Strolls over to the village church/And then waits on its stone steps/.”
Simic’s sensibility throughout is as strange and thrilling as his phrasing. He writes like a man
Stepping out after a long illness
Who can’t help but see the world with his heart
And hopes not to forget what he saw.
November 2017
The Analyst
by Molly Peacock
by: Alec Solomita
Anyone who has spent what poet Molly Peacock calls a “harrowed hour” or more with a therapist has some idea of the complexity and strangeness of this relationship. And, although several fine writers have made a stab at exploring the dynamics of the personal dyad, more often than not they find it singularly resistant to scrutiny. In The Analyst, her latest book of poetry, Molly Peacock overcomes this resistance with more ease and grace than any writer since Philip Roth gave us the longest psychiatric session in literary history in Portnoy’s Complaint.
In its four parts, The Analyst explores a decades-long relationship between the narrator and her therapist, 37 years of it in actual therapy and then the friendship during “the rest of life” after the therapist suffers a severe stroke. But the book offers more than a portrait of a fraught, beautiful, and necessary series of meetings in a 21st floor office and the similarly fraught and beautifully rendered reversal of roles that follows the stroke. Peacock goes on to give us glimpses into the patient’s early life that are vivid and often terrifying, and retrospectively make it clear why she took that elevator for years and how lucky she was that it was this particular woman waiting for her at the last stop.
Already acclaimed for her various use of rhyme and rhythm as well as her ingeniously indirect structural building blocks, Peacock outdoes herself here. In the very first poem, “Gusto,” she performs structural and rhyming magic. Unlike any first session with a therapist, we are blessed with an immediate intimacy on the page. The verses are simple yet artful—the narrator is making a difficult meal with great care when a memory floats in of a restaurant dinner with her therapist and a moment later she recalls when the 77 year old woman “slumped in your watercolor class.” The affection between the two women reveals itself quickly and subtly. Peacock’s vehicle here is the intensity with which the narrator attends to her cooking. The same verses display Peacock’s uncommonly daring use of rhyme, in this case (what most workshops will tell you never to do) exact rhyme.
… Slice the baby potatoes, skins on,
turn to the smooth black surface on
the stove where two steamers—enamel--
swim like red fish painted on enamel
and prepare with attention, like you,
my intimate witness, like you …
Spoon the mustard and parsley sauce
on the perfectly steamed potatoes …
watching over them, keeping on my toes--
as you watched over me.
Despite the bold, seemingly aggressive rhyming, there is no sing-song quality here. The repetition sounds more like real conversation, as well as the way one might idly muse over the past while performing an everyday task.
Although they are deftly meshed together, there are clearly two different bonds between the narrator and analyst in this book of poetry— pre- and post-stroke. One of the profound pleasures of this mostly true story is the opportunity the patient gets to “pay back” the riches she acquired from a brilliant, tough, and kind therapist. Although, like the work of an analyst, the work of a caregiver can also be arduous.
Peacock offers some of the details of the 37 years of psychological work in poems that are framed like thank-you notes. The longish, cunningly shaped “The Pottery Jar” starts off like this:
Thank you for asking me not to smoke,
thank you for the extra ten minutes no charge.
…
Thank you for your chic haircut--
every therapist should have one.
…
Thank you for your posture, bolt upright,
when I was so mad I declared I could break
the antique pottery jar on your shelf.
Her movement from these charming details to the dark past is adroit and disturbing:
Thank you for not believing me when I said I was suicidal
(my dad had died and evaporated into smoke
—that rageful man, yes, slowly I admitted I had
half his genes—bomb-vaporous beneath
the heavy gray apartment door).
And, through a series of alternating raking and mellifluous lines, the poem brings to light brutish boyfriends, an abortion, the loss of a sister, and healing.
Thank you for your poise and ease.
Thank you for simply standing
as I learned how to stand on the sand.
And in “Mount Anger,” a single therapy session is described in vivid, resourceful language:
It began as liquid
a mountain rush of fear
the breakage of hidden springs
into grief-tears then tiers
of earthwater gushing
but the flow thickened
—snotty bloody clotty
as the tissues heaped
industrial pyramids of
used Kleenex
After her stroke, the analyst eventually returns to her first love, drawing, which she’d given up years before. Peacock makes good use of the simple word:
So draw,
as I was drawn to you
as you drew me to you,
till I could walk away
as you now draw away.
But then, with the therapy in the past, our narrator walks back. As the analyst partially recovers, her former patient takes her to museums, visits her for tea, and, to the extent possible, converses with her. She befriends her.
Peacock’s observations of the symptoms of stroke victims are unusually acute. Her description of the conversation of the aphasiac is spot on, chilling, and somehow reassuring. In “Speaking of Painting and Bird Watching,” she writes
We skirt around the blast hole in your memory:
your stroke and aphasia left a singed edge.
As we talk around that burnt gorge—you can recall
a thing or two about the distant past.
And in “George Herbert’s Glasse of Blessings”:
In jet lagged unrest I played the messages:
Your voice! With all the colors of its emotions
from cerulean to cerise. …
but your words were garbled and weak. Slow.
Yet your message hemorrhaged its color into air
I heard your voice as in a painting: CANT. BE. YOUR. PHYSCHO-
THERAPIST. ANYMORE. …
The last part was clear: CALL WHEN YOU GET HOME!
Then date and time in stately monotone.
There is so much more in The Analyst that one review cannot capture. The poem “The Canning Jar” is a short story in verse reminiscent of Kunitz, Hollander, and Hayden; a series of poems cleverly describes the world of a child through school assignments; French lessons show a thousand ways to say merci. All excellent. But the spine of this remarkable book is the love between these two women.
“But it was paid love, wasn’t it?”
Where else in life is the necessity for payment so clear?
You could call it making a living,
though now that it’s over,
perhaps it’s the pure unpaid love you mean.
by Molly Peacock
by: Alec Solomita
Anyone who has spent what poet Molly Peacock calls a “harrowed hour” or more with a therapist has some idea of the complexity and strangeness of this relationship. And, although several fine writers have made a stab at exploring the dynamics of the personal dyad, more often than not they find it singularly resistant to scrutiny. In The Analyst, her latest book of poetry, Molly Peacock overcomes this resistance with more ease and grace than any writer since Philip Roth gave us the longest psychiatric session in literary history in Portnoy’s Complaint.
In its four parts, The Analyst explores a decades-long relationship between the narrator and her therapist, 37 years of it in actual therapy and then the friendship during “the rest of life” after the therapist suffers a severe stroke. But the book offers more than a portrait of a fraught, beautiful, and necessary series of meetings in a 21st floor office and the similarly fraught and beautifully rendered reversal of roles that follows the stroke. Peacock goes on to give us glimpses into the patient’s early life that are vivid and often terrifying, and retrospectively make it clear why she took that elevator for years and how lucky she was that it was this particular woman waiting for her at the last stop.
Already acclaimed for her various use of rhyme and rhythm as well as her ingeniously indirect structural building blocks, Peacock outdoes herself here. In the very first poem, “Gusto,” she performs structural and rhyming magic. Unlike any first session with a therapist, we are blessed with an immediate intimacy on the page. The verses are simple yet artful—the narrator is making a difficult meal with great care when a memory floats in of a restaurant dinner with her therapist and a moment later she recalls when the 77 year old woman “slumped in your watercolor class.” The affection between the two women reveals itself quickly and subtly. Peacock’s vehicle here is the intensity with which the narrator attends to her cooking. The same verses display Peacock’s uncommonly daring use of rhyme, in this case (what most workshops will tell you never to do) exact rhyme.
… Slice the baby potatoes, skins on,
turn to the smooth black surface on
the stove where two steamers—enamel--
swim like red fish painted on enamel
and prepare with attention, like you,
my intimate witness, like you …
Spoon the mustard and parsley sauce
on the perfectly steamed potatoes …
watching over them, keeping on my toes--
as you watched over me.
Despite the bold, seemingly aggressive rhyming, there is no sing-song quality here. The repetition sounds more like real conversation, as well as the way one might idly muse over the past while performing an everyday task.
Although they are deftly meshed together, there are clearly two different bonds between the narrator and analyst in this book of poetry— pre- and post-stroke. One of the profound pleasures of this mostly true story is the opportunity the patient gets to “pay back” the riches she acquired from a brilliant, tough, and kind therapist. Although, like the work of an analyst, the work of a caregiver can also be arduous.
Peacock offers some of the details of the 37 years of psychological work in poems that are framed like thank-you notes. The longish, cunningly shaped “The Pottery Jar” starts off like this:
Thank you for asking me not to smoke,
thank you for the extra ten minutes no charge.
…
Thank you for your chic haircut--
every therapist should have one.
…
Thank you for your posture, bolt upright,
when I was so mad I declared I could break
the antique pottery jar on your shelf.
Her movement from these charming details to the dark past is adroit and disturbing:
Thank you for not believing me when I said I was suicidal
(my dad had died and evaporated into smoke
—that rageful man, yes, slowly I admitted I had
half his genes—bomb-vaporous beneath
the heavy gray apartment door).
And, through a series of alternating raking and mellifluous lines, the poem brings to light brutish boyfriends, an abortion, the loss of a sister, and healing.
Thank you for your poise and ease.
Thank you for simply standing
as I learned how to stand on the sand.
And in “Mount Anger,” a single therapy session is described in vivid, resourceful language:
It began as liquid
a mountain rush of fear
the breakage of hidden springs
into grief-tears then tiers
of earthwater gushing
but the flow thickened
—snotty bloody clotty
as the tissues heaped
industrial pyramids of
used Kleenex
After her stroke, the analyst eventually returns to her first love, drawing, which she’d given up years before. Peacock makes good use of the simple word:
So draw,
as I was drawn to you
as you drew me to you,
till I could walk away
as you now draw away.
But then, with the therapy in the past, our narrator walks back. As the analyst partially recovers, her former patient takes her to museums, visits her for tea, and, to the extent possible, converses with her. She befriends her.
Peacock’s observations of the symptoms of stroke victims are unusually acute. Her description of the conversation of the aphasiac is spot on, chilling, and somehow reassuring. In “Speaking of Painting and Bird Watching,” she writes
We skirt around the blast hole in your memory:
your stroke and aphasia left a singed edge.
As we talk around that burnt gorge—you can recall
a thing or two about the distant past.
And in “George Herbert’s Glasse of Blessings”:
In jet lagged unrest I played the messages:
Your voice! With all the colors of its emotions
from cerulean to cerise. …
but your words were garbled and weak. Slow.
Yet your message hemorrhaged its color into air
I heard your voice as in a painting: CANT. BE. YOUR. PHYSCHO-
THERAPIST. ANYMORE. …
The last part was clear: CALL WHEN YOU GET HOME!
Then date and time in stately monotone.
There is so much more in The Analyst that one review cannot capture. The poem “The Canning Jar” is a short story in verse reminiscent of Kunitz, Hollander, and Hayden; a series of poems cleverly describes the world of a child through school assignments; French lessons show a thousand ways to say merci. All excellent. But the spine of this remarkable book is the love between these two women.
“But it was paid love, wasn’t it?”
Where else in life is the necessity for payment so clear?
You could call it making a living,
though now that it’s over,
perhaps it’s the pure unpaid love you mean.
Small Worlds Floating
by M.J. Iuppa
Cherry Grove Collections, Cincinnati, Ohio
ISBN: 9781625491916
by: Francine Witte
M. J. Iuppa’s third full-length poetry collection, Small Worlds Floating, is an inviting read. The poems are arranged in couplets or other short stanzas, and are told in unpretentious, everyday words. But for all of this, each poem is packed with moments that explode out of the boundaries of its shape and language. These poems are a celebration of the small, exquisite moment.
Each poem seems to scream, stop what you are doing and pay attention. In “Traveling through Flesh,” which begins with a reference to the painting by Eric Fischl that inspired it, “Frailty is a Moment of Self-reflection.” Iuppa, asks you to observe a father walking down a hallway:
Morning’s light glows in the corridor where
your father walks the carpet’s worn threads.
You watch his hesitating steps; his right arm
out-stretched, balancing on his body’s shadow –
his ordinary mouth pursed in the words
he never said out loud. Even now
he doesn’t want your help. He’s determined
to be a man of certainty. Yet you can see
through his transparent skin something
indescribable:
Your furious father, you kind father,
your father who vanished before your eyes.
We are given everything we need to know about this father in tidy couplets, with the father’s life seemingly summed up in the final stanza.
In all of the poems in this book, Iuppa freezes moments with words that act like strokes of a paintbrush. In “Portrait of Lighthouse with Irises” we see what the poet sees:
Against a sapphire sky,
this whitewashed lighthouse,
constant solemn face, searches
the wide sea for any breach--
whale or ship, rising up
in the swell of tide…
Noise of buoy bells,
a rusty gate’s hinge,
gulls’ wheedling cry--
morning and night spent
leaning forward – open-eyed
indigo irises grow brighter
than torches set to burn –
no one can say how long
eternal will keep.
We have this beautifully well-crafted moment full of precise imagery that appeals to the senses. But Iuppa doesn’t settle for mere description. She infuses the poem the lighthouse suddenly becoming a face that is searching the ocean and performing the function of the lighthouse. A startling moment inside the bigger moment.
Poem after poem is filled with this technique, this perfect setting up, through sensory detail, into a deeper emotional resonance. In “Yellow Rice” the poem opens with us watching rice boil.
One cup of yellow rice spilled
into a glass pot full of cold
water - everything settled –
The gas stove’s blue
flame sputtered – the lid
fitted securely, and I looked
away, and back
again, though
the pot’s vision,
air’s beaded lines bubbling
up – here, then there – then
more lines, and more,
until there’s a cloud
of steam, roiling
to a boil – I could barely
see yellow plumping
up in a surge of saffron
so familiar and lonesome.
So far, we have this very studied moment of the rice, the flames, the air around it, then wham…
As a child I was left alone –
I didn’t question the empty
spaces at the kitchen table.
Those empty spaces
still here, and there.
Thin lines of breath.
She has deftly connected us back to the air around the pot.
The glass pot uncovered,
Steamy yellow rice,
scooped up into a blue bowl –
Eaten quickly
on a rainy evening –
another new year.
There is so much that is unspoken here, just under the surface. We feel the loneliness, the resignation to the loneliness as it is brought up in the act of cooking, then tamped back down into the everyday. This might be a motion that is recreated by each of us countless times in our own daily lives, and we recognize this very easily.
In the poem, “Evidence,” the beauty of a park is described:
Dwindling winter afternoon, walking
in the park where anapestic beeches
line the path to the lake’s shore,
sunlight radiates within clumps
of red osier and feathery
pampas grass.
The details here are very sharp, but now we move in closer,
The stillness contradicts hours
of last night’s wind sweeping
the littered beach, clean.
Gulls weep and circle as we
look at this lonely
expanse, at love’s initials
gouged into the beeches’
silvery back and wonder
what s cursed here…
and closer…
Standing on sand, we
have separate thoughts.
The temperature,
strangely mild.
I turn away from you
to find a loon’s father,
black with two small windows
of white on its tip.
and finally…
A prediction.
I hold onto it
and don’t say a word.
This collection is one you can sit back with and enjoy the combination of craft and emotion. Engaging and unassuming in its presentation, with its easy form and accessible language, it will welcome you into its world. But for all of that ease, every line is exquisitely crafted, and every poem pays off with an emotional connection that is organically rendered and enormously satisfying, and certainly ones you will not soon forget.
by M.J. Iuppa
Cherry Grove Collections, Cincinnati, Ohio
ISBN: 9781625491916
by: Francine Witte
M. J. Iuppa’s third full-length poetry collection, Small Worlds Floating, is an inviting read. The poems are arranged in couplets or other short stanzas, and are told in unpretentious, everyday words. But for all of this, each poem is packed with moments that explode out of the boundaries of its shape and language. These poems are a celebration of the small, exquisite moment.
Each poem seems to scream, stop what you are doing and pay attention. In “Traveling through Flesh,” which begins with a reference to the painting by Eric Fischl that inspired it, “Frailty is a Moment of Self-reflection.” Iuppa, asks you to observe a father walking down a hallway:
Morning’s light glows in the corridor where
your father walks the carpet’s worn threads.
You watch his hesitating steps; his right arm
out-stretched, balancing on his body’s shadow –
his ordinary mouth pursed in the words
he never said out loud. Even now
he doesn’t want your help. He’s determined
to be a man of certainty. Yet you can see
through his transparent skin something
indescribable:
Your furious father, you kind father,
your father who vanished before your eyes.
We are given everything we need to know about this father in tidy couplets, with the father’s life seemingly summed up in the final stanza.
In all of the poems in this book, Iuppa freezes moments with words that act like strokes of a paintbrush. In “Portrait of Lighthouse with Irises” we see what the poet sees:
Against a sapphire sky,
this whitewashed lighthouse,
constant solemn face, searches
the wide sea for any breach--
whale or ship, rising up
in the swell of tide…
Noise of buoy bells,
a rusty gate’s hinge,
gulls’ wheedling cry--
morning and night spent
leaning forward – open-eyed
indigo irises grow brighter
than torches set to burn –
no one can say how long
eternal will keep.
We have this beautifully well-crafted moment full of precise imagery that appeals to the senses. But Iuppa doesn’t settle for mere description. She infuses the poem the lighthouse suddenly becoming a face that is searching the ocean and performing the function of the lighthouse. A startling moment inside the bigger moment.
Poem after poem is filled with this technique, this perfect setting up, through sensory detail, into a deeper emotional resonance. In “Yellow Rice” the poem opens with us watching rice boil.
One cup of yellow rice spilled
into a glass pot full of cold
water - everything settled –
The gas stove’s blue
flame sputtered – the lid
fitted securely, and I looked
away, and back
again, though
the pot’s vision,
air’s beaded lines bubbling
up – here, then there – then
more lines, and more,
until there’s a cloud
of steam, roiling
to a boil – I could barely
see yellow plumping
up in a surge of saffron
so familiar and lonesome.
So far, we have this very studied moment of the rice, the flames, the air around it, then wham…
As a child I was left alone –
I didn’t question the empty
spaces at the kitchen table.
Those empty spaces
still here, and there.
Thin lines of breath.
She has deftly connected us back to the air around the pot.
The glass pot uncovered,
Steamy yellow rice,
scooped up into a blue bowl –
Eaten quickly
on a rainy evening –
another new year.
There is so much that is unspoken here, just under the surface. We feel the loneliness, the resignation to the loneliness as it is brought up in the act of cooking, then tamped back down into the everyday. This might be a motion that is recreated by each of us countless times in our own daily lives, and we recognize this very easily.
In the poem, “Evidence,” the beauty of a park is described:
Dwindling winter afternoon, walking
in the park where anapestic beeches
line the path to the lake’s shore,
sunlight radiates within clumps
of red osier and feathery
pampas grass.
The details here are very sharp, but now we move in closer,
The stillness contradicts hours
of last night’s wind sweeping
the littered beach, clean.
Gulls weep and circle as we
look at this lonely
expanse, at love’s initials
gouged into the beeches’
silvery back and wonder
what s cursed here…
and closer…
Standing on sand, we
have separate thoughts.
The temperature,
strangely mild.
I turn away from you
to find a loon’s father,
black with two small windows
of white on its tip.
and finally…
A prediction.
I hold onto it
and don’t say a word.
This collection is one you can sit back with and enjoy the combination of craft and emotion. Engaging and unassuming in its presentation, with its easy form and accessible language, it will welcome you into its world. But for all of that ease, every line is exquisitely crafted, and every poem pays off with an emotional connection that is organically rendered and enormously satisfying, and certainly ones you will not soon forget.
August 2017
RESURRECTION OF A SUNFLOWER
AN ANTHOLOGY EDITED
By Catfish McDaris
and Marc Pietrzykowski, Editors
PSKI'S PORCH PUBLISHING, LOCKPORT, NY ISBN-13:978-0998847603
By: Francine Witte
One knows what to expect when visiting the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands -- sunflowers, starry nights, the Van Gogh we know. But this museum is dedicated to his paintings, which tell us part of a story, limited to the visual. What about the rest of the experience?
This is where Resurrection of a Sunflower, a poetry anthology recently published by PSKI’s Porch, and curated by Catfish McDaris and Marc Pietrzykowski, steps in. The subject of course, is Vincent Van Gogh, the paintings AND the man behind the paintings. A kind of poetry museum, if you will.
A line from the one of the anthology’s poems, “NOT ENOUGH” by Alan Britt, reads, “…one art form is not enough. One art form is only one aspect of human potential.” He goes on to say how painting can’t do what poetry can, and poetry can’t do what sculpture can and so on.
And he is right. We can look at a painting, but the poems in Resurrection of a Sunflower takes us deeper-- the thoughts, the imagined observations of family and friends of Van Gogh. Some of the poems in this collection are ekphrastic responses to the Master's work.
Grouped by poet, many of whom have nearly 10 poems each, this is a hefty volume. It allows us to appreciate the voice of the individual poet rather than comparing one poem about the sunflowers to another poem about the sunflowers.
You can’t think of Van Gogh without thinking of The Ear. The Bandage. But Neil Ellman’s poem “Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear” takes one step further, in a way only the written word can, into what Van Gogh might have been thinking:
When the deed was done
I could no longer hear my art
the sound of oils
moving the river across
a barren land
of paint drying
under an obdurate sun –
the price I paid
and must endure
to live in the silence
of my art
with little left
but my visions in a dream.
Ellman also writes about the other themes we associate with Van Gogh, the starry night, the irises.
Other poets employ this same strategy of the painting as prompt. Charles Joseph speaks to Vincent directly in “Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette”
Vincent, I’m sure that this self-portrait
is a much better depiction of you
than you would have cared to admit
so I imagine that that’s why
you tried to trick me into believing
that these bones belong to someone else
by smoking a cigarette here instead of a pipe.
But with the layers stripped away
the darkness of your torment
is much more visible to me here
than anywhere else
so I’m not fooled, just sad
each time I think about
how vulnerable you truly were.
Of course, the poems must be able to stand alone, and they do, as evidenced by Lisa Stice’s “Wheatfield with Crows” which does not need you to reference a painting or even Van Gogh.
the birds are hungry
steal from golden fields
gold before the reaping
and here am I, hungry
with an ache that burns
like fields on fire
As you would expect, in any museum, there are standouts. George Wallace ends each poem in his section with detailed notes, informing readers as to its genesis. But it is Wallace’s artistry, the characteristic music of his poetry that enchant.
Missing Portrait
East of coffins, in the manner of all eyes which cannot quite read the
sky, uncertain eyes set in a bold fabric of arabesques, landscapes
printed with cornflowers and forget me nots, eyes like coiled rope,
oilrags piled in a corner of the rooms, painting what you are told not to
paint, with your hands, with your eyes, with your mouth and your beard…
Similarly, Sudeep Adhikari creates magic with language in “The World is a Symbol":
The glitter from the wings of dusted ghosts; drapes the city
and my head in a single gold.
the sad joy of the never-ending present. The pain and
elation of being a mad passion…
Carol Alexander charms us with her artistry in “Redux”
The yellow blooms of Auvers, stippled in the grass.
This warm morning of his last spring, in a field
that has defied March to the teeth, sprawl the hasty stems
and the girl child with eyes of Frisian blue.
The combination of words, image, and language, make for an incredibly satisfying experience. As you read through Resurrection of a Sunflower, you may find yourself researching the paintings you are not familiar with, and the ones you are familiar with will take on an added layer.
In “NOT ENOUGH,” Alan Britt ends with the thought that “the human soul requires nourishment from all directions.” Each art form, be it music, painting, poetry is only one piece of a larger puzzle. It is this blending of art forms, these poems in response to the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh that make both the paintings and poetry even larger than they individually are.
Full list of contributors
Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Catfish McDaris, Mendes Biondo,Charles Joseph,Daniel Snethen,Bryn Fortey, Alan Britt, Rona Fitzgerald, Sudeep Adhikari, Kevin Peery, Clint Margrave, Brenton Booth, Ali Znaidi, Wayne F. Burke, George Wallace, Kerry Trautman, David Cravens, Adrian Manning, Eve Brackenbury, Richard Wink, Neil Ellman, Victor Clevenger, Guinotte Wise, Chigger Matthews, Bob Holman, Robert Lee Kendrick, Lisa Stice, James Benger, Lylanne Musselman, Ndaba Sibanda, Yoby Henthorn, Tim Staley, Debi Swim, Sheikha A, Subhadip Majumdar, Carol Alexander, Jonny Huerta, Lisa Wiley, Bob Kunzinger, Mary Ellen Talley, Jay Passer, Judith Berke, Hillary Leftwich, Claus Ankersen, Dan Sicoli, Dr. Marianne Szlyk, Perry S. Nicholas, Kerry Rawlinson, Huang Xiang, David S. Pointer, Ally Malinenko, Su Zi, John Grochalski, Norman J. Olson, Doug Mathewson, Donald Armfield, Marc Pietrzykowski, Heller Levinson, Nina Bennett, Floyd Salas, Maja Trochimczyk, Karen Greenbaum-Maya, Connie Ramsay Bott.
Publisher's note: George Wallace, Neil Ellman, Carol Alexander, Judith Berke and Marianne Szlyk have all appeared in SoFloPoJo.
May 2017
Enter Here
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
KYSO Flash Press, Seattle, Washington
ISBN: 978-0-9862703-7-6
by Francine Witte
If a poetry collection could pout its red lips and run its manicured fingers down a stockinged leg, that would be Enter Here, the latest book by Alexis Rhone Fancher. This is a masterful mashup of sex, noir, and storytelling, all set against a California backdrop and dotted throughout with Fancher’s gorgeous photography. In fact, it’s through Fancher’s photographic eye that you experience these poems. Details smartly set up the scene, and as a master of the zoom, Fancher knows just when to focus in on the exact right moment.
And she also knows how to bring out the snoop in her reader. You may, at times, feel as though you’re listening to stories you probably shouldn’t be, watching scenes you ought to turn away from. But with her skilled craftsmanship and compelling characters, you will not want to. The book opens with a conversation we can’t help but want to eavesdrop on. “When I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:”
Soon you’ll have breasts. They’ll mushroom
on your smooth chest like land mines.
A boy will show up, a schoolmate, or the gardener’s son.
Pole-cat around you. All brown-eyed persistence.
The girl’s aunt continues, detailing the time-line of this relationship until…
Soon he will deceive you with your younger sister,
the girl who once loved you most in the world.
This is a stunning moment in the poem, revealing the backstory of the aunt’s own experience with betrayal. We have been happily taking in the imagery, the bond between the aunt and her niece, everything going so well, until that moment of pow!, where the speaker reveals a tiny detail that spins the poem around the inside of your brain. Not surprising that this poem was included in the 2016 edition of Best American Poetry. In “Tuesday Nights, Room 28 of the Royal Motel on Little Santa Monica” we meet John Colton, who has a wife, but meets the speaker on a weekly basis, likes to watch her “vamp for him in the steamed-up bathroom,” and holds her “like I matter.” This last detail highlights how Fancher injects a moment of poignancy into this seemingly hard-boiled account of loveless sex. We zoom in further to this “relationship” as he “brushes the hair from my face,/plants a kiss on my forehead.” We feel the vulnerability. In one tiny moment, Fancher has told us the story within the story. Another intriguing character is the “Sad Waitress at the Diner in Barstow” who seems typically detached as you might expect, “beyond the kitchen’s swinging door,/ beyond the order wheel” and the beautifully carved diner experience, then out of nowhere, this bland, forgettable waitress suddenly springs to life:
Watch as she eyes those 18-wheelers barreling
down the highways, their mud guards
adorned with chrome silhouettes of naked women
who look nothing like her
the cruel sun throws her inertia in her face.
this is what regret looks like.
maybe she’s searching for that hot day in August
when she first walked away from you.
Suddenly we have a mystery, a femme fatale, perhaps.
Fancher’s storytelling takes us to the Mojave Desert in “Regarding the Unreliability of Buses in the Desert in Late July.” Here we meet the cast of a tragic story: a girl who “wouldn’t last the afternoon, …the man who picks her up and tells the police ‘it was like a dream,’ and the girl’s mother who salutes the girl’s faded photograph and says “nothing ages a woman like a dead kid” A chilling story told through image. Then there is the sad “For Kate in Absentia” a conversation in which the speaker advises Kate how her husband is moving on after her death.
…His new love lives close by.
He returned from her arms, all sparkly, school-
boy giddy. Not like last year,
when he was walking wounded, watching
his cell-phone video of your forest burial,...
The poem continues how the new love is a married woman. Kate, the deceased woman, whispers to the speaker:
Watch out for my husband…
he’s always been naïve.
Photography and language mix beautifully in “Daylight Savings Won’t Save Us,”
If I pull the drapes it is always night.
I cannot see the seasons,
or you, sneaking off in the half-light
like there’s someplace you’d rather be.
Come Monday, it will grow cold and dark
before people leave work.
Maybe you should go with them?
When I photograph you,
I stash my feelings in my pocket
where you won’t find them,
where the fabric sticks to my
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
KYSO Flash Press, Seattle, Washington
ISBN: 978-0-9862703-7-6
by Francine Witte
If a poetry collection could pout its red lips and run its manicured fingers down a stockinged leg, that would be Enter Here, the latest book by Alexis Rhone Fancher. This is a masterful mashup of sex, noir, and storytelling, all set against a California backdrop and dotted throughout with Fancher’s gorgeous photography. In fact, it’s through Fancher’s photographic eye that you experience these poems. Details smartly set up the scene, and as a master of the zoom, Fancher knows just when to focus in on the exact right moment.
And she also knows how to bring out the snoop in her reader. You may, at times, feel as though you’re listening to stories you probably shouldn’t be, watching scenes you ought to turn away from. But with her skilled craftsmanship and compelling characters, you will not want to. The book opens with a conversation we can’t help but want to eavesdrop on. “When I turned fourteen, my mother’s sister took me to lunch and said:”
Soon you’ll have breasts. They’ll mushroom
on your smooth chest like land mines.
A boy will show up, a schoolmate, or the gardener’s son.
Pole-cat around you. All brown-eyed persistence.
The girl’s aunt continues, detailing the time-line of this relationship until…
Soon he will deceive you with your younger sister,
the girl who once loved you most in the world.
This is a stunning moment in the poem, revealing the backstory of the aunt’s own experience with betrayal. We have been happily taking in the imagery, the bond between the aunt and her niece, everything going so well, until that moment of pow!, where the speaker reveals a tiny detail that spins the poem around the inside of your brain. Not surprising that this poem was included in the 2016 edition of Best American Poetry. In “Tuesday Nights, Room 28 of the Royal Motel on Little Santa Monica” we meet John Colton, who has a wife, but meets the speaker on a weekly basis, likes to watch her “vamp for him in the steamed-up bathroom,” and holds her “like I matter.” This last detail highlights how Fancher injects a moment of poignancy into this seemingly hard-boiled account of loveless sex. We zoom in further to this “relationship” as he “brushes the hair from my face,/plants a kiss on my forehead.” We feel the vulnerability. In one tiny moment, Fancher has told us the story within the story. Another intriguing character is the “Sad Waitress at the Diner in Barstow” who seems typically detached as you might expect, “beyond the kitchen’s swinging door,/ beyond the order wheel” and the beautifully carved diner experience, then out of nowhere, this bland, forgettable waitress suddenly springs to life:
Watch as she eyes those 18-wheelers barreling
down the highways, their mud guards
adorned with chrome silhouettes of naked women
who look nothing like her
the cruel sun throws her inertia in her face.
this is what regret looks like.
maybe she’s searching for that hot day in August
when she first walked away from you.
Suddenly we have a mystery, a femme fatale, perhaps.
Fancher’s storytelling takes us to the Mojave Desert in “Regarding the Unreliability of Buses in the Desert in Late July.” Here we meet the cast of a tragic story: a girl who “wouldn’t last the afternoon, …the man who picks her up and tells the police ‘it was like a dream,’ and the girl’s mother who salutes the girl’s faded photograph and says “nothing ages a woman like a dead kid” A chilling story told through image. Then there is the sad “For Kate in Absentia” a conversation in which the speaker advises Kate how her husband is moving on after her death.
…His new love lives close by.
He returned from her arms, all sparkly, school-
boy giddy. Not like last year,
when he was walking wounded, watching
his cell-phone video of your forest burial,...
The poem continues how the new love is a married woman. Kate, the deceased woman, whispers to the speaker:
Watch out for my husband…
he’s always been naïve.
Photography and language mix beautifully in “Daylight Savings Won’t Save Us,”
If I pull the drapes it is always night.
I cannot see the seasons,
or you, sneaking off in the half-light
like there’s someplace you’d rather be.
Come Monday, it will grow cold and dark
before people leave work.
Maybe you should go with them?
When I photograph you,
I stash my feelings in my pocket
where you won’t find them,
where the fabric sticks to my
May 2017 Guest Review
Scald
by Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
$15.95, 112 pages
ISBN: 9780822964506
by Charles Rammelkamp
“Let’s scold and scald. Let’s be skalds – poets who write of heroic deeds,” Denise Duhamel writes in “Scalding Cauldron,” from her new collection, exhorting all “Cosmic, Counterclock-Wise, Crackpot Crones,” all “Goddesses and Goofballs…Gyno-centric Gals,” all “Pagans, Pixies, Prideful Prunes” to rise up against the patriarchal order that has so thoroughly fucked up the earth and society, culture and civilization.
Arranged in three sections, each dedicated to a feminist thinker/activist – Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly (Wickedary Mary) – the poems in Scald, many of them pantoums and villanelles, seethe with the absurdity that so often characterizes the plight of women. These forms, with their braiding, weaving, repetitive rhythms, are so appropriate for Duhamel’s theme, stuttering and staggering through history and time, especially the pantoum, which ends where it begins, invoking the image of the Ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth. Indeed, “Snake Pantoum,” from the final section, begins and ends with the line, “Once the snake was like the moon.” The twelve quatrains of the poem develop the symbolic image of the snake that contains eternal life, female fecundity, phallic energy, menstruation, knowledge, good and evil, and finally, corruption. The poem’s final stanza reads:
When there’s nowhere to go but guilt,
women become eternally maligned –
snake charmers, dragon ladies, old birds.
Once the snake was like the moon.
While it would be misleading to say that certain poems in Scald “belong” to a particular section, the poems in the Shulie section are more devoted to the idea of the biological female – “Helen Hamilton Gardener’s Brain,” “Conceptual Villanelle,” “Reproduction Pantoum,” and the grandmammy of them all, “Darwinian Pantoum,” among them. By contrast, many of the poems in the Andrea section address the idea of women as sexual objects. Dworkin, of course, famously wrote about porn (Pornography: Men Possessing Women) – “Fornicating,” “Sex Dream,” “Rated R,” and “Porn Poem (with Andrea Dworkin)” among them. The poems in the Wickedary Mary section are more apocalyptic than anything – “The End Is Coming,” “Americas,” “Recycling,” “The Things That Can Never Come Back.” But “Our Lady of the Milk”? This could be in the Shulie section. The point is that the poems in Scald themselves braid and weave throughout the collection. History overlaps, time circles back. This is exemplified in the final poem of the Andrea section, “Maybe Your East Village Was Better Than Mine: A Braided Poem,” a seven-page poem that compares the experiences of Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials, sometimes similar, sometimes not. The poems ends:
I wish I could have seen Hair on Broadway,
those twenty seconds when actors stood naked
behind a scrim, chanting “beads, flowers, freedom,
and happiness.” I’ve always wanted
to step back, but just a little bit, in time.
This idea is echoed in another pantoum, “What Child Is This?” The poem begins with the line: “In 1871, it was common to parody evolution.” It ends nineteen stanzas later: “In 1975, no girl could afford to parody feminism.” Duhamel manages to mention all the American heavyweight feminist theorists in Scald, Betty Friedan, Nancy Friday, Gloria Steinem, even Eve Ensler and Helen Reddy. What ties this collection together, though, of course, is what Maureen Seaton calls “that special Denise-ness”: “the humor, the witchcraft, the history, the culture.” As she concludes the poem, “The End Is Coming”:
What will this matter in a year from now,
a week from now? Will it really even matter
tomorrow? I will laugh my last breath
though it’s no laughing matter.
It’s just the way some of us cope.
She’s helping us all cope! “What if death is an ambulance to the future?” (a repeated line in the final poem of the collection, “The Things That Can Never Come Back”) This “Denise-ness” is on full display in the poem, “Bikini Kill Villanelle” (which is fun to say!): the humor, the flux of feminism in history and culture, the witchcraft. I confess, I’d never heard of Bikini Kill, that I remember, a 1990’s radical feminist punk band from Olympia, Washington, but their song, “Rebel Girl,” from their 1993 debut CD, Pussy Whipped, was an anthem for the riot grrrl feminist punk movement.
Whatever happened to those Riot Grrrl
fanzines? Extra r’s slashed to “girl power,”
the growl softened by the mainstream Spice Girls
who, in black Wonderbras, spout faux pearls
of wisdom and flirt with Matt Lauer.
Whatever happened to those Riot Grrrls –
Tobi Vail’s drums, Kathleen Hanna’s snarls?
I put batteries in dancing flowers
that boogied down with the mainstream Spice Girls.
Kurt Cobain knew music’s future was girls,
their pink/punk scalding fury and glower.
Whatever happened to those Riot Grrrls
happened to us, too. Revolution swirled
with sugar in blenders. We devoured
the stuff, sweetened by the mainstream Spice Girls.
Women do crunches, pushups and leg curls
so they’ll look good at cocktail hour.
Whatever happened to those Riot Grrrls
who kicked open that door for the Spice Girls?
Scald is a terrific, humorous, thought-provoking collection. I can’t imagine anybody not enjoying and being impressed by it.
by Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
$15.95, 112 pages
ISBN: 9780822964506
by Charles Rammelkamp
“Let’s scold and scald. Let’s be skalds – poets who write of heroic deeds,” Denise Duhamel writes in “Scalding Cauldron,” from her new collection, exhorting all “Cosmic, Counterclock-Wise, Crackpot Crones,” all “Goddesses and Goofballs…Gyno-centric Gals,” all “Pagans, Pixies, Prideful Prunes” to rise up against the patriarchal order that has so thoroughly fucked up the earth and society, culture and civilization.
Arranged in three sections, each dedicated to a feminist thinker/activist – Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly (Wickedary Mary) – the poems in Scald, many of them pantoums and villanelles, seethe with the absurdity that so often characterizes the plight of women. These forms, with their braiding, weaving, repetitive rhythms, are so appropriate for Duhamel’s theme, stuttering and staggering through history and time, especially the pantoum, which ends where it begins, invoking the image of the Ouroboros, the serpent with its tail in its mouth. Indeed, “Snake Pantoum,” from the final section, begins and ends with the line, “Once the snake was like the moon.” The twelve quatrains of the poem develop the symbolic image of the snake that contains eternal life, female fecundity, phallic energy, menstruation, knowledge, good and evil, and finally, corruption. The poem’s final stanza reads:
When there’s nowhere to go but guilt,
women become eternally maligned –
snake charmers, dragon ladies, old birds.
Once the snake was like the moon.
While it would be misleading to say that certain poems in Scald “belong” to a particular section, the poems in the Shulie section are more devoted to the idea of the biological female – “Helen Hamilton Gardener’s Brain,” “Conceptual Villanelle,” “Reproduction Pantoum,” and the grandmammy of them all, “Darwinian Pantoum,” among them. By contrast, many of the poems in the Andrea section address the idea of women as sexual objects. Dworkin, of course, famously wrote about porn (Pornography: Men Possessing Women) – “Fornicating,” “Sex Dream,” “Rated R,” and “Porn Poem (with Andrea Dworkin)” among them. The poems in the Wickedary Mary section are more apocalyptic than anything – “The End Is Coming,” “Americas,” “Recycling,” “The Things That Can Never Come Back.” But “Our Lady of the Milk”? This could be in the Shulie section. The point is that the poems in Scald themselves braid and weave throughout the collection. History overlaps, time circles back. This is exemplified in the final poem of the Andrea section, “Maybe Your East Village Was Better Than Mine: A Braided Poem,” a seven-page poem that compares the experiences of Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials, sometimes similar, sometimes not. The poems ends:
I wish I could have seen Hair on Broadway,
those twenty seconds when actors stood naked
behind a scrim, chanting “beads, flowers, freedom,
and happiness.” I’ve always wanted
to step back, but just a little bit, in time.
This idea is echoed in another pantoum, “What Child Is This?” The poem begins with the line: “In 1871, it was common to parody evolution.” It ends nineteen stanzas later: “In 1975, no girl could afford to parody feminism.” Duhamel manages to mention all the American heavyweight feminist theorists in Scald, Betty Friedan, Nancy Friday, Gloria Steinem, even Eve Ensler and Helen Reddy. What ties this collection together, though, of course, is what Maureen Seaton calls “that special Denise-ness”: “the humor, the witchcraft, the history, the culture.” As she concludes the poem, “The End Is Coming”:
What will this matter in a year from now,
a week from now? Will it really even matter
tomorrow? I will laugh my last breath
though it’s no laughing matter.
It’s just the way some of us cope.
She’s helping us all cope! “What if death is an ambulance to the future?” (a repeated line in the final poem of the collection, “The Things That Can Never Come Back”) This “Denise-ness” is on full display in the poem, “Bikini Kill Villanelle” (which is fun to say!): the humor, the flux of feminism in history and culture, the witchcraft. I confess, I’d never heard of Bikini Kill, that I remember, a 1990’s radical feminist punk band from Olympia, Washington, but their song, “Rebel Girl,” from their 1993 debut CD, Pussy Whipped, was an anthem for the riot grrrl feminist punk movement.
Whatever happened to those Riot Grrrl
fanzines? Extra r’s slashed to “girl power,”
the growl softened by the mainstream Spice Girls
who, in black Wonderbras, spout faux pearls
of wisdom and flirt with Matt Lauer.
Whatever happened to those Riot Grrrls –
Tobi Vail’s drums, Kathleen Hanna’s snarls?
I put batteries in dancing flowers
that boogied down with the mainstream Spice Girls.
Kurt Cobain knew music’s future was girls,
their pink/punk scalding fury and glower.
Whatever happened to those Riot Grrrls
happened to us, too. Revolution swirled
with sugar in blenders. We devoured
the stuff, sweetened by the mainstream Spice Girls.
Women do crunches, pushups and leg curls
so they’ll look good at cocktail hour.
Whatever happened to those Riot Grrrls
who kicked open that door for the Spice Girls?
Scald is a terrific, humorous, thought-provoking collection. I can’t imagine anybody not enjoying and being impressed by it.
February 2017
NOT ALL FIRES BURN THE SAME
BY FRANCINE WITTE
By Alec Solomita
In her latest chapbook, Francine Witte’s preoccupations haven’t changed. She continues to write about runaway men, dying relatives, loquacious animals, and the futility of hope and its necessity. Also intact are her gift for ingenious metaphor, conversation-like verses that pack a subtle rhythm, and the ability to leap into the minds and hearts of others. But in Not All Fires Burn the Same (Slipstream 2016), she’s challenged herself to write with more indirection, braver and broader tropes, and white-hot anger tempered with a new, mature resignation. Although her poems are still “accessible,” they are also more likely to progress in imagery as well as argument. And the reader is the grateful beneficiary.
The first poem, “Breaking Sky,” exhibits the poet’s ambitiousness. From the first extravagant lines: “A piece of sky breaks off/and falls into your coffee cup,” the speaker escorts the reader to her own birth (“… How you were/once the star she pushed out of her/body…”) then takes a delicate turn to sorrow.
“And now it’s your turn, time to reshape
your mouth, learn the language your
mother now speaks, where she doesn’t
quite remember you and says your name
like it’s a miracle or a bathroom fixture.
You know that soon the earth will have
to change, open its skin and scar itself
back around her coffin. …”
The shift to dementia is quietly heartbreaking as is the un-birthing into the living earth. It’s a poignant poem that almost coerces you to turn the page, where more often than not you’ll find something completely different. “Daylights” is a cautionary tale about keeping your mouth shut if you’ve slept with your friend’s wife. It’s very tough, very funny, and very good advice. The whimsical “Wolf Logic” shows off Witte’s expansiveness with metaphor. Like several of her poems here, the whole piece is an extended metaphor, the hapless wolf who envies humans:
And finally, he’d tell you that he’d kill
for an hour when he isn’t being
gnawed by hunger or living on constant
alert. And how would it be to curl up
with a book, how good, in fact, to read.
And how wonderful if he needed more light,
to not have to wait for the moon.
Witte also has a knack for compression, summoning up an entire scene with just a few words. In “Weather Wins” she writes:
“Elsewhere the weather
is winning in quieter ways;
the sun toasting its own
tasty beach-morsels, girls
in bikinis, salty surfer dudes.
Forcing young lust to insure
that the species goes on.”
“Salty surfer dudes”! There’s a whole summer in the phrase.
In “My Dead Florida Mother Meets Gandhi,” Witte masterfully combines the surreal with the quotidian; an unlikely, delightful conversation in paradise brings back sadly vivid memories. Gandhi, “taking a gulp of heaven air, lavender and cool,” complains about the India heat: “‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I hated it,’” wishing that he’d spent his time in Greenland instead with arctic ice and polar bears. “‘You did good,’” the Dead Florida Mother reassures Gandhi:
“… She looks
at him the way she looked at me when Davey Goldfarb
called to say that, yeah, he was gay, after all. The way
she looked at me the night my husband said that by other
women, he meant our neighbor Ruth, and the way she looked
at me the last time in the nursing home as if to say
it’s not your fault, it’s not.”
As in her earlier poetry, particularly the chapbook First Rain, Witte still has something to say – or vent – about both wayward husbands and absent fathers, more effectively with the former than the latter. One of two poems about fathers dips just slightly into bathos. In “I always called them needle trees,” about a father who visits once a year, purportedly to see the evergreens at holiday time, the line “He told me he loved them/because they didn’t die” sentimentally pre-figures the father’s own death. “Turning,” about a man’s chimerical lies to his daughter (“The angels are flying south/for the winter, my father said,/ pointing to the fast-moving clouds.”) is more compelling, just skimming like those clouds above the maudlin.
Witte has always written acutely about the faithlessness of men and the yearning of abandoned wives and lovers. Here, however, there is a new combination of resignation and hardness. The title poem is a sly tour de force of shape-shifting metaphor. It begins with forest fires on the evening news, which the second-person protagonist watches “… safe behind your TV tray,/feeling smug and oh so cool. Not at all/like those fires you started as a kid …” and “nothing like the fire of your husband/and his other woman, how you thought/he should be strong enough to reason/her away. …” And in the end, the husband returns like a failed firefighter, “full of dead smoke and regret.” And, although she “could taste the ashes still in his mouth,” she takes him back – but the reader gets the sense not for long.
In “Convenience,” we encounter a kind of collapse of nerve – or is it the beginning of wisdom? The cheating husband doesn’t trigger his savvy wife’s anger so much as a mild disgust with “loving a no-good man, unable to walk away.” And she even empathizes with the woman her husband texts in the convenience store parking lot as she goes in to buy some milk. She feels “more like a painsister/than a wounded wife.” The poem “Not only” offers another kind of response to betrayal. In a series of surreal, scary images, we are shown the rage and entitlement of a woman deceived.
“... Somewhere, a woman
was up there with her man …
… she billowed a blanket
above the bed that was only
half-slept in. …
… Love graveyard
she thought, and that’s when
she heard the birds, all of them gone
vulture now. Tapping their beaks
at the window pane, hungry to gnaw
on the corpse.”
Yes, not all fires burn the same.
BY FRANCINE WITTE
By Alec Solomita
In her latest chapbook, Francine Witte’s preoccupations haven’t changed. She continues to write about runaway men, dying relatives, loquacious animals, and the futility of hope and its necessity. Also intact are her gift for ingenious metaphor, conversation-like verses that pack a subtle rhythm, and the ability to leap into the minds and hearts of others. But in Not All Fires Burn the Same (Slipstream 2016), she’s challenged herself to write with more indirection, braver and broader tropes, and white-hot anger tempered with a new, mature resignation. Although her poems are still “accessible,” they are also more likely to progress in imagery as well as argument. And the reader is the grateful beneficiary.
The first poem, “Breaking Sky,” exhibits the poet’s ambitiousness. From the first extravagant lines: “A piece of sky breaks off/and falls into your coffee cup,” the speaker escorts the reader to her own birth (“… How you were/once the star she pushed out of her/body…”) then takes a delicate turn to sorrow.
“And now it’s your turn, time to reshape
your mouth, learn the language your
mother now speaks, where she doesn’t
quite remember you and says your name
like it’s a miracle or a bathroom fixture.
You know that soon the earth will have
to change, open its skin and scar itself
back around her coffin. …”
The shift to dementia is quietly heartbreaking as is the un-birthing into the living earth. It’s a poignant poem that almost coerces you to turn the page, where more often than not you’ll find something completely different. “Daylights” is a cautionary tale about keeping your mouth shut if you’ve slept with your friend’s wife. It’s very tough, very funny, and very good advice. The whimsical “Wolf Logic” shows off Witte’s expansiveness with metaphor. Like several of her poems here, the whole piece is an extended metaphor, the hapless wolf who envies humans:
And finally, he’d tell you that he’d kill
for an hour when he isn’t being
gnawed by hunger or living on constant
alert. And how would it be to curl up
with a book, how good, in fact, to read.
And how wonderful if he needed more light,
to not have to wait for the moon.
Witte also has a knack for compression, summoning up an entire scene with just a few words. In “Weather Wins” she writes:
“Elsewhere the weather
is winning in quieter ways;
the sun toasting its own
tasty beach-morsels, girls
in bikinis, salty surfer dudes.
Forcing young lust to insure
that the species goes on.”
“Salty surfer dudes”! There’s a whole summer in the phrase.
In “My Dead Florida Mother Meets Gandhi,” Witte masterfully combines the surreal with the quotidian; an unlikely, delightful conversation in paradise brings back sadly vivid memories. Gandhi, “taking a gulp of heaven air, lavender and cool,” complains about the India heat: “‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘I hated it,’” wishing that he’d spent his time in Greenland instead with arctic ice and polar bears. “‘You did good,’” the Dead Florida Mother reassures Gandhi:
“… She looks
at him the way she looked at me when Davey Goldfarb
called to say that, yeah, he was gay, after all. The way
she looked at me the night my husband said that by other
women, he meant our neighbor Ruth, and the way she looked
at me the last time in the nursing home as if to say
it’s not your fault, it’s not.”
As in her earlier poetry, particularly the chapbook First Rain, Witte still has something to say – or vent – about both wayward husbands and absent fathers, more effectively with the former than the latter. One of two poems about fathers dips just slightly into bathos. In “I always called them needle trees,” about a father who visits once a year, purportedly to see the evergreens at holiday time, the line “He told me he loved them/because they didn’t die” sentimentally pre-figures the father’s own death. “Turning,” about a man’s chimerical lies to his daughter (“The angels are flying south/for the winter, my father said,/ pointing to the fast-moving clouds.”) is more compelling, just skimming like those clouds above the maudlin.
Witte has always written acutely about the faithlessness of men and the yearning of abandoned wives and lovers. Here, however, there is a new combination of resignation and hardness. The title poem is a sly tour de force of shape-shifting metaphor. It begins with forest fires on the evening news, which the second-person protagonist watches “… safe behind your TV tray,/feeling smug and oh so cool. Not at all/like those fires you started as a kid …” and “nothing like the fire of your husband/and his other woman, how you thought/he should be strong enough to reason/her away. …” And in the end, the husband returns like a failed firefighter, “full of dead smoke and regret.” And, although she “could taste the ashes still in his mouth,” she takes him back – but the reader gets the sense not for long.
In “Convenience,” we encounter a kind of collapse of nerve – or is it the beginning of wisdom? The cheating husband doesn’t trigger his savvy wife’s anger so much as a mild disgust with “loving a no-good man, unable to walk away.” And she even empathizes with the woman her husband texts in the convenience store parking lot as she goes in to buy some milk. She feels “more like a painsister/than a wounded wife.” The poem “Not only” offers another kind of response to betrayal. In a series of surreal, scary images, we are shown the rage and entitlement of a woman deceived.
“... Somewhere, a woman
was up there with her man …
… she billowed a blanket
above the bed that was only
half-slept in. …
… Love graveyard
she thought, and that’s when
she heard the birds, all of them gone
vulture now. Tapping their beaks
at the window pane, hungry to gnaw
on the corpse.”
Yes, not all fires burn the same.
November 2016
Mistaking Each Other For Ghosts
By Lawrence Raab
By Francine Witte
With Halloween just past and the following Day of the Dead, leaves drying, snapping off and swirling to the ground, Autumn is a ghosty season. Lawrence Raab’s eighth full-length collection of poetry, Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo Press 2015) fits right in with that idea.
Poetry itself has a ghostiness to it. It flitters by, quietly clattering the air, untouchable to our hands, but not our souls. Raab’s poetry deftly exhibits these characteristics. Accessible in its language, but skillfully crafted, each poem comes in, sits its invisible self next to you and takes its corporeal shape.
In “The Mortality of Books” he muses on the memories that everyday objects can awaken, in this case, books. How the simple act of picking up a book can take you back to “the afternoon you first held it in your hands.” He describes that day:
“The sun was out, the books were shining
in their displays, along the avenue,
and you were certain you’d fallen in love.
Remember that day”
Everything was a bargain. And mortality?
That was an idea,
one word among the others.”
The book has become a ghost that evokes many other ghosts.
Then, there is the appearance of a non-ghost. In a poem I very much enjoyed, “Ophelia at Home” which is told in the voice of Hamlet’s often-pitied girlfriend. Here, Ophelia corrects our mistaken notions about her:
“I didn’t drown. All those eloquent
were a misunderstanding”
She goes on to explain that she went on to have a very compete life in another town, that she didn’t not want to correct the story everyone believed, and how she trusted that Hamlet loved her “even when he said he didn’t” because “I was a girl, after all./I wanted things to work out.”
Then there is the theme of not seeing the significance of something as it is happening. Sort of a musing on the future ghosts of any given moment that continues to happen and grow long after it has taken place. In “Last Evening” he watches the birds:
“Swallows dash through the twilight
and I don’t think about
what they might mean. Or I didn’t
just then. They swooped in and were gone.
It got dark. One more bird song
briefly off in the trees, and I felt
grateful to be standing there, letting
the moment pass through me
as if that was all that had to happen.”
Throughout the book, we see the flipping back and forth or time, the past infusing the present, the present making sense of the past.
Then, there are Raab’s musings, as seen in “I Was Just Wondering”
“If the universe keeps expanding
where is it going, and what
was here before?”
Here Raab, also a screenwriter, uses the cinematic technique of establishing shot in this first stanza. He sets up a question but soon begins to zoom in. The speaker goes on to question the necessity of deer ticks and diseases. His questions become deeper and more pointed as the poem goes on.
“And don’t tell me there’s a plan
but we’re not supposed to know
how it works. What’s the point of guessing””
He ends the poem with a simple, yet rattling statement. “Don’t tell me we shouldn’t be afraid.”
The book is divided into four sections, the final one called “A Cup That Turns into a Rose” which had been published as a chapbook in 2012. Here, the tone is decidedly more narrative and prose-like than the previous sections. This seems natural for this kind of content and length. But for the shift of tone, it is no less engaging and beautifully rendered.
“A few notes from a piano
and night descends. Later the wind
moves east, shaking the loose doors of houses
all along the coast. In one of those
frail cabins we were sleeping.”
The poems in this collection are a beautiful demonstration of Raab’s masterful ability to reach his unseen hand, his ghostpoetry hand and stroke, or even grab us, whichever he needs to do at any given moment. He blends the past, present , and future into one, and makes us realize how dependent they all are upon one another. This is a wonderful combination of philosophy, insight, poetic language and technique that will satisfy not only in autumn but any season, any year, anytime.
By Lawrence Raab
By Francine Witte
With Halloween just past and the following Day of the Dead, leaves drying, snapping off and swirling to the ground, Autumn is a ghosty season. Lawrence Raab’s eighth full-length collection of poetry, Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo Press 2015) fits right in with that idea.
Poetry itself has a ghostiness to it. It flitters by, quietly clattering the air, untouchable to our hands, but not our souls. Raab’s poetry deftly exhibits these characteristics. Accessible in its language, but skillfully crafted, each poem comes in, sits its invisible self next to you and takes its corporeal shape.
In “The Mortality of Books” he muses on the memories that everyday objects can awaken, in this case, books. How the simple act of picking up a book can take you back to “the afternoon you first held it in your hands.” He describes that day:
“The sun was out, the books were shining
in their displays, along the avenue,
and you were certain you’d fallen in love.
Remember that day”
Everything was a bargain. And mortality?
That was an idea,
one word among the others.”
The book has become a ghost that evokes many other ghosts.
Then, there is the appearance of a non-ghost. In a poem I very much enjoyed, “Ophelia at Home” which is told in the voice of Hamlet’s often-pitied girlfriend. Here, Ophelia corrects our mistaken notions about her:
“I didn’t drown. All those eloquent
were a misunderstanding”
She goes on to explain that she went on to have a very compete life in another town, that she didn’t not want to correct the story everyone believed, and how she trusted that Hamlet loved her “even when he said he didn’t” because “I was a girl, after all./I wanted things to work out.”
Then there is the theme of not seeing the significance of something as it is happening. Sort of a musing on the future ghosts of any given moment that continues to happen and grow long after it has taken place. In “Last Evening” he watches the birds:
“Swallows dash through the twilight
and I don’t think about
what they might mean. Or I didn’t
just then. They swooped in and were gone.
It got dark. One more bird song
briefly off in the trees, and I felt
grateful to be standing there, letting
the moment pass through me
as if that was all that had to happen.”
Throughout the book, we see the flipping back and forth or time, the past infusing the present, the present making sense of the past.
Then, there are Raab’s musings, as seen in “I Was Just Wondering”
“If the universe keeps expanding
where is it going, and what
was here before?”
Here Raab, also a screenwriter, uses the cinematic technique of establishing shot in this first stanza. He sets up a question but soon begins to zoom in. The speaker goes on to question the necessity of deer ticks and diseases. His questions become deeper and more pointed as the poem goes on.
“And don’t tell me there’s a plan
but we’re not supposed to know
how it works. What’s the point of guessing””
He ends the poem with a simple, yet rattling statement. “Don’t tell me we shouldn’t be afraid.”
The book is divided into four sections, the final one called “A Cup That Turns into a Rose” which had been published as a chapbook in 2012. Here, the tone is decidedly more narrative and prose-like than the previous sections. This seems natural for this kind of content and length. But for the shift of tone, it is no less engaging and beautifully rendered.
“A few notes from a piano
and night descends. Later the wind
moves east, shaking the loose doors of houses
all along the coast. In one of those
frail cabins we were sleeping.”
The poems in this collection are a beautiful demonstration of Raab’s masterful ability to reach his unseen hand, his ghostpoetry hand and stroke, or even grab us, whichever he needs to do at any given moment. He blends the past, present , and future into one, and makes us realize how dependent they all are upon one another. This is a wonderful combination of philosophy, insight, poetic language and technique that will satisfy not only in autumn but any season, any year, anytime.
August 2016
A Simple Blues With a Few Intangibles
By George Wallace
By Benjimen Myers
It is a well-known story that the invention of the typewriter changed modern poetry, reorienting composition from the aural to the visual and giving us e.e. Cummings and Ezra Pound. Reading George Wallace’s A Simple Blues with a Few Intangibles, however, one is reminded of the aesthetic impact of another twentieth century technology: the phonograph. With the invention of the record and the record player, we subtly shifted from thinking about art as a product to thinking about it as a process: not the sheet music to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik but the way Coltrane played “Naima” on a particular night at the Village Vanguard. Of course, this shift was also inspired by the French avant-garde – particularly the spontaneous poetics of the surrealists and Dadaists – but the technology of music recording and the improvisational influence of jazz are at the heart of a new spirit of improvisation and a new privileging of process over product in American art beginning around midcentury. This new way produced painters like Jackson Pollack, composers like John Cage, and poets like Alan Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara. George Wallace is carrying forward that improvisational spirit.
The great French poet Mallarme famously insisted that poems are not made out of ideas but rather out of words, and Wallace’s poems are made out of words the same way Pollack’s paintings are made out of paint – not a medium to see through but rather the thing to be seen. In some sense, whatever else they are about, these poems are about the energy of words, as Pollack’s paintings are, at least in part, about the energy of paint and Coltrane’s music is about the energy of sound. Consider these opening lines from “Bent Pistons, Kites Flying in the Harmless Wind”:
Landscape, sound of a landscape,
sound of women and men in landscapes,
smoking, sweating, oil pouring out of cans,
polishing new steel against old stone,
women and men drinking from a ladle,
dream weaving, lazy, lazy, back to work[.]
With effort and imagination, one might extract a narrative situation here, and there are certainly plenty of concrete images to give the lines solidity. What obviously matters most here, however, is the sound. Wallace uses alliteration and assonance the way an abstract painter uses color. Similarly, in the poem “Jonesing with Moses on the High Tide Line,” we get enough direct statement and imagery to catch on that the poem is “about” a car ride, but the nature of the ride is conveyed primarily through the propulsion of the diction, particularly when the title phrase is repeated. Perhaps I’m just a square, but I have no idea what “Jonesing with Moses on the high tideline” means. I do, however, really love to say it, and I feel in the phrase a forward movement, a momentum that makes the poem a delight. This feeling of momentum runs throughout the book, frequently reinforced with images of the automobile and the great American highway. “This is America waiting for a ride the highway swings / the oracle speaks” read the first lines of the first poem in the book, with too much energy to be slowed down by punctuation. These poems should be read aloud.
Wallace is clearly writing in the tradition of the Beat poets and makes several direct references to Kerouac and Ginsburg, along with many references to the jazz music that was such a part of the Beat aesthetic. In “Brooklyn 1956” he picks up Ginsburg’s distinct cadence: “Momma you and your infallible flashbulb head, momma you and your tip of the tongue, momma you and your television manners and sharp eyes like the edge of a nail file. Toasterwife. Lionmouth.” The daring, impromptu word combinations also have an air of Ginsburg about them. Following in the footsteps of Kerouac and co. has led many poets into the realm of pure shtick, but Wallace is too good of a poet for that. He has the ear and the depth to avoid mere imitation. These poems don’t read like an imitation, or even an homage, so much as a carrying forward of the Beat style. Reinvigorating the Beat legacy seems to me a great way to inject some much needed energy into contemporary American poetry.
Wallace’s roots clearly extend back past the Beats, however, all the way to the French avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first verse paragraph of “The Architecture of Love Memory Death and Desire,” for instance, would be at home in a volume of Baudelaire or Rimbaud, were the allusions not so distinctly American: “There’s no use crying like an idiot child, life is an assassin, chewing on a toothpick, wearing a film noir raincoat and grinning like Bogart and Bacall, and beauty walks by on crooked feet, finger on the trigger, ready to shoot you up or shoot you out of its mouth, and love is nervous as a cat in the southern zone and I am looking for evidence of the sacred in the flesh, and love is always right there behind me or right around the corner, ready to brain me with a cobblestone or the butt end of a handgun.” In “A Radio Believes it is Singing this Song,” Wallace offers a compelling version of surrealism:
A river looks up at
the sun – I am fire,
says the river, I am
the mountain in my own
belly, rumbling stone
by miraculous stone
to the sea.
Mira! says the river –
Mother, look at me!
But the rain has no eyes
True to the surrealist technique, Wallace offers the images without commentary or interpretation, but they are compelling enough on their own to suggest a depth of meaning hiding just out of sight. American poets rarely get this close to the spirit of the European avant-garde.
While Wallace’s poems are often fascinating, frenetic machines made out of words, they are also often quite moving. A few of the poems are, given the avant-garde nature of much of the collection, surprisingly personal. There are several very powerful poems about the poet’s father. In “My Father’s Felt Fedora,” he says “I am trying to explain things / I will never understand,” a very apt job description for the poet who explores his own childhood. In “A La Vecchia Caverna” and “A Canoe Full of Monkeys,” Wallace explores early and painful sexual experiences in a way that might be called “confessional” but that avoids the narcissistic pitfalls that such work often falls into. The poems are so emotionally effective because they are not entirely self-centered. “They spoke Italian down by the boathouse, / When I was little I mean,” begins the former poem. It is striking that he makes himself almost an afterthought as he begins a poem that reveals some significant emotional scarring. In “A Canoe Full of Monkeys” the painful memory of being callously used sexually by an older girl is conveyed without melodrama and with a vivid setting of scene and description of experience – “I never tasted beer before / it was like a Saint Christopher medal / in my mouth” –that throws the emotion into high relief. This is Homeric technique and very effective.
As anyone who has ever listened to Charlie Parker knows, improvisation is not the opposite of artful craftsmanship. Wallace’s improvisational style might distract from his compositional skill, but if one looks closer, it is easy to see that Wallace knows what he is doing. Consider this artful line break from “We Burned our Way to Nowheresville”: “a moment when time stops / worrying about itself[.]” The movement from line to line reverses the meaning so that the poem gestures in two directions almost simultaneously. This kind of technical skill enlivens the poems throughout this book. Wallace also knows how to use metaphor and simile to generate compelling, emotionally resonant imagery. Take, for example, these lines from the same poem:
. . . and she swung me in her arms
like a cradle, like a grave, like we were two
shipwrecked sailors swinging in the bottomless
pit of the same empty sea[.]
The images of the cradle and of the grave subtly and effectively color the image of the
deep sea, making the picture more vivid. Wallace’s improvisational style may suggest that he is shooting from the hip, but he obviously has put in the hours of target practice necessary to develop deadly aim.
Like his beat predecessors, Wallace follows Whitman in a poetics of inclusiveness. The allusions in these poems range from Camus to Elmer Fudd. There is an astute elegy for Prince. Several poems are more political in subject matter. There are fast cars, blues musicians, hapless poets, lovers, and drunks. This is a meaty collection but tightly cohesive in its improvisational spirit. It is the rare volume of poetry that will appeal equally to the guys in the classic car club and to the scholars of the avant-garde in the local English department.
Benjamin Myers is the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and the author of two books of poetry: Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Image and other journals. He has been honored with an Oklahoma Book Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book and with a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His prose appears in World Literature Today, Books and Culture and other magazines. Myers teaches poetry writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature.
By George Wallace
By Benjimen Myers
It is a well-known story that the invention of the typewriter changed modern poetry, reorienting composition from the aural to the visual and giving us e.e. Cummings and Ezra Pound. Reading George Wallace’s A Simple Blues with a Few Intangibles, however, one is reminded of the aesthetic impact of another twentieth century technology: the phonograph. With the invention of the record and the record player, we subtly shifted from thinking about art as a product to thinking about it as a process: not the sheet music to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik but the way Coltrane played “Naima” on a particular night at the Village Vanguard. Of course, this shift was also inspired by the French avant-garde – particularly the spontaneous poetics of the surrealists and Dadaists – but the technology of music recording and the improvisational influence of jazz are at the heart of a new spirit of improvisation and a new privileging of process over product in American art beginning around midcentury. This new way produced painters like Jackson Pollack, composers like John Cage, and poets like Alan Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara. George Wallace is carrying forward that improvisational spirit.
The great French poet Mallarme famously insisted that poems are not made out of ideas but rather out of words, and Wallace’s poems are made out of words the same way Pollack’s paintings are made out of paint – not a medium to see through but rather the thing to be seen. In some sense, whatever else they are about, these poems are about the energy of words, as Pollack’s paintings are, at least in part, about the energy of paint and Coltrane’s music is about the energy of sound. Consider these opening lines from “Bent Pistons, Kites Flying in the Harmless Wind”:
Landscape, sound of a landscape,
sound of women and men in landscapes,
smoking, sweating, oil pouring out of cans,
polishing new steel against old stone,
women and men drinking from a ladle,
dream weaving, lazy, lazy, back to work[.]
With effort and imagination, one might extract a narrative situation here, and there are certainly plenty of concrete images to give the lines solidity. What obviously matters most here, however, is the sound. Wallace uses alliteration and assonance the way an abstract painter uses color. Similarly, in the poem “Jonesing with Moses on the High Tide Line,” we get enough direct statement and imagery to catch on that the poem is “about” a car ride, but the nature of the ride is conveyed primarily through the propulsion of the diction, particularly when the title phrase is repeated. Perhaps I’m just a square, but I have no idea what “Jonesing with Moses on the high tideline” means. I do, however, really love to say it, and I feel in the phrase a forward movement, a momentum that makes the poem a delight. This feeling of momentum runs throughout the book, frequently reinforced with images of the automobile and the great American highway. “This is America waiting for a ride the highway swings / the oracle speaks” read the first lines of the first poem in the book, with too much energy to be slowed down by punctuation. These poems should be read aloud.
Wallace is clearly writing in the tradition of the Beat poets and makes several direct references to Kerouac and Ginsburg, along with many references to the jazz music that was such a part of the Beat aesthetic. In “Brooklyn 1956” he picks up Ginsburg’s distinct cadence: “Momma you and your infallible flashbulb head, momma you and your tip of the tongue, momma you and your television manners and sharp eyes like the edge of a nail file. Toasterwife. Lionmouth.” The daring, impromptu word combinations also have an air of Ginsburg about them. Following in the footsteps of Kerouac and co. has led many poets into the realm of pure shtick, but Wallace is too good of a poet for that. He has the ear and the depth to avoid mere imitation. These poems don’t read like an imitation, or even an homage, so much as a carrying forward of the Beat style. Reinvigorating the Beat legacy seems to me a great way to inject some much needed energy into contemporary American poetry.
Wallace’s roots clearly extend back past the Beats, however, all the way to the French avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first verse paragraph of “The Architecture of Love Memory Death and Desire,” for instance, would be at home in a volume of Baudelaire or Rimbaud, were the allusions not so distinctly American: “There’s no use crying like an idiot child, life is an assassin, chewing on a toothpick, wearing a film noir raincoat and grinning like Bogart and Bacall, and beauty walks by on crooked feet, finger on the trigger, ready to shoot you up or shoot you out of its mouth, and love is nervous as a cat in the southern zone and I am looking for evidence of the sacred in the flesh, and love is always right there behind me or right around the corner, ready to brain me with a cobblestone or the butt end of a handgun.” In “A Radio Believes it is Singing this Song,” Wallace offers a compelling version of surrealism:
A river looks up at
the sun – I am fire,
says the river, I am
the mountain in my own
belly, rumbling stone
by miraculous stone
to the sea.
Mira! says the river –
Mother, look at me!
But the rain has no eyes
True to the surrealist technique, Wallace offers the images without commentary or interpretation, but they are compelling enough on their own to suggest a depth of meaning hiding just out of sight. American poets rarely get this close to the spirit of the European avant-garde.
While Wallace’s poems are often fascinating, frenetic machines made out of words, they are also often quite moving. A few of the poems are, given the avant-garde nature of much of the collection, surprisingly personal. There are several very powerful poems about the poet’s father. In “My Father’s Felt Fedora,” he says “I am trying to explain things / I will never understand,” a very apt job description for the poet who explores his own childhood. In “A La Vecchia Caverna” and “A Canoe Full of Monkeys,” Wallace explores early and painful sexual experiences in a way that might be called “confessional” but that avoids the narcissistic pitfalls that such work often falls into. The poems are so emotionally effective because they are not entirely self-centered. “They spoke Italian down by the boathouse, / When I was little I mean,” begins the former poem. It is striking that he makes himself almost an afterthought as he begins a poem that reveals some significant emotional scarring. In “A Canoe Full of Monkeys” the painful memory of being callously used sexually by an older girl is conveyed without melodrama and with a vivid setting of scene and description of experience – “I never tasted beer before / it was like a Saint Christopher medal / in my mouth” –that throws the emotion into high relief. This is Homeric technique and very effective.
As anyone who has ever listened to Charlie Parker knows, improvisation is not the opposite of artful craftsmanship. Wallace’s improvisational style might distract from his compositional skill, but if one looks closer, it is easy to see that Wallace knows what he is doing. Consider this artful line break from “We Burned our Way to Nowheresville”: “a moment when time stops / worrying about itself[.]” The movement from line to line reverses the meaning so that the poem gestures in two directions almost simultaneously. This kind of technical skill enlivens the poems throughout this book. Wallace also knows how to use metaphor and simile to generate compelling, emotionally resonant imagery. Take, for example, these lines from the same poem:
. . . and she swung me in her arms
like a cradle, like a grave, like we were two
shipwrecked sailors swinging in the bottomless
pit of the same empty sea[.]
The images of the cradle and of the grave subtly and effectively color the image of the
deep sea, making the picture more vivid. Wallace’s improvisational style may suggest that he is shooting from the hip, but he obviously has put in the hours of target practice necessary to develop deadly aim.
Like his beat predecessors, Wallace follows Whitman in a poetics of inclusiveness. The allusions in these poems range from Camus to Elmer Fudd. There is an astute elegy for Prince. Several poems are more political in subject matter. There are fast cars, blues musicians, hapless poets, lovers, and drunks. This is a meaty collection but tightly cohesive in its improvisational spirit. It is the rare volume of poetry that will appeal equally to the guys in the classic car club and to the scholars of the avant-garde in the local English department.
Benjamin Myers is the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and the author of two books of poetry: Lapse Americana (New York Quarterly Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems may be read in The Yale Review, 32 Poems, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Image and other journals. He has been honored with an Oklahoma Book Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book and with a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His prose appears in World Literature Today, Books and Culture and other magazines. Myers teaches poetry writing and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature.