Reviews
August 2018
Reading Queer: Poetry in a Time of Chaos
Maureen Seaton & Neil de la Flor, editors
Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, Florida
ISBN: 978-1-934695-52-4
Reviewed 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, Florida
ISBN: 978-1-934695-52-4
Reviewed 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
Reviewed 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
Reviewed 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.
Guest Reviews
Voices in the Air, Poems for Listeners
by Naomi Shihab Nye
an introduction by the author.
Green Willow/HarperCollins. 208 pages.
Reviewed 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.
Reviewed 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.)
Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom
by Rebecca Aronson
Review 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
Review 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.
Irish Poets Plus Beer a Hit at The Betsy Hotel - By Chauncey Mabe
A review of an O, Miami Poetry Festival reading on April 27, 2018
“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
“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
February 2018
Falling Landscape
by Silvia Curbelo
Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, Florida
ISBN-978-1-934695-42-5
Reviewed 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
Reviewed 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.
SCRIBBLED IN THE DARK
by Charles Simic
Reviewed 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
Reviewed 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.
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
by Chen Chen
Reviewed by Susannah Simpson
Welcome to the Simple and Complex Universe according to Chen Chen. This well-deserved prizewinning book: When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is indeed a tour de force. It treats heartache and humility with both a surgeon's precision and a poet's tenderness, and if the reader is capable of radical honesty, these poems read like the inner workings of our own hearts. Chen Chen's work is surprising and provocative on the page, but read aloud these poems, through his stylized use of anaphora, unfold and blossom as the reader becomes witness to musings, regret, teenage angst, and familial disappointment.
Many of these poems are witness to the classic tale of one choosing to be true to one’s authentic self and the hand wringing, the dashed hopes of mothers and fathers who see their progeny embarking on a less than “acceptable” and perhaps “tragic” trajectory. Art school, dance troupe, live theater, or in this case, acknowledging being gay, and becoming a poet. “In Search of the Least Abandoned Constellation” the self-absorbed parents of the speaker bemoan: How will our child be a doctor/or lawyer now? Support us when we are old?
In the poem “First Light” the poet unmasks a household where the speaker was not just a disappointment, but worse, a pariah. Here the reader is witness to violence and name calling:
What do I remember of crying? When my mother slapped me
For being dirty, diseased, led astray by Western devils, dirty, bad son
I cried. Thirteen, already too old
Too male for crying.
Then he breaks open our hearts with permanent banishment from the father: when my father said Get out, never come back/ I cried & ran. Threw myself into night. In addition to breaking open our hearts, Chen Chen grants us accessibility and even permission to consider our own foibles and nasty thoughts. For example, in “Ode to My Envy”: I am envious of jealous God & those who always know/ the difference between envy & Jealousy. Here of course, the poet is transparent in his pettiness, so we are afforded an opportunity to recognize our own dirty little secret, one we share with Chen Chen, for after all, he is correct, who really knows the difference between envy and jealousy? Does anyone really know the difference? And if they do, don’t we just hate them a little? Could T.S. Eliot have imagined farts as a likely topic for a poem? Probably not, but Bukowski, Ginsberg, and most assuredly Whitman could agree that fart is an acceptable, perhaps even worthy choice. If the subject matter weren’t so tender, one might find an impulse to laugh out loud, but in “Poplar Street” the poet confesses:
I am afraid of death. I am afraid of farting around people I love.
Does your mother still love you when you fart?
Does your mother love you all the time? Do you ever doubt?
Chen Chen is not using the term “fart” as provocateur, or using naughty words for the naughtiness of them, instead he reveals a very human frailty and asks the question we all, in our heart of hearts, ask: Are we lovable when we are wholly human? Can a mother love a flawed creature? And who, or what is to be cherished? This thematic thread runs through a majority of his poems and though we are witness to much heartache, there plenty here to celebrate. For example, the speaker in “Song with a Lyric from Allan Ginsberg” delights in nature and what is natural:
…Can you believe the trees,
Out our bedroom window, what a turn on, nature,
even in winter, no “I don’t think the earth ever stops/
being alive, just ask Allan or his boyfriend Walt
or anyone who’s had an orgasm or two.
The poet reminds us that our sexual selves are as much a part of nature as the trees, and although there is a poetic tradition to lavish praise on trees in the autumn, or trees full blown in spring, he suggests we can find beauty and grace even in the stark and leafless. One cannot read Chen Chen without being charmed by his sense of the absurd. The poet’s observations in “Elegy for My Sadness” produce unlikely pairings which, as they are planted, make perfect sense:
I want to be a sweetheart in every moment
Full of goats and xylophones, as charming
as a hill with a small village on it.
I want to be a village filled with sweethearts
In addition to his sheer versatility, this poet offers us elevated language redolent with childlike awe. “In Search of the Least Abandoned Constellation” he describes the train as:
the train is an accordion
the train is a giant ant
wearing an exoskeleton
So here is a poet who speaks of “farting” and yet many of Chen Chen’s poems portray a speaker who is also a spiritual seeker. For how can one chastise God, write letters to and about God, unless one is seeking some kind of a non-god to rail against? And who among us, if we have flailed around the idea of worship, faith, or religious practice, has not wrestled with the existence of a higher being. If we are capable of the same level of honesty as the poet, who has not found themselves muttering humble foxhole prayers, just in case?
Perhaps Chen Chen is most transparent is his penultimate poem “A Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls”: I remember what a writer friend of mine once said to me, all you write about/ is being gay or Chinese---how I can’t get over that, & wonder if It’s true…
We can assure the poet: Clearly, that person wasn’t truly a friend and, no, it isn’t all you write about.
by Chen Chen
Reviewed by Susannah Simpson
Welcome to the Simple and Complex Universe according to Chen Chen. This well-deserved prizewinning book: When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities is indeed a tour de force. It treats heartache and humility with both a surgeon's precision and a poet's tenderness, and if the reader is capable of radical honesty, these poems read like the inner workings of our own hearts. Chen Chen's work is surprising and provocative on the page, but read aloud these poems, through his stylized use of anaphora, unfold and blossom as the reader becomes witness to musings, regret, teenage angst, and familial disappointment.
Many of these poems are witness to the classic tale of one choosing to be true to one’s authentic self and the hand wringing, the dashed hopes of mothers and fathers who see their progeny embarking on a less than “acceptable” and perhaps “tragic” trajectory. Art school, dance troupe, live theater, or in this case, acknowledging being gay, and becoming a poet. “In Search of the Least Abandoned Constellation” the self-absorbed parents of the speaker bemoan: How will our child be a doctor/or lawyer now? Support us when we are old?
In the poem “First Light” the poet unmasks a household where the speaker was not just a disappointment, but worse, a pariah. Here the reader is witness to violence and name calling:
What do I remember of crying? When my mother slapped me
For being dirty, diseased, led astray by Western devils, dirty, bad son
I cried. Thirteen, already too old
Too male for crying.
Then he breaks open our hearts with permanent banishment from the father: when my father said Get out, never come back/ I cried & ran. Threw myself into night. In addition to breaking open our hearts, Chen Chen grants us accessibility and even permission to consider our own foibles and nasty thoughts. For example, in “Ode to My Envy”: I am envious of jealous God & those who always know/ the difference between envy & Jealousy. Here of course, the poet is transparent in his pettiness, so we are afforded an opportunity to recognize our own dirty little secret, one we share with Chen Chen, for after all, he is correct, who really knows the difference between envy and jealousy? Does anyone really know the difference? And if they do, don’t we just hate them a little? Could T.S. Eliot have imagined farts as a likely topic for a poem? Probably not, but Bukowski, Ginsberg, and most assuredly Whitman could agree that fart is an acceptable, perhaps even worthy choice. If the subject matter weren’t so tender, one might find an impulse to laugh out loud, but in “Poplar Street” the poet confesses:
I am afraid of death. I am afraid of farting around people I love.
Does your mother still love you when you fart?
Does your mother love you all the time? Do you ever doubt?
Chen Chen is not using the term “fart” as provocateur, or using naughty words for the naughtiness of them, instead he reveals a very human frailty and asks the question we all, in our heart of hearts, ask: Are we lovable when we are wholly human? Can a mother love a flawed creature? And who, or what is to be cherished? This thematic thread runs through a majority of his poems and though we are witness to much heartache, there plenty here to celebrate. For example, the speaker in “Song with a Lyric from Allan Ginsberg” delights in nature and what is natural:
…Can you believe the trees,
Out our bedroom window, what a turn on, nature,
even in winter, no “I don’t think the earth ever stops/
being alive, just ask Allan or his boyfriend Walt
or anyone who’s had an orgasm or two.
The poet reminds us that our sexual selves are as much a part of nature as the trees, and although there is a poetic tradition to lavish praise on trees in the autumn, or trees full blown in spring, he suggests we can find beauty and grace even in the stark and leafless. One cannot read Chen Chen without being charmed by his sense of the absurd. The poet’s observations in “Elegy for My Sadness” produce unlikely pairings which, as they are planted, make perfect sense:
I want to be a sweetheart in every moment
Full of goats and xylophones, as charming
as a hill with a small village on it.
I want to be a village filled with sweethearts
In addition to his sheer versatility, this poet offers us elevated language redolent with childlike awe. “In Search of the Least Abandoned Constellation” he describes the train as:
the train is an accordion
the train is a giant ant
wearing an exoskeleton
So here is a poet who speaks of “farting” and yet many of Chen Chen’s poems portray a speaker who is also a spiritual seeker. For how can one chastise God, write letters to and about God, unless one is seeking some kind of a non-god to rail against? And who among us, if we have flailed around the idea of worship, faith, or religious practice, has not wrestled with the existence of a higher being. If we are capable of the same level of honesty as the poet, who has not found themselves muttering humble foxhole prayers, just in case?
Perhaps Chen Chen is most transparent is his penultimate poem “A Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls”: I remember what a writer friend of mine once said to me, all you write about/ is being gay or Chinese---how I can’t get over that, & wonder if It’s true…
We can assure the poet: Clearly, that person wasn’t truly a friend and, no, it isn’t all you write about.
November 2017
The Analyst by Molly Peacock
Reviewed 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.
Reviewed 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.
M.J. Iuppa
Small Worlds Floating
Cherry Grove Collections, Cincinnati, Ohio
ISBN: 9781625491916
Reviewed 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.
Small Worlds Floating
Cherry Grove Collections, Cincinnati, Ohio
ISBN: 9781625491916
Reviewed 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
Reviewed 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.
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
Reviewed 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
thighs…
…Come Sunday, the saving of daylight
will no longer matter.
If I photograph the light, maybe you
will no longer matter.
I grab my camera and shoot the dawn
from the roof of our building.
Catch you slipping out the lobby.
My world goes dark without you.
The world of Enter Here never goes dark. From start to finish, we have met characters and shared their poignant moments. We’ve leaned in, strained to hear bits of forbidden conversation, looked when we shouldn’t, but it’s never gratuitous, and ultimately, we walk away knowing we’ve been taken on a beautiful, touching, and mysterious journey, one we won’t soon forget.
KYSO Flash Press, Seattle, Washington
ISBN: 978-0-9862703-7-6
Reviewed 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
thighs…
…Come Sunday, the saving of daylight
will no longer matter.
If I photograph the light, maybe you
will no longer matter.
I grab my camera and shoot the dawn
from the roof of our building.
Catch you slipping out the lobby.
My world goes dark without you.
The world of Enter Here never goes dark. From start to finish, we have met characters and shared their poignant moments. We’ve leaned in, strained to hear bits of forbidden conversation, looked when we shouldn’t, but it’s never gratuitous, and ultimately, we walk away knowing we’ve been taken on a beautiful, touching, and mysterious journey, one we won’t soon forget.
Scald by Denise Duhamel
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
$15.95, 112 pages
ISBN: 9780822964506
Reviewed 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.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017
$15.95, 112 pages
ISBN: 9780822964506
Reviewed 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
Reviewed 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.
Reviewed 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
Reviewed by Francine Witte
Reviewed 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.
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
Deadly Aim from the Hip: A Review of George Wallace's
A Simple Blues with a Few Intangibles
by Benjamin 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.
May 2016
A Very Funny Fellow, by Donald Lev
By Gary Kay, SoFloPoJo Associate Editor
Fair Ball
Fair ball. Hit into the beautiful sky then
falling into play.
In the stands are crowds of onlookers drawn
from sweetest imagination.
As the third baseman scoops the ball up and
Speeds it to its destination--
The peanuts in the air, the lager, the boiling franks--
Where can I go with this?
In this poem, Donald Lev does a fine job of describing the pleasures of an afternoon at the ball park-- the ball aloft in the sky, the onlookers watching with “sweetest imagination,” the third baseman skillfully speeding the ball to its destination, and the typical ball park food. Yet the poem ends on the surprising line: “Where can I go with this?” This is a question that the restless and crafty Lev keeps answering in numerous ways, often with great success.
But not always.
In several poems, Lev shares with the reader, ironically and playfully, the difficulties of creating the poem he is in the act of writing. In “Birdsnest,” for example, the nest is described blandly as “a rather large one.” Then Lev adds with mock humility that it is “as precise an observation as I am capable of,” and that it “has now become visible as the snow melts.” Perhaps, he offers, he should leave it, Haiku-like at that. But he chooses not to, and calls it “a flawed symbol of spring.” A haiku, however, captures, not symbolizes, a moment. In addition, Lev’s “symbol” is far too smug and cynical.
“Baptism” fails for different reasons. The deflation of the ritual here seems tepid and pointless. The language is flat and prosaic, and the lines “there are treasures hidden at the bottom/if only I could ever reach it” fails to convey any sense of urgency and genuine frustration. For me, the last line is an apt commentary on the poem.
Baptism
I just slid under
waters prepared from the beginning
for me. For only me.
There are treasures hidden at the bottom
if I could only reach it.
I slid under yet here I am
shaking the wet out
and spilling something out on the page
that again misses the point.
Far more successful is “Titanic,” where Lev is on the infamous ship as a character trying to write a poem under cataclysmic circumstances. The humor in this poem is in the way he describes the horrific scene with utter calmness.
Soon I will be crashing headlong into the sea.
My love has already preceded me.
All around is utter chaos.
The lifeboats have been loosed
and the crew is maintaining order
by shooting the more panicked
among the remaining passengers.
The poem ends with an apology and ironic reference to Wordsworth’s definition of poetry: Emotion recollected in tranquility.
So you see I cannot write this down just now:
till I have had the chance to recollect it in tranquility.
I find Lev at his best when he is able to integrate irony, humor and cynicism into some fine, emotionally textured poems. A good example is Carnal Knowledge, a poem of intimacy, humor, and poignancy.
Carnal Knowledge
I watch you through my sincere blue eyes
take off your brassiere
and my mind races like clouds in a windy blue
and I see our children signing papers
to allow us into a nursing home…
How beautiful…how beautiful you are…
I especially enjoy the contrast of knowledge of the flesh with the more painful knowledge of the couples’ eventual infirmity and mortality.
The poem, “My Father,” offers a nuanced, intriguing description of his father’s relationship with his mother and himself. It begins:
I could not see him bait a hook.
Why would he do that to a worm?
Soon we have the father’s gentle side expanded to his genial social behavior.
He might never have baited a hook
but hanging out gregariously on a boat on whatever high sea
was just one of his favorite voyages.
The focus shifts to the father and mother, who good naturedly “piss each other off.” It ends on these resonant lines:
…I never saw him bait a hook,
yet he might have: I was never these to see.
“Never” is a fine, energetic poem, dizzying in structure and movement, emotionally compelling from clipped line to clipped line, and in the poet’s frenetic attempt to deny most of what happened.
Never
We never.
I would have remembered. And I don’t.
I remember standing on the beach.
That night. I remember how chilly it was.
But the rest you must have made up.
I wish it were all true. It would be something
like a life. Not a very good one but something.
Sand got in my shoes. I remember that.
I was just wearing what I thought I had to wear
at the office. This was before I lost the job. Or after.
I see green. I see someone dressed in green.
I think that’s enough to recall.
Close the door behind you when you leave.
The last line beautifully concludes the poem, where the woman is told to leave the room, and the speaker is now left with the vivid memories he cannot deny or forget.
Lev’s poetry is equally compelling when he “gets out of his poems” and is able to channel his considerable energy into other characters and create vivid, powerful and poignant
scenes. “ Bowery, Circa 1950,” for example, offers not only a bizarre and chilling portrait of a drunk at a bar, but also the theme of carpe diem with a vengeance.
The ogre who sits inside history
lays his head on the bar and dozes off.
The bartender comes over, pushes his
shoulder to wake him and
pours another waterglass full of Five Star port.
The old monster tries to growl but only
coughs up hunger for a lesson
which he aims at the nearest spittoon, but misses.
“There’ll never be another moment like this
moment,” he weeps. Nobody listens, so he
drains his glass and calls for another.
“Gothic Tale” is also a gem, a poem of subtle contrasts and emotional control. First we have an idyllic setting, followed by the graves of murdered parents. Then the appearance of a rabbit, who hops on a gravestone, then jumps off, free from the human awareness of the surrounding horror and sadness. The focus shifts to the poet and sister, searching for something from nature-- rainclouds, anything that would correspond with their sorrow. Next comes the descent into the emotional center of the grave and death, reflected in “a sour note sounded in the distance/from a soulless trumpeter.” Finally, the emotional release—poet and sister weep like little children, at least free from punishment, but not the deep, abiding sorrow. Another nice touch in this poem is the contrast of the “Gothic” tale with the simplicity of the language.
Gothic Tale
Golden sunlight was passing over
the little green field
with the lovely flowers
and the graves of
murdered parents.
A rabbit hopped onto one of the gravestones
and sat there a few seconds before bounding off.
My sister and I searched the sky for rainclouds
which we did not find.
Anything would have brought relief.
But a sour note sounded in the distance
from a soulless trumpeter.
And we began to weep like children
who were, after all, not to be punished.
In “The Window,” the last poem of the book, Lev playfully begins with his need for
a telescope to peer into the
night sky with
to look for moons or comets or
astrally projected floaters
or maybe see who’s
undressing in the window
across the road…
The poem moves from the immensity of the sky and stars, to the woman undressing, to his
seriously neglected yard
like my sluggish imagination
like my boxloads of books and neuroses.
In many of the poems in this book, Donald Lev makes fine use of his “sluggish imagination” and neuroses, real or aesthetically manufactured, to composes crafty, witty, surprising and engaging poems, and to show that not only is he “ A Very Funny Fellow,” but, at his best, also a very fine poet.