South Florida Poetry Journal's staff reviewers choose the books they want to review. Neither management nor editors assign books to review.
Poets & Writers, however, has a list of journals that consider reviews. Click here to go there.
Poets & Writers, however, has a list of journals that consider reviews. Click here to go there.
Michael Hettich is SoFloPoJo's Official Reviewer. SoFloPoJo does not assign books for Michael to review. Rather, he chooses the collections he wants to review.
November 2022
Guest Reviews
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ON THE LEVEL: POEMS ON LIVING WITH MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS by Bryan R. Monte
Review by Jen Karetnick Circling Rivers hardcover | US $25.99 120 pages | 6 x 9 in. | Publication date: November 15, 2022 Cover art: Gelb-Rot-Blau (Yellow-Red-Blue), by Vassily Kandinsky A month before he was assassinated, President John F. Kennedy gave an homage to the late Robert Frost at Amherst College. “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment,” he said in the 1963 speech, which was published the following year in The Atlantic. I was reminded of these lines when reading Bryan R. Monte’s new book, On the Level: Poems on Living with Multiple Sclerosis. Disability does all the same things poetry does: It reminds you of your limitations. It reminds you of the richness and diversity of existence. And it cleanses. Oh, how it cleanses. On the Level begins with a poetic glossary, “The ABCS of Multiple Sclerosis,” that acts an epigraph for the entire collection as well as an alphabetical introduction for the reader. A combination of symptoms, tests, medical terms, and definitions for the lay speaker, the poem sets up expectations for the rest of the manuscript. To that end, it warns readers that the speaker will pull no punches: “S is for Sex, Spasticity, and Sphincter problems, for Spinal cord and tap examinations and for Symptoms I quit counting after my Sixth year That’s only for starters. Throughout the book, you’ll hear about Botox shots in the rectum, “flames flicking my groin and anus,” “the sensation of a hot nail driven through his penis during sex,” and the “MS plug,” a type of unrelievable constipation. If these lines sound salacious or titillating, they shouldn’t. They should sound terrifying, because they’re real, and humbling, and together they partly comprise what life is like every single day—the aforementioned limitations—for the speaker. Written in five sections, On the Level offers a comprehensive look at this debilitating disease, from reflection on genetic causes to speculation on environmental factors and possibilities of a cure. Throughout, the speaker also compares having unrelenting and progressive MS to HIV and the AIDS epidemic, which took his friends and lovers but spared him, as he writes in “The Law of the Conservation of Anxiety:” “The irony of running for thirty-five years from one unknown, incurable disease that killed two dozen friends and two partners only to be caught by another” What the book doesn’t do is climb into self-pity. Instead, Monte keeps his focus on what helps him—the richness and diversity of his existence—which includes continuing to work, write, travel, and practice religion. In “Glasgow Meeting,” he writes, “I think of the strangers / next to me who are Friends / as I center down” and he feels his symptoms briefly abate. He also trusts his time at pool therapy, as he writes in “This House of Disabled People,” where he feels “safe” as well as “able and complete.” In addition, he allows himself some poetic rants, which cleanse him. In the successive poems, “No One Ever Asks” and “Nobody,” the reader learns about how it feels to be seen as both invisible and an imposition― in buildings, at events, and on public transportation. The erasure of disability is, in fact, a common theme throughout the book that Monte makes tangible through insistence and repetition, both thematically and stylistically. He illustrates his complaints effectively, especially when others are taking up disabled spaces when they shouldn’t, as in “There Is a Difference:” “There is a difference between being tired and being disabled, between being pregnant and being disabled, between being a mother with young children and being disabled. I would gladly use the front door and stand for you, if I could, but I can’t, so you should.” As the narrator’s illness progresses and his symptoms worsen, the poems relate wheelchair accidents and indignities in various countries from the United States to Amsterdam to Italy, friends and colleagues who can’t control their shock at his appearance, homophobic family members, and a greatly reduced income. In “Moonfaced Man,” he writes about saying goodbye to his former self, who had a more glamorous existence, and hello to his current self, who lives with “low ceilings and heating bills, / smaller windows, darker rooms, / and the river rush of ventilators and unseen traffic.” There are moments of sweetness in this final section as well. In “Homecoming,” which is the name of the section as well, he writes, “I sit in the shade in the town square’s café, drink a frothy coffee, eat a sweet and tart lemon chicken and avocado sandwich, feel a cool, lake breeze caress my face and finally know where I will rest.” And in “Trento,” another poem set in Italy, where he went to trace his family tree, he writes, “How could I not love you and your marble sidewalks in the old town center over which my wheelchair rolls almost effortlessly” But both narrator and the empathetic reader seem to knows these moments of reprieve are a panacea. In the penultimate poem, “One Room,” Monte relates how, “after forty years and twenty addresses,” his life has shrunk down to four walls just the way his paternal grandmother’s did, referring back to one of the opening poems. And while there is acceptance in the lines, there is also still a hunger, as he writes, “for food and someone’s touch.” On the Level isn’t an easy book to read. Nor should it be. But for those whose ablism make them lean toward power, arrogance, and corruption—and also those who are part of the disability community and relate to this intimate, defiant look at a complex disease—it’s a necessary one. Jen Karetnick's fourth full-length book is the 2021 CIPA EVVY Gold Medal winner The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020). Her work has won the Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, the Deering Estate, Maryland Transit Administration, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Cutthroat, Hamilton Stone Review, Missouri Review Poem of the Day, Notre Dame Review, The Penn Review, Ruminate, Tar River Poetry, Terrain.org, The Worcester Review, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com. |
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Notes from the Column of Memory by Wendy Drexler
Terrapin Books, 2022. $17. Review by Peter Bates Some poets never peak. Leonard Cohen never did. And unlike those who churned out clunkers late in life—William Wordsworth with Ecclesiastical Sonnets (at 52) or Bob Dylan with Together Through Life (at 68) —Wendy Drexler shows no sign of peaking. Through her latest volume, it’s clear she continues to improve her poetry in metaphoric complexity and thematic scope. Her first book, Drive-in, Gas Stations, the Bright Motels was a kind of poetic memoir of her childhood. It captured the quirkiness of her family through humor and poignancy. Before There Was Before delved into self-reflection, focused on guilt, and used experimental techniques like dramatic hard-hitting endings. An amateur photographer herself, she also began writing about photography, ruminating on its imagery and implications. The poems in this book show she continues to explore. Its eighty-nine pages orbit many subjects: the natural world, her mother and father, the mundane (a gas fill-up, a chance meeting, a traffic jam), and much more. In several poems, Drexler shows her fondness for using animals as extended metaphors. This is an apt fit, because she’s a passionate advocate for nature conservancy. She co-authored a children’s book about urban Peregrine falcons (Buzz, Ruby, and Their City Chicks). In the first part of “At Intermission,” she runs into her ex-husband at a concert and he doesn’t recognize her. It’s an embarrassing and puzzling moment for both. I wondered if I was to apologize, a joke, then, about my hair, to relieve my shame, or to relieve him of his? Was I to giggle, do a little dance? The sobering and irrefutable music of the wife I’d been strumming through me. In the second part, she muses about the Romas of Bulgaria, who kept dancing bears that weren’t allowed to hibernate. When they were released, they finally got to hibernate, but upon waking they …didn’t know what to do. They began to stand on two legs. They began to rock back and forth and side to side. They began to dance. This device is so successful, she uses it several times, but with some variations. “Thinking About the Octopus,” inspired by the film My Octopus Teacher, seeks a homology between the cephalopods and humans, “that common grammar, that syntax of salt and stars.” “Galapagos Tortoise” tells of the mass slaughtering of this animal. She concludes with a line about her grandmother’s unwitting collusion as she delights in her new tortoiseshell comb. “When she wore it in her hair,” Drexler archly notes, “the reddish-brown flames caught the light.” Sometimes her metaphors are not obvious, making their detection challenging, like solving a puzzle. Drexler plunks us into the room of a poem and we’re left to wander its unannotated walls by ourselves. But as in Alice in Wonderland, we may have trouble reaching the key. “Calling in the Grosbeak” is one of these. Drexler attends a birdwatch and the guide “lures the bird with a recording of the grosbeak’s own song.” The bird appears, “furious with cause and claim” and is visibly upset. Nevertheless, Drexler exults: “now I’ve got him in my scope—the ivory beak, the scarlet breast/like a wound.” We readers congratulate ourselves for noticing Drexler’s clever visual simile. The grosbeak’s rose breast really does look like blood. Not so fast, cowpokes. It took me three readings to unveil the stronger metaphor. The deception is the wound. Like this poor bird, we have all been slashed by lies. As Octave says to Christine in Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939): “Today everybody lies. Pharmaceutical fliers, governments, the radio, the movies, the newspapers. So why shouldn’t simple people lie as well?” [Note: Most Audubon guides shun calling in birds with recordings.] My award for the cleverest poem in the collection is “To Prove That I Am Not a Robot.” Drexler skillfully uses time-honored anaphora as a stiletto dagger, sharp on both edges and on point. First she lampoons one of the Internet’s most annoying security tests, the I-am-not-a-robot form. Unless you’re living in a cocoon, you’ve encountered it. She starts off whimsically: I check off three mountains. I check off three crosswalks painted gold. I check off fourteen images of tsunami waves. Then she sharpens her blade to social-satiric acuity. I check off twenty-five states with new voting restrictions. I check off the last known addresses of six million unfixed lead service lines. It gets even better. But you’ll have to buy the book to find out how much. In 1935 the radical aesthetician Christopher Caudwell wrote that “Poetry is clotted social history, the emotional sweat of man’s struggle with Nature.” Although there is much social history in Drexler’s poems, I believe they transcend Caudwell’s outdated definition. I think of them more like dried mango slices: some sweet, some sour, substantial, multi-textural, and long-lasting in the mouth. So the next time you get a pharmaceutical flier in the mail, toss it aside and pick up Drexler’s Notes from the Column of Memory. The front cover is prettier, and there’s probably be more truth in it. Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Notes from the Column of Memory, was published by Terrapin Books in September 2022. Previous collections include Before There Was Before (Iris Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Solstice, South Florida Poetry Review, Sugar House, The Atlanta Review, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Threepenny Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in numerous anthologies. She’s been the poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, since 2018, and is programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club. Her website is wendydrexlerpoetry.com Peter Bates has published poetry, interviews, short stories, book reviews, and journalism. He is also a photographer and videographer. He’s aimed his camera in Europe, New York, Cambridge, Boston, Lynn, Tampa, and throughout Florida. He has worked as a power plant tour guide, a vacuum cleaner coroner, a librarian, social worker, film critic, music critic, technical writer, web designer, teacher, and computer consultant. He’s soon to publish the comic memoir Greatest Hits of Junior High: How I Survived Dating, Bullying, & Catholicism. His blog is styluszine.com. |
Gash Atlas, by Jessica Lawson
winner of the Kore Press Institute Poetry Prize selected by Erica Hunt Review by Hesper “I am afraid I don’t have the right to record any of this. It’s a privilege to be afraid of only that.” -Corpus, Jessica Lawson The gash is the wound, open and weeping. The gash is the vagina, vulgarly. The vulgar is the common, the everyday, the banal: that which is afforded no mystery, no shrouding veil of privacy. The atlas is the book of maps and illustrations. The Atlas is the architectural man, upholding certain buildings and temples. Pushcart-nominated poet Jessica Lawson’s debut Gash Atlas combines all of these definitions: it is the chronicle of the injuries sustained in the bearing of a vagina in this world, it is an illustration of how men uphold and are upheld by a society that is all too willing to erase the paths it has taken and the wounds it has inflicted. It offers a map of the intersections of violence: how misogyny hurts the womb-bearing body, how being complicit in oppression damages the accomplice even as they benefit from it. The first poem in Gash Atlas is our compass for all that follows: Recurring character Christopher Columbus (an alias which reveals more than it conceals, about the Trumps and fathers and cops and bosses that it describes) gloats in his power repeatedly, takes his sexual pleasure not just from the body of the (white) narrator but in describing his victories to her over everything else. Some passages are easy to dismiss as white guilt: “I imagined taking Christopher Columbus from my pores and fat deposits and single chin and double helix” (Part Five, -ectomy), the desire to have this legacy excised, to have the weight so easily taken, but this is only one road chronicled by Gash Atlas, and it is brutally felt, at no point shying away from the part played by the narrator herself: she learned in childhood “a community of language on the backs of bodies darker than ours…Christopher Columbus held my ears open to drink a father’s foul honey…I was learning the limits of my power in the same breaths I learned to forget whose backs this all started on.” To hold both responsibility and damage suffered from that responsibility together in one agonized confession is a nuance often lost in the national conversation about these matters. Without erasing the damage done by the social temple of privilege upheld by its Atlas, Gash Atlas considers those who are raised in that temple, stained with others’ blood in order to serve as an ornament to the power of the Titans who raised it. Is it truly privilege, for a white woman to escape a cop’s attention by allowing him to sexually assault her? Is it truly privilege that her wounds, her vagina, her gashes are common business? But is it not the height of privilege to live on the graves of others? Is it not privilege, to attend Christopher Columbus in the height of his victory, to be the subject of educated discussion and high academia, to receive the estimation of your peers for your pain? Is it really privilege for everyone to assume they know who raped you, and miss the real culprit completely? For violence against your most intimate being to afford no privacy? Is it not privilege, when you are insulated from violence by the way you are taught that your victims are gone, were never victims at all? To be the object of the white-male Christopher Columbus gaze brings with it both power and the most abject victimization. To be an ornament to power is still to be an object. The psychological conflict between awareness of victimization and awareness of complicity renders Gash Atlas a difficult, but absolutely compelling negotiation of navigation in an America finally coming to reckon with its geography of bodies. It is a difficult read, but one that will jar your thinking off of easy, well-worn roads and into the new challenges of intersectional justice. It is a map we sorely need. Jessica Lawson is a writer, teacher, and activist. Her debut book of poetry, Gash Atlas, was selected by judge Erica Hunt for the Lore press Institute Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Rot Contracts was published in 2020 byTrouble Department. Her work on the page, in the classroom, and in the world emphasizes literary experiment asa tool for community-building. |
Household Gods by Bonnie Proudfoot
Commentary by Michael Mackin O'Mara
The first thing Household Gods told me was to slow down. In the book’s first poem,
time is elastic. “Then” and “now” are two dogs facing each other, snapping at a Flamenco
dancer’s heels:
“El Tiempo”
“We are three generations
a distance that disappears viewing Goya, El Greco.
Imagine an ocean passage…”
One moment the speaker is in El Prado or El Parque Retiro and the next in a crowded cold-
water walk-up in Queens as this poem continues and testifies to the “otherness” experienced by
each new wave of immigration to the U.S.:
“’If anyone asks what you are,’ my mother instructs,
‘tell them you are American.’ I try. Strangers
see right through that…”
If there is any odd comfort in the “swell and throb” that’s shared and passed from generation
to generation, in the “hold tight” of simultaneous multi-generational exhilaration, it is quickly
stripped away in
“Superpowers”
“… And I know that the odds are good
that life will betray them, that their bodies will betray them,
that winning flashes off and on like a Lotto sign, and that I,
who at age six, dressed up to trick or treat as a Parliament
flip top box, all white and blue and glowing, I will
betray them, too…”
How fitting and right that a poem beginning with “Once / upon a time” catalogs a child’s
attempts to escape, observe, understand, cope:
“Once”
“In Scrabble, R is one point,
A is one point, G is two points and E is one point:
it’s only a five-point word, so small
but it fits everywhere on the board…”
With these three opening poems, the stage is set. A couple of dozen more gems of give and take
follow.
In Elegy for Kitty Genovese the poet asks:
“What if we fail each other,
more times than we know, and in more ways than we know?
What if to speak means to open a wound, a knot of rage and grief?”
We are invited to pause within poems of rage and grief, poems of powerless inaction, of uprooted
history, of witness, and poems of tenacious fortitude that look at you steadily with their one good eye
and quietly insist in an old-world meets the five boroughs voice: I’m talking here.
SoFloPoJo is proud to have published poems included in this wonderful collection.
time is elastic. “Then” and “now” are two dogs facing each other, snapping at a Flamenco
dancer’s heels:
“El Tiempo”
“We are three generations
a distance that disappears viewing Goya, El Greco.
Imagine an ocean passage…”
One moment the speaker is in El Prado or El Parque Retiro and the next in a crowded cold-
water walk-up in Queens as this poem continues and testifies to the “otherness” experienced by
each new wave of immigration to the U.S.:
“’If anyone asks what you are,’ my mother instructs,
‘tell them you are American.’ I try. Strangers
see right through that…”
If there is any odd comfort in the “swell and throb” that’s shared and passed from generation
to generation, in the “hold tight” of simultaneous multi-generational exhilaration, it is quickly
stripped away in
“Superpowers”
“… And I know that the odds are good
that life will betray them, that their bodies will betray them,
that winning flashes off and on like a Lotto sign, and that I,
who at age six, dressed up to trick or treat as a Parliament
flip top box, all white and blue and glowing, I will
betray them, too…”
How fitting and right that a poem beginning with “Once / upon a time” catalogs a child’s
attempts to escape, observe, understand, cope:
“Once”
“In Scrabble, R is one point,
A is one point, G is two points and E is one point:
it’s only a five-point word, so small
but it fits everywhere on the board…”
With these three opening poems, the stage is set. A couple of dozen more gems of give and take
follow.
In Elegy for Kitty Genovese the poet asks:
“What if we fail each other,
more times than we know, and in more ways than we know?
What if to speak means to open a wound, a knot of rage and grief?”
We are invited to pause within poems of rage and grief, poems of powerless inaction, of uprooted
history, of witness, and poems of tenacious fortitude that look at you steadily with their one good eye
and quietly insist in an old-world meets the five boroughs voice: I’m talking here.
SoFloPoJo is proud to have published poems included in this wonderful collection.
August 2022
Guest Review
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--reviewed by Judy Ireland
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A Review of Togetherness, poetry by Wo Chan.
available September 13, 2022 from Nightboat Books
available September 13, 2022 from Nightboat Books
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The first time I met Wo Chan, they came running down the train station ramp with arms wide open, ready for an embrace. That image returned to me as I read Togetherness, Wo Chan’s debut poetry collection from Nightboat Books, to be published in September of 2022. The poems in this collection embody energy and movement, and an openness to the world that is nothing less than heroic.
Togetherness includes epistolary poems, prose poems, and poems addressed to nature. By alternating these forms throughout the collection, the reader continually returns to what feels familiar, then finds that something has changed. The result: delight and surprise. The collection as a whole is about family, friendship, and forgiveness, but it’s also about being queer and about a relentless fear and anger at an immigration system that has no regard for human beings, their feelings, and their histories. There is humor in these poems, but there is also pain and exhaustion. There is Rimbaudian candor, and at other times, great delicacy. In “@nature, you are loved,” the orchids “…learn to live / neighborly by // that breadmuncher staunch at the window frame, / learn to live a restructured, buttery life.” Then the question is asked, “…why don’t // they feel ever // the right to be here?” The question is followed by the speaker observing that “(sometimes my body feels like outdoor furniture someone loosens all the screws to / secretly / overnight)”. Chan creates new words in this poem, repeats the “uh” sound, uses an offbeat simile – all in quick succession, and that deft handling of serious topics and true-to-life imagery is characteristic of many of the poems in this book. The reality TV show Chopped provides fodder for several poems, one of which ends with tears for the speaker’s mother. ….Tell me chef, who are you competing for today? Your fingers grip around the handle of your cleaver, a deep breath: I’M COMPETING TODAY TO HONOR MY MOTHER, WHO SHOWED ME WHAT SACRIFICE AND LOVE COULD LOOK LIKE THROUGH HER UNFORGETTABLE COOKING AND LIFE. AT THE WORD “LIFE,” you tilt your head up on cue and rock your blade quietly into the heft of a red onion. Then you remember your mother is still alive. A tear slides down your face. Another poem, “August Moments,” is a letter to the speaker’s mother. …just by the accident of our blood, I feel lovely. I love you, flowers, clouds, and language very, very much. (of course like language, i love you – like language, i barely know you. In a poem entitled “the habits of your life simply become your life,” friendship becomes the thing that answers one’s needs. After asking, “what can friendship do for us?”, the speaker observes that the faces of friends “are clear / shadows cast across the bottom of the pond on the bright, slow day.” The speaker finds that “the old depression has not touched me the same way….” The family restaurant is an important location in a number of the poems, and “Tender Buffet” is a long poem about working in the restaurant, the patrons and their families, and the speaker’s own family. The food and its ingredients are described in detail that is both rich and telling, and abundantly full of wordplay. The title of the collection appears in a phenomenal poem entitled, “i’m so glad i got to see you.” The speaker has met another person at a pie shop, and they observe: “what are all the words we know? let’s piece it together. / our mothers are intelligent; papers have us isolated; togetherness / can be brutal. yet we need it….” At the end of the poem, the speaker admits, “…i’m scared of my desire /…for closeness to the people that a genuine feeling can hurt.” The joy and the vulnerability in this poem are moving and real. The final poem in Togetherness is a perfect end to something that is neverending. In “the smiley barista remembers my name,” the speaker is surprised to find themselves eating the same sandwich every week, and questions how they have come to love routine. Then there is a moment where the speaker says, “…’i forgive you’ slipping / like a key beneath a door, where never was a house attached.” Finally, we are told, “This is not a feeling. This can be, I think, a conversation.” There’s much to talk about in Wo Chan’s work, much to love, and much to look forward to in future poems that are yet to be written by this beautiful poet. Togetherness is word art, a gift given to us by a very generous poet. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Togetherness will be available September 13, 2022 from Nightboat Books and distributed by Consortium: www.cbsd.com. Wo Chan is a non-binary poet and drag artist who performs as The Illustrious Pearl, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Find them at @theillustriouspearl. |
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May 2022
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Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poems,
The Mica Mine, won the Lena Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. A book of new and selected poems in forthcoming in 2023 from Press 53. |
The Light that Leaks from the Darkness: A Review of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, by Yi Won.
Translated from the Korean by EJ Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Zephyr Press, 2021. $16
--reviewed by Michael Hettich
Perhaps more than at any other time, the poetry of the past hundred years―at least in
English―has been influenced by works in translation. While this has been mostly a good thing,
opening our poetry to a far wider range of sensibilities and imaginative discourse than would
have been otherwise available, it might also be said to have flattened the aural landscape of
poetry in English, as so many young poets have trained their ears on poems coming to them
essentially second-hand. It may be true that, as Valery said, a true poet is “strictly
untranslatable,” and as Robert Frost famously quipped, poetry is precisely what gets lost in
translation. It is certainly true that, just as the best poetry resists paraphrase, so too does it resist
translation. The spirit of poetry lives in its body, and its body is composed of its natal words and
syntax. To quote the poet and wide-ranging translator W.S. Merwin: the formal elements of
poetry are “embedded in the original language…you’re not going to get the form doing in your
language what it did in the original.” Run-of-the-mill translation, which often attempts to bring
one language into another in some literal manner, can—at best—bring only the merest smidgen
of the original across. The song, the heart, the poem, is lost.
The successful translator, then, captures some ineffable quality of spirit, that quality of
silence that defines what’s heard, that “gaze of being” that shivered the original song and made
its readers shiver in response. Thus, “the translation becomes simultaneously a radical departure
and a radical arrival” (Translators’ Notes), and in the (translated) words of Yi Won, “a common
language in another language.” That is to say that the original poem must be re-visioned into
another original poem, a palimpsest of the first perhaps but a fresh and vivid creation in itself–
one that sings and dances in its own way, with its own unique body, in its adopted/adapted
language. Thus, for obvious reasons, the translation of poetry is best done by those who are
themselves accomplished poets.
Born in 1968, Yi Won grew up in Seoul. Since the early 1990’s, her avant-garde
modernist poetry has been highly-regarded in South Korea. Influenced by visual art, her work is
characterized by its striking, often violent imagery, its Feminism, and its fresh and challenging
treatment of our emerging digital civilization. In the words of her translators, she is a poet who
“combines ancient Buddhist meditations on the human condition with the language of commerce
and technology…[pressing] the limits of meaning through syntax in order to deconstruct and
reconstruct.” In other words, her work is extremely difficult to translate effectively. Happily, her
present translators have largely succeeded in this endeavor. The just-published bi-lingual volume
of her poetry, The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, translated from the Korean by E.J. Koh and
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, is a beautiful book, full of vivid, startling and expertly-rendered
poems, most of which succeed as poems in English. Though many of the tropes and surreal-
influenced images in these poems will be familiar to readers of contemporary poetry, they are
handled here with a vigor and sharpness that makes the prick of their revelations feel new. The
best of these English versions carry a luminous strangeness, and, though thematically grounded,
they deftly resist paraphrase. Which is to say, these poems, virtually all of them, are vigorous and
surprising.
Much of the power of Yi Won’s work lies in poems in which theme, rather than felicity of
phrase or syntax, is foregrounded. This is not to say that poetic devises and techniques are not
masterfully employed but that they are generally at the service of theme. These poems know
what they want to say. The surprising images and juxtapositions here deepen the texture of the
thematic content, making the poems truly poems. They startle by reminding us of what we may
think we already know, with the prick of fresh revelation:
Plugs are unthreading
from every part of my body
suspended like umbilical cords
I open the door and go outside
Foul air
clusters at the end of each plug
People everywhere
walk around with plugs suspended from their bodies
charged by the world’s rage
In the spaces between them
pebbles clothed in the air float buoyantly
(“On the Street”)
Though the subject matter of Yi Won’s poems ranges widely, many circle around the
unrelenting rush of capitalism to turn humans―and in fact all sentient beings―into mere
products, for use and for sale. As in her lined poems, the treatment in the prose poems is startling
and fresh:
The TV from 1990 and my body from 1968. Products with the year they were
made. Products with serial numbers. Products that scald. Bulky products.
Somehow the TV in my body won’t turn off. The TV broadcasts me to my body…
(“Dark and Bulging TV and Me”)
Sometimes, even in the best of these poems, the flavor of the original is communicated
despite the fact that its English feels a bit stilted and—yes―translated. In these pieces we get a
sense of what Yi Won was after without actually experiencing a fully-realized poem in English.
Still, even these less-successful versions are always interesting; all repay our close attention.
Often an unexpected juxtaposition will jolt us into a new kind of awareness, as the jarring but
beautifully-placed olfactory image does here:
She wailed as she yanked
a twisted wire from her body
She screamed and screamed
Her body smelled
like wet cement
A flower bloomed, a bird cried
(“At the Apartment 1”)
Some of the poems in The World’s Lightest Motorcycle glint almost like new angles of
light illuminating something not-quite-seen-before but nevertheless recognized as an authentic
insight drawn from deeply-lived experience. Here’s “At the Apartment 3” in its entirety:
Several old women
crouch in the apartment parking lot at midday
giving birth to shadows
One woman gives birth to a sticky stone
Translators Koh and Cancio-Bello are clearly highly-accomplished poets in their own
right. It is their personal modesty and poetic expertise that have allowed Yi Won’s voice to sing
as vividly in English as it does here. Perhaps the greatest task they have accomplished as
translators lies in the fact that we rarely feel as though we are hearing their puppet-master voices
ventriloquizing the poems, as is often the case in lesser works of literary translation. Rather, we
feel the original poet’s voice calling to us—sometimes from afar―enjoining us to feel and see
toward fresh revelation. This is true poetry and a true gift. As Yi Won herself says in the last
sentence of one of her prose poems, “The darkness is dead tired, unaware of the light leaking out
from itself” (“Salt Desert”).
Yi Won is the author of When They Ruled the Earth (1996), A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! (2001),
The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (2007), The History of an Impossible Page (2012), Let Love be Born (2017), and
I Am My Affectionate Zebra (2018). Yi Won is currently a visiting professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
E. J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (2017), winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and the memoir
The Magical Language of Others (2020). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books,
Slate, and World Literature Today. Koh is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and American Literary Translators Association, among others.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (2016), which won the 2015 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.
She has received poetry fellowships from several organizations, and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review,
The New York Times, The Sun, and more. She is on the advisory board for Sundress Publications, and is the program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.
Translated from the Korean by EJ Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Zephyr Press, 2021. $16
--reviewed by Michael Hettich
Perhaps more than at any other time, the poetry of the past hundred years―at least in
English―has been influenced by works in translation. While this has been mostly a good thing,
opening our poetry to a far wider range of sensibilities and imaginative discourse than would
have been otherwise available, it might also be said to have flattened the aural landscape of
poetry in English, as so many young poets have trained their ears on poems coming to them
essentially second-hand. It may be true that, as Valery said, a true poet is “strictly
untranslatable,” and as Robert Frost famously quipped, poetry is precisely what gets lost in
translation. It is certainly true that, just as the best poetry resists paraphrase, so too does it resist
translation. The spirit of poetry lives in its body, and its body is composed of its natal words and
syntax. To quote the poet and wide-ranging translator W.S. Merwin: the formal elements of
poetry are “embedded in the original language…you’re not going to get the form doing in your
language what it did in the original.” Run-of-the-mill translation, which often attempts to bring
one language into another in some literal manner, can—at best—bring only the merest smidgen
of the original across. The song, the heart, the poem, is lost.
The successful translator, then, captures some ineffable quality of spirit, that quality of
silence that defines what’s heard, that “gaze of being” that shivered the original song and made
its readers shiver in response. Thus, “the translation becomes simultaneously a radical departure
and a radical arrival” (Translators’ Notes), and in the (translated) words of Yi Won, “a common
language in another language.” That is to say that the original poem must be re-visioned into
another original poem, a palimpsest of the first perhaps but a fresh and vivid creation in itself–
one that sings and dances in its own way, with its own unique body, in its adopted/adapted
language. Thus, for obvious reasons, the translation of poetry is best done by those who are
themselves accomplished poets.
Born in 1968, Yi Won grew up in Seoul. Since the early 1990’s, her avant-garde
modernist poetry has been highly-regarded in South Korea. Influenced by visual art, her work is
characterized by its striking, often violent imagery, its Feminism, and its fresh and challenging
treatment of our emerging digital civilization. In the words of her translators, she is a poet who
“combines ancient Buddhist meditations on the human condition with the language of commerce
and technology…[pressing] the limits of meaning through syntax in order to deconstruct and
reconstruct.” In other words, her work is extremely difficult to translate effectively. Happily, her
present translators have largely succeeded in this endeavor. The just-published bi-lingual volume
of her poetry, The World’s Lightest Motorcycle, translated from the Korean by E.J. Koh and
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, is a beautiful book, full of vivid, startling and expertly-rendered
poems, most of which succeed as poems in English. Though many of the tropes and surreal-
influenced images in these poems will be familiar to readers of contemporary poetry, they are
handled here with a vigor and sharpness that makes the prick of their revelations feel new. The
best of these English versions carry a luminous strangeness, and, though thematically grounded,
they deftly resist paraphrase. Which is to say, these poems, virtually all of them, are vigorous and
surprising.
Much of the power of Yi Won’s work lies in poems in which theme, rather than felicity of
phrase or syntax, is foregrounded. This is not to say that poetic devises and techniques are not
masterfully employed but that they are generally at the service of theme. These poems know
what they want to say. The surprising images and juxtapositions here deepen the texture of the
thematic content, making the poems truly poems. They startle by reminding us of what we may
think we already know, with the prick of fresh revelation:
Plugs are unthreading
from every part of my body
suspended like umbilical cords
I open the door and go outside
Foul air
clusters at the end of each plug
People everywhere
walk around with plugs suspended from their bodies
charged by the world’s rage
In the spaces between them
pebbles clothed in the air float buoyantly
(“On the Street”)
Though the subject matter of Yi Won’s poems ranges widely, many circle around the
unrelenting rush of capitalism to turn humans―and in fact all sentient beings―into mere
products, for use and for sale. As in her lined poems, the treatment in the prose poems is startling
and fresh:
The TV from 1990 and my body from 1968. Products with the year they were
made. Products with serial numbers. Products that scald. Bulky products.
Somehow the TV in my body won’t turn off. The TV broadcasts me to my body…
(“Dark and Bulging TV and Me”)
Sometimes, even in the best of these poems, the flavor of the original is communicated
despite the fact that its English feels a bit stilted and—yes―translated. In these pieces we get a
sense of what Yi Won was after without actually experiencing a fully-realized poem in English.
Still, even these less-successful versions are always interesting; all repay our close attention.
Often an unexpected juxtaposition will jolt us into a new kind of awareness, as the jarring but
beautifully-placed olfactory image does here:
She wailed as she yanked
a twisted wire from her body
She screamed and screamed
Her body smelled
like wet cement
A flower bloomed, a bird cried
(“At the Apartment 1”)
Some of the poems in The World’s Lightest Motorcycle glint almost like new angles of
light illuminating something not-quite-seen-before but nevertheless recognized as an authentic
insight drawn from deeply-lived experience. Here’s “At the Apartment 3” in its entirety:
Several old women
crouch in the apartment parking lot at midday
giving birth to shadows
One woman gives birth to a sticky stone
Translators Koh and Cancio-Bello are clearly highly-accomplished poets in their own
right. It is their personal modesty and poetic expertise that have allowed Yi Won’s voice to sing
as vividly in English as it does here. Perhaps the greatest task they have accomplished as
translators lies in the fact that we rarely feel as though we are hearing their puppet-master voices
ventriloquizing the poems, as is often the case in lesser works of literary translation. Rather, we
feel the original poet’s voice calling to us—sometimes from afar―enjoining us to feel and see
toward fresh revelation. This is true poetry and a true gift. As Yi Won herself says in the last
sentence of one of her prose poems, “The darkness is dead tired, unaware of the light leaking out
from itself” (“Salt Desert”).
Yi Won is the author of When They Ruled the Earth (1996), A Thousand Moons Rising Over the River of Yahoo! (2001),
The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (2007), The History of an Impossible Page (2012), Let Love be Born (2017), and
I Am My Affectionate Zebra (2018). Yi Won is currently a visiting professor at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She lives in Seoul, South Korea.
E. J. Koh is the author of the poetry collection A Lesser Love (2017), winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and the memoir
The Magical Language of Others (2020). Her poems, translations, and stories have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books,
Slate, and World Literature Today. Koh is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and American Literary Translators Association, among others.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (2016), which won the 2015 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.
She has received poetry fellowships from several organizations, and her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review,
The New York Times, The Sun, and more. She is on the advisory board for Sundress Publications, and is the program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.
Guest Review
|
JUDY IRELAND’s poems have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Calyx, Saranac Review, Eclipse, Cold Mountain, Coe Review, and other journals, as well as in two anthologies, the Best Indie Lit New England anthology, and the Voices from the Fierce Intangible World anthology. Her book, Cement Shoes, won the 2013 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and was published in 2014 by Evening Street Press. She is Co-Director for the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches, as well as a poetry & reading series Editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. She teaches at Palm Beach State College.
|
NYC FROM THE INSIDE: New York City through the eyes of the poets who live there is a dense but
sprawling anthology of poems about the largest city in the United States. One in every 38 people in the
U.S. reside in New York City, with 27,000 residents per square mile.
As George Wallace, editor and curator of this anthology, points out in his introduction, “…New York City
and its many icons continue to be at the center of the imaginative vortex to many of the key poetic
voices in America…. All the popular American arts reinforce the primacy of NYC….” He goes on to ask,
who “wouldn’t want to strut their stuff before the greatest stage in the world – Manhattan? "
The very first poem in the anthology offers us a starving poet’s daily menu, and the observation that
“you aren’t / the first to starve with / a pen in your hand” (Grisel Y Acosta, “Meal Plan NYC, Circa 2000”).
The poems in this anthology, one after another, point back to the poetry, music, and visual art that thrive
alongside the grittier aspects of a city that has 6,000 miles of streets and 850 miles of subway track.
In fact, the subway trains and tunnels become a subconscious version of the city in the poems, taken as a
whole. If New York is “the everturning wheel / that grinds exceeding fine” (Max Blagg, “Second
Avenue”), the subway trains provide the motion. Poet Carlos Aguasaco finds “subway / drifters the
homeless the roofless / the beggars / the a cappella singers and the / schizophrenic” on the subway, and
Julio Marzan finds childhood memories of his mother on the subway stairs (“Subway Stairs at Spring
Street”). Even the moon uses the subway stairs and becomes a rider in Francine Witte’s “The Moon
Takes the E Train”.
There are many fine poems in this anthology, and one of the finest is Patricia Spears Jones’ “Mermaid
Parade Poem / June 21, 2014”. The poem’s speaker meets “Three goddesses on the F train”. While
“Goddesses are a dime dozen in New York City,” these three are made so singular by their descriptions
that by the end of the poem, the reader wishes them a wonderful evening in their scented baths, sipping
their “Almond & honey or lavender / drinks”.
New York is “the place of many meetings” as we also learn from Joseph Bruchac’s short poem, “City of
Dreams”:
Held between rivers
and the deep breath of the ocean
you remain the place of many meetings,
words sung in many tongues,
the mother of dreams.
New York City’s familiar landmarks are present in many poems, but the Statue of Liberty becomes
particularly multi-dimensional in this anthology. The Statue represents both the immigrant experience,
and the flip side of that experience. In Karen Finneyfrock’s persona poem, “The Newer Colossus,” the
statue is an older and wiser woman who is “choking on the words I said about / the huddled masses”,
and who declares, “I am America’s first liar….”. In Edward Field’s poem, “The Statue of Liberty”, she is
the woman “Who used to be excellent to welcome people with / But is better lately for departures”.
Other poems in this anthology are also not a celebration of New York but are instead a necessary
reckoning with its past. David Mills’ excellent poem, “Talking to the Teeth”, contends with artifacts from
a time when an estimated 20 percent of colonial New Yorkers were enslaved Africans. In Frank Murphy’s
“When Our Ancestors Ate Each Other, And They Did”, the speaker states that “…we who are New Yorkers
strut down the street / Knowing the other side of everything”.
Violence is present in this anthology, and the violence is physical as well as psychological. Toi Derricotte’s
“In an Urban School” and Denise Duhamel’s “FEAR on 11th ST. and Ave. A” deal with different experiences
that impact children, due to violence in the streets or the inner harm done by oppressive religious
beliefs.
The violence of 9/11 and the violence done to so many lives by the pandemic are present in these
poems, and there is no flinching or turning away from that reality. However, poetry does continue to
thrive as do New Yorkers in the face of great challenge. Bill Zavatsky says, in “104 Bus Uptown”,
How bad can it be,
dear wacky New York City,
when the first twelve lines
of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
blink down at me
from a poster on this bus . . . .
Zev Torres, in “Carelessly Yours”, asserts that “…transcendent poems…/Like New York City itself…/
Reorient our sensibilities….”.
The slow changes that come with time, and changes due to gentrification in particular, are subjects for
exploration in this anthology. Wanda Phipps in “Waltzing Nostalgic” eulogizes the places that are now
gone: “sunshine deli, gargoyle mechanique, / the gas station, the telephone bar, / kiev diner, st. mark’s
books / all has gone.” The poem, “Dog”, by Ron Padgett declares, “New York’s lost some of its rough
charm / And there’s just no getting around it….” Jean Lehrman writes, “let’s bring back crime to the
lower east side” in order to “make it uncomfortable / for the children of realtors and the trust fund
kids . . . .”
Still, some poets find something everlasting and eternal in New York City. Eugene Richie in his poem
“After Red Noir” says, “There is something about NYC / that makes you feel life will / go on forever
despite // everything we have done / to ourselves or that others / have done to us.”
New York poets and the people who inhabit their poems sometimes think of leaving NYC. They
contemplate whether or not they should “Say adios to living in a zip that starts with 1” (Danny Shot,
“Hope”). In “Let’s Move”, Nicca Ray’s speaker has an annual urge to go: “I start thinking / I’m leaving,
too. / Every year I fixate / On that new somewhere.” Christopher Seid confesses in his poem, “Leaving
New York City”, “When I lived in New York, I always wanted to leave ― / then, after being away, burned
to get back / to the maw of city streets, the din // of traffic’s exhaustive rush to nowhere.”
Why stay in New York? This anthology offers many answers, but one of the best is embedded in Kat
Georges’ poem, “I want to marvel at the universe but all I see are bricks”. She identifies:
…an energy here, the energy of people and more people with all their loves and
jealousies,
joys and griefs, dreams and nightmares, worried people and people radiating
pure carefree bliss
people that bite like mosquitos and rummage like bears, but mostly stroll on by just
wandering the village as they do on Sundays.
Near the end of the anthology, George Wallace remembers a time “a while ago when we were angels of
the new nork city night” but in today’s New York City, two men find themselves at a diner looking for a
late breakfast. They hear “the joyful crash and clink of the world” and realize they’ve ceased to live by
the clock. And they find they don’t mind “paying full fare” for their “eggs over easy….”
This poem enacts the surrender to the beautiful power of the City’s neighborhoods and landmarks, its
people and its energy, its wrenching changes and its everlasting joys. As editor and curator, George
Wallace has constructed a book for those who live in NYC, for those who used to live in NYC, and for
those who wish to live in NYC. There are big poetry names in this anthology, but there are also
wonderful poets to discover. This is a big collection of voices, with something for everyone, much like
the city it celebrates.
sprawling anthology of poems about the largest city in the United States. One in every 38 people in the
U.S. reside in New York City, with 27,000 residents per square mile.
As George Wallace, editor and curator of this anthology, points out in his introduction, “…New York City
and its many icons continue to be at the center of the imaginative vortex to many of the key poetic
voices in America…. All the popular American arts reinforce the primacy of NYC….” He goes on to ask,
who “wouldn’t want to strut their stuff before the greatest stage in the world – Manhattan? "
The very first poem in the anthology offers us a starving poet’s daily menu, and the observation that
“you aren’t / the first to starve with / a pen in your hand” (Grisel Y Acosta, “Meal Plan NYC, Circa 2000”).
The poems in this anthology, one after another, point back to the poetry, music, and visual art that thrive
alongside the grittier aspects of a city that has 6,000 miles of streets and 850 miles of subway track.
In fact, the subway trains and tunnels become a subconscious version of the city in the poems, taken as a
whole. If New York is “the everturning wheel / that grinds exceeding fine” (Max Blagg, “Second
Avenue”), the subway trains provide the motion. Poet Carlos Aguasaco finds “subway / drifters the
homeless the roofless / the beggars / the a cappella singers and the / schizophrenic” on the subway, and
Julio Marzan finds childhood memories of his mother on the subway stairs (“Subway Stairs at Spring
Street”). Even the moon uses the subway stairs and becomes a rider in Francine Witte’s “The Moon
Takes the E Train”.
There are many fine poems in this anthology, and one of the finest is Patricia Spears Jones’ “Mermaid
Parade Poem / June 21, 2014”. The poem’s speaker meets “Three goddesses on the F train”. While
“Goddesses are a dime dozen in New York City,” these three are made so singular by their descriptions
that by the end of the poem, the reader wishes them a wonderful evening in their scented baths, sipping
their “Almond & honey or lavender / drinks”.
New York is “the place of many meetings” as we also learn from Joseph Bruchac’s short poem, “City of
Dreams”:
Held between rivers
and the deep breath of the ocean
you remain the place of many meetings,
words sung in many tongues,
the mother of dreams.
New York City’s familiar landmarks are present in many poems, but the Statue of Liberty becomes
particularly multi-dimensional in this anthology. The Statue represents both the immigrant experience,
and the flip side of that experience. In Karen Finneyfrock’s persona poem, “The Newer Colossus,” the
statue is an older and wiser woman who is “choking on the words I said about / the huddled masses”,
and who declares, “I am America’s first liar….”. In Edward Field’s poem, “The Statue of Liberty”, she is
the woman “Who used to be excellent to welcome people with / But is better lately for departures”.
Other poems in this anthology are also not a celebration of New York but are instead a necessary
reckoning with its past. David Mills’ excellent poem, “Talking to the Teeth”, contends with artifacts from
a time when an estimated 20 percent of colonial New Yorkers were enslaved Africans. In Frank Murphy’s
“When Our Ancestors Ate Each Other, And They Did”, the speaker states that “…we who are New Yorkers
strut down the street / Knowing the other side of everything”.
Violence is present in this anthology, and the violence is physical as well as psychological. Toi Derricotte’s
“In an Urban School” and Denise Duhamel’s “FEAR on 11th ST. and Ave. A” deal with different experiences
that impact children, due to violence in the streets or the inner harm done by oppressive religious
beliefs.
The violence of 9/11 and the violence done to so many lives by the pandemic are present in these
poems, and there is no flinching or turning away from that reality. However, poetry does continue to
thrive as do New Yorkers in the face of great challenge. Bill Zavatsky says, in “104 Bus Uptown”,
How bad can it be,
dear wacky New York City,
when the first twelve lines
of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
blink down at me
from a poster on this bus . . . .
Zev Torres, in “Carelessly Yours”, asserts that “…transcendent poems…/Like New York City itself…/
Reorient our sensibilities….”.
The slow changes that come with time, and changes due to gentrification in particular, are subjects for
exploration in this anthology. Wanda Phipps in “Waltzing Nostalgic” eulogizes the places that are now
gone: “sunshine deli, gargoyle mechanique, / the gas station, the telephone bar, / kiev diner, st. mark’s
books / all has gone.” The poem, “Dog”, by Ron Padgett declares, “New York’s lost some of its rough
charm / And there’s just no getting around it….” Jean Lehrman writes, “let’s bring back crime to the
lower east side” in order to “make it uncomfortable / for the children of realtors and the trust fund
kids . . . .”
Still, some poets find something everlasting and eternal in New York City. Eugene Richie in his poem
“After Red Noir” says, “There is something about NYC / that makes you feel life will / go on forever
despite // everything we have done / to ourselves or that others / have done to us.”
New York poets and the people who inhabit their poems sometimes think of leaving NYC. They
contemplate whether or not they should “Say adios to living in a zip that starts with 1” (Danny Shot,
“Hope”). In “Let’s Move”, Nicca Ray’s speaker has an annual urge to go: “I start thinking / I’m leaving,
too. / Every year I fixate / On that new somewhere.” Christopher Seid confesses in his poem, “Leaving
New York City”, “When I lived in New York, I always wanted to leave ― / then, after being away, burned
to get back / to the maw of city streets, the din // of traffic’s exhaustive rush to nowhere.”
Why stay in New York? This anthology offers many answers, but one of the best is embedded in Kat
Georges’ poem, “I want to marvel at the universe but all I see are bricks”. She identifies:
…an energy here, the energy of people and more people with all their loves and
jealousies,
joys and griefs, dreams and nightmares, worried people and people radiating
pure carefree bliss
people that bite like mosquitos and rummage like bears, but mostly stroll on by just
wandering the village as they do on Sundays.
Near the end of the anthology, George Wallace remembers a time “a while ago when we were angels of
the new nork city night” but in today’s New York City, two men find themselves at a diner looking for a
late breakfast. They hear “the joyful crash and clink of the world” and realize they’ve ceased to live by
the clock. And they find they don’t mind “paying full fare” for their “eggs over easy….”
This poem enacts the surrender to the beautiful power of the City’s neighborhoods and landmarks, its
people and its energy, its wrenching changes and its everlasting joys. As editor and curator, George
Wallace has constructed a book for those who live in NYC, for those who used to live in NYC, and for
those who wish to live in NYC. There are big poetry names in this anthology, but there are also
wonderful poets to discover. This is a big collection of voices, with something for everyone, much like
the city it celebrates.
February 2022
|
Gentleness and Revelation: A Review of Finding Token Creek, New and Selected Writings, 1975-2020 by Robert Alexander (White Pine Press, 2021, $18.00) --reviewed by Michael Hettich |
One of the most widely-practiced forms in contemporary poetry, the prose poem carries
with it a wonderful sense of liberation from the constraints imposed by lined poetry―just as, in
an earlier time, free verse liberated poets from the tired conventions of late-Victorian metrics.
Though these developments have been mostly salubrious, leading to new ways of thinking and
feeling in poetry, in certain more insidious ways, the freedoms afforded by the prose poem—like
those of free verse a century ago—can also consign otherwise interesting poets to satisfying
themselves with writing poems that hardly sing. Just as many free verse poets might discover far
richer veins if they were to impose the limitations of metrics on their linguistic choices, many
prose poets, it seems to me, would benefit similarly by turning to the line, rather than the
sentence, in their approach to the blank page. In imposing few constraints on the poet’s lexicon,
the prose poem appears to be “easy”; this makes it both seductive to write and difficult to write
well. We see such half-realized poems everywhere, these days—mostly surrealist or absurdist in
attitude, wryly confessional, or self-consciously “postmodern,” which is to say indecipherable.
We read them to forget them. To write a truly memorable poem in prose—a poem in prose—is
hugely difficult. Discovering such a poem—or a collection of them—is cause for celebration.
Robert Alexander’s writing—virtually exclusively prose poetry—could serve as a master-
class in how to make the sentence sing with the compression, vitality, and indefinable mystery of
the best poetic lines. His poems sing with the authority gained when a talented writer has honed
and refined his or her craft over many years. That is to say, Alexander’s poems are memorable
for the balance and control of cadence and syntax; they are complete and completely-made
objects in which all all the parts have been carefully-considered, designed and balanced. Their
authority is as moving as their content: modest and personal, intimately observed, potent in their
silences, and authentic in tone and revelation. His poems rarely strain for their effects, letting the
material and language do their work:
Today’s the solstice: mountain ash along the shore lift their white
flowerheads like candelabra. When I pass the mouth of Towes Creek,
paddling steadily, an eagle flaps outward from the tallest spruce along
the shoreline. As the eagle rounds the point ahead of me, a slight movement
reveals a deer standing in the shallows. She looks upward for a moment
as the eagle passes overhead, then slips back into the trees.
(“Lake Solstice”)
This fine book is filled with such carefully-rendered revelations, evocations of the real
world, the ongoing dance of animals and creatures, trees, lakes and rivers—as well as the human
presence, observing and discovering, and then going on its way, leaving only the ripple of a
poem to mark its passage. Alexander’s work brings us to such moments repeatedly here, waking
us to such life. In this too his writing is fresh and one might even say “unstylish”―as much the
opposite of self-involved confession as it is of broken-world surrealism. The majority of
Alexander’s poems are in fact vigorous explorations of the big, actual world of nature—all
around us equally in city and so-called wilderness―the world which the self participates in and
observes, in concert with all the creatures and energies of the larger community of being.
Some of the more ambitious poems here, such as the long poem “Richmond Burning,”
come close to feeling like short stories, though they all retain the compression and intensity of
poetry. The book also contains a number of poems employing a kind of alter-ego named Ralph.
Though excellent in themselves, the “Ralph” persona feels awfully close to the author himself, so
I found myself wondering occasionally why Alexander chose to bring him into the picture, why
such a device was necessary. Still, even Alexander’s less successful poems speak with the
authority of true mastery and are well worth reading.
Finding Token Creek is a substantial collection, gathering writings spanning 1975-2020.
Throughout this time, Alexander has been active as an editor, teacher, and advocate for the prose
poem, and he has written a generous, insightful and very entertaining introduction to his book.
If one of the gifts of poetry is a kind of solace in the face of social and natural upheaval,
these quietly-observed, wise poems beautifully fulfill their goal. The very desire to write such
poems moves me deeply; the fact that so many of the poems connect, feels like a kind of miracle,
a kind of soul-cleansing and an affirmation of the power of true poetry:
From out on the water, it looks to me like a duck sitting on a
pedestal, asleep. A female mallard, speckled brown and white,
atop a low brownish mound. Drifting closer in my canoe I see
a bunch of little heads pressed close to her belly, a crowd of
sleeping ducklings huddling up to her for warmth. They are all
asleep, the little ones pressed against her, surrounding her, hiding
the one leg she’s perched on (the other tucked beneath her wing).
One duckling opens his eyes, turns his head to look at me, neither
of us moving.
(“Pedestal”)
with it a wonderful sense of liberation from the constraints imposed by lined poetry―just as, in
an earlier time, free verse liberated poets from the tired conventions of late-Victorian metrics.
Though these developments have been mostly salubrious, leading to new ways of thinking and
feeling in poetry, in certain more insidious ways, the freedoms afforded by the prose poem—like
those of free verse a century ago—can also consign otherwise interesting poets to satisfying
themselves with writing poems that hardly sing. Just as many free verse poets might discover far
richer veins if they were to impose the limitations of metrics on their linguistic choices, many
prose poets, it seems to me, would benefit similarly by turning to the line, rather than the
sentence, in their approach to the blank page. In imposing few constraints on the poet’s lexicon,
the prose poem appears to be “easy”; this makes it both seductive to write and difficult to write
well. We see such half-realized poems everywhere, these days—mostly surrealist or absurdist in
attitude, wryly confessional, or self-consciously “postmodern,” which is to say indecipherable.
We read them to forget them. To write a truly memorable poem in prose—a poem in prose—is
hugely difficult. Discovering such a poem—or a collection of them—is cause for celebration.
Robert Alexander’s writing—virtually exclusively prose poetry—could serve as a master-
class in how to make the sentence sing with the compression, vitality, and indefinable mystery of
the best poetic lines. His poems sing with the authority gained when a talented writer has honed
and refined his or her craft over many years. That is to say, Alexander’s poems are memorable
for the balance and control of cadence and syntax; they are complete and completely-made
objects in which all all the parts have been carefully-considered, designed and balanced. Their
authority is as moving as their content: modest and personal, intimately observed, potent in their
silences, and authentic in tone and revelation. His poems rarely strain for their effects, letting the
material and language do their work:
Today’s the solstice: mountain ash along the shore lift their white
flowerheads like candelabra. When I pass the mouth of Towes Creek,
paddling steadily, an eagle flaps outward from the tallest spruce along
the shoreline. As the eagle rounds the point ahead of me, a slight movement
reveals a deer standing in the shallows. She looks upward for a moment
as the eagle passes overhead, then slips back into the trees.
(“Lake Solstice”)
This fine book is filled with such carefully-rendered revelations, evocations of the real
world, the ongoing dance of animals and creatures, trees, lakes and rivers—as well as the human
presence, observing and discovering, and then going on its way, leaving only the ripple of a
poem to mark its passage. Alexander’s work brings us to such moments repeatedly here, waking
us to such life. In this too his writing is fresh and one might even say “unstylish”―as much the
opposite of self-involved confession as it is of broken-world surrealism. The majority of
Alexander’s poems are in fact vigorous explorations of the big, actual world of nature—all
around us equally in city and so-called wilderness―the world which the self participates in and
observes, in concert with all the creatures and energies of the larger community of being.
Some of the more ambitious poems here, such as the long poem “Richmond Burning,”
come close to feeling like short stories, though they all retain the compression and intensity of
poetry. The book also contains a number of poems employing a kind of alter-ego named Ralph.
Though excellent in themselves, the “Ralph” persona feels awfully close to the author himself, so
I found myself wondering occasionally why Alexander chose to bring him into the picture, why
such a device was necessary. Still, even Alexander’s less successful poems speak with the
authority of true mastery and are well worth reading.
Finding Token Creek is a substantial collection, gathering writings spanning 1975-2020.
Throughout this time, Alexander has been active as an editor, teacher, and advocate for the prose
poem, and he has written a generous, insightful and very entertaining introduction to his book.
If one of the gifts of poetry is a kind of solace in the face of social and natural upheaval,
these quietly-observed, wise poems beautifully fulfill their goal. The very desire to write such
poems moves me deeply; the fact that so many of the poems connect, feels like a kind of miracle,
a kind of soul-cleansing and an affirmation of the power of true poetry:
From out on the water, it looks to me like a duck sitting on a
pedestal, asleep. A female mallard, speckled brown and white,
atop a low brownish mound. Drifting closer in my canoe I see
a bunch of little heads pressed close to her belly, a crowd of
sleeping ducklings huddling up to her for warmth. They are all
asleep, the little ones pressed against her, surrounding her, hiding
the one leg she’s perched on (the other tucked beneath her wing).
One duckling opens his eyes, turns his head to look at me, neither
of us moving.
(“Pedestal”)
|
Michael Hettich’s most recent book of poetry,
The Mica Mine, was published in April, 2021. His website is michaelhettich.com. |
Guest Review
|
Train of Thought: poems written on and about everyday commutes by train. By Wendy Winn. Includes access to the French translation by Sara Montebrusco. Luxembourg: US Embassy in Luxembourg and Radio ARA. ISBN: 978-99959-0-691-7 --by Carmine Di Biase |
“I’m a late adopter,” says Wendy Winn, who “wasn’t born with a railway pass in my hand.” This
observation gets to the core of one of the best of these new poems, “In praise of new normals.”
Winn, an American who has spent much of her life in Luxembourg, is still enchanted by the
movements and sounds, by the smells and colors—by all the sensory qualities—of trains and
their passengers.
In these sensory qualities, which in fact animate all of the poems in Train of Thought, Winn sees
the old metaphor: life as journey. Her poems call to mind W.H. Auden’s “Night Mail,” every line
of which embodies the train’s rhythmic movement, so that, by the end, one feels how organically
tied to the human journey this machine has become. Winn too has that ability to evoke the train’s
rhythmic movement through her expert control of language.
In “Serving time,” for example, the train “serves” its passengers with the time to read their books, have
their conversations, think about “how the grass needs cutting,” or “how they once kissed someone at that
bus stop.” When the train stops, they “might even be annoyed,” but some of them, those who embrace
the marvel of this machine, will feel its rhythm lingering within them when they get off. This, however
subtly, is what the rhythmic control on display in this poem suggests:
The train’s arrival will interrupt them all,
the talkers, the texters and the readers,
the gazers and those lost in contemplation.
Engrossed, they’ll switch gears, and get up to go,
as if roused from a brief and pleasant slumber.
And how attuned Winn is to the potential uses of the spondee, like the one she deploys in the stressed syllables
of “they’ll switch gears,” which make us feel the train’s stop. The closer one looks at these seemingly easy poems,
the more one appreciates this poet’s command of the craft.
Especially remarkable is Winn’s closeness of observation, at once rigorous and natural, at once highly concrete and
deeply poetic. In “Childish thrill,” the “exhilarating tug” she feels when the train starts moving whisks her back to
when she rode in her “Red Flyer wagon,” her “small hands gripping the metal sides” as her “big brother firmly yanked”
the little vehicle’s “long handle.” And how natural it is, in this poem, that the train’s sounds should be like words.
Its “cheerful, childish” whistle, seems to say “let’s go!” and “the motherly siren,” translated into human speech, says,
“get back from the train doors.”
“Faith” is in an altogether different vein. In the rubbery gangway connecting one carriage to another,
she is
lulled by the steady motion
of the plates beneath my feet
rising and falling,
as if spellbound by
a metronome.
The sensation, however, pleasant though it is, evokes her
great, great uncle,
a train engineer,
who was crushed to death
between two carriages in Colorado,
and thoughts of how we place our faith in “civilisation,” in the people who make and run these
machines, to ensure “our safe passage.”
Of the fifty-seven poems in this collection, forty-seven are in “Part One: On Track”; the last ten make up
the conspicuously shorter “Part Two: Derailed.” These ten poems seem inspired, at least in part, by the
global pandemic. Among the most affecting is “Ghost trains,” a grim but beautiful meditation on the eeriness
of empty train carriages, which is caused, “as it turns out,” not by the machine but by the absence of passengers.
The trains outlive us; they slip away from us when we die, like the rooms of our homes do, while,
with faces mummied
and hands that can no longer touch,
we watch them disappear from view
with the envy of the dead
for the living.
There are no ghost trains: “we’re the ghosts”—we are the “rumored apparitions” who haunt both
house and train.
One wonders here if Winn was thinking of “In a Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound’s brilliant two-line poem:
“The apparition of these faces in a crowd; / Petals on a wet black bough.” Certainly she appreciates such density
of imagery, so essential to the haiku, of which she includes a group of seventeen, one for each of the form’s seventeen
loaded syllables. This density of imagery, along with the clarity and utter sincerity of Winn’s voice, makes Train of Thought
worthy of several readings.
observation gets to the core of one of the best of these new poems, “In praise of new normals.”
Winn, an American who has spent much of her life in Luxembourg, is still enchanted by the
movements and sounds, by the smells and colors—by all the sensory qualities—of trains and
their passengers.
In these sensory qualities, which in fact animate all of the poems in Train of Thought, Winn sees
the old metaphor: life as journey. Her poems call to mind W.H. Auden’s “Night Mail,” every line
of which embodies the train’s rhythmic movement, so that, by the end, one feels how organically
tied to the human journey this machine has become. Winn too has that ability to evoke the train’s
rhythmic movement through her expert control of language.
In “Serving time,” for example, the train “serves” its passengers with the time to read their books, have
their conversations, think about “how the grass needs cutting,” or “how they once kissed someone at that
bus stop.” When the train stops, they “might even be annoyed,” but some of them, those who embrace
the marvel of this machine, will feel its rhythm lingering within them when they get off. This, however
subtly, is what the rhythmic control on display in this poem suggests:
The train’s arrival will interrupt them all,
the talkers, the texters and the readers,
the gazers and those lost in contemplation.
Engrossed, they’ll switch gears, and get up to go,
as if roused from a brief and pleasant slumber.
And how attuned Winn is to the potential uses of the spondee, like the one she deploys in the stressed syllables
of “they’ll switch gears,” which make us feel the train’s stop. The closer one looks at these seemingly easy poems,
the more one appreciates this poet’s command of the craft.
Especially remarkable is Winn’s closeness of observation, at once rigorous and natural, at once highly concrete and
deeply poetic. In “Childish thrill,” the “exhilarating tug” she feels when the train starts moving whisks her back to
when she rode in her “Red Flyer wagon,” her “small hands gripping the metal sides” as her “big brother firmly yanked”
the little vehicle’s “long handle.” And how natural it is, in this poem, that the train’s sounds should be like words.
Its “cheerful, childish” whistle, seems to say “let’s go!” and “the motherly siren,” translated into human speech, says,
“get back from the train doors.”
“Faith” is in an altogether different vein. In the rubbery gangway connecting one carriage to another,
she is
lulled by the steady motion
of the plates beneath my feet
rising and falling,
as if spellbound by
a metronome.
The sensation, however, pleasant though it is, evokes her
great, great uncle,
a train engineer,
who was crushed to death
between two carriages in Colorado,
and thoughts of how we place our faith in “civilisation,” in the people who make and run these
machines, to ensure “our safe passage.”
Of the fifty-seven poems in this collection, forty-seven are in “Part One: On Track”; the last ten make up
the conspicuously shorter “Part Two: Derailed.” These ten poems seem inspired, at least in part, by the
global pandemic. Among the most affecting is “Ghost trains,” a grim but beautiful meditation on the eeriness
of empty train carriages, which is caused, “as it turns out,” not by the machine but by the absence of passengers.
The trains outlive us; they slip away from us when we die, like the rooms of our homes do, while,
with faces mummied
and hands that can no longer touch,
we watch them disappear from view
with the envy of the dead
for the living.
There are no ghost trains: “we’re the ghosts”—we are the “rumored apparitions” who haunt both
house and train.
One wonders here if Winn was thinking of “In a Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound’s brilliant two-line poem:
“The apparition of these faces in a crowd; / Petals on a wet black bough.” Certainly she appreciates such density
of imagery, so essential to the haiku, of which she includes a group of seventeen, one for each of the form’s seventeen
loaded syllables. This density of imagery, along with the clarity and utter sincerity of Winn’s voice, makes Train of Thought
worthy of several readings.
|
Carmine Di Biase was born and raised in Ohio. He recently retired as Distinguished Professor of English at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where he taught since 1993. Occasionally he writes for the Times Literary Supplement. |