Pieces of Air in the Epic by BRENDA
HILLMAN
2005
Reviewed
by JEN
TYNES
Note: Read Jen Tynes’
Interview with Brenda Hillman here.
Brenda Hillman has
me thinking about the long poem. I appreciate speedy discoveries, but I am
invested in the big project. The story is extended indefinitely, until through
extension we become aware of its finity. It repeats
itself and returns to new things. It eventually reveals its body in a
meaningful way, strategy and realization of strategy for being part of the
world. Brenda Hillman’s Pieces of Air in the Epic says that it “is the
second book of a tetrology that takes the elements –
earth, air, water, fire – as its subject.”
Both books contain discrete poems and poem-series, but they read into
each other, function as continuations.
In both books,
Hillman seems to track the human necessity to define and name by process of
elimination: we recognize a valley because of the mountain beside it, a gust of
wind because of the papers it invisibly moves. We figure out what a story is by
tinkering with its parts. Wendell Berry writes, “It is the thought of not
writing poetry down that returns us to its mnemonic (its musical) form.” In Pieces
of Air in the Epic, Hillman reviews and questions and tinkers with a
history of poetry: poetry as song, poetry before it was written down, poetry as
mode for telling the epic, the hero story. The narrative is lyricism and vice
versa. The first poem in the collection, “Street Corner,” ends:
We could have said
song outlasts poetry,
words
are breath bricks to
support the guardless singing
project. We could have
meant song outlasts
poetry.
These poems exist in the good tension of
Poem; they resist being removed from the page and they resist being stuck to
it. Often they make sounds: onomatopoeia and puns. When poems say -eee or ch-chch, they are usually mimicking the natural world, the
animals. Sometimes, however, they reside in more ominous spaces: they tilllllt (“Enron Executives Take the 5th”)
or float “over e-e-e-each/ Exploded body into third forever/ News briefs with
short particulars” (“Nine Untitled Epyllions”), and
the repetition is mock, scary, a hole. Sometimes the fullness of sounds can
only be understood through the page. “Near Stations” ends:
blossoms fall diagonally
between
history and an endish
time. Crumble, horror;
a
thought star, having
thrown
throne thrown itself down
swallows the minus sign—
The physical shape
of poems also leads us back to sound. In “Air in the Epic,” columns sometimes
bleed into one another, suggesting a chorus, an uneven mind. Form reflects content:
the poem deals with focus, attention, main lines of questioning. In “Green
Pants & A Bamboo Flute,” four columns or blocks of
text contain fragments of narrative and suggest alternate readings, “like a
three-part song.” The reader feels like the reader of a play (for which there
are many parts and only one author); thinking about the voices is more
realistic than “doing” them. “If the flute cannot be found/ Its
breath is still in you.”
[On the “backs” of
poems, between titled pieces, there are some short, fragile pieces that seem to
go “off-book,” break out of form, although there is no overwhelming convention
for them to break. Some of these poems appear in brackets; others might as
well, as they are asides, incompleted, prayers. They seem small; in my mind the
font is smaller and there is no capitalization, though when I look back at the
book I see I’ve misremembered that. Urgent, a whole blank space of page before
them: they get your attention.]
Near the end of the
book is a series of poems in and about libraries, specifically about the smells
and sounds of libraries, the ways that people exist alongside paper. From “Dust
Acolytes”:
Who has come? What ironfoot iliad
girl approaches
the PS’s, her weathers
locked in gray flame? A steep
scent sends
energy back through the
fate myth. Readers walk mazedly carrying
your book~~ Did
you love paper
more than people? Perhaps its healing
These poems are double-spaced and spread
out, not spread thin but intimating, each word
highlighted against a base of quiet. The titles are cushioned in sets of
colons; they are both sturdy and fluttered. In “Dust Dialectical”:
Dust comes
from galaxies,
each mote bent at the waist
like a poetry translator,
slight train-
trace of sleeper breath, horizon hair
a flame of
doubt. In evening
The shapes of these poems become and
disappear into their meaning, but they are also self-conscious: as written
works, as poems. They are aware of the limits of language, but more importantly
they are aware of the limits acquired by language: “(loosatic/ is the word/ needed
here but Microsoft/ has rejected it)” and “Saw the exhalation of an ‘enemy’”
and “How does one write when the laws that limit power have failed.” The book
begins with two quotes (one is from The
Odyssey) about spinning and weaving: weaving stories, spinning tales. In a
2003 interview, Brenda Hillman says that making a poem is like "knitting a
sweater and someone is unraveling it on the other end." Alongside the
singers, there are seamstresses and textiles in these poems. From “Nine
Untitled Epyllions”:
Haunted by the
need to work, blinded
by cloth, I take
my needle through
gates
of ivory and gates
of horn, I sew,
I push the little
bright thing on through—
Hillman’s artists and artisans draw the
connection between breath and making, practice and being. “String Theory Sutra”
begins:
There are so many types of
“personal” in
poetry. The “I” is a needle some find
useful, though
the thread, of course,
is shadow.
In writing of experience or beauty, a cloth emerges as if made
from a twin existence.
It’s July
4: air is full of mistaken stars & the wiggly half-zeroes stripes
make when folded into
fabric meant
never to touch the
ground again—
and goes on to say “By
its I/ mean our, for we would become/ what we made.” As Pieces of Air in the
Epic sends me back to Cascadia with more
sophisticated ideas about how the forms of those poems render earthshapes, so do the threads at the end of this book send
me back to the beginning of it, revisiting what it means to separate a craftmaker from their craft, a shape from its place, a
narrative from its convention. The stories and the songs are not divisible, but
by testing and tinkering with them, Hillman begins to expose the greater map of
their system.
Sundays on
the Phone by MARK RUDMAN
2005
Reviewed by CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING
Following the tradition of dialogue poetry, Mark Rudman’s ninth book of poetry, Sundays on the Phone
delves into a store of actual and personal memories he has of his mother
Marjorie. The longing to somehow re-visit, re-enact, rearrange order in what
seems a tumultuous and passionate mother son relationship powers the book. Rudman reminds the reader of the novelistic possibilities
for poetry, that its scope can reach out to situation,
prose that is not the symbol laden prose poetry we’ve grown so used to but that
recounts parts of a life. The dramatized anecdote and its attendant, subtly
transforming texture move past the reader under the guise of reality. That
unpretentious, direct delivery allows the awful emotions that can radiate only
from parents to encroach and punish the reader rather than to fall maudlin. Not
easy to pull off at this late date. (Albert Goldbarth and David Kirby in the generous candor and
off-handedness of these poems.)
A lyric memoir, the jacket offers, Sundays on the Phone moves
through four sections of spare and cut dialogue poetry interspersed with prose
poems and long sectioned poems of varied lineation. Voices talking to one
another in the blank silence of the page, that is what Rudman’s
apparent habit of having talked to his mother every Sunday morning at
The first poem of the first section—titled “Kid’s
Stuff”—explores childhood from the vantage of the parent. Rudman
goes on to draw airy problematic spaces so they can be later contrasted with
the personal as in “Back Stairwell”:
Like a rustle
of eternity
Shattered in
the vista of receding
Clouds,
antennae, water towers…
And I think
we are not far from ecstasy
Even in the
interior. (3)
This more
abstract texture serves as a good backdrop in which Rudman
can establish his more mystical and lyrical authority, and which helps him move
to his own childhood, to the strange establishment of generic figures of
adulthood – Marjorie’s husbands, quickly drawn, grouped, named. Soon the
plainest detail from life in its own generic quality equates itself with
tenderness, heightening the presence of that ominous mother, Medea in “Cutting Edge Production: Medea”
and Marjorie’s potential for rage.
Having established that sense of unpredictability in the figure of a
mother, Rudman gets back to his large open terrains
again, yet these aren’t delineated by the physical world but by the dialogue
between himself and his mother, their squabbles in the movie theater (“How Bad
Can it Get”), the tedious quibbling about her gourmet cooking and Rudman’s own son’s limited palate “Sole Responsibility”.
The nagged and nagging rigmarole of trying to explain something to a stubborn
parent is perfectly captured, held on its angry
terrain with few moments of peace or transcendence for most of the middle of
the book.
Interspersed with these narratives that search for explanations
of why this second husband for the mother, why that move back to
“You couldn’t control me when I was alive and now that I’m alive
in another way you have
even less power over me.
You are sitting in that damned dentist’s chair 37 stories high
over
Don’t interrupt—” (12)
(“Approach of the High Holy Days”)
Anyone who
has lost someone close might have a strange and instant mix of relief,
lightheartedness – oh yeah, I know that voice, the voice that continues – and
feel a deep pang about the life in it. Rudman takes
us deeper and deeper into varieties of this kind of conversation; she complains
how her bones hurt now that they’re ashes and teases him with her knowledge of
the term from his area of expertise, simulacra: “You smile Mark. /The dead read their Baudrillard.” (“The Birthday Call”). These moments all underline the way
the poet struggles to process the mother’s dominating presence, ignited by
flinty insecurity and fueled with huge indignation, even long after she’s gone.
How can one deal with the unresolved conversation, and un-resolvable fallout?
The dialogue poem allows us to move from the strange outlying regions of
supposition and its atmosphere of rarified bravado into the real, and shocking
anger of, say, “Late Lunch”. In it the speaker and son show up almost an hour
late for a lunch the mother has cooked and as soon as they’re in the door:
“Oh why don’t you just go fuck yourself.
Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and go back to
Oh my god. (86).
This poem’s wanderings
into bald narrative permit Rudman the kind explicit
summation and revelation that earlier landscapes of the book wouldn’t have
supported. The result seems purgative. Most of the rest of the book ramps these
dialogues into the lyrical and the transcendent without truly detaching from
the live report of a human voice. The rarified and the real dissolve and
resolve their boundaries, as in “The Albuquerque Interventions” that allow Rudman to hear his mother say:
“I told you.
I knew if I
could go
Further than
I could go I would know
What lies on
Solitudes’ other side.”
And Rudman replies:
“You may have
told me.
(Pause.)
I didn’t
know, I don’t know.
But somehow
you’ve erased
All the good times.” (119)
A great counterpoint
to this almost excruciatingly vivid mother is the usually mute grandson, Rudman’s child Sam. Almost by the strength of his
adolescent inscrutability, the child foils or attracts his grandmother’s ire,
revealing its selfishness, and his own imperviousness, something the reader
almost wishes the raw speaker could embody as well. He’s like a blank rock in a
hoodie at times, eating only his steak and noodles to
his grandmother’s chagrin, a boy who would like vegetables if only she’d raised him (?). And so he models his own brand of
resistance to change, like the mother, and cleverly, one she can’t always get
her hooks into, though she does embarrass and anger him at times. Sam becomes
the traveling, valued pawn that always turns up in dysfunctional triangulated
relationships, the one which provides examples for good or for bad, depending
on who’s doing the talking:
She’s back.
“So, no bar
mitzvah for you Sam, huh?”
(He smiles.)
“I don’t
think so.”
“Well, it’s
too bad that your parents didn’t (as if I’m not in the room) give you some
religion.”
(Red-faced).
The ambiguity of Rudman’s quasi-stage
directions give the dialogues a kind of weaving, ungrounded quality. Is
the mother red-faced? Is the boy? The boy, the reader decides. And as one moves
through more and more expanses of dialogue, one finds one’s self picking out
what part is the mother’s, what part Rudman’s, almost
being moved to sketch the names in the margin. This blurring of the identities
lets Rudman say why it is so hard to deal with one’s
parent: it is hard to deal with someone whose faults are so familiar and, one
hates to think, possibly like one’s own. Clearly Marjorie is not always
rational, and Rudman maintains a kind of un-cool
posture in relation that irrationality.
Rudman takes the poetic focus
off style, surface, cleverness, and steeper ravines of syntactic invention to
pay tribute to what his mother meant, set as they are in a clear and ingenious
set of contexts: dialogue, narrative, prose, not to mention specificity and reflective
summation. The ins and outs of story matter here: guilt, the mundane, the
burden of caring for children and caring for parents, cities, meals. In “Late
Lunch” he seems to reveal what piece of sand has been wearing on him, both
causing him to remember and sometimes despise that determined woman. The reader
can hear the volume summed up this way:
My mother didn’t manage my life, but she curtailed the
satisfaction I took from my life.
Had all this not been so bitter, I could have grieved.
I could have written a lachrymose elegy. (89)
___
I don’t think she has a moment when she isn’t thinking about
herself.
I’ve known thousands of people, never anyone like her. (91)
Like Wind Loves a Window by ANDREA
BAKER
Slope Editions
2005
Reviewed
by BRIDGET
CROSS
As if a point of interest could be found
where in place we are dilated with craving. I put a model of the drink in the
model of the cupboard that represents the one in the real room. Try to
understand behavior like our own.
We do understand this behavior: the poet’s
attempt to gaze inward trumped by the need to make a model of all that must be
looked at and consumed en route. Andrea
Baker’s Like Wind Loves a Window encompasses that distraction in 56
sound yet scattershot pages—a prose-poem preface and three sections titled “gilda,” “bird,” and “body,”—and reading it is not unlike
trying to write a poem: the fight to move through the mind’s noise in hopes of
somehow making it back to the self.
Baker watches
herself and gets watched in turn so that her efforts at explication are quickly
unraveled. While her steady prose spreads through the book’s first section, it
intersects eventually with the shifty lines that break through the rest—often
only a quick smattering of words to a page, reluctant to offer a foothold:
“birds hang / Suspended / Like a bird hangs.” What she means to explain pulls
out of her reach so it’s unrecognizable: “pull your face off / from the
tattooed face // my broken egg eyes.”
But she finds her
fuel in the wild-goose-chase nature of her ideals, and what’s so enjoyable
about reading this book is watching that dynamic unfold. She chases down definition
and desire, all the while decorating the poems with obstacles. She tinkers in “gilda,” like she means to crack the code of herself but is
constantly sidetracked by her own ornamentation. She catches and obsesses on
her models, as if to say, This is not the real me, only my reflection: “the
former yellow house hung as an ornament from a ceiling / all the cars were all
in hiding / but the rooms had nowhere to go // and the center room was
surrounded / by other rooms / so it had nowhere to go.” She blockades her
senses: “ghost out my sight.” She insists on occupying only the figurative:
“make me a bird / things are getting out
of control.” (It’s worth noting, too, that the third section contains four
poems titled “not a bird,” possibly in frustration: Not a model. Not a mirror.
This is actually me.)
In the final
section, “body,” Andrea Baker cops to her own devices: “every sight is an
instrument / to absorb us.” The
diversions she’s inhabited
now act as sustenance, as if her own need to be fed is replaced by that of her
loved ones: “I feed you / all my little chairs…I feed you the round empty /
spree of your mouth.” It’s a satisfying conclusion in that Baker has in no way
renounced her distractions but seems to celebrate them. Once again, we do understand this behavior. It offers
some hope about turning chaos into form, harnessing obsession with a poem’s
visceral elements, and allowing that obsession finally to feed the poem, the
way “the window waits to be fed / one minute more.”
Natural History by DAN
CHIASSON
Knopf
2005
Reviewed
by GIBSON
FAY-LEBLANC
If this review were
written in the style of a Dan Chiasson poem, it might
begin with the immortal words of Robert Frost, or Chiasson’s
rendition of them: “I’m delighted with Dan’s poems, particularly the one that
quotes me.” You see, Chiasson likes to assume other
voices and doubly likes to talk to or about himself in those voices. The poem
“Randall Jarrell” begins, “I’ve never written in a way that really pleases
Dan”; another, in the voice of Horace, is titled “To Dan Chiasson
Concerning Fortune.” While this is definitely a strange sort of navel-gazing,
it’s also a funny and strangely effective part of the sad, fanciful world Chiasson creates in his second book.
In Chiassonland, which is “a little true, for verification’s
sake,” you hear the channeled voices and stories of figures like Gorky,
Raleigh, and Shakespeare, not to mention Frost, Jarrell, and Horace; you are
captivated by a heartbreaking elephant named
In fact, Chiasson’s own voice is often at its sharpest when riffing
on someone else. The short poem that begins “as if regret were in it and were sacred,” a line from Frost’s
“West-Running Brook,” ends this way:
Once was a mindful current: now leaden,
still;
it is ourselves we
most resemble, now. Now
the maples that had
been nowhere gather. When
we look down what we
look down on is our own.
That last sentence haunts the poem. It’s
both a nod to Frost’s use of one-syllable words and completely Chiasson’s own. It sounds clear, but what exactly does it
mean? We’re left to wonder.
Chiasson works in more
modes and touches on more subjects than I can do justice to in a small space.
What holds his collection together though has to do with how well-crafted the
poems are and with their careful balance of humor and pathos—perhaps best
exemplified by the poet-elephant who reappears in several of the poems.
Formally speaking,
I’m sure some readers will be annoyed by Chiasson’s preference
for well-groomed couplets and tercets—this is not a
poet who shows any desire to crack his lines and gallop across the page. So what. If he can write this well, with deft slant rhymes
and surprising leaps of thought and image and rhythm, let him write his neat
stanzas until he’s 90.
As for the
elephant, we are told he “got drunk at the department party / and showed off
that photograph of my anus” and also that, when the “ax struck, it was / so
warm at first… / … I had a mouthful of dirt.” In so many of these poems and
series of poems, it is that ass photo that helps make us see and feel how this
world (Chiasson’s and ours) is “a wheelbarrow” that
“hauls shit and dirt and hay.”
My Kafka Century by ARIELLE
GREENBERG
Action Books
2005
Reviewed
by PENELOPE
CRAY
What shall we wish
for someone beset by history, plagued by too much information, by remembering? Courage? Wisdom? Oblivion?
In her profitably dense second collection, My Kafka Century, Arielle
Greenberg proceeds by making such wishes for anyone overwhelmed by what they
know, offering, on the one hand, an existence “codeless, happy,” “sublimely plotless,” and, on the other, a desire to face G-d
directly, to “get to know His middle dash up close.” While the collection
shoots from a mostly postmodern hip, its bullets are neither ironic nor
ambivalent in their aim, lodging deep in the heart of each poem’s experiment.
Marriage, genocide, family, God, baseball, and fairy tales drive Greenberg’s
poems, which variously attempt to evade, confront, and cajole these realties
into loosening their grip on us. In “Joke,” for example, the speaker counsels:
If we are not eaten, then we become hungry,
and we eat.
In the meantime, why not have a little good
conversation to help the food settle? A little showtune for old time’s sake?
Yet Greenberg
demonstrates that humor too “has its own bad history,” and, so burdened, sees
suffering all around—even the park bench on which the two Jews in “Joke” sit
“want(s) to die an interior death,” wants, in other words, to forget. “At the
Cinema Lecture” elaborates this desire to get away from a part of the self,
suggesting “<We need to get beyond the body because it’s all theory, theory,
theory.>” And yet it is the body, our physical self, site of trauma and
contact for memory, that allows equations to be made between ourselves and
other things. The folding table in “Ok Hurricane” that declares, “I have the
most rickety legs now, four of them. / But to call you
Mom sounds weird in my mouth” becomes a later speaker’s concern: “Do I still
remember the table, its wobbling limbs, my language locked inside?” (Other
visual equivalents invite connections between this table and a crawling
infant’s body, as well as a woman who, ravaged on “hands and knees, all fours,
bad dog” leaves her body long enough to note “This is also a good position for birthing a child.”)
What does a violent
history beget if not new ways to survive? Ultimately, Greenberg’s second
collection is not only “another book about genocide / and my body” but is also
about how those who went before remain in the ones who come after: “We could be
anyone. / Under the bed, we are anyone. / Any genocide
we’ve mentioned.” Equally so, “Some people, unnamed, do die in a plane crash. /
Some young couple, my age, your age,”—if not genocide,
then some other random or premeditated violence might take us. Greenberg’s
poems make wishes for us all.
The Thorn by DAVID LARSEN
Faux Press
2005
Reviewed
by MICHAEL
SCHARF
Larsen is the
creator of such sui generis
figures as The Crypt Tickler, a kind of Janus-faced over-modernist shade
arising from the witch’s brew of foehn-fomented ideas
and virulent poetic superstitions. He literally draws such characters and then
puts the most surprising, sometimes shockingly beautiful things into their
mouths. (See The Crypt Tickler here.) It’s graphic poetry. Gary Sullivan does
it too, and, somewhat differently but no less
captivatingly, Jim Behrle.
Larsen also was,
for a run of months or more, the guest blogger at Alli Warren’s The Ingredient, where he (like she) was a
must-read. The David Larsen blog that has the tag
“Giving Thanks in All Circumstances” is not by the author of The Thorn,
which carries on its back cover the following epigraph: “EASY TO READ / HARD TO
BEAT / AND ROUGH ON/ THE CORONA / THIS TEXT / ANTICIPATES YOUR RESISTANCE / AND
OFFERS IT / A MEAT-EATING / FLOWER.” Things get more complicated from there.
“The Thorn,” you’ll
remember, is a Wordsworth poem about a gnarly thing, “a wretched thing
forlorn,” ostensibly a tree but also a broken promise. The results of that
broken promise include a child’s death, a woman’s ruined life—one that has
driven her into acute abjection—and a deceptive, menacing landscape, all of
which the speaker of the poem tries to reckon. The speaker of this book, who is
consistent even as he commands and controls information and vocables
from a variety of sources, does a very similar thing: He gives an account of
the abjection . . . not quite of
himself but of the person who is ordering him to be made and of the context
that contains and, in some sense, produces his abjection and of the general
menace that surrounds him. His eventual provisional, asymptotic, neo-Bukowskian resolution is part of what makes the book great.
A recent review
noted that “[a]bjection, here, is a close cousin to
violence, and both are directly linked to emotional cowardice—often in others.
In a cumulative manner impossible to quote, the speaker doggedly tracks that
cowardice at various levels of representation and relationship: from what
roommates say to what Osama bin Laden
does, from the words of ‘The Diviner Satih’ to all of
To expand on that a
little: There is a series of poems, each titled “OH GREAT,” that goes very far
in describing with a kind of deliberately contained agitation what it is like
to be in a fugue state, in the grip of an unnamed “it,” only to have that “it,”
along with the series, get truncated unresolvedly—in
this case by a page break—to a badly reproduced graphic of a Nuremberg
stained-glass window, which seems as random as the things that, without our
realizing it in the moment, blessedly take one out of oneself when it’s most
needed, when (as one poem says) one is “intensely haunted by it,” even if only
temporarily.
Larsen also manages
to convey a great deal of the absurdity and pathos and circumstances
surrounding real deaths related to the War on Terror, in the figure of “The
Pancake Vendor,” who falls victim to Osama bin Laden
in a manner that lets no one off the hook. The prose poem “The Diviner Satih” is, over the course of a few pages, an amazing
send-up of zealotry and Western fetishism of zealotry, and at the same time a
poem that takes attachment to ideas very seriously.
There’s a poem that
claims to be, in all caps, about EKPHRASIS, one that says it’s about FIFTY
PIZZAS, and another that claims COUNTRY CRACK as its subject. The LETTER TO JORDAN,
for instance, describes the
All of these things
circle abjection and its negation, which I think is something like expression,
or expressivity, until the book finally bursts into handwritten “WILD SPEECH,”
near its end, “ ‘I LIKE TO PARTY/ AND GET WASTED,’ LARSEN SAID, / ‘AND SMOKE
AND BONE AND BONE AND FUCK / AND GET FUCKED ALL NIGHT LONG / AND THEN ILL HAVE
A CAESAR SALAD.’ ” One believes him. The framing, too.
You see why I have
avoided quoting until now the kind of direct statement that runs through the
book. Other parts are much more baroque. They’re beautiful but equally
impossible to excerpt, because they, like the above, require the book’s force
field.
The thing about all
of this is that it’s only some of what Larsen does. But the Caesar salad, with
its spiny anchovies and its stripped-down classicism, is what one craves
sometimes.
Pretty Young Thing by DANIELLE
PAFUNDA
Soft Skull Press
2005
Reviewed
by THOMAS
HUMMEL
The sordid and
shifting monologues—utterances? testimonies?—that make up Danielle Pafunda’s debut collection Pretty Young Thing are,
at their best, showcases of how rhythmic tension (now clipped, now discursive)
paired with syntactical structures that unfurl over the periods (“The fireworks
were loused up. // On a lone walk around the park. Counterclockwise or poorly executed.”) can
enact the fractured yet searching psychology of a speaker. Pafunda’s
speaker is staking a claim to herself, histrionics of (for) herself in all her
forms: “Even my breakage. In the closet, I shook the vehicle. In the / back of
the closet, I examined my own fur.” Which is not to imply solipsism—in fact,
these poems read as evidence, proof, even primers for developing an identity in
a landscape littered with sardine cans and bullet holes. Here, the poet’s
commitment to a harsh, direct, spoken English is what
propels the accrual and construction of a self. Count the monosyllables—it’s
verbosity without varnish as the speaker shifts from desire to infuriation and
all between. Hers is a voice that is decidedly a product of both our daily
language and the cultural moment that gives rise to it, for example:
Took
my hand off the handlebars. Took my hand off the
suitcase.
Took my hands out
of my pockets and they were the white pages
of a new diary. A
stolen diary, and ready to chuck in the snow.
And, similarly:
The town was Dutch
but the people were Republicans.
At night, we stood
perilously close to the trains
and the trains were just
the kind of men we’d read about.
These predominantly
untitled poems both embrace and resist existing as sonnets, a choice that, when
coupled with the speaker’s cognitive and temporal leaps, further complicates
our expectations. Instead of using a formal constraint to ground us, she lets
the sonnet and its effects haunt the telling. Each poem hinges on what comes
next, yet each resists establishing a systematic pattern. As the speaker relays
her disparate instances, we have to follow her, assert with her the vagaries of
an existence.
Beyond Pafunda’s formal prowess, her ability to invoke figures
intimately familiar with crises of identity—whether emotional, political,
sexual, criminal—adds a subtle perspective to the
work. One can’t help but recall Akhmatova’s “Why did
you poison the water / And mix dirt with my bread,”
when we read, “Wherein pearls are like worms, and / the stories about pogrom
end in a bird’s wing. Wherein the gingerbread, / rife with buckshot, worn with
larvae.” Or, in “Salon,” how Herculine Barbin, the 19th-century hermaphrodite whose memoirs were
unearthed from the French Department of Public Hygiene by Michel Foucault,
becomes an object of admiration in one of the book’s most memorable stanzas:
A suitor. At
the doctor’s. We talked about the lovely
Herculine, as if we weren’t
ourselves girls about to find out
that we were actually
boys finding out that we were still
a little bit girl. Infernally. We weren’t ourselves the governess,
dreaming herself the
renegade, tied to the tracks, untying herself
from the tracks, riding
to safety, frothing as the horse does.
Even Lady Macbeth appears: “out of my
mouth. Out. I had the rush rinsed out of me. Out.”
If there is one overarching criticism it is a matter of length.
The strengths of this collection are the direct results of its ability to
surprise, to excite by illuminating its (often jilted) relationships between
intent and action, desire and resignation, and for that reason fewer poems
might only heighten the overall effect. That said, Pretty
Young Thing is a book that offers more of itself with every reading. One
can even admire the ways in which the first and last lines of Danielle Pafunda’s fierce and intelligent debut frame the collection
and offer hints of the range, cadences, and intimacy within:
I saved part of the infection in a small
plastic bag. A grievance.
At the end of
Crush by RICHARD
SIKEN
2005
Reviewed
by SAMUEL
AMADON
Richard Siken’s Crush, chosen by Louise Glück
for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, is a collection of 21 poems printed in a
semi-square book that’s small enough to fit in your mouth. Crush begins
with “Scheherazade,” an apt title for a poem that tempts the reader with an
unfinished story. Imagery from “Scheherazade” will recur often, like water and
light, which appear—“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of
the lake”; “Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s
One method Siken uses to control the discursiveness of his poems is to
repeat, or vary slightly, the beginnings of sentences and phrases. In the 14
lines of “Scheherazade,” he uses “Tell me” three times and “That means” twice,
as well as “It’s not,” “it’s more,” “How it,” and “how we.” Violence is only
hinted at with the early line, “it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,”
but the reader soon enters a world that’s armed with poison, a handgun, a
bottle of pills, a lug wrench, a whip, a hacksaw, bullets, bandages, broken
glass, and a buck knife.
Formally, the
majority of the poems sprawl across the page in a Leaves of Grass–esque hyper-long line.
There are no traditional stanza forms, though a few poems like “Unfinished
Duet” and “Saying Your Names” are in columns of five-beat lines. “You Are
Jeff,” a 24-section prose poem, is a bit exhausting but, for the most part, the
book maintains speed with lines like these from the end of “Wishbone”:
Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky?
Do you want to go home
now? There’s a bottle
of whisky in the trunk of the Chevy and a
dead man at our feet
staring up at us like
we’re something interesting. This where the evening
splits in half, Henry,
love or death. Grab an end, pull hard,
and make a wish.
When a poet’s voice
is as fresh as Siken’s, one wonders What is he going to do with it? To answer,
try reading Crush aloud.
Notice how the book tries to shove
itself down your throat? That’s because it wants to grab hold, to force you to
pay attention. That’s because this speaker, like Scheherazade, tells stories to
stay alive. This is a rare instance of a poet who wants his work to be as
necessary for the reader as it seems to be for the writer. Willingly or not,
“We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”
The Last Clear Narrative by RACHEL
ZUCKER
2004
Reviewed
by MATTHEW
THORBURN
The difficulty of turning
experience into narrative—to render in language not just what life is like, but
what life is—hangs like a shadow over this second collection by Rachel Zucker. The poems zero in on major life transitions,
including marriage, the physical and emotional transformations of pregnancy,
mourning (for a great-aunt, who shares the book’s dedication), and the
harrowing experience of a child’s difficult birth. With subject matter that
might have trodden the familiar territory of merely confessional writing in a
lesser poet’s hands, Zucker breaks stunning new
poetic ground while also empathically advancing our understanding of marriage
and motherhood.
Though Zucker can strike a self-deprecating, witty, and
conversational tone (of a pregnancy test, she writes, “I read the instructions
twice and peed on my hand by mistake”), her voice seems to come directly from
the mind rather than the mouth. Crackling with jumps and skips from thought to
thought, these poems at times break out of stanzas, scattering phrases across
the page, or spill into breathless, unpunctuated prose. They leave a fair share
of the work to the reader—to make the connections between episodes and
utterances and piece together meaning—but this challenge is also one of the
poems’ greatest strengths.
Language, Zucker knows, is an approximation. No two people’s
experience is quite the same, even when the experience is shared in the same
words. The prose poem “Having a Baby, Atom Bomb” begins, “three months later a
friend has a baby describes the labor now we have babies we have babies and
nothing in common . . .” The realization that each of us has a
different take is elaborated, initially with a humorous flourish, in perhaps
the collection’s best poem, “In Your Version of Heaven I Am Younger,” in which the
speaker struggles to come to grips with the grief of a failed pregnancy through
numerous “versions” of what’s happened:
In your version of
heaven I am blond, thinner,
but not so witty. In
the movie version of your version
of heaven you fight
God to come back to me.
[. . .]
Put on the
preservers! they announce. They are under your seats!
Time
to tell your wife a few last things. People are puking
in the rows around
us. The jackets sweaty and too big.
We are, in this
version, an image of hope.
The broadcasters
are just now sniffing us out.
I am pregnant but
don’t know it and can’t know
the fetus would have
been, in any event, not viable.
In the book’s
strongest moments, Zucker cuts through the thicket of
multiple, often conflicting narratives of suffering and joy to tell us, with
stunning immediacy, what it is to mother a child: “he’s why I will not want to
die.”
The Book of a Hundred Hands by COLE
SWENSEN
2005
Reviewed
by MATTHEW
HENRIKSEN
In The Book of a Hundred Hands, Cole
Swensen catalogues the hand in a predictable sequence
of perspectives from various aspects of the human conscious—memory, “The
History of the Hand”; experiential, “The Positions of the Hand,” “Professions
of the Hand”; functional, “Representations of the Hand,” “The Anatomy of the
Hand”; symbolic, “American Sign Language,” “Shadow Puppets,” “A Manual of
Gesture: Public Speaking for Gentleman (1879”); and the conceptual, “Paintings
of Possible Hands.” Poetry should show us something we don’t already know, but
we find mostly research and careful prosody:
Assyrian hands were carved of stone.
Egyptian hands were the point of the tale.
The Gothic hand, like no other, launched,
while that of the Renaissance,
both early and
late, fragile and
breaks, a wave on light. Ghirlandaio had hands of
willow,
and every hand
that Dürer ever drew thrived. Most hands are startlingly small,
like eyes.
(“The History of the Hand”)
Swensen’s assertions that
the Gothic hand was “like no other, launched” and “every hand / that Dürer drew thrived” garner attention because of the
syntactical variations in the passage, but throughout the book, interjections
like these usually do no more than tell us what any observer would recognize
unaided by the poet. The final sentence of the passage may be acknowledging an
intentional “smallness” of observation, but the startling is too obviously crafty for me to appreciate it.
Yes, these poems are carried through by a
consistent sense of mystery unique to Swenson. When she gives her voice over to
the hand, we can almost hear her mind working around the thing:
Here the hand is usually bent;
if at the wrist, a
chiseled arc angles to an
eventual middle finger
is another dark
they say
is most often the
most often curved. Darkness makes things
turn of their own. I’m
sure you’ve seen.
(“The Palmar
View”)
I’d much rather follow Swensen’s
voice through such uncertain imaginings than watch her force metaphors to
create the tightly wound, ineffectual poetry, as in “Garden,” where she begins:
The body is a circle, which comes home in
the hands. Move
out and within it
are the phyla; orbit
these
(and if a sphere)
(this can also be invited)
to pool in air
While the elegance of Swensen’s
syntactical and structural delivery entices me, I find no reward in hearing
that “[t]he body is a circle.” If intended to describe a yogic practice, then
the imagery is too immersed in the practitioner’s experience to enrapt the
uninitiated. Rather than enlarging the perspective, however, the poem becomes
cryptically didactic: “keep planting the hands in increasing circles.” Though
the poem suggests an enlarging consciousness through the outwardly proceeding
concentric circles, the repeated circular imagery, rather than providing a
contrasting tightening effect, draws our attention to Swensen’s
efforts toward at a tidy poem.
Some of the best poems occur in the ekphrastic final section, where, as in “The Palmar View,” Swensen’s voice
gets almost terrifyingly close to the object:
So much for the hills
that still their animal time. To geometrize
in long, articulated
lines. The hand upon the world
bends down and down and
down.
—“Norman Bluhm
and Frank O’Hara, Hand, 1960”
When music, sensual instinct, and urgency
overwhelm Swensen’s poetic sensibilities, she sings
what fails when said.
Antidotes for an Alibi by AMY
KING
BlazeVox
2005
Reviewed by BARRY SCHWABSKY
A poet appears and
suddenly things look different. “How can you see with azure lakes across your
eyes?” This question, which begins Amy King’s poem “Drowning Refrain,”
concerns, perhaps, the relation between emotion and perception—if those lakes
are hyperbolic tears—and it asks for an answer, not just a reaction. Not unlike
the question with which Yeats famously ended “Among School Children,” King’s
seems on the surface to be the sort commonly called rhetorical—not a true
question but a forcefully indirect way of making a statement: Just as you
simply can’t tell the dancer from the dance, you simply can’t see with azure
lakes across your eyes. But not so fast. The poem’s
power is to open up a space in which the question becomes urgent, in which one
knows one ought to be able to distinguish dance and dancer but can’t tell how;
likewise, King’s reader comes to imagine that it must be possible to see with
azure lakes across your eyes—but how in the world do you do it?
All too many poets opt either on the one
hand for some form or other of objectivity, of formal/perceptual perspicuity,
or on the other for an overflow of feeling. Not many are as scrupulous is King
is in steering their poems through the meanders in which feeling and
observation push and pull at each other, nearly indistinguishable in effect,
though that is the terrain in which language is most at home. Here, to see
something is not only a recognition but an
encounter—what Yeats called a “brightening glance.” It makes something happen.
As in King’s “The Spirit is Near”: “I like the
capability of my eyes, the way they / brighten the woman on the curb by the
church. / She will burst alive in two minutes.”
Invoking Yeats might be seen by some as an
evasion of King’s most evident stylistic influence, namely John Ashbery. (The most overt allusion in “Drowning Refrain,” to
Stevie Smith, is a one-off.) Like Ashbery,
she employs a collagelike accumulation of linguistic
detritus, as if every few lines had been extracted almost at random from
disparate strata of a culture where banality and vision coexist, yet this
aggregate, rather than being presented in its raw state, is always suspended in
the unifying medium of what can only be called the music of her ruminations.
Although this “Off-Balance Romanticism” (as one of King’s titles would have it)
can only have been learned from Ashbery, the older
poet’s sibylline equanimity in the face of illusion and disillusion is
impossible for the younger one. Her propensity to give way to a “fit of grief
or rage” is Yeatsian. She seems always to be working
toward a grand statement that inevitably turns against itself. In all earnestness
the poems take on “religion, sex, and daily sprawl.”
That provisional summary of King’s subject
matter comes from one of the best poems in Antidotes for an Alibi, the
aptly named “Delicate Tasks.” The poem opens with another one of King’s musings
on the intertwining of perception and emotion—this time articulated through the
sense of hearing rather than sight:
The distance of
your whisper
becomes the proximity of
whispering
as if discovering a
loved one
with her telephone
lover
speaking in tones.
One could speak here of a hermeneutics of
jealousy. The fine distinction between a sound (“whisper”) and an activity
(“whispering”) comes at the cost of confounding opposite qualities: not knowing
whether one’s relation to the beloved is that of distance or proximity. The
poise King shows in her insouciant refusal to characterize the “tones” in which
the loved one speaks to the unseen “telephone lover” is brilliant. Any tone at
all would be false, not because of any desire to deceive but simply because any
tone implies an unstated understanding between speaker and listener, which is
inherently unstable, even or especially when it seems like playfulness:
Each party
enjoys using another
one’s voice
even when it’s not
their own.
The sentence’s frazzled syntax reflects the
confusion it describes. Borrowing already-borrowed voices is hardly a formula
for stable identity.
I am among them a
pronoun
of loose weight. I
envy their density,
anchor their destiny, one
thinly drawn
sign of stardust on
fire. Outside,
homes press side by side
composing a direct
correlation
of religion, sex, and
daily sprawl.
How a “pronoun of loose weight” could
conceivably “anchor their destiny” is hard to imagine—as hard as to understand
whose voice has been borrowed when it is already second-hand. And the “envy”
that is the product of all this unknowing reproduces itself over and over, a
recurrent (and recursive) structure.
Even without
following “Delicate Tasks” through to its, as the poem says, “highly qualified”
conclusion, it becomes clear its pinpoint emotional accuracy has not been
developed at the expense of attention to the sticky, refractory qualities of
language as a medium—quite the opposite, the two are as intensely and perhaps
as conflictually intertwined as a drowning swimmer
and her would-be rescuer. The dialectic can stretch meaning to its limit.
Perhaps that’s why Antidotes
sometimes seems like a series of excerpts from a bigger, less easily contained,
perhaps even endless rumination on basic words, one that crop up often (though
not ostentatiously) throughout the book: words like woman, love, God, sex,
mother, child, man…. King is a lyric poet who can pack enormous surprises into
concentrated doses of, typically, ten to thirty lines, and for that matter some
of these poems contain single lines so capacious you almost want to stretch out
in them and spend the night, not move on, especially when they’re opening lines
like “I’m learning to give disappointment an honesty,” “She was soft and
sentence,” or “Light’s residue on my tongue.” Yet the flow from line to enjambed line can be irresistible, with the end of a poem
leaving you wondering how you got so far so fast. It’s the force of that
movement that makes me wonder what King would do with looser, messier, more
open forms. This is a first book of unusual power, but I suspect that King has
it in her to succeed on a bigger scale.
Free Again by JOSEPH LEASE
Xantippe 3
2005
Reviewed
by
THOMAS FINK
The Oakland-based
literary magazine Xantippe included a
poetry chapbook by Rachel Zucker in its first issue,
and in its third number, it features Joseph Lease’s Free Again. Lease has authored two full-length
collections, The Room (Alef, 1994) and Human
Rights (Zoland, 1998, reissued by Jensen/Daniels)
and the chapbook My Sister Life (Jensen/Daniels, 2001). By virtue of the verbal power and dramatic
complexity of such long poetic sequences as “Apartment,” “Slivovitz,” “The
History of our Death,” and the long poem under consideration, Lease deserves to
be regarded as one of our strongest contemporary political/experimental
poets. His work has been praised by the
late Robert Creeley, Forrest Gander, Donald Revell, Maria Damon, and various other significant poets
and critics. When
Coffee House Press publishes his next book, Broken World, in 2007, my
judgment will probably become commonplace.
In the mean time, Free Again, a 30-page
poem in 26 sections (all bearing the chapbook’s title), some entirely in
prose-blocks, others in verse, and others in both, is not only Lease’s longest
poem but one of his most accomplished.
There are relatively few commas and periods; the dash is the main form
of punctuation. Resemblance to
The tense imagistic prose of the opening
section presents the poem’s prime themes, crises in individual subjectivity and
the collective ethos during the W. Bush era
When I can’t sleep I am full of red buds
and torn curtains and
shiny cars parked in a
lot. My lower-middle class manners tear
through my upper-middle
class manners: I stared at braided
colors in water while my
peers figured out the art of the deal. I
was (I wanted to be) a
Midwestern boy with a disco in my
eyes—Chicago Jew, greengolden suburb Jew, son of a Coney
Island Jew. When I drank I got
punched up by luminous waves
of anger. I thought I
had to choose between winning in New
person doesn’t talk about
himself—or so good people tell me. (36)
Like other
experimentalists who have learned from seventies and eighties “Language Poetry”
but question some of its early proscriptions, Lease utilizes what he has called
a “representative” (never universal) “I” to probe social questions. This “I’s” insomnia
seems to be caused by multiple agitation.
Though “red buds” could be a trope of passion and natural vitality, this
image’s proximity to “torn curtains” brings out a sense of spiritual
bleeding. Privacy is “torn,” and
advertisements for material acquisition (“shiny cars”) stimulate either disquieting, obsessive pangs of greed or equally
upsetting distaste, or perhaps both.
As Lease demonstrates, class conflict can be
be fought within
a person, the “middle” functioning not as a place of equilibrium but as an
anxiety-producing site where the uncomfortable, if appealing presence of the
past (“Coney Island Jew,” explored in earlier poems like “Slivovitz”) struggles
with the attempted mastery of “upper-middle class manners” (encouraged by the “greengolden” suburb environment). Lease happens to possess a tremendous gift
for the rendering of sensory elements. A
poet or artist entranced by compelling images (“braided colors in water”)
seemingly foregoes further class mobility and even endangers his “middle”
status by not focusing on what enriches Donald Trump and his ilk. However, what constitutes “winning in
What is our country.
Did it start as blank, as blank blank, as
blank blank blank. I would love to fly to
Vegas for the punk
festival—we aren’t the first culture to ”monetize relationships”—
force steel splintering,
force breathing, moisture in the air: the
city dissolves, one
long story of corruption:
outer miracle kills the
inner miracle: history has to live with
what was here: no
images, no lightning, no letters of flame:
leaves move, clouds move,
money moves, night pushes through
the money— (36)
For all their talk
about “virgin territory,” “
As the poem
unfolds, Lease elaborates on how serious constraints collide with an
indomitable will to increase of freedom.
The title “Free Again” echoes but differs from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “free at last.”
It seems to imply the goal (not present realization) of a recuperation
of something already known, but it could also refer to reiteration of the call
for freedom. The poem dramatizes a
dialogue between haunting and the hope of freeing a community from such
haunting. One element that keeps
returning to haunt is the concept of “shattered selves” (64). When Lease’s speaker asserts, “We need to
know why voices fall apart” and adds the moral judgment, “our claims of
innocence are false” (39), this is no pomo
celebration of the decentering pluralization
of selves/voices, even if Lease might acknowledge the value of identitarian flexibility; instead, the poet names a faltering
of vision (imagination): “he visualized himself but he knew he was lying—he
could not make his life come true—his father hid pain in a pot of gold, his
mother hid pain in a hollow tree” (57).
Parental models are only part of the problem; Lease keeps reminding us
that “the I lives in an empire—community of headlines,
community of video loops. . .” (61).
Representations produced by media empires are largely legislated by
corporate imperial forces, and in the face of large uncertainties managed or encouraged
by these forces, an individual might resort to the unsatisfactory shield of
extreme self-assertion, imperial selfhood:
A
light bulb fails, and each town fills
And empties, empties and fills—
this town could be
freedom of each one—this
is God risen—I was a rock
star, a shaman, a
buffoon, a hero—
each of these
experiences was very good
for me—
I have an
indomitable will to win—like true
love, I conquer
all—like death and taxes, I am certain—
it’s all within my
reach— (64)
Simultaneously, on
the poem’s penultimate page, one may see the potential for greater social
fragmentation (via uncritical individualism) and a gathering of utopian energy.
If this “I” is recontextualized as a collective voice, thus emphasizing
the phrases “for us” and “the freedom of each one,” personal “experiences” are
placed in the service of something beyond one woman or man’s welfare. The dangerous certainty of narcissistic
posturing gives way to the salubrious assertion of “an indomitable will to win”
over antidemocratic trends, to put a shared freedom “within [our] reach.”
Lease’s speaker,
early in the poem, asks, “Why don’t people talk more about corporations and
power—“ (38).
Perhaps he alludes to how analysis by critics of rampant multinational
corporatism like Michael Moore did not get enough of a hearing from working and
middle-class voters to unseat George W. Bush in 2004, or to how the Democratic
ticket, also indebted to “corporate sponsorship,” did not go far enough in
articulating this link. Not directly
providing the supplement for this lack, Lease repeatedly cites ecological
damage as evidence of corporate power to do great ill:
You
never slept under a bridge—what blurs you—tell me common
stories—there’s a brownfield in
says he’d rather work
at 7-11 than live over there in
that stuff—you can
smell it in the wind—
Letters shine
outside “low-income housing”—there are arrows on
the water—crab-apple
colored—thaw reaches up through mud,
drenching wet opens stink,
stains concrete moss-colored— (49)
In its
juxtaposition of the sadly ironic paucity of choice (for those who “never slept
under a bridge” but are near the poverty level) with evocative descriptive
language that is at once strangely beautiful and horrifying, this passage
exemplifies sections pertaining to pollution’s “stink.” Three pages later, in a reference to what
goes on at “Dow Chemical,” there is a repetition of the stinking evidence: “you
can smell/ that stuff in the wind” (52).
In general, recurrent motifs like “Choirs of repetition fired from
graves—“ (50, 57) contribute to the text’s haunting
quality.
W. Bush struck out
in
Given the poem’s
overall emotional/informational architecture, Lease does not have to say directly
that the Bush team in 2004 engineered a victory of the upper class over the
other two by persuading enough of the middle to accept this inaccurate,
short-term view and thus vote against their own class interests and in favor of
the upper class’s. The Republicans fed on the insecurities of a group heavily
affected by such corporate practices as downsizing and too dependent on credit:
“we’re the middle class—venting:// collectors really
began hounding us, but luckily our mom saw an Oprah show about non-profit debt
management—“ (46). Quick fixes, whether
found in the Republican platform or on talk shows, attract the desperate, and
Christian fundamentalism reinforces conservatism without much compassion:
“America// named you, said you are “I”: strip/ malls equal temples or clouds
that drift to the words we/ can’t speak—// singing hyms
for no reason: and, and,/ and, and, and—I, I, I, I, I—“ (51).
I have insisted
that Lease refuses to embrace despair, but this refusal is more subtly
manifested and takes up much less space than implicit and explicit negative
critique of the current national situation.
Not far from the middle of the poem, he articulates a various actions
that an unspecified “it” “could” perform— “It could be gorgeous, it could be/
loss, it could be broken, it could fold— // . . . it could dangle, it could fall, it/ could
glisten, it could freeze—“— before revealing “its” identity: “the soul
inventing the world—/ the soul inventing the soul—“ (45). We could make different things of the reminder
that “soul” self-construction must precede “world”-composition, which in turn
must precede individual and collective decision that affect material freedoms
and constraints in the social world. In
another context, it could be a turning inward and a rejection of focus on the
political, but here, it includes the hopeful assertion that “gorgeous,”
“glistening” possibilities of social relations might arise from a dialogue
among “souls” engaging in self- and world- “invention.” Even more dramatically, six sections from the
end, Lease’s condensed lyricism and elegant visual
balancing of lines evokes excrement, enchantment, and quasi-utopian promise:
Stillness in red, stillness in green—I
have no words, light
hangs like rope—
We breathe our eyes,
promise the
wind, boxes of shit,
pieces of glass—
Color the wind, we breathe our yes,
open the doors, one
vote one corpse—
One seed of light— (60).
The imaginative synesthesia of “breathe our eyes” infuses perception (that
had been dulled by so much deceptive political/commercial advertising, like
“boxes of shit”) with (re)new(ed) spirit. In the removal of a mere “e,” renewed “eyes”
morph into the breath of affirmation (“yes”).
To “promise the wind,” a grammatically uncertain clause, is either to
assure an audience that prophecy is on the way or to assure prophecy itself of
something. In either case, it seems an
alignment with positive spiritual forces.
To “color the wind” could be to recognize pollution’s stain, but it
could also be to bring one’s subjectivity to bear on potential energies. In the revision of the phrase, “one man, one
vote,” there is also a pregnant doubleness. “Vote” and “corpse” are associated because
war often purchases the franchise in democratic nations, and yet,
alternatively, “one vote” might be regarded as a mere residue of what it could
be in a more truly representative democracy.
President George H. W. Bush made “a thousand points of light” a symbol
of volunteerism replacing federal responsibility for social welfare. While Lease’s trope, “one seed of light,”
like Bush Pere’s, could also be misused, the notion
of “seed” as potential, as life emerging (after “corpse”), keeps the goal of
the chapbook’s title awake, in play, in struggle with what would drown it.
The Hatmaker’s
Wife
by DOROTHEA
LASKY
Secret Architecture by AARON
KUNIN
Adventures Three Through the Isles of BrainCase: A Chapbook’s Excursion
by BRAD FLIS
NEARING NICHOLS BY RAIL
I am sped, my head lifting
out the train window. A series of dynamic self-histories, richly compiled,
opens the air. Am I leaving or entering Travis Nichols’
ON & ABOUT
Seen from a great
distance, a brilliant book forming an island looks like a man’s hat floating
away in the water, the crown and broad rim being distinctly silhouetted. It is
called The Hatmaker’s Wife by one Dorothea Lasky, and halfway up the crown, which is eight hundred
feet high, I almost had a run-in with the
nurse./ It would have been just me and the nurse!
The captain’s lover shot and pierced her brother’s hat with an arrow, She kept asking me for a pen but I told her
I had none./ Something inside me froze as I imagined my two good ones deep in
my bag. And at each luminous
pinnacle, ten wives, all but one ineffable, Her house was immaculate, like she had never been born. Amid this
solitude and salacious landscape, in a dark lit bar, my love said my poems were
shit/ And I, in the light of the candles,/ Pushed a sword into myself and fell
over a cliff/ Into a neverending ocean./ Once a man 5
years my younger/ Loved me and then gave me up./ I raged around him like a
bear. Thus you curse rueful islands like
a lemon on fire with ebullience and ubiquity in larger-than-leitmotif colours, calling at the fishing hamlets to leave mail,
freight, attentive passengers. You pick the salmon off stalks and gills,/ And
the wine-plum Santas with their mouths all afill./ And I know you are true--a veil of oxters, the Cyclops with a sad pool of nurses. From the
marshy banks of concession we observed, in traditional garb and with a pikeman’s lance, Eileen Myles skewer a young Paul Eluard, deservedly so (for his “conversion” we’d been
told). But perhaps strangest of all, in the small fjord of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, we bore witness to an act
expressively criminal. The murder took
place on a day that was made for the children. He took the children and
mashed them into a bucket. He made us eat it. I had to eat it!
The effect was most candid, beautiful, and salient. I would go so far as to
call the experience miraculous. Categorically, those who possess the time at
their disposal and the inclination to venture through The Hatmaker’s Wife will return much benefited in health by
the pure and invigorating air of the poet, those
EXPENSES & KUNIN TOPOGRAPHY
The following
sketches of aerial forays into Aaron Kunin’s Secret
Architecture are given to the public in the hope that their perusal will
furnish information concerning the poets, and poetry, of worlds being explored
by Americans more and more each successive year, worlds having been surveyed in
duplicate, revised, our pilot noted, as The
hum of the fish tank kept him awake, so he got up in the middle of the night to
turn it off./ The glow of the fish tank, placed directly behind the sofa, made
it impossible to sleep, so he reached out pettishly in a fit of half-sleep and
turned it off./ The fish boiled in their tank; someone having (maliciously or
accidentally?) turned the temperature dial as high as it would go during the
night. Aphoristically, the locals, baring no small resemblance to Queneau and Ted Greenwald, encouraged intersection in many
directions, The lies they tell are more
reasonable than their truths./ Reason gets in the way of their effort to tell
the truth./ “Why didn't he assume I was lying?
He's clearly lying all the time--I assume.” Having acquired an Uncanny ability to say the same thing every
time as though discovering it for the first time, he would nosedive for
several minutes, helplessly struggling with his h’s
and u’s before he could say ‘hu-hu-hu-hu-humane.’
Maintaining radio correspondence was even more reproachable. Aren't you afraid that this cheap hotel pen
is going to corrupt your writing?/ As I sign my name it appears on my face in
glowing letters./ He writes his name in one place and it appears in another
place. To hear it again, we worried. Déjà vu interred us for weeks under
sweltering red lights of our nutured immediacy which
could not be avoided at the level of
Content from Nov.
18 to Jan. 24
Form “
“ 20 “ “
25
Time “
“ 22 “ “
17
Whatever ‘hell’ may
signify in Kuninian, this place is decidedly
different as regards the climate of inspection. My name doesn't look like me, but it sounds like
Iterature by EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY
Ugly Duckling Press
2005
Reviewed
by
MATHIAS SVALINA
If you like
rhyming couplets then Eugene Ostashevsky’s Iterature is the book for you. If you like rhyming
couplets that wrench the syntax in favor of the rhyme and often guide the poem
through its ideas how my old neighbor would pull her schnauzer’s leash so hard
the dog would be briefly, though I imagine uncomfortably, airborne then Eugene Ostashevsky’s Iterature is
for you. If you like a kind of chucklemonkey
personality-driven absurdism that hides its biting
intellect in self deprecation and one liners then Eugene Ostashevsky’s
Iterature is for you. If you like your Russian
émigré poetry brash and self aggrandizing with a saccharine twist of
near-parody hip hop style and the American pop culture fascination then Eugene Ostashevsky’s Iterature is
for you. If you like your Russian émigré poetry with a deep seeded knowledge of
the classics of Western and
If nothing else, this book is an amazing display of dedication to and
exploration of a personal style. Ostashevsky pushes
all of his language and ideas out, seemingly as quickly and nakedly as
possible. His absurdism manifests itself in drastic
jumps in ideas, the following of language into cul de
sacs of meaning, a mixture of bravado and self deprecation and
ubiquitous, devious humor. While much of his humor and style relates back to
the Russian absurdist movement OBERIU, of which Ostashevsky
has been an effective popularizer and translator, he
is in no way a mimic of their playful childlike style. One might consider his
voice more frantic, a breathless surge from line to line, attempting to jump on
the next rhyme, the next joke, the next idea. He’s more Artaud
in his confrontational style than Kharms writing his
little tales for his drawer to read. In this respect he is a poet of
autobiography, of near confessionalist moments of
laying bare the self. He attempts to control the chaos of intellect with
language. He jokes and sputters in search of control, in search of anchors.
In much of the book, Ostashevsky employs the rhyming
couplet as his controlling agent and this formal element is what I find most
compelling in his work. He is so dedicated to the form that I want to file his
work next to Pope, though on the willfully unheroic
side. These couplets often wrench the poem in favor of the rhyme: “Yes, my mind
spins and my stomach too./Should you look at me from
the ceiling, you,” “In the forest of onerous sadness/ I pranced around,
mine own onanger that is ass” and “I would rather
fall on the floor in my elbow a saber/ than figure out life from the agony of
my neighbor” are three examples, though you could find them in nearly every
poem.
Other portions of the book explore different formal styles. The section
entitled “Smotherland” uses more concise couplets
with less obvious rhyming play. And “The Ambassadors,” shows Ostashevsky at his most Dadaist, with choirs of penguins
and insects intoning gibberish. But the heart of Ostashevsky’s
poetry is the rhyme. This creates a nearly Shel
Silverstein-like preference for play above intentional progress of the poem.
The rhyme demands a sing-songy reading that links the
Silverstein voice with the exploratory nature of freestyle hip hop. Just as
often as the rhyme takes precedence over the line or idea this exploration
leads Ostashevsky to images of shocking correctness
that are dependent on the rhyme, such as “Your body flopped around like a
sturgeon,/ though five minutes before that you were a virgin” and “and other
mutilations most favored by nations/ as they make orations among carnations.”
And there are moments when he turns a rhyme that makes me nearly stand up and
salute the poets ability to find that
connection: “You’re acting like a character from Theodore Dostoyevsky!/ Thus
proclaims I, Eugene Ostashevsky!” He at turns invites
groans, out-loud laughter and shock at the way he can occasionally pull ideas
of depth and imagination out of the morass of his form.
If you’re anything like me, though, this book is going to piss you off at
times. Ostashevsky presents a theory of language just
below the surface of the playfulness of this book. All philosophy becomes a
matter of semantics in Ostashevsky’s poems, all ideas are reducible to useless blobs of language:
Cantor
questions the swallow
They discuss
The equivalence of parts and wholes
The precise meaning of transcendental
Whether the crib is a crib
I’m not a child
cries Cantor
and stomps on his bib
from
“Cantor in the Aviary”
We say to you,
Teach us love
Teach us love
Teach us love
Teach us love
You say,
Know reads No
That’s all you know
That’s all you do not know
from
“Language”
So what was your conclusion?
we ask the philosopher
Tell us
Tell us
Tell us
Deaf man, dead man
ancestor god
Deine
Zung ist rot
Your tongue is rot
The philosopher in the photograph
only clutches
his favorite monograph
cause language, what can it say
from
“The Two-Dimensional Philosopher”
Sure, it’s Wittgensteinian and so much more, but the poems continually
dance away from the ideas stated within them. And yes, I understand that this
is the whole thrust of the pomo
mistrust of language and that an absurdist approach to a philosophy of language
enacts the philosophy. I understand that the movement of Ostashevsky’s
dance is more meaningful than the ideas themselves. The play and absurdism is a layer of cloudy ice that allows you to see
the ideas below the surface but always the ideas are obscured.
Yet the ideas of language, like the ideas of cultural affiliation and the
understanding of the self in relation to history, are laid out so baldly that
it seems that Ostashevsky wants to be able to develop
them into arguments. His devilish humor and absurdist ideology continually
undermines this attempt. And beyond the at times virtuosic formal play this
undermining is what I find most engaging about this book. Ostashevsky
does not create a balance between the personal and the absurd, but instead
poems are in constant battle between their ideas and their performance. If you
want an orderly enactment of philosphical and
prosodic ideology then this is not the book for you. If you want the delight of
a poet writing poems that admit to every intellectual desire and defeat then
this is the book for you. If you want
a book of poems that will force you to return to it continually both as a
puzzle and model of puzzling then Eugene Ostashevsky’s
Iterature is for you.
Interview with BRENDA HILLMAN
by JEN TYNES
Brenda Hillman was born in
JT: In a 2003
interview with Sarah Rosenthal, you say that making a poem is like
"knitting a sweater and someone is unraveling it on the other end." Pieces of Air in the Epic includes two
epigraphs that reference spinning and weaving, the act of or potential for
making. I don't know my Odyssey very
well and had to look up the context for the quotation you take from it, but in
the meantime I tried relating another instance of weaving in the The Odyssey -- Penelope's shroud weaving --
and it raised some questions for me about how a project exists in time. The
same week I read "Nine Untitled Epyllions"
I heard an interview with a woman who's making quilts
for the families of American soldiers who've died in the
BH: I started
thinking about time in this contrasting way when working on Loose Sugar, ''time resembles
sugar''—I'd been interested in alchemy, in alchemical process—and when I was
working on Cascadia I thought about time not as a
different dimension but as a set of relations we construct from our sense of
the elements in relation to
what's not human. I think a lot about mythic time, and guess after thinking
about the alchemists, their daily work, their frustrations,
I got a sense of the determination of the life of art… Living in California,
thinking about alchemy lead me to think about the periodic table, then about
geology, then about California geology as a
metaphor for consciousness in time about the many manifestations of geology
evolved in several ways there…Geological processes are so slow our life is so
slight and brief in relation to these millions of years. Whatever I intended, intention has little to
do with how the poem presents itself finally…The artist, the poet, works along,
at this pace, in pacing… In writing about the
The idea for the tetralogy—of 4 elements—came about because
I didn't get past the element of ''earth'' in Cascadia. Working on a larger scale refreshed my spirit somehow. Cascadia was
published the week of
About the weaving and fabric metaphor—certainly not a
very original one, especially for a woman writer—but I like to think metaphor, even clichés,
are infinitely refreshable. To use another household industry metaphor: using
clichés is like using sourdough starter for the baking of bread—you take off a
little plug of the starter-yeast for the new loaf.
In this book I had the sense that the
fabric metaphor connected with kinds of singing—the choral singing and the individual
singing—in the epic, mostly in tragedy, actually, and about how singing motifs
have varying threads. Of course, there are all kinds of ways in which threading
as time, threading as consciousness can work: Penelope, the Fates spinning,
weaving, and cutting threads. Thread throughout time, like, were the tights
that Elizabethans wore really stretchy?
And all the ways the mind starts drawing things in—the idea that an
industrial revolution could come in the fabric industries…So I was thinking
about flags in war when all the bullshit about the American flag-worship
started up after 9-11, and how flag worship doesn't even consider the makers of
flags—like, the fact that
some of the flags were made in Vietnam—what an irony. The Epyllion
poems put the idea of a seamstress who is making the flags of war throughout
time next to poems that are kind of a seared vision of various invasions some of the
imagery in those poems comes from Iraq War situations, and some from other
wars. "String Theory Sutra'' expands on this. Vermeer's lace-maker,
coupled with the lacey lightning in the last poem, is supposed to give a sense
of peace and inner drama. I guess—in all three of these books—the time of the
artist, the daily work of the imagination, is set in the context of the
elements and of history.
JT: I've been reading Wendell
Berry's Standing By
Words, and a line from "Notes: Unspecializing
Poetry" seems especially relevant to Pieces
of Air in the Epic: "It is the thought of not writing poetry down that
returns us to its mnemonic (its musical) character." The first poem in the
book, "Street Corner," ends, "We could have said/ song outlasts
poetry, words/ are breath bricks to/ support the guardless
singing/ project. We could have/ meant song outlasts poetry." The
relationship between poetry and song recurs in other poems, and throughout the
poems there's punning, wordplay, and onomatopoeia, which make us conscious of
the poem's existence as both sound and image. After reading Pieces of Air I had to return to Cascadia and
reconsider how I'd understood the physical form of some of those poems. In Pieces of Air, "experimental"
physical form definitely relates to sound, voices, for me. I hear choruses and
conversations. In Cascadia
I originally only *saw* the forms -- shape referenced topography. But I am now
interested in how "point of view" can mean both sound/voice and
location (point) in these two books. How do you think about these poems'
physical forms in relation to both image and sound?
BH: This is a really
good question—and really large! Physical forms reveal themselves in different
ways. I sometimes have the sense of --I don't know how to put this—squinting into the
gestalt of a shape before beginning a poem—even if it's going to reveal a shape of
conventional, left-justified quatrains.
I believe inspiration is given by the gods and the human mind at work in
its traditions in the case of forms or numbers, this
could include both Oulipo and the Count on
Yet when I try to will the poem into some preconceived form, it will refuse…Many
things in the contemporary new lyric work for and against the song-like, the
continuing of sense. I've always liked
multiples of six, and so sometimes a pacing of certain thoughts will put the
poem into the twelve- or twenty-four lined poem. I choose forms that interest me for the
subject matter or the spirit of the poem; I seem always to want to explore new
forms, almost like learning new languages or a new game… for example, the
punctuation around the Mission poems in Cascadia really
had to do with looking at the art in the churches and not with anything else…
The split form in "String Theory Sutra" came from squinting at Horace
while my husband was translating Horatian odes when
we were in the mountains. Horace's
''look''—in which there were
twice as many word on one side as on the other—gave me the idea for the poem—it's like Vinnie's remark in Saturday
Night Fever—"I saw it on t.v. then I made it
up.'' There's much more to be said about
this. Form and whether it will evolve fitfully or easily has everything to do
with how I feel after making the first blobby forays into the poem, which,
because I love ''re-vision''—
JT: In "Forms of Activism for
Overwhelmed People" you talk about poetry-making as "an imaginative
spiritual practice that gives strength for everything else." I wonder how
the poem itself also activates its audience. In this book you focus quite a bit
on history-making, narrative-making, how we both desire story and resist its inaccuracies.
In "Air In The Epic" you write "Try/ to describe the world, you
tell/ them--but what is a description?" and later "Side stories
leaked into the epic,/ told by its lover, the
world." The development of the poem seems rooted in (quoting the same poem
again) "a type of thought between trance & logic where teachers/
rest," which I understand to be intuitive movement. Can you say a little
about the "air" in the epic? How do we write meaningful histories?
And/or how do you approach the act of history-writing?
BH: I had the sense
that the epic, with its grand sweep, its invasion-driven plots, needed a little
air. Air seemed a matrix for cultural healing; I mean, originally I had thought
to describe different types of
This takes me to a question I've thought a lot
about: the connection between poetry and politics. (I'm think
about this a lot because Bob and I just participated in a colloquium on
politics and poetry at U.C. Berkeley)… Statements are often made like ''
everything is historical in a poem,'' or '' all poems are political…'' These
may both be true statements, depending on what you mean by poetry and history
and politics, and I like French theory just fine. It is true that all choices
about subject matter—even whether to leave the War—of your poems, are political in a
sense? But it isn't helpful to not make distinctions. Some poems have material that works with
historical or political events, trying to make subtle re-castings of our
notions of received history… Or, in various kinds of innovative traditions—the use of the
sentence against itself, or toward freedom or something…
Poetry can help us understand other
disciplines and vice versa, so I like making use of historical and scientific
materials and vocabularies, history of Geology , politics, culture
or spiritual traditions and soul's processes. All poetry is symbolic, to some
degree or another, and I employ varying realisms when making meaning. And I
want to add the obvious: For people involved in legislative business, in the
military or the anti-military, for people involved in activism, even
frustrating activist work outside of poetry—I've been working with Codepink
to bring home the National Guard—there is a great deal of difference between
politics in poetry and politics in Sacramento. So, my Buddhist friend says,
everything is true. But it's also true that we need to write our poems and also
do activism outside poetry and not just on the internet, either.
As for the latter part of your question:
the way I approach the act of writing about these things is to work hard. When
that doesn't pay off, I get on my knees and beg the goddess to give me the next
poem. When the next poem begins to happen, I try to be a nice brenda, not a grouchy, flakey,
crazy person.