REVIEWS

Zero Star Hotel
Anselm Berrigan
Edge Books, 2002. $14.

Zero Star Hotel shines with the attendant luminosity of a poet wholly coming into his own; and yet, one does sense the presence--the very still and observant, almost Zen-like presence--of a perhaps overlooked, though no less important, influence, namely: Philip Whalen. In, "Since You Asked Me," Whalen's self-described press release, he writes, "This Poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is history...and you." Such an approach, one based on exploring and mapping myriad states of consciousness, from those unexamined in our daily routines to those brought on by Rimbaud's dictum of forceful derangement, is foundational for Zero Star Hotel. In an early poem, "The hunt of the frail stag," Berrigan writes:

The stasis here is ironically quite productive, as a sort of multitasking has taken place, wherein the recounting of both mundane acts and the mind's response to them becomes that thing such acts so often obliterate the poem. Berrigan has a knack for the built-in admission of the fragility of a poem, which, rather than leading to the lifeless, shiny-diamond of artifice present in so much overworked verse, shows how we are inherently flawed, giving his work a welcomingly human tactility vis-á-vis "giving up art for breakfast". Similar to those in Berrigan's Integrity & Dramatic Life, the poems that comprise the first of the book's three sections are equal parts playful and endearing naiveté ("My stuffed tiger/ doesn't even bother to assault me in his dreams/anymore when we sleep together"), imagistic and sonic romp ("Part camera part bulldozer/ Poppa my pod fell apart"), syntactic conflation ("Pictures of exploding bikinis/ Bootiful weeping and silver I wore/ Charles' birthday brood-swings/ Mean Bomb the Suburbs") and wholly sociable "I"-centered lyric.

The final two sections, Zeros And Ones and the 24-page title poem, are accompanied with direct references to their particular compositional method. Zeros And Ones, comprised of 19 poems written in response to Richard O'Russa's Elastic Latitudes, came about, as Berrigan explains, "directly out of a process of copying the pages of Elastic Latitudes, a typewriter-written poem made entirely of the numbers 0 and 1, into duplicate lines with the numbers spelled out. By the end of each page I would be in a trance-like empty state and write what turned out to be all the poems that make up that middle section." These trance inducing conditions engendered some deceptively Dadaesque poems, which, while having been written from an "empty state", demonstrate how the self is--like it or not--thoroughly embedded in the fabric of culture. Here are a few lines from "No knock knows you're awake", one of the more straightforward poems in the section:

The final section is comprised solely of the title poem, a stunningly rendered, 24-page exploration and enactment of how the mind deals with grief. The poem documents Berrigan's response to the onslaught of emotion brought on by the death of his stepfather, the poet Douglas Oliver. Set up in two columns per page, it is similar both visually and in its intensity of movement to Tom Raworth's "Writing"; however, in Berrigan's poem, each column is comprised of three ten-line stanzas set uniformly apart. At times this causes an uncertainty as to how one should approach the poem, as it appears to move from the left stanza to the right as often as it reads straight down the columns. Additionally, all of the lines in the left column begin with a capitalized letter, suggesting the possibility of the line reading across columns. Such a contained chaos, one which is at once antithesis to and synthesis of Hannah Weiner's Clairvoyant Journal, makes the emotional register of the poem all the more palpable as one is forced to mirror the uncertainties of grief through one's continually thwarted attempts to find a specific and uniform way of reading. Scattered throughout the poem, there are self-referential moments in which Berrigan reveals some of his process:

This call and response between experience and mind creates a level of intimacy that makes the poem feel as though it is being written while one is reading it ("this fluidity between/ abstraction and talk/ is a portal to a portal"), as though the next stanza is just a black swirl of symbols waiting for one to engage in what Marcel Duchamp called an inner osmosis. And yet so much of this poem is concerned with the external world, with the socio-political implications of the IMF, the AIDS crisis, our current faux-president and "the difference between/ dimpled chad/ vs./ pregnant chad", the menial jobs one has to take on as an artist, poverty, sex, China, the "stinky French hotel" of the poem's title.

At times, the poem even feels like spontaneous bop-prosody for the twenty-first century, as the deftness with which Berrigan moves within each of these stanzas is quite astonishing. For example, in the following excerpt an allusion to a few of Spicer's more infamous phrases ("No one listens to poetry" and the disputed "My vocabulary did this to me") unfolds with a syntax that simultaneously mirrors and critiques our sound bite culture by twisting the poem into chilling reportage-speak:

Berrigan has performed an act of hyper-compression, one where the truncated syntax and emotional heft of a poet like Paul Celan is filtered through the more sprawling, but no less wounded, Gregory Corso (Although perhaps that should be Bruce Andrews via Anne Sexton, as Berrigan writes, "A language poet trapped/ In a confessional poet's body"). One hopes the following passage rings true:

Ceci n'est pas Keith --- Ceci n'est pas Rosmarie: Autobiographies
Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop
Burning Deck

This is not Keith. This is not Rosmarie. It is certainly not their pictures on the cover. But it is an autobiography, or is at least marked as so. As prolific writers, translators and publishers, the Waldrops are a formidable literary team. Not just formidable: admirable. I've built up a lot of goodwill for them in my short adulthood. In this slim volume (the first half is the not-Keith, the second the not-Rosmarie) of 90+ pages, each member tackles the task of autobiography. The epigraphs give helpful guides to each half. Keith's epigraph ("We lov we know not what: and therefore evry Thing allures us" - Thomas Traherne) presents the reader with a focus on thingness, and the things in his story are seen fairly clearly. He recalls people and places-the characters and settings change, but the presence of objects and subjects does not, and his stance seemingly does not alter either. Rosmarie's epigraph ("Poetry is having nothing to say and saying it: we possess nothing" - John Cage) is equally pertinent to her autobiography; the presence of subjects and objects is not such a given, and therefore (perhaps) the emphasis is placed on action and movement.

Mr. Waldrop opens with observation: "I know, in songs, how important the words are [. . .] I almost always listen to, for instance, Schubert (or whomever) without taking the text into account, without in some cases any idea of, what the song is about." The implication seems to be that the movements of the forthcoming pages should encountered the way the author listens to music: to follow the motion of the writing while sometimes disregarding the embedded content will be "adequate." And early on, this seems to be the case: Mr. Waldrop fast forwards through his childhood, from early impressions of language ("incomprehensible---and, thereby, magical-message[s]") to his first practice at conscious role-playing (Peter Rabbit); from noticing a doctor's name is Butcher to observing that a headstone simply reads "Loveless." This is done with a skillful artlessness, allowing the reader to grasp the resonance of the above on his or her own terms.

From here, Mr. Waldrop moves towards the subject of his family; refreshingly, it is a seemingly angst-free subject. His father's character is summarized with some brief notes on his peculiar sayings ("crazy as a peach orchard boar" "this world-and then the fireworks"). His mother is remembered lecturing Jehovah Witnesses with such vigor that they begin avoiding the Waldrop home. So far, the author has managed to address the issues of language, childhood and family simultaneously and subtly-but then the writing moves from the richness of its first few pages to more familiar territory: the amusing anecdote. The narrative still moves at record speed: we go from high school to the military to college to Rosmarie in a page. Language is always orbiting the memories, whether it's John Crowe Ransom lecturing incomprehensibly or the newlyweds deciding which books might go where in a small and crowded home. Actually, this might be the funniest little section, as the Waldrops decide upon the books that will be stored in the bathroom: Howard's End, The Golden Pot, the Brownings, etc. No mention of The Sound and the Fury or All the King's Men, though. And: is this when they came up with Burning Deck?

Anyway, after this interest lags as Mr. Waldrop's focus seems to shift completely to the anecdotal: recounting his grad school days and his numerous personas and shenanigans. Skimming through the photographs, one notices that Rosmarie is often looking directly at the camera, her expression either warm and inviting, or caustic, but always fairly natural. Keith, on the other hand, is very theatrical: often behaving as though the camera is not there, gazing off to the left or right, or with his eyes closed while his head is in someone else's lap. Or he's posing with Yoko Ono, staring down some off-camera corridor (Yoko Ono? I don't know either. Fluxus, I guess. She is not mentioned in the text itself). Other than childhood or action shots, none of the photographs of Mr. Waldrop seem to catch him in any sort of non-theatrical behavior. This is may not be fair, but the same sort of impression is made in the writing: if one were to film the Waldrops' autobiographies as monologues, one would have Keith speaking to someone a little to the left or right of the camera, or in another room, and he would sometimes giving the audience a knowing wink; in contrast, Rosmarie would be filmed with the camera looking over her shoulder as she is writing her section, the audio provided by voice-over. So: Mr. Waldrop: very spoken. Mrs. Waldrop: very written.

Let me recast that. Mrs. Waldrop: superbly written. Her half is the one that begs rereading. Instead of a continuous, if occasionally caffeinated, narrative, Mrs. Waldrop provides short titled sections in what seems to be a chronological order. Her half begins with a short section (two paragraphs) titled "The Past, Upon Scrutiny." It begins: "Not green mountains embedded in strong feeling." Immediately she presents the reader with what is not there (anything Romantic or pastoral, apparently)-immediately she is working from a point of absence. A few pages later, while in primary school, the remark "Yes, I said, I'm here" has the spark of revelation. One gets the sense that the liminal nature of Mrs. Waldrop's approach is a considered reaction born out of experience and not a theory based upon fashion: "The world is certainly not a given, even if it occupies more and more of they sky." The flux is real: the constant and deadly bombings, the re-imagining of Hitler from "our leader" to "the criminal" (in the latter case, my sense is that the author's bewilderment is not so much the translation of "leader" into "criminal" as the morphing of "our" to "the").

So Rosmarie grows up with herself and the other children playing in the ruins, aware of the possibility of finding "real bodies in our imagined dungeons." This is an arresting example of a familiar and often effective literary trope: the imaginative realm houses actions with real consequences. The actor playing MacBeth actually kills the actor playing Duncan, for example-an imaginative narrative adopting a more real and thus a more sinister bend. There's no nostalgia in Mrs. Waldrop's childhood anecdotes. There's more than a little red in the sepia tone. Even the fanciful narratives of kids at play have seen a darkness.

I can't keep idea of motion out of my brain as I discuss Mrs. Waldrop's autobiography. The idea that even though one has nothing, one must speak. Or that even though one has nowhere to go, one must go there. It is no surprise then that the author finds solace in music, of movement freed of subjects, objects, and so forth. Rosmarie meets Keith after playing a concert and they fall in love listening to his records. One section is titled "Music Enters the Body as Music" and begins "but hollows it for emotion." At first I misread it as "motion." The further Dante descends, the more stationary are the damned, right? Music-the paradise of movement unbound by matter. Is this why seduction is often accompanied by music? The suggestion of free movement? Keith soon returns to the states and an unhappy Rosmarie enters a university: "By the next fall I was a ghost." This out-of-body state doesn't seem accidental; on the next page she describes herself as a puppet. Throughout, Mrs. Waldrop's maturation as a writer seems to coincide with her desire to be outside not only someone else's canon, but also her own body (an early book is titled The Road Is Everywhere or Stop This Body). One assumes Mrs. Waldrop's approach to her physical self informs her writing methods: she speaks of verse's "refusal to fill up all available space," and quotes Clark Coolidge that "to create is to make a pact with nothingness." Towards the end of her narrative, her tendencies become clear: the need to rethink the potentially overly-macho subject-object syntax of the ordinary sentence, the fragment as a peek at the infinite, the ruin (with its implication of a past, and further, movement) as a more eloquent monument than the (stationary) shrine:

Rosmarie's section works both as illuminating autobiography and as a sort of primer for her poetry. Keith's, despite its early promise, does neither for me: there is an occasional red herring that impedes the narrative flow, but overall, I get the sense of a few amusing stories from his life, but not a life's philosophy or focus. But, the volume is slim. Skim through Keith's half in one sitting (it's like a pleasant conversation), and then enjoy Rosmarie's section a few pieces at a time. By the end, you'll by moved by her final image: Rosmarie in motion, as motion (as language?) itself: "I circle like a moth until the blinding splendor will exceed the anxiety of wings."

it was today                    A Handmade Museum
Andrei Codrescu           Brenda Coultas
Coffee House Press         Coffee House Press

The penultimate poem in Andrei Codrescu's new collection it was today is a 9/11 poem, one that Codrescu read on NPR on 9/11/2002, one that has "Allen Ginsberg in mind." An interesting poet to have in mind, if only because Ginsberg certainly would have had something to say about 9/11, though it seems unlikely it would've been much like Codrescu's poem; Ginsberg's holy fool persona, I'd guess, would have allowed him to internalize the event to the point that any "I"/"you"/"the towers" in his unwritten poem would have grown to be indistinguishable. Codrescu's persona is much more acerbic; it is that of the wise-cracking outsider, where the heavily-accented "I" is very different from the less-accentuated "you" - this is why an "us," unless erotic/romantic and therefore temporary, is often difficult for this reader to take seriously in his poems. But Codrescu, to his credit, does try to create an "us" in this poem, with the "us" consisting of Codrescu and 9/11 itself: the two of them as the outsiders, watching with disdain as the rest of us (retired generals, loonies, fakes, Lefties, soured professors, wolverines led by Noam Chomsky, poetasters, etc.) react to the catastrophe. For Codrescu's stance to be successful, one has to either agree with his sentiments (which are on the safe side of irreverent) or be charmed by his mask [1] . The severe limitations of the poem's language ("I cheered when our warplanes ripped through the skies of Afghanistan scorching the caves where our enemies burrowed") disable its abilities to charm. In terms of sentiment, Codrescu makes a potentially appealing, if predictable, case:

More interesting than Codrescu's sentiment is the position he creates for himself as intermediary between 9/11 and the Republic, as a means of dialogue and reconciliation. The holiest game is the game of reconciliation, and Codrescu's status as emigre could give him street cred for speaking as a conscientious individual outsider as opposed to some official poetic mouthpiece. Unfortunately, the poem doesn't have enough imagination to do this. First of all, Codrescu himself is beyond any reproach in his poem - he cries and cheers at the appropriate moments, and apparently the poem itself is not among the "thick layers" earlier noted. The last line of the poem, "9/11, I can barely remember you & I'm sorry" sounds like the inevitable ending of a powerful poem, but this poem is not that poem. This last line is the first note of self-chastisement, of inclusion of the speaker with the rest of America, and it feels obligatory. Perhaps Codrescu's speaker cannot remember 9/11 (the language of the poem does treat it as more of a abstract, as opposed to a visceral, event), but it might be because the speaker seems almost incapable of remembering or even encountering anything it cannot address with a knowing smirk. I think Codrescu placed "9/11" at the end of this collection hoping, perhaps, to develop a speaker who could address the tragedy with some authority. I wish that was the case, because I know I need to read a poem like that.

Perhaps Codrescu simply needs to stop trying to be the "big-hearted wit" of his blurb. Instead, I suggest he consider becoming the heartless wit that his talents suggest he can be. His language usually comes alive when he is in mocking mode-but not always. For example, the poem "the masses," while trying to be bitter and sardonic, ends up being merely vaguely Populist:

Okay, and poets use them in poems. Codrescu's approach is at least consistent: he's the straight-shooting outsider you can trust in a world of fakes and posers, but here he doesn't have the gumption to be the outlaw he could be, taking shots that draw some sort of blood, that say more than "the masses are a bit like cattle, eh?" and "darn them dirty politicians." I don't know if I'd personally enjoy a sharper, more biting Codrescu, but at least I wouldn't be such a bored spectator. I'd maybe even feel a little threatened. The least successful poems in this collection are of the same stripe as "the masses": the weary anti-literary literary wit lending out everyday advice, casting caustic asides. Codrescu's poems get more interesting when they rely less on his persona. "how I got to america" stands out as a solid, vaguely surreal travelogue, the sort of thing Charles Simic did more precisely in The World Doesn't End. "Lu Li and Weng Li" is a strange intermission inserted into Codrescu's one-man show - the details are often lovely: "the emperor has a red monkey/he strokes it so much it is bald". But moments like this, and the brief but vibrant poem called "opera later," are rare; more common is "wartime questions & answers in montreal," where Codrescu presents himself as the nicotine-stained drinking buddy of The Truth, offering little else than the rightness of his personal opinions.

***

In contrast, Brenda Coultas' debut is a dense, thrilling book that makes actual, lived-in reality feel like imagination's most necessary ground, a book that seeks more appropriate identities and spaces for Coultas and her neighbors. Immediately one is struck by the content, the objects, of A Handmade Museum - the speaker dives into dumpsters, recovering chairs, shirts, teeth. All this refuse doesn't come across as gritty decoration, or as a surface gesture towards an ideal of all-inclusiveness; instead, it resonates as an imaginative search for possible, usable forms. The speaker, whether in urban or rural setting, seems to identify obsessively with her locale, so it makes sense for her to expand her identity by exploring her surroundings. Most of the book is in prose, which is appropriate; prose is the way language gets work done, and there is a lot of work in Coultas' book, much lifting and carrying. Literal and figurative lifting and carrying. The speaker's impulse to take materials from the streets and bring them into her home seems to parallel the book's impulse, of selecting from the too-easily disposed. From "Dumpster":

Coultas' speaker finds value in the most basic aspects of living: interacting with family and strangers, remembering, utilizing the senses as a means of discovering meaning and purpose. In many ways, this is an old-fashioned book; it is an intelligent, artful response to the difficulties and riches of trying to make a life. For many, Joseph Cornell is the idealized image of the artist-as-collector. Coultas' art is less whimsical, more ash can, but is still stubborn enough to insist on a kind of optimism. From "Boy Eye":

Coultas' poetry seems free from any anxiety about being the new or next anything. Instead, it is busy working, collecting, arranging, and (as Coultas notes) following Allen Ginsberg's advice "to notice what's vivid." As much as I'm eager to read what Brenda Coultas does next, I truly hope her following projects also take their time to discover what their purposes are, because A Handmade Museum is the rare first book that exists not to announce the arrival of a new talent, but to offer a considered vision of a shared, actual world.

Tony Tost

[1] "Literary charm, arising out of the desire to please, excludes those flights of intellectual power which are more rewarding than pleasure." Cyril Connelly, The Unquiet Grave

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