GEORGE KALAMARAS. Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair. Quale Press. 2004. $14

JOHN OLSON. Oxbow Kazoo. First Intensity Press. 2005. $12

reviewed by G. C. WALDREP

To read much George Kalamaras at one sitting is to grow progressively more aware of a certain circle or cycle of reference points—images, words—that form, at the confluence of Surrealism and the yogic meditative traditions that together constitute the wellspring of his work, a sort of eccentric, vivid kabbala. At the lower registers lie nodes of lice and carp, silk and blood, the owl, and the human groin. In the middling scaffolding reside ears and bees, the moon, the color green, the tongue, the human torso (by way of "chest" and "breast"), eggs and eels and salt and seed. Cascading over everything, hair: sometimes shaved, sometimes growing, sometimes braided; sometimes the speaker's, sometimes another's. At the very top, crowning Kalamaras's vision of the world, glitter spine and vowel and sparrow.

Kalamaras works conscientiously in both the traditions he has chosen to inherit. His newest book, Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair—beautifully produced by Gian Lombardo's Quale Press—claims the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux (whose 1937 painting The Call of the Night appears on the book's cover) is its tutelary muse; Max Ernst also appears, briefly if memorably, as a sort of doting uncle. The book's compositional strategies hew close to Surrealist practice, but the book's philosophical frame of reference comes from various Eastern spiritual traditions; Kalamaras dedicates the volume, in part, to "the beloved Yogis of India." The result is a synthetic discourse that moves easily back and forth between Western modes of juxtaposition and surprise and Eastern postures of phenomenological concern.

Kalamaras's previous book, Borders My Bent Toward, prosecuted his particular (and particularly erotic) vision primarily through traditional free verse lines and stanzas. The major exception to this rule was the playfully exuberant series of epistolary prose poems he called "Births Incurred" (Kalamaras's half of a long-standing correspondence with Eric Baus; the other half appears in print in Baus's The To Sound). Nearly all of the poems in Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair are prose poems, but the shift is more than a formal one.

For starters, the poems in Java Sparrows seem more relaxed than their predecessors. In Borders Kalamaras displayed an insistent emotional earnestness that crosscut, and sometimes undercut, the affective power of Surrealist play. In Java Sparrows that earnestness has receded; the result is often a less coercive experience for the reader, though also at times a less exigent one. It's as if Kalamaras had channeled Russell Edson by way of his own erotic fever dream and a renewed acquaintance with Breton. Here are three prose stanzas from "A History of Sleep":

Animal skins from the time of Eden. Hunters with boils, appearing from Emmaus, believing in inverted stars. Eating locusts. A nipping in your half-sleep when you turn over the day's plague as hair crowding the pillow.

You found the earthworm and left the clods moiling in the moonlight. What could not be put into love? Pried into an earwig? What cracked like a word broken across the black bread?

We were inmates of the dark kitchen. Given crusts. Told never to believe a lay person or a monk. The window, the size of those in Flemish paintings. The cup of boiled milk had a skin of cinnamon, was smaller and larger than your only mother.

Most of the poems in Java Sparrows rely more on narrative than "A History of Sleep," which conveys Kalamaras's associational poetics in condensed form. Kalamaras's Eros is less an Eros of encounter than an Eros of condition: everything has sensual valence, starting with sound and proceeding through the human body to language and other furnitures of daily life.

What sets Java Sparrows apart from other contemporary Surrealist poetries, and from Kalamaras's earlier books, is a sense of community that not only informs his process but also infuses the work. Rarely have I read a book of poems so affectionately aware of its own primary audience. Two of the longer poems in Java Sparrows are addressed to poet John Bradley; others appear to be later entries in his correspondence with Baus. The flip side of human community, of course, is loss, and Java Sparrows contains more than its share of elegies. Maybe it's this sense of the fragility of community that makes Java Sparrows read more soberly than Borders My Bent Toward. There were moments when I longed for the manic wordplay of "Births Incurred," but they were matched by the moments in which I, reading from outside the charmed circle, nevertheless felt the pathos that lies at the heart of Kalamaras's project, the sweetness of each inevitable goodbye.

For me, the most powerful poem in Java Sparrows is the longest poem, "Wang Wei Board Game." Positioned as the second of four sections in the book, "Wang Wei Board Game" invents itself through nine pages of instructions for prospective players. The instructions alternate between moments of pathos, humor, technical language, wry humor, and high camp. The poem's appropriation of the ancient Chinese poets is indiscriminating, irreverent, and thorough. Here is the stanza describing the gamepieces:

Select board token as your principal participant 'identity.' Choose among the following, one for each player: wandering monk, Chinese timber wolf, panda chewing bamboo, lute, Mongolian pony, emperor's fingernail (pointed, curved token), Tu Fu's ragged overcoat (token with holes), amorous palace peacock, courtesan, Yangtze ferry boat (without ferryman), River Han ferry boat (with ferryman), panda without bamboo (sad-looking token), full moonlight (elongated, translucent piece), Tartar warrior, blood pheasant (red-tipped winged token), apricot grove moth, river wave Li Po drowned in (token marked luminous with dissolving star), Subprefect Chang (government official token), court poet, yarrow stalk, bamboo rain forest (large, slightly damp token), and conscription officer.

The poem, of course, is a game, not unlike the game it describes. Who wouldn't want to play? As the poem progresses, however, it becomes clear that we are all already playing. "Place poem on depiction of one stream or the other, and sprinkle water," the instructions at one point read, "...until brush stroke of calligraphy dissolves, joining the 'world of me' with the world of the eternal river of either life or death." "Is there a way out of one's soul?" Kalamaras asked in his previous book. In Java Sparrows, the soul finds its way back in.

***

What's striking about John Olson's jittery, often hallucinatory prose poems is how little a sense of community they betray. If Kalamaras writes both from and to the consciousness of a specific poetic community, Olson's poems seem to emanate from some unnamed and intensely private location. Names are dropped, yes, but they tend to be the names of the famous, or else the safely dead; the names of poets appear chiefly as metonymies for their poems. Kalamaras's acknowledgements effusively thank his friends; Olson's list only the journals that first published his poems. Olson-the-poet is, by inference at least, an isolato.

Olson's latest book, Oxbow Kazoo (First Intensity Press), is his fifth full-length collection and follows on the heels of 2003's Free Stream Velocity. If Kalamaras locates his work at the intersection of Surrealism and yogic philosophy, Olson's poems owe more to the New York School—by which I mean the endlessly-chaining, free-associative riffs of Koch or Ashbery—with lessons in chiming from Gertrude Stein. Olson typically announces a given poem's organizing conceit in its title ("Arthur Rimbaud on Horseback," "A Brief History of the Halo," "Money"). Then he's off.

The pleasures, of course, lie in making the journey alongside the poet, allowing the texture and fragrance of the language to wash past like landscape through the window of a train bulleting across the continent at 80 m.p.h. Making sense of the sensory and linguistic input is another matter. Olson leaves signposts scattered about his poems, brief moments of conceptual orientation. In "Colloquial Navajo," he remarks on "how infinite and spectacularly arbitrary language can be. One can get lost in it...." In "An Accidental Treatise on the Paragraph Glands of Gravy Canyon," he refers the reader to the propeller: "When the propeller turns, the sentence moves forward stirring material from the bottom of the mind and then veers into the horizon." The result is not always an intelligible discourse. In "Hieroglyphic Bark," the poet declares "If this has a theme I'd like to know what it is. Remember it just. Wire is it. Hand me the infrared. I want to smear the sound of this with poetry." "Poetry is required to make the mosaic to percolate," Olson avers. In Olson's poetics, it is not poetry's office to explicate—to convey meaning through mosaic—but rather to convey motion, to harness the kinetic value of a language brought to pressure via action.

In Free Stream Velocity, Olson circled back again and again to two conceptual nodes: the origins of writing, presumably in ancient Sumer, and the helical structure of DNA. If Eros is the engine for Kalamaras's work, then in Free Stream Velocity Olson's engine was Science. Sumer makes a reprise appearance in Oxbow Kazoo, but the poet appears to have left DNA behind. This is a pity, not only because Olson's DNA poems were among the strongest in Free Stream Velocity, but also because in Oxbow Kazoo their place has been taken by a shifting panorama of contemporary cultural ephemera. "I Was an Extra on Gunsmoke" is charming, but not much more than that. And I don't really hear the mosaic percolating when the poet confesses "All I want to do is go bowling with Michael Moore."

Periodically in Oxbow Kazoo the associative chain creates an odd distancing between the poems' intelligence and the object of that intelligence, whether it be the ostensible subject matter or the language in which that subject matter is recorded. "Blank is blank" is one of Olson's default rhetorical gestures for moving poems forward and palls in the weaker pieces. There is also an economy of reference in Oxbow Kazoo (at one point Olson refers to "the chemistry of reference") that on occasion feels recycled, second-hand. Olson's American West is the West of Gunsmoke; his Tennessee is a Tennessee of the mind (Gertrude Stein's mind, in fact—pax Wallace Stevens). The very arbitrariness of the language that Olson finds so generative turns against the fabric of the poem, so that when one suddenly encounters lush, vivid imagery in the service of a recognizable affective conceit, it electrifies:

One day I saw Egypt walk by clutching a ghost.

And the sun was a peach bleeding light and heat and cumulus and wheat.

And the moon was a color whose corollary was gauze and whose chasteness was cold as the

plumbing of heaven.

These from "The Bell of Madness," a brief autobiographical account of the poet's youth in San Francisco. We've been there before, of course—City Lights, Jack Kerouac, Howl—but never quite in this way.

At Olson's zenith, the language shimmers with giddy possibility. In the best of the associative poems, both the poet and the poem approach a sort of delicious ecstasy that catches up with itself in moments of sheer wonder. In "An Iguana Made of Meaning," Olson's evangelical zeal on behalf of the reptile bubbles at last into a glorious, sugary fugue:

I tell you this out of enthusiasm. I tell you this out of enthusiasm for the iguana. For the iguana is a glorious delineation of mood. Iguanas and orchids. Iguanas in orchids. Iguanas in orbits. Iguanas in orchards. Iguanas orchestrated in scudding beats. Go iguana. Go into the iguana. This is an iguana. It is made of glass. It is not commonly found in igloos. It lingers in lingerie. An iguana in lingerie. Imagine that. An iguana in lingerie.

And we do. As also in these lines taken at random from the viscera of "A Puddle of Words":

Pools of pools of spools of water. A pond in the pond a pool in the pool. Oral floral aural wind. Hear the wind. Print the wind. Unwind the wind. The wind on the water. The wind on the water a pond in the water that glows with the flame of a candle on the bottom. A thin spiritual star with a wick and some wax and a cloud and a climate. Vast in honey vast in jelly vast in nobility and apparition.

Olson's ear is attuned to the sonic possibilities of the language; in many poems one can follow his exploratory locution through precise chains of homosonic association. The world is taken from us, then handed back glistening and new.

Poetry, for Olson, cannot be approximated or paraphrased; it can only be written, that is, committed, as a crime or act of faith. "The alphabet is real," Olson asserts at one point, "Black as a nerve. Pink as a muscle." Or, as the poet maintains in the closing sentences of "Sit Anywhere," "Discourse cannot be photographed. Because the words are magnetic and widen into snow. Because the menu is pure light. Because the tables are made of protons. Because life is patterned energy. Because the fog is a beautiful silent drum. And the syrup pours slowly like the dream of a rose."