LUNA Volume Eight

A new issue of LUNA will be released shortly. It will feature the work of Nin Andrews, Dan Beachy-Quick, Robert Bly, John Bradley, Luis Cernuda, Blas Falconer, Juan Felipe Herrera, Major Jackson, Alessandra Lynch, Wayne Miller, Simone Muench, Joan Murray, Nguyen Do (trans. by Paul Hoover), Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and many other poets.

Issues are $10 and can be ordered using the form to the right. Orders are expected to ship by the end of April.

And there are still back issues available of the previous seven issues of LUNA. To take a look at some of the contributors in those issues, just click on the link below:

http://lunapoetry.blogspot.com/2006/12/issue-number-seven.html

Review: Keep and Give Away

Keep and Give Away
SUSAN MEYERS
University of South Carolina Press, $14.95

Susan Meyers’ debut book of poems might as well have been titled “Contraries,” after the name of the poem most representative of the dominant thought behind the volume: the inherently paradoxical nature of desire. Terrance Hayes calls this (in the foreword) “opposing gestures,” the simultaneous need for two opposing things. The concurrent movement and stillness of the birds in “Contraries” and the speaker’s desire to side with both the delicate small birds and the hawk that attacks them resonates through the rest of the volume.

In “Someone Near is Dying,” Meyers explores the possibilities of the “contraries” she sets up with the first poem in a formally elegiac setting: “What does your every move show/ if not, I am still alive?” The poem expresses the tension between the sadness of this dying and the powerful acceptance and even celebration of life in the last few lines: “Listen Mother--/ thunder, out of season: an old woman/ / at the end of her day, humming.” This acceptance evolves in the second of the three sections in the book, where the mother-daughter roles are almost comically reversed. From “Cavities”:

…This was my mother,
now I am hers, wiping spittle from corners,
leaning close to peer past all decay.
Whenever I ask her, like a friendly dentist,
she obeys the same way she taught me
and holds still, cow-eyed
and gaping, as if caught by surprise,
long after I’ve brushed away all that I can
and seen more than I want to see.

Meyers’ poems vary in their individual subjects, loosely threaded with the needle of the subtitles of the three sections, but every poem seems to be dictated by some form of loss, whether it’s the inability to have a child (“Cradle and All”) or the grown woman’s need for a mother (“Selling My Mother’s House”): “I know why children put off sleep,/ ask for juice before bed.” In “My Mother, Her Mornings,” an earlier poem about her mother, the poet reflects on the essential miracle of the mother’s touch, her power almost magical: “With a sweep of her palm…she persuades away wrinkles/ as if brushing off crumbs.”

The first section also cradles a few quite discerning poems about childhood losses even before the image of the dying mother is introduced. “Late One Friday Afternoon” speaks of an early loss, the kind that teaches about desire, and hope. The bird continues to act as a symbol of “contraries,” reflecting the child’s simultaneous desire to keep still and leap into motion:

…I held his hand
nested like a bird in my palm

and with my other hand brushed dirt
from his knee. Then the bird fluttered
and was gone. Tires screeched.
I saw pieces of a toy truck
land in the Lefler’s yard.

The third section “Small Bones of Contention” wraps up the collection with poems that deal with life as it is unrelated to the dying mother or the frail chickadees of the beginning. They retain the domesticity, this time of the speaker’s life, and in some cases, they employ the elegiac stanzas that remind the reader of those poems written about the mother.

In all, Meyers has managed a compelling first collection, one that will earn her a seat amongst other notable writers of the elegiac tradition.

by Gaganpreet Kaur

Review: American Music

American Music

CHRIS MARTIN

Copper Canyon Press, $15 paperback

ISBN 978-1-55659-266-9

I: like American Music 

Of course I flip to the backmatter to read Chris Martin’s biography before I start in on the collection proper, as though somewhere in this paragraph, amid the list of journals I may or may not be familiar with, I might find a constellation communicating something to me about Martin’s poetry a priori Martin’s poetry. Because I have gone to the back cover first (even before the backmatter) I am already equipped with the knowledge that this is Martin’s full-length collection of poetry and that his manuscript, American Music, emerged at the top of more than a millennium of manuscripts as the winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging poets selected by C.D. Wright. So I'm there in the backmatter after the back cover and I flip forward (I don’t read the last poem first or anything deviant like that—I typically respect the order of operations a poet has set out) but in Martin's collection I come across something that betrays what could have have been a more innocent reading of his book. I find another, less-typical page in the backmatter headed by the following:

Words lead double lives: anonymously adrift and tethered to authorship. This book attempts to celebrate both. In addition to those named outright, other voices in the chorus of American Music include:

Underneath this cautionary and instructive note, Martin lists forty-three “voices in the chorus." As far as I can tell, the personalities include filmmakers, artists, bands, and philosophers, but not even a Google/Wikipedia search could help me with some of the inclusions. Some inclusions to the list you might expect rounding out a collection that sports the author's name inside a cartoon ketchup bottle: Joy Division, Modest Mouse, Nietzsche and Ingmar Bergman. Automatically I flip to the contents of the collection and count: there are thirty-seven poems, not forty-three; this saves me the task of compulsively turning back to the voices list, trying to match poems to voices, and attempting to create some kind of master map of the collection. (Cautionary note to reader: it is still pretty tempting to do this, part of the fun of reading the book if you ask me, and I think I’ve got some of it decently figured out.) The two epigraphs Martin chooses (“Plagiarism is necessary” —Guy Debord and “The world’s furious song flows through my costume”—Ted Berrigan) support what I am gathering is the collection’s thesis. All of this before I even get to the poems. I am certainly entertained, excited at the prospect of our narrator wearing dozens of hats, but I am also beginning to experience some anxiety that what I am about to read will fall somewhere between a post-post kind of schizophrenic cacophony and sitting down to a 37-act 2-D puppet show put on with one semi-mobile hand. 

Martin doesn’t subject me to either of these things. His collection is controlled, tightly knit, and formally and thematically cohesive. There is little anxiety that Martin's careful lines do not orchestrate for me. Two formal strategies save him (and me) from the abovementioned dangers. The first is Martin’s totally admirable commitment to form. Each poem in American Music 100% strictly adheres to a three-line stanzas and regular meter; they are short lines, just two to three beats per line the entire way through the collection. (I wouldn’t really say “tercet” here for reasons of technicality and posterity, and though I’ve never sat down with Martin or anything, I kind of think he’d shirk from use of that term as well.) Martin’s commitment to this form offers a technical foothold, providing a constant a rhythm through excessive enjambment. It also establishes a general spatial orientation. I begin to anticipate how to move, when to bob and when to weave. The second strategy is the use of “I” emphatically and often. So emphatically and so often in fact, Martin stretches the lyric “I,” the "I" of ultimate subjectivity in this case, to almost to the point of elimination— he stretches it to its absolute thinnest and enlarges it to its thickest. Martin's goal, as I know going into the collection, is of course to blend “I” Chris Martin and the various “I” voices we expect to find in collection (thanks to the list provided and the table of contents: “I am No Proprioceptivist,” ‘I” “I Am Not a Cinematographer,” “I” “I Ghost,” and “I” “Being-in-the-Being,” etc.). So, the whole voices=plagiarism thing is a bit misleading, in a good way.

Martin takes these two strategies outlined above and combines them to create what becomes perhaps his most instructive and rhetorical device, his consistent little nod to the reader. See below:

At the exigencies of cinema, even at this

Intersection if I

Tremble my trembling divides

(“Toward Perceptual Ensembles”)

Towers toll without

My being there, as my being ebbs only

To erupt in directionless code, I

(“Being-in-the-Being”)

Storefronts as my sense

Of direction daily rearranges

Itself in heat, so I

(“Allegrissimo, or Not As Hell As You”)

Smile tremoring the air

Into festive throbs, I think I

Hear all the bleeding

(An Introduction to the Mechanics of Deformable Bodies’)

And sinking in the paradox

Of frozen motion, if I

Say I ghost hummingbird-like

(“I Ghost”)

Martin gets so many good miles from the “I” because the predicament deepens, the device begins to traverse the kind of subject/object chasm the collection presents often and with ease, so Martin is able to simultaneously occupy and write in the voice of the new I's and the consistent I of the author without sounding pretentious or insincere.

Any reader of Martin’s collection becomes interested in how the “I” (the “I” Chris Martin, that is) aligns and unaligns with the various voices in the chorus of “I”s. This of course prompts the obvious conclusion at which any reader (myself included) is tempted to arrive at: if “I” Chris Martin is so much a part of so many other “I”s and all of those “I”s (Martin included) are not really a part of anything at all—except the clothes they’re in, the mustaches they wear, the cities they walk through, the foods they eat, etc., (their ultimate subjectivity)—how, in the face of that (ultimate subjectivity) I am supposed to not just throw my hands up and close the book at the utter impossibility of the task of reading, yielding to the pervading-post-post-anxiety-authorial-death-signifier-instability thing that is going on?

If the collection were not—on top of being in tune with these possible discourses—so utterly and completely entertaining, smart, and aware of when and to what degree to take itself seriously, it might not be so loveable. (There’s a whole level of entertainment in this collection that is the laugh out loud kind of entertainment-funny, the kind of Seth Green or American Pie comedy for adolescent males, which it seems someone could spend an entire review with but which I will swiftly address here with the help of one excerpt before moving on to acknowledge there is indeed a great deal of more sort of high-brow comedy here that works in a number of very different ways; from the poem, “Lo”: “MY NUT SACK/ But also like the Nobel Prize/ Winning novelist who.”) American Music is loveable beyond its comedy and I-play because a serious human concern surface through its artifice. This concern takes the form of laments for the trappings of said I's (all said I's). Martin frequently (at least one juncture in almost every poem) comes out directly with lamentation:

Plainly—I am afraid

Of becoming a sad pervert, even

So I yearn for a life of direct

And unfettered humanity, suddenly today

It is the future and the sun

Is a laser beam dispassionately shooting

You in the eye, you

Being I, here, the uncalloused

Observer of daily, nay

Momentary phenomena, such

As the children sledding the crusty

Hill on their little flotilla

(“Misdiagnosis, or Funny Music next to Death”)

Here Martin confronts the situation he illustrates so consistently with the use of the ventriloquized and enjambed I. The line: “Plainly—I am afraid” can be interpreted in two very important ways, right? It can be read ‘I am basely afraid,’ somewhat cowardly or at my core scared; or it can be read, ‘when and where I am plain (exposed, vulnerable, myself, etc.) I am afraid.’ The question of how to interpret one of Martin's lines is important to ask in a collection like this.

Martin’s ability to balance that kind of double-edged emotional transparency with a statement like the one he then makes about the sun being “a laser beam dispassionately shooting” is where he is at his best. In these moments Martin is his most literal and his most transformative all at once—not when he tries on a mustache or a dress, but when he identifies the sun’s rays for what they are, definitively (both very objectively and very subjectively, both "I" Chris Martin and "I" Everybody), when he laments the limitations of his own confessions.

Of course, it is becoming clear that I want to suggest the consistency beneath the Martin’s veil is Martin. That the personas/costumes/accessories he tries on, the voices he adopts, are—purposefully so—the first thing we forget in his poems. They are an entrance only, “In the recurring caveman/ Dream I wear my meat vest/ And I love you,” a façade that is meant to quickly fall away revealing something more genuine:

Of my own desire as it comes

Into being, which is

Why I prefer the hallucinations

Of Neanderthal life, days

Spent inching

Boulders from the ridge

(“There Will Be a Very Meaningful Picture Here”)

Martin loves to take off the mask. The revealing moments in American Music are more important to him than the guise. But the guises keep us moving; they allow us access to worlds and experiences that—dare I say it—if Martin were to explore in a different or less successful way, we might find superficial?

In this collection, a reader is meant to experience a plethora of different emotional states while holding on the that always slippery “I” at the heart of it all; the reader is a complete outsider and part of the inside joke. They are not unlike a listener of the quirky and great band from which Martin borrows his title. American Music references the Violent Femmes song of the same title, of course. (The Femmes, though, are conspicuously absent from the list of voices.) As a teenager learning to play the guitar, I gravitated towards the Femmes songs because of their simplicity, their tenderness, their unabashed pleasure in bouncing back and forth between some of the three-chord melodies. There was always a bit of singing along, somewhat genuinely somewhat ironically. I can’t help but wonder if Martin wouldn’t himself blister in the dispassionate sun.

by Thomas Cook

Review: Skirt Full of Black

Skirt Full of Black
SUN YUNG SHIN
Coffee House Press, $15


Transmogrifying Type


In Skirt Full of Black, Sun Yung Shin’s first collection of poetry, our expectation that the collection will entertain a meaningful and creative dialectic between American English and Korean languages is quickly and fruitfully complicated. It is true that almost all of Shin’s poems take language as at least part of their subject, but she is less concerned with a simple contrast of Korean versus English; rather, she is interested in some of the forms in which language manifests (oral, written, in typeface, as icon) and this leads her into a thematic and formal examination of the tension between spoken/written language, written/typed characters, and human/technological voices. She opens with, “MACRO-ALTAIC”:

“Sometimes even the surface forms defy etymology.”

In place of reading, two doors open
Away from each. Door—paper—door—

Because in her opening poem, a reader grasps the relationship between the textures of the first two voices readily and they stand in stark contrast, we might expect the two-voice formula to return to guide us through our reading of this maze-like collection where conjoined twins split and reform, human typewriters work in pork-processing plants and enormous flowers budding petals of countless histories shake loose one message at a time. The first voice, the one in quotes, reads like an out-of-date textbook on how to translate (Korean into English?) but as easily it could be something else (maybe a primer on structural sociology?), but in “MACRO-ALTAIC,” and throughout the collection, Shin does not acknowledge where she cribs the quoted voices or if she is cribbing at all We can call this first voice the “textbook voice,” to help us keep things straight. The second voice, the “poetic voice,” is the image-driven voice that we encounter often. A few lines later, in the same poem:

“Korean contrast structurally with European languages such as English in a number of ways.”

Your sister’s spirit escapes through a pinprick in the paper wall.
The shaman kneels at her side as before a meal.

In the first poem we can begin to understand how the images created in Shin’s more poetic voice operate with the textbook voice. This makes for an engaging play. Anyone who spends time though with Skirt Full of Black, will come to realize that Shin is interested in this play for about three pages.

The poems that follow build on the concept of multiple textures set-up by the first poem in increasingly alarming and rewarding ways. Images fly out of control, across time periods and continents and voices intermingle to the point of assimilation. In the second poem, “KUAI-ZI,” both voices from the first poem return in similar typographic manifestations (“poetic voice” and “textbook voice”), but other voices show up here to complicate the picture. Now we have a voice that appears in italics and dialogue. This voice reminds us of prose fiction and fairytale:

“We are cannibals,” said a man to his wife, in a picture. He took a picture of the page of words and saved it for processing later.

We also have a kind of bold, capitalized computer print-out voice interspersed:

THIS PERSON IS THE “STICKER,” HIS JOB IS TO SLIT THE THROATS OF THE COWS AS THEY PASS BY ON THE ASEMBLY LINE.

or

THIS IS THE “KNOCKER,” ADMINISTERING THE STUN BOLT TO THE COW’S BRAIN.

And additionally we have the complication of the earlier voices; that is, they are unstable, they do not return and sound the same. They assume different postures. This voice falls somewhere between “poetic” and “textbook”:

Chinese chopstick, called kua-zi (quick little fellow with bamboo heads) are nine to ten inches long and rectangular with a blunt end.

And I think we have at least a second textbook as well to end the poem:

“Each soldier is an individual.”

I focus on the style and font to lead us to content. Over time, a reader might be tempted to expect certain things when they see a certain style font appear on the page, but a reader with those expectations will be quickly disappointed, because Shin adapts the fonts and styles on a per poem basis. The bold, capitalized computer print-out voice returns in the next poem only to reveal itself as the voice of a very specific typewriter that is important to the collection as a whole. As readers, we begin to understand the necessity of a multiplicity:

By the 1920s, virtually all typewrites were “look-alikes”

only in capital letter: QWERTY: WOMAN TYPING: HARD RETURN
(Shin from “OBVIOUSLY, THESE WERE HOMES…”)

We should not say there are four or even eight different voices at work in Skirt Full of Black; rather there are four or eight or sometimes ten different voices at work in a single poem. Take the book’s longer poem (almost all of section 2), “FLOWER, I, STAME AND POLLEN” for example. Here we see a plethora of styles and voices, from lists to imperatives, stories to truncated lyrics, historical allegory and rules and, perhaps, one might even say, a good old prose poem, but that comes along with a kind of asterisk dance that is dangerously close to a linguistic expression…

The beauty of this book is that we are always slipping into new forms and new styles with and within each poem. Never too far away though is Shin’s disarming poetic. One is reminded of a book like Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, by Marilyn Chin. On the jacket Chin describes Skirt Full of Black in relation to form, things like “collage of ancient fragments” and “catalogue of associative statements;” but these comments I think do not acknowledge the rigor of this project and how seriously Shin’s poems feel rooted in their new and challenging forms. The poems themselves are visual landscapes, typographically speaking, and they are very controlled compositions. On the cover: a monochromatic orange typewriter on baby blue background, where from a sheer dark gray sky letters rain either out from or into the typewriter and solid, in a yellow sheet of paper feeding out from the typewriter, we see the title and the author. The typewriter is a guide throughout the book, a control mechanism, that lets us know our language and our space, however unharnessed it may seem, has been mitigated. The typewriter provides also an early touchstone for some of the other kinds of control.

All Shin’s titles appear in bold capital letters, which kind of loom over the poems as signposts. They do not feel oppressive in their looming though, authoritative yes, but rather like things to take note of on your way by into the body of the poem. Sometimes they are a single word and sometimes we come across something like this as a title:

OBVIOUSLY, THESE WERE HOMES RATHER THAN OFFICE MACHINE, MEANT FOR PEOPLE OF LIMITED MEANS WHO NEEDED TO DO SOME OCCASIONAL TYPING

About two-thirds of the way though the book we find a table of the Korean alphabet, divided into vowels and consonants, with Korean symbols and English equivalents. This table guides us through the penultimate section of the book where we find spare, delicate poems that seem to center around uniformly one-word titles the table invites us to translate and speak. With the introduction of this table, we settle down, the page becomes less crowded and more of a portrait than a landscape. We see in this penultimate section and as well in the last, that there is indeed a place for elegy in the collection. We find poems like “LEFTOVERS,” that have a more typical contemporary American poetic:

“I’m a Gay Dad”
T-shirt on a young Korean man
Holding hands lightly with his girlfriend

“Pity, all of this Westernization”

The English language is true
Nonsense, everywhere

And “WORSHIP”:

There is a prime number
That begs to be reduced

Resist the beggars
They have no rights

Is this Mass the same everywhere there is God
Even though different people eat differently

When we reach the end of Skirt Full of Black, we do find ourselves asking the question: what is total work of the book? What have I just been through and what has it asked of me? Did I pass the test?

We also find ourselves wondering, what would have happened should we have ended still at the mercy of the out-of-control-many-voiced typewriter? If Shin had pushed us to the brink and never calmed down? Or conversely, what if the Korean alphabet opened the book, grounding us in that aspect of the project?

Part of what a reader walks away with is the idea of the ambidextrous voice: a voice that understands space and time are dangerously out of control in the most sublime sense and can reflect that; a voice that can distill space and time into beautiful, abstract, tight-knit impressions that challenge the relationship between American English and Korean, language and sound. Shin understands we all share a lingua mater, there is no indivisible sound in any language; she dedicates the collection to “the worldwide Korean diaspora—six to seven million overseas Koreans living in 140 countries.” As I walk away from this collection, I take with me a sense from one of the Siamese twin poems in the middle of the collection, “THAT CAME TO BE SPLIT INTO A PLURALITY,” where Shin’s ideas of twinning, conjoined twins, adoption, and linguistics come to a head in the imbalance and symmetry between two simple statements:

That we each have a number assigned to us

and:

That we each have a name, or three assigned to us

by Thomas Cook

Review: The Myth of the Simple Machines

The Myth of the Simple Machines
LAUREL SNYDER
No Tell Books, $15 paperback

Truth is made, not discovered.
-- Wayne Gabardi

Their voices are bringing the trees to their knees
-- Will Oldham

In Laurel Snyder’s playfully perplexing new collection, truth has its way with myth (or is it the other way round?). The “simple machines” of the title are multitudinous: landscapes, games of chess, conversations, grocery store charades, bodies, movements, dreams, thoughts, language, and seemingly everything in-between. The myth is the assumption that the machines are, in fact, simple. Like Snyder’s poems themselves, the machines are part truth and part myth (or perhaps they are always truth and always myth), and Snyder dutifully crafts her narrative across the book’s four sections.

The first section of the book, “The Machines,” is primarily centered around a mysterious, unnamed girl. In the opening poem, “The Field Has a Girl,” we, like the girl, “become” in Snyder’s world:

The sky has a blackbird.
The field has a girl.
The sky is to the field as
the field is to the sky, only

backwards. White is
to the blackbird as fear
is to the girl, despite
she’s small and alone.

...

“I live
in this,” says the girl.
“Alone,” says the girl.
Things become quieter.

Things become.
“No matter what you
may do with your life,”
says the girl.

It’s not a stretch to draw a comparison between this poem and that most-popular of blackbird poems by Wallace Stevens, but Snyder also shares some of Stevens’ other poetic sensibilities. Her line breaks, her ample use of “to be” verbs, and her command of a simple yet powerful landscape are all Stevens-esque. This isn’t to say that all eleven poems in “The Machines” are Stevens-esque (they’re more akin to off-kilter fairy-tales, more in line with Kristy Bowen’s work in Feign), but there are teacups and clover and, yes, a jar.

The book’s second section, “Their Casings,” shakes things up a bit. The girl from the first section is gone, and we are introduced to a first-person speaker. Is this the same girl, now speaking directly to the reader? It’s unclear. But one thing is certain: like the girl in “The Machines,” this I is vulnerable and endearing. In fact, that’s exactly what she wants us to say:

When my tea gets cold I like to cry,
and there’s a run in my stockings
that won’t ever end. It gets me.

But isn’t it endearing?
Tell me I’m endearing.

...

At the grocery store, I’m
“That quiet girl in the blue coat.”
I shop alone.

I like myself against the Bartlett pears
and the smell of pears.

Do I look sad
I think I’m very pretty, sad and alone
in the grocery store.

(“Posture Matters”)

Somewhere in this section, though, a question does arise: who is this speaker addressing? She constantly addresses a “you,” and as readers, it seems like we keep coming to the conversations a little too late:

Like it or not, this is for you,
so pay attention.

...

Maybe you’ve never been wrong,
but then I can’t believe a word you say.
The things that don’t work
are the important things to have wanted.

You should have all this
figured out by now.

(“Glass”)

---

But instead I have you. You staring
at that corn field, saying nothing. You sighing

at that huge green sea, with all its tides
like rulers. You tell me they run straight

until a wall happens. To them. Or something.
What’s that supposed to mean?

(“Beast in the Cornfield”)

In the book’s third section, “In Technology,” everything becomes more frenetic. Points of view shift, God makes an appearance, language speeds up and slows down, and the section ends with a trio of triptychs: “Triptych of Useful Rules (Pictures),” “Triptych of Useful Rules (Words),” and “Triptych of Useful Rules (Conclusions).” If image and language are the central concerns of “In Technology,” perhaps their best representatives are the final three poems. Snyder’s triptych of triptychs is one of the highlights in The Myth of the Simple Machines. They’re whip-smart, light-heartedly haunting, and exquisitely voiced:

Sometimes we catch the kettle.
Sometimes—icebergs.

(“Triptych of Useful Rules (Pictures)”)

---

Intimacy-
1.) You’ll know it when you see it. 2.) Anything that lasts longer
than it needs to, look, hand on shoulder. 3.) I mean to
say, it lingers. I mean both things.

(“Triptych of Useful Rules (Words)”)

The book’s final section, “At Rest,” begins with the poem “Half-sleep Segue,” before closing with a cycle of five prose poems. “Half-sleep Segue” sets-up the dream-like prose poem cycle:

On a Tuesday night, the girl dozes and dreams
of a fireplace. She’s a whisper, a murmur in a slip,
dancing in a slip made of diamonds beside a fire.

The walls are close. The air is warm
red wine and there is candlelight, from somewhere
golden behind her. Deeply golden.

She’s hushed in her heavy slip, dancing slowly
on a thick carpet, alone. When she bruises, she feels
like money, like extra money. She’s a full pocket.

The five prose poems, all titled “Night,” are mythical dreamscapes full of sensory bombardment. And in the final poem, “Night 5 (The Bake Sale),” we finally get a named character: Lucy. It’s such a shock to read Lucy’s name that her existence is itself a revelation. But it’s a short-lived revelation, for Lucy quickly exits the poem. There are more revelations, though, once the speaker finds him at the Bake Sale and the little message written inside the smallest circles of the smallest cake.

The Myth of the Simple Machines is from that wonderful world where poetry intersects with storytelling. And as Laurel Snyder shows, it’s a world of endless possibility, myth, truth, and reward.

by Nate Slawson

Review: Cate Marvin & El-P: "The Muse: Wired Live"

Fragment of the Head of a Queen
CATE MARVIN
Sarabande Books, $13.95 (paper only)

I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead
EL-P
Def Jux, $17.95 (compact disc and record)


The Muse: Wired Live

This summer, somewhere between Staten Island and Brooklyn, Cate Marvin and El-P lip-synch to each other; it is frenzied, contagions rampant, bubbling forth from their mouths and the fire hydrants of the great municipality of New York City. Marvin and El-P are buoyed in this flood only by their insistence on continuing to make lines and phrases as the city crumbles, as if voicing these poems and songs will keep them from the great intangible sinkhole developing in the middle of the road.

Marvin’s sophomore book of poetry, following the Kathryn A. Morton prize-winning World’s Tallest Disaster (Sarabande 2001) is aptly titled, Fragment of the Head of a Queen. The book opens with, “Love the Contagion,” a celebration of common infiltrations, routine adulterations, and unrecognizable disease. Marvin implores her reader, both with the title and the first line, “Quest the contagion, funnel much muck,” and then treats them with an ode to the unsanitary:

master of pestilence, conqueror of white
clothes; mud prints, paw prints, germs
not even the physician knows
(Marvin’s “Love the Contagion”)

Beautiful, for all its grime, this book is a calmly articulated disaster area, not unlike the Arturo Herrera painting (“Study for When Alone Again,” 2001) Marvin selected as her cover: beneath a seeming implosion of red paint (scattered, but seeking-center on the obscured head of a human figure) we can discern a queen in her robes, cherub-like wings and draping cloths, the queen reaching up for her headpiece, in danger of obliteration. Marvin’s poems gather strength and momentum through rhyme and through bold outlandish strokes of imagination. They boil over with provocative and alarming visions from the voice of a narrator whose person is feverishly out of control and in danger of being eliminated by the polluting forces she cannot help but seek.

Similarly for El-P, the wings on his cover belong to a haloed pterodactyl (not far from the crowned queen) also in danger of being obliterated by red light. Following his gold-selling independent debut, Fantastic Damage, from his label Def Jux, El-P’s sophomore solo album, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, opens with his ode to the polluted minds of would-be emcees. Here El-P informs us:

to the ground function I’m munsoned
it’s the dreaded 7/10 split again
the medic made it out to be
epidemic shaded, wow for me
(El-P’s “Tasmanian Pain Coaster)

For all of their allusions to “physicians” and “medics” throughout, Marvin and El-P are consistent masochists, refusing to seek solace in the sterility of anything that resembles a hospital; instead, the defacement of their narrators is a necessary function of their projects. They fly into super and sub-human forms, riding sexual coasters and pets into fantastic deserts of former downtowns, literally decapitating themselves (Marvin’s “Lying My Head Off,” El-P’s “The League of Extraordinary Nobodies”). The reader/listener begins to fear for the narrators of these sustained efforts at self-effacement—will there be a respite? The short answer is, no. But this lack of respite begins to please, this relentlessness, this refusal to untangle; it is through such resolve that these projects succeed on their own terms.

With the hope that not only their content, but the texture of their lines and their lyrics reflect the self-inflicted contamination of living in a confused city, in a confused body (Marvin’s “Your Childhood”: “To walk? We slipped those tubes of pink lipstick up our/ sleeves) and in a confused bodily function (El-P’s “Smithereens”: “I became pure BK/ cause I grew up around the krazy kings and inhaled second hand spray”), both authors insist on communicating through, rather than about their condition. They are afflicted about admitting in any terms but their own what ails them. In one moment it seems like we are hearing the truth, but in the next they confide that it has only been a big lie. In, “Run the Numbers,” El-P laments:

Weak in the kneesy species
dreaming of future faded
seen where the suture stitches knit slipped?
I’m with you baby
let’s get obnoxious with it
I wanna know what brave is
I’m tired of sitting here pretending
I’m not fucking dangerous.
(El-P’s “Run the Numbers”)

To the same tone, in “Muckraker,” Marvin writes:

If you can’t trust people, you can’t trust books, since
books are people and people are books. Shall I ask him
to sign it? Beautiful dreamer, may all your beginnings be true
beginnings. You think this unseemly for me to confide?
Reader, don’t mistake me for someone who gives a shit,
or your bride. I have no loyalty and I have no pride”
(Marvin’s “Muckraker”)

Neither author makes concessions to the reader here, or anywhere for that matter. And why should they? Operating at the top of their respective genres, with young, smart followings (they both have cute photos as well!), Cate Marvin and El-P are aware not only of the message they convey, but the medium through which they convey it; and they are both apparently a little weary of that medium and that message. They want a reader/listener to know that they can only ever be liars, in a sense, because of the infiltration of what should be fodder for poems and songs. Further on in, “Muckraker,” Marvin writes:

How do I reply? And how shall I contend with
the fact, Reader, that this matter cannot mean
much to you, and that I, as author, am required
to consider how to tell this tale in a manner that
will entertain you, despite having never met you
and having no way of knowing how to affect you
(Marvin’s “Muckraker”)

To the same end, in “The Overly Dramatic Truth,” El-P writes:

I became for you what you had asked
Telepath
You’re too young to ask out loud
I’m too old to not know that
I can talk like you’ve not heard
I know weapons
You think words
I’ve exposed you to these terms
(El-P’s “The Overly Dramatic Truth”)

Probably the biggest question that a reader/listener of Marvin and El-P will encounter, if s/he is not completely convinced by the language alone, is: how much posturing before the message am I willing to put up with? Can’t we come out and say anything for sure? Consider the following two moments from Marvin’s “Landscape with Hungry Girls” and El- P’s “Dear Sirs”:

There’s blood here. The skyline teethes the clouds
raw, and rain’s course streams a million umbilical
cords down windows and walls. Every things gnaws,
and the pink polish on their girl-nails chips, flakes
(Marvin’s “Landscape with Hungry Girls”)

If every office empties and all slaves walk in dazes
To a pool of liquid of liquid money where bath blissfully naked
And every open hydrant in a Brooklyn summer moment
Is opened up by cops and folds out into an ocean
(El- P’s “Dear Sirs”)

The cumulative effect of this textured delivery does at times test the reader’s resolve: is beautifully-rendered image of decay and danger after beautifully-rendered image of decay and danger all we need as readers/listeners to stay engaged? Especially considering whenever our voice or narrator appears, this appearance seems only to taunt us with what we would typically expect from the role:

I sold my mind on the street.
I learned another language. It translates easily.
Here’s how: What I say is not what I mean,
Nor is it ever what I meant to say.
You must not believe me when I say
there’s nothing left to love in this world.
(Marvin’s “Lying My Head Off)

I know I haven’t been walking a humble path
I know I cursed at your name and then laughed
And though I found it inane to bend calf
The servitude of groveling framed as pained task
I gotta figure it can’t hurt to ask
Suspension of disbelief in uniquely freak flash
(El-P’s “Flyentology”)

The more I read and the more I listen, the more I feel the answer to this question is, yes. Yet at the end of each virtuoso flight, as each poem and each song comes to a close, I am left with one question: who is the multi-formed “you,” the “you” of El-P’s title, the “you” of Marvin’s collection. When I ask that question and consult the texts, I find my narrators are pretty confused as well. The confusion comes from the convolution, from trying to reach us in a city where the skyscraper is as easily a domesticated animal as a lover, a drug as threat, or a mentor. When the reader/listener longs for a greater emotional truth behind these wreckages and the just finds more wreckage, well, that comes from the bottom of the heart. The beautiful fragments within these works assemble the beautiful fragments of the works themselves. This is what we are offered.

Finally, El-P writes in “Run The Numbers,”: “Five out of ten of these fuses are wired live/ if I’m gonna survive I gotta (find those detonators).” For Marvin, the analogy is clear; she replaces “fuses” with “muses.” Everything is in fact a detonator and we must seek its explosion onto the page and into the lyrics. In fact, the first dozen times I listened to “Run the Numbers,” I made the juxtaposition myself. Though the lyric book contradicts me, I am not certain El-P does not whisper it under his breath. Be leery of muses. Blow them up. See what sticks to the walls: from printer cartridge to skyscraper a sign of decay as quickly a sign of life, confusion as quickly consumption, and contamination as quickly nourishment.

by Thomas Cook

Review: Disclamor

Disclamor
G. C. WALDREP
Boa Editions, Ltd., $16 paperback

“In time of war the poets turn to war/ each in his best manner,” writes G. C. Waldrep, quoting Thomas McGrath, in his second full-length collection, a book held together by “The Batteries,” a superb nine-sequence poem inspired by the historic sea-coast fortifications in the Marin Headlands along the California coast. Long demilitarized or decommissioned, these batteries have undergone transformations into places of seemingly peaceful recreation, but the echoes of their past functions (“What is defense without a pretty view?”) seep through as the vocabulary of warfare becomes relevant again:

AND THE GOD OF THE USA DECLARED
I SHALL INCORPORATE WEAPONS
OF MASS DESTRUCTION
INTO MY NATIONAL PARKS.

—This is not quite right. The weapons came first,
mass, the destruction; then
picnic table.

Indeed, for this poet, invested in excavating the layers beneath disguise, “every copse hides/ its adder,” but so too comes the discovery of the smaller, overlooked inhabitants that preceded the invasive technology and artificial boundaries of man:

The grass sings in the parity of its consumption.
The lupine,

the sea-fig are singing,
even the Scotch broom is singing

its barbarian song.

The growths on the ground, “the mustard, the tansy,” and “the wither-itch, alfalfa & wild garlic” are the true survivors, and the poet takes note, directing his contemplative mood toward the roots, the true origins and antithesis to the chaos and din of modern politics, the “dis-clamor” of modern-day society.

But, the poet posits, have we contaminated the natural world irreversibly? In the poem “Ode to the Hottentot Fig,” the speaker struggles unsuccessfully to move away from the symbols and metaphors of the corrupt human world:

If you listen closely you can hear the scuffle of each ant:
they’re all Calvinists, they are the architects of small melodies
that flash and tremble in the afternoon sun. Like us,
they demand a more generous explanation.

Waldrep’s preoccupation is the affliction of invasion, and the damage of human greed—authority over environment and declarations of territory: “West, east, the longitudes of war./ This is no place for monuments.”

Bridging “The Batteries” are poems attesting to Waldrep’s skill at crafting similes that are characteristically playful and startling. A sampling of lines:

The dead stood in their corners like silver telescopes.
The bees ferried hunger to their hive.

(from “Soldier Pass”)

I will never achieve a nuclear family. Beneath a distant sunrise
my peccadilloes huddle like sheep.

(from “Retroactive”)

the nape of that moment
set like a sapphire into the scepter
of incident, smooth and cool.

(from “Titus at Lystra”)

Disclamor is a gorgeous collection from a citizen poet in search of the truths beneath the imperialist imagery of the times. Waldrep sifts through its rubble and gives meaning to the numbing aftermath—“the aftersilence”—of illusion and deceit. And the anxiety of that mission is best articulated in the poem “Battery Bravo”:

I will be the poet of broken things.
But what claim have I trampled
into these bare hills?
What fragment have I prised?

by Rigoberto González