tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-381527382024-02-06T21:28:52.262-06:00Luna<img src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/7934/3986/320/199833/logo_wtext2.jpg" border="0" alt="0" />Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-58912796707587723692008-07-22T09:41:00.007-05:002008-07-23T14:50:27.809-05:00Motioning: the true keeps calm biding its story<a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_z2_Hty81be8/SIXxyVDgBYI/AAAAAAAAAAw/tcJyQa4IC3I/s1600-h/truekeepscalm2in72.gif"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5225848789580907906" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_z2_Hty81be8/SIXxyVDgBYI/AAAAAAAAAAw/tcJyQa4IC3I/s200/truekeepscalm2in72.gif" border="0" /></a><em>the true keeps calm biding its story<br /></em>RUSTY MORRISON<br />Ahsahta Press, $17.50<br />ISBN 13-978-0-916272-98-288<br /><br /><br />orientation:<br /><br /><br />hereafter I will apply rules and avoid content stop<br />(Morrison 15)[1]<br /><br />To say that Morrison emphasizes the end of her line would be an understatement; depending on how you look at it, Morrison writes the end of each line twice, with two different words, or she writes the end of only three total lines, or she writes the end of absolutely zero lines. Familiarity with Morrison’s form in the true keeps calm biding its story is recommended to proceed through this review; though, even for those familiar with the text, a reiteration of Morrison’s “rules” is important for us to begin. Let’s start with the numbers.<br /><br />counting is more a stance than an observation please<br />(68)<br /><br />Each person I have read on Morrison’s poem[2] is quick to point out some of the most prescriptive ways Morrison numbers. For example, each page of the book contains in the upper left-hand corner (just about where you would expect a title, but a little more sunken) the words:<br /><br />please advise stop[3]<br /><br />Each line of each poem is right-justified; there are uniformly three lines per stanza and three stanzas per page. Every line in the poem ends with one of the three words in the mantra “please advise stop.” To push the math of all this a step further, consider factoring and powers: lines multiplied by stanzas = a perfect square, three is round, too, right etc.[5] Morrison’s “stance” remains in conflict with the rigidity of its own “rules”: the text grows, generates and self-generates through the repetition of a kind of shape-of-an-idea[6] creating a kind of eerie singularity of gesture that illustrates a repeatable motion in a fundamentally unquantifiable manner:[7]<br /><br />an unexpected foreshortening of perception is also called revelation stop<br />(51)<br /><br />The unquantifiable nature of Morrison’s line is created when her desire for each line to reach out to infinity is “foreshorten[ed]” by end words. Unquantifiability becomes echoed in the repeated gesture of creating an image that implies an infinity and ends:<br /><br />outlines are the limit of each letter which otherwise might reach out to infinity stop<br />(62)<br /><br />The end of the infinite, or the poetic line, allows us to comprehend a brief meaning, a kind of suggestion of an idea, the beginning of something that could be widely applied throughout the text[8] to lines twenty pages later, the vary same gesture repeated and magnified by its repetition:<br /><br />my repetitive gesture will eventually wear through its surrounding world please<br />(8)<br /><br />infinity, singularity, motion and meaning:<br /><br />how to measure my meaning with lamps and not clocks please<br />(22)<br /><br />Both Peter Gizzi, judge of 2007 Sawtooth Prize, of which the true keeps calm biding its story was the winner, and Susan Howe cannot resist using the word “infinite” in their endorsements of Morrison’s book. Gizzi, suggests Morrison: “launches line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning,” while Howe points to the fact “that ‘stop’ can be rendered infinitely open” as a testament to the “striking singularity” of Morrison’s “measure of order.” I want to suggest Morrison seeks nothing less than a re-ordering of the universe into a singular motion; language in this case is only along for the ride, for the motion. Motion is brought to our attention perhaps first by her choice of the common telegraphic endings (“please,” “advise,” and stop”) which conclude each right-justified line of the poem. Motion is pulled through each line, halted, and asked to continue through the same motion again in the next line.<br /><br />Motion, represented both by the language of her lines (consistent diction, meter recurring and resonating imagery) and their form (numerically potent yet arbitrary), functions for Morrison as prime example of how we think, deal with memory and loss, and construct meaning in our lives. The order Morrison creates is not a “launch toward” meaning and it is not “open,” though. There is incredible focus here, a focus that a reader feels instantly; and, it has a very prescribed meaning: how do we comprehend movement? How is it like cognition? How does memory move? How does loss move? How, most importantly, are all of these movements similar? How are they metaphors for one another? Are all of our movements contained within a pre-existing metaphor, one we starting writing and moving through a very long time ago?<br /><br />the true keeps calm biding its story communicates this within its own language—a language composed of the placeholders, where meaning is only inserted through the repetitive motion, the shape-of-an-idea. To proceed by looking at specific pages as though they were themselves singular poems, would be impossible and reductive to the project in which every line adds to a singular motion. Consider how this review could proceed by drawing conclusions based on the smattering of lines which in the course of writing this essay I have loosely organized in a file on my computer entitled: “on the repetition of the same motion slowly making an opening for meaning”:<br /><br />with each perfected dexterity I thin the surface that carries me stop<br />(15)<br /><br />the accumulation of stains on a surface becomes a site of burials stop<br />(28)<br /><br />fingers will intuitively test the patches where cognizance is thinnest stop<br />(31)<br /><br />I add brushstrokes to my vision to thicken their surface courage stop<br />(45)<br /><br />more fragile concealments merely group around a new emphasis for cover stop<br />(68)<br /><br />fingertips worrying right through their cotton gloves stop<br />(68)<br /><br />Some aspects of the motion that Morrison writes about come clear in the accumulation of these lines, which are dispersed throughout the entire poem as their pages numbers note. First, in the idea of something “wear[ing] through,” “thin[ning] the surface,” and “worrying right through.” The motion of Morrison’s lines is shrouded though not concealed by the material world; they create the shape of an idea through their motion. We also learn from the above lines that the surface can only be broken through “accumulation,” “emphasis,” and “perfected dexterity.” There are important implications here for what it means to even read Morrison’s poem. If I read the entire poem, am I reading it to understand one line, one thing, one shape-of-an-idea?<br /><br />I want to suggest that the language of Morrison’s poem only provides a context (in the most physical sense) for a motion. Everything that Morrison writes is an effort to communicate through the “rules” of the poem because they are in fundamental conflict with the infinite motion (or the meaning) of each line. It is only by writing through this motion, against the rules, that she creates the poem.<br /><br />on the possibility of the bigger statement:<br /><br />even incoherent babbling is usually phonetically accurate please advise<br />(15)<br />If we are talking motion and meaning and saying that it is all just an allegory to a bigger statement, what could that statement possibly be?<br /><br />wind is winter’s reflection among the branches stop<br /><br />true likenesses are never planned stop<br /><br />though magnifications may be choreographed please<br />(50)<br /><br />Morrison’s lines predominantly take the form of aphorism, as Morrison notes explicitly at least this once, “within the costume of aphorism a thought flees extinction stop” (61). Meaning fleeing extinction. One important point on the “horizon of meaning” Morrison remains in constant communication with is her own writing, the poem itself, and the process of creating a poem in the form that she creates it; this process, as meaning flees extinction, upholds absolutely no hierarchy between lines, between lines and entire pages, between pages and sections, or between possible subject matters. This is a poem that pushes forward with a single stroke, but is that stroke empty?<br /><br />I throw a stone in the air as if every motion were his motion come back to me stop<br />(67)<br /><br />point at which I actually say what I think the bigger statement is:<br /><br />stammered out the sentence till it completely surrounded the singular clarity stop<br />(51)<br /><br />For Morrison, meaning is brief, it exhibits a momentary opening—everything might rush in and join with everything else in single meaning, or else it might disperse:<br /><br />there are thoughts he must have entered though they were only half-open stop<br />(39)<br /><br />Each line needs to come on the heels of another line, to prop it up and to make it disappear. They need to “stop” and they need to be interrupted, but they also need to rush forward into the next line without delay:<br /><br />how to tell what must be kept and what must be kept provisional please advise<br />(53)<br /><br />This necessity both builds and tears down meaning, but that is not as important about the poem’s anxiety over the terminal nature of the poetic line:<br /><br />a silence from which I am excluded can teach me only exclusion’s precision stop<br />(54)<br /><br />It is not as though we finally must rest somewhere between meaning and not meaning. We do not have to settle. Rather, not only do we push forward, but the meanings of individual lines in poetry always either become secondary to “the bigger statement” or else they become the metonymy for the bigger statement. For example, remembering or quoting a poem for one or a few of its lines to discuss it.Morrison is concerned with the state of the poetic line and the process of reading poetry and making meaning. What constitutes the shape of a statement? For Morrison, by communicating through the shape-of-an-idea about this predicament, she illustrates it (the predicament) to its fullest extent:<br /><br />brush away the interviewing but keep the intervening light please<br />(60)<br /><br />Of course, “what must be kept” is the motion of the poem, the resonant images, the sound; “what must be kept provisional,” is reading (as in a reading, singular, or reading in general, the place of words and language in constructing meaning in poetry, et al.) and the extra-explicit danger involved in constructing meaning. So how can we illustrate the meaning of this motion, how it works on us, how it functions—the poem must be doing something, affecting me in some way?The issue becomes not what—because we do learn that we are talking here about the motion of anything and everything in the universe—but how? What does it look like? This is a whole new layer of concern:<br /><br />featureless is the vault in which I want to hide myself undetected stop<br />(16)<br /><br />So if the vault itself is a form and motion is underneath, than what of the “featureless” form of which the motion in question is most akin to a hand inside this featureless vault not unlike that of a hand in a puppet? In short, what are you reading when you read Morrison’s poem?<br /><br />even shapelessness is itself a separate thing but faltering I stare it down to fact stop<br />(39)<br /><br />Is the assumption then that we will feel discontented, that we do feel discontented by the way that this works, to the point where we will consider the word “vault” in its most concrete terms, that we consider the word “fact” beyond its presence in this line of text inside of this poem, when all we are being asked to do is consider it for just his moment?<br /><br />fill a page with words never letting a single phrase form stop<br />(63)<br /><br />Do I truly have to have this thought in a phrase, for example? What am I being asked to do when I read a poem?<br /><br />in every difference a muffled babbled never predictable of predictive stop<br />(68)<br /><br />Consider, for one moment, the futility of trying to discuss what the accumulated effect of the above lines are in terms of what they say or they say about the poem. the task at hand (new language within language elucidating the shape of thought within that language—finally, that may be my best articulation of the project)—it would be like trying to discuss the attainment of pure bliss, of movement that is still in motion, that is still becoming.there is this entire other thing that someone could focus on:<br /><br />my father’s dying offered an indelicate washing of my perception stop<br />(11)<br /><br />the true keeps calm biding its story does contain a father, perhaps the most (only?) corporeal presence in the book. You could (and you are allowed) to read this whole poem and only take periphery note of the father, the father’s death, and the close resemblance the form of his passing has to the other motions articulated:<br /><br />staring into the dark like digging a grave for an already existing grave stop<br />(18)<br /><br />In a very revelatory way, Morrison’s motion could be looked at as the move from life into death, or the stasis of death in life, of the interruption of the thought or presence of death in our everyday lives. At the same time, that thought is as fleeting as all the rest:<br /><br />with only the slightest effort I might abandon every father stop<br />(35)<br /><br />And then there are moments when a certain reading is begged, but we no doubt get the sense it (the reading, if we were to proceed with it) would be too simple:<br /><br />my father’s dying makes stairs of every line of text seeming neither to go up or down<br />(36)<br /><br />That is part of the of Morrison’s poem. The motion explored in the wake of the father’s death (because it affords a reader the opportunity to read the book in terms of the death) is by no means enforced by its presence in the text. His presence, like our presence on earth or the presence of anything in the poetic line, is not only too quick in its passing, but it is too quick to be absorbed in the expression of its passing in language when it is circumscribed to the poetic line:<br /><br />there was no moment of his death to see until it had already passed stop<br />(53)<br /><br />Morrison accomplishes this by showing the motions of memory, grief, linoleum tiles, of course birds, and also each item in the universe subscribes to the exact same rhythm. They are all contained within the same language and the same motion. The father, if you like:<br />here I place father as if the word could mend itself stop<br />(38)<br /><br />There is no dominant subject. There is no necessary reading:<br /><br />gauging the weight of each inherited object ignoring the object itself stop<br />(39)<br /><br />application of the bigger statement to the kites and thereby the world immediately outside the world of the poem:<br /><br />a correct word would steady more than itself like a banister please<br />(36)<br /><br />The moments when a reader might pause, make a note, bask in an image, are completely unplanned, rely on separate but equal probabilities, and are the delight of its (the poem’s) design. The lines below, spread (“a stain spreads under table linen and avoids being caught stop” (29)) over the entire book, present the opportunity to read the book in terms of kites, kite strings, and the inevitability that all kites stop, please advise:<br /><br />the water puddle sways like an earthbound kite stop<br />(3)<br /><br />any edge can be sharpened to rip through the sky’s cellophane stop<br />(24)<br /><br />a sudden wind against my forehead has forever changed my shape stop<br />(28)<br /><br />the quiet pulls an empty swing until it seems to move stop<br />(60)<br /><br />The kite and its string and the place of those two things together in the world are indeed a viable opportunity exercised here, in the arrangement of these lines, to an example of their own fullness. The kite as text. The line as loose string. The reader as a pulling in.<br /><br />the possibility of narrative progress in a world of kites:<br /><br />to inhabit an absence takes great balance stop<br />(27)<br /><br />I can say that we grow closer to or experience certain images, themes, and discourses more as I read from beginning to end; though, the fundamental composition of the line, how meaning is created through the shape of the line, and how the meaning of the world is the meaning of the shape of the line, remains the same. Is this always our predicament in poetry?<br /><br />In writing this review, I have two hopes. One, to approach an apprehension of the motion Morrison produces; two, to recommend <em>the true keeps calm biding its story </em>to anyone and everyone concerned or even slightly interested in what is happening with the line. If you try to talk for a moment about the poetic project of <em>the true keeps calm biding its story</em> you come quickly around (and I have had this conversation with a few people) to discussing again the specific lines and how they work, their balance, their structural integrity and how that points to a gaping hole where meaning (dangerous, ultimately misleading, tile grout) can and will enter. The tiny window of opportunity that each line provides, that is what the numbers, the father, the repeated images and objects ultimately lead to is a motion: the opening for the final statement that when stated is the opening for the final statement.<br /><br />by Thomas Cook<br />[1] Hereafter, unless noted otherwise, all parenthetical citations refer to page numbers in Morrison’s book the true keeps calm biding its story<br />[2] Hereafter, Morrison’s book, or as some have called it, her “collection” of poetry is referred to as her poem, implying it should be read as a book-length poem in either 54 page or 486 lines parts.<br />[3] In the table of contents, each poem is titled by it’s opening three words: “I add brushstrokes…” and “I throw a stone into the air…” for example. This demarcation in the contents, combined with the presence of the three looming (again, “sunken,” and in a larger type size, I forgot to mention) end words combined in a kind of impossible statement (the words never actually appear syntagmatically like that in the poem) really do complicate the idea of titling, and marked beginnings in general in a way that is, how should I say, central to the kind of bigger true of the poem.<br />[5] I also like the idea of probabilities with this poem as well: what is the probability of each word in the mantra: “please advise stop” appearing as an end word?<br />[6] I say “shape-of-an-idea” and not “idea” because the “idea” of an “idea” or the “shape-of-an-idea,” singular, a particular idea, not a universal, is Morrison’s constant gesture or biding.<br />[8] The very boring idea that each of these lines is in some way a “signifier” of a larger (and relatively unknown) “signified” line (like the title) seems, well, to go only about that far. The notion of the arbitrary sign (end words, etc.) of course haunts the text and creates an atmosphere of complete pliability, where the menaing of any word stabilizes and as quickly unstabilizes in the space of each line. Word. draft 8:56Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-22123001748317878832008-06-19T07:39:00.008-05:002008-06-19T07:55:37.051-05:00Review: The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAJwYf76UdtBCFHKxpENrKPiruel_5WSTBq0K8r6yIeMH2ulP4f3SbEOZlShUa65SDXfDJ4CgfCZDeLRvD4PUO7okJ14vkRgonM6W2qaguf0a9pDgnUucquLhbeLRusIQ7xoTH/s1600-h/cover-of-potatoes-thumb.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAJwYf76UdtBCFHKxpENrKPiruel_5WSTBq0K8r6yIeMH2ulP4f3SbEOZlShUa65SDXfDJ4CgfCZDeLRvD4PUO7okJ14vkRgonM6W2qaguf0a9pDgnUucquLhbeLRusIQ7xoTH/s200/cover-of-potatoes-thumb.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5213574827669204546" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >MARK YAKICH<br />Penguin, $18</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />In the current climate of disingenuous government policies and deceptive politics it’s difficult for any American citizen not to be cynical. And the role of the artist in this troubled environment is to play back the absurdity of the times. Perhaps someone will listen. This is a precarious position, but Mark Yakich soldiers on undeterred in his second book of poems whose choice weapons are intelligent wit and mischievous humor.</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />From the start, in the poem “Tourist Beware,” the speaker calls to task his own mission, pointing out the futility of the act of writing:</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span><blockquote><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >Humorous poetry is published exclusively</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />One month of the year when everybody is</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />On summer vacation. More than poetry,</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />Vacation is protest.</span></blockquote><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ></span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >Yet, “sometimes the subject matter is hard to pass up,” the speaker admits in “Holy Sonnet”:</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span><blockquote><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >Take Jesus. He was a very secure artist.</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />He didn’t doubt his talent. He never talked</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />About it because it was like having blue eyes.</span></blockquote><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ></span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >The impulse is more passionately articulated in the post-911 poem “September 12”:</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span><blockquote><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >...We didn’t </span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />Intend to provoke a lot of bad feelings in</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />Its reader. We weren’t even thinking about</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />War or fear or safety of courage. We know</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />That you can get those things elsewhere,</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />That in other arts, say, at the movies,</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />You can be moved to small tears or that,</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Say, at the symphony you can fall</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />Asleep gently and unnoticed. After all, what’s</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />A little book of poems going to do</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />For you?</span></blockquote><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ></span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >Indeed, this “little book” does plenty, subverting the reader’s expectations from the poems titled “Patriot Acts” and “New Pathways to Peace in the Middle East” with language that is no less nonsensical, illogical and strange as the one spoken by the national and international leaders. Thus, no figurehead is spared the irreverent axe that Yakich wields. From the spell to locate Osama Bin Laden, to Fidel Castro’s letter to Dear Abby, to the poem “Oedipus” dedicated to John F. Kennedy, Jr., everyone’s getting cut and reshuffled: “Don’t worry, we’ll let you fuck the heroes when we’re done with them.”</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />The range of Yakich’s reach is surprising, covering a vast range of emotion. Of note is the long poem in response to Hurricane Katrina, “Green Zone New Orleans,” which concludes with the haunting lines: </span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /></span><blockquote><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >For once upon a time,</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />Time. As is is,</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br />Take refuse.</span></blockquote><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ></span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" >And not far behind are Yakich’s sexual puns like “nothing/ Beats a penis like personal/ Experience” and the poem “Bow Job,” about the speaker’s adoration of the word “defenestration.” Other poems with as much tickle are not so suggestive but inventive, like the poems “I’ll Take ‘Notable Artists of 20th Century in Couplets, Please, Alex” (the answers in the form of questions—as per the format on <span style="font-style: italic;">Jeopardy!</span>—are provided at the end of the poem) and “The Supercomputer Finally Answers Charles Manson” (which is done in computer-speak).</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />The title of the book suggests that potato-peeling in Ukraine will play a central role in the book (though the poem “A Brief History of Patriotism” traces the potato’s journey through the ages), both the tuber and the country remain out of limelight. This is by design since in “Proof Text,” the second poem in the collection, the speaker let’s the reader know: “The actual lives that are lived in atrocious times and distant places can never be told—out of fear that they will be either too beautiful or too true.”</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Not much is done subtly or quietly or without the battery-shock of the tongue in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine</span>. But then again, this is the era of reality TV, peace missions, War on Terror, and other frightening oxymoron that demand the poet step off the page and into the mix of the world’s theater. It’s refreshing to have Yakich rise above the tame and timid poems that delegate American poetry as apolitical, and therefore inert.</span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">by Rigoberto González</span></span></span><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-65399482042160560122008-05-28T13:32:00.003-05:002008-05-28T13:43:44.371-05:00Robert Bly at Poetry Daily<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBCAgM5ZRqPuou00Upl2GR59SNyn7XNn7aUYlhcwNxTxFAtpMwxvjLmHqgd6pOKkqpc1qnycTRjZij2Z7jlKABwBPCh-CD3apn8gyWrGgk4YV5sEuIF7eEBlt_kGT3Z_kg-JX8/s1600-h/lvl2_logo.gif"><img style="text-align: justify;float: left; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; cursor: pointer; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBCAgM5ZRqPuou00Upl2GR59SNyn7XNn7aUYlhcwNxTxFAtpMwxvjLmHqgd6pOKkqpc1qnycTRjZij2Z7jlKABwBPCh-CD3apn8gyWrGgk4YV5sEuIF7eEBlt_kGT3Z_kg-JX8/s200/lvl2_logo.gif" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5205499683235956066" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Later this week, </span><a href="http://www.poems.com/"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Poetry Daily</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"> will feature Robert Bly's prose poem, "The Transluscent Stone," from the most recent issue of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">LUNA</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">.</span></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It is one of three prose poems Bly contributes to the issue. The other two are "A Cattail" and "The Photograph in the Second Hand Shop."</div></span>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-39941574371737165102008-03-30T00:31:00.004-05:002008-03-30T00:50:26.144-05:00LUNA Volume Eight<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm62WepnWnye1C3EowwCXNeAd74crWJVy3utrUocSYT-2x-fMGBIkQHIxXEd7GHtUNE9EIBsDtaZJ13UvJVdQgcd7IPoKGnNLskgyGe4k_0qIHMK2_cF1ezSm1M-lLx0TxF3be/s1600-h/luna8_cover.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm62WepnWnye1C3EowwCXNeAd74crWJVy3utrUocSYT-2x-fMGBIkQHIxXEd7GHtUNE9EIBsDtaZJ13UvJVdQgcd7IPoKGnNLskgyGe4k_0qIHMK2_cF1ezSm1M-lLx0TxF3be/s200/luna8_cover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5183403723764542066" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A new issue of </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >LUNA</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> 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.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Issues are $10 and can be ordered using the form to the right. Orders are expected to ship by the end of April.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />And there are still back issues available of the previous seven issues of </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >LUNA</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">. To take a look at some of the contributors in those issues, just click on the link below:</span><br /><br /><a style="font-family: times new roman;" href="http://lunapoetry.blogspot.com/2006/12/issue-number-seven.html">http://lunapoetry.blogspot.com/2006/12/issue-number-seven.html</a><br /><br /><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-38915630162448797352008-03-17T11:02:00.002-05:002008-03-17T11:11:57.437-05:00Review: Keep and Give Away<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh6I5YaMUL0yiaEo_Bx7Yu9xRz1C8bWnmV95VEWpi7Jek2G02gNGUqBJ_JWaFxr3oPq8Id_7kVj4XDCtkmUzWKOpV9T_Y3GmPE7027B70l6LN3Hjr3a2P9e3QS_D29vr35bnA9/s1600-h/3670.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhh6I5YaMUL0yiaEo_Bx7Yu9xRz1C8bWnmV95VEWpi7Jek2G02gNGUqBJ_JWaFxr3oPq8Id_7kVj4XDCtkmUzWKOpV9T_Y3GmPE7027B70l6LN3Hjr3a2P9e3QS_D29vr35bnA9/s200/3670.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5178741849966570898" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;">Keep and Give Away</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />SUSAN MEYERS<br />University of South Carolina Press, $14.95</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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, <span style="font-style: italic;">I am still alive</span>?” 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”: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> …This was my mother,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">now I am hers, wiping spittle from corners,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> leaning close to peer past all decay.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Whenever I ask her, like a friendly dentist,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">she obeys the same way she taught me</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> and holds still, cow-eyed</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">and gaping, as if caught by surprise,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">long after I’ve brushed away all that I can</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">and seen more than I want to see.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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.”</span><br /></div><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />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:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">…I held his hand</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />nested like a bird in my palm </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />and with my other hand brushed dirt </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />from his knee. Then the bird fluttered</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />and was gone. Tires screeched.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I saw pieces of a toy truck</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />land in the Lefler’s yard.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">In all, Meyers has managed a compelling first collection, one that will earn her a seat amongst other notable writers of the elegiac tradition.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">by Gaganpreet Kaur</span></span></span><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-29508861970408636772008-02-11T12:04:00.022-06:002008-02-14T16:19:16.891-06:00Review: American Music<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-size:+0;"></span><span style="font-size:85%;"></span><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5166278024082576706" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_z2_Hty81be8/R7JOfaRZVUI/AAAAAAAAAAY/4iPqHvQi8es/s320/ChrisMartin.jpeg" border="0" /></span><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">American Music</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div></span><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">CHRIS MARTIN</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div></span><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Copper Canyon Press, $15 paperback</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">ISBN 978-1-55659-266-9<br /></span></span></div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><em><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div></span></em><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I: like American Music</span></span></span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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, </span></span></span><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">American Music</span></span></span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">, 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:</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div></span><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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:</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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. <br /></span></span></div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><span><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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 </span></span></span><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">American Music</span></span></span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> 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.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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:<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">At the exigencies of cinema, even at this<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Intersection if I<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Tremble my trembling divides<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(“Toward Perceptual Ensembles”)<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Towers toll without<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">My being there, as my being ebbs only<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">To erupt in directionless code, I<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(“Being-in-the-Being”)<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Storefronts as my sense<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Of direction daily rearranges<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Itself in heat, so I<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(“Allegrissimo, or Not As Hell As You”)<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Smile tremoring the air<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Into festive throbs, I think I<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Hear all the bleeding<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(An Introduction to the Mechanics of Deformable Bodies’)<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And sinking in the paradox<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Of frozen motion, if I<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Say I ghost hummingbird-like<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(“I Ghost”)<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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.<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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?<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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:<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Plainly—I am afraid<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Of becoming a sad pervert, even<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">So I yearn for a life of direct<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">And unfettered humanity, suddenly today<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">It is the future and the sun<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Is a laser beam dispassionately shooting<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">You in the eye, you<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Being I, here, the uncalloused<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Observer of daily, nay<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Momentary phenomena, such<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">As the children sledding the crusty<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Hill on their little flotilla<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(“Misdiagnosis, or Funny Music next to Death”)<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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 </span></span></span><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">one </span></span></span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">of Martin's lines is important to ask in a collection like this.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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.<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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:<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Of my own desire as it comes<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Into being, which is<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Why I prefer the hallucinations<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Of Neanderthal life, days<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Spent inching<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Boulders from the ridge<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">(“There Will Be a Very Meaningful Picture Here”)<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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?<br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">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. </span></span></span><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">American Music</span></span></span></em><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> 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.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></span></div><em><div style="text-align: justify;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">by Thomas Cook</span></span></span><br /></div></em></span>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-91434656900190822112007-12-16T17:38:00.001-06:002007-12-16T17:56:50.768-06:00Review: Skirt Full of Black<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd-z1imO8p4OuNiJDGC-gp3q_luk7zESk-ij_k8PFhmHpPUhZGE-8aNhRKrHf6QrzuROuebD-dJdofXSfVJvx57aWgGFeB66-pEqtN_2fn2kTv3a8uKCQ2lutAvvQlpFYkWgLX/s1600-h/skirtfullofblackb.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd-z1imO8p4OuNiJDGC-gp3q_luk7zESk-ij_k8PFhmHpPUhZGE-8aNhRKrHf6QrzuROuebD-dJdofXSfVJvx57aWgGFeB66-pEqtN_2fn2kTv3a8uKCQ2lutAvvQlpFYkWgLX/s200/skirtfullofblackb.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5144719387448218050" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;">Skirt Full of Black</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />SUN YUNG SHIN</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Coffee House Press, $15 </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Transmogrifying Type</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><br />In <span style="font-style: italic;">Skirt Full of Black</span>, 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”:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">“Sometimes even the surface forms defy etymology.” </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />In place of reading, two doors open</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Away from each. Door—paper—door—</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">“Korean contrast structurally with European languages such as English in a number of ways.”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Your sister’s spirit escapes through a pinprick in the paper wall.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />The shaman kneels at her side as before a meal.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Skirt Full of Black</span>, will come to realize that Shin is interested in this play for about three pages. </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><blockquote>“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.</blockquote></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">We also have a kind of bold, capitalized computer print-out voice interspersed:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><blockquote style="font-weight: bold;">THIS PERSON IS THE “STICKER,” HIS JOB IS TO SLIT THE THROATS OF THE COWS AS THEY PASS BY ON THE ASEMBLY LINE.</blockquote></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">or</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><blockquote><span style="font-weight: bold;">THIS IS THE “KNOCKER,” ADMINISTERING THE STUN BOLT TO THE COW’S BRAIN.</span> </blockquote></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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”:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><blockquote>Chinese chopstick, called kua-zi (quick little fellow with bamboo heads) are nine to ten inches long and rectangular with a blunt end.</blockquote></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">And I think we have at least a second textbook as well to end the poem:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><blockquote>“Each soldier is an individual.”</blockquote></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">By the 1920s, virtually all typewrites were “look-alikes”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />only in capital letter: <span style="font-weight: bold;">QWERTY: WOMAN TYPING: HARD RETURN</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(Shin from “OBVIOUSLY, THESE WERE HOMES…”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">We should not say there are four or even eight different voices at work in <span style="font-style: italic;">Skirt Full of Black</span>; 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…</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The beauty of this book is that we are always slipping into new forms and new styles with and <span style="font-style: italic;">within</span> each poem. Never too far away though is Shin’s disarming poetic. One is reminded of a book like <span style="font-style: italic;">Rhapsody in Plain Yellow</span>, by Marilyn Chin. On the jacket Chin describes <span style="font-style: italic;">Skirt Full of Black</span> 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.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />OBVIOUSLY, THESE WERE HOMES RATHER THAN OFFICE MACHINE, MEANT FOR PEOPLE OF LIMITED MEANS WHO NEEDED TO DO SOME OCCASIONAL TYPING</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">“I’m a Gay Dad”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />T-shirt on a young Korean man</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Holding hands lightly with his girlfriend</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />“Pity, all of this Westernization”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The English language is true</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Nonsense, everywhere</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">And “WORSHIP”:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">There is a prime number</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />That begs to be reduced</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Resist the beggars</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />They have no rights</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Is this Mass the same everywhere there is God</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Even though different people eat differently</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">When we reach the end of <span style="font-style: italic;">Skirt Full of Black</span>, 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? </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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? </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><blockquote>That we each have a number assigned to us</blockquote></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">and:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><blockquote>That we each have a name, or three assigned to us</blockquote><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">by Thomas Cook</span></span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-8908301039701351642007-12-08T09:16:00.001-06:002007-12-09T13:15:16.339-06:00Review: The Myth of the Simple Machines<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgckaXZ26t5FvaFs9CoBPgcrKp0BZ8k-sgS7cUcdQdVUYe6Xa_vV5Jqbderufj8CSRwY5H1Be06hwdhM4PS0Wh2FUFB_PGl89xPK71XjCLOKDF_oZ4W6_1tN5WWrzP42YNUQnCs/s1600-h/mythmachcov-33.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgckaXZ26t5FvaFs9CoBPgcrKp0BZ8k-sgS7cUcdQdVUYe6Xa_vV5Jqbderufj8CSRwY5H1Be06hwdhM4PS0Wh2FUFB_PGl89xPK71XjCLOKDF_oZ4W6_1tN5WWrzP42YNUQnCs/s200/mythmachcov-33.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5141621411322993794" border="0" /></a><span style=" font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;">The Myth of the Simple Machines</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />LAUREL SNYDER</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />No Tell Books, $15 paperback</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Truth is made, not discovered.</span></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />-- Wayne Gabardi</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Their voices are bringing the trees to their knees</span><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">-- Will Oldham</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />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. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />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:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The sky has a blackbird.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />The field has a girl. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />The sky is to the field as </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />the field is to the sky, only </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />backwards. White is </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />to the blackbird as fear </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />is to the girl, despite </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />she’s small and alone.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />...</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />“I live </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />in this,” says the girl. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />“Alone,” says the girl. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Things become quieter. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Things become. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />“No matter what you</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />may do with your life,”</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />says the girl.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Feign</span>), but there are teacups and clover and, yes, a jar.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">I</span> is vulnerable and endearing. In fact, that’s exactly what she wants us to say:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">When my tea gets cold I like to cry, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />and there’s a run in my stockings </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />that won’t ever end. It gets me. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />But isn’t it endearing?</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Tell me I’m endearing. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />...</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />At the grocery store, I’m </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />“That quiet girl in the blue coat.”</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />I shop alone.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />I like myself against the Bartlett pears </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />and the smell of pears. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Do I look sad</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />I think I’m very pretty, sad and alone</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />in the grocery store.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />(“Posture Matters”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">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:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Like it or not, this is for you, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />so pay attention. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />...</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Maybe you’ve never been wrong, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />but then I can’t believe a word you say. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />The things that don’t work</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />are the important things to have wanted. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />You should have all this </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />figured out by now.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />(“Glass”)</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />---</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />But instead I have you. You staring </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />at that corn field, saying nothing. You sighing </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />at that huge green sea, with all its tides </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />like rulers. You tell me they run straight </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />until a wall happens. To them. Or something. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />What’s that supposed to mean? </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />(“Beast in the Cornfield”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Myth of the Simple Machines</span>. They’re whip-smart, light-heartedly haunting, and exquisitely voiced:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Sometimes we catch the kettle. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Sometimes—icebergs.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />(“Triptych of Useful Rules (Pictures)”)</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />---</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Intimacy-</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />1.) You’ll know it when you see it. 2.) Anything that lasts longer </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />than it needs to, look, hand on shoulder. 3.) I mean to </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />say, it lingers. I mean both things.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />(“Triptych of Useful Rules (Words)”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">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: </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">On a Tuesday night, the girl dozes and dreams </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />of a fireplace. She’s a whisper, a murmur in a slip, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />dancing in a slip made of diamonds beside a fire. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />The walls are close. The air is warm </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />red wine and there is candlelight, from somewhere </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />golden behind her. Deeply golden. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />She’s hushed in her heavy slip, dancing slowly </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />on a thick carpet, alone. When she bruises, she feels </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />like money, like extra money. She’s a full pocket.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">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 <span style="font-style: italic;">him</span> at the Bake Sale and the little message written inside the smallest circles of the smallest cake. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />The Myth of the Simple Machines</span> 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. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;">by Nate Slawson</span></span><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-64175130548542500242007-11-13T14:24:00.000-06:002007-11-13T14:52:58.154-06:00Review: Cate Marvin & El-P: "The Muse: Wired Live"<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhCL2C_p7nX9wcOIq-aco259a_3d5yBhzqjNnim2Ss231SKMZuqSj1Y4ZPxw4AlFrgsJ39Gkzlhwz5mpYfmf9kpTnFg5PCQCL8d2T9Vo-R-fLz4FjSabbGcj-PwdPzBM2DY2NH/s1600-h/imageDB.jpeg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhCL2C_p7nX9wcOIq-aco259a_3d5yBhzqjNnim2Ss231SKMZuqSj1Y4ZPxw4AlFrgsJ39Gkzlhwz5mpYfmf9kpTnFg5PCQCL8d2T9Vo-R-fLz4FjSabbGcj-PwdPzBM2DY2NH/s200/imageDB.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5132426512132963922" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Fragment of the Head of a Queen</span> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />CATE MARVIN</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Sarabande Books, $13.95 (paper only)</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;"><br /><br />I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />EL-P</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Def Jux, $17.95 (compact disc and record) </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Muse: Wired Live</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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. </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Marvin’s sophomore book of poetry, following the Kathryn A. Morton prize-winning <span style="font-style: italic;">World’s Tallest Disaster</span> (Sarabande 2001) is aptly titled, <span style="font-style: italic;">Fragment of the Head of a Queen</span>. 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: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">master of pestilence, conqueror of white </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />clothes; mud prints, paw prints, germs</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />not even the physician knows</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(Marvin’s “Love the Contagion”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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, <span style="font-style: italic;">Fantastic Damage</span>, from his label Def Jux, El-P’s sophomore solo album, <span style="font-style: italic;">I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead</span>, opens with his ode to the polluted minds of would-be emcees. Here El-P informs us:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">to the ground function I’m munsoned</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />it’s the dreaded 7/10 split again</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />the medic made it out to be</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />epidemic shaded, wow for me</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(El-P’s “Tasmanian Pain Coaster)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">through</span>, 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: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Weak in the kneesy species</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />dreaming of future faded </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />seen where the suture stitches knit slipped?</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I’m with you baby </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />let’s get obnoxious with it </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I wanna know what brave is </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I’m tired of sitting here pretending </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I’m not fucking dangerous.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(El-P’s “Run the Numbers”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">To the same tone, in “Muckraker,” Marvin writes: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">If you can’t trust people, you can’t trust books, since</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />books are people and people are books. Shall I ask him </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />to sign it? <span style="font-style: italic;">Beautiful dreamer, may all your beginnings be true</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />beginnings</span>. You think this unseemly for me to confide? </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Reader, don’t mistake me for someone who gives a shit, </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />or your bride. I have no loyalty and I have no pride”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(Marvin’s “Muckraker”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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 <span style="font-style: italic;">should</span> be fodder for poems and songs. Further on in, “Muckraker,” Marvin writes: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">How do I reply? And how shall I contend with</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />the fact, Reader, that this matter cannot mean </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />much to you, and that I, as author, am required</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />to consider how to tell this tale in a manner that </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />will entertain you, despite having never met you </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />and having no way of knowing how to affect you </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(Marvin’s “Muckraker”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">To the same end, in “The Overly Dramatic Truth,” El-P writes:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">I became for you what you had asked</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Telepath</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />You’re too young to ask out loud</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I’m too old to not know that</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I can talk like you’ve not heard</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I know weapons</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />You think words</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I’ve exposed you to these terms</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(El-P’s “The Overly Dramatic Truth”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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”:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">There’s blood here. The skyline teethes the clouds</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />raw, and rain’s course streams a million umbilical</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />cords down windows and walls. Every things gnaws,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />and the pink polish on their girl-nails chips, flakes</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(Marvin’s “Landscape with Hungry Girls”)<br /></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />If every office empties and all slaves walk in dazes</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />To a pool of liquid of liquid money where bath blissfully naked</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />And every open hydrant in a Brooklyn summer moment</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Is opened up by cops and folds out into an ocean</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(El- P’s “Dear Sirs”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">I sold my mind on the street.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I learned another language. It translates easily.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Here’s how: What I say is not what I mean,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Nor is it ever what I meant to say.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />You must not believe me when I say</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />there’s nothing left to love in this world.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(Marvin’s “Lying My Head Off)<br /><br /></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">I know I haven’t been walking a humble path</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I know I cursed at your name and then laughed</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />And though I found it inane to bend calf</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />The servitude of groveling framed as pained task</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />I gotta figure it can’t hurt to ask </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Suspension of disbelief in uniquely freak flash</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />(El-P’s “Flyentology”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">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. </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />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. </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">by Thomas Cook</span></span></span><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-21780076162892000252007-10-22T10:39:00.000-05:002007-11-10T14:51:13.803-06:00Review: Disclamor<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy2jiOb-BqMD8NhR89uh4ibfrAloUIZCvmxutFHPyhjeZONbK9S-_Ln_Qbs-K42xK_7BJdqpwRkINXfB3iYUFT7Ou3VwWeXRlMDYP7rNx-MrLwA74jyoAySe_4OvRpY8Tg_U2f/s1600-h/c_disclamor.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy2jiOb-BqMD8NhR89uh4ibfrAloUIZCvmxutFHPyhjeZONbK9S-_Ln_Qbs-K42xK_7BJdqpwRkINXfB3iYUFT7Ou3VwWeXRlMDYP7rNx-MrLwA74jyoAySe_4OvRpY8Tg_U2f/s200/c_disclamor.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5124186601757559138" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;">Disclamor</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />G. C. WALDREP</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Boa Editions, Ltd., $16 paperback</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />“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 (<span style="font-style: italic;">“What is defense without a pretty view?”</span>) seep through as the vocabulary of warfare becomes relevant again:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">AND THE GOD OF THE USA DECLARED</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I SHALL INCORPORATE WEAPONS</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">OF MASS DESTRUCTION</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">INTO MY NATIONAL PARKS.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">—This is not quite right. The weapons came first,</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">mass, the destruction; then</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">picnic table.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">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: </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The grass sings in the parity of its consumption.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /> The lupine,</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /> the sea-fig are singing,</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /> even the Scotch broom is singing<br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><blockquote>its barbarian song.</blockquote></span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><blockquote></blockquote></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">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.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />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:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">If you listen closely you can hear the scuffle of each ant:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />they’re all Calvinists, they are the architects of small melodies</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />that flash and tremble in the afternoon sun. Like us,</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />they demand a more generous explanation.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">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.”<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Bridging “The Batteries” are poems attesting to Waldrep’s skill at crafting similes that are characteristically playful and startling. A sampling of lines</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">:<br /><blockquote>The dead stood in their corners like silver telescopes.<br />The bees ferried hunger to their hive.<br /><br /> (from “Soldier Pass”)<br /><br />I will never achieve a <span style="font-style: italic;">nuclear family</span>. Beneath a distant sunrise<br />my peccadilloes huddle like sheep.<br /><br /> (from “Retroactive”)<br /><br />the nape of that moment<br />set like a sapphire into the scepter<br />of incident, smooth and cool.<br /><br /> (from “Titus at Lystra”)</blockquote></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Disclamor</span> 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”:<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;">I will be the poet of broken things.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />But what claim have I trampled</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />into these bare hills?</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />What fragment have I prised?</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;">by Rigoberto González</span></span><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-67900855345407644832007-09-08T12:38:00.000-05:002007-09-08T12:47:37.307-05:00Review: Blind Date with Cavafy<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN4OlZxrKj2CEjdvCMnA8-K51YVPEQt1UH-o5jzXBY-d4CAkreY2Zyu0VVESGpEKC_imSfD0Nx8pQ8Je62VDw9hhl27PeUj_905xfj7iJQyYR2Fglh6Q2xtNXIzGVIvOV5Op_I/s1600-h/BlindDate_cvr1pass.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN4OlZxrKj2CEjdvCMnA8-K51YVPEQt1UH-o5jzXBY-d4CAkreY2Zyu0VVESGpEKC_imSfD0Nx8pQ8Je62VDw9hhl27PeUj_905xfj7iJQyYR2Fglh6Q2xtNXIzGVIvOV5Op_I/s200/BlindDate_cvr1pass.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5107889410437028562" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;">Blind Date with Cavafy</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />STEVE FELLNER</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Marsh Hawk Press, $12.50 paperback</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Placing such a quirky title on the cover sets up the expectation that this poetry collection will deliver its share of literary chuckles. A quick browse at the table of contents (“Breakfast with Socrates” and “I Hate You, Too, Catullus”) only builds that anticipation. And indeed the moments of dark levity abound.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">From “Deux Ex Machina”:<br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">There have been times in my life I wanted to douse my apartment</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />furniture in gasoline and light a match. But then I read</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />the Want Ads and decide to change jobs for the third time</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />in a month.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">From “The Aesthetics of the Damned”:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Who hasn’t shoplifted</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />a navy blue skirt to match the bruise on their forehead</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />they got from running into a lamppost</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />on their way to a Lord & Taylor Clearance Sale?</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">But make no mistake, Steve Fellner doesn’t write out of easy laughs. Though the speaker comes across as the town chump (in “Epiphanies,” he’s the only one who’s unaware that his monologue is an epiphany), the tone is usually somber, and each poem builds toward a complex representation of a personality that is curious, sardonic and intelligent. And, yes, it is all communicated through a self-effacing humor.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The strategy however doesn’t distract from facing the serious subjects in the book, like mortality and suicide (“Death still eluded me. But life became more clear.”), and the questioning of faith (“Only God likes us unadorned, unadored.”). Indeed it seems to guide the reader to the unsettling revelation that pathos is the most effective method of communicating the everyday dramas of this cold-shouldered world where “miracles are nothing/ more than accidents we like.”<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">And in terms of exploring sexuality tragicomically, there is something of Augusten Burroughs in <span style="font-style: italic;">Blind Date with Cavafy</span>, especially in the poem “Self-Portrait,” an autobiographical narrative that takes the reader through a twisted tale of an adoption, a coming out, and a coming to terms with the feeling of lovelessness. But it provides insight into the odd contemplations expressed at other moments in the book. In the poem “Criticism,” for example, the speaker dwells over a scathing review of a film:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">How relieved I was</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />that something deemed so unnecessary</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />could receive attention. I read that review</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />at least seventy-six times as my parents planned</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />their trip to Cancun without me.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">And still later in the poem “Consider the Fates,” the speaker examines his ill-luck:<br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Blame the garbage man for picking up the trash</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />after three. If he had done it earlier, your family wouldn’t have found</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />your bank receipts. Which showed a zero balance. You gambled</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />your entire inheritance away at the racetrack</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />in one Sunday afternoon.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Fellner’s deadpan delivery disarms the reader (The poem “Judgment Day” opens matter-of-factly with “The line is long.”), but he never fails to reel the true sentiment of his poems back in. And by the end of the book, though even the funnier lines don’t seem as funny anymore because the pain underneath has surfaced fully, the reader will come to appreciate and trust this “funny man” as the compelling teller of the hard personal truths: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Forgive me for shoveling dirt into your grave,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />imagining the broken earth crushing your body, breaking</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />your bones, filling you with a happiness you never found in me.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;">by Rigoberto González</span></span><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-51662803828139247192007-08-18T15:43:00.001-05:002007-08-18T16:00:19.278-05:00Review: Quantum Lyrics<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6DgqPeYEOrTG3yQcfbLgfJqLZA72sbaaVJZWxMUuOaKAM4LhE9iNNMaOlkTgnAnClqfw1ylmZStbPLaanBaE4Ngx6C34cKH8aW1wwGBLT1nzKhaAVqb25_TLf38Ip36S6GnLz/s1600-h/006499.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6DgqPeYEOrTG3yQcfbLgfJqLZA72sbaaVJZWxMUuOaKAM4LhE9iNNMaOlkTgnAnClqfw1ylmZStbPLaanBaE4Ngx6C34cKH8aW1wwGBLT1nzKhaAVqb25_TLf38Ip36S6GnLz/s200/006499.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5100144111228558018" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;">Quantum Lyrics</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />A. VAN JORDAN</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Norton, $23.95 hardcover</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;">If A plus B = B plus A,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;"><br />A and B bear the ability to add up:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;"><br />why isn’t race always commutative?</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">That is just one of the key questions in A. Van Jordan’s third book of poetry, <span style="font-style: italic;">Quantum Lyrics</span>, a book of explorations about memory, race, history, and identity, each articulated through the language of mathematics and science. The speech of politics and society, it seems, is racially biased and unable to provide logical explanations or even unbendable truth.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">That is why superhero comic books like The Green Lantern, The Atom and The Flash contain more accessible lenses to hold up against the mysterious world. The speaker in the poems “The First Law of Motion” and “Remembrance” for example, gestures toward an earlier poem in which the reader learns about The Flash’s ability to travel at the speed of light and reverse time. For the speaker, there is no going back to rectify past mistakes, no outrunning danger, only the burdens of fear, guilt and hindsight:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">I remember, as a boy, walking home</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">from school, I saw Milton McKnight,</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">a kid we said was <span style="font-style: italic;">a little slow</span>;</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">he was tied to a tree.</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Three guys, for fun, were beating him</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">like a pedal on a bass drum,</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">but no music was coming out.</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">I want you to know, I remember</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">not Milton’s blood but mine,</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">how I felt my blood coursing</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">through my body. This is how I learned</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">fear, how I had to tell my blood</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">to keep moving, relax. I did nothing.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Similarly, The Atom offers essential life lessons about knowing when to claim visibility, when to become invisible, and how both can be subversive or evasive acts: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Sometimes shrinking to the size</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">of a coin is a super power;</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">sometimes it’s just a way</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">to find value in one’s life.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">But the heart of this collection is the twenty-three part “Quantum Lyrics Montage,” a compelling portrait of Albert Einstein’s personal and political life.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">From the troubled first marriage to Mileva Marić, to the brow-arching second one to his first cousin Elsa, and a few extramarital discrepancies in between, indeed prove the assertion that “the action of love and the reaction/ of disappointment are equal forces.” And also that:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote></blockquote> Infinite space<br /> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">is so hard for people to hold</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">in their skulls, but they believe</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">in infinite happiness.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Einstein’s relationship to Mileva, his “elegant equation,” ends with heartbreak, an emotion he sums up with a postulate: “the speed of light emitted from the truth is the same as that of a lie coming from the lamp of a face aglow with trust.”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">But Jordan’s investment is clearer with Einstein’s political leanings: his warnings about the development of the atomic bomb, and his solidarity with the black population of the his new home, the United States, he himself a brilliant thinker subject to the anti-Semitic furor sweeping Europe, where even men of learning were bringing into question “Jewish science.”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Imagining the contents of a 1931 letter Einstein wrote to W.E.B. DuBois on the issue of race:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><blockquote>Not talking about it will not ease<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />the pain of questioning who is white,</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Negro or Jewish, just to assess hierarchy</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />over humanity.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">And in a 1946 letter to President Truman in support of an anti-lynching bill: “Trees need only to drop leaves to prove gravity./ The gravity of men hanged from trees is grave.”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">By the conclusion of the elaborate rumination in <span style="font-style: italic;">Quantum Lyrics</span>, the speaker assesses: “Nothing changes easily.” Yet the potential for change has been established with the revelation and study of the mechanisms that keep systems of oppression in place.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">A. Van Jordan has written a significant and intelligent book of poems.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Rigoberto González</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> </div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-47689410947946068802007-08-11T13:48:00.000-05:002007-08-13T13:15:00.925-05:00Review: Perfect Villagers<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT0I2gZ0GX4_laRm7UIPWDeVfIenQgiREX5cy-9hHZWfP3wmeNTvA8lgd9VGnbS8Zm9y_cV4RSSJi9INyKt96sOexFzqc6MLVhcGI_ioAWY4wzUFkzLCOAcA8ARPLamsaS9Det/s1600-h/image017.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT0I2gZ0GX4_laRm7UIPWDeVfIenQgiREX5cy-9hHZWfP3wmeNTvA8lgd9VGnbS8Zm9y_cV4RSSJi9INyKt96sOexFzqc6MLVhcGI_ioAWY4wzUFkzLCOAcA8ARPLamsaS9Det/s200/image017.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5097517127411398722" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;">Perfect Villagers</span></span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;"><br />SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Octopus Books, $6</span><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;">The recognition of the inverted world still requires a knowledge of the order of the world which it inverts and, in a sense, incorporates.</span><br /></span><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:100%;"> -- Linda Hutcheon</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The particular world that a poem creates, populates, and governs is, in one sense, an inverted world. Images, lines, and meanings are all arranged according to the ordered world of the poem. This “poetic world” is not arranged in some dictionary-definition, upside-down order of inversion, though. It is a world that has been turned inside-out, its entrails exposed. But no matter how inverted a “poetic world” might be, it must remain, to use Hutcheon's phrase, aware "of the world which it inverts."</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s chapbook, <span style="font-style: italic;">Perfect Villagers</span>, is a wonderful example of this inversion. Topics are sometimes large—Korea, Kim Jong Il, language, “the insubstantial ‘universe’”—but the poems in which they situate themselves are striking microcosms of playful precision. For example, the book’s opening poem, “Dear Margaret Cho” (the first of two poems with this title), begins:</span><br /></span> <div style="text-align: left;"> <blockquote><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">korea might be gay but I do not think you are.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />korea is a peninsula. you and I are people, meaning that we have hair we </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />comb and things to look at. our lips pout and take on the fullness of an ad-</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />opted meaning. </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />the fact of the matter is that relentlessness is a handshake, a limp fish or glass </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />of lukewarm tea. the fact of the matter is that standing on a stage everything </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />is comic, meaning small and memorable, of the insubstantial “universe,” a </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />minor disaster or floating chord.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />the darkness is outside when I see you, not in.</span></span></blockquote> </div> <span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What’s funny about this poem (and some of the other poems in Lee’s collection) is that it’s not all that funny. Based on title alone, one might expect a poem called “Dear Margaret Cho” to be humorous, but this is not the case. Expectation gets turned on its head. There is an overwhelming seriousness that permeates Lee’s poems, and it becomes clear that no matter how cheeky the poems might initially seem, they are primarily concerned with memory, place (both geographical and orientational), and the process of language.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The poems are imbricated with these weighty notions in image after image and idea after idea, but it doesn’t mean Lee misses out on having a bit of fun. Language is <span style="font-style: italic;">the</span> process of progression throughout the collection, and Lee’s oft-fragmented lines are playful with their stunted or piecemeal syntax: </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></span><blockquote> <div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">a wellspring of thought. moves on without gaps or expressions of ecstasy. </span></span><br /><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">continuous, fibrous, multiple—violet shades drawn down over a liquid vibe.<br /><br /></span></span> <span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(“Enter the Dragon”)</span></span><br /></div> <span style="font-size:100%;"> <span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />...</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />this and that. between you and me; between both sides.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />make a fire ((<span style="font-style: italic;">in the stove</span>))</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />smoke. lifelong. <span style="font-style: italic;">one’s</span> lifework.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(“Kim Jong Il: A Reader)</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Other lines are straightforward and clear, their images spelled out in simple, subject/predicate declarations, but are no less as playful:<br /></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><blockquote> <div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> you are where I have left you</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span></div> <span style="font-family:times new roman;">every moment that I leave you<br /><br />(“Toshiro Mifune”)</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />...</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />we aren’t differentiable with bangs and hooded lids. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />I know the likeness doesn’t stop right there.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />what’s so great about being horny? the joke is insatiable. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />it rips and roars between and through.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(“Dear Margaret Cho” #2)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Perhaps the most striking poem in <span style="font-style: italic;">Perfect Villagers</span> is its final one, “Toshiro Mifune.” It is a fitting close that revisits and muses on the concerns that traverse the entire collection. In it, Lee sprinkles some of her most heartbreakingly beautiful lines: </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></span><blockquote><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I slept with a woman and woke up as a curse </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />I slept with a man and woke up silent </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />I ate alone and clasped hands at the kindness of strangers</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />...</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />mimicking a glint on a drawn edge, a standoff on the beach </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />these words draw oars from their spaces </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />treble their volume with a nay-sayer’s dust</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />she waxes most eloquent </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />when of her eloquence she speaks</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />...</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />categorically he was a man just as any other man </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span></span> <div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">was born, breathed, one day stood then spoke</span></span></div> </blockquote><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In <span style="font-style: italic;">Perfect Villagers</span>, Lee crafts a haunting world of language and memory. There is a freshness and clever sincerity in her work that is, to borrow her words, both “bliss and aftermath,” so dolefully fun.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">by Nate Slawson</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />This is the seventh in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.</span></span><br /></span></span></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-15638522257099466222007-07-30T11:50:00.000-05:002007-07-30T11:59:15.218-05:00Review: Dance Dance Revolution<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeY1wXH5YLhVeaaGruAPe-t9ySMRakbdIARboq0FLYi_JUMIhfWXOqsTWU8lyFmQZphS3cXnyiUJSzXcVwdsRaoWS9CI3HJzxOwfbzCyHkgHzNldHnxmhWfwilX2RlqyTeBANT/s1600-h/006484.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeY1wXH5YLhVeaaGruAPe-t9ySMRakbdIARboq0FLYi_JUMIhfWXOqsTWU8lyFmQZphS3cXnyiUJSzXcVwdsRaoWS9CI3HJzxOwfbzCyHkgHzNldHnxmhWfwilX2RlqyTeBANT/s200/006484.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5093033589576267826" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >Dance Dance Revolution</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">CATHY PARK HONG</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Norton, $23.95 hardcover</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"In the Desert, the language is an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects imported into this city, a rapidly evolving lingua franca," so scribbles the Historian of Cathy Park Hong’s second book of poems <span style="font-style: italic;">Dance Dance Revolution</span>, an unusual journey into a post-apocalyptic landscape that grows more and more familiar with each visit to a different site.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">To translate and facilitate the tour, the Historian enlists the help of a Guide, a speaker of this Desert Creole who proudly proclaims her authority as a navigator:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">O tempora, o mores! I usta move</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />around like Innuit lookim for sea pelt…now</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />I’mma double migrant. Ceded from Koryo, ceded from</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />‘Merikka, ceded y ceded until now I seizem</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />dis sizable Mouthpiece role…now les’ drive to interior.</span></blockquote> <span style="font-family:times new roman;">Virgil-like, the Guide spins her poetry and politics into revelations of global conflict, racial tensions, economic instabilities caused by terrorism, corruption and internal uprisings—devastations that resulted in a “dead scald world full o rust puddles, grim service men, / y ffyurious mekkinations.” And though a second world has been built to conceal the broken one, its attraction exists only at surface level. The damaged psyche seeps through very easily via the stories of the “guides who ache for their own/ guides / who mourn / who lead / men from human rinds of discontent.” Here, law is “the sin of choice.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The Guide weaves the history of the troubled city with her own participation as a revolutionary (“to fightim me yesman lineage”), which compels the Historian to write down her own strained father-daughter relationship set in a more safeguarded, but no less alienating, childhood. She too must come to terms with superimposing truth over deception, reality over memory, and language over language.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">By the conclusion of the tour, from the karaoke lounge of the St. Petersburg Hotel to the New Town detention center (a cursory glance “lest ye covet a forkin sinus punch on ye gob”) to the Grove of Proposals where one can toast “to bountiful gene pool, / to intramarry couple breedim beige population,” the Historian (like the reader) has become attuned to the din of Desert Creole and to the spin of “stingy” history. By then, the Historian’s personal connection to the Guide has been disclosed and indeed, the reader can identify with the irony and layered meanings in the Guide’s final statement: “If de world is our disco ball, might I have dim dance.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">As a vision of the present Babel channeled through a futuristic one, Hong succeeds with stunning inventiveness. <span style="font-style: italic;">Dance Dance Revolution</span> is a forthright critique of U.S. meddling (and fumbling) in world affairs, and is unafraid to take a heavy step into the lightly tread arena of American political poetry. This cutting-edge book is a warning to the complacent populations, as well as a “guide” to survival in the apocalypse the world is experiencing at the moment:</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">You can be the best talker but no point if you can’t</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />speak the other man’s tongue. You can’t chisel, con, plead,</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />seduce, beg for your life, you can’t do anything, because you</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />know not their language. So learn them all.</span></blockquote> <span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >by Rigoberto González</span></span><br /><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-67142793825566696842007-06-11T12:02:00.000-05:002007-06-19T13:10:50.851-05:00Review: Duende<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi92FUgNe1NHaBNWLGo_TD9HX48yInLyTK9o1xNcXGqApnmkgsFnGOUvErmZ_qzt7VLmazGFfI-6cXqTHIE8kpXrT6Rqx_iV6GBf4uiWbqYfGac23sSpr5CY5fhzAtGWJGGzOzr/s1600-h/7b1db3b6844eeba199a40138808c594c.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi92FUgNe1NHaBNWLGo_TD9HX48yInLyTK9o1xNcXGqApnmkgsFnGOUvErmZ_qzt7VLmazGFfI-6cXqTHIE8kpXrT6Rqx_iV6GBf4uiWbqYfGac23sSpr5CY5fhzAtGWJGGzOzr/s200/7b1db3b6844eeba199a40138808c594c.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5074853955837928194" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic; font-family: times new roman;">Duende</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">TRACY K. SMITH</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Graywolf Press, $14 paperback</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">In an essay examining Federico García Lorca’s well known though not always well articulated concept of <span style="font-style: italic;">duende</span>, Tracy K. Smith writes: “Unlike the Muse or Angel, which exists beyond or above the poet, the duende sleeps within the poet, and asks to be awakened and wrestled, often at great cost.” With such a risk taking place, successful results should be as impressive. Thus it was a brave move to title her second book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Duende</span>, since the expectations will be high. So far, Smith has met and surpassed that promise by winning the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets because <span style="font-style: italic;">Duende</span> is an intelligent and important book, a staggering study of the modern world.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Indeed, Smith’s project aims for a great vision, opening with a stylized epic titled “History” that sets the tone and volition:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">This is a poem about all we’ll do</span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Not to scratch—</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Where fatigue is great, the mind</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Will invent entire stories to protect sleep.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Dark stories. Deep fright.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /> <span style="font-family: times new roman;">Syntax of nonsense.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">From this vast starting point, the rest of the poems navigate through the trials of humanity, personal and communal—grief, loss, oppression, war—the pain, but so to the unsatisfactory healing, follies of the modern man, like 911: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">The century’s in rubble, so we curl</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Around pictures of ourselves, like Russian dolls</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Whose bodies within bodies form a world</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /> <br />Free of argument, a make-shift cure</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />For old-fashioned post-millennial denial.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Taking a personal turn, part II of <span style="font-style: italic;">Duende</span> maps the rift of a disintegrating marriage (“For years, your back to me made a continent./ I roamed it. Like wading the desert after dark.”), and the search for a trope to make sense of falling out of love, or rather, to come to terms with the shifting ground of emotion or being. It’s called moving on. One of those tropes is in the title poem, which personifies the <span style="font-style: italic;">duende</span>, what Smith refers to in the aforementioned essay as “the perilous yet necessary struggle to inhabit ourselves—our real selves, the ones we barely recognize—more completely.” For the Spanish gypsies:</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;">The earth is dry and they live wanting.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Each with a small reservoir</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Of heavy music heavy in the throat.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">And when they dance flamenco, they make of the body a “parable/ For what not even language/ Moves quickly enough to name.”<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Part III takes its cue from Eduardo Galeano’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Memory of Fire</span>, in which he catalogs the atrocities committed against the disenfranchised in the Americas. For Smith, the fabrics of tragedy come as near as Aunt Neet’s admission of a wistful dream at a family reunion, reach as far as the dry savannas of Uganda, where young women were forced to bear children for military leaders. The poem “Slow Burn” offers the connection: how revelation (those personal disconcerting epiphanies or the knowledge of astounding suffering in the world) comes with a consequence: responsibility or madness, and how quick the human is to create a method to sidestep both and inhabit, rather, the unsettling middle ground. The speaker concludes this about cousin Marcus, the madman in the basement: “the same thing dragging his heart drags ours,/ Only he’s not afraid to name it.”<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">A second concept Smith exercises is the Portuguese <span style="font-style: italic;">saudade</span>, a sigh or longing, often expressed in poetry and song. For Smith, this too, like <span style="font-style: italic;">duende</span>, becomes an avenue for the exploration of “ways of naming the wound,” and then keeping it—like the risk-taking poet, like a citizen in this broken world—exposed, vulnerable and uncertain.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Rigoberto González</span></span><br /> </div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-72630504044804232007-06-01T13:57:00.001-05:002007-08-11T18:01:35.511-05:00Review: The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq6iZHkGYatX_Rk7lDH20AQHuVIt9kI_xFUhSz4Uz1s_a3v7kXgSUVJAVFS4RLdpJ5Sjlb_Yo1Iv6E4X90H8fPS89xU1VKsfZtclUXeFDir4IRqNeCAsMXfhCAw9sSyL21Smzg/s1600-h/image028.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhq6iZHkGYatX_Rk7lDH20AQHuVIt9kI_xFUhSz4Uz1s_a3v7kXgSUVJAVFS4RLdpJ5Sjlb_Yo1Iv6E4X90H8fPS89xU1VKsfZtclUXeFDir4IRqNeCAsMXfhCAw9sSyL21Smzg/s200/image028.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5071172243285005090" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />JONAH WINTER</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Octopus Books, $6</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />In his captivating chapbook, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear</span>, Jonah Winter crafts a wonderful pastiche of mostly free-verse, sometimes-rhymed sonnets. The poems are playfully earnest and cluttered—in a meticulous, dioramic kind of way—with coherent abstraction and illusory “thing-ness” (or, to use Winter’s word, “thing-hood”). Each poem reads like a fractured fairy tale where character and landscape collide in enchanted proportions: </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Terrified angels hover in the basement, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />clutching on to each other’s tattered wings, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />crying ice-cubes, emitting ball-lightning </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />from their eye-sockets, now just cavernous spaces.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Evil returns again and again </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />to the little log cabin where It was born.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />* * *</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Mr. Duck? Are you aware that “time” </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />is an artificial concept, divined </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />by humans as a means of measuring </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />progress, and, too, destroying the dreams of children?</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Come back, Mr. Duck. It’s all so clear now, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />like counting backwards all the sheep in Canada: </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Tundra-esque, remote, one night repeated </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />ad infinitum, the porch lamp always lighted...</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />* * *</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Then, after the apocalypse is over, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />all the animals are wheeled back onstage, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />lifelike, smiling. (Note the Siberian Tiger.)</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Oh no – here comes Mr. Pitiful! </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />What sad song bring ye in thine heart today?</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Descending spirals, vomit, closed city, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />a huge fountain of anti-matter, raining.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Well, we’ll have to put a man right on that. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Meanwhile, if you could just fill out this form...</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Thanks! Understanding why you’re sad </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />blah blah blah negative thoughts blah blah blah corpse.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Okay, first, let’s move everything </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />back into the center ring. Maestro – </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />where is thy victory? Death, where is thy –</span></blockquote> <span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Winter also waggishly mixes-in referential elements on sonnets, process, and narrative. Perhaps the best example of this playfulness reaches across the two poems that end the book’s first section, “A Certain Argument”:</span> <span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“We interrupt this poem for an announcement: </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Will the man who’s collapsed on the marble floor </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />please come to the Information Desk, </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />I repeat: Will the long line of men and women </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />waiting at Window #7, turn </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />towards the great bronze doors. I repeat: O wild west – ”</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /> *</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />“Shall I compare thee to – ” No, I’m afraid </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />you have the wrong number...</span></blockquote> <span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Here, the halting directive that “interrupt[s] this poem” morphs into additional directives, just like the opening lines of Shelley’s terza rima ode bleed into the opening lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Another sonnet within the book’s first section ends almost winkingly: “This is not to say it can’t be done, / the poem as open-ended as the ocean.” As a whole chapbook, as two self-contained sections, or as individual poems, this notion of the poem’s “open-ended[ness]” is what Winter truly seems to be after. The narratives do lack succinctness, but they are neither trivial nor simply tongue-in-cheek. “The poem as open-ended as the ocean” provides no hindrance to understanding; if anything, the vastness contained in this proclamation serves as a buoyed guidepost as we survey the bizarre worlds Winter creates. </span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />The overall effect of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear</span> is one of esteemed wonderment. The poems are shrewd and amusing, as mysterious as they are precocious. </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">by Nate Slawson</span></span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" ><br /><br />This the sixth in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.</span></span></span> </div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-80391690515277923662007-05-19T15:18:00.000-05:002007-06-11T12:14:58.051-05:00Review: At the Drive-In Volcano<div style="text-align: justify;"><a style="font-family: times new roman; font-style: italic;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggtcs98WnXgWbcP8SrfRorcAyzKzUWyVg9ijrH-E3aWuwrkbh8an9pUHjweuGxrGMpaHU_uxt2kwpHNpUJC1uMlCr6A3nigzC_5vl3iDYyFs1Cb4CSGxz62myXqwdjiJuypeWM/s1600-h/volcano225.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggtcs98WnXgWbcP8SrfRorcAyzKzUWyVg9ijrH-E3aWuwrkbh8an9pUHjweuGxrGMpaHU_uxt2kwpHNpUJC1uMlCr6A3nigzC_5vl3iDYyFs1Cb4CSGxz62myXqwdjiJuypeWM/s200/volcano225.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5066369606559650578" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >At the Drive-In Volcano</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tupelo Press, $16.95 paperback</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The curious finds in nature and human folly, which might otherwise get slumped into trivia or become the odd ingredient in a conversation starter, are skillfully and delicately handled in the much-anticipated second book of poems <span style="font-style: italic;">At the Drive-In Volcano</span> (Tupelo Press, $16.95 paperback) by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In “Fugu Soup Blues” for example, the reader’s introduced to the toxic porcupine fish, “the only fish/ that can close its eyes.” But the poem moves beyond reportage of facts and into the terrain of people’s attraction to risky behavior, i.e. the consumption of such a dangerous delicacy. The closing stanzas, however, beg associations to all of those other uncontrollable urges and indulgences:</span><br /></div> <span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">You cannot stop this hunger. When</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />something this good can kill you, every pin prick</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />of white pain just adds more flavor.</span></blockquote> <span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> The process of taking the unexpected, disconcerting detour from the seemingly charming direction of the poem is found in numerous pieces but most notably in “How the Robin’s Breast Became Red,” “Bee Wolf” and “Planaria,” about the “murderous business” of biology class dissections. It’s as if the poet has taken to heart the <span style="font-style: italic;">ars poetica</span> cleverly ensconced in the poem about a jealous woman hiding a scorpion in her bride-to-be sister’s hair:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span></div> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> Invent a new line</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />for me, sketch me something</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />with lots of hair, extra bite. I crave</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />a new monster, all of its life</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />and saliva, how it gives me proof</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />my blood can still slam from one end</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />of my body to the other… </span></blockquote> <span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Nezhukumatathil’s poetic lens is indeed smudged with an anxiety that gives her second book a distinctively sinister edge. Witness the following lines from three different poems:</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">If you take away my glass before I’m finished, the ice</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />will cry soft in its melting, without my last mouthfeel.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />*</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is the last hotel where the towels in the corner</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />of the bathroom (crumpled, dark) look</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />like someone was shot.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />*</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />…even peeling an apple gives me</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />a small happy terror—the bright sheen of blood</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />and seed-skin.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Though the endnotes explain that the five sections of the book “are divided into specific thematic movements in a volcano’s lifespan,” the ordering of the poems within each section only hint at this larger construction. What’s more apparent is the speaker’s own movement in the first-person poems from one marker of identity to the next: sister, daughter, girlfriend, student, teacher, wife. This succession of roles stays connected by the speaker’s constant examination, volcano in the title notwithstanding, of the small and mostly eye-level encounters with the extraordinary ordinary things. The title poem, with its assertion that “Even in this darkness/ there is so much light,” appears to be addressing a new stage in the author’s poetics—a less innocent, and certainly a more perilous worldview. The result is daring and dazzling.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But fans of Nezhukumatathil’s previous volume <span style="font-style: italic;">Miracle Fruit</span> should not be alarmed since they will find traces of that earlier project in this one, such as in the poem “First Fool,” about those men who rush to the summerwear at the first signs of sunlight:</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> </span></div> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> The pale scissors</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />of this guy’s legs always cut me up. All</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />that’s left of me is a paper snowflake—</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />nothing but folds and tiny diamond holes.</span></blockquote> <span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >by Rigoberto González</span>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-77573739756165181702007-04-18T12:28:00.000-05:002007-08-11T18:01:55.411-05:00Review: The Tides<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqzz5X9SwCBZSEiaIIPamD-jLtMraRos9eV1jjgYDZoqOElZydlEdMXyslRrjhthb0-wvXKwLEl-L7VVZu6DaCYYnmGu2Q2O3LyebS8phepv8AfI2PuRUXj32sQolHy0Azg7Ei/s1600-h/image026.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqzz5X9SwCBZSEiaIIPamD-jLtMraRos9eV1jjgYDZoqOElZydlEdMXyslRrjhthb0-wvXKwLEl-L7VVZu6DaCYYnmGu2Q2O3LyebS8phepv8AfI2PuRUXj32sQolHy0Azg7Ei/s200/image026.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054826401650381218" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Tides</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">GENYA TUROVSKAYA</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Octopus Books, $6</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“<span style="font-style: italic;">everything else </span>is<span style="font-style: italic;"> a lie</span>”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So begins Genya Turovskaya’s three-sectioned chapbook of poetic oscillation, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Tides</span>. The title could not be more fitting. Turovskaya’s lines wash back and forth across the page, towing objects and ideas from place to place before they run aground and the cycle begins again. The lines are disjointed, divided, but they are not fractured or disconnected. Everything is held together in the precise movements between before and after:</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">to begin what has begun again</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">suddenly men appear and absolutely nothing</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">happens</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">except that something <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> and becomes <span style="font-style: italic;">was</span>...</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">do you approach</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">recede</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">the battering tide</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">something happens</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">something is <span style="font-style: italic;">happening</span> to me</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">something has interrupted</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">something else someone</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">turns to look</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">over their shoulder</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">there is nothing there</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(“Pax”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Turovskaya’s world is full of mythos. It is a world “removed from geography the non-event the human / silhouette impressed in an embankment of mud // land mass torn free of the continent” (“The Tides”). <span style="font-style: italic;">The Tides</span> reads like a post-creation story where the landscape has been reconstructed with names (of trees, of animals, of things), ships, lights, clothes, buildings, and water. The scenes are at once empty and full. </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Line, language, and subject have all been broken down into incremental elements that, when strung together, complete what cannot be completed. Because if we are always a part of the in-between, and if “something else” is always happening, what other choice do we have but “to begin what has begun again”? Turovskaya builds a world through division and abstraction, but she writes with a serene clarity that never loses its way. She is both creator and guide. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Tides</span> traverses the border that runs somewhere between lost-ness and finding, and Turovskaya allows us to accompany her on her journey through this vast expanse.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">by Nate Slawson</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">This is the fifth in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.</span></span><br /><br /></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-53966776033580476842007-04-10T14:57:00.000-05:002007-08-11T18:02:30.180-05:00Review: Goodnight Lung<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiXIQK_nCKYcFJN-7nqmvhxLTbHMW3Va7P6o75PxBbpQIXX0_bt5wN3Pxci0b03uvchLneaZNvj7a5E0i5fwLkeJm0maXtBeCgAEbK4-61fjIQYIGDWZlUQZmhCGEsi4whrAYU/s1600-h/image031.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiXIQK_nCKYcFJN-7nqmvhxLTbHMW3Va7P6o75PxBbpQIXX0_bt5wN3Pxci0b03uvchLneaZNvj7a5E0i5fwLkeJm0maXtBeCgAEbK4-61fjIQYIGDWZlUQZmhCGEsi4whrAYU/s200/image031.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5051891403858841602" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Goodnight Lung</span></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">SAMUEL AMADON</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Octopus Books, $6<br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“<span style="font-style: italic;">It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function.</span>”</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /></span> <div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> -- Louis Sullivan</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Almost all of the poems in Amadon’s chapbook are written in either couplets or tercets, and the form gives the content the space to proceed, to turn, and to try again and again to pin down what <span style="font-style: italic;">has happened</span> or what <span style="font-style: italic;">will happen</span>. In fact, many of the poems orbit around this idea of <span style="font-style: italic;">happening</span>:</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"> No one lets</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">my grandfather sand the ice, Kansas</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">isn’t very different from Belgium </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">& we each have a scaffold that wants </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">nothing to do with touching. Touch </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">yours to mine, we see what happens.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(“Last Giddy to Hospital Bed”)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">...</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Without an unmanageable </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">mistake, the day doesn’t </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">happen.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(“Uncomfortable Hand”)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">...</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">We might see to the arrangement of a light </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">for an emotion which would strike a figure </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">of a person with a mind for what exactly </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">has happened to all the tea...</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(“Frivolity With Lamps”)</span></blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But <span style="font-style: italic;">happening</span> in these poems isn’t limited to the explicit use that word. The poems are pensive, unsure of “how to investigate / our loss.” The voice here is one of hesitancy, a voice that is seemingly uncomfortable in a place where “same will always into same.” For Amadon, the tension lies somewhere between the act of remembering and the act of doing. </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The form, with its severe enjambment across couplets or tercets, enhances the tension of each poem’s overflow of ideas. The world is constantly moving, but it is a “world / that moves without attention.” The poems attempt to focus their attention, but the locus is typically unobtainable or elusive. </span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The repetition of <span style="font-style: italic;">happenings</span> that twine throughout this collection reaches a crescendo in the poem “Declare! Declare!” This poem, as Amadon states in his notes, “is composed of words taken entirely from the eleven formal U.S. declarations of war, with one additional word per line from the Shaker song: ‘’Tis a Gift to be Simple.’” Truly, this must be where “same will always into same.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The poems read as interior monologues, conversing only with themselves. Questions are asked (“Heard nothing?” “Act ourselves?” “How do we find a thing which / isn’t concerned enough with us to hide?”), but rarely are they answered. Amadon’s conversations unfurl in precise abstraction, and the only clear answer is that the poems themselves are what’s <span style="font-style: italic;">happening</span> again and again.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >by Nate Slawson<br /><br />This is the fourth in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.</span><br /></span></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-20451686249938692712007-04-02T16:38:00.000-05:002007-08-11T18:02:43.235-05:00Review: The Ohio System<a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB27-2bj-AzrMZJBV4otnscMRSMyyJ8FDzZs5os25gapGKv9HgFBJoBvhOlQsuJyw3vkMrGpsbGqgRu2MX69qkwrfK7qos0On_zGdop4qqw0k_pcJRsaB7j5X-92z71FEa-jHy/s1600-h/image014.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB27-2bj-AzrMZJBV4otnscMRSMyyJ8FDzZs5os25gapGKv9HgFBJoBvhOlQsuJyw3vkMrGpsbGqgRu2MX69qkwrfK7qos0On_zGdop4qqw0k_pcJRsaB7j5X-92z71FEa-jHy/s200/image014.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5048948520822883298" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >The Ohio System</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />JEN TYNES & ERIKA HOWSARE</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Octopus Books, $6</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" ><br /><br />“It’s the Ohio system of ending things with a pause or hold for safety.”</span><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />Tynes and Howsare’s collaboration is a synesthetic thicket of body and landscape. Muscles become caves, brains resemble trees, feet are thorns, and clavicles bloom. At times, ideas and images fold over and into one another:</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The bargain of the century is the bones of the face.<br /></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">...<br /></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />You tell me whatever you know. A word that means both storm and sadness, where we could have lived but didn’t, the difference between one mile and another.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />...</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br />The manufacturer is a city and a fairy, claiming no loss, only kilowatts. Numbers turning. <span style="font-style: italic;">Bifurcated geography pits</span> tongues against necks.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br /></span></blockquote> <span style="font-family:times new roman;">Throughout this chapbook-length poem, metaphor pushes against metaphor and objects continually reappear. Perhaps the most persistent metaphor, though, is that of <span style="font-style: italic;">branching</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">splitting</span>. There are roots, veins, maps, trains, and a delta. On one hand, they are paths that constantly divide into other paths or tributaries, but if viewed from another angle, they also grow back into themselves to form something singular and whole.<br /><br />The physical landscape—when one exists—is rural (<span style="font-style: italic;">“Some of it is so rural it rots.</span>” ). The poem is full of fairgrounds, small towns, horses, barns, fields, blackberries, and villagers. It is a place where the “innermost country is made out of hark,” where nothing seems able to exist independently. The persistent emergence of objects out of other objects fills up the landscape.</span><span style="font-family:times new roman;"><br /><br />Each line or sentence in the poem is at once a start and a stop, a “system of ending things with a pause or hold” before things begin again. The effect is one of call and half-answer. Statements don’t typically respond to or answer one another, but they all fit within or grow out of the same “system.” The poem itself functions like a map, and each line is a glyph marking the topography. With <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ohio System</span>, Tynes and Howsare have collaborated on something that’s both mysterious and enlightening: a document of divergence and unification.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size:85%;">by Nate Slawson<br /><br />This is the third in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.<br /></span></span></span></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-17351729222356992682007-03-30T12:55:00.000-05:002007-08-11T18:03:11.364-05:00Review: The Book of Truants & Projectorlight<div style="text-align: left;font-family:times new roman;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis2-pEvhd6xUyzKm4K0ASDD59bsB23FltXWvUj_vrdSi6LMcKZtlOOuyaPu3trLQ51lYwbbFeHlR4Jcj7k7Oi_bnV3cNBl4BkCvX8N6H1OCYrR4n9SJisvK1DZx1_sIpHoUCLl/s1600-h/image023.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis2-pEvhd6xUyzKm4K0ASDD59bsB23FltXWvUj_vrdSi6LMcKZtlOOuyaPu3trLQ51lYwbbFeHlR4Jcj7k7Oi_bnV3cNBl4BkCvX8N6H1OCYrR4n9SJisvK1DZx1_sIpHoUCLl/s200/image023.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5047778172299494354" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">The Book of Truants & Projectorlight</span><br />JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON<br />Octopus Books, $6<br /><br /></span> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Crack open Wilkinson’s chapbook and the dusty mothlight glows on a little bit of this (a picturebook, starlings, “a kind of note more easily read / when torn in two equal pieces”) and a little bit of that (marbles, grass, “a country song / in your bottle of blood”). The poems here are snapshot narratives, each one a collection of meticulously posited images. Six of the sixteen poems are titled “still life with...” (“still life with starlings in the attic,” “still life with bullfrog,” “still life with shark tooth, sleeping boy, moon [missing], & treefrog,” etc.), and the canvases on which they reside are immense. But the poems are not static. They move across landscapes populated by gardens, animals, bicycles, bellies, water, and ominous weather.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">This three-part chapbook is aptly titled: the stories and images proceed frame by frame, and there are times you’d swear you could hear the clicking of the projector reel. The poems are brief, but their trajectories are endless. Worlds spring to life in the poems’ first lines:</span><br /></div> <span style="font-size:100%;"><blockquote> The dusk light reeled backwards & all the children marched into the collated fields.<br />(“dusk light / long light”)<br /><br />...<br /><br />Here is the kingdom of the phonebooth.<br />(“sleeping & arriving alike”)<br /><br />...<br /><br />There are four gashes in the moon & if you look through this glass you will see them all & the lost satellite, spinning.<br />(“still life with satellite, radish garden, mailboxes, & deer”)</blockquote></span> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The first and third sections of the book are prose poems. The second section is in Wilkinson’s more familiar fragmented lineation that would be right at home in his most recent full-length collection, <span style="font-style: italic;">Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk</span> (winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize). As in his previous books (including the wonderful chapbook published by New Michigan Press, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Ghost As King of the Rabbits</span>), Wilkinson builds a narrative across poems, crafting what is, in essence, a book-length poem. The beauty of his work is in how each poem has both nothing and everything to do with each of the other poems. They converse with each other through queries, shared images, and a language that is both measured and ephemeral, but taken individually, they are striking and complete.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">The poems in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Book of Truants and Projectorlight</span> inhabit serene, magical worlds of solemn whimsy in which everything is familiar, but shrouded in a dream-like fog. It’s like a visit to the attic, a day spent at the Museum of Collected Things, and all you need to do is stop and look around for a bit—you’re bound find something to stow in your pocket and carry away.</span><br /></div> <span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">by Nate Slawson</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />This is the second in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.</span></span><br /></span></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-23013494578675397922007-03-29T14:47:00.000-05:002007-08-11T18:03:27.022-05:00Review: The Knife-Grasses<div style="text-align: left;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivQgbxw36MPOc4UQVK_LsusQefG2iYfkHU_QUx0G5Tz_b4y6_hQcRFFWGoacKqkrFOpiBAI8sFPEZ4VC4Qlw6UsHBwQ3x5r7xdINca4Fl5tBMWDbG06qCmFzUoZtMDyoB7dQzA/s1600-h/image011.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivQgbxw36MPOc4UQVK_LsusQefG2iYfkHU_QUx0G5Tz_b4y6_hQcRFFWGoacKqkrFOpiBAI8sFPEZ4VC4Qlw6UsHBwQ3x5r7xdINca4Fl5tBMWDbG06qCmFzUoZtMDyoB7dQzA/s200/image011.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5047435618592867266" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >The Knife-Grasses</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">JULIE DOXSEE</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Octopus Books, $6</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">As the title suggests, the duality of objects is not an either/or, but an is/is. This chapbook-length poem, with its short lines and spare syntax, strings together image after image, investigating the multiplicity of each one in perfunctory preciseness:</span><br /></div> <blockquote style="font-family: times new roman;">Here are the<br />lullabies sick<br />voices dump<br />right in the<br />cochlea...</blockquote> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The moves Doxsee makes are not turnings-over to see the other side of images, but are more like meditations on images where each image presents itself for a brief instant before it shifts out of focus and another one takes its place. In that sense, this is a book full of fleetingness where place constantly shifts under the “now sky / & now cracked sky,” where, to paraphrase Eliot, the world is a heap of twofold images.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It is a fantastic, child-like world of cross-eyed dogs, fireworks that explode into castles, girls diving from balconies into mittens, a peanut-shaped sun, and stars that are walls. It is a Technicolor dreamscape where everything <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> only when it <span style="font-style: italic;">seems</span>, whether real or imagined or some gorgeous hybrid of invention.</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;" >by Nate Slawson</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;" ><br />This is the first in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;" ></span></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-26588552833736148672007-03-28T13:23:00.000-05:002007-03-28T13:32:33.565-05:00Volume 7 Has Arrived!<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Hot off the presses, the newest issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Luna</span> is in and available for your reading pleasure.<br /><br />Volume 7 is full of wonderful poems by Mary Jo Bang, Michael Burkard, Adam Clay, Mark Conway, Denise Duhamel, Dobby Gibson, Rigoberto González, Mark Irwin, Henry Israeli, Laura Kasischke, Shara McCallum, Paul Otremba, Ellen Wehle, and Crystal Williams.<br /><br />Subscriptions are available, too. Just print and mail the ordering form found on this page.<br /></span>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-63014151313851712062007-03-24T16:56:00.000-05:002007-03-30T13:20:30.900-05:00Review: Crow Call<div style="text-align: left;"><a style="font-family: times new roman;" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipk_RRj-I_PeMO6Mi5g3pVcKZpiO5m6nUHzHwORqf6K2ImWoaBtEl3CF4fte2SzlaHENLt_Qei5dBU8rXDlx4vwREFaDrUK1cTse7jxDhWVdtv13AY_OM-KXEXP_Lg6okD1lNI/s1600-h/cvlg_crow_call.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipk_RRj-I_PeMO6Mi5g3pVcKZpiO5m6nUHzHwORqf6K2ImWoaBtEl3CF4fte2SzlaHENLt_Qei5dBU8rXDlx4vwREFaDrUK1cTse7jxDhWVdtv13AY_OM-KXEXP_Lg6okD1lNI/s200/cvlg_crow_call.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5045613842532725730" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;" >Crow Call</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">MICHAEL HENSON</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">West End Press, $12.95 paper</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">ISBN 0-9753486-6-3</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A book-length elegy, a meditation on loss and love, a call to action, <span style="font-style: italic;">Crow Call</span> is an unusual book of poetry. Inspired by the murder of Cincinnati homeless activist Buddy Gray, these poems boldly call upon Henson’s “ancestors”: Debs, Tubman, King, Neruda, Whitman, Lorca, Blake, Florence Reece, Tom McGrath, Joe Hill, and Molly Jackson. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tough company, but this book takes great risks, and they pay off. One of the results is that the book possesses <span style="font-style: italic;">duende</span>, Lorca’s term for that death-defying ability found in great art. You hear it over and over it these poems, which at times echo Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias.” Henson too uses repetition to build deep emotion, as can be seen in these lines from “Song of Wounds":</span><br /></div> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Wounds blackened in the asphalt of the beltway</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Wounds with the marks of teeth of the wind</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Wounds in the bellies of small brown children.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Wounds sleepless at four in the morning</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Wounds in the disordered ladders of the cell</span></blockquote> <div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Henson’s “at four in the morning” even evokes Lorca’s “at five in the afternoon,” but if Henson’s influences are manifest, so is the power of these poems. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Part of the power of the book is the relentless focus, the reoccurring images: crows, moles, cold, streets, and bullets. Once again, it’s risky, but Henson knows how to use crescendo and silence. And he also knows the strength of direct statement, as can be seen in the closing lines of “The Day”: </span><br /></div> <blockquote><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It is sad, to leave such richness and grief,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">but it was love that called us out,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">and I think it is love who calls us back,</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">into the earthen lap and wintering birth of the world.</span></blockquote><br /><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Readers who tire of the poetry of clever displays of technique and ego, or who believe that poetry of resistance no longer can be found are in for a surprise with <span style="font-style: italic;">Crow Call</span>. We need more poetry like this, and more poets with Henson’s courage.</span><br /></div><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:times new roman;font-size:85%;" >by John Bradley</span></div>Natehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04531887251346660412noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38152738.post-35814319153962253452007-03-24T12:51:00.000-05:002007-03-24T17:14:42.358-05:00Welcome!!<span style="font-family: times new roman;">The Editors are pleased to announce that Rigoberto Gonzalez, contributor to Issue 7, will be joining LUNA as a contributing editor. Rigoberto (author of the new collection </span><em style="font-family: times new roman;">Other Fugitives and Other Strangers</em><span style="font-family: times new roman;">), will occasionally grace the LUNA blog with his reviews/criticism of contemporary poetry. Welcome, Rigoberto!</span>Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05279255105119620476noreply@blogger.com