Cati Porter

Dear Readers:

I am in the process of compiling an annotated reading list of all the books I’ve read for and during my time in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and I thought it might be something other readers would find of interest. Below are the annotations of the books I have read so far; I will add more as time permits.

Please note that these are NOT book reviews. They are not polished. In fact, they may not even reflect my current thinking but instead reflect my state of mind at the time I was reading them.

I invite discussion on any of these books, journals, or topics addressed in these annotations. I entered the MFA program at Antioch because I suspect there are huge gaps in my knowledge. Dear readers, help me to fill them in!

[Updated December 2, 2008; full reading list for my first term at Antioch, from June - December 2008]

[Updated April 2, 2009; new annotations not filed alphabetically this time, instead just pasted in at the top because I'm feeling lazy today!]

[Updated May 6, 2009; again, newest ones at top]

[Updated July 13, 2009; ditto the above]

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Boully, Jenny. The Body: An Essay. Essay Press. Athens, Ohio, 2007. (originally printed by Slope Editions, 2002)

The Body: An Essay is “a “ text on absence, love, ontology and identity — minus the text” (Arielle Greenberg).  This was a book recommended for my reading list, as it is experimental and written by a woman. I’m not sure that this is one that could rightly be called Gurlesque, because there isn’t much of the burlesque or the grotesque about these poems (if you can even call them poems), but it certainly does “stretch one’s notion of the poem” — a requirement for Gurlesque works, according to Greenberg.

The book consists solely of footnotes at the bottom of otherwise blank pages. There is a bare-bones narrative that peeks through the many many gaps: In the first few lines we are introduced to a “him” and a “you” and a “me” that is presumably the narrator, who may or may not be Jenny Boully (Boully does interject herself into the narrative directly later, but it’s unclear whether or not she is in fact the narrator or simply another character). There is also the “great poet” who appears to act as a mentor to the narrator.

I suppose the obvious predecessor to her work is David Foster Wallace and all of his crazy footnotes. The major difference here is there is no (visible) text the footnotes are referring to. But her notes go off on tangents, with facing pages containing footnotes that seem wholly unrelated. Several pages are almost entirely footnote, with only an inch of white space at the top of the page.

One of the “footnotes”, aka poems, or poem fragments, or whatever you want to call them because they defy labels, seems illustrative of the author’s intent:

76. When the protagonist happens upon the crime scene, when she stumbles into the prop room, when she reads the work of the great poet, and most importantly, when she holds the letter up to the sun to read between the lines, the author is supplying examples of dramatic irony. ⁱ

^i. “Dramatic irony usually refers to a situation in a play wherein a character, whose knowledge is limited, says, does, or encounters something of greater significance than she knows” (ibid., p. 29)

So much of this collection of fragments requires “reading between the lines”, and is self-referential in a way that we just have to trust. There is no text to refer back to. It’s a little like the emperor’s new clothes. She says it’s there so it must be there. But of course we know it’s not. The difference is we’re playing along not because we don’t want the author to expose herself, but because it’s much more fun to fill in the gaps than to be told explicitly what supposed to be there.

What I admired most about this book was it’s ability to tell a story in the margins; to give us a glimpse into this world without actually admitting us. It’s a neat trick not many could have pulled off.

~

Schiff, Robin. Revolver. University of Iowa Press/Kuhl House Books. Iowa City, 2008.

I initially looked at this book’s cover and saw the gun and thought, there’s no way I’m going to like this. I’m not a big fan of guns, nor am I big fan of the Old West, I am going to put off reading this one. I did, until I had no others, almost — this is the second to last book left from the batch that I purchased for this term. Of course, then I started reading it and sort of went, Wow. All of the poems in the book are about objects — a Colt revolver, a Singer sewing machine, a designer dress hand painted with a lobster by Dali. The poems read as sort of a stream of consciousness, but actually, that’s deceptive; each poem is constructed meticulously, and each string of associations, I suspect, is not random at all but rather an intricate web of interconnections. But I’ve spent far too much time trying to dig up the connections, looking to see if the Donner party carried Colt revolvers, ferreting out connections to another famous Elizabeth (none but her name, as far as I can tell, and the sugar). Better to just enjoy the poems for what they are and move on (though I suspect that on exhaustive research more and more layers could be revealed, but alas I am out of time).

In reading reviews, one thing that was not immediately apparent, but which made so much sense when I read it, is that most of these objects are drawn from what was exhibited during The Great Exhibition, a precursor to the World’s Fair. A blogger sums up Schiff’s strategy with Revolver by pointing out that “Schiff’s speaker is our distracted yet functional guide, beckoning us with a prepositional hand around each turning, making a clear path that we could have never discovered on our own.” (http://ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com/2009/04/poetic-work-of-prepositions.html). This seems particularly apt, though I might argue that the distractedness of the speaker is only an illusion. I love how she makes all these connections, and think the quintessential line that sums up the collection and makes “Colt Rapid Fire Revolver” such a great poem to lead into the collection (and of course the word revolver is indicative of revolutions, convolutions, unexpected turns, and rapid fire is indicative of the pace she keeps up) is this one:

… I

see like a fly whose vision is more like

several interlocking rings left by a tea-

cup on a book…

I was also surprised by her formal dexterity — she seems obsessed with syllable counts. I thought maybe these were in some fixed form, but couldn’t find anything to line them up with. I only became aware of the syllabics being used because of the often weak (but somehow working…?) end words, like “the”, “a”, “in”, “of”, and regular use of hyphen-ation to break a word so that the line breaks on the correct syllable. Also, the shape of the stanzas looked nearly identical, but not in any recognizable way. I did spot what I decided were a couple of canzones, but the pattern’s loaded at the beginning of the line, not the end, at least on one of them.

~

Myles, Eileen. Sorry, Tree. Wave Books. St. Paul, MN, 2007.

I read this one in one sitting, while waiting on my porch for a package to be delivered. I found it a quick read, as opposed to other books I’ve read recently, because Myles’ concern is not with embellishment, not with embroidered craft and obscure allusions that would take me years to unravel, but with the now, by reflecting on the past while inevitably and unstoppably moving forward. She doesn’t pause to come up with a title for the opening poem of the collection; it simply begins. The second poem does have a title, whose title, “No Rewriting”, hints at her propensity for propelling the reader ever forward; she doesn’t pause to fix punctuation errors or run-on sentences or to clean up her argument. Or so it seems. As it is with great poetry, this work seems effortless, but not because there was little effort expended; because the voice that is driving this collection toward it’s conclusive prose poem/essay piece, “Everyday Barf”, is concerned with “grasping the present”, abhors the “everyday” and instead revels in every day.

These poems chronicle past loves, political activism, and recent historical events. I’m a little puzzled by her irregular use of punctuation and capitalization; I don’t know for certain if she intended it to read this way, or (possibly) they read this way because I am reading from an uncorrected proof (I am). For instance, the word “circled” is misspelled as “circld” in line five of stanza six, and is followed by lines ten through sixteen which read:

… I just saw a coyote

tippy tippy tippy

I didn’t tell you about the creature with hair

long hair, it was hit by cars on the highway

Again and again. It had long gray hair

It must’ve been a dog; it could’ve been

Ours. Everyone loses their friends.

My questions with this stanza are, 1.) Why the capitalized “Again,” “It,” and “Ours.” I thought maybe it was to demarcate sentences within the stanza without having periods at the ends of the lines, but at a minimum “Ours” does not begin a new sentence. So that leaves with a.) either she really doesn’t like rewriting/revising, b.) there is some reason I can’t fathom for these deviations from the norm, or c.) these are typos. Because I’m reading from an uncorrected proof, I’m left wondering.

These poems didn’t strike me as formally innovative, or particularly inventive in any way. They almost seem sloppy. But sloppy in a lovable way. In their desperate clinging to the “now”.

I loved the end poem, “Everyday Barf,” which I’m not entirely sure was a poem (though the language is certainly heightened; at minimum it’s an elevated prose). And I also loved the politically astute and ultimately slant patriotic penultimate poem, “To Hell.”

~

Armantrout, Rae. Versed. Wesleyan University Press. Middletown CT, 2009.

I absolutely fell in love with this collection. I read it while sitting in the hospital waiting for various things to be done, which was sort of fortuitous in that she has some hospital poems, in her battle with cancer. Each of these poems is like a little puzzle. The word play is dizzying. I dog-eared all the poems I wanted to mention. As an example, the poem “Relations”, which begins:

“Head” and “Bring.” // I remember the words. // “Bobble” and “Bauble,” //“Rosy” and “Lonely” // set off now. // What will you / little chimes / bring me?

Well, for me they brought all sorts of connections: “Head” and “Bring” coupled with “Rosy” and “Lonely” have a blatantly sexual connotation. The poem ends with the lines “Bring me the friendship // between solving / and dissolving.” That right there is what I love these poems for — this kinship between words, solving a puzzle while dissolving the language, stripping it to bare roots. In keeping with this dissolution and revolution of language, I loved the sensuous humor in “Scumble”:

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words

such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or “extrapolate?”

What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that

others would pronounce these words?

Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the

other person touched them lightly and carelessly with

his tongue.

What if “of” were such a hot button?

“Scumble of bushes.”

What if there were a hidden pleasure

by another’s name?

Well, there is! This poem is evidence of that. Take for example the actual definition of “scumble”: 1.) To soften the colors or outlines of (a painting or drawing) by covering with a film of opaque or semiopaque color or by rubbing; 2.) To blur the outlines of: a writer who scumbled the line that divides history and fiction. The word itself is a good working definition of what Armantrout is doing with language in this collection: blurring the outlines of words, of sketchy definitions, so that they mean more rather than less than was originally intended!

~

Volkman, Karen. Crash’s Law. Norton: New York, 1996

I read Crash’s Law in a day, sometimes lying on the bed, or standing at the stove while the Texas Toast burned. Selected by Heather McHugh as the winner of the 1995 National Poetry Series award, I found the poems not quite as electric as some other collections I’ve read recently (Minnis, Harvey, Greenberg — the “Gurlesque” set, I guess), but certainly charged with an intensity that would be hard to match. Judging by the publication date, Volkman seems to be a predecessor to some of the more blatantly non-narrative, fragmented, collage-like work that I’ve been focusing on. While the collection is not overtly narrative, there does seem to be an underpinning love story between the speaker and a married man. This informs most if not all of the poems in the book. The Dickinson quote from which the title of the collection is drawn reads:

Ruin is formal — Devil’s work / Consecutive and slow — / Fail in an instant, no man did / Slipping — is Crash’s law.”

–from Dickinson’s poem #997

It is this “slip”, this slow melodious fall, that Crash’s Law documents. Beginning with the first poem in the collection, there is an allusion to someone who has returned, a revenant, who is “Planning new calamities for sad girls at the beach house / their tan lines a testament to self-invention.” This reference to self-invention seems to me to be a directional, signifying that there is an element of the self transformed, in order that we not confuse the speaker with the author of the poems. “It is Miami in the world and in the mind” seems to be implying that the speaker not only is in Miami, but has been there before, and is recalling some specific sequence of events, however disjointedly or fractured.

There is an interior musicality to the lines, sometimes augmented by repetition. The one that uses repetition most clearly is “The Pregnant Lady Playing Tennis”:

“In the quiet glide / of the lady playing tennis, / there’s a knowledge of speeds and angles, / arcs and aims. From the other courts, / the players watch, dismayed, half-fearing / for the safety of the lady playing tennis, / half wishing this odd distraction shut away.”

A number of poems in the collection are titled after flowers: “Gladioli,” “Tulips,” “The Rose Garden,” “White Lily,” and “Daffodils.” The first one, “Gladioli”, has the speaker in a flower store where the flowers “don’t even wish to grant me their red regard.” It is as though the flowers know something about her, and are snubbing her because of it. The last line asks, “brilliant sister, forgive me”. What is to be forgiven? I read a review on goodreads that finds within it echoes of Plath. Is she asking Plath for forgiveness, now that she is the other woman in a married man’s life? And of course there is the echo of Plath in the poem titled “Tulips”, in which more details of the affair unfolds.

This is one that I could return to, and will.

~

Wagner, Catherine. Macular Hole. Fence Books: New York, 2004.

Here is a collection where the language bops around like it’s had a little too much caffeine. The titles alone are fun: “My what to replace my,” “I’m total I’m all I’m absorbed in this meatcake,” “Kill so we feel safe and comfortable”…. The poems eschew a directly narrative approach but do manage to get their story across:

woman finds man and gives up her name and some modicum of personal identity (What would I trade for my, / my favorite trick / begone! and “I” begone, ballast over the side, from “My what to replace my”);

woman gets knocked up by man (a tiny carcass veined all round and eyed, also from “My what to replace my”);

woman examines her marriage (Give the woman a pedestal / bouncy pedestal bingbong / my ring rang on, from “Freely esposa”);

woman is unhappy with her appearance/husband/life in general (A monster to be with a monster to see / Oh, ho, blow the man down / a canker on one lip a bruise on my knee / Give me a rhyme to blow the man down, from “A bash, and I wanna look good”);

woman’s marriage ends (And when I woke / and walked between the two trees to my house, / the house they’d lent me, / the door was blown open / I saw that I was single / and my marriage capillaried clasped to all / to the field and the brown world,” from “An hendy hap”);

baby is born (Somersaulted out on a cord of blood, from “Big bang”);

woman grapples with the suffocating reality of motherhood (I hate the baby, stop crying / I hate you and put you down. / I hate you coming over my life like a bag, from “Perfect Love);

woman thinks about god and what his existence (or lack thereof) might mean (God was not personal to me / God would become personal to me when I thought I was so sexy / / which was craven // God was neither personal nor impersonal / it was a questionnaire, from “Imitating”);

Throughout the language is witty, smart, sometimes deliciously frivolous, and sometimes scary. I think her approach to language is probably best summed up by these lines from “Not very much is abstracted”: which means pulling strands off gummily into a word or system / that breaks them off into itself. Wagner chops the syntax, revs up the punch, and sometimes lets it collapse just so we can see all the pretty pieces.

~

Carson, Ann. Fragments of Sappho. Vintage Books: New York, 2002.

I had never read Sappho before, in fact didn’t really know much about her except that there was not much left of her work, and that she was a lesbian. I also know very little about translation (though now that I’m in the translation seminar, I’m learning).

Having the translations and originals on facing pages was very helpful; I could see what each of the fragments looked like in the original Greek. Also very helpful were the brackets denoting the missing phrases/lines, etc. To think of how ancient these texts are, and how little remains, and in what condition, it’s amazing that there’s anything coherent about them at all.

There is much to be said about white space on the page. Just thumbing through the collection there really are very few poems that take up even half the page; most are just a line or two, or a column of words down the page. And yet, somehow it all makes sense. Whether or not the translation conveys what the author originally intended is, I think, impossible to know, but the fact remains that the poems are not only readable but convey a unique passion and sensibility.

Some favorites among them include:

]
]nor
]desire
]but all at once
]blossom
]desire
]took delight `

as an example of the erotic;

] ]
]prosperous ]like an old man
]to listen ]
]

as an example of the profound;

yes! radiant lyre speak to me
become a voice

as an example of her passion for her instrument.

~

Brown, Jericho. Please. New Issues. Kalamazoo, MI, 2008.

Please was really a surprise. Well, I guess each new book that I pick up with little or no background on the contents or the author is a surprise. The structure of the book is novel, in that it is broken up into three sections — repeat, pause, and power, and with a final page with just the line stop — with intermittent “tracks” which provide cultural reference points, texture, context, and music. As an African-American, homosexual male, these poems explore issues of cultural, familial identity and sexual identity, with an interior music contained within the poems that keeps up a heady rhythm.

Many of the poems touch on the physical abuse of a father & husband, and the complicated nature of abusive relationships. On the one hand, one who is outside the situation might ask why a woman stays with a man who beats her, or why a woman leaves and then returns to a man who beats their child. But on the other hand, if one is inside the situation, it is difficult to break out of it, because sometimes there is genuine love, and genuine remorse on the part of the abuser. This is the B side that Brown shows us in “Again”, where the speaker is telling us a story about having, as a child, been rushed by his mother out of the house in borrowed clothes, only to conclude:

Turns out it never mattered. / Right now my mother’s asleep / On my father’s chest. / His arm has landed / In the same place around her / Most of thirty years. / Give a man a minute. / She’s asleep and I’m typing it / All over again. Everywhere / A man is shifting a bit / To make his woman comfortable / In his arms. / I should have told you this / Lines ago. We walked back / To the house we ran from. / Because. / My mother loves her husband / And his hands / Even if laid heavy against her. / I know you / Don’t want to believe that / But give a man a minute, / We’re not done. / My father loves his wife / And the shape of her body / Even if hunched in retreat.

The poem concludes with the father kissing the son’s forehead, the husband and wife …making love loud enough / For the oldest to learn.

There are many painful moments in this collection, between the speaker and his various lovers, between family members. There are two others that I can’t risk not mentioning. First, from “Pause,” in the context of a love affair, of a lover whistling while putting on a condom:

I hate for people to comment / That I must be happy / Just because they hear me hum. / I want to ask if they ever heard of slavery, / The work song — the best music / Is made of subtraction, / The singer seeks an exit from his scarred body / And opens his mouth / Trying to get out.

And “Detailing the Nape”, a brief narrative about the speaker’s grandmother washing the back of a little girl’s neck, which is so black as to be declared “filthy” only to find, after she has been scrubbed to bleeding, that that is just the color of her skin.

~

Shipley, Ely. Boy with Flowers. Barrow Street Press. New York, 2008.

I picked this up as a book swap (mine for his) when I introduced he and Ching-In Chen’s recent reading at the Riverside Public Library.

Once again, I didn’t know anything about Shipley before the reading (aside from what I’d been given as a bio). When he remarked before he began not to be put off by the pronouns, I thought that was sort of interesting, that maybe it was a series of persona pieces.

Or maybe not. As he began reading, I pieced together the story of a young child born anatomically a girl but who believed herself to be a boy. I was especially moved by the title poem, “Boy with Flowers”:

My aunt loved me, asked me: / will you be the flower / girl at my wedding? But I’m not / a girl, I argued, and she persuaded me: / you’ll get to throw rose petals / / onto the aisle, walk before me, both of us / crushing them beneath our feet, my gown / dragging over them. I agreed. I wanted / nothing but chivalry.

But while I was moved by it, I also found it a little hard to swallow. As the mother of two young children, one who was a ring bearer for a wedding when he was six, I don’t think the word or the notion of “chivalry” has ever occurred to them. So, for me, while I am moved the speaker’s voice, by the speaker’s situation, I find the that final line just a little too perfect, like the past has been massaged into compliance to suit the poem. Of course, I guess we all do that, don’t we? Remake the truth to suit our needs.

As a narrative of a young woman making the transition to a young man, I found the collection compelling. There is a lyric intensity to them, a consistent voice and tone, and they are grounded in the body as well as the mind. But formally there is nothing new about them. They are all fairly short-lined left-justified free verse, with just a couple of exceptions.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book for what it taught me about the malleability of gender and identity, about human decency and compassion (or the occasional lack thereof), and not necessarily for what it taught me about craft.

~

Greenberg, Arielle. My Kafka Century. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Action Books, 2005.

I seem to be on an Arielle Greenberg binge. Last term I ran across an essay and an interview with her on a new aesthetic theory she was developing and had decided that this term, along with others she referenced in that essay, I wanted to read her, too. I wanted to see if her poems fit the Gurlesque mode, or whether they were something altogether different.

My Kafka Century was, at first glance, a very associative and post-modern work that seemed to skirt the narrative while telling unconventional, surrealistic stories in an oblique way. Early poems in the collection seemed to be more interested in language play (Unknowable covers the baby’s head with lye / To keep it straight. To make it burn. / Unknowing wipes the sink with Crisco / Because the ironwork’s so old. / The Un begins his wily day stripping / The skin from my lips. Polish, he says. New skin. From “Morning Breaks the Window”), others with a frank sexuality (…Wanted sex with velvet (They all did — artists!)), but mostly what seemed to be a common denominator between them all was Greenberg’s Jewish identity, and her attempt to get under the skin of it.

As the book progressed, themes emerged: home, family, love (though in a gender-slipping way; an engagement, a pregnancy; friendships. And of course a number of poems about or at least referencing Kafka, but to quite honest I’m not a Kafka scholar — have only read The Metamorphosis — and so am sure that I am missing the relevant allusions.

Almost all of the poems are comedic in some way, though most if not all balance the comic with the serious. There are a number of poems, such as “Pastoral”, that draw upon Jewish folk tales or jokes, or that reference the Holocaust in a way that evokes the poet’s sense of humor while invoking the tragedy.

I’m not entirely confident of my assessment, but I think these poems fit the definition of Gurlesque. Some of them might more than others, like “Out of the Past”, whose first line reads is your face fucked into the mattress; that seems to aim to disturb more than anything else, as far as I can figure. I certainly wouldn’t classify any of them as “pretty”. So I suppose it’s fitting that she’s the mother of the term.

~

Chen, Ching-In. The Heart’s Traffic. Los Angeles: Arktoi Books, 2009.

I first saw Ching-In read at a local art gallery where she and some of her MFA buddies were reading; she was, without a doubt, the standout among them. Because she is a local I occasionally saw her name on things that I was looking at — other readings, etc. Then she sent me some work for the persona poem issue of Poemeleon. I read through her submission and knew that I wanted to accept most of what she sent. The poems were from her upcoming book, this book, The Heart’s Traffic.

Earlier this year, Ching-In was scheduled to read at our local library as part of the Inlandia Institute’s reading series. When the director had a conflicting engagement, she asked me to fill in. There seemed to be such a huge change in the way Ching-In presented herself — and it wasn’t just about having cut off her long hair in favor of a mohawk. She was very poised and warm and ebullient and the audience really responded to that. After the reading I made sure to pick up a copy of her book as it was on our assigned reading list for the conference. I sat down to read it this past week with an idea of what I was in for — after the reading I led a Q & A where she answered questions about forms and process and autobiography as it related to the work — so I already had these things in mind as I began to read. The story, as Jenny Factor puts it, is in motion by emotion, rather than by plot. There is a very definitive narrative arc as the narrator begins in China as the child of a salt merchant. The story is set in motion as we are told from the beginning that the father has left for America. The parents, throughout, remain on the periphery. The father becomes almost mythic, appearing in fairy-tale-esque poems; the mother is both revered and reviled in poems that speak to her cultural heritage while also seeking a rebirth as a modern woman.

The real meat of the collection focuses on the speaker’s, Xioamei’s, shifting identity; not just her cultural identity, which she retains even as she moves beyond it, but more importantly her identity as a woman who loves women, beginning even with her best friend Sparrow when she was very young. The death of Sparrow is carried with her as she moves to America and finds, loses, finds, and ultimately loses, love. This theme of transformation and self-renewal is carried throughout in several ways: through the speaker’s experiences as her identity shifts from being only Chinese into becoming Chinese-American, which is sometimes rather painful in that children can be cruel to other’s they perceive as “different”; through the literal transformation of Xioamei’s girlfriend Jani, who self-identifies as male and later pursues the operations to make the transition more permanent; and through the innovative use of traditional forms which she warps and re-works to suit her needs, while still maintaining ties with the original. Some forms that she uses include sestina, villanelle, pantoum, zuihitsu, haibun, renga, ghazal, crown of sevens, prose poem, epistolary, carmina figuratum, a wryneck (?), a bop (?), and lots of riddles (is this an actual form?), not to mention her inventive use of the page (numbered sections that snake around, ghost-type that interweaves the voice of the dead girl). I really envy her versatility and her innovation.

~

Po, Chui-I. The Selected Poems of Po Chu-I. New York: New Directions Books, 1999.

I came to this collection with very little knowledge of classical Chinese poetry; heck, of any Chinese poetry. It is not something I would naturally reach for. But reading Po’s work has been a bit like meditating; it is very serene and mild to read. In searching the web I’ve read a couple of other translations of Po’s work (I don’t remember whose now) but what struck me was the quality of the words — they seemed less carefully chosen, choppier, more prosy. Because I can’t read the original text of these poems I can’t compare, but I appreciate David Hinton’s careful attention to language; it made me realize how much hinges on the quality of a translation.

All of Po’s poems as translated by David Hinton are written in couplets, the effect of which is almost soothing compared to much of contemporary poetry which has a tendency to sprawl. According to the Barnstone/Ping introductory essay from the Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (part of our required reading for this month), the period in which Po lived was the Tang dynasty and the prevalent mode for this period was regulated verse. Regulated verse, I have learned, is a five character verse consisting of four paired lines, with three different levels of symmetry: rhythmic, lexical parallelism, and tonal pattern, with a rhythmic pattern of five-syllable lines broken up into two, a pause, and then three more. There is also a conceptual symmetry between the two interior couplets. The symmetry involves mirrored parts of speech, and other traditional requirements in regards to word choice. Whew. This seems like a heavy load, a very strict prescription to follow. It is amazing for me to think that one who lived and wrote at this time could primarily write in this mode and produce lovely poem upon lovely poem.

I’ve gone back through the intro to Po Chu-I’s selected works and don’t see any reference to his working in this mode, but based on Hinton’s translation and his adherence to the couplet form (as a side note, in the essay Ping states that “if we transcribe the poem phonetically, its rhythmic symmetry in paired lines is easier to percieve), I’m guessing maybe he did.

Po’s collected works, while steady and even on the whole, display a range of emotion. His poems criticizing governmental abuses are stirring, and I was especially moved by those poems that referenced his children — first, “On My Daughter’s First Birthday”, where she practices sitting, is so full of joy for his daughter, and then just a few poems later, “In Sickness, Mourning Golden-Bells”, we learn that she has died at such a young age. Later, we learn he has also lost a young son. I was surprised, though, at how many poems speak to Po’s friends, but very seldom does he mention his wife (though in his defense, the one early reference I can think of he calls her his treasure). I also noticed that while the sonic qualities of the early poems are very subtle, there are some in his “middle poems” where the end rhyme and chiming was much more pronounced, then later returning to the more subdued. I thoroughly enjoyed those poems he wrote during his exile, in that they seemed the most meditative of all of these poems. Overall, I would say that Po is quiet poet, introspective, occasionally self-deprecating, but always generous in spirit and in heart.

~

Herrera, Juan Felipe. CrashBoomLove. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. New York. Grand Central Publishing, 1972.

In February I was asked by the Riverside Arts Council to moderate a discussion comparing and contrasting these two books, both male Latino coming of age stories. Juan Felipe Herrera read from CrashBoomLove during the kickoff event, even involving the audience with call and response and calling up audience members to read; free copies of the book were available to anyone who attended, with the expectation that they would sign up for the book discussion that would take place simultaneously at four different branch locations. I moderated the discussion at the Arlington Branch — and, after the crowd we had for the kickoff, only had one person show up! (Guess they were all just there for the free books and munchies.) The two books are alike in that both involve young boys, though one is considerably younger than the other, who go through what are essentially rites of passage into manhood.

Bless Me, Ultima, is a richly detailed highly narrative magical realist novel told from the point of view of the young boy, Antonio. He is six when the book begins, just getting ready to enter school, and acts much older than his age because he has three older brothers and an older sister. Early on in the novel he witnesses the killing of a man who killed the town sheriff but who arguably could have been exonerated (he was suffering post traumatic stress after having coming home from the WWII). Later, an elder (Ultima) is invited to come live with them. She is a “curandera”, which is sort of the antithesis of a “bruja”; she has the ability to heal and knows how to use herbs to create remedies, and is not a witch. But because there is a family of witches nearby who curse one of Antonio’s uncles, and because Ultima cures him and lays a curse on them (they begin to die off one by one), the father/head of that family makes it his mission to kill Ultima. The boy ultimately witnesses another death, this time a murder. Throughout he is told by his mother that he will grow up to be a priest and by his father that he will be a vacquero (cowboy), though Ultima is the only one who knows his destiny. By contrast, CrashBoomLove is a novel in verse which tells the story of an adolescent boy who lives with his mother and whose father abandoned them for another family when he was very young. It takes place in what I supposed to be the current year (though in looking at the copyright it was published in 1999), and is set in a very urban setting. The boy, Cesar, falls in with the wrong crowd, does drugs, gets into fights, gets thrown out of school and has to go to continuation school, gets into a car crash while drag racing high, and ultimately redeems himself through music and learning the value of his own self-worth.

Both of these books interweave the Spanish language, though in CrashBoomLove there are footnotes that provide definitions. Although CrashBoomLove is a novel in verse, it is very prosy. It was helpful to have listened to Herrera discuss his work prior to reading the book, as he explained that he wrote it with his audience in mind, and in fact didn’t conceptualize them as individual poems but rather as “chapters”, and introduced it to younger readers that way in order to make it a more accessible work.

~

Minnis, Chelsey. Bad Bad. New York: Fence Books, 2007.

I first ran across Chelsey Minnis’ name in an article by Arielle Greenberg on “the gurlesque”. After reading about this group of youngish female poets that make up this new movement called gurlesque (who may or may not even be aware that they have been labeled as such) and after having read a couple of authors that seem to fall under the gurlesque heading (Brenda Shaugnessy and Brenda Coultas) I have decided that what I want to focus on for my five page is how sexuality is portrayed within this new movement, and how that may or may not differ from how their foremothers portrayed sexuality. Having blindly ordered Minnis’ book Bad Bad because her name was on my list of women whose work I wanted to read, I have to say that I was surprised when I first opened it.

The book begins with a series of 68 “prefaces”, all of them brief and quirky, with most lines ending with an ellipse rather than a period; this entire series acts as a sort of ars poetica. There is an almost palpable disdain for po-biz as she flippantly dismisses all the conventional trappings by suggesting she “buy your book, ask you to sign it then throw it in the trash”, that “poetry careers are a bad business”, and that she “…will never submit to the fellowship committees/ because I don’t like encouraging handwritten notes!” The longest poems in the collection use punctuation in ways that I haven’t ever seen before; so many periods in a row! One review of Bad Bad depicts the text as “[riding] along on a kind of undulating, calming series of rows”.

As for her depiction of sexuality, the collection is highly erotic but in a very dark, often surreal way. It begins on the first page, eroticizing poetry by saying that “Poetry should be “uh huh” like… “baby has to have it…” ending the first preface with “But, in the thighs…I feel it…” In her poem “Man-Thing” she objectifies men in a sort of boy-toyish way, saying “man-thing / you are permissive / and I like it”, following that up with “…but I am trained for it / to want you like a souvenir / and that’s all I can use of it / you are to be / used like a sentiment”, and tacking it all together with the end “I have a new half-hate for you man-thing…. I have a whim for you….. and it is a love too…..” There is a distinct push-pull throughout, a desire and a loathing for pretty much everything encountered here. The title above the title poem “Bad Bad” actually reads “YOU LOOK GOOD / YOU FEEL GOOD / BUT YOUR BAD BAD”, with a little crucifix between the words bad & bad, and is very dominatrix-like, with little crucifixes separating the sections of the poem. “Foxina” is a very sexual, sensual poem, filled lots of strange images, beginning with “the women in the viewing boxes” biting each other, biting their index fingers, at once shiny but also covered in fur, but not just any fur – ocelot, weasel… — , with “true pleasure snarling at you”. In this book she seizes anything and everything, grabs it by the balls, claims it, then dismisses it. It is fiercely original and doesn’t give a shit what anybody thinks.

One of my favorite poems in the book is “Anti Vitae”, emphasizing all of the speaker’s failures rather than their accomplishments. The book ends with “-5 (negative five), which seems to deduct five points for each one of the speaker’s infractions. There is such a playfulness to this collection, such a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the establishment, such an unabashed eroticism aimed at claiming whatever power the poems can by overturning our expectations about what a poem can, or should, be.

~

Niedecker, Lorine. The Granite Pail. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnoman Press, 1985.

The poems collected in The Granite Pail are often brief, imagistic, with an economy of language that is both rich and spare. My first inclination was to label her as plain-spoken, but really, the language is so fresh and vivid; it’s plain speech, the vernacular of small town life, but sharpened and shining, every dull little thing brought into fierce focus. Here is one of the earlier poem’s that I liked best -

1937

In the picture soldiers
moving thru a field
of flowers,
Spanish reds.
The flowers of war
move cautiously
not to tread
the wild heads.

Here we last,
lilacs, vacant lots,
taxes, no work,
debts, the wind widens
the grass.

In the old house
the clocks are dead,
past dead.

There is an exquisite focus here that seems both general and specific, and expansive, especially in that lovely line about the grass.

Her earliest work, which I presume is what is included as part of “New Goose”, uses a lot of end rhymes (near, not perfect), are succinct, and incorporate imagery associated with small-town life. As her work matures she seems to move toward favoring an interior musicality, with heavy use of assonance and consonance relevant to a poem’s theme. My favorite of these is “My Life By Water”, which reads: “My life / by water — / Hear // spring’s / first frog / or board // out on the cold / ground / giving // Muskrats / gnawing / doors // to wild green / arts and letters // Rabbits // raided / my lettuce / One boat // two — / pointed toward / my shore // thru birdstart / wingdrip / weed-drift // of the soft / and serious — / Water”. Each instance of assonance or consonance supports the image – the r’s that run through water/hear/spring’s/first frog/or board, the hard but not unforgiving sounds of cold/ground/giving, the onomatopoeic word “gnawing”. This was the sort of thing I found myself gravitating toward in her work. I also enjoyed that for most of the collection I felt like it was her voice speaking through the poems, and found myself somewhat disappointed by the later poems that used historical personae; it’s not that I disliked these poems, but I just didn’t find them satisfying in the same way that I did the earlier poems that seemed centered around her own life.
A note on the structure, which bugged me: As I read the collection I found myself confused by the way the poems were titled/untitled. I was perplexed at times because it was hard to tell where one poem ended and another began because I thought, at first, that each of the very small poems in the beginning were all one long poem in many small sections, but in looking back at the TOC it became clear that they weren’t. But then, later in the collection, I noticed that there *were* titles, but some of them were italicized while others were in all caps, which supported my supposition that maybe the other untitled pieces were a sequence of some sort, as the tone and recurrent themes seemed consistent. This seemed supported by the structure of the poems “Lake Superior” and “Traces of Living Things”, which began with titles in all caps but also contained within them other sections with italicized titles (this thinking then reinforced by the way the TOC listed these poems). BUT then in the last section of the book, the poem “Tradition”, whose title is set in all caps, is followed by pieces whose titles were italicized, but because of the way they are set forth in the TOC, I believe they are meant to be separate poems. So, throughout, I found myself trying to find ways to tie things together, only to have to untie them again, and generally perplexed by the way the poems were listed and wondering why couldn’t they have just set all poem titles in all caps and saved the italicized titles for sections within poems?  I guess I’m ranting about something that really isn’t relevant to the poetry, but I found it distracting.

All in all, I found the collection a quickish read, accessible but not simple, and the obvious work of a generous and inventive mind and spirit.

~

Rekdal, Paisley. The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.

I’m not sure whether or not Paisley Rekdal fits the gurlesque label, though maybe she does. Unlike Minnis, or even Niedecker, Rekdal’s poetry leans heavily toward autobiography and confessionalism. All of the poems in this collection are narrative, chronicling the failure of the speaker – in marriage, in the conception of a child, even in death (there are allusions to anorexia, and her failure is that she could not not eat for more than two days, and therefore a failure at death).

The poem for which the book is titled was actually first published as a chapbook and is the longest in the book. In it she tells two stories, one of meeting her future husband and the story of their love; the other the story of the inventor of the kaleidoscope. She weaves them together in stanzas that alternate flush left and flush right, with the phrase “click go the gems in their golden cell” as a segue between the two. She says “it is an accident that anything is beautiful”. She says that her lover, an Irishman, loved her “ahistorical gaze” (she is multi-racial). Drugs play a role throughout, whether its opium or acid or whatever, but the tone is consistently subdued and eloquent no matter the subject, which ranges from the near-death of an anorexic friend to her father who she watches b-movie horror flicks with to an ex-beau who liked her to call him “Aslan” (after the lion from Narnia). What could have come off as comic instead rings true with a sort of pathos.

There are plenty of references to sex, but none of them seem (to me) to be working any differently than her (our) predecessors. For instance, the first stanza of “A Pornography” reads:

There was a time when I watched it happen.
Strangers pressed to other strangers
in one bed, clothes on, air humid
with the cloying scent of fruit juice
and vodka; none of us
giving into another and yet unwilling to leave the scene
of that possibility,
pretending to sleep, actually sleeping.
Then waking again to slip a hand
over a shoulder, slide a finger
inside the waistband of a skirt; so young
(we are even now still
so young) in that hotel room
turning blue then lighter blue.
We wouldn’t have tried for more:
the kiss, the button; firm, white shape
of an image slipped wholly into the mind,
acted upon, dreamed upon,
filling the thin vessels of the lungs.

In the following stanza we learn that this scene is preceded by the group watching a porn film, and the tension that builds as a result. But is this any different than what Sharon Olds has done? It reminds me, actually, of a poem my Marie Howe about a group of pre-teen girls “practicing” kissing on each other during the night of a sleepover, the innocent gropings toward sexuality without the burden of real release.

The poems in this collection that enjoyed the most were actually the least narrative ones, like “Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard”, which employs word play, and “Rubbed”, which contains a great series of images about a lightbulb: “What else am I supposed to start with? / Not the light bulb, to which / this whole narrative yearns, loving / the glass envelope sizzling with light, / grasshopper antennae scrubbed / with electricity…”.

The first poem begins with the image of a failed strawberry plant, and in that failure a sort of beauty. The last poem ends with the image of a peony, and of “what swims and possesses this dumb will to survive, to root, to plumb”. Ultimately, this collection explores the beauty in the fragments and the failures of our lives, in the will’s ability to succumb to growth, to death, and to rebirth.

~

Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.

I had been looking forward to reading “The Descent of Alette” after having gotten a recommendation from a couple of different sources and then having read some sample poems on Poets.org. It seemed to take forever to arrive (probably because I chose the free super-saver shipping option, which I’m sure means that it was transported here from wherever by bicycle or maybe mule), so that when it finally arrived I was almost desperate to read it. But then I opened it, and after the first couple of poems I almost couldn’t keep going. The gimmick of using quotation marks to set off the phrasing seemed really intriguing, but proved more of a distraction than anything else – at first. Over the course of several weeks, maybe a month, I would pick it up and read a poem or two, but found it necessary to reread each of them because by the time I’d get to the end of the poem I had forgotten where the poem had begun. Finally, at long last, I sat and finished the book, starting from the beginning again and reading continuously until the end. It was sort of as before, except that I forced myself to press on, and as I did found myself more and more drawn in to the text. The quotation marks began to function in surprising ways, jarring the text into something to be actively read rather than passively scanned. There is an unbroken rhythm throughout that is reinforced by the book’s structural elements: untitled poems divided into four “books”; each of the poems written in quatrains; and of the course the quotation marks. All of these provided continuity. I’m also tempted to relate the effect of the quotation marks to that of the physical sensation of being on a train, or of driving over tracks – b’dmp-b’dmp / b’dmp-b’dmp.

The Descent of Alette is a novel in verse, Alette’s story chronicling her journey as she descends into “deepest origin”, with a stop in “middle psyche” – a mountain entered through an eye containing many caves in which she encounters many new voices and deeply disturbing dreams. Ultimately, she moves toward a reclamation of matriarchal power by, ironically, losing her sex (‘”Your sex is now bone” “My sex?” “Your vagina is white bone”‘). There are references to the origin of life as being sexless, and then later a separation into sexes and the pleasures associated with that, but with that a sort of splitting off of the male from the female and the male’s forgetting of its origin, having lost the ability to give birth; gradually it learns to fetishize and repress and exploit the weaker sex, and so in order to restore balance to the world there seems a need for reunification of the sexes in ‘”the divine” “neutral principle”‘, in a ‘”sort of deity – ” “some divine” “neuter principle”‘. In a sense, by losing her sex she does become neutered, and by absorbing other identities (the others on the train down to middle psyche, the Old Mother), she becomes larger than her self and her “I” takes on multiphonic properties. Her encounters with an owl and ultimately her partial transformation into an owl signify knowledge (though this is one small thing that I found sort of cliché, in that the owl seems – to me – to be an overused symbol of knowledge).

There are many biblical parallels — the search for the first mother/ first woman, “an Eve unlike Eve”, the “tyrant” a seeming an embodiment of the patriarchal god whose rules and universal laws are to be obeyed no matter how counterintuitive or harmful or degrading – but firmly grounded in evolutionary concepts humans (or are they humans? I don’t know) take on animal forms throughout, and seemed to be constantly in flux. Ultimately, killing the tyrant doesn’t eliminate him entirely because it is still his world they live in, and in order to remake the world in their image they must use the materials at hand and that have been created by him, so that even as they attempt to re-envision their world they must do so with pieces of him forever in their midst.

Notley herself refers to Alette as a female epic. Another source refers to Alette as an allegory using the Paris Metro as the Underworld. Others compare Notley’s world to Dante’s. Ultimately, I see this work as a deeply feminist exploration of what it means to be female in a patriarchal society, and in a quote (found online) from her essay “Women and Poetry”:

‘In this ridiculous inescapable and tawdry material world we women are allowed now what? To make more of it, more of that, more stuff. But not to remake it. Not to change it from the ground up and walk out onto the earth as if it were its first morning.’

(Quote found on http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2008/10/7.html)

~

American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, Bonnano, David, & Scanlon, Elizabeth, eds. (September/October 2008): 56 pps.

I buy a copy of APR nearly every month – in fact I should probably subscribe, but there are so many journals that I’d like to subscribe to that I hardly have the money for it. There are some months where I miss out, but in this instance I was alerted by my poetry group to a piece by Beth Ann Fennelly, and so made it a point to get into the bookstore to pick one up. I was especially pleased to find work by Gregory Orr, Ann Marie Macari, Bruce Weigl (whose poem about May I am frequently reminded of at readings where I read my own about dogs), Bob Hicok, and Reginald Shepherd, along with a very illuminating and moving interview with him.

Fennelly’s piece was on the memorization of poems, and the number of poems she has memorized is staggering – just the one hundred referenced by her title, “My Hundred”, wasn’t enough for her, as now it seems she’s up into the hundreds. Again, here’s something that I’ve never tried. The only poem in recent years that I’ve deliberately memorized was “The Great Figure” by William Carlos Williams, in that I have a watch that features a painting called “The Figure Five in Gold” (?) by Charles Demuth, which was sort of an ekphrasis after William’s (his good friend’s) poem. Rarely have I read another poet’s poems aloud to myself, and I think it’s a pleasure I’ve denied myself because I’m so seldom alone. So I’m going to set myself a goal of memorizing a poem – perhaps one of Fennelly’s, as she is someone whose work I greatly admire.

Of the poems in this issue, I especially enjoyed Hicok’s “The Practical Tycoon” – the image of everyone rollerskating through the Guggenheim was hilarious, Weigl’s “Roses for the Reader”, and Shepherd’s “To Summon Up a Son”.

The interview with Shepherd, along with the two poems – maybe the only two of his I’ve ever read, aside from a recent one posted to his blog just before his passing, has left me wanting to go out and buy his books. His intelligence and thoughtfulness and deep compassion are so evident, I am sorry that I never was able to meet him. All that is left now is his work. In his own words, referring to his attempt to rescue his dead mother through his poems, all we have are the words

~

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983

I’m told that every poet knows, or should know, who Elizabeth Bishop is. I had of course read a handful of her poems over the years – “One Art” being a particularly notable one, and had bought a copy of Geography III in a discount bookstore once for just a couple of dollars – and loved it. Recently at a friends house I noticed her The Complete Poems on his shelf and excitedly asked to borrow it. So, after many years, I think I have finally read all of her work.

What impressed me most about these poems was her concise, evocative imagery, and her use of form. I was not able to identify all of the forms or even that they were “in form”, necessarily, but they are all very meticulous and crafted. Those of her poems that are written in a received form – “A Miracle for Breakfast” (a sestina), “One Art” (a villanelle) – are easily identified; others, like “Rooster”, which is written in tercets that are rhymed aaa bbb, etc., and “The Map”, with its abbacddc rhyme scheme (with exactly repeated end-word rhymes for the a’s and c’s) in both the first and third stanzas and an unrhymed second stanza hemmed in in the middle, I am inclined to identify as nonce forms, ones conceived of especially for use in those poems, but am not quite sure. And, though her use of meter throughout is regular (but with enough substitutions so that it is not monotonous), I am unable to pin down exactly what it is (an exception being maybe the iambics used in “The Imaginary Iceberg”).

Many of the poems set in Brazil I didn’t really care for, and I have to say that some of the longer poems (“Manuelzinho”, “The Burglar of Babylon”, “Crusoe in England”) I didn’t find compelling at all. However, I did find some new favorites: “Exchanging Hats”, “Insomnia”, and “The Weed”, which in some strange way I must have been influenced by (but don’t ever remember reading before), because I have a similar image of a plant growing out of the chest/heart that recurs in my chapbook small fruit songs, particularly my poems “Inflorescence” and “Fructify”. After all of it was read, though, those poems that I found the most compelling are still those that I first read, the ones contained within Geography III, in particular “The Moose”, “12 O’clock News”, “In the Waiting Room”, and “One Art”.

~

Blossom, Laurel. Degrees of Latitude. New York: Four Way Books, 2007.

My stepmother had been suggesting I contact Laurel Blossom for several years, but the timing just didn’t seem right. (Blossom is her cousin, her mother’s sister’s daughter – I think!) Then, when I was visiting family in Cleveland this last summer another aunt loaned me Blossom’s latest book, which I read on the drive back to my parents’ home in Virginia Beach.

Degrees of Latitude is a book-length poem in sections detailing complex family and marital relationships amid the speaker’s struggle and recovery from alcoholism. It is broken up into sections. It was an easy read, in that the work is not difficult, in that it reads like a novel, but is more of a cross between traditional confessional verse and memoir. I don’t know how much of it is true, and frankly I don’t want to. Once I dove into the book I was hooked. Blossom manages to conjure a speaker who is both terrifying and likeable. Not that you are terrified of the speaker, but for the speaker. Written as one long prose poem, there are no accessibility issues – the prose is concise and the imagery is vivid and the voice is confident and self-assured.

After reading the book, I did contact her, and hope to stay in touch in the future. I’m also going to read more of her books.

~

Valparaiso Review. Volume X, Number 1, ed. Edward Byrne (2008-9): http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/v10n1.html.

I have been an intermittent reader of the online literary journal Valparaiso Review for some years, usually only reading what interested me and then clicking away to check e-mail or what-not, but because I am friends with Edward Byrne on Facebook I receive his messages about his editor’s blog, One Poets Notes, and after reading it this time decided I would read the current issue as my literary periodical selection this month. My interest in online literary journals is both personal and professional; I am always watching what others are doing so that I can get ideas of what to do (and what not to do) with Poemeleon.

The current issue of V.P.R. features new work by some familiar names – Claire Keyes, Deborah Bogen, Rosemary Winslow, Steve Myers, Diane Lockward, Michelle Bitting, Athena Kildegard, Tad Richards and J.P. Dancing Bear, who I am familiar with either because I have published them, rejected them, or been rejected by them in some form or another.

Routinely I am surprised at the interconnectedness of the various poetry circles in which I swim, and how they figure in to the larger poetry community to which we all belong. For example, those that are on that list are either a member of the Women’s Poetry Listserv, Facebook, or both, and I often wonder what sort of impact those social relationships have on our professional relationships.

The featured poet in this issue is Elise Paschen, and I was pleased to become acquainted with her work and thoroughly enjoyed the three poems which V.P.R. published in this issue. I also made it a point to read Edward Byrne’s “conversation” with her; much of what she said resonated with me. I was also surprised to find that she is the editor of the Poetry Speaks anthologies, and that she had edited the Poetry Speaks to Children anthology that my boys and I have all but read to pieces.

I also enjoyed reading the book reviews, noting that the women (four of five of the reviews) reviewed books by other women, and the one man reviewed a book by a man. I was especially interested in reading the review of Deborah Bogen’s Landscape with Silos, as a review I wrote of that collection appeared in Rattle’s e-reviews section recently, and I am always curious to see what I might have missed or maybe more accurately what others saw in the work that I didn’t; in this case, the author of the review talks a bit about Bogen’s use of the tetrameter line, and I am regretful that I didn’t unravel the formal structure of Bogen’s poems enough to reveal that. Also, I noted a book review by Claire Keyes of Marianne Boruch’s Grace, Fallen From, and that Keyes’ own poem in this issue takes a Boruch line as its epigraph. Another connection: I am currently reading an essay about Plath’s bees in the Voigt/Orr essay anthology, Poets Teaching Poets.

Most importantly, I read with great interest the essay on Dickinson, Bishop, Plath, and Oliver, and their use of nature in their poetry to convey metaphors about the self. More connections: a quote by Adrienne Rich describing Bishop, both of whom I have read this term.

I have to admit that I didn’t like everything I read in this issue, and am reminded of the subjective nature of poetry. Before I started Poemeleon, I viewed everything as an outsider, as strictly a poet without considering the machinery of the editorial process, resentful of the inevitable rejections and rejoicing over the occasional acceptance. Now I view publication through an editor’s lens as well as a poet’s, and have come to understand how arbitrary the whole thing can be; what one editor likes on one day s/he might not like the next, due to factors largely out of either the editor’s or the poet’s control.

~

Carson, Ann. Autobiography of Red. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

I came to Ann Carson cold, not having read anything about her or work prior to my picking up a copy of this book. She was on my reading list because we talked about her in our first mentor-mentee meeting. When I went into the bookstore I nearly bought another of books that focused on the erotic until I realized it was essays and not poetry, so instead I picked this one up.

As soon as I read the synopsis on the back cover I was intrigued. I had never heard of Stesichoros or Geryon. I’ve since looked both up, and am surprised that Carson’s story is so far from the original myth (which, of course, is hardly written in stone – it seems there are so many variations, including whether or not Geryon had wings (Dante’s did), or six arms and six legs, and what exactly happened to the cattle.

But none of that really mattered as I read the book. I loved the faux-interviews and reproductions of the “original” Geryon text, and the story of Helen blinding (and then restoring the sight of) Stesichoros for portraying her as less than wholesome. The mythology is so tightly interwoven into the text, yet the text strays from the mythology almost entirely, so that I didn’t feel betrayed by own poor knowledge of myth and the characters involved.

Early in the book there is a discussion of words unfastening themselves from meaning, and that seems to open the door for some interesting language throughout. There is a synesthesia on Geryon’s part, where he can hear the roses and the grass blades, in a world that is not surprised by a red man but is surprised by his wings.

I enjoyed the way the text flowed – long lines of expository mixed with dialogue, where the usual delineation between speakers is not there and instead we are forced to keep up in order to figure out who is saying what. Some of the book reads almost like prose poetry, but the language is so consistently heightened, and, despite my first impression to the contrary, I found that there are numerous places where the line is broken so that it conveys something meaningful; it is not, as I first thought, simply longs lines of prose poetry.

I found this book-length poem/novel in verse compelling, lovely, and disturbing, with an ending that defied my expectations but fulfilled them at the same time.

~

Coultas, Brenda. A Handmade Museum. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2003

The first time I heard Coultas’s name was during the “Toward a Supreme Fiction” seminar at the June residency. I volunteered to read aloud “The Human Museum” and was struck by the collage-like aspect of the poem. She layers so many details that it becomes clear she is invoking something of an Every(wo)man in her “girl”, supported by lines like “I have a dress of multiple mirrors / a fork of many flavors” and “That be me, girl mouth of assorted flowers: bitter and sweet, a cornucopia of / peach stones”.

I thoroughly enjoyed that poem, and looked forward to reading the entire collection, but I have to admit I had a real hard time getting into the book, beginning as it does with the Bowery Project. I hard time calling that poetry, initially, though by the end of the section it did seem clear that it was more poetry than prose, in terms of its occasional economy and compression.

Much of this work feels autobiographical. Her voice is plain-spoken and even; one reviewer of another of her books stated that she felt the speaker of the poems was clearly Brenda, and not some “other”, and I’d have to say the same thing would apply to this collection, too.

The first half or so of the book flatly describes the process of gentrification and its by-products, displacement of objects and individuals and ways of life. Later poems the voice is occasionally amused with itself, engaging in wordplay – there is a significant amount of interior rhyme, assonance & consonance.

Many of the poems take their cues from documentary filmmaking and journalism, but while some of them are fairly straightforward (The Bowery Project) others are deliberately inflated and exploited and turned on their head (“Inside the Weather”, “Capitalist Projections”, “The Blue Eye: A Paper Film”, “Weather Report”). But there is a seriousness that runs through the entire collection. The poems dealing with farm life, which are sometimes strange and silly (“Seedhead”, “Hayroll”, “Hayhenge”), stand in relief against poems like “The Cat Situation” and “Burials”.

Coultas’s work is both multi-faceted and singular. I might even assign the label “combine artist”; I’ve seen her compared to Robert Rauschenberg, in the way she takes all these discarded objects & people & her own past & present and slaps it all together into something new. But I’ve also seen her work labeled as “investigative”, and I might even venture that at times it is surreal.

A quote by Edwin Torres reads that “Brenda Coultas burns light into the decay of America’s promise and shows us where something beautiful festers.” I would agree, partially. But I would argue that Coultas is not deliberately trying to do this, that this is a by-product only. The poems in this collection present the reader with image after image, observation upon observation, piling them on. She doesn’t pause to tell us what they mean; instead the reader is left with a portrait not of the objects but of what they represent to us, and the complexity and duplicity of those representations. Her work is, I think, social commentary — humanizing and valuing the marginalized individual and the displaced and discarded object.

[afterthought: some of her work seems to revel in the sound of words and the random associations made by putting similarly-sounding but inherently different words together; could she possibly also be considered a language poet?]

~

Doyle, Ben. Radio, Radio. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001

Ben Doller (nee Doyle) was my workshop leader during the last residency. I didn’t know much about him prior to the residency, and frankly was a little sad that I wasn’t going to be able to have my original workshop leader, Reginald Shepherd. That said, I looked him up on Poets.org before the residency. His photo was very sophisticated – he looks like a forties film star. The winner of the Walt Whitman prize for 2000, and with endorsements on the back (and thanks in the front) from some very big names in poetry – a formalist and a language poet among them – I opened this book not knowing what to expect.

I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the poems are a ride. You get inside and you never know where he’s going to take you. I am inclined to stick the “language poetry” label on them, a school I don’t know much about, but in looking it up the label seems apt: “Language poetry emphasizes the reader’s role in bringing meaning out of a work”; So much of this book feels associative, though I did find myself trying to extract some sort of narrative from the whole. I found it interesting that in the midst of an unrelated riff I’d find some oblique reference to marriage, to miscarriage, to regret. But at this point I’m betting that’s my own slanted reading of the text, because so much of seems constructed not haphazardly but with a certain gleeful abandon.

One thing I can say with relative certainty is that this a very original work – I think I would be hard-pressed to find any lines, any turns-of-phrase, that are duplicated anywhere in the English language. Just as an example, I opened the book randomly and my eyes fell on this line: “Skin from the incisors of the air”. I’m not exactly sure what it means, but feel fairly confident that it’s never been said before using that particular combination of words.

The joy in reading this collection was in letting the sounds wash over me as I read them. From “Immortalities (dance remix)”, in which every line ends with a version of the word and:

Nothing was happening and
then it stopped. The charges &
temperatures were dropped. My hand
was an unfamiliar and
how it waved me hellos and
also how it caught & fanned

I have no idea what this means, thought I enjoyed the playfulness of the lines “The charges & / temperatures were dropped.” I’m tempted to read and reread this book, looking for a buried subtext, but I’m not convinced I’d find one!

~

Ebberson, Laura. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetic Voice: Reconciling Influences.” Valparaiso Review. Volume VIII, Number 1, ed. Edward Byrne (2006-7): http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/ebbersonessaybishop.html.

After reading Bishop’s The Complete Poems I went searching on the web for more information – about her, but mostly for something about the technical aspects of her craft. I found multiple websites that contained biographies, one of which included an interesting letter written by her to someone named Miss Pierson, an aspiring poet. Her advice was to read all of a poets work, then to go and read their life, letters, etc. So, in the spirit of that, I now have on my list to read Edgar Allen Poe and the Jukebox, as well as the collection of her letters, One Art, and Elizabeth Bishop: comprehensive research and study guide by Harold Bloom.

In the meantime, I ran across this article in the Valparaiso Review about Bishop’s influences, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. I knew that Moore was a mentor, but did not know to what extent, or in what way she was influenced by her. What I have learned from this article was that she inherited Moore’s precision, and allowed Moore’s distaste for the personal to guide her in her choice of subject matter and treatment. That is, until she shared with Moore her poem “Roosters”, at which point Bishop’s relationship with Moore shifted, and while they continued to be close she no longer relied on Moore’s guidance to shape her poems. It was around this time that she first corresponded with Robert Lowell, who was to become another influential force. His drive toward the confessional in poetry, and their steady exchange of poems and comments on each other’s poems, pushed her toward including more autobiographical and emotional content in her work.

I already have Lowell’s Life Studies on my shelf, as well as the collected works of Marianne Moore, though I have never read either of them in their entirety, they are also now on my list to read.

~

Factor, Jenny. Unraveling at the Name. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2002.

I first encountered Jenny Factor as a name I saw mentioned occasionally on the Wompo listserv. I remember there had been some discussion of a poem of hers, “Song Beside a Sippy Cup”, and had read it as a stand alone on the web somewhere. When I was considering (again) whether or not to apply to an MFA program, I had queried my fellow Womponies to see if there was such a thing as a “no-residency” MFA, because as a wife and mother of two small boys I knew that there would be no way that I could participate in a program that actually required me to be somewhere for a part of every day. At the same time I queried the Wompo list, I also queried Antioch about whether or not they would consider waiving the BA requirement, as I had long ago dropped out of school to have a baby. I was shocked when Jenny Factor called me up on the phone, and spoke with her at length about the program. Up until then, she was just a name on the list, another mysterious entity I had yet to encounter but whom I admired from afar. It was because of her encouragement that I applied to the program.

I looked forward to the first residency so that I could meet her in person, and bought her book from the bookstore the first day on campus. I loved this book. Jenny Factor’s story of a woman’s transition out of a traditional marriage and into life as a lesbian single mother is gripping. The poems are nearly all written in some traditional verse form, though having taken her seminar at the last Antioch residency, “From Anaphora to Zeugma”, I learned that while the earliest poems in the collection stick closely to the rules, as the book progresses the forms loosen up and some are barely recognizable as forms at all, thus fulfilling the “unraveling” effect alluded to in the title, but did identify sonnets, sestinas, quatrains, pantoums, villanelles, couplets, tercets, a canzone, and a fun acrostic where the end words all add up to the sentence “girls like to pull their skirts down rather than over their heads!”

The themes of motherhood, sexuality, and identity are ones that I have often explored and I found myself identifying with the speaker in her struggle to maintain her own identity as a woman. By the end of the collection, I felt I had gone on that journey with her and admire the courage it took to write such a frank collection of poems. After finishing the book, the only question I was left with, was where is “Song Beside a Sippy Cup”? I was sure it would be in there somewhere! It seemed such a natural fit with the subject matter. In any case, I look forward to reading more of her work.

~

Fennelly, Beth Ann. Unmentionables. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.

Here is another book that I loved. Not surprising, in that Fennelly’s has been the one big influence on my own work these past few years. After taking a workshop online through Gotham Writer’s Workshops with Jason Schneiderman, I found myself gushing to him about Fennelly after a conversation about mentorship. His response was to put me in touch with her so we could work out some form of mentorship arrangement, and so we did. I had become aware of Fennelly’s work first through the journal Meridian (U.Virginia Press) where I read some poems that were forthcoming in her book, Tender Hooks. I’ve since read that, as well as her first book, Open House, and her book of letters to another expectant mom, Great With Child.

I went out and looked for Unmentionables the day of its release last spring, and was grateful when the bookstore located their only copy for me. The only poem in the book that I was familiar with at that time was “Souvenir” as I had read that in the Best American Poetry anthology the previous year – and had found that I wasn’t quite connecting with it. I was really hoping that the rest of the poems would live up to my expectations, and they have.

I led the book discussion on Unmentionables, and some of the questions I posed were: (On theme) What do you see as the underlying theme or themes running through this collection? Is this different from other work that we’ve read this term?; (On voice) What characteristics would you use to describe the speaker’s voice throughout these poems? Do you feel it is consistent or all over the place? Is the speaker herself or someone other than herself? Do you identify with the voice in these poems or find it off-putting? Why?; (On form) Fennelly has been known to use received forms in her earlier collections. Does she make use of any here? What do you make of the poem, “We Were Drinking Champagne When We Found It”, which mentions the word “pantoum” twice– is this, somehow, a pantoum? In other of her poems, are the lines metered at all? And how do you differentiate between form and format?; (On tone) How would you describe the overall tone of this collection? Is it consistent, or does it vary from piece to piece?

I also asked about Berryman’s Dream Songs and how Fennelly’s compares, what her aim might have been, what formal techniques does she use. I also asked people to listen to the audio of her reading so we discuss whether or not her reading of the piece changed how we felt about it.

I was sorry that most people chose to stray away from the questions I posed, and simply wrote a brief synopsis of what they thought. I was really hoping to get more of a dialogue going. I was also surprised to find that not everyone liked her work, or not nearly as much as I did.

What I like about Fennelly is that there is a tension at work between these womanly roles she plays (mother, wife, and lover) and her creative life, and how they all sort of overlap in places like a venn diagram. Her material is often if not always verging on the autobiographical, even when she is speaking as someone else (her identification with Morisot is both as the female artist figure competing in a man’s world and also an homage to her artist-mother). The title Unmentionables is directly relevant to just about every (or maybe every) poem in the book. She touches on female erotic lust, alcoholism, suicide, and sexism; subjects that are often embarrassing or nearly impossible to put into words. The over-arching theme that I detected in this collection is mortality, in a coming to grips with mortality in the face of motherhood and fading youth, the differing but overlapping and always changing forms of love — maternal/erotic, conflict over the body as objectified by the opposite sex, a woman’s internalized body image that reflects that objectification, the struggle with lust and longing in the face of a long term marriage as well as in the face of fading youth, reconciling parental roles with professional goals, women in the arts and the struggle for recognition, and a difficult relationship with an alcoholic father.

I think Fennelly can afford to experiment with form as she’s already proven her chops in previous collections (I once read a description of her blank verse as “delicious”). I like that she has modified the pantoum form to the point that it would be unrecognizable if it were not for the specific repeated reference to it; it does not repeat whole lines, but it does use a double repetition of key phrases, and the ending does double back to the beginning (though I’m still not 100% convinced that it even *is* a pantoum!). The sestina takes significant liberties, though does manage to remain basically intact.

I came away from this collection feeling energized and wanting to get back to work on my own writing. I think for me that that’s the best compliment I can a book — that it makes me want to be a better writer.

~

Forche, Carolyn. The Angel of History. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.

In the epigraph to this book, there is an excerpt from “Theses of the Philosophy of History”, part IX, by Walter Benjamin, which describes the Angel of History – it’s back to the future so that it cannot see what is coming, it can only witness it as it passes as an endless pileup of destruction. This is, essentially, how we live our lives. We never know what is coming (though we can sometimes make fairly reliable predictions), and instead we are forced to reckon with what has already come to pass.

Of course, not all that comes to pass is destructive – but I live such an insulated life that it’s important for me to read someone like Forche from time to time in order to ground myself in the reality that not all is pleasant in this world. I read an interview with Forche about how one of the pivotal moments in her life abroad came while in El Salvador. The women walking with jugs of water on their heads was picturesque, like something out of National Geographic that we can stand in awe of. But then she was on the bus and one of those women asked if she would hold the jug in her lap because there was nowhere for the woman to sit and the jug weighed a hundred pounds or more, and the woman was transporting it because there was no potable water within walking distance of her home. Clean, running water. Just one of the luxuries that I take for granted. So much atrocity is contained within this book, retold by the speaker as well as by other characters who lived through or felt the effects of the atrocities.

The Angel of History is essentially three long, rich, dense, poems, “The Angel of History “, “The Notebook of Uprising”, and “The Recording Angel”, which entirely comprise the first three sections; but then the fourth and fifth sections are almost sparse by comparison, the fourth containing only three poems of which one is an elegy, and the fifth containing several poems in a series called “Book Codes”, which are severely fragmented yet somehow still make a sort of sense. At first I wondered about the division of these last two sections – why not just make it one section? But the “Book Codes” poems do seem to need to stand alone, and the preceding section is a sort of a winding down of the narratives explored in the first three sections.

I was, once again, grateful for the notes at the back of the book; there are severe gaps in my knowledge, especially in regards to history, so that in order for me to have even the narrowest understanding of the significance of events I have to read these, and found myself referring back to them as I made my way through the poems. Forche is not an easy poet to read. My lack of knowledge of history is due mainly to a lack of interest in the subject, so reading a book that relies so heavily on prior knowledge of historical events is hard for me. But I have found that as I have grown older my appreciation for and interest in history has grown and I will continue to explore works like this, if only to keep myself grounded, and to remind myself that the insulated life I lead could implode at any time.

~

Free, Sheela Sitaram. Of Fractured Clocks, Bones, & Windshields. Austin: Plain View Press, 2009

Of Fractured Clocks, Bones, & Windshields is a collection of poems by Sheela Sitaram Free that is slated for publication by Plain View Press in February of 2009. Free was referred to me by a friend because she needed to secure blurbs for the back of the book. I agreed to read it without knowing anything about her or her work, basing my decision solely on the good judgment of my friend, who also wrote a blurb for her. The purpose of this preamble is to point out that I came to this work cold, and so had no idea of what to expect. When I opened the file (I read this in electronic form), I was surprised to see in the table of contents two poems referencing San Bernardino, a city which border’s my own. I was even more surprised, though, to see that the t.o.c. was two pages long and that the acknowledgments did not contain even one previous publication credit. That said, I began reading this collection with some trepidation.

Upon reading the first few poems I formed an early opinion of the work as one that was essentially performance-oriented, one that might work better read aloud than on the page. But the voice was original, even invigorating. There is an energy and a vibrancy to the words, an authenticity to the voice. The first third of the collection contains mostly what I would consider rants against pop culture and politics and politicians. Among them she includes references to Vicodin, Prozac, Kurt Kobain, Heath Ledger, AT & T, Citigroup, and Dawn dish soap; references the recent forest fires, earthquakes, the Columbia disaster, and the current presidential race, with the speaker siding with no one. She nails the schizophrenic nature of modern American existence, writing as she does as both an outsider and an insider. However, as entertaining as they were, they hammered the same nail in over and over and over. I began to get bored, but just as I did I noticed a shift in the narrative focus – away from Big Themes to more personal ones. Much of the work from here on out focuses on her experience as an immigrant of Indian descent, where family and culture – including the caste system, which follows her even as an American citizen – figure prominently. The longest poem in the collection, “Little Teluga Women of the Earth”, is a tribute to her grandmother, also a writer, and tells the story of a woman “doing the Asian thing”: shutting up, shutting out. Clearly, this is what Free was trying to break free of in turning to poetry. Childhood molestation by uncles, the death of her very young daughter, the death of her father when she was six years old (which she witnessed), her experience as an immigrant in an America where promises are rarely kept, steeped in culture and family that is ever-present and revered but also rebelled against. The poems that dwell on these themes shine. By the end of the collection, I was glad I had read it. At times it is gritty and a little rough around the edges, but overall it is a thoughtful collection that tackles regional, national, and global topics, with a strong voice that risks sentimentality but overall remains confident and resolute.

~

Greenberg, Arielle & Pafunda, Danielle. “Disarming, Destabilizing, and Creeping out the Patriarchy: a Conversation on the Girlesque with Arielle Greenberg.” Delirious Hem. News & Reports. By the members of Pussipo. (May 2008): http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-gurlesque-part-1-introduction.html.

Greenberg, Arielle. “On the Gurlesque.” New Experiments Series. Small Press Traffic, News & Reports. Elizabeth Treadwell Jackson, Executive Director (April 2003): http://web.archive.org/web/20040108013739/http://www.sptraffic.org/html/news_rept/gurl.html.

After reading Human Dark with Sugar I went in search of more information on Brenda Shaughnessy and her poetics and ran across this interview with Arielle Greenberg that referenced her. She gave a talk, “On the Gurlesque,” for Small Press Traffic’s New Experiments Series which outlined this new poetics as being one of girlish tropes, filled with all the frilly things that we normally regard as having no place in the poem, but rather than seeming saccharine a poet writing in the “gurlesque” exploits these frilly things, turns them on their head, examines them, and exposes their dark underbelly.

As a woman born in 1971, a year before Greenberg, I found myself identifying with this new brand of poetics, and while I haven’t yet employed many of the gurlesque strategies, I had decided before I even began this MFA program that my final manuscript was going to deal with my seventies girlhood, unicorn stickers and all, in a sort of surrealist/Fantasyland attempt to document my bland but semi-complicated upbringing and my relationship with my stepfather, who is from Iran, whose often extreme patriarchal inclinations both terrified me and kept me generally out of harms way.

I think what intrigues me the most about the idea of a gurlesque poetics is its reveling in all things girly while at the same time poking fun at and subverting those same girly tendencies; the tie-in to gendered stereotypes and the desire to buck those while at the same time being far too attached to them being that they were – and are – so much a part of our collective girlhood experience. And that this particular girlhood is the product of our mothers’ experience of living through second wave feminism.

I appreciated how Greenberg gave examples of the Gurlesque in other art forms, and how she tackled the issues of race and gender as they pertain to this emerging aesthetic. When Pafunda points out that many of the women working in this mode are middle class Caucasians, Greenberg brings up a bevy of notable poets of color (Cathy Park Hong, and a Hawaiian poet with a very long unpronounceable name as examples) who are also working in this mode, but also goes on to explain that because this is an emergent rather than an established poetics, these women are often writing from a relatively privileged vantage point, and that women of color may not yet feel they have luxury to write in this way.

After having read this interview and its related side articles, I feel like I have a new direction in which to push my work, a new way to explore my own geography.

~

A Brief Guide to Language Poetry. Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5661

Heijinian, Lynn. The Language of Inquiry [Introduction]. Poets.org http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16195

In reading this month’s books – Coultas & Doller in particular – I found myself again wondering what exactly is “language poetry”. I’ve read numerous collections where I was inclined to label it as such, but I’ve never been entirely sure. I’m still not, though I think I’m closer.

Heijinian’s book of essays, The Language of Inquiry, is something I am now interested in reading. I’ve also had this notion of language poetry as being devoid of meaning, but I doubt that that’s really an accurate perception. I’ve been following a friend’s blog who is a professor of Philosophy, specializing in the Philosphy of Mind. He seems especially interested in experiment, and I’ve enjoyed participating in some of those experiments, and have found myself thinking more about language and the sometimes arbitrariness of it. I enjoyed Ben Doller’s seminar on “The Made Poem: Assemblage, Collage, Decollage and Other Machines Made Out of Words” at the last residency, particularly the parallels between what Picasso and Braques were doing with collage and what Gertrude Stein was doing with her poems, and how much they resemble collage in their construction, as well as Marianne Moore and Ronald Johnson.

I like the idea of involving the reader in the text, of meaning being dictated by language rather than the other way around. It explains how different readers can interpret the text in wildly differing ways, and how juxtaposing a string of seemingly meaningless words can nonetheless leave the reader with a sense of narrative, of texture.

In searching for a new direction for my work, I find myself drawn to these sorts of things. Not that I want to veer completely away from the type of lyric narrative writing that I’ve been doing, but that it’s worth exploring and perhaps incorporating.

~

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Talking Dirty to the Gods. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000

I first heard the name Yusef Komunyakaa on the Wompo listserv, alongside the names Reetika and Jehan Vazirani, the day Vazirani took her own and her son’s (Komunyakaa’s son’s) life. This was the day of my birthday in 2003. I wrote a poem in response, attempting to funnel my own discontent and sadness over the loss, and it was published in small e-zine that I don’t think is operational anymore. Thus I became aware of both Komunyakaa’s and Vazirani’s work. By the following year I had acquired Neon Vernacular, which I took with me to the Idyllwild Festival of Poetry workshop that I attended that year; he was one of two visiting poets. In Maurya Simon’s workshop we read several odes, one of which happened to be “Ode to the Raccoon” and another “Ode to the Maggot”. I really enjoyed both of those, both for their simplicity and beauty and also for their touching on larger subjects by focusing on a small detail (maggot examines the process of decomposition of the body, raccoon the holiness of the body as sustenance and the poverty and circumstance which drives people to eat what is easily and cheaply acquired).

I was pleased to find that both of those poems are included in Talking Dirty to the Gods. Individually, I enjoyed each of the poems in this collection. But as a whole, I found it very difficult to penetrate. Each of the poems is written in the same form – four quatrains – and there are no section breaks and no discernible order (not even alphabetical, though there were occasionally similarly themed poems back to back, but not always). A review on the back cover describes this book as “a sustained anti-hierarchy” and I agree, and appreciate the strategy; nevertheless, it became monotonous after a while. I felt as though I were in a long dark tunnel. Because there are no notes at the back, I found myself lost in many places because of my own poor knowledge of mythology (though it is improving as I continue to read). I did love how he was equally enthralled by the small details – the silk of an eye through which a hook must fit on the back of a dressing gown, as an example – and the dressed-down myths that took human form, becoming a form of allegory.

While I did make it through cover to cover, I think this is a collection that is best opened up and read at random, where each poem can be read and appreciated individually. There is no narrative arc, no common denominator throughout, aside from the formal structure of the poems.

~

Maclay, Sarah. The White Bride. Tampa, Fl: The University of Tampa Press, 2008.

I started hearing about Southern California poet Sarah Maclay a few years ago during one of my monthly poetry group get-togethers. One of the members had read with her and she was described as having a very intense style of reading, and that intrigued me. Every now and then I’d run across her work somewhere, but about a year ago, when I was soliciting work for the prose poem issue of Poemeleon, she was encouraged to send us some poems by my associate editor. I really enjoyed them, and we ran three of her poems that would ultimately be part of her next book, this one, The White Bride. Then , when we were looking for work for the persona poem issue, we ran another of her poems which was later selected as Verse Daily’s Web Monthly Feature for August of this year. I invited her to read for our annual summer reading, after which she suggested a book swap, which is how I came to own a copy.

Seems sort of serendipitous, in that many of the poems in the collection could conceivably fall under the gurlesque header: there are a lot of references to fabric, and to bodies, and to sex and love and whips and mirrors and veils. But there is an dark undercurrent weighing it down: sweetness and sadness and regret, and a city landscape that is gritty and changing, with the occasional homeless person wandering through. Made up primarily of prose poems in various incarnations, there is a lushness to the collection, full of assonance and rich imagery. Even though many of the poems are blocks of text, because of her placement of commas and dashes there are enough pauses to suit.

Many of these poems have allusions to historical events, or are inspired by paintings, sculpture, and music. I’ve enjoyed reading her notes at the back of the book, and have found them helpful in illuminating some of the poems, especially Rosamunda and Edmund.

~

Oliver, Mary. Red Bird. Boston: Beacon, 2008

Prior to reading Red Bird, the only other poetry collection by Oliver that I had read was The Leaf and the Cloud – which I did thoroughly enjoy. For some reason, I found Red Bird less satisfying. I will say that it was refreshing in a pleasant way, in that I didn’t need to work hard to enjoy it. They are accessible. There are few if any allusions. Her diction and syntax are uncomplicated. Her recurring subjects are objects in the natural world, her theme our relationship with them. The pleasure in Oliver’s work is, I think, in the voluptuousness of the words – the way they fill the mouth, the air; the way the words play off of one another.

What I didn’t care for was that her God is ever-present, and, for me, I found that sort of annoying. Hers is a paternalistic god, and while she does not quote scripture or preach, his presence, in what for me were pleasantly mysterious and ambiguous poems, kept bringing me back to the fact that I couldn’t completely identify with the speaker. What I did like, though, was that her god was not portrayed as the stereotypical all-knowing or all-powerful; rather, he is portrayed as a shape-shifter, as both sides of the coin, neither of which are good or bad. My favorite along those lines was the poem, “I am the one”, which ends “Always I was the bird / that flew off through the branches / Now // I am the cat / with feathers / under its tongue”. Her turn of phrase is sometimes deliciously surprising and accurate, as in the lines “In the spicy / villages of the mice” (“Maker of All Things, Even Healings”). This was one that I especially enjoyed, in that invoked the idea of god in the title, but god was portrayed in a more neutral, all-encompassing way. I also liked the opening lines: “All night / under the pines / the fox / moves through the darkness / with a mouthful of teeth / and a reputation for death / which it deserves.” The poem, “Straight Talk from Fox”, was enjoyable for its contrapuntal theme, giving us fox’s point of view

~

Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994

I chose this book as I thought it be prove insightful as to Mary Oliver’s own methods and thoughts on poetry and poetics. It was. In her introduction she states that the poem is both a written document as well as a mystical one. The parts of the poem that comprise the written document – the overall shape of the poem, the construction of lines and linebreaks, even the anatomy of words (my favorite chapters are the two that deal with devices of sound, specifically the way letters sound when read or spoken, both together and apart) – are laid out for us. She does not try to lay out the mystical for us – that she leaves for us to figure out, in that she sets forth from the beginning that “something that is essential can’t be taught; it can only be given, or formulated in a manner too mysterious to be picked apart and redesigned for the next person.” There is certainly something mystical at work in Oliver’s poetry, in that they virtually glow with serenity and quiet wisdom. I also appreciated the chapters on workshops & solitude, as well as imitation. I’ve never actively tried to imitate another’s work – and I’ve never transcribed, for the purpose of getting inside of, another poet’s poem; something I think I should try.

~

Poemeleon. Porter, Cati, ed. (May 2008): 182 submissions x 2 -5 poems/each.

Well, I haven’t quite finished reading all of the submissions, but it has been interesting reading them with the annotation in mind. Because the current call is for humorous poems, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a poem funny, what kinds of poems make me laugh, and the difference between a humorous poem and light verse.

So far, I have on my acceptance list work by Sherman Alexie, Charles Harper Webb, Kate Fetherston, Roy Jacobstein, and Alex Grant. Sherman Alexie’s is funny in a wry sort of way, exploring issues of ethnic identity, his experiences giving talks, humor in poetry and in real life, as well as a detour through a dream encounter with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Webb’s poems are funny in more overt ways, taking phrases from real life (or even made up words and phrases) and exploiting them. Fetherston’s are raw and unapologetically sexual and smart-alecky. Jacobstein’s are more subdued but funny in an intellectual sort of way. One of Grant’s is hysterical, a very gentle critique of a beginning poet’s over the top poem that just about made me pee my pants it was that funny, but so true, in that, how do you tell someone their work is awful? If you sugarcoat it, then they may never realize how bad it really is, but if you tell it like it is then there are inevitably hurt feelings.

What all of these have in common is that they aren’t just funny; they’re about something: the humor is used in a very real way, and is not heavy-handed or obviously trying too hard. In fact, the funniest ones I’ve read so far are humorous because they draw their humor from real life.

The ones that I have summarily rejected are usually hammy, many of them sing-songy and written with the primary aim of making someone laugh. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not what I’m looking for, and that’s not something that I find appealing in a poem.

I chose to focus on humor this issue because I’m tired of reading depressing work where somebody dies, or is dying, or leaves their lover, or their lover leaves them, or life sucks, or worse, life is really really great and here’s why, which usually just rings false. I’ve received so many good submissions that it’s going to be hard to choose. So, I suppose, separating the light verse from the good humorous verse isn’t so hard after all – the hardest part is choosing the best from the best, and turning down otherwise competent work.

~

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1976

As much as I wanted to read it, I had a little trouble getting my hands on this one. I tried the library (though I admit I never asked anyone, only looked on the shelves) as well as Borders and Barnes & Noble. I was willing to pay full price, though ultimately I ordered a copy through Alibris – a hard-cover – for only a couple of dollars. It’s in great shape, a first edition with a somewhat faded dustjacket with only a few marks.

This just arrived a few days ago, and as I’ve been struggling to finish up other books I had already started, I have only read so far the introduction and the first chapter, “Anger and Tenderness”. I will say, though, that it has already changed me. What I have always taken for granted as my role, and which has been reinforced by my conventional husband, I am beginning to see as something manufactured and disseminated by a patriarchal society. I am anxious to complete this book.

I spent the morning trying to finish the chapter without interruption. I got up before my kids, but it wasn’t long before they were yelling for me to get them something and so I had to put the book down. I retreated to the bathroom to read in peace, thinking that at least there they know better than to barge in; instead, my six year old yelled for me from the den, louder and louder. I tried to ignore him, but I finally couldn’t stand it and so went in there and yelled at him. All he wanted to ask was if it is the day before Thanksgiving. (Yes, it is.) But reading a passage about how Rich was routinely interrupted by her children, about her restrained anger (I have, in my most desperate moments, begun to understand the complicated nature of child abuse), and about how she understood that the repeated interruptions were simply an attempt on her children’s part to maintain her focus on them and not out of malice, I am beginning to come to grips with my own divided self.

~

Rich, Adrienne. the school among the ruins. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2004

I went to my library in search of Rich’s Of Woman Born, a book on my booklist, but they didn’t have it, and instead picked up the school among the ruins. Previously, I had only read a small selection of Rich’s work, and so thought it was time I read an entire collection. But I didn’t finish it before it was due, and so renewed it; still, I didn’t finish it. Finally I returned it. Then, when I was back at the library last month, I picked it up again, determined to get through it this time.

I did, but I didn’t love it. I wish I did. I wanted to. I appreciate what she is doing, and know that is considered one of the greats – her ability to use the wide lens to encompass historical as well as current events, then draw us into a more intimate scene that relates the personal to the political, is masterful, but what I am finding is that I have difficulty getting beneath the surface of poems that have any historical or political content. This is my own shortcoming, in that, while I am not totally in the dark, I generally miss most of those allusions because my knowledge of history is very poor. I have made it a point to avoid most newspapers – and the news – because it’s depressing, and rely on Google — or my husband — to fill me in when I need to know a reference. Favorites in the book include “Tell Me”, for its odd delicious language and syntactical breaks, and “Memorize This”, because it’s gorgeous.

One element that I appreciated in her work and have filed away in my head for future use is her unconventional use of punctuation – colons in particular, used as partitions to force a breath (surrounded by white space) that are less sudden than a period, but more so than the white space would be alone. Also, she uses the page well — she constructs her poems in ways that are often asymmetrical, the lines staggered, stair-stepped, rarely predictable; I didn’t note the use of any received forms at all in this collection, though I know she has a series of (very loose) ghazals, some of which I have read and want to read more of.

~

Trickhouse. Saterstrom, Noah, founder/curator. (Fall 2008): http://www.trickhouse.org/

In search of more Coultas, I googled her. One of the places she turned up was in a journal that I had never heard of before. Trickhouse is “a quarterly on-lline curatorial project.” Fall 2008 is their second issue, and Coultas was one of three “writers” in this issue. (The room for writers is not genre-specific; it welcomes all forms of writing including, and especially, it seems, cross-genre work.)

I was impressed by its layout – “hallways” with doors that lead into single rooms; it is based on the layout of a bordello (thus the name Trickhouse, I assume!). This issue contained a curatorial space filled with paintings and mixed-media artworks that resembled sherbet-colored topographical maps (some with beach and other scenes painted on them), a space filled with the collages of William Davies King (all of them collaged within the pages of a huge book), a sound space with video and audio of Orchestra Descarrego, an “improvisation mutant band”, as well as an experimental space wherein a guy describes how he took random police sketches and placed them in numerous public spaces without any explanation just to see what people would do. I laughed out loud at some of the goofy responses people had, like the moderators of Craigslist deleting them because they somehow went against one of Craigslist’s policies (though they couldn’t pin down exactly which one), and also the placement of said sketches on tables at restaurants, complete with crayons. There was also a space with writings from a correspondent who was writing from a boxing gym located within a prison, an interview with an artist named George Hildrew, and a gorgeous 75 minute video by Ed Lowe – I’ve only watched excerpts of this so far, but it’s an exploration of what and how we know called “Against the Slope of Social Speech”.

As for Coultas’s work in this issue, it was a prose poem in sections not unlike the ones in The Handmade Museum. It is dedicated to a friend who died filming a riot in Mexico, and who, ironically, filmed his own death as well as the assailants (who have yet to be charged). The poem is called “The Diary of Found Foods”. I tried googling the term “found foods” but found very little. My understanding is that it is food gathered from public sources like fruit trees and wild herbs, or maybe grown/made yourself. It was an interesting poem, further exploring the themes prevalent in T.H.M. – poverty, social injustice, salvaging what is/is being lost.

There was another really interesting piece included by Kristen Nelson that began with a collage that resembled a family tree. As you scrolled over it portraits revealed hyperlinked words like “sprite” and “blanket” and “button” which turned out to be the names of characters in a linked series of prose poems/flash fictions. I enjoyed the surprise of it, a little like opening little doors on an advent calendar.

I was interested in exploring this new journal as it was satisfying a need for me to see what other online literary journals are doing, what is made possible by the use of an electronic format, and also because I seem to be interested in the experimental this month!

~

Shaughnessy, Brenda. Human Dark with Sugar. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2008.

What I admired most about this book was its steamily frank sexuality, its interior musicality and rhythm that doesn’t seem to conform to any preset pattern, and its sometimes startling use of language.

In the reading conference, a link to a review was posted and two questions about that review posed: 1.) How does Human Dark with Sugar fit with the surrealist tradition, and what is so difficult about parsing the line, “Don’t we melt it? / Aren’t we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?”

Blatantly borrowing from my post to the conference, I’m afraid grammer isn’t my strongest suit and I’ll admit that I’ve never attempted to parse/diagram a sentence. I’ll go even further to admit that I had to look up precisely what surrealism means:

Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.

Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.

What I believe makes this work work in the surrealist sense is that much of it defies/denies parsing. We are made to *work* to make it make sense. Its juxtaposition of odd thoughts and images, on the surface, seem disjointed, but when simply read do make a subliminal sort of sense.

I especially enjoyed the strangeness of some of the poems in the first section titled Anodyne. Again, I had to look up this word and was surprised by its meaning: a painkiller, or something that soothes, comforts or relaxes; also, bland, harmless, inoffensive to the point of being dull. After having read reviews of her earlier collection (I found this one that states that Human Dark is actually “more transparent and plain” than her previous collection!), I believe this first section she designed to be a sort of a transition from her earlier style (e.g. “Why is the Color of Snow”) into something new that borders on the confessional (“This Loved Body”) but doesn’t abandon the aesthetic of the surreal altogether.

I think to understand the lines “Don’t we melt it? / Aren’t we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?” we need to re-visit some of the previous images: snow as a kind of privacy, melting snow as a means of making oneself more clear for the observer, snow as having a kind of a double-edge that both cools and burns (snownova), snow as a kind of blanket (here we are again with simultaneous hot/cold idea). Snow also as an implied metaphor for something that obscures, numbs, but strangely comforting (the Anodyne idea) that we can wrap ourselves in to avoid full disclosure. In the first poem, the speaker says, “But my lovers have never learned to read / my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct”. I think, after having read about how deliciously obscure and obtuse her first book is/was, that this is a sort of a directional for those readers who’ve come into this new book expecting the same.

Her section titled Ambrosia, by contrast, contains more personal poems. Again, back to the dictionary, Ambrosia is the food of the classical gods, a fruit and coconut dish, or simply something delicious. So, the idea for this section is that she is offering up something new for our consumption, something she hopes will be delicious, more of herself, but something that also is rooted in classic themes (the subjects she tackles are the same ones poets have been tackling for centuries – “Love. Loss. Sex. Rejection. Pain. Time.” (from the back cover). Then there’s Astrolabe, which is an early astronomical instrument used to observe the position and determine the altitude of the Sun or other astronomical object, which, I believe, brings us full circle back to the opening poem “I’m Over the Moon”, a sort of anti-love love poem that claims to be “over” as in “done with” the moon (or, love), but by the end of the collection it becomes clear the speaker is not.

So, back to that line, “Aren’t we human dark with sugar hot to melt it?”: if we are to take the dark sugar literally, for melted sugar *is* dark, then we must accept that much of what is sweet is also dark, has a down side, a bitter side. Furthermore, I believe the “it” is not just the snow, but the privacy, the obscurity, the safety implied by having something to hide behind/under/within. Removing the comfort of that privacy, that “snow”, implies an opening of oneself, a sort of vulnerability. I believe the reason she chose “human dark with sugar” as the title for the collection (aside from it being a really evocative line) is that it represents what she is doing with the work in this book: trying to clarify, eliminate the snow.

~

Tate, James. The Ghost Soldiers. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008

When we first talked about adding James Tate to the reading list, I was a little put off by the title. I was sure it would be war poetry, and dry, that’s how little I knew of Tate. I ordered it from Amazon, and was more than pleasantly surprised to find that it is firmly anchored in the surrealist tradition (or at least tethered by a piece of spaghetti!). What I noticed first was that all of the poems, when flipping through, seemed to look the same – rough blocks of double spaced text with quirky titles and ragged margins. As I began to read them, I noticed that all have much in common: they employ, as Gioia calls it, a sort of “dream logic,” where anything is possible, and all manner of strange things are taken in stride, to the point that even the characters are placed in the most bizarre of situations they seem nonplussed.

There is so much humor, but also a seriousness lurking just below the surface. Many of the poems take on big themes like war, social injustice, big brother-ish situations, interpersonal relationships, fear, and anxiety, without feeling heavy-handed or preachy. In fact, as I read through the collection, I actually became bored with them, for even with the varied situations and character names, they all had the same flatness of tone, the same brand of weirdness, and they all ended in the same abrupt and unexpected way so that that became my expectation.

One of the questions posed by you and Eric Steineger dealt with which poetic strategies Tate employs. He piles on the narrative detail, layering it, lacing it with eliptical dialogue that leaves us wondering what the hell he’s saying. Also, the flatness of his tone really makes the humor and strangeness stick out. To address his form, he has deliberately shunned stanzas in favor of something more straightforward. What makes these prose poems, rather than flash fiction? If you look carefully, these are not written paragraph style; in spite of appearances, he has paid attention to linebreaks, and has chosen to leave the edges ragged and organic. Of course, one could argue that this is simply prose broken up into lines, but I do think there is a significant amount of compression, and a heightened use of language and imagery, and on the sonic level there are a lot of hard consonants and occasional use of internal rhyme. I might go even further to argue that these aren’t even prose poems but simply poems. But then again, I look at my own “prose poems” and others that I’ve published under that banner and think, and others that I’ve published under that banner and think, Yeah, they’re prose poems!

I wasn’t put off by the randomness of the character names and situations; the collection is unified in voice and tone and style and form — that’s what provides the connective tissue. However, what I did note is that, despite the fact that the characters have different names they are all very much alike; he could have used the same names throughout and that would have given the collection even more consistency. Years ago I read a collection of short stories called the Harry and Sylvia stories. The situations were all different, and in each story it was clear that they were different characters despite the fact that they all had the same names. I think maybe the same thing is going on here, except in reverse. And, yes, Tate does seem to render them with affection, but I’m not convinced he likes them — otherwise he wouldn’t have put them in such inescapable and often perilous predicaments.

~

Poetry. Wiman, Christian, ed. (May 2008): 177 pps.

I picked up this journal from Borders Books when it was current but never read it. What drew me to it was its contributor list, specifically Jane Hirshfield, Cathy Park Hong, Seth Abramson, Cate Marvin, and A.E. Stallings. A friend had recommended a book by Cathy Park Hong but I had never bought it; also, I had become familiar with Cate Marvin’s work through other journals I had picked up, but most specifically an issue of Tin House devoted to “evil”; and I had become acquainted with Seth Abramson through his blog about MFA’s when I was researching programs prior to applying to Antioch. That’s usually how it goes for me; I will pick up a journal – usually – because it contains work by someone I know, either personally or by reputation. In this case, I fell in love with one of the Hirshfield poems in this issue, titled “The Pear”. I especially loved the opening lines: “November. One pear / sways on the tree past leaves, past reason. / In the nursing home, my friend has fallen. / Chased, he said, from the freckled woods / by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais. / Delusion, too, it seems, can be well read.” The image of a single pear hanging on past ripeness juxtaposed against the image of the speaker’s aging friend still “hanging on” is lovely. I also thought her poem “Seawater Stiffens Cloth” was beautiful with imagery of the grandfather’s hands, the memory of pain in the body long after it’s gone likened to the way the presence of seawater, though evaporated, is nevertheless still evident in the cloth.

Also, I enjoyed Seth Abramson’s poems, especially “Hands are Wood”, which depicts a mill where men cut and chop and hew the wood that will become, among other things, “… packing for a transatlantic box, / or paper for essays on schadenfreude….” There is mention of a fire, of a “short history of commotion”, and we are invited to look, to watch these men do “…only / what they were made to do.” What I found most compelling about this one was its brevity, its concision, each word carefully chosen. Everything in this poem “works”. I found Cate Marvin, unexpectedly, in the comment section (I had been hoping for poems). She, along with Joshua Mehigan, participated in a section called “Curious Specimens: An Exchange”. In this section each of them responded to a book they had read, one chosen by Marvin (Space Voyager I: New and Selected Poems by Alice Oswald) and one chosen by Mehigan (Drunk in Sunlight by Daniel Anderson). The first, I believe based on Marvin’s review and their subsequent exchange, is decidedly more experimental, and the second, more “traditional”, with a Midwest, middle-class setting. I enjoyed this format for reviews, particularly the back-and-forth exchange, each of them stating what they liked about a piece and then having to defend their opinion, more than I usually enjoy reviews, which are often dry and hard to swallow unless I have nothing better to read!

Sadly, I didn’t really find Cathy Park Hong’s poems compelling, perhaps because I don’t know enough about her work to follow where she is going.