Whim, Fetish & Blogorrhea

MARY JO BANG—ELEGY

2008-09-04T11:59:00.000-07:00

My first question about Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy is whether it represents grief as obsession or obsessive grief. The persistent attention that Bang pays to her subject—the death of a child, a son— is impressive, but after a while I started to wonder if it wasn’t a little macabre. All that energy that was expended by Bang to recreate the son image by image, memory by memory was undoubtedly a tender and thoughtful effort on her part, but it also felt a little bit like entering Borges’s “The Circular Ruins” with the dreamed image slowly being dreamed until it came alive. Very otherworldly.

I can imagine some readers being put off by the obliqueness of the speaker in Bang’s Elegy. After all, we are very rarely put in touch with a straightforward depiction of what happens. The reader pieces together most of the details of the situation from the glancing blows the speaker deals to its subject in poem after poem.

With this technique of erosion, Bang seems to be commenting on the slow dissipation of grief over time, how if one befriends it and doesn’t fight it, then it becomes a companion to while away the empty hours. This is an interesting notion; however, I can’t say that my brief episodes with grief have worked that way. The loss presses itself very urgently in the moments directly afterwards. Then there seems to be a point of activation where the grief evaporates very quickly (often life’s other pressing matters begin to wear on the lingering grief).

Then again, I might just not be doing grief right. One of my brothers accused me of not grieving enough when my mother died.

I thought mom would probably understand my “callous” behavior.

So, for me, this lingering in grief and biting off a bit more to chew on poem after poem seemed a death by a thousand cuts. It didn’t map on to my experience. But of course, it doesn’t delegitimize Bang’s experience or even her depiction of said experience. To me this experience of another’s grief is the most fascinating part of the book. I find myself gawking at Bang’s odd emotional striptease, discarding layer after layer of memory and image.

The fairly opaque language (Bang’s poems are rarely straightforward depictions of experienced scenes) can be viewed in one of two ways. One perspective might be that Bang doesn’t allow her speaker to co-exist in the same space as its subject, the lost child. It is not experience rendered with any interest in heartfelt anecdote. It finds its subject in more of the details and the detritus. Bang’s speaker is not regaling the good times and the bad times. One might wonder how one is able to hold such stories at a distance, why one, a mother, would be reluctant to depict the relationship with the son in such way. It is suggestive of fracture, strain, disconnection.

However, another perspective onElegy might be that it is actually one of Bang’s most open and accessible texts. In earlier work she seems very wedded to verbal and language play as seen in 2000 from Jacket 12 . . . and probably a holdover from her days as editor of Boston Review. There is still a good bit of sleight of hand in Elegy and at least one reader has confided in me that the verbal play is irritating. But in Elegy the turns always lead to a further definition of the subject of the book. In previous work those turns would always take one to the far ends of the universe. The wilder turn always seemed better.

I found there to be some beautiful moments, despite the rather rambunctious Heather McHugh-inspired machinations of her language. In fact, my favorite piece in the book was one that McHugh chose for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2007:

The Opening

1.
Open the door and look in.
Everything is in place.
The flickering heart
The owlet eyes are locked on.
A serpentine hair hangs over an ear.
A hand comes up to touch it.
A rhythmic hum runs ahead of the wave.
Someone turns her head
And hopes, no, lopes across the lawn.

2.
Open the door and look in.
The black magic cat is clawing the sofa.
The midnight lamp is loosing some light.
Someone is getting undressed.
Her pajamas are pressed
And she’s getting into a bed of flowers.
Ophelia is lying in the bog in the park,
A moment’s orphan in the afterdark.
Sing me a song, Pet, I beg of you.

3.
Open the door and look in.
The Vivian Girls are reading the books
Their countenances were cut from.
It’s like a mirror. The parent and the penguin
Child. Two men with two suitcases.
The hand mirror making its lake
Last as long as it can.
The self looking the depth
Of Wallace Stevens’ wife on the dime.

4.
Open the door and look in.
A murder, some mayhem, the night
News. A cloak on a hook in a closet.
There’s no rug on the floor and the wood
Feels warm. There may have been an arson.
Mistakenly Released Suspect Still Missing
In Dogville or Dogtown or the Down-and-out
Sorry state of things now. Listen,
Brenda Lee is singing, I’m sorry.

5.
Open the door and look in. Look
Down the page to the footnote. To the fine print.
To the FedEx box on the bedside and
The floral print jammies that are jarring
Against the previous-era paper on the wall.
Some ice-cream topper Jimmies
To top off the night. Red Yellow Blue White.
The deer-leg lamp, says Jessica, really does work
And with that, she twirls the shade like a top.

6.
Open the door and look in.
A pin under the bed.
A dust layer on the desk top.
The minutia and the microbe, the fear of failing
To ward off the inevitable, It will be done.
Whatever the It is. The static of darkness,
The dissolve of the moment.
The mouse crawls out of its house,
Remembers where it last ate a grub.

7.
Open the door, Mother, and look in.
The babies in their boxes are sleeping like beetles
In ladybug red, each with a Santa hat.
They’re all at the border of risk,
All about to vanish into the past
Of the unvarnished after.
A longer word for gone. Girl.
Boy. Girl. Boy. Girl. Boy.
If we turn out the lights, they will keep.

8.
Open the door and look in.
In her pajamas, she looks thin.
Pale skin, short nails, hail on the rooftop
And window glass. January is ant dark
Every morning and early in the late afternoon.
With a gloom aspect like a seascape
That was smoke damaged above a fire grate.
The wrapped-mummy mood mutes
The emo that spins like a Catherine Wheel.

9.
Open the door and look back.
Over your shoulder. A peach-cheek
Love bird on a cage roost
Is swinging back and forth.
He’s nature, but he also seems nervous.
The traffic din music comes floating in.
He’s nature, but he also seems nervous.
Sing us a song, Pet, and he does. He sings of arson
In Alexandria, of Helen of Tragic of Troy.

Despite urging the reader to play at Peeping Tom, to check in on the room where the one who is lost had stayed and has now been replaced by a woman in floral print jammies, this somewhat transgressive act of voyeurism feels permissible. Bang allows her speaker to comment on Bang’s own(?) condition as the woman in the floral print jammies, the mother whose meditations on the vicissitudes of human personality have her (also) peering in on the child shortly after it is born where it is poised at the border of risk (in so many more ways than one).

The risk that is alluded to throughout the book is the aggressively aberrant behavior (with respect to drug addiction and anti-social behavior) of the son (presumably that of 37-year-old-at-the-time-of-passing Michael Donner Van Hook — to whom the book is dedicated) that is hinted at by Bang.

One is never transported into a full-on account of the details of the son’s demise, and it is curious to me to see how Bang chooses the details around the life, the detritus of a life to stand in for that drama. You can tell she doesn’t write for television. If the same subject matter were touched on by television scriptwriters, we’d have action, action, action, followed by drama, drama, drama. I suppose this is what happens when you put twenty-somethings in charge of the depiction of tragedy.

Thankfully, Bang is much more seasoned and given to repose— a luxury these days, I guess.

Her discipline to the subject of her grief is the most fascinating aspect of the book for me. With the months as our tour guides, Bang takes the reader on a journey through her grief, quietly dipping into the past days and memories of the son, taking up just enough detail to sustain her for the next ritual grieving. I kept asking myself whether this masochism was necessary. Finally, I concluded that for Bang it was. For me, probably not.

However, Bang also labors to make these poetic reflections [part oddly-turned phrase, part peculiarly-enjambed line, part alliteration-and-rhyme casserole) a work of art. This is a difficult task. One can appear to be exploitative. Yet as sensitively-attuned as I am to the gimmick or the crutch that one’s artistic efforts can be pinned to, I didn’t find those notions creeping into my head. Bang’s pain and care of attention were palpable, not an affectation in service of “art.” [Of course, I’m easily fooled by Hollywood films into thinking that what I’m seeing is genuine.] Yet, the sheer scope of the project seems to favor an interpretation of Bang’s efforts as lovingly rendered, not exploitative. The book’s theme at that point appears to be dedication, devotion . . . without doting, a difficult line to straddle, especially for a mother.

In “A Sonata for Four Hands” that initiates us into this grief space, Bang longs for the face in the photograph, then at the end juxtaposes it against the ornamentation on the morgue door. The two are synonymous. That kind of quirky association permeates Elegy and Bang’s work in general. In a sense it is, I hope, one of the things we come to poetry for, for the singular associations that a poet can bring to bear, the equivalences between the plethora of objects in a world of things. Is that beauty too? It just might be, Dorothy. It just might be. Or at least one of its distant cousins.

For those readers who might wish to have a poem’s subject more clearly delineated, Bang will seem a tad bit jittery (to crib from Tony Hoagland), and as a result, I suspect, such a reader will find such “jittery grief” off-putting. Or is it enlivening? Is Bang’s mind alive in her grief? Should we expect a more moribund treatment of the subject, a mind that stays within the parameters of just the subject, without diversion? What kind of grief would that be? What kind of voyeurs would we be to look in on that?

In “Where Once” the dead son is invoked but is immediately placed back in the world. Very often Bang employs this technique to animate the dead. It is the dead “as if”. Such a move on her part signals to me a great sense of personal regret for things turning out the way they have. Bang walks right up to the edge of accepting responsibility for fate, which, if she did, might signal a particularly unproductive space to dwell in. But I find this undercurrent of unnamed self-blame to be acutely present at certain times in the book. One almost wishes to console the speaker except for the speaker’s equally vehement resistance to being a sink for consolation.

That Bang can measure and balance these tensions consistently throughout the book is a testimony to her skill and experience as a poet. For many who have followed Bang’s wilder poems in the past, the tonal and technical shift in Elegy will be a curiosity. However, as one makes one’s way in the book, sees the subject matter at hand, one will understand this shift. In fact, it should deepen one’s respect for Bang as a practitioner. Her more obvious craftedness in this collection is done in deference to the emotional landscape of grief. Rightly, the extraneous and carefree diversion in much of the earlier work would seem out of place, like she is trivializing her pain too much, avoiding it for the sake of her own and her reader’s enjoyment.

There are plenty of other complications of tone and subject matter in Elegy if this more-stripped-down (in terms of the line) version of Bang displeases. As for me, I found it very interesting to see what happened when the generous line and imagination of Bang’s past work got toned down, became compressed by grief.

With still one more parent to go [not to mention two kids (heaven forbid, I should outlive them)] Bang’s Elegy gives me hope I can get it right the next time and adopt a more circumspect tone.

BEST OF THE BLOGS (What are you? Nuts?)

2007-01-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

It was the end of the year when I began this project/search to look for the “best of the blogs” so that I could ably assume the troubled role of tastemaker. Now it is the beginning of the next one, and I am no closer to settling the issue. Certainly the pronouncement about some past effort has no importance insofar as it does not make its mark upon the future. So while I straddle this year and the last, I will tell you what I mean by the “best.”

It is such a laughable feat that I undertake that I can almost hear that reader sobbing for the obviously poor condition my soul is in and my transgressions. I shall repent at tax time. Meanwhile I will persevere to deliver what I find online among the bloggers whose main emphasis seems to be the love of poetry. This means I am looking at blogs that put poems online (either as out-and-out published poems or as part of a review of a book or close reading of a single poem). I tended to veer away from those blogs engaged in literary theory or academic disputes about one thing or the other. Also, I discounted those blogs dedicated to the daily ephemera of the author. Many of these turn out to be the blogger’s private little soundpost to project onto the world or to air one’s grievances.

What I was really interested in was bloggers whose main interest was in delivering poetry in a satisfying manner to those who might stroll through the site.

My ranking really reflects my own desire to revisit the site in the future. It is a metric of my own curiosity if it measures anything.

1) Eileen Tabios’s Galatea Resurrects (1), (2), (3), (4) are all billed as “poetry engagements,” and this is primarily what makes them so delightful. Though the site is really an online publication dedicated to reviewing primarily small press poetry books, the dedication to the work is readily apparent. For anyone who endeavors to find that next gem from a little known press, this is the first place to stop. There is no historical context like in other high profile blogs. Just a lot of love.

2. Simon DeDeo’s Rhubarb is Susan is a compendium of “flash reviews” of poems written by a self-described “man from Chicago.” Though he does not always adhere to flash reviews, he does do the visitor to his site the service of quoting the entire poem he is looking at and commenting on. Much of the focus is towards small presses that feature experimental work (especially if the subject matter relates to science . . . as the man behind the Simon DeDeo persona appears to be a scientist . . . oh-my-god there’s a scientist running loose in the house of poetry!)

3. Kathy Kieth’s Medusa’s Kitchen is always an interesting mix of local Northern California poets’ work and the work of established poets from across the country or throughout the world (recent posts have featured Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen and Goethe. There is no era or geography she doesn’t like, but this is probably not the place to find work that is pretending to leap into some new poetic space. This is a space for good, solid, crafted work that often takes a thoughtful pose on the natural world. This site is often a good spot to check for a grounded poetry fix.

4. Paul Hoover’s blog is a great antidote to Silliman’s blog only because the posts there are more periodic and do not require a slavish acquiescence to daily opinion-making on poetry. While some might find this as not living up to the blue collar poetry ethic, I am always relieved that I do not have to wade through a month’s worth of posts to find something that is inspiring. The paucity of posts makes it easy savor them. Kudos especially to the focus on Nathaniel Mackey and Vietnamese poet Nguyen Trai as well as Hoover’s own Edge and Fold, whose cover and contents I’ve found to be very satisfying given my limited exposure.

5. James Lee Jobe’s blog does it all. Often the focus is on local Northern California poetry, but just as often it is not. A two-week sampling of poetry posts finds poems by Norman Dubie, Bob Kaufman, Forest Hamer, Lawrence Ferlighetti, Bob Hicok, Robert Bly, Federico García Lorca, Robert Desnos, Jane Kenyon, John Ashbery, Jean Follain and others. What is it with the inland empire of Northern California blogs to use the blogspace as an anthology/literary journal? The contemporary and the past poets live together in harmony. Where’s all the theory and the poetics? Where’s all the positioning of poets within a historical context? Nope. Just poems for people who love poems.

6. Sina Queyras’s Lemon Hound (now temporarily and perhaps perpetually defunct) is a Canadian offering that is talky at times, but Queyras has sworn off her blog for the time being because she wants to connect back to the physical world. That’s a reason to check in to see how that project goes into the future. One wishes her a lot of brick and mortar happiness and even a glimpse at the moon from time to time. That seems healthy enough without becoming overbearing. Her tag phrase is “pissing people off since 1969.” I find that admirable. Queyras’s photos are punctuated by snippets of Jena Osman, Laura Sims and a link to Kenneth Patchen. Any blog that offers a little self-reflexiveness is worth taking note of, and there is enough of others’ work to make one hold on to its past even as it has renounced its future.

7. Another from Canada is Jon Paul Fiorentino’s blog Asthmatronic which provides a brief glipmpse at what is new and fresh in Canadian poetry. Fiorentino, like Queyras above, is part of the Coach House Press stable, and his work is satisfyingly edgy in way that many American poets who aspire to the edge are not. The blog is mostly a collection of outtakes from Fiorentino’s reading tour late in the year, but there is enough of the contemporary poetry scene in Montreal and the rest of Canada to make the blog worthy of a stop. There isn’t always poetry in great doses here, but there often is a lot of other cultural droppings: a link to a pop bad devoted to hockey star Dale Hawerchuk and a spooky You Tube video of a Japanese-made English instructional video. And just enough venom and vigor for the previous generation of Canadian writers.

8. Heidi Lynn Staples’s Mildred’s Umbrella is a bit heavy on the links to Staples’s own poems, which is kind of like a look-what-I-got-for-Christmas kind of thing she has going on there, but I’m partial to the Herb Scott piece she has posted as well as a short piece by Medbh McGuckian she has posted. Also, I like the fact that she addresses her readers as “bloggerisimo” as though one who passes through the site must be the biggest blogger of them all.

Well, I couldn’t quite come up with 10 poetry blogs that would fit the criteria I was looking for in particularly satisfying ways, so I resorted to what many others do, I resorted to picking some favorite music titles.

1. By far this year’s most inspiring and beautiful record of the year is Eric Whitacre’s Cloudburst and other choral works. I can’t stop listening to it. Eric Whitacre is the 35-year-old choral composer phenom whose works have redefined notions of polyphony for choral music. This is unearthly stuff, but the best thing about Whitacre is that he is the only classical composer with a My Space site (for Eric Whitacre). Not only that but he has 18640 friends. Geez. That’s more than went to my high school! Swing on over to the site and listen to “Sleep.” If that’s not what you expect music to do for you, then I’m sorry for all of that. On top of all this, his librettos are taken from Rumi, Lorca, Cummings, Dickinson, and Paz.

2. OK. So maybe I’m a sucker for anything this guy does and maybe his “Romance of the Violin” made more of an impact, but there isn’t a violinist whose tone “sings” as much as Joshua Bell’s. Therefore, it is an obvious move for Bell to record “The Voice of the Violin,” where he adapts many operatic arias and other choral works for the violin. Just the inclusion of many of these pieces into the repertoire would be enough to be included in the “must-listen” category, but how Bell captures the intensity of his (and my) boyhood idol Jascha Heifetz yet makes the violin stay sweet and not sound stark is beyond me. Of course, there are many reasons why I should be drawn to Viktoria Mullova or up-and-comer Cecilia Ziliacus, but for some reason Bell remains on the top of the heap for me. Perhaps he is the undisputed heavyweight champ.

BIN RAMKE–AIRS, WATERS, PLACES

2006-10-13T01:38:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of Bin Ramke’s Airs, Waters, Places, the tone of the speaker suggests he seems to have just emerged from a department meeting fuming and struggling to believe in kindness as a viable structure for human interaction. The voice is wounded and patching holes in its armor. It is dark and poisoned by the ineptitude of the physical world (the airs, waters and places of it) despite the speaker’s seeking solace in it. It is a hard voice to warm up to with its vision of a difficult and thankless world full of foreboding, a world where one dare not be generous to others so that we might not see the self in them (as in “Tiny Wounds: A Theory of Generosity”), a world where the stranger is to be feared in order to escape empathy. This is not a very sanguine world.

Yet every time I wanted to shy away from the darkness that pervades Airs, Waters, Places, I admonished myself for doing so. For it is my belief that one of the greatest public services literature does is that it allows a reader to linger in the presence of others whose tempers and predilections are different than the reader’s own. In short it breeds tolerance. If only one weren’t charged (the price of the book) for the experience.

So I charged on, unsure of whether I could come to some position of reckoning with Ramke’s speaker in this book. This was dismaying because after “Matter,” a book largely concerned with epistemology, and a book I thoroughly enjoyed, I was wondering whether I may have made a wrong turn into this book.

After all, the long cycle of poems in “Against the Cycle of Saint Ursula (Carpaccio)” in which the saint sets out with the Pope from Rome for Cologne only to be slaughtered upon their arrival does not lend a reader to a deep massage of the feel-good spot. Also in this poem the life of, presumably, the poet and his relationship to his itinerant mother is juxtaposed against the life of Saint Ursula.

In “Surface Tension” the last lines that one comes across are “People touch and between them is a layer of darkness a thin skin of no-light keeping them apart. A world. To touch is to darken the space between. The tear is bright, it glistens, is a lens—the tear is the girl in light and the shape the world takes.” After I read these lines I knew I was in a space where all is mediated by sadness. I am not given over very easily to combing through the layered growth of pervasive sadness. Yet I continued to watch Ramke’s display in the book, perhaps a bit awkwardly, as though I were watching the pornography of grief.

I pressed on, knowing that, like eating spinach, reading this book may be good for me. I felt that it might be an important place for me to go after peering over my 8-year-old son’s shoulder as he watched his cartoons and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. But still there was more darkness as in “The Science of Reunion and Opposition”:

What is the dark if not the warning
against which we wildly wave
our little hands like antennae
dreading the crushing weight of wisdom,
of absurd logic and laughable necessity.
It is a hopeless case, and I disclaim it.
I am such a burden to me, so homemade
and so necessary.

Here the speaker seemed to self-consciously acknowledge that he is his own worst enemy, stewing up his own burden of grief as though it emanated from an internal crock pot held deeply within him.

The grief seems almost to be a natural element within the world, clinging to every bump and fold of the space-time continuum. Again, from “The Science of Reunion and Opposition”:

If I had bones to break, it would mend them
If I had numbers to puzzle, it would delude them
into submission, it is such a world
such a speculative ambition.
All is in flames, and we wish it so.
All is flame, and wishes. So.

And a little earlier in the poem, the speaker wishes for exclusion from this world.

. . . I do NOT wish
to extend so vulgarly into the world,
the room, to displace the air so rudely

The physical world seems to be a place where the ill-mannered dwell. It is thoughtless and inconsiderate too. Anything that evokes physical sensation in the speaker is “casually arrogant.”

However, Ramke is not a poet who uses his display of words to primarily explore an emotional landscape, even though the landscape of grief and darkness is dominant. He is not a confessional poet.

Like the often-invoked Rilke, Ramke’s speaker wants to seek refuge in the immaterial, the other realms (where one thinks terrifying angels might roam?). The primary other realm that comes to call is the realm of the textual. The textual interrupts continually throughout the book. It frequently emerges as marginalia (near the right-hand margin), commenting on what is going on in the text of the left-hand margin. The textual colors the physical world it is commenting on, and it serves as periodic escape hatches for the reader to bail out of the dominant left-hand margin “text of the actual world.” the brief right-hand margin quotations from mostly serious literary sources [no quotes from the Beatles or Steven Wright or Oprah Winfrey or any pop culture personality for that matter here] such as, Anaxagoras, Maurice Blanchot, John Ashbery, the Bible, Shakespeare, Rilke, Empedocles, Wallace Stevens, Pythagoras, etc.

One place where the textual actually competes with the physical is in “Moths and the Occasional Dog.”

Someone’s telephone ringing in the distance—
a sound of traffic like some ocean—wind in trees et
cetera, closer—the occasional dog—Siehe, ich lebe

I love Rilke because German is not English but almost
and I hide again and again in translations each
an obvious failure each providing room for me, Reader.

Reading a burning book turning the tinder page
at night by the light of the burning book reading
nothing burns like paper like nothing alive.

A little cluster of words to arrange—
house, school, church, a village, see how
the lights glow through painted windows.

(A bottle in the medicine cabinet
is labeled “hope” but none of us
is fooled all who can read know better.)

False fronts like western towns in the movies
behind which a duplicate reality lies
the difference is lighting—erotic to pornographic.

Seduction to delivery—the brightness of the room
and the color of its light will change or
the neon sign blinks in on

the lovers, sometimes blue,
sometimes bathed in blood
it would appear, if we could see.

The speaker is “hiding in translations” and tending the written word as though tending a bonfire. The translations here are literal ones [Siehe, ich lebe is from Rilke’s 9th Duino Elegy] and the translation of te physical world into text. The words that are arranged on the page create an alternative reality that, though false, serves as suitable alternative where a little fake brightness can seep through (unlike the actual physical reality) and deliver its judgment of the fates and lives of humans.

As I read through the book, it became more apparent that as illusory as it is, Ramke’s speaker seeks refuge in the immaterial, the particular immateriality of the text. In “String” this business with texts approaches the erotic:

Her hair thick with music lies
on me. Each time is the first. Consider
that she now predicts gravity, her theory
an art: an accident of history makes her young.
Her skin is paper and her eyes are ink.
There is no note she cannot be, no need.
Music is something she might die of, or art or
that other mathematics, the one that predicts
the end of everything.

The skin is paper and her eyes are ink. Is the text the feminine other or are there associations to be made here?

As I continued with my voyeurism into another man’s grief and his literal eroticizing of the text, wading hip deep into the snatches of quoted text in the margins, and allowing myself to become ever more haunted by texts that stand apart from the physical world, I wondered how I might satisfyingly depart the ride I was on. I was growing more and more anxious about whether I was on a “trip” that might deposit me in some unexpected aura or whether I was being driven to a final destination, a subject matter that would be summary for all that had transpired beforehand.

I admit I finally “arrived” during the last piece in the book “Gravity and Levity.” For me, this was the piece de resistance within the whole book.

Picking up on numerous images and references that have been sprinkled elsewhere in the book (see herons, Rilke, music, bleeding bodies, mathematics, explosions, theories), Ramke’s speaker engages the notion of difficulty. In line 40 he says, “In German, a language, the art of heaviness is called schwerkraft [gravity (right-hand marginalia].” The cognate for this word is gravity or perhaps more accurately “gravitational force;” however, Ramke correctly observes that schwer translates to difficulty (or more figuratively heaviness). The next few lines also quote a Rilke poem of the same name:

Schwerkraft

Mitte, wie du aus allen
dich ziest, auch noch aus Fliegenden dich
wiedergewinnst, Mitte, du Staerkste.
Stehender: wie ein Trank den Durst_

Durchstuerzt ihn die Schwerkraft.
Doch aus dem Schlafenden faellt,
wie aus lagernder Wolke,
reichlicher Regen der Schwere.

The Force of Heaviness

Center, how you fall away from everything,
draw yourself away, even from flying creatures
come back to yourself, center, you, the mighty.
You stand upright: the force of heaviness rushes

through a standing man as drink through thirst.
But falling from the sleeper,
as though from a resting cloud,
is the rain endowed with a difficult weight.

[translation mine]

One might say that, for Ramke, the difficult weight is the trap of the physical world. One does not escape it easily and not without consequence. But heaviness can also be seen as ponderousness, and in the book Ramke among many other things, ponders, and he ponders beautifully. It is the beauty of this thought world that lures him away from the grief and difficulty of the physical world.

In I saw in “Gravity and Levity” that perhaps Ramke’s subject matter is the difficulty of being ponderous, the difficulty of difficulty. This was the way in to the book, the way in that I had been hoping for all along. The grief, the wounds held on to for so long, the hard edges, the textual interruptions of the physical world are all markers of a difficulty that is central to much of Ramke’s work.

We as readers are not going to arrive at the other end of the thing without enduring some bruises along the way: the obfuscations, the obscure reference that sends one shuffling off after reference materials, the discontinuities, the brave associative leaps, the unintentional darkness of the human psyche reflecting the world it perceives. But Ramke acknowledges the difficult journey at the end of the book.

This is a bigger world that it was once
it expands an explosion it can’t help it it has

nothing to do with us with whether we know or
not whether our theories can be proved

whether or not a mathematician
knew a better class of circles

(he has a name, Taniyama, a Conjecture)
than was ever known before—

not circles, elliptic curves. not doughnuts.
Not anything that is nearly, only is, such

a world is hard to imagine, harder to live in,
harder still to leave. A little like love, Dear.

The “Dear” at the end is quite probably the reader. It is difficult to leave the world of the book that Ramke has created, but indeed we must (as readers). In this last reference to a dearly beloved, Ramke has acknowledged the difficulty of creating such a world as the book portrays and the difficulty off inhabiting it for the reader. It is only one’s passion, a love of sorts that stands as a model for how this is to be accomplished. In this last line Ramke seems to be saying that to be charged with a true passion for something is equal to enduring difficulty. By the tie one has reached the end of Airs, Waters, Places the reader has earned Ramke’s appellation of “Dear.”

DAN BEACHY-QUICK—MULBERRY

2006-09-20T01:19:00.000-07:00

Dan Beachy-Quick’s Mulberry weaves an intricate web of lyrical quasi-Dickinsonian fragments together in a manner that is reminiscent of a silkworm eating a mulberry leaf and, from its mouth, spinning a web from a single thread. This is the silkworm’s cocoon that eventually transforms the silkworm into a winged creature. The metaphors for the poet and the spoken word/text are apparent.

I use “spoken word/text” mainly because it is evident that Beachy-Quick intends his assemblage of found text and common utterance to be music in the mouth. Just as the text reiterates the fact that the silkworm’s silk is spun from its mouth, Beachy-Quick is noting that the point of origin for all poems is the mouth. The central organ for the poet is not necessarily mind, but mouth.

Another element that Beachy-Quick features prominently in the mix is a 6000-year-old Chinese urn that was constructed by rolling the clay into a thin coil and forming ring upon ring until the urn was completed. This is Beachy-Quick’s model for constructing Mulberry in such a layered fashion. Each poem is a vessel that is made of an accretion of “language coils.” These coils are often repeated in the design of other poem-vessels in the rest of the book. To my taste, the word that best describes the movement in these poems is swirl, a path circling around an absent center that is slowly filled with a sense, almost an apparition, of what is there.

The motif of the coil also presents itself in the overall organization of the book. The major sections are set off by small bullet-like dots that mark the beginning of each section. The number of bullet-like dots varies at the beginning of each section, and they follow the pattern: 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4. The repetition and re-sequencing in this series of dots mirrors the kind of repetition of the motifs that exist in the musical fragments. In addition there is an icon of a coil that is used to break up sections (perhaps individuate single poems?) within the bulleted sections. Like with the aforementioned bullet sequence, there seems to be progress, but then there is always backtracking, starting over from the beginning.

Record no oiled tongue, diary—
Note my lantern bruises the low
Clouds with light the evening
We talked. Almonds in a bowl;
She ate none. I did
Not bid her remove her dark
Gloves as sometime before she had done.
Her dress not so clean as before.
A last brand not rescued to flame—
No billow but breath, and breath
Too short a line to twine
Our hands in marriage: I left
A last time. Her in widow’s silk—
My lantern clothed in morning
Dawns on this road so late tonight
The white birches I believe,
I believe I could have loved
Her, her white wrists
White the birch trees by lantern bared,
Black gloves pulled off at night
Become the night . . . . Do you hear?
That pulse? The deer wander
Between her hands, glean fallen
seed at hand, bed down in fallen
Needles and grass. Those green discs
Afloat in the night are their eyes
Caught in lantern light. Can it be
So many wake the forest glows
With sight? See and am seen. A pulse
At the stump is breath and rest
And breath again. Infinite
In store the game of this land.
Note the plumage of the turkey.
Note the thick meat at breast.
Sap: syrup. Pine: plank. A copse
Of wood is cord for furnace. A copse
Is cottage, too. The owl in the hollow
Tree screeches because I am too close
To truth. Note the almond
Tree overmuch with fruit. The almond
Pressed is oil sweet. The almond bit
Is a smoky meat that leaves—note it:
The tongue bathed in oil.

In this piece “Record no oiled tongue, diary” the resemblance to Dickinson is apparent in the title, the often inverted structure in the sentence, the odd enjambments that color the ensuing line, and in the capitalized first letter of each line. This tendency toward the antique meshes with the subject matter in this poem. Much of the language seems to be culled from one of Beachy-Quick’s favorite sources for found phrases, the diaries of early settlers. Interestingly, though, the domestic situation maps onto the rustic contemporary almost as readily, and this is the intriguing spell of the work by Beachy-Quick. The contemporary and the antique conflate. One begins to believe, especially in other parts of this book-length poem (spun from a single thread) that the wife that is being referred to is the author’s (Beachy-Quick’s?) wife, and that these are lyric poems of a quiet, domestic life.

The almonds, the breath, the silk, the lantern, the white birches, the black gloves, the pulse are all repetitive images. The poem is bookended by the notion of a tongue bathed in oil, a phrase that generally means a smooth talker, someone with a glib tongue. Is the male speaker in this piece just such a man? The man who has left this widowed woman even though he could have loved her?

Even though the oiled tongue at the end is a literal one and at the beginning is a more figurative one, the fact that the poem uses the oiled tongues as poles for the poem suggests an invitation to judgment of the man even as he insists he does not want his diary to depict him as speaking in any other but a straightforward manner.

Certainly this is not the case for Beachy-Quick whose iterations of images strike this reader as very mannered constructions. The poems are as much about their craftedness as they are their subject matter, which for the most part, is the realm of the domestic. In this way Beachy-Quick owes as much to George Oppen as Forrest Gander does.

But along with these American writers, the swirl of his words owes even more to the Italian neo-avant garde writer Antonio Porta whose “to open” with its violent semi-narrative. Porta’s swirl of signifiers seems to reference some specific sexual violence, but like a rape narrative, never quite lands on the actual thing that has happened. It glances off the very thing that it is trying to articulate. In much the same way the speaker in these poems seems to be circling around the gist of the matter, partly out of respect for that kind of truth which is difficult to disclose with pinpoint accuracy and partly as an homage to the now, the present, that makes language insufficient to catch up and to express living in the present moment.

However, in a poem that is clearly even more pointed about its reference to the lives of the past, the lives of the early settlers, the speaker in “Posterity, this is me Now” uses a similar “language coil” effect, layering phrase on phrase, reworking the interstices between layers so that the vessel will hold water. What makes this piece particularly interesting is that it is a kind of disjointed narrative with the crucial information about these settlers withheld until the last two lines. When Beachy-Quick delivers:

We live in the sound. He found
Our voices pinned to the trees.

the reader understands Beachy-Quick’s affirmation of the insubstantiality of sound in the present moment. In the second line the reader comprehends the drama that has been building up to that last bit of revealed information. Sonically, the internal rhyme between “sound” and “found” is the motor that drives our ears to the end of the line. Also, the voices of absent people who have fled the village (only to disappear entirely from the historical record) connects logically back to the sound in the previous line.

In addition to the interconnectedness between the lines of a particular poem, one can also find word-allusions to other parts of the book. One might notice that “sap,” “syrup,” “the woods,” “a breast” also appear in “Record no oiled tongue, diary.” In a variation on a theme, the “pinned notes on the trees” appear in other poems elsewhere in the book. Once a word appears, Beachy-Quick has no inhibitions about circling back on it and spreading it throughout the book, mapping it to different contexts, in this way connecting one poem to the next in a long, continuous thread. It is this interwoven connection that also hints at the responsibility of the part to the whole, of the individual to the collective, of the dead to the living.

In “east east the great lake” the speaker’s voice seems much more contemporary, but as readers we are never very far from the idyllic. A plethora of natural words and imagery flood this section. The presence of the wife echoes against the would-be wife in “Record no oiled tongue, diary.” Yet, the poem is much more self-conscious than other sections. Beachy-Quick even seems to drop in a little ars poetica (always necessary in a sprawling poem for those who might be wondering what in the heck the author is doing.)

I sing my love to thought
In time// a silken art // philosophy
in margins // the eye cocoons
within the tongue one silken strand

Here we have something of Beachy-Quick’s poetic process. Vision is the font of the material verbiage which encases the tongue the way a silkworm encases itself in a cocoon. And of this hand-to-mouth feeding of the visual to the spoken, Beachy-Quick resorts to using the term “thought” to describe this process, a kind of marginal philosophy that has no system except for the placement of its words in interesting patterns of sound, with meaning connoted. This marginal philosophizing holds up the supple god of the present moment. All is at once extemporaneous and ever-associative.

Yes, thought takes its place quite readily in Beachy-Quick’s presentation, but is there “feeling” for those who might, more traditionally, seek this. Even though Beachy-Quick would be easily tagged by such a reader as an experimentalist, there are plenty of human connections and hints of the sensuous for the reader. First and foremost of these is the relationship of marital love. Beachy-Quick’s speaker(s) are frequently in consort position, yet never is there any full frontal display. Creaturely habits endure, and are for the most part caught within nature’s web. Occasionally, the speaker agonizes over a fit of anger or invokes grandmother whose palm was the whole bed of the lake. Most of these connections, though, are subsumed within Beachy-Quick’s habit of looking closely and seeing pattern. It is almost an ingrained sensibility, the way a spider or silkworm spins its web or cocoon. I can imagine that spider or silkworm almost anticipates the pattern before it happens. The human relationships are leveled with the setting and even placed next to the insect world (as Beachy-Quick, in Kafka-like fashion equates himself to the silkworm).

Beachy-Quick’s comparison of surfaces might unnerve some readers who look for rhetorical display that is short on ornamentation and interesting foible. This kind of reader (let us call him “laconic hombre”) will surely tire of what he sees as Beachy-Quick’s incessant word games. But this is not to say that Beachy-Quick’s Mulberry is bereft of incisive bursts. Many of the short Dickinsonian fragments penetrate and break the skin of the reader, yet it is through their repetition and re-contextualization that they lose their edge as words aimed at making a direct impression. These are words that do not assert themselves, but allude to other situations from which the reader can draw his/her own patterns of association or even of what may have happened.

“I said no prayers, but had milk reflects Beachy-Quick’s interest in the hesitancy to speak. The poem begins with italicized phrases, phrases which are assumed to be from a diary of an early Puritan settler. With these italicized sections (and a few other italicized phrases like I danced my dance) Beachy-Quick connects a contemporary domestic scene. The wife is reminding the speaker to practice his Hebrew, but the speaker seems nonplussed by this, matter-of-factly saying, “I spoke a page.” The speaker seems much more intent on watching an inchworm eat a leaf in its own backyard, watching it do its own thing. In this way its own instinctive behavior connects to the repetition of I danced my dance previously in the poem. The fact that the speaker is reluctantly concerned about the language of the past, a learned and codified language, yet engrossed in the personal expression of the inchworm, underscores Beachy-Quick’s seemingly intense focus on the instinctual habit of making language new while being shackled by the languages of the past. If behavior is another such language, then Beachy-Quick seems to be calling for a re-invention of human gesture, a re-invention of human speech patterns in particular.

While some might describe Mulberry as rangy, to this reader, the range of diction never strays from “poetic language”. Despite Beachy-Quick’s expressed interest in early American history, Puritan diaries, language philosophy, art history, and religious mysticism, (or maybe because of it) his poems never drag any diction from any contemporary setting beyond the domestic situation and natural imagery. There is not a city in sight. Perhaps to do so would have undermined the credibility of the one continuous thread from the past Puritan settlers to the contemporary domestic milieu. However, without a nod in the direction of a more familiar contemporary setting, it was hard for this reader to make the associative leap that the lives and struggles of the past are intimately connected in a single piece with those of us living in the present moment. This is curious as Beachy-Quick certainly would like for us to exalt an all-inclusive now where the past is contained in the present. Perhaps Beachy-Quick means to have the past lives of the Puritan settlers whose diaries he has mined to stand apart and separate from us now. Are they merely historical artifacts? Too many associative leaps are drawn between the two for me to believe that is the case.

Can one live the life of the Puritan in the city? Is the Puritan way of life just an oddity that makes for something to muse on, given that its mores and means are so far from our own today?

Ultimately, Beachy-Quick is probably not all that interested in the kind of political statement that pits the traditional versus the modern or one that equates the two. Rather, he seems to have a more aesthetic interest in the quality and fabric of these kinds of lives. Like Oppen, he might prefer to point out that the personal is the political. The small patterns embedded in the way one lives one’s life are intensely political. the way one uses things, today, for example, is as important as to whom or to what organization one has mailed a check of support. The small rituals of one’s domestic life is the locus from which all political choices spring. This would probably be something that Beachy-Quick’s Puritans could understand. Their daily procedures were all geared towards showing their love towards God in particularly ritualistic ways. There weren’t many flourishes tolerated as far as behavior was concerned. The fact that God (and showing one’s love towards God) was the primary organizing principle for the Puritans, then it is easy to see how one’s daily devotions reinforce the group cohesion, which, in turn, is a political act.

Beyond this observance of the political in each daily act, Beachy-Quick’s assemblage of the routines of daily life into a non-linear, dynamical space, hint at an almost mystical order in the daily routines of life. Ultimately, juxtaposing and intermingling a strangely patterned nature with an equally strangely patterned domestic life, Beachy-Quick draws a haunting parallel between the realm of nature and the realm of the human. That these two are of a piece strikes me as the raison d’etre of Mulberry. The inherent order/disorder of nature is at work pulling, pushing, gnawing, clawing also at the most basic fabric of our lives.

CAMILLE NORTON—CORRUPTION

2006-08-24T00:14:00.000-07:00

Some manuscripts become published because they present a unique way of organizing and presenting the material. They provide a novel context. Some manuscripts get published based on the strength of the language, sound, rhythm and content of the writing. Camille Norton’s Corruption was probably chosen for both its concept and its content. Corruption is the story of a life as it becomes corrupted (read educated?) by pleasure and learning, by the internecine warfare between the heart and the mind.

In the first part of Corruption the National Poetry Series winning book, Camille Norton deftly weaves a contemporary speaker into the lives of Florentine paintings done during the age of Medici rule, a ruling family that was as noted for its corruption as it was the birth of the Italian Renaissance.

Using the material culture of the Medicis, a green baize (felt) table, paintings by Caravaggio, Savonarola’s cape, Norton meditates on their significance during their time while she marries them with a contemporary speaker who is in the midst of various sorts of bodily corruption. In doing so, she seems to be equating the era of licentiousness among the Medicis to the obsession with bodily pleasure in our own.

The speaker in these poems, however, is more than nostalgically equating these two eras in human history. The setting in both this time and Medici Florence serves the purpose of letting the speaker explore the mysteries of desire, particularly that of the feminine in its complicated system of restrictions and allowances. She sees hints of the feminine in a painting by Buonaroti hanging in The Gallery of Slaves. A slave that is depicted appears to be indistinct with regard to gender, but despite the young slave’s beauty, Norton’s contemporary speaker sees the slave as “imitating that look we call femininity.” The speaker recognizes the submissive role of the slave as one that inscribes the feminine, and it is this role that the contemporary speaker in the book continually negotiates, negotiating how the submissive must subjugate desire.

Paired with this contemporary speaker’s focus on the curtailment of desire is another concern for the life of the mind. The speaker sees the life of the mind as a dark and heavy counterpart to the life in the physical world where beauty reigns.

The Ideal City

Anonymous, c. 1475, Tempera on Panel,
Calleria Nazionale Delle Marche, Urbino

for Maurine Stuart, Roshi (1922-1990)

After a long exile, the city of the mind must look like this—
placid because uninterrupted by what happens next

and therefore pleasing, pleasing and empty.

Here the light clicks across the white and gray
Carrara marble and pietra serena

going nowhere, intending nothing.
It is beautiful. It is itself.

Light then, light as it breezes through
vacant piazzas and quiet loggias,

light as it unravels,
illuminating interiors where no one lives or dies or loses ground.

Light as a systematic display of single point perspective
hastening now around the columns of the rotunda

then slipping through a small red door
into the refuge of a stanza.

All your life you thought of such a room and then you found it.

When a woman starting up from the sensible world
catches sight of beauty, she should not look back

at all she used to love. Her body moves
into a light so absolute it casts no shadow.

Nobody here, nothing to do, you said in your hospital bed.

Then you disappeared.

The body is pitted against the mind in its ideal city, empty and therefore beautiful. Yet it is surprising how frequently Norton champions the mind despite what is signaled in the verse. These poems are intelligent, scholarly. It is not surprising to see how Campbell McGrath would find this collection so appealing. The poems make their mark because of the careful attention employed and the connections derived from these observations, connections which range all over the map. This is not to say that Norton has as much of a prose-ish ear as McGrath. There are many areas in the book where image and sound take precedent, and it is clear that Norton finds the feminine beauty more attractive than male logos.

In section 2 of Corruption Norton turns her gaze away from historic depictions as they appear in works of art and towards a speaker’s experience (presumably Norton’s own experience).

But in “Camera Obscura” the poem that serves as the title for section 2 of the book, Norton reveals:

When I looked down I could see
straight into the heart of a scene, only in reverse,
so that I saw history first, then the transfer
of the present bleeding through the pinholes
like light on the screen of my mother’s face,
the way it settled unhappily there

Seeing first the past in the present is an obscure perspective for sure. But it helps to explain why the past is always cropping up in section 1, where the Medici Era seems more securely fastened to her work than the present day. The Medici helps to explain the temperament of our own time. This obscure perspective also helps to explain why in section 2, as Norton reflects on the construction of her self, she finds her first impulse to see how the past helped to shape her temperament, her push to pursue the life of the mind as compensation for an apparent lack of it in her childhood.

Section 2 is the autobiographical section, the section where Norton spreads her life (especially her familial life) before the reader. None of these is more affecting than her poem for her father where she tries to visit him after he has died through an opening into the dream world. She does so in order to repair what had been damaged between them, but she is rebuked and finds the settling of the real material world has exacted a resolution to their relationship.

Aperture

The night my father died the salt and the rain went out of him.

leaving behind a reverberation
like sunlight skimming through glass

It was like that just after
and for some time
it was like that

like light behind film strip, a ticking mutability in everything
left behind on the nightstand, it was so little, it was nothing
in the way of effects

He had nothing to leave us—

his poor man’s watch winding down imperceptibly in its steel case,
the narcotic trade in empty pill cups, nine copies of his brother’s
face on nine 1987 Mass cards, his radios, his radio batteries,
his hearing aid (despised, cast off, it never fit),
The Philadelphia Inquirer folded at the spine as he would have
folded it,
his white cotton handkerchiefs, clean and triple-creased—
he did not die penniless, exactly—

the object world survived him

And it was animate

Animate with its own disappearance
as if it had bubbles in it, tiny apertures
and pinpricks of negative space
through which we would all disappear sooner or later

Why this should console me I cannot say but it did
and I knew, even as I stood in the door of his closet,
that when the scent of his shirts began to degrade
I could do nothing to stop it
though I must have felt I could follow it as if it were

a thread
leading to the other side of matter
where the problem of matter is repaired

They say that you should not importune the dead
too soon in their dying

because they go on dying awhile elsewhere

But one night soon after we buried him,
while I lay sleeping in my father’s bed,
I knocked at his dream and entered it

He seemed surprised, as if I were an acquaintance
who had climbed the stairs on a whim, without invitation
He was sitting mildly on a small chair in a clean blue shirt
He was young and slim, my bachelor’s father, he was unaware
that he was young and slim, that his hair was black
as a pirate’s, that he would ever grow old or that I
would ever be born
Until he said: I’m dead, can’t you see that?
Get away from here And I was out, out with a force

I trespassed and survived it

Then my sister’s hands were on me.
She was warm, she smelled of chocolate
She brought me water in a bathroom cup
that had ridges in it from where it had melted
in the dishwasher a long time ago
We talked ourselves to sleep, we slept
past the broad stripes of July sun
ticking across the pavement
We slept all afternoon

and when we woke

the surface of the world had slipped
and locked into place
between our bodies and the myriad portals
through which the branching streams
flow in the darkness.

From this poem Norton further explores the nature of an indeterminate intermediate state between the living and the dead. In a series of poems related tobardos (a Tibetan word that refers to, among Buddhists, the state of existence between incarnations), she enters into a dialog with her parents (though mostly her mother) while they are in their transitional states and wonders why they were the way they were. Norton’s “mind is crying out” to them and contemplating some regrets (her mother’s dissembling mind) she still has, wondering what piece of her parents is left in her.

What part of you belongs to me,

bitter, beautiful woman?
Spit on the ground.

Come back to your body.
Your own mind’s shining before you,

all that willfulness, bad temper,
all that toughness carried lightly

The contemplation of her parent’s imprint brings the speaker in section 2 to examine herself for the choices she has made in her life, (“and if we choose, what do we choose—the manner of our arrival or of our departure?) the choice of where love’s pleasures have been taken, the choices of relationships squandered and built. All the while the speaker is badgered about these choices by the mother.

I’m forty-eight and I hear my mother
in the well of my bed, like a bellwether rising late

from the dream of loneliness:
You chose this, you chose this

In section 3 of the book Norton further screws into the self she has created. However, the self vanishes in “Monday Music,” an unusual piece from the perspective that the speaker’s self is derived from a vanished Monday Music Club 1912 that, again prefaces the past within the present. In this case, like the music club, Norton’s speaker seems to be flattening and disappearing, a fallen subject that has attained its vanishing point.

Monday Music

Nobody, no one, not one, not a single one
hears me at the piano playing the white keys.

I make a truant sound.
I am as eloquent as anything

I heard in the world on Sunday.

Do you remember those conversations?
Accidental, repetitious as language in dreams?

I wonder why it is I know so little
about the black keys,

how they marry and come apart
in the history of a scherzo

or in the history of a scene
in which I play myself

playing only the white keys.

Sometimes I write myself
into a sheet of music

using the usual notations,
my little signs and jokes

of self disappearing.

White, white paperwhites
bloom in winter.

There are birches outside the house.
White crocuses in the snow.

The house is white too.

Above the door, on the lintel,
someone’s carved the words

Monday Music Club 1912.

Before the first war happened and the other wars,
the door swings open on its iron hinge

and there’s no one at the piano,

nobody I tell you,

as the door swings open.

Like the diminishing sustain of a piano key, this speaker floats into white noise, which is aptly signaled with the paperwhites, white crocuses, birches in winter. The emanation for this speaker seems eerily to be a historical point which, though it has made its imprint in the past, no longer has much effect on the present in its insubstantial form.

This piece is the gateway to section three because it leaves the historical self behind and ventures forward as a self inscribing itself in the world, sometimes to the point of its own negation. The self navigates its cultural present and even turns to forms in nature in “Songs Against Ending,” the hedonistic fruit fly, the multi-gendered earthworm, the wayfaring and embattled water beetle, the moth holding to its own shape and aesthetic. These are Norton’s totem animals in section 3. They are her guides and stencils to the shaping of self. Later, in “Wild Animals I Have Known” Norton invokes animals as stand-ins, but these animals are not taken from nature but rather from animals in stories, fables, and mythology: the Frog Prince, The Ugly duckling, the “clone,”the hydromedusa, and Babe the Blue Ox. In this way the self is not shaped in a cultural abyss, without information being thrown into the mix. References to Stein and Levertov also appear as well as language from “Hush” that sounds vaguely Deleuze & Guattari-like.

. . . like minimalist
compositions scored to re-
repeat, repeat, repeat

the pulse of machines
the pulse of our desiring
to live in machines

However, it is in “Ugly Duckling” where Norton/Norton’s speaker makes its clearest identity statement:

I speak from here, where pressure blooms

out of me like a baby or like a sac
of meaning and what I want to say

is that I am not what I was. I am
a changeling, half-creaturely,

half other-than-creature,
like a mind inside a body

or like a coil inside a girl,
her sleeping snake, her phallic shape

waking into utterance.

The line that is most interesting is the “half other–than-creature.” Would this mind inside a body be like the software that runs the CPU? Is this the cultural programming that the speaker seems to allude to again and again in section 3?

Norton reminds us that the self is not a SCUBA diver, contained all by itself within its separate domain. The exchanges are with the historical and natural primarily, but also with the literary and the musical, and all of these play a part in fixing the self within its grid of operations. The instructions are played out for the self again and again until the “file” is corrupted, unable to be retrieved, vanished into the unparseable.

I suspect some might find Norton’s work, like Campbell McGrath’s, a bit too scholarly. The historical artifacts embedded within the verse might strike some as treatise-like, and for this reason, they might seem unfriendly to the common truck driver or cafe waitress who needs to know nothing about the machinations of the Medicis in pre-Renaissance Florence. To this, I respond with curiosity. I wonder what makes this presumption so. Is it all working-class people who have no appreciation for the cultural and historical presence in their daily lives? Or is it only American working class people who, as they are too frequently depicted in movies and TV, damned righteous about their ignorance. The reality always strikes me as far from this kind of depiction. In this regard, the backdrop for many of the historical poems in section 1 are not solely accessible to someone with an advanced degree. They are for everyone who has ever wrestled with how the heart finds a mind to attach to, and how the mind gives way to the heart even as both are undercut by the body’s demands. This is the story of mutual corruption of heart and mind and the natural impulse that makes it possible.

Note: For those within hollerin’ distance of this blog’s point of emanation, please bear witness to the fact that Camille Norton will appear Mon. Sept. 25 at 7:30 PM at the Sacramento Poetry Center for a reading.

BRENDA HILLMAN—PIECES OF AIR IN THE EPIC

2006-04-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

One of the most endearing things about the wind is that it is impossible to harness it as it blows through you. Unless, of course, you happen to be Uakti. Then the wind blows through you and seduces as it does so.

In Brenda Hillman’s Pieces of Air in the Epic the spirit of Uakti is alive and hypnotic. The phrasal clusters and perturbations from the exterior that Hillman assembles and merges together ring like the intonations of a bamboo flute droning in order to inspire a meditative state. Pieces of Air in the Epic is the second book in a proposed tetrology honoring the four elements. Cascadia was the first book dedicated to an examination of the metaphors of the earth. Pieces of Air in the Epic deals with air and its various manifestations—wind, whipper of dust, medium for sound and light, container of the vocable and song, matrix for aura, marker of the ineffable (such as the space between the vibrating strings of string theory) etc.

However, there is ample time spent “commenting/noting” the current political zeitgeist, as if it were unavoidable to have the tenor of our current political age to infiltrate one’s mental space. Such a piece early in the book is the following:

The Value of Empty Protest

Longing declined;
whatever had been charged with it,

what curls, what
octave flowers
angered the voice ramp

which for a while called
from their gray-rim signs
Come back to the stamped
lawn as people cheered,

wearing an abyss
for the whorled
capitol, threads dangling

from their placards,
from misery of capital, known

as a crowd
in the crowd and
they would lose again,

as a wheel loses,
taste, past,
skies reptilian and vast,

nothing to sell but being
sold, mute hands clapping at the
why of whys—

This piece seems to be a nod toward the frustration of so many who, in the face of the current administrations’ predilection toward gut instinct, lament the current administration’s imperviousness to fact and data. The piece also seems to lament the American public’s perception of wearily being bought and sold. [Note: Number of consecutive years that the U.S. median income has failed to increase: 5; Number of consecutive years that the percentage of Americans living in poverty has increased: 4 (Harper’s Index November 2005)]

The intriguing aspect of this poem is whether to read the title as sincere or ironic. The speaker(s) seem(s) to point to acts of empty and useless protest with “placards” on the “stamped lawn.” Is the speaker(s) suggesting the value of this kind of protest is valueless? Or is the speaker suggesting there is something strangely cathartic in experiencing in vain protests as a manner of finding personal redemption? The last line seems to leave the speaker(s) in a state of wonder, in a state of awe at the bewildering force that shapes historical moments. Is this the value, the value in recognizing the point when things have taken a turn? Of course, this kind of perceived abstract distancing always inspires the ire of those who participated in the protest, inviting the query of who the speaker might be that he/she can afford such a privileged perspective and not be entangled in it (as they have chosen to be).

The strategy of the poem is to use rather oblique language to get at the themes mentioned above. This, as opposed to an explicit treatment of the protest scene and explicit commentary on the political subject matter, places the protest into the realm of the abstract. It is meant to be pondered as social phenomenon the way one contemplates a change in shape of a cloud or the consequences of a tectonic shift in 1906. This is to say that whatever is “going on” in Hillman’s poems, it is usually measured through the lens of contemplation and abstraction and the beautiful and terrible fractals that human history proliferates.

Of course, the medium of this abstraction (language) is also fair game for the poems’ speaker(s) to work on. Many pieces let the English language as a construct intrude, such as with “Study of Air in Triangles” where Hillman writes, “When I saw the world’s triangles, some letters came: / First a Y then N & especially A.” The letters occupy a nest and become sound that fills the evening. In this passage, one encounters a theme that is held to in nearly every piece throughout the book. The abstract is present, real, concrete, as concrete as birds’ beaks or the yellow meadow. But in the poem where language has been compared to birds, the speaker asks if “these birds be subject to a geometry”? Is there an ultimate form to the rambling nature of language, a Chomskian deep grammar or some other such structure. The speaker in “Study of Air in Triangles” posits a temporary structure that relates to the triangle, then the speaker reconfigures that structure so that its points align differently. This is the way that Hillman’s speaker(s) move through the world and through poems, confabulating and reconfabulating their physical and mental space.

While some may read Hillman’s work as “fragmented,” echoing the current critical term that is used to describe what Tony Hoagland calls “skittery,” I would use a slightly different term to describe her assemblages. The material, though disparate, does not fracture as much as it is allowed to intrude onto the trace of the poem, or as Hillman puts it so well, it is “side stories leaked into the epic, told by its lover the world.” The relationship of the disparate material to other disparate material in the poem is that of a lover’s relationship, not as agent of deconstruction reminding the reader that the mind’s constructs are fragile and not up to the task. Hillman asserts a more constructive position for the mind. It assembles, but it does so in a manner which suggests artifacts that are lovingly culled by a seasoned archaeologist whose main reason for culling is not to disprove that dinosaurs were a freakish collection of bones and teeth, but to ask questions about how they lived and what they thought about what how they lived.

If this is still fragmentation in some people’s eyes, then it is their task to live with this outlook. Another more fruitful question to ask is what is the spirit of assemblage that is present. Are the movements from one field to the next, rough cuts, jump cuts? Or do they move more slowly, inviting the reader to experience their languor? Are the movements slow accretions or undercuttings? Do they aim at a single revelation or, like their disparate sources, are they meant to reveal a panoply of refracted concepts without a singular conclusion?

A great example of a poem that is ambitious in its form and content and delivers marvelous complexity and breadth is, in my opinion, the centerpiece of the book, “String Theory Sutra.” The poem is divided into two columns. The left column proceeds down the page as single-spaced lines; however, the right hand column, beginning with line two, provides a short line followed by another double-spaced line. The effect is that the reader moves from 1) left column, line one 2) left column, line two 3) right column, line two 4) left column, line three 5) left column, line four 6) right column, line four and so on. The necessary crosstalk between columns suggests the importance of interplay and interaction in texts, primarily between that of reader and writer, but also between writer and subject matter. It is this weave of the thread that ties the form together with the threads of string theory. The poem touches on other ground too, how subjectivity is also threaded together,

The poem ranges from a small meditation on subjectivity, then it touches on the history of the spinning wheel, the nature of string theory and how it resembles the Bay Area community of poets. Then it heads for some quotidian observations made at a park and the insect noises that persist there. A “thread” is then picked up on where the speaker talks about different fabrics—flag cloth that is used as ties for airline pilots, women in medieval times whose weavings took on significance beyond the representational. The seam as metaphor for the poem emerges. The speaker then endeavors to sort out to whom it is presenting itself, who the “you” and the “they” is in the poem. The speaker embarks on the poetics of the poem, its project of making “meanings which hang tatters of dawn’s early light in wrinkled sections of / the druid oak with skinny linguistic branches, Indo-European roots & the weird particle earth spirits”

Dream voices appear. The speaker (imagines?) herself as a seamstress for the missing queen (one of the medieval seamstresses mentioned above? presumably so) A litany of fabrics is presented. An atheist doctor who says “God Bless You” in order to facilitate human connection with his patients is invoked. Then, the speaker heads back to string theory, using its threads as a metaphor for how meaning is sewn into a subjective state. Sisters of the speaker are invoked and told by the queen, “Be what you aren’t.” A short discourse on negation and opposition leads to a questioning of the long-term usefulness of revolution and the role of the nation-state versus the role of the tribe in the history of human social organization (the speaker seems to prefer atomization rather than consolidation . . . is this contrary to “sewing” metaphor in the rest of the poem?) 1937 nylon parachutes are brought into the mix. Churchill and Rimbaud appear. Another metaphor of “sewing,” that of the bringing together of opposites, the Hegelian dialectic, is presented. More lament about the current political state of affairs in America (a prevalent undertaking in the book) surfaces. A segue into Santayana’s “thin thread of calculable continuity” is risked and it bears fruit in the later notion that the thread that stitches together subjectivity can seem ineffable, elusive, shadow-like in its workings. The possibility that the stitching together of subjectivity is invented (like string theory itself) rears its head. The notion of the “stitching” being a mental construct is dealt with. Other motifs, like the flying shuttle and the parsing of the pronouns in the piece return. The reader is reminded that textiles sing and another litany of fabrics is used to ramify this idea.

Then the two lines that serve as the crescendo of this miraculous symphony appear: “Human fabric is dragged out, being is sewn with terror or awe / which is also joy. Einstein called mystery of existence ‘the fundamental emotion.’” Finally, the speaker asks, “How am / I so unreal & yet my thread is real.”

So the synopsis of this long poem, the trace of its path, its “thread,” only runs three paragraphs? Wouldn’t it just have been easier to type in the poem itself? Perhaps. But it would have been a time-consuming proposition as well as a formatting nightmare.

Yes, for those readers who prefer the fixed frame, this poem is not going to satisfy you the way someone with a good, firm, honest handshake would. That’s too bad. Sometimes people try to engage each other with their intelligence, with their language as both considered and playful thing. Is this not at least as legitimate a greeting as the embrace or the double kiss on the cheeks?

If one is interested in writing the long, multiplicitous, intellectually complex poem (by the way, are American poets still allowed to do this?), then “String Theory Sutra” is worth the price of admission for the whole book. It is that sparkling, dazzling jewel that you can’t take your eyes off.

It is one of the two finest long poems (the other being Bin Ramke’s “The Naming of Shadows and Colors”) that I have read in years.

One other kind of treatment that Hillman offers in the book is her rumination on numbers and their “airiness.”

Confused 3’s

Faint confused 3’s dialed from mobiles

Searching for signals from hire hovels

3’s from hire hovels airport users

Stock rubble NASDAQ making info bubble

Crookened stubble George’s W George’s III

U-Bahn girls’ hard-on-sized cell phones

Dialed 3’s snagged in nylon air

Invisibly 3’s = half-hearts sideways

God used 3’s tons of them

Walter B liebened Gretel poor 3-some helium

Face-down mystic Fraulein bitte fraulein please

Rehearten 3’s for no seized-on power

This more discontinuous presentation is a blatant experiment in language. In particular, it addresses the novelty of expression and how numerical terms are abundant within neologisms. The program of this kind of poem appears to be collage. The figures used in this collage indicate a world ruled by numbers that is inhumane and solely utilitarian. “NASDAQ bubbles”, “Face-down mystics,” and “half-hearts sideways” intimate this. The “seized-on power” for which 3’s are reheartened suggests that numerical fluency is the dominant mode of discourse. The legitimacy of numerical abstractions versus the illegitimacy of linguistic abstraction is even seconded by God whom the speaker informs, “used tons of 3’s.” The gist of the poems is that “a man with numbers can put your mind at ease” (as an obscure Paul Simon song puts it).

The juxtaposition of numerical abstracts next to linguistic abstracts occurs in a series of pieces. Hillman has “tribute” poems to 5, 6, and 7 also, and they all reside within the larger structure of “The Corporate Number Rescue Album.” Certainly not too far from the veiled surface is a condemnation of corporate culture.

Another interesting section of the book is the section entitled “Nine Untitled Epyllions.” An epyllion is a “little epic” that was cultivated in the Hellenistic era. It is a narrative that embraces mythological subjects and is characterized elaborate and vivid description, learned allusion, lengthy digression and an interest in psychology. It often narrated only a few events in the life of an epic hero, who is then humanized by being placed in an ordinary situation.

The epyllions that Hillman writes vacillate between white-print-on-black-background poems that are less narrative, almost verging on collage again to the black-print-on-white background poems that are lyrical expressions of a speaker that rapidly becomes decentered from its historical past as seamstress (a motif that is followed up in “String Theory Sutra”) into the present condition of America at war. The seamstress from the past comments on the excesses and stupidities of the war even as the seamstress sews the shroud flags. Everywhere American culture is under indictment.

Another sequence of poems that Hillman includes is the set of ten poems that seem to have a large library as their setting.

: : : An Oddness : : :

A scent rather quietly loves
the library. Readers look up: a
life of paper inside the great
Life: scent of greenly ravished civilization~~
dream of inspiration freed. When a
book is lifted from horizon’s steel
that mystery object spreads an oddness
each call number a timeling of
yellow math, its curve leftover from
epic. the mind had no periphery
for meaning, the several phoenician, sailing
sideways through vowels of the dead.

As the series progresses, the meditation on scholarship turns to comment on history, making meaning, the nature of thoughts (particularly odd ones), the casual slip into dualism and subsequently paradox, the presence of aura, etc. My rendering of these poems above does not do justice to the arrangement on the page. The lines are broken into 1, 2, and 3-word clusters with more than one space from the space bar separating them. This provides the appearance of air between the words, and Hillman is suggesting that in these passageways dust motes can do their thing. In “: : : Epoch of Dust : : :” she writes, “Between each word the century rests its nothing air.” The emptiness that presides is filled up with scattershot words that congeal to found their meanings together as a collective. Whether they are gleaned from other texts or poised at the threshold of experience and observation doesn’t matter because in Hillman’s world (and by extension, the reader’s as well) the source of language isn’t as important as the workmanship involved in putting the pieces of the fabric of a life together.

The ubiquitous odd thoughts that populate Pieces of Air in the Epic are the byproducts of a strange and large world whose bits recombine in unusual patterns. The crossings and connections are “like spare dreams of / citizens where abstraction and / the real could merge.” The presence of strangeness in all its is a celebration of vastness in the world more than it is any kind of tricky intellect designed to goad the reader into accepting the speaker’s brilliance. Pieces of Air in the Epic is a monument to a concerted mind pressing itself on the world (and, by contrast, a mind generous enough to let the world intrude) which results in some anomalous high-flying sparks.

RUTH ELLEN KOCHER—ONE GIRL BABYLON

2006-04-20T22:07:00.000-07:00

Imagine a life that is treated with restriction enzymes so that the fragments of that life are swirling around in a tiny amount of liquid at the bottom of an Eppendorf tube. As the fragments recombine, they come together to anneal at strange junctures. The trauma of violence and abuse anneal to the colors and inexplicable rhythms of nature. The DNA that results miraculously produces an animal that is both “cerebral” and “emotional” and can be loved and cared for by either camp. These are poems that beg to be domesticated in that they prepare the reader for the familiar wild, the back lot that has grown over with dark, prickly bushes which threaten to draw blood as one wanders through them.

Kocher is the singular Babylon, a collection of shed particles, the considered ruin. She thinks through image and sound (though not to the same extent as Clark Coolidge thinks through sound) in a language that is lush (a term she uses to describe her own work in “Making the Reader Work”). Established meter gives way to a more syncopated feel, a jazz prosody, where the comma serves as breath for the soloist to pursue another direction with the phrasing. Each new direction entangles speaker and reader on a voyage through territory that is unclaimed by any nation. Yet the territory is familiar, populated by bone, blood, and gristle. Love lost and longing. In this manner, the old line drawn between “cerebral” and “emotional” is rent asunder . . . and not a moment too soon.

Pleurisy

All night you feel
red horses galloping through your blood
hear a piercing siren, and are in love
with the inexplicable

—Arthur Sze

Through the ocean you weather, deep
waves uncurled into the pain of pink tissue
failing between your ribs, imagine the body
yields to a spell that goes like this:

A band plays a march somewhere.
The sun has found its winter arc.
The volcano looks like an eye from above.

Remember,
in a love hex, it’s all rhythm
so within each square is another, another
until pain becomes a twin some mornings:
the sharp shape of your lungs galloping.

And what of the past, heals:
watching the fish die, you realize
the dream of horses, the snake
veined like a cock. Now,
before the evening tells you
everything you’ll soon forget, say this:
The living are at my window,
calling me out. I am unconcerned
about what’s over the mountain.
The other side. Yes, the old woman
was beautiful in her death.

Could you have been forsaken
tonight? A painless sleep:
lungs became horses, charged,
stood high on back legs, facing,
their front hooves lightly flanking . . .

If you are lucky,
the temptation to escape takes you
whole at midnight and desire is overripe,
drips the red risk of pomegranate.
Even your footprints can’t find you.

You are lost. Love this.
You are lost and never found.
Here is the healing: the airplane
crosses through your morning
with the roar of last year, a season of icicles
plunged into your sternum, a one-night stand,
a lost fang begging his way into your home.

Forget him. Forget him.

The imperative at the end of this piece is a rhetorical construct that Kocher uses frequently. She weaves her magical web of life fragments and intoxicating sound, but she never abstains from giving direction to the reader. Or is the last line an appeal to hope, that there is a course of action that can be taken which leads one out of the dense emotional forest? the imperative peeking through reminds the reader that there is will in the speaker and not just another dreamy voice walking through the universe and fetishizing things and the life within those things.

Another aspect of this piece that is worth noting (even worth duplicating for those who are not sheepish about weathering the accusation of being “uneven”) is how the diseased condition (that of pleurisy) transforms itself into a “love sickness” and how “healing” is the action that binds these two disparate items together. The interlude with the procession of animals in stanza 4 reins in the Sze epigraph. While some who prefer “the fixed frame” in poetry might find this move unnecessarily digressive, I find this move to expand the scope of the poem into territory that connects with something unresolved in the poem. In doing this, it invites me as a reader for a closer look, a second look, even a third or fourth. I imagine that those who find the “puzzle” aspect of poetry distasteful would flinch at Kocher’s move, but I say we should raise our glass to the good ol’ days (before the easy FOX NEWSification of everything) when it was OK to think and consider a thing for longer than three minutes.

In stanza 5 the metaphor of the horses is returned to explicitly (with the italicized voice picking up the theme this time). In stanza 6 Kocher turns toward the theme of being consumed by passion which will drive the poem to its conclusion where the he is vaguely equated to a lost dog.

That’s a lot of work to move through the various scrims Kocher has placed before the reader, but the following is an even more ambitious piece which speaks to the title of the book.

To Speak is to Speak About the Fall

Babylon in all its desolation is a sight not so awful as that of the human mind in ruins—Scrope Davies

I.

I see these things in my life:
a circle of boulders
perched on a hill, the side of a hill,
a bird flattened by boulders and placed into a fold of sod
buckled on the side of a hill—
a thrush flattened and placed into a can that’s been
cleaned and placed carefully into a fold of sod.

Almost everyone knows the noise
caused by any round
tin object . . . the lid of a canister,
when it slips from one’s grasp.

I am paralyzed to see people eating
alone in restaurants or singly
holed-up in theaters,
keeping the dark near them as siblings
sharing their bad dream
a bed away, or the very old, the old men in grocery stores
holding a can close. The words,
label, the eyes wandering.

Ordinary life shackles us. Swallows us
whole even within our dreaming.

II.

I loved plums. I loved plums most the three summers
I could not eat them without raw hives
swelling my lips and tongue, my throat
thick, closed to breath, plum-purple
arrogant as blood drawn in a cold room by a cold
nurse who does not look at you because
she will love you and you will let her, let her go,
let her take you into a charge of submission and larger yet
her cold hands collapsing into themselves
while her own veins struggle,
blue beneath thin skin.

Let her go.

there were bridges in my life for many years,
bridges in my life where the floes of ice
caught up and scraped the winter into ears of runners
crossing the bridge like thrushes who didn’t care about cold
except winter them from eating—
life, yet, beating in their ears.

Have you forgotten, I’ve touched your palms,
your fingertips . . . Let the gods speak softly of us.
Have you forgotten, if I could forgive, I would . . .

III.

In my death, I would be sitting with Cochise still angry about his children
disappeared into the grass of a quiet field, angry about the indifference
of the wind,
and the deep witness, sky.

The enormous tragedy of your dream is the peasant’s bent shoulders.

If the life, dying, could find sleep,
I would be sitting with Catherine de’ Medici, eating
artichokes served with the brie of her servants’ kitchen.
Thin butter would run from her chin
like a child’s slobber, run from her chin onto my arm
so that now I hear her laughing. She laughs in her purple skirts,
her purple bodice and the posture
of her corset boned with a splay of whale ribbing.

Have you forgotten, she is the noise caused by any round
thin object, of any object falling when it slips from one’s grasp . . .
We have dreamed this all of our lives.

If she falls as I wake, although waking me, my body
will see these things—dumb with paradise,
caught in the open glare of artichokes, the green clutch,
purpled skirt—my life, a circle, perched and buckled.

Here Kocher is ultimately ruminative about her life. She seeks refuge in Cochise and Catherine de’ Medici as foils to her own life which serves as an example of a life fragmented by desire, a mind as ruin. The historic, the everyday, and the dream world converge to offer a tempting splay of possibilities for the life of the contemplative, condemned to being dispossessed of its faculties as it tracks down every imaginable loose end which desire compels it to explore.

But Kocher is not always providing “evasive” assemblage. At times the images align themselves into something more approachable, more willful. In “Vicinity,” suspicion by others fuels the identity statement.

Vicinity

for K.E.Q.

After church, the neighborhood returns to its failing.
The lights come on. Children retreat to their rooms.
In my driveway, ants continue to make good

of the cactus wren’s dead flight while deaf Jim waters
the arbor vitae. The old widow next door to him
checks her car again and looks at my house,
knowing blackness is up to no good,
in her trunk, maybe, or at her roses when
she’s sleeping. Wave hello and pass,

wave hello and pass her mint-green house,
ill-decision, another decade’s color scheme
gone wrong, even in the awnings striped white.
The girl who knew me a decade earlier was right.

I am more black when I’m barefoot.
I am more black when I walk down the street,
carrying my shoes like I just don’t care.

Kocher’s neighborhood is recalled rather matter-of-factly. A denizen of a more racialized past serves as the focal point for Kocher to regard her racial identity as irrelevant, a detail as insignificant as the activities of the ants and the cactus wren. Inclusion of these details of the minute fauna serves to level the concerns in the latter half of the poem with those kinds of minutiae.

Even the most casual reader will notice the syncopation in Kocher’s lines, the repetition and then the lurch forward like in below:

in a love hex, it’s all rhythm
so within each square is another, another
until pain becomes a twin some mornings:

The effect is like that of Charlie Parker (if you make a mistake, make it again). Is the mistake here “another”? Or does the comma just replace the word “and”? It definitely “lurches” at the comma.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a cold
nurse who does not look at you because
she will love you and you will let her, let her go,
let her take you into a charge of submission and larger yet
her cold hands collapsing into themselves
while her own veins struggle,
blue beneath thin skin.

Let her go.

In this passage the refrain of “let” placed right after the comma sets the reader to considering the speaker’s mind is lurching/darting in another direction and that the linchpin of the new diverted thought is the repeated word. Kocher’s rhythms don’t leap around like Joshua Redman playing “St. Thomas.” They certainly don’t approach Sonny Rollins’ noodling. However, they are central to the way she plies her craft. This is evidenced by this candid photo at a recent reading where she held the fingertips of her right hand above her larynx as she read (see photo below).

When I asked her about it, she said she holds her hand there to feel the resonance of her voice and to register, in a more physical way, the rhythms of her poem. Sound is definitely an important ingredient in her work, and it accentuates the image play and juxtapositions rather than adding noise to the assembled matter.

Finally, there is sassy Kocher, where the spirit that usually dwells in the realm of contemplated beauty is given permission to put a few things on her mind out in the open.

Ode To the Woman Who, On the Day I Earned a Doctorate, Mistook Me For a Shoe Clerk

I want to tell you I loved how your shoes
sparkled like the muted gold

flecked into an east coast diner’s creamy Formica
countertop. I want to tell you how I

imagined them on my wide feet (yellow and crusted
with the desert of five years, walks to the library,

to my truck, to the bar, to my classroom, to my office,
the copy machine, always down, and to the bar again)

and yes, I imagined the thin slips of leather
emerging from beneath the plum-colored robe that would

embarrass and thrill me as I walked the procession, gowned
over my red shoulders. I would sit, in just four hours,

through long speeches by deans I had never known,
but who were happy to tally another retention with a handshake.

I could have forgotten the head cap of my mortarboard,
too small to crown thick African twists damp with pomade

and beeswax. I could have forgotten your tap on my shoulder
at just the moment I was remembering mangoes hanging

heavy on a sparse tree near the top of Saba Island,
so close to the cliff the sea longed to swallow one whole;

but I didn’t. I did not tell you that you were mistaken,
or that my husband’s skin rose into goose flesh at my touch that morning,

even after ten years of waking to the same black mole on my shoulders—
I kept from you the moment, a month before, I had cradled

a student in my arms because the year had mugged her and left her bruised.
And so you couldn’t know that the smell of dust from rotting

volumes of Gertrude Stein replaced the stench of the toilets
my teenage hands scrubbed in other people’s homes

because government programs for us kids at risk, risked us.
I did not tell you because you were right in noticing

every brown face in that store name-tagged, your beautiful
feet pedicured into acceptance. I want to tell you, now,

never to read this poem aloud in your home as Esperanza,
your maid, listens at the sink. Never read it, because the words

will sift through your ears and fall into the forgotten spaces
between your ribs. They will rattle in your gut. They will circle

the chasms within your shins and fall to the hollow of each smooth
foot, just near the arch, lost to any hope of hearing. And Esperanza

does not need to hear them, not from your lips, because she
can still take her own name home at night, lotion her knees,

peel an orange into the distance measured between
the two doorways of her apartment, and love the sharp scent,

love how it becomes her life, like the words of this poem, and how,
for a few hours, the citrus oil hanging in the air washes you away.

Class and gender rear their head, but there is always an element of beauty in all of Kocher’s work. Even in anger above, the images never portray a world with much rot or waste or decay. The world that Kocher inhabits is the world where beauty affirms life. That instinct to swerve from squalor is admirable, and it has me asking myself what my obligation to portray beauty in the world is. The portrayal of beauty is an old trope, at least as old as the first prehistoric make-up kit, but it is redemptive. Beauty fixes our gaze and lets us wander barefoot without a care for who admonishes us. I felt this same kind of enjoyment in reading One Girl Babylon as I cared less and less about the kind of book I was reading (and the kind of book I should be reading). A fulfilling robust flavor cooks on every page, amid every “lurch” and through all the “lushness.”

She’s a star which we would all do well to follow.

STEPHEN BURT—PARALLEL PLAY

2006-03-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

All hail the critic, Callimachus, who appears at crucial moments in Stephen Burt’s book Parallel Play [Graywolf Press 2006] to provide structure and commentary on the life of the poet-critic. Stephen Burt may perhaps be best known for his criticism on Randall Jarrell, who was himself another poet-critic. Throughout Parallel Play the spirit of critique persists and underscores much of the book. It is laudable that Burt wanders into the space of critique, as it is seldom visited by many poets today for its perceived vulgar and elitist strains, for the prevailing perception that critique cuts only to build up the critic. Burt’s aesthetic views are informed (as a critic) by the notion that the world of the self is a smothering one, and as a keen observer of American culture, it is this tendency that he is addressing in Parallel Play.

On the book’s back [read blurb] cover, the reader is told by the publisher (as there is no credit given for this verbiage):

Consult virtually any childhood development guide and you’ll run across the term “parallel play” : when children under two are placed together, they’ll play separately but won’t actually interact. Stephen Burt’s second collection of poems, Parallel Play, describes lovers, friends, travelers, and revelers attempting lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitable into preoccupations of their own self-awareness.

This is the intellectual conceit (or is it “project”?) of this book. Burt intends throughout Parallel Play to point his focus towards those things that are not just reflections of his self (for this, you may go to his blog and see his pictures of his newborn, etc) but delve into those things that are normally the domain of the critic—art and literature, with a good helping of politics and pop culture. Enter Callimachus. Callimachus parallels Burt’s own life in many of its dimensions (though I doubt that Callimachus would have been a fan of the WNBA). Callimachus was the caretaker of Greek literature in the second century B.C., most of whose works have been lost. However, he is largely responsible for collecting the work that came before him and making sure that it survived. It is the ironic fate of Callimachus’ work that so few pieces are extant. Burt addresses his affinity for Callimachus in his first piece entitled “After Callimachus” (there are four of these pieces with the same name” that appear at the end of each section of the book).

After Callimachus

Cover me, quietly, stone.
I wrote verse. I meant little in life,
blamed few and injured none;
I tried to get along.
My writings kept me warm.
If I with my featherlight pen
confused prestige with worth
praised evil, or ever wronged
the few who wanted a fight,
allow me, generous earth,
to do no further harm—
let me atone in my sleep;
I with my good will,
so lightly and often given,
who rest with nothing to keep,
and nothing to offer heaven.

Burt’s apologia for his critiques operates in this piece. Though one doubts that it is possible as critic to “blame few and injure none,” it is apparent that, like Callimachus, Burt is willing to accept that he may not have anything to offer heaven, that ideal place that bears no blame or fault. Burt’s East Coast sensibility is very much apparent in this manner, a manner which can be very foreign in some places where the appearance of fair play and ample praise are expected. In this piece Burt reaches back to the past to legitimize his efforts, and like Callimachus, whom Ovid described as dwelling within the arena of art and learning but devoid of any real poetic genius, Burt seems willing to acknowledge that his learned efforts may not endure (like Callimachus’ literally haven’t) but that, as long as his critiques are given with good will, they too belong to this earth.

In “After Callimachus (1)” Burt has provided his raison d’etre. He takes solace in the lives of critics from a previous age (hence his affinity to Jarrell) who offered substantive critiques without resorting to criticism as powdery snow for everyone to ski easily down hill on, which generally passes for criticism today. From his critical perspective, he can venture into observing his surroundings and making statements about them. Those surroundings are often the world of visual art (Burt offers meditative poems on Pierre Bonnard, Gerhard Richter, Franz Kline, Richard Diebenkorn, and Christine Willcox—fellow instructor at Macalester), the world of literature (a very witty piece on the maddening presence and influence of John Ashbery, a piece dedicated to Jorge Guillen, and a sestina dedicated to Barcelonan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma) and the world of pop culture (pieces on the New York club scenes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lindsay Whalen of the WNBA). The result of "Parallel Play" is that it provides very little biographical detail about Burt’s life, a detail which some readers might find disheartening in a book of poetry. However, a careful reading might point out that Burt reveals much of his thought life, if not his felt life. In this there is a kind of honesty by which a reader can come to know him. For sometimes it is not necessary to know the details of an individual’s life, but to see how that individual thinks, in order to see the individual’s passion and suffering. Perhaps the thought life even emphasizes a speaker’s plight because with the speaker’s awareness, it brings the attention of a reader to the speaker’s recognition of his/her circumstances (which is likely to be more sympathetic than one who is blindly trapped by his/her circumstances).

In “After Callimachus (3)” Burt invokes Conopion, the workmanlike Athenian, who was charged with burying the ashes of Phocion, after Phocion was unjustly charged by his enemies among the Athenians and sentenced to die by ingesting poison (similar to Socrates). In Burt’s poem, Conopion is able to sleep without worrying about the misfortune of others who may, in fact, be close by while Conopion slumbers.

In “After Callimachus (4)” Burt invokes Eudemus, the Greek astronomer and mathematician, who pared back his life in order to avoid debt—which came with mortal penalty. In both (3) and (4) Burt is taking contemporary America to task (through showing parallels to our esteemed Athenian friends). In (3) Burt does this for the American tendency to dismiss the cries for help presenting themselves to Americans on a daily basis. In (4) raises his critical hackles by reminding Americans that in another time, debt came with the penalty of death, yet with Americans taking on more and more debt (and the Congress voting to raise the debt ceiling for the government again just this week), Burt is slyly pointing at what Kevin Phillips in his new book American Theocracy calls one of the three most clear and present dangers facing America today, American indebtedness.

With such a voracious appetite as Burt’s, it is not surprising that Burt’s poetic/critical eye turns to his own generation. In Parallel Play Burt seems to be invoking the notion that his own generation is too self-absorbed, too willing to move within the territory it has colonized in the past. It is engaged in “parallel play” without any intersecting points of mutual contamination (with infants one always has to make mention of germs). Neither with work outside one’s oeuvre or with the past. For this reason, Burt is traveling the time-tested path of those many who have trod before him, that is, namely, if one wants to make art, then one must deal with something larger, something outside of the self. If all one wants to do is retell stories of one’s self, then one should join any number of support groups. Burt is reiterating the longstanding note that art should aim to offer more than personal accounts. It should be ambitious. In this, Burt counters the idea that there is no obligation to what art should be anymore. After all, “It’s all good.”

The “it’s-all-good” mentality is, of course, what the critic fights against. It nullifies his/her existence, his/her perspective on the world. It figures in strongly in the crusade against progressivism. Why should anything be better, after all, if it’s all good? [This is the primary reason I am turning down any invitation I get to heaven; there’s nowhere to send back the food.] Burt in his discussions of politics similarly favors the progressive. His homage to the late senator Paul Wellstone was one of his most affecting pieces, placing him firmly in line, again, with Callimachus, who was known primarily for his elegies.

Thanksgiving 2002

The government froze, and then
we found it hard to breathe.
Bus stops where no one spoke
remembered other queues,
where flyers underfoot
dissolved like garlands, or
the ghosts of a belief—
of willful false belief.
Once we were on TV;
we counted and we lost.
Apparently permanent clouds
blew in, and funereal bells,
and then the freezing rain.

*

This month the lots of rain
meant thumbs down and warped wood,
doorbells in Cottage Grove.
How often can you trust?
Twenty-nine percent
of those eligible, I
salute you. Sunset struck
late voters from their lots.
The people I came to like,
who slogged through wind all day,
and traffic, could almost drown
in one another’s thin air.

*

Against the morning air,
I sat in our car and cried.
Heart, do not give your heart;
better to follow a sport,
where telling the truth won’t hurt.
For how could you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbor’s eyes?
Only the fine art
of replacing the pins on a map
could save us, and even that
seemed almost entirely lost.

*

Obscured and almost lost
amid commercial hosts,
the Origins poster read
Win the Cold War. We tried
a water-painting kit,
whose strokes fade like applause.
The last drawbridge outdoors
stood lonely, and to scale
it seemed almost antique,
while taxicabs passed, and vans,
unwilling to give, backed up,
sounding their basso horns.

*

The fabled Gates of Horn . . .
On the way to their airport, the glow-
ing glow-in-the-dark signs point
straight up before the night,
Who owns the state? Who will?
Jets boom and stagger west.
Drivers, you hope for more
and self-sufficient lives.
When you are sick or alone
or miss the city, what
will you discover you want?
What will you tell the men
who own your roads by then?

i.m. Paul Wellstone (1944-2002)

Those who were in Minnesota in 1990 when Paul Wellstone drove his bus across the state and captured the imagination of youthful voters (far from the 29% of the electorate whom Burt references here) recognize how Wellstone and his ideals did arrive through the Gates of Horn. He won despite being outspent 7 to 1 in that election by the incumbent, Rudy Boschwitz. While some might see this piece as simply a lament for poor sports and losers of elections, it registers as a worthy successor to Callimachus. It is elevated, with classical references to the Gates of Horn. It employs the formal sensibility of repeating the main noun in the last line of the previous stanza in the first line of the following stanza. It quotes Yeats’s “To a Friend Whose Life Has Come to Nothing.” In short, it is felt as an elegy, not only for Wellstone, but an elegy for a lost era of political idealism.

If there is still any home for the ideal, it is in art. Burt’s poems on Kline and Diebenkorn, found here and here find Burt not bashful about abstraction when dealing with art that seems to call to its viewer to ponder it. The Diebenkorn piece in question (found here is described by Burt via one of its many possible interpretations. The fact that Burt uses traditional end rhymes with the piece suggests that even in the realm of the far-flung, the pointedly abstract (such as with Diebenkorn), there are classical moorings through which one may enter the piece. Burt is very much aware of similar nods he makes in the direction of traditional form (such as with “Six Noodles” the aforementioned sestina on Ashbery and "eating out"). This tendency reminds one of older Donald Revell a little, only instead of the meandering sestina (such as in Erasures), Burt’s focus is on end rhyme and refrain. Therefore, it is not surprising that Revell is one of the blurbers for the book.

Some readers may find Parallel Play a little too icy, too clinically detached. For them, Burt’s observations and commentary are not their kind of prescription for what ails this age. At times the language is difficult. The turns of phrase can circle back on themselves and then move with blinding speed a la Ashbery. The intelligence on display may unsettle for the time being the way Ashbery unsettles (though Burt is far more penetrable in my opinion), but the uneasy feeling it provides clearly marks Burt’s work as something that aspires to be art. It may not be meant for easy access like American Idol where everyone is urged to get up and become a star. Catching up to the intelligence of the poet could very well be one of the hallmarks of difficult poetry.

I am reminded of Forrest Gander’s insight that he offered after his reading here in February when someone asked him to comment on the tension between the intelligence displayed in his subject matter and the strong emotional current that also resides there. Gander said, “Emotion endures.” I suspect, if pushed further, Gander may have conceded that in his work, his emotion needs his intelligence as much as his intelligence needs his emotion in order for it to endure. Emotion that justifies its own existence solely because of its presence quickly and easily devolves into bathos, into “parallel play,” where anything goes and “it’s all good.”

Can the poetry of critique endure? Or after the age it critiques floats by, will it cease to be pertinent as well? By referring to ancient Greek writers, much of whose work presumably does not exist anymore, Burt seems to suggest that such a question doesn’t matter.

Will Burt’s specific “steely” reign endure? Perhaps in a time in this country where thinking seems to have so little worth compared to doing [read invading(?)], it is a foregone conclusion that Burt will not be championed in the end and will be described by the Ovids of our time as “not having the right stuff.” However, Parallel Play serves as an invitation to another place and another time where other possibilities are vivid. For this, it should be cherished. It resists the natural temptation to move towards hermeticism, to avoid the contentment that comes with being self-contained. In the 50s American poetry moved towards confessionalism. Is it any coincidence that in a similarly conservative time when critique is not ventured very much (see the consequences for Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame), there is a similar turning away from the world towards the personal space? Burt’s biggest contribution in Parallel Play is showing readers that they don’t have to turn away from the outside world. Readers can always turn to the past or an abstract landscape (where politics never goes because it never matters that much) for solace in such a time.

Though there may be much dispute about our being in a hermetic age, it would serve us well to heed Burt’s admonition about our propensity for parallel play. Otherwise, the confessionalists will dare to return, and we will have to brace ourselves to look at lots of poopy diapers.

GERALDINE KIM—Povel

2006-02-17T15:58:00.000-08:00

I wish I would have been able to keep Forrest Gander a little longer when he was here a few weeks ago. If I had, I would have asked him what in God’s name he was thinking by selecting Geraldine Kim’s Povel as the winner of the 2005 Fence Modern Poets Series.

I’m sure I’m betraying my age, my jaded sensibilities, by dismissing this book so out of hand. I’ve probably established myself in the past as not the most effusive reviewer (a tendency I attribute to witnessing too many congratulatory reviews that reviewers write out of their own personal interest of not offending someone). So, I understand and expect readers of this review to be cautious of my pronouncements. I can hear them say: there goes Schnickelfritz grousing again.

I was anxious to take on this book from the moment I heard about it. I expected some insights about the internal gears of the twenty-something female mind. I was hoping it would be fun. Instead, what I have to admit I encountered was pure drivel. It was trite, boring and a tad bit scatological. To make it to the end seems to me to be like having to eavesdrop on 4 hours of a cell phone conversation. I admit it. I couldn’t make it. I strangled the speaker and ditched the body where no one is going to find it.

The book is a long sprawling stream-of-consciousness piece that emanates from a young Korean woman while she is attending university. While there are moments of wit and literary rumination, most of the piece is littered with inane anecdotes where the speaker sorts out her feelings about friends and family and where she explores her becoming a sexual being. Perhaps the most useful aspect of the book is to see how the speaker (almost undoubtedly Kim herself) mediates and decodes the plethora of sexual messages she encounters and the effect they have on her consciousness. The reactions she takes to many of the people in her anecdotes is disturbingly juvenile: her desire for the man checking her purse to find a dead fetus in there, her verbalized uncontrollable desire to smash into her dad’s Achilles tendon with a shopping cart (to the point where her father develops a nervous tic when he hears a shopping cart coming up from behind), not caring when John Ritter dies. Here is an example of some paragraphs.

“We thought it was cool at the time. Pretending to smoke imaginary cigarettes in wintry air. Convincing my dad to buy a Powerball ticket. The news shows a security camera video of a deer prancing through an empty subway station. I fit all the stereotypes. You knew I was going to say that even. ‘I just knew it. So predictable,’ my ex said to me." (96)

“We laugh because it’s funny, we laugh because it’s true. As pointless as phoneticized translations. My brother asks my mom to break a wishbone with him. Their greasy fingers slipping along the bone. Then my mom lets go of her end and says, ‘all you wish come true I am going to die soon.” Leaving long phone messages. Like the scene from Falling Down when the main character is about to use a bazooka and a kid comes from nowhere and asks him what movie he’s filming." (36)

“Listening to hardcore like Sworn Enemy, Full Blown Chaos, and From Ashes Rise and being unable to stop smiling. ‘Leave, or leave me,’ says the radio and wanting to bash my brains against the wall. As I ran on the track, I saw a falcon fly past and tried chasing it. My mom insisting that I go to church with her and promising with her pinky finger. Then I check the nametag and it says ‘Nick’ and realizing it’s an effeminate boy bagging these groceries. ‘Ma’am, you forgot this,’ he says and hands me a canteloupe wrapped in plastic." (81)

The book is an example (112 pages of it) of hypergraphia informed by either adrenaline or insomnia. I’m not sure which. I’m not sure the distinction matters. My basic reaction was similar to one of the characters who flies into one of the fragments of Kim’s extended narrative:

‘What if I ask them for a wrap and then they start rapping?’ I ask my friend. He smiles weakly.

Yup . . . smiles weakly. That about sums it up. Apparently, people in her own life (and we never get more than a centimeter away from Kim’s musings and anecdotes) find her commentary on what happens to be equally trying.

I did try to smile. Occasionally, I found a little sparkle in some of the running commentary:

As accessible as a Magic Eye Picture

I wonder how much my soul would be worth on eBay.

I want to have an installation in the Bad Art Museum.

From my judgment, she might be able to realize this desire, perhaps fill up a whole wing.

There is even a strange reference to a Carioles Effect on page 19. I wondered if this was supposed to be The Coriolis Effect, [Google searches on Carioles Effect seem to point to the same phenomenon as Coriolis Effect with the first being a variant(?) or mistake] and what a muffed reference like this was supposed to illustrate about the stream of consciousness. In this “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink” effect, I suppose, everything is allowable. But I wondered if this wasn’t a miss by the fact checker at Fence Books.

The term “Povel” is itself a connection of "poem" and "novel". Poem + Novel = Povel. This term is perhaps stretching both genres a bit, a bit of wishful thinking. The content seems like spaghetti blog, the daily bits of a life mixed up in a blender. The major formal constraint is that there is a paragraph of left justified text, then centered text, then right justified text, then centered text again, and so on [later on in the book there are slight variations]. My biggest question was why Kim didn’t use any right and left justified text in her pattern. That way she could have used all the buttons on the toolbar of Microsoft Word.

There are so many reasons to question the merit of this book that one is forced to ponder and parse the politics of poetry publishing. I suppose I was drawn to it because it got some attention on Silliman’s blog as clearly one of the best books of 2005. In some ways ,Povel reminds me of some of Silliman’s alternately mind-numbing and playful gestures like Tjanting and What, especially the latter.

At a beep tone, the driver grabs
the phone by the farebox: “29
on the 24” be thy name. Why that
obsolete twist? Why this
semi-metacomment? Augie’s
Basil obit overpraises, ‘ey?
Simple supper sip on seamen.
Bad pun, old song. Tweed cap’s
rim rots. Two posts, one loop
and a hanging cross
dangle from that lobe (the other
being bare forms the pair).
Toothless man roars to himself
scaring the other riders.
His body’s oils, unwashed,
stain the flesh brown. Up
the terraced hillside, lush ground cover
surrounds the boxy wood shigle condos.
I had hopes. Helicopters dot
the large sky, a perfect blue
out over the bay. (55) [What]

Sound familiar? Only Silliman’s observations are a lot more cultivated and specific. The wit extends to more than commentary on pop culture.

Admittedly, I got sucked into the blurb machine on this one. Of course, the endorsement by Gander held a lot of sway as well. Like someone on Silliman’s blog commentary said, “It’s not like it was nominated by David Lehman.”

Perhaps Forrest Gander’s selection of Povel was his way of critiquing the whole prize system in poetry publishing. By nominating a book that was so undeserving (in my not-so-humble opinion), was he, in fact, condemning the prize-winning-book-turned-into-academic-career dynamic that so often occurs? Many are deserving, but equally many leave one wondering.

Perhaps he just determined that he could do some good in the world by giving the prize to a young woman who seemed in need of some confidence building. Was this a mercy selection?

There are other questions outside the immediate text that arise as well. Does the increasing presence of the blog inject itself as a new literary form? I hope not. If it does, I submit here and now that it will be the first literary form in history that no one will feel obliged to read. Also, why bother to read it in a book when you can go straight to the source like you can with Geraldine Kim. Is there any reason to have a book version of a blog? A blog version of a book as product tie-in?

Does all diary writing rise to the level of literature? When my grandmother emigrated from Schleswig-Holstein and came to live in Davenport, Iowa, she kept a daily tab on her activities for many years. I inherited several shoeboxes of her scribbles on the quotidian life of Davenport [Hers was a more laconic hypergraphia.] I ask you, do these rise to the level of literature?

May 1, 1963 (Wednesday)

We are off to Texas, left Davenport about 3:00, stopped at the airport, had a drink in the Lounge Cocktail and watched the planes take off, a beautiful day. Stopped off at Lake Stony. I am waiting at the Depot. Dad is bringing the car away, the train leaves at 6:05, we insured our bags for $500. We had broiled fish for dinner. Dad had his glass of bier.

Dez. 1 1980 (Monday)

put the flowers by the window again, looked through all the papers, wrote some checks. I blame the check book. Went to get tickets for the show, the S & H Green Stamp Store was closed, it started to rain, had dinner with Ernst here at home. Ernst didn’t go to Chicago with Ernie and family, but is beginning to feel better. He had dinner with the Leidenfrosts at Thanksgiving. He tells me Betty Schlueter ist not very good, John is getting old looking, they tell me Betty is just like Alma.

June 19, 1968 (Wednesday)

I got up a little early to write some cards to Marg, Sallee, and Tante Marie. We are at Fort Walton Beach Surf Dweller Motel Apts. We took a dip before breakfast. Betty made bacon and eggs. We have a two bedroom apartment, very nice $26 a day. We were lucky to get this one, everything was full in the afternoon we drove out to Panama City. We like this side of the Gulf better, is more quiet. We had hamburger and pizza for supper. Took a dip after we got home. We all had a good nap in the afternoon.

As for Povel, save your money, save your time. Cruise the mall and hang out at the fountain where you can eavesdrop on several teenagers talking at once. This is pretty much the same experience as reading Povel.

FORREST GANDER—EYE AGAINST EYE

2006-01-21T15:30:00.000-08:00

Forrest Gander is always writing snatches of the infinitesimal, the ineffable. The smaller the detail and the more impervious it is to the membrane of the human eye, the more likely Gander is to throw it some attention and grant it space in his collection of writings. He inhabits the microscopic like no other and employs scientific jargon and other arcane diction to encroach on the unseen world the way only scientific equipment can with its accuracy down to the nearest angstrom. He is also maddeningly protean—shifting the registers of his attention quite easily and usually without warning. However, there are a number of areas that Gander gravitates towards. He loves the natural world; in particular, birds and other animals are prevalent. The minute and sometimes outrageous details of his personal domestic life come to call. His present personal world exacts a toll as well. Also, Gander is relentlessly playing with the white space on the page. For him, the absent entails just as much as the present, and he pays great attention to it. Eye Against Eye uses the left hand margin as a place to ground every line, unlike Science & Steepleflower and Torn Awake where the fragments scatter over the page like iron filings that have just been magnetized. For this reason, there is an appearance of more narrative in Eye Against Eye as opposed to his last two previous books. Perhaps this appearance of a more storied form is due to his desire to take on more moral territory in Eye Against Eye. If Science & Steepleflower was about the contrast between seeing the world as it is presented and the obstacle of intellectualizing the visible world through a kind of scientific abstraction, and Torn Awake was about the rapture of transcendence via visible detail and that which is not normally seen, then Eye Against Eye looks at the outcome when visual fields and their attendant outlooks on the world overlap and collide. It is about the conflict of visions; sometimes they enhance and other times they destroy each other.

Eye Against Eye is organized like Torn Awake. Longer pieces serve as anchors for each section, and they are punctuated by short pieces that connect and accent each section. In Eye Against Eye there are four main pieces that are punctuated by a series of four “ligatures” (one after each longer poem). The ligatures themselves are oddities in that they don’t seem to be bridges between main pieces, nor do they cohere very much themselves. They seem to be couplet outtakes from other poems (and given Gander’s penchant for piecemeal construction, the glomming on of phrase after phrase, this assessment of the ligatures seems likely). Perhaps they are even transitional pieces that have been removed to give Gander’s poems their distinctive feel at times. In this way they might be said to be the doughnut holes of the larger poems that are themselves the doughnuts. They are collections of transitions it may be said. As scraps, ephemera, they might represent evolutionary dead ends within his works. They are little mutations that might have guided the development of a particular poem, but were no longer needed. They are vestigial, like hen’s teeth, a link to the unseen past of the organism.

Perhaps they are ligatures to the unseen, the unfelt, that are awaiting the items that can be fused to them (which are supplied by the reader). Perhaps Gander is chiding the reader to consider whether one can consider whether something can be called a ligature without its overtly connecting anything. At this reading, these pieces are still a little bit confusing as to the purpose they serve in the book.

While the ligatures may be the condiments, the four longer poems are what the reader goes to the ballpark to eat.

The first longer poem that opens the book is "Burning Towers, Standing Wall." It is a meditation on Mayan ruins that the speaker inspects closely and in typical Gander fashion asserts the presence of those who are absent. The builders of the ruins are venerated and the destroyers are shamed. In this way it resonates with the World Trade Towers. The lives of those who perished behind the walls of the Mayan ruin are implicitly equated to those who perished in the attack on The World Trade Towers. The equation of these two is never more than implicit (beyond the title) as those who died in the Trade Towers are never explicitly invoked. Very craftily and subtly Gander implies this connection through the title alone. The ruins are inhabited by a plethora of flora and fauna: spotted turkey, iguana, trogons, quetzal, orange lichen, crows, king vultures, sea birds, gnats, iridescent butterflies, mosquitoes, wukus, cacomixtles, Capparis trees. These residents are the present ones, but the disappeared ones are the ones grieved for. Yet in the next to last line Gander posits “the fragility of presence,” not only to lament the ones who are no longer present, but also to remind the reader that the animals that occupy the ruins now are susceptible to vanishing. But it is with the human realm that Gander is primarily preoccupied. The final image in the poem is of “a bird perched at the tip of the branch. Singing, we say.” The reflection here is that even the wild world of animals that presides over the ruins is claimed by humans in the way we anthropomorphize them as mimicking human acts, like singing, when more precisely a bird’s verbal gesture only conveniently resembles song. Even the ruins, perhaps especially the ruins after Gander’s treatment of them, belong to the realm of the human and must be embraced by the humanity that survives them for as long as that impulse to embrace the ruins can be sustained. This poem is the table-setter for the “encounters” that ensue.

“Present Tense” is the poem that least addresses the moral sphere of eye against eye, will against will. The main task of this poem is to address the notion of simultaneity, the “world of physical even and mind’s word indissoluble.” The beginning of the poem is a litany of strange occupations in a “sobering enthusiasm for the unmoored no longer defining narrative.” On first approach, this is a confounding commentary (is it the “unmoored” who are no longer defining narrative, or is it the sobering enthusiasm?) Presumably it is the will and desire to apprehend those wandering bits of information which escape the encapsulating drive of narrative. The whole world blossoms simultaneously in “Present Tense” while the speaker gauges how that world is perceived, either through the lens of a knowing viewer or through the “virtuosity of feeling as it meets the mineral-hard quiddity of the world.” The ultimate presence that exists in the simultaneous now is that of the beloved. The “you” (the beloved) begins to emerge in the fourth section. The presence of the “you” overtakes all of the world’s intrusions that compel the attention. Backstory for the “you” is established. Intimate details and preferences are rehearsed. These details reach simultaneity with other distant and larger events.

you were telling me don’t lead with your left foot
just when a solar storm blew out the cell phone
I heard you say grasshoppers open their spiracles to breathe.

The inquiring mind of the speaker pushes out further at the same time it is tuned in to the local, yet it is somewhat deficient in that “our [human] inquiry is given us whether or not we can speak it / in the world’s terms by the world.” The inquisitive state of mind is the eternal present. But none of the universe’s claims on attention can finally match the claims on attention the beloved makes. The beloved becomes the universe at the end of the poem “should you fall / should you hollow inward” represents the implosion of the big-bang of the universe after the universe has extended to its final reach. The beloved “crack(s) and spill(s) the yolk of yourself,” but the speaker defies this transformation through the utmost tenderness of being there. In these last strains is the pledge of allegiance and closeness to the beloved even as the beloved ages. This is the claim made by the speaker in the present tense in the face of the past and facing the future of aging in the context of the world’s grandness. The simultaneity of events that is suggested in the poem’s title is supplanted at the end of the poem as well. The title becomes ironic. The gist of the poem is about the past and the future not the present. The speaker seems to assert that the present as it manifests itself in the world is full of things that do matter, but not ultimately so.

In “Late Summer Entry” the eye of the poet is matched against the eye of the photographer, in this case, Sally Mann, whose ethereal landscapes provide the canvas for Gander’s meditations and insertions of the speaker into the scene. No one writing today is better than Gander at tracing the path from vision to intellection and unpacking this process along the way. Miraculously, Gander’s insights are declarative and informative, yet they remain mystical too. These pieces are the most magical in the book. The herky-jerky accretion of fragment he uses in the other pieces (which emphasize disjunction as much as connection) give way to a wholly discursive presentation even though Gander takes it upon himself to create a sense of brokenness in “Collodion” and “Argosy for Rock and Grass” and “Road and Tree.” The majority read like prose poems with Gander’s careful attention to detail and oeuvre providing much descriptive language that maps onto the photos we see. He animates many of these landscapes with the life of the unseen or loads them to carry metaphysical freight. Such is especially the case with “Science & Steepleflower” which comments on the photo that was the cover of the book of the same name published in 1998.

SCIENCE & STEEPLEFLOWER

The temperate velvet sheen on the water is not applied, but
constitutive. Just the stream utters light. The woods are hushed.
The vagueness of a near shoreline endows the water with a
transfigured, opalescent lour. We see the reflection of trees, partly
erased in splotches, as though a delicate mist. Our eyes following
the stream until shadows pinch off the flow of our gaze.

Because the realm is uncertain, it prompts us. Not placid,
but haunting, this pastoral. the shaggy forest is dim, private,
oneiric. And the circular frame of the image closes inward.
Called vignetting, this girdling dark is a metaphor, and it has two
meanings. It signals the onset of our blink, and as such, can be
read as a sign of the evanescence of the image that, even in the act
of preservation, must be relinquished. However it is equally
indicative of the incipient vision opening to us from the other side
of consciousness, the muscular curtain drawing back from the
beginning of a dream.

The end of this piece is where we see Gander hearkening back to Torn Awake, his 2001 effort on New Directions. The last sentence is about as explicit of a definition of the transcendence he explored in that book. Some might question this section of the book who know Gander’s previous efforts and who hail him as restlessly experimental. He seems to be rehashing old subject matter, yet I for one am entranced by his mastery when writing about this subject matter—the marriage of vision to thought. For those who come to Gander’s work for the first time in Eye Against Eye, I suspect this section will provide the most impact. One might argue here, though, that the form Gander chooses to play with these themes is a novel one. The dialogue he has with Mann’s photograph provides an insight into the praxis for his conceptual/theoretical work in Torn Awake. Here we see his tendency toward romantic transcendence in action as he transforms many of these seemingly lifeless and barren (certainly understated in a way that, say, Ansel Adams is not) landscapes into frames teeming with brisk lives of their own and ready to trigger thought.

The final section of the book, "The Mission Thief," is a Borgesian-like narrative of forking paths. The main trajectory of the poem follows down the same path of the latter part of “Present Tense.” The speaker almost fawningly illustrates his gratitude for his presence at the side of his beloved on a seemingly innocuous day in San Francisco’s Mission District. However, an interesting turn of events occurs at the end. The speaker is presented with an instantaneous moral choice. A homeless person who has stolen a bicycle is hurtling toward him. The speaker can either be a man of action and interfere on behalf of the righteous, but at the potential cost of being ripped away from the bliss of having his beloved by his side. In addition, by acting he exposes a coarser, tougher side to his beloved than he is accustomed to exhibiting. The second choice is to let the bicycle thief go by and commiserate with the grief of those who have been harmed by the theft. Unlike Vittorio de Sica’s classic, “The Bicycle Thief” where the moral weight is placed on those who happen to be harmed by the thief, the innocent victims, if you will, here Gander chooses to put the moral question to the bystander, the role that has been so easy to take on in complex modern societies. He presents good reasons for staying out of harm’s way. The poem presents one kind of ending and then in a “doubletake” that manages to bifurcate the poem, the poem ends with the choice of complacency and passivity. Gander seems to be rewarding this choice as the path to peace and well-being. There are regrets for this failure to act. He takes on the grief of the injured party. It is the speaker’s burden to be befuddled by the events that are transpiring when he says, “the world shifts / along a hairline crack / you can’t tell / what is happening / until it moves on and is gone / as someone and someone’s grief / careen around a corner.”

It is fairly transparent that Gander’s real subject here is not really the slice-of-life drama that he depicts. Rather, this scene acts as a metaphor for one’s passive complicity with or active stance against world-shaping events (like the War On Terrorism or the war in Iraq). The metaphor is apt insofar as the decisive moment arrives as the speaker is still somewhat befuddled by events. However, the metaphor breaks down somewhat because, for me, there is no equivalency between theft and today’s scourge of terrorism and its accompanying efforts. Theft is easy to greet with moral certitude that it is wrong. Terrorism is quite different in this regard. As the old saying has it, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. While I don’t fancy that every mujahideen is a principled freedom fighter, I have difficulty in escaping the realm of moral ambiguity when I contemplate their project, even if I don’t condone their means. Of course, the thief, too, is not without sympathy; however, a purse snatcher is far easier to recognize as a moral hazard, and it is easy to lump the homeless man who is a bicycle thief into this same general category. Certainly this is why Gander must choose a homeless man as the thief because it is easier to see this act as one of desperation. [Unfortunately, I suppose this is upsetting for all of the homeless who can afford to read this book and see themselves depicted in such an unfavorable light.] The central moral question Gander presents is both a timeless and a timely one. Is there a moral obligation to thwart the desperate act of someone whose action may cause grief or harm to others? I think I hear Gander saying that the world moves past such harm and grief, and the individual act to thwart such desperation only leads to more grief and harm (made right by an immediate sense of vindication), and the immediate act often has the effect of poisoning the attitudes of those who previously thought well of you.

One of the most satisfying aspects of any of Gander’s work (and Eye Against Eye is no exception) is the apparent fastidious technique that lies beneath the surface of the poems. It is fascinating for me to imagine how the accretion of fragments come together to achieve a system that is poised at the edge of entering a chaotic regime. In his book of essays A Faithful Existence, Gander describes his technique like this:

Sometimes I begin poems with a structural penchant, but unlike the Oulipoians, whom I admire, my architecture deforms according to what it comes to contain. A long poem, “The Faculty for Hearing the Silence of Jesus,” started as mimetic enthusiasm for a rhetorical motif in a section of the Bhagavad-Gita, but in the final version of my poem, no approximation of the original pattern remains. Overriding musical and semantic concerns transformed the poem. “Feel pattern, be wed” goes the gnomic verse that guides me.

Whether form or cadence triggers the poems, measure always conducts my composition. Writing, I pass from time to space, from succession to juxtaposition. I write the poem in all directions at once, emphasizing not the stability of single words but the transition that emanates between them, or between it and its rings of association, rings of silence. My idea of meaning derives from the continuity of the transition, which is, for me, erotic

These cobbled-together forms of slow accretion must be informed by the geological process of stratification where layer upon layer are added to come up with a complex structure. The poem is then the cross section of these layers (some of the information missing as it is cut away). [In this way Gander’s work reminds me of the Austrian avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker, whose work I have translated and whose poems also provide the reader with the similar feeling that he/she is only seeing the cross section of a healthy number of tangents she has pursued. the overall effect of Mayröcker is phantasmagorical whereas Gander is more steady and wondrous.].

However, these accumulating fragments in Gander also remind me of a biological metaphor, that of point mutations which give rise to appendages that are grown but then perhaps abandoned, resulting in evolutionary leaps and bounds (successful adaptations) and evolutionary dead-ends. To extend the metaphor a little further, each fragment has its aura of effect, just as, say, a mutated gene may result in a cascade effect whereby it effects many other kinds of other genes or even distant cell types. A self-proliferating system is borne, one where, as the system grows more and more complex, accumulating more and more bits and fragments, it is catalyzed again and again by the new fragments it takes on. Indeed, this is exactly the process of autocatalysis that Stuart Kauffman describes in The Origins of Order and elsewhere. It is autocatalysis which explains how, despite the statistical improbability of random molecular interactions leading to the first amino acid within the pre-biotic soup, amino acids, the presumed building blocks of cellular life were formed. Gander’s fragments, while far from being random, come together in the same way to bring about his complex poetic structures.

Juliana Spahr—This Connection of Everyone With Lungs

2005-12-01T10:15:00.000-08:00

TAKE TWO

I must admit that I am confused about Juliana Spahr’s book This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Is the speaker supposed to be pathetic or sympathetic? I’m not really sure. I’ve read the book twice with several spot readings of some passages, and I want to do my best to meet the speaker honestly and be generous to it. However, I’m pressed to find value in the book beyond its portrait of a person who is battling information sickness.

I’m sure you know the feeling—the slight nausea, the vacant stare, and thickheadedness that arises from crunching innumerable data sets, from surfing endless waves of web pages and taking notes on all of them.

Spahr couples this obsession with information with an ecstatic plea for belonging in the world and community. However, for me, despite her ecstatic passages where she invokes the beloved,

But I say it’s whatever you love best.
I say it is the persons you love.
I say it is those things, whatever they are, that one loves and desires.
I say it’s what one loves.
It’s what one loves.
It’s what one loves, the most beautiful is whomever one loves.
I say it is whatsoever a person loves.
I say for me it is my beloveds.
For me naught else, it is my beloveds, it is the loveliest sight.
I say the sight of the ones you love.
I say it again, the sight of the ones you love, those you’ve met and those you haven’t.
I say it again and again.
Again and again.
I try to keep saying it to keep making it happen.

I’m left gnawing on my wonder at how someone who is pleading for the beloved has so little interaction with it/them. It’s curious to me how the people she has met never interfere with her involvement with the lead-up to the war. And then when they do, talk of the war starts to encroach on every conversation with them, even that of the birds’ nest building. If I kept bringing up the headlines and imminent war while I was at the beach with friends or my kids, my wife would kick my butt, and rightly so.

Too often obsession is championed as concern. Spahr’s concern has been lauded as expansive. In a private e-mail I received, the writer of the e-mail described Spahr’s outlook in This Connection as “expansive despair” (a term I like very much, and one that is apt). He went on to say that he preferred Spahr’s expansive despair rather than, say Louise Glück’s limited one. With that, I would concur. However, I would add that my biggest problem with Spahr is that her vision is not that expansive. Her life is downplayed, negated by statements like “This is the stuff of the everyday in this world” after rehearsing a litany of violence around the world. It’s not the stuff of the everyday. The maintenance of relationships, small touches, roles taken on that are unpleasant but effective, etc.—whatever flavor of the quotidian that strikes a person. This is the everyday that is glaringly absent in Spahr. In this way I say the speaker in This Connection is not expansive.

Information and fact without imagination mixed in equals nothing.

But perhaps I am missing the central point of the book. In some way as I look at the book again, I see that perhaps the real focus of the book is not how the overtly political and mediatized vision of the world meshes with the quotidian. It is about how the overtly political and mediatized vision of the world swamps and drowns out the quotidian. In her one statement on page 62, “It is an uneventful day overall as we sit here waiting for the news” the circumstances of the war are taking precedent over everything else. On the next page the speaker goes further to say that “the military-industrial complex enters our bed at night.” Clearly the speaker is portrayed as helpless in the face of political events taking shape on the TV and computer. The speaker claims its status as victim. Indeed, it is. I can recall feeling helpless in March of 2003 also, but I held no illusions about my concern holding sway over those who had made “decisions.” [I can also remember thinking and telling everyone I knew that there were no WMDs and that all of that talk by the Bush administration was a politically useful tool. I got a lot of strange stares when I went on that diatribe.] It seems to me that Spahr’s speaker is portrayed as almost hypnotized by events to the point where the gaze is unable to be broken. This kind of tunnel vision seems avoidable to me, perhaps even regrettable. This is what I mean when I say that Spahr’s speaker seems more pathetic than sympathetic.

Perhaps it is counterproductive to become so passionate about politics in that it destroys one’s perspective on what is fundamentally important, and also in that it brutally colonizes the imagination and leaves it flailing.

But if one accepts being “stunned” by events as the given that this book is dealing with, then Spahr’s depiction is masterful. As it evokes the beloved and attempts to connect with it, it is heartbreaking to watch the speaker squirm in her sensibility. The speaker struggles to make a mark on the political map by playing the ultimate sorter of information. It is almost like watching Maxwell’s Demon hopelessly sorting electrons in order to bring about a global effect in the macrosystem. One wonders what kind of benefits package it gets for taking on such fastidious work.

To my thinking, it is more productive, especially when one is charged with shaping the minds of the young, to invoke an America from a different time so that the young will not grow up with a distorted notion of what America is supposedly about. Copious amounts of Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Ben Webster are antidotes to war (or perhaps the music of Naseer Shamma or Munir Bashir or Anouar Brahem to make it possible to wander the night . . .).

I’m sure that residing in the aesthetic will aggravate the inner activist who points out that this line of action is going into hiding. Perhaps. I am not always so anxious to make my mark upon the world. It seems to me that one can sum up the role of the responsible and informed adult as one that brings to bear one’s individual talents and will on his/her community, but it can also be withdrawing one’s mark when its incidental effects might be calamitous (advice I wish the Bush administration had heeded itself).

Perhaps it is that Americans are so mad for power in the form of making one’s mark on the world (and recognize that any vulnerability equates to a loss of power) that the dilemma of powerlessness as depicted in Spahr resonates so deeply. Spahr’s depiction of the responsible and informed adult as utterly powerless is discomfiting. But only if one buys into the notion that the assertion of power is the only way out of this dilemma. Let us all hunker down in our blogs and plan a faith healing!

Ultimately, perhaps Spahr is posing the question of whether political experience can be an aesthetic one also. My bristling at this central premise is related to my doubts that the political can be completely equated with the aesthetic. Politics is not sublime. I fail to grasp the importance of being a purely political animal.

TAKE ONE

In This Connection of Everyone with Lungs Juliana Spahr has witnessed the world in full dress rehearsal and given it a bad review. Except for a few brief cameos from the parrots who get high marks, the rest of the production is doomed. There is nothing joyous emanating from the human realm. All of humanity is teetering on the brink due to the fact that there is a lot of depressing news out there.

Even when optimism is invoked, it is only in irony. The speaker retorts “Such optimism, beloveds, such optimism” (p.65) in response to mynas collecting dried grass and napkins for their nest. After this the speaker admits to going “to the beach yesterday not in optimism but in avoidance and we spoke about the birds” This is the classic retreat into nature. This is the archetypal move to make for a middle-aged woman who is childless (I presume she is childless because I can’t imagine an entire text written about the “state of the world” without some contemplation of how the child one is raising is going to fit into it . . . this seems too great of an omission). While I agree that gloom is a peculiar burden for the informed to carry, there is no reason one must linger in it.

I’ve just received word from a private source that the alternate title for this book was The 12-Step Program to Losing One’s Humanity.

The larger project of the book seems to be how to inhabit this gloom, but the insistence on dwelling within it does not provide any great insight into existing within the contemporary malaise of information paralysis while yearning for connection to the world. The speaker’s voice is flat, flatter, flattened and making great appeals to some über-collective. Is the point of this book anything other than to illustrate that such a mindset exists?

I don’t want to belittle any intellectual involvement in the world. That’s laudable, but Spahr’s antidote to information sickness is to imagine everyone in bed with her, establishing skin contact with all her beloveds. While this vision seems plausible, it never seems to happen in the places I’m living. Of course, Spahr means this in a metaphorical sense. She means connect in any meaningful way possible. Yet the book is suspiciously devoid of any meaningful connection to humanity at all, nothing specific at least. The closest I could find to actual involvement in the world of humans is when the speaker talks of 136 people dead by politics’ human hands (p. 39) and how these 136 had pets and plants that needed watering, had food to make and eat, had things to read and notes to write (notice that absent mention of children again). Surely, one can find more joy than this in the world. Is there any joy left over for the living? I guess for Spahr and her ilk the real joy in life is getting together for a spirited kvetchfest.

This is what seems to be happening in most of the scenes with friends. In the scene mentioned above with the friends on the beach, the topic turns to Bush’s summit with Britain’s leaders. Perhaps the speaker and the speaker’s friends were strategizing about what Bush should say. I hardly see how that would matter except as an idle exercise in how to perform pointedly political acts of speech. Certainly it’s not something to take too seriously. But “take things seriously” is what this book does unabashedly. It seems to validate the seriousness as the newfound path to the examined life. It is the new pathos.

Perhaps the “excruciating life of the political observer” is the point of the book, and I am just failing to address it on its own terms. The question raised and the psychological terrain presented is that of a person who has reached the end of enchantment. The despair and disappointment is the main operating mode. While Spahr seems to want to legitimize this flatness as the mode which any concerned individual is likely to inhabit, it doesn’t leave any lasting impression on how to deliver any relief from it. Unless one posits the calling of everyone “beloveds” as a way out of the morasse. This, for me, seems akin to me (white) expecting to be able to pass as black by referring to every black guy I see as “brother.” How long is that ploy likely to last?

Joshua Clover in his New York Times Review of Books review championed the book as “political poetry the way it’s love poetry: how can it not be when you go for the everything?” Everything? One glaring omission is any sense of humor. And political? Well, yes it does inhabit the blank stare of someone who has propped himself/herself up in front of the screen for four hours, but I would argue its political pretensions fall short as well. A political poem that doesn’t deal with the quotidian presents a shallow view of politics. I got the sense that the book was championed by Clover because of its “stance” (read as utter capitulation to paralysis?) on the Iraq invasion. While the speaker may have captured the tone of despair that many felt in the days leading up to war, generally speaking, the speaker failed to meet the circumstance head on with anything more than a certain pleading and whining and obsessive need to accumulate ephemera about the war effort. Ho hum. I have my collection of war ephemera collected obsessively at 2 AM. You have yours. My datastream isn’t going to be the same as somebody else’s, but how do you get the datastreams to overlap?

Perhaps I am just sensitive about all this because as a father of two, I don’t have the luxury to mope and bathe myself in an avalanche of data from the computer. I don’t really see how rehearsing the notion that the world is a difficult and scary place, full of insanity and intolerance does much good for a five-year-old’s attitude and mentality. This book seems to be an argument for how morally superior one is for not bringing any children into this messed-up world.

I mention this only because in my life recently I was voted out of the living room, so to speak. My family took a vote on whether Iraq commentary should be present during dinner. I lost 3 to 1. I got huffy for a while, unable to participate in what I thought to be my obligation as informed citizen. I eventually learned that I would be allowed back into the fold if I listened to baseball over the Internet during dinner. While baseball wouldn’t be the choice of many who pursue an aesthetic life, it worked for me. It worked because it made me focus on human struggles that, no matter how insignificant compared to the altering of history in Iraq, were important to someone, important to affirming that the realm of the human matters. They inspired passion. In that, they weren’t a distraction. More than that, in some strange way, it made me feel connected to being American (in my opinion, baseball and jazz are the best reasons to be an American). In the face of my discontent about abysmal American foreign policy, our monolithic validation of Israel and negligence towards Palestine and our current Middle Eastern shenanigans, and my discontent about popular culture (which, admittedly, is no longer being produced for me) and its effects on the average American, spurring him/her on to greater consumer abuses, baseball can be the badge any American is proud to wear. [Of course, admitting anything other than disinterest in sports to an academic/aesthetic crowd is like admitting to finding deep spiritual significance in watching “Barney” with your kids.]

But not everybody grows up with the game, and many people find its scandals and inequities frustrating, emblematic of America gone awry. Not to mention the fact that many feel slighted watching the exploits of a bunch of tobacco-chewing galoots. Fine! I might suggest community service or any number of different kinds of dance. Take up a passion for food preparation. Sing in the choir. Start up a local branch of Diane Knorr’s Wonder Inc. If you don’t like this decade, then pick another and revisit it for the joys you think should be represented in this age. Etc. Jeez, if all else fails, in your darkest hour read some Billy Collins for relief.

I can imagine that my manic reaction above is a testament to the success of the book. My getting worked up about the paralysis and malaise of the speaker could be the reaction that Spahr is looking for. Her successful depiction of the life of the paralyzed intellectual is supposed to prod the reader to some sort of passionate involvement. However, I suspect the book’s aim is to provoke empathy for the speaker because of the speaker’s pathetic condition. I didn’t find myself going to empathy very often though. I’m sure this is indicative of one of my many personal failures.

TAKE THREE

I am left going back over the earlier threads of my thinking on Spahr’s book, and I have come to the conclusion that what Spahr is dealing with in the book is making the political the aesthetic. Beauty and truth (outdated concepts for sure, but ones I feel compelled to hold on to) only rear their heads when justice has been meted out equitably. In the face of the build up to the war, this was impossible. One was left with the feeling of helplessness at the sight of one’s own country standing up ready to distribute more suffering in the world for some rather nebulous ideal, which even if it had been fully comprehended, would still have been offensive.

The moral question in the book seems to be about disengagement versus engagement. When the engagement can only be intellectual, is there a neurosis that ensues? Is the comfort taken in exile the only rational way out left? Spahr hints at this on page 63 when she says, “I try to comfort myself with images of exile on this small piece of land in the middle of the large Pacific.”

To her, the formula is physical disengagement but intellectual engagement. Is that ramrod intellect effecting a ping on the drawbridge of the brutal world? I would say (after a while) not. It is leading, seemingly, to the “expansive despair” of the speaker. Is that a legitimate place for intellectual engagement to lead a self? I somehow wonder if Spahr’s speaker might have been better off calculating earned run averages rather than taking stock of protest crowds on the Internet.

Yet, many times in my ranting and raving over the years in the classroom about Rwanda, I have been accused by my students of exactly the same thing. I am accused of “bummerdom” and asked to sing a few choruses of the Beatles’ “Don’t Bring Me Down.” My standard retort is that the world is a brutal place and that turning your back on its brutality does not eliminate it. I realize that my resistance to “expansive despair” may be a bit greater than my students. But I must concede that I can’t hold up to the dentist’s drill the way Spahr’s speaker can. However, neither is my despair so totalizing (primarily because I can’t afford to be or I’d give up the hiding place of my stash of chocolate to my 5- and 7-year old, all the while shrugging my shoulders and saying, “What’s the point of hoarding chocolate in a world so tortured by suffering?”).

I have championed the need for a psychological buffer from the news, the need for a psychic fallout shelter when the news of the day encroaches in a totalizing manner. Is the alternative to this happy idiocy the point in the book where Spahr’s speaker says,

“It is an uneventful day overall as we sit here waiting for the news.”

When one’s whole life is parsing politics, the other nuances of the human condition tend to get lost in the shuffle. People whose political views one doesn’t agree with become solely opponents or evildoers. Scarcely does the world seem that black-and-white, that devoid of complexity (I fully admit I don’t have the mindset of the activist).

To exile oneself into the quotidian reinforces the status quo, and in this way one is complicit with the powers-that-be. That hurts. It’s as significant a burden to carry as assuming the mantle of chief parser of events in the news. But I also realized that short of personally going to Washington and splattering the brains of Dick Cheney on the wall of his private bathroom, the decision had been made. Clear signs of saber rattling were in the works since November of 2002. If one thought that somehow the US was going to stand down in March, then they were foolish. The machine to manufacture consent for the war was well in place prior to this.

Perhaps the burning question for me that begins to rear its head in Spahr’s book is what the moral thing to do is in the face of insane judgments made by those whose decisions will adversely affect millions of lives. My impulse is to acknowledge the insanity, prevent one’s own mental collapse, and hang on. Spahr’s approach seemingly is to fastidiously gather enough information to fill a small hard drive and then use this accumulated data as a security blanket. It serves as the proof that one hasn’t gone insane too.

Several years have gone by now since those fateful days in the run up to the war. One thing that This Connection does is it serves as a record of the events in the days prior to the onset. As I read the events, I remember them — Turkey’s about face regarding their participation as launching area for US troops. It is a record of complete insanity for sure. Tracking it all makes one fall prey to the same. Going back over it all again evokes the same old feelings and incomprehension. While it is important to have the record there, reading This Connection as an American is like replaying the scene of a horribly shameful event one was involved in over and over again. Such a replay starts to become damaging unless one confronts the replay with the notion that “that’s not my America.” Following this train of thought leads one to isolation again.

That Spahr gets me to endlessly meditate on the relationships involved in all of this is a credit to the book, and it is the reason that the book has been getting a lot of word-of-mouth attention in poetry circles.

That I would like the book to offer a more hopeful outlook probably reveals much more about my own views than I might like to admit. The resolve to stave off the poisoning of one’s life and tempering of one’s outlook on the world with cynicism is the story I should probably get busy in writing . . . even if it is inevitably a failed story due to the ever-imposing force of current events.

ALBERT GARCIA—SKUNK TALK

2005-11-03T23:49:00.000-08:00

I often get the nagging feeling that I should be medicated. I feel this way primarily because I sense it might help me compete better or focus on and complete more tasks during the day, tasks which normally would be left undone, waiting for a day when a positive mood might strike me. I wonder if all those people out there who are getting ahead, accomplishing great things, aren’t using those SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) to get an edge. They are composed, relaxed and come off as honest. Yet, somehow I see taking SSRIs as cheating. Somehow you’re using somebody else’s brain chemistry.

This is how I feel I about Albert Garcia’s Skunk Talk on Bear Star Press. I feel that when I try to enter into Garcia’s world, the calming effect it has on me gives me that same feeling of cheating. Garcia’s lines come from the “measure twice, cut once” school. They are well-crafted, laconic, and endeavoring to be earnest. There isn’t an ounce of fat on his lines, which is a bit disconcerting because with corpulence often comes jocularity.

The poems and the speaker in them are pretty much no nonsense; there is very little impulse to go for the great guffaw. Valley poets are skeptical of the ecstatic. The closest they come are ordinary wonders, which this book is chock full of. Its raison d’etre is the ordinary wonders that are part of domestic life and the expressions of gratitude for the existence of these ordinary wonders, to hang a little meaning on them once and again.

The poems Garcia crafts are small nodules of prayer fashioned to draw attention to minor miracles and enhance their place in the world. The following scene where the speaker drives by and notices a man and a small girl bear witness to the death spiral of a pigeon is an example of just such a moment.

A Scene: Driving Past the Corner Market

What did he say, this man
holding his infant daughter,

hovering over the flapping, spinning
pigeon, injured or poisoned, flailing

its dusty wings on the hot sidewalk
outside the corner market?

The moment it took me to drive past,
I could see his mouth

speaking to the baby. Was he explaining
this is what happens

when a bird glances into a car’s fender,
when one grain of rat poison

looks like a bread crumb
and seizes a tiny nervous system?

Did he tell his daughter,
squirming in his arms to see

the bird’s irridescent head,
green and purple, thrashing

from side to side, that this too
is nature, the spasmodic

preparation for death?
Was he thinking

he should step on the bird’s head
to end the pain, to prevent

the girl, too young for words herself,
from seeing? Or was he saying

anything beyond, Damn, look at that,
amazed, on a warm spring day

on a walk to the market,
at the kind of frightening, beautiful miracle

the world can give a man
who holds tight to what he loves?

The last three lines are quintessential Garcia. His speaker throughout the book is firmly devoted to place, one might say almost obsessively committed to it. One of his mentors/heroes at the University of Montana was Richard Hugo, and presumably this is where Garcia locates his devotion to the small place that is subsequently writ large. Unlike Hugo’s larger-than-life characters though, Garcia’s preference is to reflect on primarily family, both past and present. The somewhat odd and introverted types, the town drunks and ballyhooers that Hugo documented are not at all present. Garcia’s main characters are his kids and his wife. This kind of humility is more typical of the Valley, where a sound practicality is what usually prevails instead of all that room under the Big Sky beckoning for a broad palette of expression. It is this sensibility that makes Garcia’s lines so stripped down. He doesn’t waste a word because it isn’t wise (nor efficient) to say more than you mean.

Writing about those who are so close is not an easy task. It always looks easier from afar than it does up close. In the same manner, it is a lot easier to talk about than practice. In many ways it seems very cautious to take on “just what you know,” but those who practice writing about loved ones know of its perils. It takes wisdom and precision to place words on those who reside so close. It’s not a job for those who use words to evoke a reaction or make an impression. This kind of writing is the serious work of making one’s mark as a guide, not as a curse or a blessing. Garcia does this kind of serious work well. While Garcia does fawn over his wife in his love poems for his wife that capture their small intimacies as another variety of astonishing moment, his poems about his children show the deftness of his touch. In "‘Possum" where the speaker (presumably Garcia) gets excited about spotting a possum in the garage only to have his daughter, whom he has been watching from afar, look right through him and pronounce him as something of a ‘possum geek, Garcia depicts his daughter as following her own course despite the attempts of grown-ups to guide her attention. In choosing this manner of depiction, he is officially giving license to his daughter to find her own way (even though she probably would anyway without license being given).

Writing a poem about a child is a bit like getting on stage with a dog. There are very real and specific dangers to consider. With a dog, one must have no illusions about being upstaged. With a child in a poem, one must walk that razor thin edge between sentiment and mawkishness. A poem like "Ice" inhabits the no man’s land between the two. The poem serves as a vehicle to address the constant state of wonder the small child possesses. It is that state of wonder that Garcia is circling around throughout Skunk Talk. Garcia seems to be saying that this state of wonder is the one that sustains us through our lives, that if we don’t hold on to it, we find ourselves in a much more forbidding world.

Most of the poems in Skunk Talk employ the standard mode of poetry as witness and narrative. Occasionally, though, Garcia sneaks off into a pointedly imagined space.

Aquifer

Under the heat-blistered walls of this house,
water laps and trickles between rocks.

It’s dark down there—disturbed by no one—
just the occasional well like ours

sucking the liquid, gallon by gallon, up
through strata to sprinkler heads,

kitchen faucet, a tin cup
in my wife’s hands, her lips. I want

an opening, a hatch in our back lawn
that hides a shining metal tube

we can slide down for hundreds of feet
until we splash in a room

of water, a cavern. My wife
would swim beside me, both of us

gliding through the pool
like otters, swimming, drinking, swimming,

gulping until we’re under water
all the time, lifting our lips

to the surface to catch droplets
percolating out of the rock ceiling,

spilling toward out faces,
believers in a world that’s gentle and cool.

The assumption in the last line is that the world is generally not gentle and cool. It is hot, tumultuous and it may do bodily damage if given an opening. This is poet as protector. As I mentioned above, the antidote to the “heat” (remember that it is the heat that threatens in the Sacramento clime) is the time-stopping marvel that rescues one from the passionate pursuits of humans in the world and deposits one in a place (like an imagined cavern filled with cool water) where the brain can relax. Aha! I am back to the relaxed brain. It seems as though I am going to have to discover some small miracle in order to shut mine off.

Albert Garcia’s Skunk Talk is a tribute to the life’s work of a decent fellow. His work is not flashy. It does not call attention to itself. It does not try to set the world on fire. For this reason, there will probably never be a screenplay adapted from this book, probably not even a television show. The voice is steady and sincere. If a reader becomes habituated to the space it occupies, the world will slowly scab over, and the reader might even discover the compulsion to pick at it is lost.

GEORGE KALAMARAS—EVEN THE JAVA SPARROWS CALL YOUR HAIR

2005-10-19T23:40:00.000-07:00

When I first read the title piece "Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair" in Facture 3 back in 2002 (a magazine which, by the way was seemingly a replacement for Sulfur but unfortunately lasted only three issues), I had an immediate pull towards the piece. It was a piece that immediately set me on fire for the kind of linguistic pyrotechnics, the energy and drive of the hurtling rhythms, the variety and breadth of the things invoked in the poem. It struck me as a kind of tour de force, one which I immediately tried to emulate in order to see if I could approach the daring movement Kalamaras practiced there. It’s not often after many years of reading that you read something that "takes off the top of your head." I was compelled to pick up my pen, and Kalamaras has continued to be a model for me whenever I feel that my lines lack verve and nerve.

It seemed to emulate the Clayton Eshleman writing dictum of "driving 100 MPH with your foot on the brake."

I imagine that upon first reading many readers will feel put off by Kalamaras’s tendency to overreach with his images in a way that I can hear many say is "bad surrealism," the kind of overwrought juxtaposition that tries just a little too hard to be jarring but which doesn’t quite resonate in a semi-logical manner with a reader the way the best surrealist images do.

Watching someone overreach on the page like Kalamaras does is a lot like watching kids of the current generation who wear their jeans down below their ass. It seems ridiculous, even embarrassing, to wear them like this, just barely held up, but at the same time one has to acknowledge that, both literally and figuratively, it takes a scrotum filled to its capacity to do so.

Examples of the kind of imagery I am talking about abound in Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Name.

"Lice of sorrow, lice of squid, lice of the torn kite tail your breath remembers but cannot swallow when it inhales nine times again beneath that star over you when you were nine."

"A sparrow like the like the clarity of a broad-shouldered man housing beeweave as mound in the tube hidden in his limp on a rainy street."

"Bone of ground red cloud, of the snapped tentacle of swarmed lice that surrounds moon with moving light that bathes the tongue’s afternoon rain, dark Indiana oak pain that makes your prayer an urgent yet crass reciting of calm."

In short, this kind of image-making employs a kind of overly indulgent form of surrealism straight out of the Breton school of surrealists. I have this impression also, but in his essay "The Death of the Self: Poststructuralism and a Rhetoric of Silence" from his book of critical essays, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence, Kalamaras gives us some idea of what he is up to when he does this.

In the essay Kalamaras explains that the poststrucuralist gap (read aporia to the converted), that place which no utterance abides, the death of words, is similar to the notion of the paradox among Eastern mystics. He questions whether this silence is equal to the death of the self as the poststructuralists would posit. Kalamaras invokes Blanchot’s concept of silence which is not so "oppositional." Rather, it is "reciprocal." It nourishes and reconstitutes the discursive. Therefore, silence, far from being the death of the self and of its will toward empowerment, is seen as an ally in the self’s development.

I believe this is the central reason why Kalamaras engages in so much befuddling imagery that clearly does not aspire to logic, even in a pictorial way (for an example of this, one may look at the title of the book . . . what does it mean to have a Java sparrow call your hair? Would this be different from the way a sparrow in South Carolina would call someone’s hair?). The images seemingly fail to map onto anything. They are just there as verbal constructs resisting any attempt to unpack them. They are, in fact, paradoxes. As they litter the page in so much of Kalamaras’s work, these can be seen as reconstitutive moments in the text.

But so much of surrealism’s project is based on the moment of illumination that arises when disparate images rub up against each other in a moment of passionate frotteurism. Usually, the desired result is a recontextualizing of the items that are involved, rendering them each larger than what they were before they were thrown together to exchange electrons. But such a hideous organic compound cannot occur without that magical moment of gestalt that accompanies it. Surrealism relies on magical thinking.

For this reason, surrealism has not been a very good friend to academia. Academics tend to go for sharp, analytical modes of thinking. Their modes of discourse are usually geared to achieving power (perhaps this is why poststructuralism has gained so much caché). Graduate students become mad about discourses of power. They engage in various kinds of discourse analysis. Across the country they align themselves with the disempowered (even though most or many come from relatively privileged backgrounds) and study and analyze their claims to power. Then, when they graduate and the need to integrate into the machine for the purpose of recapturing the social position they inherited arises, they use their knowledge about claims to power to subvert other people’s attempts at making them [everyone knows the story of the middle class suburban Marxist who is weaned on revolutionary proclamations in graduate school only to understand the beauty and clarity of cooperation later]. However, surrealism's project is not analytical or constructive. It is an invocation of the visionary, and it's hard to rationalize a vision.

For this reason, I think that Kalamaras’s work does not offer itself up as critique of anything, not does it provide any real intellectual grist for the mill. It does not argue for anything or claim anything other than its own existence. It invokes, invokes, invokes. The things that it raises on the page in a kind of neverending blitzkrieg of a parade are ends in themselves, and their presence is designed to work on a reader the way op art does or the way Yolngu bark paintings are said to induce fantasies among the Yolngu Aborigines of Australia. For someone looking for greater insight in Kalamaras’s work, they may not find any other than what is appropriated by accident.

So, I am suggesting that the reason for Kalamaras’s “fluffiness,” is for readers to reimagine the world via that next technological innovation that is beyond technicolor. It should induce some psychological twist that underpins seeing the world in a different hue and changing the way the tongue works.

Is Kalamaras “beyond technicolor”? I tend to think so, but I suppose this depends on the ratio of gestalts achieved per cubic centimeter of lined poetry.

All of this is much like Rimbaud’s reasoned derangement of the senses also (which he achieved through absinthe). But it might be the altered state of mind that is achieved by Kalamaras in yogic meditation. Here is Kalamaras from his interview in Spoon River Poetry Review:

I hope that the lines achieve both a heightening of the
senses and a neutralizing of opposites. That's one reason
couplets, as a structure, are so very important to me—they connect
to my practice of yogic meditation. One basis of all the yogic
techniques is to neutralize opposites so that one may not be bound
by binaries and the changing tides of “good and bad,” “right and
wrong,” “inner and outer,” “you and me”— those tricks of conceptual
thought that block a deeper psychic reciprocity with the
universe.

In the same interview Kalamaras goes further:

The perspective of paradox is central to the collection and
to meditation in general. It is similar to a koan, but I prefer not to
see koans as riddles, because riddles imply a specific question and
answer. It is the process of the koan that is the transformative
agent by its structure, and not the answer. The koan, like poetry,
can momentarily short-circuit one's rational hold on the universe
and evoke a meditative state.

While I am not sure I achieve a meditative state when I read Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair, I wouldn’t rule out that possibility. The mental space I occupy is somewhere between awe and beleagueredness. I start out reading, and I am thunderstruck by the linguistic jolt I recieve. Then after the surprise and pleasure have firmly taken hold, I wonder how I can continually achieve the immaculate again and again—without becoming dehydrated. It’s like trying to dance Irish jigs all night. Not even Lance Armstrong’s heart can take that. At times one senses that Kalamaras is trying out every product he can find at Wal-Mart on you.

The problem with much of the surrealist project is: after my subconscious has been liberated, now what? After all of my dichotomous constructs have been rendered as part of a unified flow, then what? Is this really enough to build an alternative world as Breton suggested? Or does one begin to get the nagging feeling that one has taken on some of the rather nasty peculiarities of a none-too-intelligent mammal?

Strangely though, despite the beating the senses take after reading Kalamaras for a while, I always get the sense that Kalamaras is readying the mind for something. Mostly it is this reason I find his work valuable. I read his pieces as warm-ups when I am about to engage in my own form of mental gymnastics. In this way Kalamaras’s Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair serves like a book of etudes for a practicing violinist.

Each piece is a bite-sized candy in a Halloween treat bag, but take care that if you eat too many at one time, you might get sick.

But what of the pieces themselves? How do they work? In "Your Insides Have Some Explaining to Do" there are an accumulation of extraordinary images. They pile up, and at times refer back. There is more than one mention of the "counting of toes and only coming up with one", "writing on the insides (the intestinal tract)", "sparrows", "the theme of adult vs. child." Also, Kalamaras moves off of images from line to line. The fire ants from Namibia arrive (a mention of Africa where Rimbaud sails exists in the previous line) and implant themselves beneath the skin (another semi-reference to the "insides of the body"). This leads to eczema, then to the psoriasis of the scrotum and a brief encounter with the erotic in a "bout of almost-kissing." The items he invokes are always out of the ordinary. One might comment that he is indeed fetishizing strangeness throughout. The items themselves, though, are not particularly strange; just their actions and environment are out of the ordinary. There is a good mix of the exotic and the familiar, which is almost always the case in first-rate surrealist writing. We get Rimbaud, Ethiopia [Shoa], Namibia, Java sparrows, the Gobi, and the Punjab. But we also get, popcorn, toes, dice, ravens, cabbages.

The line-to-line references provide structure at the local level. One can almost feel the mind using association as its navigational tool, its compass. The brief episodes of looking further back provide more of a global structure for the piece. These instances are the folding of the protein that leads to its three-dimensional form. What I find invigorating about pieces that employ this structuring technique is the unique protein-folding that goes on in each. Sometimes the hardness of keratin emerges; sometimes it is hemoglobin.

I imagine there are those out there who will judge Kalamaras on the protein scale to be more like lambs wool rather than any of the nobler proteins. He is quite fuzzy for sure. This often has to do with his tendency to not even give away what his mind has been meditating towards in the last line. Frequently, the last line is meant to resonate with a point that the mind is moving towards. When we encounter,

That writing inside you may or may not be sparrow, be blind, become, is more like bird track, I hear, or frustrated fists of ordinary cabbage railing to get out.

There is little to gather about what Kalamaras’s linguistic performance has been building up to. One might venture that the last line is an ars poetica referring to the difficulties of “calling out” language onto the page. The "frustrated fists of ordinary cabbage" suggests that it is some inner emotional state like frustration that serves as the engine for his language generation.

In "Looking For My Grandfather with Odysseus Elytis" the last line also seems to echo an ars poetica (if not more generally what it means to be a language-producing animal in the world).

He gently undoes my trousers, the buttons of my shirt, dabs sweat from my brow, rubs olive oil on my groin, in slow circles at the sensitive tip of my penis, on my chest just above the nipples where the crushing begins. Push, push, he says. Vowel without end in the chest, he says. Soon you will speak, Giorgos. Soon you will speak.

In this situation the moment of manifesting language is at hand, the creative moment has arrived, and like most of us, Kalamaras is comforted to have a master like Elytis by his side. Surrealists are often keeping company with their cultural stars. There are an assortment of writers: Elytis, Wang Wei, Miguel Hernandez, Breton, Rimbaud, Vallejo, Shinkichi, Georges Seferis, John Bradley who make appearances. There are visual artists like Max Ernst and Paul Delvaux, many musicians like George Harrison, Laura Nyro, Rory Gallagher, the group of poems dedicated to Paul Kossoff, Tommy Bolin, John Cipollina and Randy California, who are members of the obscure rock bands, Free, Zephyr, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. There are very few references to people or works outside the arena of the arts. It is safe to say, then, that Kalamaras is highly concerned with aesthetic experience.

The largest question I am left pondering after touring with the Kalamaras light and visual effects show is whether work that makes exclusive claims about the aesthetic can be fulfilling over the long run. The absence of any fully fleshed-out ideation (or reference to the same) presses down on me. However, I keep reminding myself that if Kalamaras is comfortable with his work being replete with urges toward a fundamentally different aesthetic experience, then I should be OK with that too. However, along with this project of his comes an abdication of any responsibility for the world the way it actually is, for any responsibility to make any statements with any claim to veracity and power. Inscribed by the power relationships of human hierarchies, Kalamaras repeatedly refuses to face them.

So, what of poetry that refuses to make a statement about the world as is? Does this refusal ultimately delegitimize? History is full to the brim with critiques of the aesthete. The greatest of these is that the aesthete makes of his/her life a kind of useless ornament. He/she loses the capability to be effective; he/she loses power. For most, there is a perceived obligation for the poet to speak to the truth of his/her age.

But what if a poet challenges this obligation? What if a poet has no other aspiration than a pretension to illuminate? Even “serious play” seems too much like work, too involved with the practical virtue of seeking rigor in one’s work. What if the poet sees himself/herself as having no great cause to buy into the world? And to the extent he/she does buy into it, is this the ultimate buyer’s remorse?

I don’t want to begrudge Kalamaras his aesthetic space, especially when I find it such a pleasure to tread upon it, but I have my doubts at times in his work that it never fully ventures an episode in life. The blood, bone, guts and gristle he invokes are an attempt to represent the living, but they fall half a breath short.

Other links to pieces in this book are: "Living in the Material World" and "If"

QUINTON DUVAL—JOE'S RAIN"

2005-09-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

Quinton Duval's book Joe’s Rain revels in the slow wisdom of knowing that losing one's aspirations is a kind of achievement. The spirit of "hanging on" rises and animates nearly every poem in the book. The various speakers in the book, invariably mapped onto one shade or another of Duval, feel perfectly at home with the errant turn in life as well as reference made by the speaker to himself as "fat, bejeweled maggot." That'd be pretty harsh stuff if it weren't coming out of such an affable, self-deprecating guy.

Duval's earnest and straightforward work matched the Mark Bowles Central Valley landscape paintings behind him—flatline horizons. Listening to Duval read his poems at The Art Foundry in Sacramento reminded me of an interview with B. B. King I heard recently. King’s outlook was always gracious for whatever fortune had smiled on him as he held firm to the things he claimed as his own. Duval keeps the familiar in his clutch at all times. The poems are laced with generous amounts of Central Valley ephemera and natural phenomenon. As is the frequent trope for many Sacramento poets, the familiar and home are mainstays. Sacramento is a place that inspires fierce loyalties and myriad reflections, and though happening upon the Central Valley by chance in the mid-60’s, Duval has firmly ensconced himself within the literary imagination that Sacramento’s weather and rivers inspire.

Joe’s Rain is a tidy collection. Slightly more than half of the poem titles are one or two-word titles. It is a collection of six groups of seven poems bookended by a welcoming and farewell poem. In this way it appears as though you’ve been visited by a very sociable and amiable fellow with good manners who knows not to stay too long nor say too much. These are characteristics I admire because, for me, they're so damned elusive. One looks up after an evening with Joe’s Rain that isn't too taxing or intimidating and discovers a relaxed feeling arriving unexpectedly. His presence is the kind one saves a special bottle for. The bottle is brought out solely for the two of you when he visits. Indeed, beer, wine and bourbon (but no saké) flow throughout the book, but in "Joe’s Rain," another elixir is proffered.

Joe’s Rain

This late rain drives
into the dry soil
silent through the windows
that look out back.
One big robin bathes
in a saucer left out,
but that doesn’t mean much.
Two weeks ago a man stood
where the rain is falling,
frail, stooped, but standing,
forming words and making sense
about plants and birds and
what a garden does for your soul.
All the daylight is nearly burned,
smoke and ash of evening.
Lights from the house shine
back from wet concrete
this late rain has darkened.
The moon, we learn, reflects
the sun, so that’s what’s real.
I swear I hear a mockingbird
sound just like an alarm clock
mornings when I don’t have to
get up. So that is real too.
And today, wet streets
under the overpass, trucks above
barreling somewhere hurried,
a shower of cherries, shaken
from their crates around a curve
rained down in front of me
and adorned the roadway.
Farmers don’t like rain
when their crop is on the tree.
But I like rain almost always.
Bury us all near water,
scatter us all on water.
If it can rain cherries, it can rain
anything. Does this help?
Have a glass of rain on me.

Rhetorically speaking, this poem ends the way several poems in the collection do. The you understood suggests a giving of advice or a giving of directions. "Have a glass on me" is an invitation, but it's also a warning that slaking thirst can seem like a useless gesture in retrospect. The speaker knows that a glass of rain really isn't going to help with the bitter pill, but he offers it nonetheless. In this way, "Joe’s Rain" can be offered as a kind of Duvalian ars poetica that says—"Hey, I'm just making these poems as a way to take care of what ails you, but I can’t vouch for their effectiveness at alleviating a lifetime of your pain." Does this poem help or does that poem help? Duval isn’t presumptuous enough to even hazard a guess. However, in "Shine" he makes his humble proposal to embrace optimism such as it is.

Shine

This paper hides in back
of a book I’m reading
because it is sad and beautiful,
the last book of poetry
written by a man who knew
he was dying, and still he found
joy and life and shine in most things.
this paper with nothing on it
asks, I suppose, by its blankness,
to be filled.
I don’t believe in curses,
good or bad, rubbing off.
Maybe I have a pencil
and this paper to put down
how the turkey vulture came
straight toward the house
so I could see its red head
like stewmeat in the noon light.
Or across the bay, from this high,
a road looks like a backwards C,
like fingers and thumb showing
how much you missed something,
when what you missed by was slight.

I know, I’m not going anywhere
like the eucalyptus that waves
back at something constantly.
I can only describe what’s out there
and try to make it shine
like a ring pressing into a finger,
like the shallow water
the boats are careful to steer around,
like, like, like the sun dropping,
the blood spatter on that one gull’s beak.
Pencil on paper, I still have things
to say. Here’s to everyone trying
in some way to make shine out of shinola.
You know what I mean. It’s the difference
between the vulture’s beaded eye
behind his meat face, the rain
pouting miles offshore, the lizard
that comes out to share the sun,
the one my wife doesn’t like
but I think is a bright little motor
pulsing up and down in this light.

Here Duvalsides with the little guy (doing his push-ups in order to survive). That lizard isn't "going anywhere like the eucalyptus." If I weren’t sure that Duval doesn’t have green skin and a tail, I'd swear he had manifested himself as this reptile sunbathing in the nude. The speaker seems to be getting at the ol' accepted wisdom that there is truth ringing through all the sorrow and disappointment. A little shrine of abdications can be built to glimmer in the afternoon heat, fending off a world of menace.

Duval makes great sport of ridiculing the grandiose and celebrating the simple pleasures of common experience. Everywhere in his work there are gestures made to common experience. He is very self-conscious about sounding like a poet with a capital p, like in "Trying to Read Mythology,"—"Or more beautiful,/a pitcher of moonlight spills over/the heat-faint garden and lights up/ a fig tree laden with ancient, ripe fruit./Maybe we should shut up and eat.” Here the poetic gesture is trumped by more basic demands. This kind of deflation is pervasive in Duval's poems, and it tends to nestle into the body of a poem between the yearning and wrenching detail the way a cactus wren hunkers down in a scabbed-over hole in a saguaro.

In I Remember SaltDuval takes the reader to a non-descript Spanish-speaking venue—my best guess places me in Mexico, but I wouldn't rule out Neruda's Antofagasta plains ( I must admit, though, that this second option is unlikely as Duval usually opts for direct experience as his subject matter rather than traveling through to an imagined space). Once there, the reader is greeted by a rather harsh and bitter domain. Life is hard—sleeping and eating and laundry, the trifecta of a barren life. The scenes are working class scenes, and Duval becomes aware of his alienation in such a place where "salt is taken in kind and bitter olives yield the oil year after year." Here again, the focus is on expectations dashed. In such a place dreams are not even worthy of idle chatter. Revealing something like a dream might get one arrested for indecent exposure. Residents of this visited place might be too familiar with the truism Duval offers in "Honey"—"we rarely get to taste the honey we've made." And when we do taste it, Duval in "On a Hot Summer Day" reminds, "being grown up is accepting/the diminishing of all things/we imagined ours forever." Duval seems specifically in tune with this sensibility of accepting the echoing sentiment of nostalgia in "Into the Sea."

Into the Sea

Take your tarnished halo
and sail it into the pale blue
line between sky and water
this evening offers you
here at the edge of the world.
Take your faded blue shirt
and strip it to bandages
for the wounded souls
you’ll meet along the way.
Bring what you can carry
and remember that no one can tell
what lingers behind your smile.
You know some songs, yes,
but the words seem to have fallen
from the board, as the birds
this evening fall off the face
of the sky and into the ocean’s turmoil.
How many songs have you ever known
with "pilgrim" inside, wander
the directive, and the needle
pointing north? A squad of pelicans
clears the space west of you.
Your path leads to woods, a bridge,
a hill, a bluff, a bench
where rest the weary. The sunset’s
glorious, it’s not so cold,
and everything goes off, everything
except your full heart, your waving hand,
your watery eyes. Into the sea
everything goes.

At the end of the book, the reader might feel like he/she has been witness to a lemon-sucking contest. The leftover lemon rinds are the dregs that serve as reminders of tattered lives, still loved like stuffed bears with their patina of wear and tear. The hard truth of the matter, though, is that the reader is probably better off than those dismembered lemons. The Germans call this schadenfreude, joy at another’s misfortunes. It is a strange way to get to catharsis for Americans, but I presume Duval would allow for any of his readers to get there any way they might manage. Besides, all the self-deprecating humor Duval employs, Americans generally don’t get that anyway. When was the last time you heard an American tell a joke that started out, "There were these three Americans . . ." Duval is one American who might just rise to this occasion.

JOSH McKINNEY—THE NOVICE MOURNER

2005-09-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

Josh McKinney, sporting his new Gary Snyder haircut (or was it a Lance Armstrong cut?) read nearly twenty pieces from his new collection The Novice Mourner published by Bear Star Press. The short-cropped hair and cowboy boots seemed apropos of a redneck shitkicker past that McKinney claims in the book, which is very distant from the effete elliptical type that Stephen Burt and others have proclaimed him as. Nowhere was this neatly compartmentalized past self more apparent than in McKinney’s piece called “Gun,” the highlight of the evening. In “Gun,” a collection of short prose poems inhabited by Bonnie Parker and populated mostly by childhood vignettes about his father’s sidearm pistol, McKinney intoned the words descriptive of his father’s (and now his own) pistol—the Ruger “Blackhawk” .22-caliber single-action revolver—in such an incantatory manner that it made it possible for a brief moment to truly believe in and devote oneself to the raw power of firearms.

Many of the poems in The Novice Mourner stand in stark contrast to Saunter, McKinney’s previous book that won the University of Georgia Press Poetry Series Open Competition in 2002. The Novice Mourner is seemingly much more autobiographical. It is the place where McKinney negotiates and wrestles with his past (in particular with the spectre of his bitter and authoritative father) at the same time providing reminders of his experimental tendencies. The discontinuities and fragments which are emblematic of much of the work in Saunter often give way to, in a case like "Gun," brutally straightforward narratives where McKinney’s aim is to reveal arrived-at truth rather than truth searched for, shaken, separated, and reticulated.

This adaptation of style to fit content shows that McKinney is not a slave to current fashion and that he understands that form needs to serve the content it delivers. The poems I admire most though are the ones that maintain their narrative thread while introducing a healthy amount of meditation on the events, placing the events within the arc of humanity’s struggle and exhibiting the reach of an energetic mind. A Principle of Perspective is a terrific example of how a son’s battle with his father (though the son is not completely equated to McKinney through the use of the first person I) can be the backdrop for a meditation on the need to acquire distance from a colossal event. In this poem the event is one that upsets the typical father-son power relationship. The perspective that evolves passes through normal tones until a “sinister” one develops to inform the living.

But it is not enough for many to simply admire poems. Many readers wish to love poems and the authors who write them. They look for the familiar forms of persons they know in them. And McKinney delivers this to them as well. In “In Other Words” the speaker informs the reader of how the past wreaks havoc on his thinking. Then in stanzas four, five, and six, a scene with an old woman begins to emerge. An old man (the father who likely appears in "A Principle of Perspective") exhibits some odd behavior, and the speaker is left to interpret it, to interpret the slow dissembling of this man at the end of his life. The last two lines prove that the thing that makes one human might also be the thing that leads one to ruin. McKinney cautions that the higher faculties doth lead us astray.

IN OTHER WORDS

Light tactics splay over the ground,
and the clothes twisting
in wind, the shirts and skirts
forming like tall thoughts,
make sight a plea for mediation.

What sinful, crazy architect
concocts a past in tatters?
The light. The wind. I grew up
tall, thinking the way a chain twists,
winching engines into air.

“Back in the spring of” is how
it begins. In, at, on—the little
words that make place possible.
Telephones revise the fields,
which is why I am twisting even now

into the patchwork of an old woman’s
apron, her hands without tactics
to clothe her husband, naked,
stumbling into a field to call
his dog, dead now for years.

I call no one and the tale survives
another telling. We embroider place.
We clothe the wind and lash it
to our backs. Power is always naked.
How could I tell them his stories grew

better in his last months,
the squeamish garments of a past
cast away in tatters, his words
strangely light, attendant to the world
and free from the idea of it.

Death seems singularly prepared to make its face seen on nearly every page in The Novice Mourner, not unexpected in a book primarily about grief and loss. McKinney read his pieces plaintively, in an even tone that enhanced their solemn nature. The stare into the harsh abyss requires such a steady voice. That earnest tone is spread liberally throughout the book. There is very little of the nimble elision and undercutting of pronouncement seen in McKinney’s other work. The speaker in the poems of The Novice Mourner is urgently delivering a message to his readers: the world is cruel and crueler when looked at in hindsight. In fact, in “In Earnest,” the only piece in the book that takes respite from the past and places the reader in a decidedly Sacramento landscape, McKinney seems to elevate death to a kind of noble gesture, a kind of success that can be had when the time comes for there to be no more expectations about living. The salmon gracefully move towards their end, and in doing so, reach something like epiphany at the moment they expire. In this, they are “almost nothing, almost all.”

Even the love in The Novice Mourner is brittle, susceptible to disruption by catastrophe knocking at the door. “The War at Home” is one of the most beautiful and poignant poems about the current war in Iraq and how the presence of war can unnerve even those in a remote domestic setting. The effect that the war has on the speaker is reminiscent of how young Israelis who serve in the Israeli Army seem to inherit blindness and fury just by their proximity. The young soldiers are poisoned by the atmosphere. In “The War at Home” husband and wife suffer the same fate at the hand of a world that rudely encroaches and destroys habits of caring for others.

THE WAR AT HOME

It’s Tuesday, nearly Christmas,
and the kids have gone to school.
It’s the day I work at home, the day
we’ve planned to set aside
some time, a few hours, to talk,
to touch, to take a walk around the block
among the falling leaves, and then
beneath the quilts to feel the chill
go out of us. Perhaps to say
some soft and secret thing unplanned,
perhaps to doze—if only to wake
still holding one another—and then
to rise again, to carry the glow
of union through the day.

We sit down to read the news
and by the second cup of coffee,
stop. The specters of the daily dead
assert themselves, and I can read
the disappointment in her face,
and worse, the shadow of a tired resolve
that looms up now, a merciful distraction:
there are goods to buy, and the car needs
gas. And I, too, in the mood now
only to be intimate with my anger at
the world. What used to come so easily
to us is now the victim of our broader view,
which narrows like this season
and its sun, like our grim smiles
as we tell each other, silently,
that we will make no time for love.

These lovers are a little too experienced in the world. They let their grief about its violence and chaos manage their time. However, not every poem’s speaker is similarly afflicted. In “The Novice Mourner,” the speaker seems psychically unprepared for the next calamity even though he expects it. Knowledge is scarce. What befalls the speaker is a sense of living in the world among the disparaging ingratitude of imminent tragedy. The tragic always announces itself as essential.

THE NOVICE MOURNER

This may not be the end of something.
If the cat in the window knows anything,
she’s not talking. For three days

his hands have smelled of pine,
clear eyes closed to study the blue moon
where the hammer kissed his thumb.

Food shadows lengthen, counting lulls
between determined moans of ambulance
and cottonwood. All those dishes to return.

His neighbor leans on a lawnmower
purple-faced; even his once-luscious
wife wears life like a thin gown.

He scans obituaries for names of the living.
The mail slot sings its avalanche of grief,
anticipating spaces for every shotgunned

sign post, for every forgotten squash
turning to water under a canopy of leaves.
Any minute now, the phone rings.

Perhaps the great irony (or is it justice?) in The Novice Mourner is that the view of the world as harsh and unforgiving that the father in many of the poems inhabits is now adopted by McKinney himself. The circle is complete. Another father has jettisoned his burden for a son to carry. As McKinney’s past surfaces and is processed, it cannot escape submission to the grim requirements of the serious consequences given on any particular day.

It is a testament to Beth Spencer at Bear Star Press that she is able to let a variety of styles commingle in The Novice Mourner, for the real glue is the emotional weightiness of the subject matter. The stylistic variance is also tribute to McKinney’s understanding the game of sloughing off labels that have been affixed—as X kind of poet or Y kind of poet. The tone of the book can deaden joy at times, again understandable in light of the subject. However, if one bears down and is willing to immerse oneself into the craggy depths of McKinney’s level-headed look at the somber, the result will be that one begins to feel like a cancer survivor (on a long bike ride), like one has endured a long, tough battle with an adversary who plays as unfairly as life in the world does.

GUTTING MR. GUDDING

2005-09-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

While I agree that Mr. Gabriel Gudding does a very thorough job of pointing out what the habitual pot-stirrer is up to, I am concerned about where legitimate dissent is allowed to present itself (after all, it can always be branded as "bad behavior" by those firmly ensconced in the group ethos).

Quite honestly, I get tired of those who are so quick to use the label of "bad" rather than "complex" about behavior. Mr. Gudding's piece reads like a primer of how to deal rhetorically with those who dare to dissent. [It's not always to draw attention to oneself. Some people actually have ideas of their own these days. Might there be a difference?] In this age of deep and scary conformity, I am concerned about how totalizing norms work their magic.

I suspect this is why some people are always a little bit shy of those people whose name creates a little cloud of community along with them. One can usually smell the blind alignment to the cause which is always present within the cult of personality.

Furthermore, I've always understood it to be the literary responsibility of "those outside" to comment (many times unfavorably) on the inner machinations of majority groups. I would go further in saying that there are many people whose radar is finely tuned to the poisons lurking as groupthink within any community. Those who champion "community above everything else" seem to me to forget how repressive groups can be.

That Ginsberg may have had some rough spots on his emotional profile, I don't doubt. However, in my discussions with Bei Dao, he was always grateful that when Ginsberg went to China, he publicly recognized him as opposed to the official state-sanctioned poets. I'm sure Mr. Gudding would accuse Ginsberg of mugging for the camera. Perhaps, though, he was naturally inclined to acknowledge dissidence. The attacks on Ginsberg now (years after his death) are probably due to the fact that we in the States don't do dissidence very well now. ESPECIALLY in academia [Where I presume Mr. Gudding resides as he identifies himself as a "semicolon specialist"].

Apparently, in Mr Gudding's book, all those who seek to inscribe their own individuality are narcissists. Let us be helped by the God of good manners when these said "individuals" are expunged from the realm of the artistic corps.

BRAD BUCHANAN—THE MIRACLE SHIRKER

2005-09-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

Brad Buchanan reciting a poem to one of his favorite hand puppets

Brad Buchanan’s reading at The Art Foundry in Sacramento was like going to see the old school poets as they assembled around a campfire and recited their earnest renderings of the world long into the evening. One almost expects a harmonica to (as Buchanan himself writes in "A Personal History of the Harmonica") appear in the wings as a "voice as fragile and eager as a flame."

While I wouldn’t characterize Buchanan’s voice as fragile, his baritone is steady and deeply attuned to metrics as he reads. Each poem is recited from memory (nearly two dozen from his repertoire by my count), and the timing of each line is very measured, if not the modulation of voice. Yet, this works to his benefit. By the end of the evening, one feels mesmerized, pulled into the solemnity of Buchanan’s world. Like Segovia lulling animals to sleep in Seville, Buchanan's poems transfix their listeners and introduce them deeper and deeper into the miasma of human emotion. He is calm and earnest, so calm my five-year-old fell into blissful sleep on my lap.

Coupled with this calm, though, is great intensity. There is nothing breezy at all about Buchanan or his work. During his reading, an intensity comes over him that suggests a game of chess with him would be no ordinary one. His lines are the definition of "muscular," loaded as they are with rich adjectives and "heavy" concepts. For his ambition to take on weightiness so earnestly, I admire his work in that it runs so contrary to current fashion. Buchanan’s soul is very old, and he has no problem in returning to the ponderous ground of the old masters and oral tradition. The poems in The Miracle Shirker are object studies in how to construct a line as a mighty fortress ripe for memory.

Buchanan writes primarily out of his own life experience in The Miracle Shirker. The early part of the book documents aspects of his life growing up in Ottawa. Then he addresses his formative years in the States. Several poems in the middle take on literary and aesthetic subject matter (as well as a smattering of politics). Finally, the last poem of the book returns to the childhood game of tag with a childhood acquaintance who was a cancer patient.

It

Sometimes our games of tag made room
for a cancer amputee named Jamie;
he dangled from one armpit and swung
a crutch, too late, at the fleeting boys
who went near enough to the “home free” zone.

Still, we took our lumps; there was no cast to sign,
so we let the rubber tip of his aim
leave its mark on us as we darted in
and out of range, as though we were drawn
by the vectors of healthy momentum.

He was having fun, we were convinced
as we ran past, pushed each other close.
Bald beneath his baseball cap,
he whirled in pursuit of a shifting home plate.

Too sick to be anything but "it"
in a swarm of playmates he couldn’t infect,
he hit out with one hand at the life
that eluded him, laying the wood on
too hard and too seldom.

Buchanan is best when he is using his precision language to compress action. In this piece we are led through innocently cruel actions of the speaker and his friends until the last three lines when Buchanan lays his punch onto his readers by commiserating with all who have suffered indignity and have been unable to find retribution often enough.

But Buchanan is not one to deliver lines such as the final one above too seldom. On the contrary, there are many dense and muscular lines that must be carefully unpacked. At the outset of “His Wardrobe,”

The vagrant angels of his wardrobe
are prone and prostrate, shapeless cuckolds,
frames of skin that, uncollected,
slump in wrinkled attitudes.

This line and the next make for a complicated and finely wrought image:

They are spread out like pelts let slip in traps:
a feather-filled parka, fallen, faceless
hood-space down, is humped like a monk
uncloistered, wintering in that basement.

The piece continues with various ruminations on the kind of body and the various manifestations of the body’s spirit that resided in this wardrobe. At the end the speaker emerges to speak to these various manifestations that he "want(s) no part of them,/ they’ve made room already; his nakedness/in all but name has been proven/unfaithful, the soul’s cloak, a sham."

Emptiness, failure and death linger in many of Buchanan's offerings. One would presume he would be in possession of a shattered life instead of a Ph.D. from Stanford (perhaps this was the crucial catalyst for such despair). But emptiness, failure and death are really impostors in Buchanan’s work. All of these are really foils for what concerns Buchanan the most—emotional loss. There is grief and near-grief on every page. His world is a world where sperm turns to dust and old men fish and shift foot to foot while they watch their other lives wash away. Buchanan has trained his focus on how consequence and the choices that one makes conspire to cut off one's other lives. This is the root of Buchanan's emotional loss, the loss of possibility.

There are so many other taut and demanding lines that I could continue my discussion of them indefinitely. One line that catches my attention in "Picking Fruit," a poem that neatly approaches the subject of how we choose our mates, is a line that is kind of an ars poetica. In the poem the speaker is instructed by his/her mate to pick ripe fruit. The speaker recognizes that the fruit can’t be put back after it is plucked from the tree, ready in its urge to rot. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker’s I appears to reveal:

I might do worse,
when I write this poem,
than to take your advice
as I look for an ending—
and stretch the thought
till it breaks, or not,
at which point I will choose
other fruit to take home.

While the parallel to the picking of fruit is obvious, and the "picking" of one's mate is the subtext, one might venture that there is more of a literal rendering of Buchanan’s poetics here. The intensity that Buchanan musters to forge his lines (at times because of the slant rhymes he employs) almost causes there to be a shear force for the meaning of his line. It’s a kind of semantic contortioning that occurs. This might almost make him seem like a "LANGUAGE" poet, a notion which Buchanan would be horrified by or find as outright absurd. [Let it be clear that Buchanan makes no bones about his disdain for incomprehensibility elsewhere in the book.] However, in the lines above, one can peer at an attitude of indifference about whether the thought a line delivers remains intact on first impact with the reader.

More of Buchanan’s approach to writing can be seen in "Not If I See You First." I shouldn’t really claim that this piece addresses his approach to writing. It is more indicative of his approach to seeing and telling, so much a part of any poet's toolbox. Buchanan is not very well-ensconced in the first thought-best thought school.

Not If I See You First

My eyes and ears,
you give notice that light
is moon-colored this evening—
the wet wind has stopped
and clouds are no object.

You tell me: look up
and listen for more specific
directions, as if we could fly
to where your observations
originate.

What you describe

makes a second sight
more intense and more lasting
than my own impressions.

Reality tells me you’re what
I can trust. You make time
for the senses to take, unrehearsed.

One day I’ll wake up
and get a taste of unmediated
experience—a sunrise
that signifies, undiscussed—
but only if I don’t see you first.

In this poem Buchanan lauds the double take, raising it to the sanctified ground of the impression. Spontaneity is cashed in for a Rilke-like deep look at things. His eyes and ears intone that it is this kind of hard, rigorous looking that should be trusted, not the facile glance. In this manner, the second take, the experience mediated by rumination is championed. This is a hard thing to get used to when one is informed by mainstream contemporary poetics to get the mind out of the way and just provide unmediated experience. Buchanan knows better. He realizes that the human mind can contribute to a rendered scene. He is most honest about the way his mind intercedes between seeing and telling. In this way he is not just a run-of-the-mill poet of experience. Mercifully, the mind is at work, and it is given acknowledgment for what it contributes to experience. One might say he is a minimalist in tone and style, but a maximalist in the breadth of what his thinking life offers.

Another refreshing thing about Buchanan’s take on the role of the mind in poetry is that he doesn’t want to make very many apologies for the mind being overwhelmed or tripped up by all the input in a highly mediated culture. Buchanan's mind insists that it is still fashionable, if not good manners, to use that mind to make sense.

There are several ringers in the book. "After the Victory Declaration" poignantly deals with the absurdity and inhumanity of war. “The Heroin Garden” is a meditation on drug addiction and, by extension, all kinds of addiction. Other poems from the collection include: A Photograph from Northern Iraq and The Separate Sleep. My favorite poem in the book at current reading, though, is

A Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park

An Eden of juxtapositions
a litte dark-haired girl feeding pigeons
on the lawn, mimicking a parent’s
too-predictably generous hand,
is given a hasty peck and drops
her peaceful bounty, creating a mob.
A dwarf bonsai by a waterfall
is a parable of serenity; a plaque
offers her a more grave consolation:
"In 1942 the Hagiwari
family was relocated to a different part
of the country." One cannot live
in a garden unmindful of wars,
which are bound to happen.
Golden carp polish themselves in a pond,
like tarnished suns in a captive sky;
crayfish stick together in a muddy corner,
wondering why they were ever set free.
Tea is served in prophetic cups;
fortune cookies gobbled between sips.
These fragments prove the beauty
of a long-suffering imperative:
cultivate your life for strangers
to see themselves in, whoever they are.
When you’re gone a reflection remains,
clean but haunted, a clue to the nature
of paradise: an ancient banishment reinvented.

"Golden carp polish themselves in a pond,/like tarnished suns in a captive sky" alone is worth the price of admission, and the last line is indicative of the kind of loss that determines Buchanan’s world view—even among the small pleasantries of the observable world, one has a feeling that one has been banished into paradise, that some other world holds even more promise.

Buchanan is not a school of quietude poet, a poet who makes the mind disappear because it is some embarrassing toilet paper sticking to the bottom of the shoe. Yet his mind’s adventures do not take him down the path of numerous younger poets who want to explore the noise and confusion of the mind as the new and proper agenda for the mind swamped in a heavily mediated culture. While no one can deny that the mind today is too frequently overwhelmed and therefore seen as a kind of sickly child that constantly throws up on itself, this is not an excuse to openly indulge in this version of the mind to the exclusion of all other versions. And this way of writing, championing discontinuity, is hardly new. I thought I saw all this discontinuity many years prior as the harbinger of the new, and with Zukovsky and others before that. The tricks of discontinuity have grown old and tiresome, even annoying when they insist themselves so adamantly. Buchanan’s work may just be proof that intelligence need not always go beyond the brink and embrace chaos.

A BEAUTIFUL MOMENT

2005-08-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

I know this is not a political blog, but sometimes there is a moment of such beauty and inspired genius that I can't help but pass on the aesthetic moment for everyone else to cherish.

Bill Moyer, 73, wears a "Bullshit Protector" flap over his ear while President George W. Bush addresses the Veterans of Foreign Wars. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)

HISTORICITY AND FICTION

2005-08-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

Relativism with regard to truth seems to be a winning notion these days, one that is hard to deny as the grand narrative of the past splinters.

However, a disingenuousness ploy to pawn something off as real that clearly isn't real is offensive because there is a pretense of veracity as non-fiction. When the context is notably a fiction, like with Michael Earl Craig's work (see my review), invoking the historical real brings the intersection of the historical real and the pointedly imagined space of the writer into relief.

Much of this issue reminds me of the discussion that Harry Frankfurt provides in his book On Bullshit. Frankfurt bemoans the loss of the idea of truth. He feels the truth is ascertainable (even though it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to get at without some complication). He believes the truth is ascertainable because there is a real world that behaves in a certain way that has clear causes and effects. People's interpretations of these events make it difficult to ascertain truth.

The problem he has with bullshit as (he tries to define it) is that bullshitters have no regard for the difficulty of getting at the truth. They tend to offer catch-all statements like "it's all story-telling" in an attempt to save face or curry favor. Advertising and politics are currently hotbeds of such rhetoric. Nothing is said without a nod to how it will be perceived, truth be damned!

For Frankfurt, bullshitting is different than lying. To lie one must have a notion of the truth and then avoid it. Bullshitting begins with the premise that anything goes as long one plays a savvy public relations game.

The interesting part of Frankfurt's book is the question he poses about why bullshit is more tolerated than lying when, in fact, bullshitting is perhaps erodes the public trust more.

Nowhere is there a better example of this than the condemnation of Bill Clinton for "lying" about having sex with Monica Lewinsky while George Bush II's declarations about Niger's uranium enrichment program and IRaq's movement towards nuclear weapons were made to sell the war and probably were not regarded as "truthful" by many intelligence officials. However, they played because they would sell well. This bullshit (as Frankfurt would define it) is not condemned (at least intitially by most and even now by many).

What ramifications does all this have for fiction or poetry? Does infusing a fictional world with elements of the real poison our attempts to get at a difficult truth?

Perhaps, but because it does not try to portray itself as verifiable, there is no deliberate intent to misrepresent. The richness that the fictional interspresed with the historically real can be observed in the way it forces a reader to contemplate the counterfactual (much the way Philip Roth does in The Plot Against America.

I have always been interested in how the surrealists have dealt with history. Most tend to invoke mythical places out of it, like Craig. Most stop short of invoking the historical real because the effect can be subtly political without seeming to hold true to the facts. In short, their work seems flippant (Aimé Cesaire an exception here).

The real value in invoking the historical real within a pointedly fictional realm is to engage with the counterfactual, to contemplate what the world might have looked like if inserted into a different context. I think this is always useful in establishing perspective on the past as well as the future, perspective on the place where you live now and the place one grew up, for example.

This "alternative worlds" view of the present and the past gets panned for being flaky. [Craig seems to resist it because bringing the serious historical real undermines the playful tone of his work.] The bias against flakiness is hard to overcome (even though this criticism is a lot like criticizing Fauvism for depicting a brown sun). Something that is perceived to be addled and dreamy has no business daring even to encroach on the serious real. Somehow, this is an aesthetic breach. Taking it on is risking something. For all that Craig does risk, he does not venture this far, presumably due to his disregard for the importance of history.

Planet of the Apes Meets A.R. Ammons

2005-08-04T22:17:00.000-07:00

Today I watched the original Planet of The Apes with the kids. It reminded me of how writers in the 70’s, like Rod Serling, were willing to take on such heady stuff (even as Charlton Heston warns Julius, more than a bit comically, to “never trust anyone over 30.” Ah, so sweet. Next week our family film festival will feature True Grit, the original Star Wars and Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson. Good, strong, honest 70’s fare. The only fallout of the viewing is that my kids were intoning, “Get your paws off me, you damn, dirty apes” all night. I hope the little one doesn’t use that on his kindergarten teacher tomorrow.

I love the “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” scene during the trial. Can anyone find a t-shirt with that on it anymore? News Flash: Still available on eBay for $12.99

The 70’s were the age of self-indulgence, yes, but also a much more ponderous time. The 24-hour news cycle had not intruded yet. I can remember honestly poring over the concept of goodness after the week’s Little House on the Prairie episode. Such naïvete is what the 70’s are despised for these days. Why in that age even Charlton Heston could stand revealed as a hero. How my kids will be devastated when they learn what happens to him later.

Ammons in The Selected reminds me of this kind of intrepid spirit to take on the imponderables. Ammons holds up his galactic perspective of nature for our perusal. I remember reading “Gravelly Run” for the first time and having that feeling of the top of your head being taken off, that feeling which, when it does still happen years later, provides satisfaction even though it is much rarer. The surprising details in the line that Shawn Pittard quotes from is the mention of the “algal hair,” and the “shoulders” of the highway bridge, a blunt attempt to anthropomorphize nature. There is something deeply satisfying for me (and perhaps all readers) to see humanity reflected in nature.

In the end, though, nature is sealed off from the speaker and his gaze “so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass / jail seals each thing in its entity.” The realm of the human and the realm of nature are separate. Philosophy is futile. The only answer one is going to find is to keep moving (which leads us to Mark Strand’s “Reasons For Moving,” the real juggernaut from that age in my opinion . . . the one poem, more than any other, that influenced me to write poems). Here Ammons is of the “Natural Prozac” school. Don’t think about the futility and it can’t get you down. I wonder if such an attitude is still recognized as commendable.

the poem of ammons I’ve always admired, though it is never as often anthologized as “Gravelly Run” or “Corson’s Inlet” is “Mansion.”

Mansion

So it came time

for me to cede myself

and I chose
the wind

to be delivered to

The wind was glad

and said it needed all

the body
it could get

to show its motions with

and wanted to know

willingly as I hoped it would

if it could do
something in return

to show its gratitude

When the tree of my bones

rises from the skin I said

come and whirlwinding
stroll my dust

around the plain

so I can see

how the ocotillo does

and how saguaro-wren is
and when you fall

with evening

fall with me here

where we can watch

the closing up of day
and think how morning breaks

The wind shows gratitude. An elemental force personified. If only all interactions with the big things of nature could be so magical. I suppose the lack of this kind of thing is what I was harping on the other day with Gary Snyder. Obviously, this flight of fancy is more romantic than the level-headed observations that Ammons usually makes in his poems (and Snyder makes virtually all the time). I think it may be necessary and important to point out that Ammons is interacting with nature in this poem (even though it is interaction of a more hypothetical nature). This may lead him to personify nature in order to facilitate this interaction in his poem. So many of his others he merely plays the witness and pontificates about man’s place in nature. Can we get back to it? Can we even get back to the 70’s (when the back-to-the-landers were prevalent)? What makes Ammons so sweet is that he raises this question, a question that we, now, have resoundingly answered with man’s place is in nature, mucking around in it. Why just last week I saw a bunch of simians . . . or were they my arboreal cousins trying to withhold the knowledge from me that they were my forebears?

Hobbled Discourse on Poetic Forms—The Sijo

2005-04-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

What good is a traditional poetic form outside of the tradition from which it was derived? This is a question I consistently bump my head on as I ponder the role of “given forms” in poetry. Certainly, the haiku has achieved its place as an icon among forms in English because so many have practiced it for a number of years. But I always get the feeling when I’m reading the latest offerings from the Haiku Society that something has been lost, some strange piece of foreign antiquity has lodged itself between the teeth of us moderns. Basho might cringe at how the haiku has become the object of a dabbler’s afternoon fancy.

The constraints are fun to move around in, but one always asks, why 5,7,5 for the syllable count? Why not 7,11,7 in order to appease the gambling set? Of course, Robert Kelly did become disenchanted with the form in the 60’s and started writing the lune, a form which employed syllable counts of 5,3,5 because he thought that English says things in fewer syllables than Japanese. I’ve always thought that a good mathematical foundation for the number of syllables in a line should be the Fibonacci sequence, sometimes known as the The Golden Section [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc]. This pattern is found all over the place in nature. At least it might seem universal.

I’ve also been curious why some forms that are dredged up out of other traditions seem to make it big. Others don’t. The sonnet comes from the Italians. Now every American poet is writing a sonnet . . . until he/she reaches the fifteenth line; then he/she is not [Note: Henri Cole’s latest collection Middle Earth]. To me, this seems disingenuous. You can’t just keep a couple of the formal constraints, toss others out and call yourself a practitioner of the form. If poets were divers and left out a couple of twists on their dives of 3.2 difficulty, they’d lose a lot of style points.

The ghazal is a good example of this. I was first introduced to the form by Robert Bly and some of his translations of the Persian poet Hafez. There he describes the ghazal (pronounced “guzzle” I am informed, though I have never heard anyone in the U.S. call it this) as a series of couplets that employ sprung lines (each couplet is detached from the others) that finally invoke the poet’s name in some manner in the last line of the last couplet. I may be oversimplifying, but then Bly was oversimplifying before me. If one reads a little further about this form, one sees that the opening couplet should be rhymed. The successive couplets should employ an AA, BA, CA, DA, etc . . . rhyme scheme. In addition, the radif, the two-to-three words immediately preceding the rhyme in the first line of the first couplet should be mirrored in the second line of the first couplet and every second line of every couplet thereafter. Imagine such rhyming excess. In addition, to become really fluent in the form, one should familiarize oneself with the concepts of Beher, Matla and Kaafiyaa. On top of this, it is said that each line in the couplet should have the same syllable length or employ the same metrical pattern. One has to be quite diligent to get all this down. The end result is something that would strike most American readers as more than a slight bit repetitive. Adrienne Rich invokes the form throughout her career in a way that is interesting, but it doesn’t come close to the formal constraints of the traditional form. Is this another American conceit or does Rich just understand the psychology of the contemporary American a little better than ancient speakers of Urdu?

After a while, I think we can see: why bother? The game is up.

Too many constraints? This is only part of the truth. The other part I think is marketing. Until the big name poets plug this form (and why do they do it? one seemingly can point to an answer that mixes genuine curiosity and the genuine ambition to seem erudite), there is very little attention paid by other poets, even less incentive to imitate it outside of the workshop led by the famous poet.

So in the interest of advertising for my favorite but little-known form (which has little to no value with regard to the strengths that the English language has to offer), I humbly prepare for you: the sijo (pronounced shee-jo).

The Korean sijo is an ancient haiku-like form from the 16th century. It developed at that time because the pre-existing lyrical form, the hyangga, had gone out of fashion and only the didactic “hanshi” form and the epistolary “kyonggich’e ka” existed at that time. And both of these used the Chinese hanmun rather than the vernacular hangul Korean. The sijo, like the haiku, has three lines. Each line has a major pause in the middle. Each of its three lines typically has fifteen syllables, for a total of forty-five. Each line (of the first two) is usually broken down into two half-lines of 7 to 8 syllables. However, because the form can be interpreted as somewhat elastic, a sijo can have as few as forty-one or as many as fifty. Typically, though, the most rigorous adherents conform to the formal constraint of syllable counts 7-8 (first line), 7-8 (second line), 8-7 (third line).

The first and the second lines are nearly identical in form and syllable count, but there is considerable variation in the last line. The similarity between the first and second lines is one of function and content. The first line usually declares the theme; the second reinforces it usually through a restatement or a concrete example. The second line develops and elaborates on the first. However, in both function and content the last line is quite different. The third line closes the poem by introducing a jolting twist or countertheme. Because this third line is the focus of the poem, the first half-line of the last line, may be “syllable-heavy” usually containing eight of the total fifteen in the most rigorous application of the form, but it could range from five all the way up to nine syllables.

Hangul was reserved solely for the lower ranking individuals in Korean society. Women were some of the sijo’s foremost practitioners, and they were responsible for some of the greatest love lyrics in this form.

I will break the back
of this long, midwinter night.
folding it double,
cold beneath my spring quilt,
that I may draw out the night,
should my love return.
—Hwang Chin-i, early sixteenth century

Of course, all topics are fair game for sijo—love of nature, the joys of drinking, the pleasures and sorrows of idleness.

Green Grass covers the valley.
Do you sleep? Are you at rest?
O where is that lovely face?
Can mere bones be buried here?
I have wine, but no chance to share it.
Alone, I pour it sadly.
—Im Che (1549-1587)

Night covers the mountain village;
a dog barks in the distance.
I open a brushwood gate
and see only the moon in a cold sky.
That dog! What is he doing, barking
at the sleeping moon in the silent hills.
—Ch’on Kum

Boys have gone out to gather bracken;
The pine grove is bare of guests.
Who will pick up the dice
Scattered on the checkerboard?
Drunk, I lean on the pine trunk,
Let dusk and dawn pass me by
—Chong Ch’ol (1537-1594)

In the wind that blew last night,
Peach blossoms fell, scattered in the garden
A boy came out with a broom,
Intending to sweep them away.
No, do not sweep them away, no, no.
Are fallen flowers not flowers?
—Anonymous

For my next installment on traditional poetic forms I’d like to discuss the Icelandic form of the slettabönd, a rigorous four-line verse form that has the same meaning backwards and forwards. These palindromic verses are composed by people who have been buried in an avalanche and are waiting to be dug out. The rigor required to compose such a piece is said to keep the mind active and to keep it from panicking in the face of such a calamity. If each one of us gets going on this, I bet we all could knock one off before we’re 50.

Jeanne E. Clark's Ohio Blue Tips

2005-04-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

Very rarely do I get surprised by a literary experience. I am jaded. If I do get surprised, it is usually because I am unpleasantly surprised. That is why it is so nice to report on Jeanne E. Clark’s Ohio Blue Tips. Not only was I pleasantly surprised once, I was pleasantly surprised twice.

My first surprise was during her reading at California State University, Sacramento. I had no expectations. I went because Josh McKinney invited her and also because I had a common point of interest, namely, we were both primarily raised in Ohio. Her reading exhibited some beautifully crafted poems and some highly eroticized imagery. She read many poems from Ohio Blue Tips and some new poems. She also read a poem by poet Tim Seibles (on Cleveland Sate University Press) entitled "First Kiss" that was a tour de force. On the strength of what she read that night, I bought the book.

The second pleasant surprise was reading the book. It was a winner of the 1997 University of Akron poetry prize. I am always a little dubious of lauded "prize" books. So many turn out to be duds. I started the book and immediately realized that most of the poems were even better on the page than read aloud. The dense imagery was able to soak in even more. I didn’t experience "style fatigue" as is the case with many first collections. There were catalog poems, narratives, character sketches, short impressionistic pieces, etc. All of these were wrapped up in one of the most intoxicatingly arranged manuscripts I’ve ever read. Come for the poems; stay for how they are laid out in this book.

In Ohio Blue Tips Jeanne E. Clark wends her way through a collection of poems that transform Ohio into a rich wonderland full of dangerous erotic pleasure the likes of which I never saw as I was growing up there. The book is formally constructed in three parts, but these three parts do not belie a simple structural strategy. The book vaguely traces the course of the sexual adventures and yearnings of a woman. Probably this is Jeanne E., but only one reference to a "Jeanne E." (as "NeeGee" spelled backward) appears in the book. Later on the reader infers that this character is probably the same as the Quinn Margaret character who presides over the second section. In the third section Quinn Margaret is married and enduring the doldrums of married life as she is haunted by a domineering mother that she can’t quite shake off. [Perhaps my desire to equate Jeanne E. with Quinn Margaret derives from the knowledge gained during the reading that she really did teach in the prisons in Ohio and that she really was prevented from teaching one day because she was thought to be too high value of a target for kidnapping.]

Two main fictional characters (Joe Silver—it was Joe Spinner in an earlier incarnation during publication in Weber Studies—and Quinn Margaret) are interwoven throughout the poems in the book. Joe Silver is a character about which all information is inferred. He could be described as a mentally-deficient prisoner, and someone who is doggedly pursuing a female speaker in the book (mostly in the first section of the book) to the point of near self-destruction. The female he is pursuing is submitting to the pursuit, but Joe Silver eventually ends up compromised on a Marlowe bed, a device used to restrain prisoners, his “bread-dough belly breathing hard.”

The female character he doggedly pursues is seemingly Quinn Margaret and sometimes the first person "I," whom the reader surmises is probably Quinn Margaret because the same events overlap in the poems that use Quinn Margaret as the central figure and ones that use the first person I as the central figure. Bits of Quinn Margaret's poems interlock with poems that employ the "I" so that the image that begins to appear upon these interlocking puzzle pieces is the image of a single character. The overall effect is the accretion of narrative bits that link together—some pieces moving forward, other pieces looking back. Often times the narrative sweep is punctuated by short, meditative impressions.

So one puts together the following formula: Quinn Margaret is probably based on Jeanne E; Quinn Margaret is synonomous with the first person "I." Jeanne E., the author, is written on top of, a palimpsest of the first person "I." The end result is that the author is speaking to the reader through the guise of an invoked character that is seemingly her self. This ingenious bit of narrative witchcraft is disorienting at times, but as all of this comes together through many scenes of unspoken passion, it spells out the life of a child of Eros in Ohio.

For sure, Ohio becomes the third main character in the book. The culminating poem provides some sense of this.

That Summer, Joe and Prison

1

Ohio, with its steel-toed boots,
Heels worn away on the outside.
Those boots are shackled
Like a chain of Coniber traps;
Ankles, the twice-sprung necks of muskrat.
Gray day workclothes hang
From window bars by a rope.
Ohio, an inmate’s sucker-punched face,
Peony face, swollen
And latticed with ants,
Its broken nose bleeding from one side.
Ohio’s wrists are leashed
By leather, its puppet hands
Playing to a full house. Wooden heads
Jerking off on a day-hall rug.

Ohio then, with its petticoat sail
Skirting the lake. Bare-breasted,
Bikini top whipping a mast,
Its tin bucket full
Of bluegills dropped back.
Ohio on holiday,
Tongue licking colored ice,
A thin-wristed lover,
Sunburned and sleeping,
Its fingers, a ribboned ponytail
Twisting down the back,
Fingers that loose a rope from the pier.
Ohio, a four-pointed star
Spread out under moonlight,
Its pretty ankles
Dipping the green water.

2

Ohio, wrist under the hand of Michigan,
Riot gear stacked in the hallways,
The Man figures my worth
As a hostage: young, white teacher—
Single female with child. I’m worth too much.
He sends me home for the weekend.
Johnny Crusoe sends each pitch
Home, over the wall. Crash Redell
Glides his facethrough plate glass.
The Man cancels passes, fishing.
And you, slamming a ball down the alley,
Break the pinsetter’s leg at the knee.

Bluegills in a tin bucket,
And the man I’ve invited from New York
Dangles his chicken-bone wrist
Over the side of the boat. I float on my back,
Casting into night: boathouse dinner,
Then the moon, shiver of glass,
Spreads out on the deck.

The Man called you Fat-Boy-in-Trouble, Joe,
Strapped you four ways down to a Marlowe bed,
Bread-dough belly breathing hard,
Rising naked and fast in 102 degrees,
Six-by-eight room. You called for water.
And sometime before morning,
The man from New York pissed
From the side of the boat. It was summer,
And laughing and no good. The trouble, Joe,
Falling back and away from me.

Here we have the perspective of the first person "I" looking back on the events that are presented in the first part of the book. The emphasis on Ohio in the first section suggests that the distant perspective attained by Quinn Margaret/I is seen through an Ohio prism. It was the place where odd magic happened. The way Ohio is repeated it seems almost like an incantation designed to ward off evil spirits.

Quinn Margaret is the focus of the book. She is somewhat of an oddball female character that doesn’t seem to fit into the family portrait. Her interests and passions are diverse and unconventional. The composite female character of Quinn/I encounters a mother that is self-righteous and a sister who is naive but endowed with a physical presence that tends to be noticed. In the third "marriage" section she is a woman who has moved beyond her family's judgments only to have them resurface in her overly-defining-of-the-self marriage. Quinn Maragaret clearly struggles with notions of propriety. A bit of danger always seems to be lurking, usually near water like where one might find the Sirens. The Quinn/I character moves through her erotic passions, some conventional, some not for the timid (as a male I kept hoping that someone would grant me permission to write about similar topics, such as my lusts and transgressive erections). There are scenes with prisoners and women [Aside: what has she saved for the next book? animals and furniture?]. If blood doesn’t start flowing to uncharted regions of your body while you read this book, you just might be dead.

The following is another vivid example of the visceral nature of so many pieces in this book.

Almanac

Back then, I knew what I liked:
Tomatoes huddled in hothouses,
The fat, splitting red
Faces of German gardeners.
The Loeschers
Sold the hothouses to the bank.
Bill Loescher, the grandson, the heir,
The first boy in our school
To drink coffee and eat shrimp in a restaurant.
The first boy. Back then,
Hawthorns and marigolds
Grew on Sugar Street.
Blisters bubbled the bottoms of my feet.
The pool swam against them,
Sandpaper on soft wood.
I liked the bleeding,
Rubbing my raw toes against
The also-raw toes of my favorite boy—
Cousin Brian—
Not the one everyone thought.
I liked that my desire was secret:
A criminal’s herb
Fundamental and growing,
The bone twitch in a girl’s hip,
Summer squash that in one day
Outgrows the garden
But not summer—
Big, but not the whole season.
Back then, I liked calves,
Young cows and the legs
On a left-handed girl.
They stood upright and strong.
I liked sweat,
Its coral vine
Trails along my baked skin.
I liked that Wednesday was the hungriest
Day in the middle
Of abandon and houseflies.
I liked a thunderstorm’s electric dirt,
the way it started the dog.
Back then, I liked
That sometimes penniless sky.

This piece is from section two. It is one of the poems that looks back on childhood from the vantage point of a young woman, not quite the mature woman the reader encounters in section three. What strikes me is the rapacious hunger present in the quality of seeing in this poem. Heat and a kind of throbbing rawness make their way to the surface. These two qualities, especially the heat (as intimated by the title of the book), are consistent metaphors throughout.

The heat of desire is always lurking in the shallows. In the following poem, Clark conflates this heat with the common practice of luring snails to their death. The erotic merges with the grotesque in a manner that thrills.

The Eccentric Beauty (excerpt)

I collect snails
At night,
Set out grapefruits,
Half-moon traps
Hollowed out.
The snails
Are gray lips
Over these breasts.
They push small circles
Of brown earth.
By morning,
the fruit is full
With their bodies.

Somehow, reading this kind of passage makes it easier to imagine what freak show artists do to each other when they are aroused in their circus trailers.

After all, firing the imagination of the reader is the heaviest lifting that poetry can do. All else is but good stewardship on the part of the poet. I suspect Jeanne E. Clark is an excellent steward of her senses. When she recognizes what stimulates her senses, this provides a grade for the path she takes to the reader’s imagination. There could be other kinds of beauty besides the rough and sumptuous kind presented here in Ohio Blue Tips, but those other kinds of beauty don’t get touched as often. And she is a poet who is very generous to her memories, memories that might make others flinch at their slightest recall.

Bei Dao's UNLOCK

2005-03-30T21:12:00.000-08:00

Bei Dao’s work is “misty” to a very large degree. It can be maddening—momentarily one has a bead on his “drift,” then a moment later the poem is intimating something else. All of his poems work through image. There is very little reference to other texts (that Western readers can access). There doesn’t seem to be any subversion of logical statement nor any “intellection” to any great extent (that is, there isn’t any grappling with larger ideas outside the realm of lived experience and difficult emotions like exile and suppression). The act of reading Bei Dao is much like reading a mysterious rebus. Bei Dao’s work exhibits the accretion of image upon image that endeavors to lead the reader to a conclusion. It hints at what it is saying (an artifact left over from his days when he had to escape censorship in China).

Admittedly, I don’t always get to a place where I can absolutely say what the “intimated meaning” is in every piece. Quite frankly, I don’t care after a while. I luxuriate in his imagery. I just let it take me where it wants to go. If it reveals, so much the better. Of course, in order to be led by the nose like this, one has to develop an addiction to imagery. This may not be possible for those who always wish the imagery to “add up” to something or those who get their jollies from a rhetorical flourish.

The images are jarring and provocative. Bei Dao’s world is an intensely observed one. The compactness of his imagery is consistent throughout all of his pieces. The poems move from image to image, and there is little straying into other kinds of diction (in the English versions at any rate . . . in the Chinese Weinberger suggests that there are more different kinds of dictions present) Most of the objects that are present are fundamental ordinary objects. Bei Dao subjects them to odd juxtapositions with the insubstantial in order to get us to pry at the larger human significance that he is hinting at. Nowhere does he refer to those items that might plague the mind of a modern urbanite whose mind is highly mediatized. There are no brand names, no place names. The months of the year figure more prominently than any of these. By always staying within the realm of these simple, directly experienced items that, for example, a Chinese peasant might be able to recognize, the work almost seems to have a populist kind of appeal despite its resistance to straightforward communication. This is an interesting tension in Bei Dao’s work. A similar kind of tension exists between the quasi- formulations from classical Chinese poems at the same time he is working to twist these to almost the point of non-recognition. This “almost allusion” is the way he got around a lot of the censors in China while he was writing there.

Bei Dao’s work employs what I like to call a visual logic. It is the logic that is similar to the way a collage artist puts together images on a surface. The artist takes the forms as they are presented to him/her (by nature) and pieces them together to get some sort of overall picture that conveys a point, either commentary on a past episode or conveying some emotional content.

SMELLS

Those smells making you remember again
like a horse-cart passing through the flea-market
curios, fakes, hawkers’
wisdom covered in dust

and there’s always a gap between you and reality
arguing with the boss
you see the ad out the window
a bright tomorrow, Tomorrow brand toothpaste

you are facing five potatoes
the sixth is an onion
the outcome of this chess game is like sorrow
disappearing from the maritime chart

I’m not really a big fan of “close reading” for Bei Dao’s works (or anybody else’s for that matter), but here goes:

The first stanza introduces the general notion of “smells” and places the reader within the realm of an outdoor market. This market though seems to have withered, gone out of existence. All of the life of the market (seen in the curios, the fakes, the hawkers, indeed the most aggressive poseurs) is covered in dust. Like so much of Bei Dao’s work, there is a sense of loss and dilapidated culture present. This barren marketplace underscores this sense.

Stanza two presents a speaker addressing a reader trying to convince that reader that he/she too is dislocated, distant from authority with whom it presumably does no good to argue and distant from reality (the ultimate authority?). Economic realities prevail outside the window in the form of the “ad.” There is a sense that economic progress is being mass marketed. Its importance to one’s daily life makes it as essential as toothpaste. This seems to speak to me of Mao’s Great Leap Forward for China in the late 50’s and early 60’s. The speaker seems to dissent from such a mass marketing appeal.

The third stanza suggests that there is an odd man out, the onion that is in line with the five potatoes that precede it. Bei Dao implies that this onion is in a strategic battle with the potatoes (reminiscent of Bei Dao’s struggles with the Chinese government during the days leading to the Tiananmen Square protest). The last two lines are very curious though. The outcome of this struggle is said to be similar to the disappearance of sorrow from a maritime chart. This is a striking image and more than a bit elusive; however, I contend that the unmappable human emotion suddenly becomes absent in the same way that the human spirit disappeared from the map after it was crushed during the uprising in Tiananmen Square.

The poems that resonate most strongly for me are the ones that seemingly refer to the time of that uprising. In many ways I feel that Bei Dao is still living in that moment. It has become his identity. Many of the poems in Unlock still seem to refer back to this (or am I forcing them there through my interpretation?). I keep wondering if the pieces that don’t seem to add up for me might be relevant to a criticism of American life (where he has lived for the last dozen or so years) or some other more contemporary concern removed from China and Tiananmen.

Clearly, though, Bei Dao’s poems are dark. They are agonized meditations on that time, which use a veiled language partly as a hangover from the days of censorship in China, partly from the way that his exile continues to torture his language (like that of Paul Celan—another writer who adopted a pen name to write under, presumably because of the repression of his self). By the same token Bei Dao’s poems also champion the spirit of the individual. Perhaps the darkness and sorrow, the emptiness in his poems are elements of what he sees as the plight of the individual within a smothering collective.

Indeed, when he was asked a few years ago at his reading given at American River College what the most important prerequisite was for being a poet, he quickly and without thinking responded, “one must suffer.” This is a key insight into his work. His exile has never made his imagery buoyant and playful. It usually deals with the foreboding and ominous, the sense of loss and the attempt to recover that lost historical moment in 1989 when optimism ran high.

What is particularly pertinent in Bei Dao’s writing is the feeling of exile and how this may afflict many of us living in the US who feel we are in exile from our culture even though we are in its midst. I don’t wish to suggest that the magnitude is the same as with Bei Dao’s case. I, for instance, have never been reassigned for work in the hinterlands like he was. That said, Bei Dao’s poems provide insight into how to write political poems. For him, it was necessary to write in a cryptic manner—like the samisdat writers writing under the rule of the former Soviet Union. Of course, for Americans, the real repressive force is the market. The more one criticizes it, the more likely it is to ignore you, unless one is (mis?)fortunate enough to tweak the nose of someone in power. In the face of either kudos from the converted or dismissive jeers from the offended, is there any reason for poets not to cede this ground to journalists or content themselves with polite table talk at the Hungry Heifer Family Restaurant?

What I think is instructive from Bei Dao’s poems is he takes a highly charged moment in the political and cultural life of his nation and distills the emotions it wrought via a richly-laden and evocative imagery. The human element emerges out from under the bickering of the warring factions. Is this what political poetry in the US could be? Work that hints at the personal involvement in the culture’s formative moments, a kind of “you were there” at the World Trade Center told in mystical language that evokes how America felt at that moment? I dare say that this would be unthinkable for most American writers even if they had the credentials of Bei Dao whose line “I do not believe” was taken up en masse and chanted during the Tiananmen Square uprising.

In another poem in the collection:

IN MEMORY

Turning back from the end
when it was hard to breathe—
the angels of the fallen leaves on the hill
the sea of heaving rooftops

on the way back to the story
the deep-sea diver in the dream
looks up at the ship passing by
blue sky in the whirlpools

the tale we are telling
exposes the weakness in our hearts
like the sons of the nation
laid out on the open ground

dialogue of wind and trees
a limp
we crowd around a pot of tea
old age

Stanza 1 invokes a turning back in time to witness a breathtaking tumult. There is great uproar in the dissembled leaves and their attached angels, which suggest even the moral order is in disarray.

Stanza 2 employs a common practice in Bei Dao, the melding of the world of artifacts (i.e. the story, the song, the poetry, words, etc) with the physical world. These artifacts become equivalent to the sun and moon and objects-of-poetry-writ-large. The placement of the “story” as a location suggests its physical presence. The “diver in the dream” (someone lost in revelry?) looks up at that which passes and all is murky. The poem seems to be a meditation on memory.

Stanza 3 is the first time a “we” is mentioned. The speaker is part of a collective that is exploring the tale/story (the momentous events of at Tiananmen in 1989) mentioned previously. The exploration of this story reveals that hearts are heavy and full of remorse the way a nation’s might be at the sight of a battlefield of dead soldiers.

In stanza 4 the members of the collective dispute the events as they remember them. This is the “dialogue of wind and trees.” With the “limp” and the “crowd(ing) around a pot of tea” a suggestion of feebleness and disempowerment are evoked. Finally, just “old age” is left. Memory is the only comfort for then.

The speakers in Bei Dao’s poems suffer an affront by the world. Its moral absurdities and quandaries leave the individual speaker at the heart of the poem to construct the world as it appears in his poems as its defense. These poems with their often fantastical world intact are the counterweight to the distress of interesting times. And almost miraculously the speaker at the heart of his poems believes in the transformative power of the word and the poem. Bei Dao bore witness to his poems as the rallying cry for a revolution, and this appears to affirm that the poem as socially transforming device is possible. Perhaps this optimism is what many readers find redeeming about Bei Dao’s work despite its rather gloomy and vacant imagery. The belief in the poem as a vehicle for social change is a tall order for most Western writers to believe in when the written word is drowned out by a hundred-plus channels, the airwaves glutted with opinions, examples, and analyses. Is there anything that poetry can say with enough clarity that could cut through this haze? Again, most Western writers seem to collectively intone: I DO NOT BELIEVE. I DO NOT BELIEVE.

The Journey Between Long Shadows

2005-03-23T22:39:00.000-08:00

Cole Swensen's Goest

2005-03-21T22:04:00.000-08:00

Looking to develop a vocabulary of absence? Then proceed to Cole Swensen’s Goest. It is hard to imagine what Cole Swensen is up to in this book when a reader first approaches Goest. However, after reading the entire collection, a certain program and theme begins to emerge. The book is arranged into three sections, the centerpiece being the middle section where many poems about “invention,” “development,” “firsts,” and “origins” lie. These pieces seem to speak to the creative act by abandoning little outposts of words that are fortified with (often factual) detail. The reader then is allowed in on the process of creating these texts by filling in the gaps, becoming an unwitting imaginative partner in the formation of these texts. This activity frequently parallels the fragments from the “story” of invention, development, etc. that is featured in each piece. In this way the process and the subject are entwined. The first and third sections [“Of White,” On White”] are suggestive of why we should value this aesthetic of the broken, the fragmentary and torn open. These sections use metaphor for the open, the vacant, the ghostly(?) (which some have suggested is punning with the title of the book—Goest). To my mind, the middle section is the most important aspect of the book, the part that raises the most questions. I find that I must acknowledge Swensen’s project of valorizing the degradation of the language (or being reminded of its insufficiencies). This kind of aesthetic is hard for many to swallow at face value (I’m reminded here of my own battles with my wife who always wants to throw out the cut flowers as soon as the blossoms begin to falter while I implore her to let them die a little more, to let them burn out and show the full range of their beauty. Of course, my approach is not very practical because the seeds and leaves scatter everywhere . . . just as Swensen’s approach mat not settle with a reader who insists that the packets of meaning should not scatter and create messes that good, middle class folk will have to clean up later because of her negligence). Despite the formal elegance of the book and the ingenuity put forth in many of her writing projects, other larger questions linger. When we elevate the broken and disfigured to the status of art objects (especially in the realm of language), how does this assail the underpinnings of what it means to produce work that essentially undercuts the medium used to express it? In other words, why use language to express what language is incapable of? Perhaps one needs to develop a new medium of silence or gesture. Could it be that Cole Swensen is really a dancer at heart?

I can accept her infatuation with the aesthetic of the broken and lost in language as impulse; however, it seems to me that she has deliberately chosen this kind of aesthetic and tried to “develop” it and “invent” it. I ask myself why all this rigor and dedication to dismantling the language?

I think of poets as choosing language to be the one kind of technology they are fluent in, and now here comes Swensen (who in her spare time disassembles and reassembles language like it is some sort of outmoded solid state device). She points out the flaws in the design, the underperformance of the signal-to-noise ratio, etc. At times I feel like I want to say to her that if she really must believe in and insist on the ineptitude of words, then she should get a job in politics and work for the government. Leave the language smithies to their delights in what can be accomplished with language.

The wonderful thing about this book is that she does deliver on this language-as-instrument to a certain extent. Her accomplishment with the language is the act of omission. However, this is akin to what the composer can do with the rest or, perhaps more aptly, what a visual artist does with negative space (or that which is not contained within the frame/installation).

Unfortunately, it is difficult for most readers to override their prevailing notion of what is beautiful. They become wary of where to draw the line between what is beautiful and what is not. They ask: are you to develop an aesthetic based on bowel movements and toe fungus? Indeed, I always have a hard time convincing my neighbors that my dog is leaving little sculptures on their lawn. They are the same folks who strut around galleries, tut-tutting, this isn’t art .

In saying this, the difficulty in getting this kind of person to grant legitimacy to a project like Swensen’s rests not only in informing him/her what the project is, but in making them care about it. They will need to defend such an aesthetic, not just merely accept it.
Then again, maybe she is basing her aesthetic on the gaps and outages that occur in cell phone conversations. The piecing together of those is almost always more interesting than what the caller originally intended.

“The Girl Who Never Rained” is a short narrative of a girl who moves around with clear space surrounding her (we will see the reference to clear space in the second section) and the resultant attraction that follows. This is a neat metaphor, I presume, for the way that she would like readers to be “attracted” to the clear and open space of the poems in the second section.

“Others” addresses the permanence (and sanctity) of blankness, how it can be magnified by passing it along (the way one passes on language, a good joke, etc.) as in the first vignette (page 4-5) Swensen goes further to look at territory that surrounds some vague but hazy recognition “a scene of roofs so blurred they were often mistaken for sails.” This suggests to me that looking at something intently can invariably result in the blurring of that object. This is something she seems to be getting at in the second section as well.

“Five Landscapes” describes very sparse landscapes always with a bit of white as the focus—egret, spot of a white house, white sheet, white bird, child in a white t-shirt. While by itself this piece does not overtly provide any insight into her project, it signals that we should pay attention to white, the white spaces of the coming poems in section 2.

“The Future of Sculpture” is seemingly a meditation on Cy Twombly’s sculptures given the epigraph. Twombly’s sculpture exhibition at the National Gallery was of work from 1946-1998 and consisted of primarily found objects and rough fragments of wood coated in plaster and white paint. Twombly’s work is also said to exhibit poetic allusions to motifs and relics of classical antiquity. The white paint would explain all the references to white in the poem. Swensen seems to be cobbling together scraps much in the same way that Twombly is so that it could be said that he is her guide and model in this approach. The poem tends to veer away from this subject towards other areas (at least I could not make it cohere in my time with it). However, it is interesting to note how the block-like sections are arranged so that they appear to be little sculptures themselves. Already we see the glomming of plain fact (scrap piece of wood by scrap piece of wood) present in this piece that is largely the project of the second section.

“White Cities” returns to a meditation on white. Here the whole imagined city is white, made of white objects—chalk, talc, sugar. The sun (already mentioned as a key ingredient in “The Future of Sculpture”) returns and could possibly be a metaphor for brightness, illumination. Finally, in the last stanza, a man is glancing at windows (presumably only getting a brief snatch of the vignette presented there as he walks by—just as we are privy only to glance at the fragments assembled by Swensen as we meander past them). The man is always and only counting up to one as he counts the cobblestones. In this respect Swensen reminds us that the cobblestones (cobbled together) are to be treated as singularites in themselves as well as larger parts of the whole.

Section 2. “A History of the Incandescent,” based on John Beckmann’s “A History of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins” (1846), is the full poetic project of Swensen’s pastiche and her concern (obsession) with white space. The first selection “Lachrymae Vitreae” reads to me like an ars poetica for the rest of the pieces in this section. The subject is a glass tear made by a man named Schulenberg in 1695. The rapid cooling of this tear causes it to shatter (a shattering that “must excite the curiosity of philosophers”). This tear then turns to particulates which Swensen so aptly relates to the fragmentation of we (the readers? the populace at large? “those who were home at the time”(those who are centered and belong to one particular space and frame of reference)?” It is the last juxtaposition which suggests as the world fragments, we fragment along with it. This would be a point that many traditionalists (who write from a singular perspective) would contest.

The technique of these poems is disorienting at first, but with repeated exposure (about 8-10 poems into this section for me), there is a tendency for the reader to arc across the gaps and spaces which Swensen presents. The imagination fills in the gaps in order to habitually connect them in semi-narrative. The presence of historical dates in many of the pieces suggests that there is a historical narrative to be had if only we, as readers, continue to pry.

“The Invention of Streetlights” is one of the more sustained pieces in this section. At first I was confused about all the classical references, the quotation by Libanius, etc. This may be because she is using Twombly as model, who also referred to classical shapes with his found pieces. But this piece seems to be quite close to having intact content extracted from it. The overall effect is to illustrate how the lighting of city streets became a democratizing experience. They became accessible to all, not just thieves and those who could afford protection from thieves. From the article that Josh sent out about how Swensen regards her poetics to be similar in how one goes through a city and discovers its incongruities, this piece is indicative of her overall oeuvre. Is this a kind of “white city” mentioned earlier in section 1, full of blanknesses that are to be written on?

In this section there are numerous references, call them motifs, if you will, to glass, the sun, the city, counting, phosphorescence/luminescence, etc.

“Sing: if in pieces we are accurate, here the we accrues” from “The Invention of the Mirror” suggests that it is the mirror that realigns all the various fragments of self (with a single representation of it.)

Throughout all of her cut-ups/collages in this section the gaps are sometimes hardly discernible, and there is very little trouble to read across the gap from one fragment to the next. Sometimes it is only after one arrives at the end of the second fragment is it apparent that there was a splice made. Many of these cuts are made as though by a master film editor. For example, “The Game of Balls and Cups” can read like a narrative nearly all the way through. Only occasionally does a fragment veer into territory that makes it apparent we are reading collage; it veers into extraneous subject matter. The transparent gaps are what one might refer to as “minor gaps”. The gaps that call attention to themselves could be said to be “major gaps,” and these pieces are systems of major and minor gaps.

Section 3, “On White,” returns to the themes in section 1: cities, the sculpture of Cy Twombly and more “landscapes.” In “Razed Cities” the most meaningful line is the last one, “Then who are they?” It suggests that blankness, whiteness is what we are all reduced to. With so much light and luminescence it is worthy of noting that white light is the composite of all in the visible range—red through violet. This perhaps also suggests that subjectivity, similarly, is the accumulation of all those colors that combine to form whiteness, blankness. The “they” might also be foreshadowing of the classic age which seems to rear its head in the next two pieces.

The “Future of White” returns to Twombly. The piece seems to be alluding to a specific work(s) by Twombly, but without seeing the exhibition, I can’t be sure. The “box” from the section 1 Twombly poem comes up again. This time it is of “the dead/we left spread out” that seemingly refers to the dead of classical Rome “by the Ionian Sea.” Here a non-descript “wheel” marks the beginning of the poem and the end. It seems to be the main subject, but I am at a loss as to what kind of wheel (or circle) is being referred to here. A wheel of life? A wheel of days, of time (a clock)? The little wheel turns vicious at the end. There seems to be regret attached to its existence. It is implied that time erases that which once existed to the state of blankness.

The “Five Landscapes” that end the book are much like the first “Five Landscapes” with one major exception. All the white items that served as the main focus in the first section are missing. The blankness has been done away with (presumably because it has been inscribed upon by other things as time ensued). Only the air is white, and it is emptier. The “field” dominates the white air. Symbolically, the field (the modern) dominates the white air (the classical) because it resembles the classical which has been inscribed upon and displaced.

[Note] John Poch's Review for Smartish Pace finds the potential for Swensen’s poems in Goest to be there, but is put off by the lack (they rely on the white space too much) of what they deliver despite the promise. He seems to be suggesting that Swensen’s emperor has no clothes. At the same time he seems to be suggesting that her presentation is reminiscent of John Cage, and just as empty. His only example cites the sparsest of poems “”The First Lightbulb.” It is only four lines, for sure, but to suggest that all the poems in the second section (and the entire book) are equally brief is to overstate the case. Also, he tries to disparage the book by saying it is more reminiscent of Joseph Cornell than Cy Twombly. This, though, seems like faint criticism to me. Cornell’s boxes were terrific. In any case, I don’t see him as anyone in the position of casting judgment. Additionally damning is his reference to Swensen’s language as something that Hart Crane would swoon over. Apparently, his great desire to contextualize Swensen’s work is something he could not overcome. It is not even remotely helpful unless one reads Hart Crane as a synonym for “incoherent,” but clearly Crane’s multisyllabic, pyrotechnical flourishes are a far cry from the plainer, factual and informational bits that Swensen has cobbled together. But what do you expect from a guy from Texas who writes sonnets about fishing? Why are guys like this allowed to review books they clearly aren’t qualified to comment on?

How Do you Spell Relief?

2005-03-17T08:42:00.000-08:00

I really shouldn't have provoked those boys yesterday. It's just that I find people's squaemishness towards defecation to be hilariously interesting. The feces taboo is what I call it. All this anxiety over a lump of bacteria-laden food that has been miracuously transformed to the point that it is no longer even associated with its former self. Now that's a magic trick. The dog was squatting in the yard, and a group of boys walked by. I said, "Say 'Trick or Treat' and I'll give you some." Today they twittered as they walked by. They enthusiastically related to another boy who wasn't with them what they had seen the day before. Apparently, I share the same fascinations as a 6-year-old.

But I am actually making gains, mentally speaking. Yesterday I was an animal. I spent the better part of the afternoon reading Temple Grandin's new book Animals in Translation . [ Temple Grandin ] There was a fascinating chapter about animal minds, in particular about animal language. She made some very interesting points and gave some very interesting examples of animals' use of music as language. Then she made the case for autistic people having a similar predisposition towards the communicative properties of language, suggesting, for example, that tone of voice is much more communicative than the vocables which the non-autistic hear. She relates how her mother decided that she could be given therapy and make progress because she could hum Bach before she could learn to speak. Then also, at the end of the chapter she relates an anecdote about Irene Pepperberg's famous parrot Alex. They are teaching the bird phonics by giving the bird a nut for each correct sound it can recognize and then make. One day one of the corporate sponsors came into her lab. Wanting to illustrate the progress they were making, Pepperberg picked an orange piece of felt with the letter "s" on it. Whe asked Alex "What color orange?" The bird made the correct "s" sound. However, wanting to save time, she did not reward Alex with a nut. She asked the same question with a a red piece of felt with the letters "sh" on it. Again Alex made the correct sound, but again Pepperberg did not reward Alex. This procedure was repeated a third time, and then on the fourth time, and after correctly vocalizing the letter, Alex finally showed her frustration. alex said " ennn uhhh tuhh." Pepperberg interpreted this to be the phonetic spelling of what she wanted. This behavior was totally unprompted and surprised Pepperberg who has been working with Alex for the last twenty years. She had no idea that Alex might have had the capability to go way beyond the simple phonics he was being taught and to show some form of rudimentary aptitude for spelling.

But I know what you're thinking: How does Alex do with three syllable words?

And by the way? Whatever happened to the Shamrock shake? I am going to McDonalds today to do a little bit of research on this.

The Wisdom of the Elders

2005-03-16T08:32:00.000-08:00

My elders tell me that me that I should never kiss a dog full on the lips. Doing so might result in other kinds of temptations. After all, dogs are known to eat one another's feces. But I submit that any one of us would do the same if the chef came highly enough recommended.

To Save A Sick Hermit Crab : What Would Brando Do for Chi Chi?

2005-03-14T09:03:00.000-08:00

My hermit crab, Chi Chi, is looking rather ill. His body is extended way out of his shell. He did not retract into his shell when I picked him up and tried to wipe the moss off his shell. Now he is not reponding to the apple parings, his favorite food, that he normally devours. I suppose this is what one might expect. I have been expecting him to live in his own filth for quite a while. I thought it would toughen him up a little bit. I held up the ants running across the sink as examples for him. "Look how damn tough they are," I'd say to him. "I wash them away and they keep crawling out of the drain. Very impressive." I don't think Chi Chi was all that enthused about my value system. Sluggo just stayed in his shell, day in, day out, just being his Sluggo self. But he's the healthy one now. He measures every movement, comes out only when there is a high value food source that does not require contestation with the higher ranking Chi Chi. I suppose there is a lesson for all of us trapped within our various hierarchies. Hunker down, and let the other guy bog down in his own filth until he can't stand the environment he's living in and departs this stress-pit of a world.

There are people whose office and home I would willingly decorate in dung if it meant an early departure from the scene.

The dog keeps eating chicken bones it finds on the way to school. I would like to know who is eating all this chicken and throwing its remains out onto the street. Is this some kind of anarchist plot? Are these people just doggist, extremely prejudiced against those who have retained their fur? They must know that a dog will do nearly anything to chase a cat or suck on a bone. It's pitiful, really, to watch them struggle for such a low value food source and such a low value source of entertainment.

But I'm sure the gods make the same comment about me when I strain for recreational sex.

The Bradford pears have let almost all their blossoms fall. It is the end of an era. A strong wind took the majority of them down yesterday. Driving down the street, it was like being in a ticker tape parade. I was a genuine hero in the neighborhood. My adoring fans had all come out to praise my impeccable lawn maintenance, to express their awe at the way I staked up the camellia. Alas! To have lived and never seen a pink camellia blossom ring itself around the edge with its brown overcoat.

But now I must get back to eating my chocolate.