Books and Music – Page 40

April 27, 2012April 27, 2012 by Dave Bonta

In Search of Mariachis by David Shumate

In Search of MariachisDavid Shumate; Epiphany Editions 2012WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder Since I blogged about Russell Evatt’s We Are Clay last week, Epiphany Editions have re-launched their website with order buttons, previews for each book and a design much more reflective of the aesthetic of the print editions, which are things of absolute beauty. In Search of Mariachis is a masterpiece of the book designer’s art, so if you are as afflicted with book lust as I am, it might be worth ordering for that reason alone.

I was also pleased to get it for the contents, however. David Shumate is a prose poet of some renown with two full-length collections out from Pittsburgh University Press, which — I should point out for the uninitiated — is one of the best poetry presses in the country. And reading this collection was a pleasure only partly attributable to the fine homebrew with which I lubricated my reading. It had fairly typical proportions of poems I liked a lot, poems that did nothing for me, and poems I thought were O.K. but not earth-shattering: roughly a third in each category. A more exacting reviewer might condemn the book for not being amazing on every page, but I personally feel a lot of poetry reviewers need to chill the fuck out. I enjoy an experimental spirit, which means taking risks and sometimes (often?) not quite making the mark.

One of the things Shumate does in this collection that doesn’t always work for me is play with notions of exoticism, as signaled by the title. In poems such as “Waking Up As a Buddhist,” “Curry” and “Darwin’s Beard,” speculations that are presumably intended to sound humorously ill-informed just strike me as inexcusably ignorant, especially in an age of smart phones, Google and lots of actual Buddhists and Hindus in our midst. I have a hard time seeing these sorts of people as exotic any more, I guess. “Waking Up As a Buddhist,” for example, begins:

Sometimes you may wake up and find you’ve become a Buddhist. You realize its [sic] illogical because you’ve never taken lessons in Buddhism or had a Buddhist sprinkle water on your head or do whatever a Buddhist does to become a Buddhist.

As day goes on the bliss wears off, and that night you even have un-Buddhist dreams.

But in your final dream a deer comes and licks your face and you’re a Buddhist again. Your heart so full of compassion you feel like calling up your enemies and thanking them for being alive.

So at the end “you” recognize compassion as being more central to the religion than bliss, which had proved so transitory. The poem in fact wouldn’t be a bad critique of the mind-set of novice Buddhists, had it not been framed as an exercise in magical realism.

“Talking to the Woman in the Yellow Kimono” finds the narrator “at a loss for words,” which isn’t entirely inappropriate given the extent to which Japanese do in fact idealize wordless communication. The narrator considers raising stereotypical Japanese subjects with his interlocutor: flower arranging, haiku poetry.

But that might appear to be empty flattery. So when she bows, I bow back. And I sip the tea she’s poured for me. Thus we build our little pagoda of silence. Plank by plank. A structure so fragile, a single syllable would bring it crashing down.

Again, a good conclusion for an O.K. poem. But there are a number of poems that kept my interest from start to finish, so perhaps I should mention a few of them instead. “The Immigrant’s First Day of School” is a pitch-perfect mix of the predictable and the unexpected: “You learn the name of the desert you walked across. The history of the night.” And the ending was a little gut-wrenching:

Your teacher points to the place where you are living now. It is green and seems situated in the center of things. You take home a few sheets of paper. Your mother meets you at the bus. She’s wearing her colorful shawl but looks like she has shrunk.

Another poem take the narrator-as-avatar-of-the-exotic-other idea to its logical extreme. In “The Village of Miraculous Happenings,”

We’d like our lives to return to normal. We’d like the rains to fall on their own rather than each time the librarian claps. We’d like our thoughts to be private again. We’d like our deaths to take us by surprise instead of always being foretold. We gather in the chapel to pray for this daily.

The notion of people with lives so magical that they are beset by busloads of tourists being reduced to praying in vain for normalcy is a delightful conceit. The collection is liberally sprinkled with thought-experiments like this. A couple of others that struck me as especially successful were “The Meek,” which supposes that the meek really are going to inherit the earth, but of course are too meek to claim it, and “After They Plundered the Language,” which imagines the aftermath of a marauding barbarian horde which “made off with a thousand precious words.”

There used to be a gentle word we spoke when we wanted to be intimate with a lover. It conveyed both good faith and desire. Now we must paint our faces red. Do a little dance. And set a hat by her door.

As these quotes demonstrate, Shumate has a strong preference for short sentences or sentence fragments. I personally find the effect a bit monotonous, and wish he would have varied the sentence structure a bit more. Still and all, this substantial, attractive and entertaining chapbook assumes a place of honor in my growing collection of prose-poetry.

April 24, 2012 by Dave Bonta

I Was the Jukebox by Sandra Beasley

I Was the JukeboxSandra Beasley; W.W. Norton 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
Sandra Beasley has soul. This is useful to keep in mind the third time you encounter a title following the pattern “Another Failed Poem About X,” or when you labor through a sestina with “ginger” as one of its line-ending words for no good reason that you can see. Yes, genius can be annoying: how many of us would resist the urge to be clever at the expense of emotional impact if we had anything approximating Beasley’s gifts?

Once I asked a broker what he loved
about his job, and he said Making a killing.
Once I asked a serial killer what made him
get up in the morning, and he said The people.
(“Vocation”)

But even her less-than-fully-successful poems are still pretty damn impressive. This book deserved its place on everyone’s top poetry lists last year. I don’t know what made me break my usual pattern of studiously ignoring whatever everyone else is hyping — possibly the fact that Beasley is a long-time blogger, or that she’s a Facebook contact — but I’m glad I did.

Why do I say Beasley has soul? Because she throws her voice like nobody’s business, taking on the personas not only of inanimate objects, plants and dead gods, but also historical events (“The World War Speaks”) and plural beings (“The Sand Speaks”):

Mothers, brush me from the hands

of your children. Lovers, shake me
from the cuffs of your pants. Draw
a line, make it my mouth: I’ll name
your country. I’m a Yes-man at heart.

Because, unlike so many young poets of a surrealist bent, she stays relatively down-to-earth and tends to give the uninitiated reader something to grab on to, even when writing a modern-day allegory (“Beauty”).

That night, something howled outside.
I opened the door. It was Beauty. Beauty
was muddy and senseless. I let her in.
I tried to towel her off, and she bit me.

Because she is so fond of apostrophe, she has written love poems to college, oxidation, and Wednesday.

You are the loneliest of the three bears, hoping
to come home and find somebody in your bed.
(“Love Poem for Wednesday”)

And now and then there’s a poem that appears to be autobiographical nonfiction, such as “Antietam,” and it’s all the more affecting for coming in the midst of wilder and woolier stuff. The narrator is on a school field trip to the Civil War battlefield.

Our guide said that sometimes, the land still let go
of fragments from the war—a gold button, a bullet,
a tooth migrating to the surface. We searched around.
On the way back to the bus a boy tripped me and I fell—
skidding hard along the ground, gravel lodging
in the skin of my palms. I cried the whole way home.
After a week, the rocks were gone.
My mother said our bodies can digest anything,
but that’s a lie. Sometimes, at night, I feel
the battlefield moving inside of me.

I Was the Jukebox has been very widely reviewed, and since I have to go to bed early tonight, I’m going to slack off a little and just point you toward the links on the Open Library page. I do however want to say a little about the book’s packaging, trivial as that may seem. I was a little turned off by the publisher’s decision to put a short blurb right on the front cover, up at the top — that’s just tacky. The cover design is a mess. But both these failings are off-set, for me, by the pleasingly grainy surface of the paperback cover. There’s a lot to be said for a book that feels good in the hands. It won’t slide off the couch as easily easily as a book with a glossy cover. And like sand on the beach, it makes you want to dive in.

April 23, 2012September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Flowers of a Moment by Ko Un

Flowers of a Moment (Lannan Translation Selection Series)Ko Un; BOA Editions 2006WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
Tonight, I don’t feel like pretending to be a book reviewer. (Does it really matter what I have to say about a guy who’s been nominated so many times for the Nobel Prize?) Tonight I would rather respond to a few of Ko Un’s brief poems as if he were right here, sharing drinks and conversation.

I have spent the whole day talking about other people again
and the trees are watching me
as I go home

Sometimes I confuse the road with the map and everything on either side with terra incognita.

Exhausted
the mother has fallen asleep
so her baby is listening all alone
to the sound of the night train

The spider spends 99 percent of her lifetime waiting, suspended among her knitting, yet will perish before the first of her children hatch.

Outside the cave the howling wind and rain
Inside
the silent speech of bats filling the ceiling

Today, I read about a study that found that plants emit and respond to sonic vibrations. With their large ears attuned to ultrasonic sounds, I wonder if bats can hear the questing rootlets of the oaks over their heads?

We went to Auschwitz
saw the mounds of glasses
saw the piles of shoes
On the way back
we each stared out of a different window

Every window has its own fragile truth. Once, in a basement dangerous with broken bottles, a thug threw me against a wall and my glasses flew off. I became half-blind and sober at the same time.

Beneath the heavens with their scattered clouds
here and there are fools

Some of us are expanding, some shrinking, some taking a leak with a beer in one hand.

Crayfish, why are you so complicated?

with your feelers
your jaw legs
your hairy legs
your chest legs
your belly legs
and all the rest

My god! How is it that I missed my calling to be an egg?

In the old days a poet once said
our nation is destroyed
yet the mountains and rivers survive

Today’s poet says
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
yet our nation survives

Tomorrow’s poet will say
the mountains and rivers are destroyed
our nation is destroyed and Alas!
you and I are completely destroyed

Isn’t there some way we can destroy all these pesky poets?

Look at the nose of a baby rabbit
look at the tail of a dog—
that’s the kind of world I’m living in

Look at those three bs in “baby rabbit,” then look at the small g in “dog” — the alert way a prey animal sits, the alert way a predator lies in wait.

A thousand drops
hanging from a dead branch

The rain did not fall for nothing

Today I watched a crowd of mayapple parasols down by the streambank thrown into disarray by one simple snowfall. Some turned completely over, their flower buds like thumbs pointed at the sky.

One spring night, the sound of a child weeping
One autumn night, the sound of laundry being pounded
This
was a place where people were really alive

As I passed the field fertilized with their shit
involuntarily I bowed my head

I was going to say that I have never grown anything with compost made from my own excrement, but then I remembered I’m a writer.

From across the river
the sound of a bell reached the two of us
for us to listen to together
The sound of a bell reached us

We had decided to part
but then we decided not to part

I remember the big bronze temple bells in Japan, how they boomed rather than clanged, the sound going on and on: the bells of Mt. Hiei that I listened to with a lover as we gazed into each other’s eyes, and the bell at Ikkyu’s old temple in the country where I trespassed one night so I could stand inside it, whispering hello to the spiders and the thousand-year-old bronze.

No need to know its whereabouts

A small spring in a mountain ravine
is like a sister
a younger sister
like a long lost younger sister
now found again

The whole point of drinking, it seems to me, is that moment of recognition. I’ve had brotherly feelings toward mosquitos sinking their drilling rigs into my arm.

The top is spinning
Yesterday the poet Midang departed
today old Oh from next door departed
How can death concern only one or two?
The child’s top is surrounded by every kind of death

The rubber ball, the spinning jacks — how many can you keep in play? Between one bounce and the next they can all fall down.

A warship moves through the sea
near Paekryong Island in the Yellow Sea
Not one seagull’s in sight
The sea
looks as if someone has disappeared in it
I’m carrying an empty soju bottle

When war becomes permanent, who but a poet or a crackpot remembers the kind of peace that doesn’t involve desolation? The deafening howl of A-10 fighter jets can linger for half a minute after they’ve passed from view, the air like a fresh wound that hasn’t yet learned how to bleed. Then, slowly, the whine of cicadas, and this old wrinkle of earth goes back to being a mountain.

April 23, 2012April 24, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Walden by Haiku, by Ian Marshall

Walden by haikuMarshall, Ian; University of Georgia Press 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

the old pond
not one wrinkle
after all its ripples

That’s one of Ian Marshall’s “found haiku” from Walden, “The Ponds” chapter. Here’s the original passage, helpfully included — as are the sources for each of the haiku from the main section of the book — in Part 2, “Sources and Commentary”:

Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve the honor. Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow dip, apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore. [emphasis added]

If you’re a haiku purist, or if the idea of rewriting a hallowed classic fills you with horror, you won’t like this book. I thought it was a blast, not least because even when I was young and impressionable I found Thoreau a little too long-winded, self-righteous, and apt to treat nature as an excuse to indulge in airy philosophizing (though as Marshall points out, this tendency diminished over time). Transcendentalism is utter crap as far as I am concerned, and nothing could be father from the Zen spirit of haiku as Bashō, Buson, Issa and Shiki practiced it. So to me, Marshall’s distillations offer an almost ideal condensed version of Walden, cutting all the parts I don’t like and highlighting almost everything I do. In essence, he’s applied Thoreau’s famous directive, “Simplify, simplify” to the text in which it appears.

I’ll admit I didn’t read all of Part 2. I would’ve dipped into it much more often if the publisher had made it easier to quickly locate the source and commentary for a haiku in the first half, e.g. by including referenced page numbers in the top margin, as more scholarly books with extensive end-notes often do. Walden by Haiku is kind of a hybrid between a scholarly work of ecocriticism and a popularly accessible primer on haiku, and possibly the author or editor figured it would scare off potential readers to treat Part 2 strictly as end-notes.

Not that the main section of the book is lacking in a critical apparatus, however. Following a very readable 17-page introduction explaining the project and describing haiku aesthetics in general terms, the haiku are presented in the order in which Marshall “found” them in the book, chapter by chapter, each section followed by a few pages of additional commentary expanding on some aspect of haiku aesthetics as it might relate to Thoreau’s writing. It kind of reminded me of one of those volumes from Doubleday’s Anchor Bible translation, with the translation of each passage followed by two or three sections of increasingly arcane commentary and notes.

And in fact translation is how I’d describe this project. As I’m sure I’ve said here more than once before, I’ve personally found translation to be an invaluable aid to attentiveness, kind of the apotheosis of reading, which is why I think every serious poet should give it a shot. It’s clear from Marshall’s commentary that, despite the dozens of times he’s taught the book, the countless times he’s read it and the hundreds of journal articles and books about it that he must’ve read in the course of his career, translating Walden into haiku revealed new puns and other layers of meaning in the text that he’d never noticed before. Though Thoreau himself was unfamiliar with the haiku tradition, like any writer who goes outside of himself for moments of authentic contact and insight, many of his best passages can readily be translated by a skilled poet into approximations of English-language haiku. And Marshall is nothing if not a skilled poet. Here are a few other examples of Walden translated into haiku:

furniture on the grass
white sand and water
scrubbing the cabin floor

fishing for pouts
baiting the hooks
with darkness

a cool evening
the sound of a flute
stars over far fields

mortaring the chimney
our knives thrust into the earth
to scour them

after a cold night
my axe on the ice
resounding

Most of the poetry I’ve read this month has been in the form of chapbooks or shorter full-length collections, but I thought it was worth compromising on my book-a-day pace to fit this one in; I’ve been meaning to read it ever since it came out. Marshall is a friend of the family, so I suppose I should issue a disclaimer — except that many of the authors whose works I’ve blogged about this month have been friends or acquaintances. If I’d read the book and not liked it, I simply wouldn’t have blogged about it. And I’m not sure how much Ian will appreciate my slighting comments about Thoreau! But for the majority of readers who presumably hold more reverent attitudes toward ol’ Hank: I can assure you that there’s hardly a trace of arrogance in Marshall’s commentary. These are not appropriations but homages, I think. He’s very aware of the audacity of this project, his conclusions are cautious, and his general attitude toward his source comes across as an apprentice-like humility. In my translator analogy, he would be a W. S. Merwin rather than a Robert Bly or a Stephen Mitchell: someone determined to try and capture the voice of the original author rather than to impose his own.

Let me conclude with an example of Marshall’s semi-populist, semi-scholarly analysis: part of his commentary on the “old pond” haiku I quoted at the outset. This follows his quote of the source passage.

Again, I cannot help but see this passage and haiku as invoking the most famous and thoroughly analyzed haiku of all, Bashō’s “the old pond / a frog jumps / the sound of water.” Thinking of Walden as Bashō’s old pond [which Marshall also did at the beginning of the introduction] makes this passage as resonant as Thoreau’s “hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove” parable. The pond retains its purity and remains undamaged and unchanging even after all its far-reaching ripples—far-reaching in terms of both time and geography—and even after the ice-men (critics?) have done their skimming. And every time we find something new in Bashō’s old pond, the change is all in us. … Bashō’s pond haiku has been extensively commented upon, imitated, and evoked—as I have done one more time by arranging Thoreau’s comment here in the form of a haiku that echoes once again the sound of water Bashō heard over three hundred years ago. And still—all these wide ripples later—no wrinkles on the pond.

(Note, by the way, that the hardcover edition I’ve linked to at Open Library has been supplemented by paperback and electronic editions. Click on the publisher link for information about all three.)

April 21, 2012September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Nocturnes by Kathleen Kirk

NocturnesKathleen Kirk; Hyacinth Girl Press 2012WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
This was the perfect companion for a quiet, rainy spring night. Kathleen Kirk‘s latest chapbook gathers 20 night-themed poems that together trace a landscape of loss and yearning, peopled by memories, dreams, ghosts, lovers and various errant moons. The book begins in Cuba, with a striking image of women wearing fireflies in their hair nets (“Cucuyo”) followed by several pieces from the perspective of a Cuban exile’s family, culminating in the grotesque “Our Son Dreams of the Beast Shark.” It then segues into “Stargazing with My Son,” introducing an astronomical theme that continues off and on throughout the book, mingled with, increasingly, poems about love and desire.

All of which is to say that the book is very well put together. As someone who has written several themed collections myself, I can attest to the difficulty of maintaining a good balance between unity and diversity, as Kirk does here.

Three of the poems are ekphrastic, responses to Whistler’s “nocturne” paintings — not surprising, considering that Kirk is poetry editor for Escape Into Life, a magazine devoted to the intersection between visual and literary arts. But even poems that weren’t sparked by paintings abound with painterly details: “A grey glob” of mortar “lands wet and heavy / on the plastic sheet / like a body part” (“Losing Cuba”), and the narrator’s skin is likened to “these moon-colored leaves (touch them!) / trembling in the moments / just before rain” (“Last Leaves”).

“Almost an Aubade” references Edward Hopper, his subjects “shining in their loneliness,” but unexpectedly turns into a love poem: “After the sharp dream of another, I come back to you…” The book is full of such artful inversions. Possibly the most unexpected poem, “When We Lived at Night” — my favorite in the collection — goes deep into our pre-human past, when “there was no time, / only the moment” and “we lay along the wide limb / of our new existence / in the trees, nocturnal together.”

What’s left of my reptilian brain
still longs to live in the moment,
that wretched clawing in the dust
suspended forever.
But there was no forever.

I relate to the poems about sleeplessness, “Acorns Rolling Off the Roof” and “Naked Dance”:

It’s three oh three,
I’ve dreamed a giant red poppy,
tall as a small tree …

It’s good to be lonely

at a time like this.
I wouldn’t want to wake the sleeping world
from its soft desserts.

There’s only one explicit reference to blues in this book, but if you love blues music as I do, the dominant mood should feel very familiar, that same mix of melancholy and exultation. Like good blues, these poems are never lugubrious, and aim to turn losses into something salutary: “When the time comes, / juncos will feast on this cold” (“Almost Winter”). Or as Kirk says at the end of “Cosmonaut”:

This shining loss is now a thing to be praised,
as stunning as a comet’s tail
or a transit of Venus,
or a black hole swallowing up life as we know it
and spitting it back out whole
somewhere else, without any teeth marks.

Kudos to Hyacinth Girl Press for their selection of this surprising and delightful book.

April 20, 2012April 21, 2012 by Dave Bonta

A Woman Traces the Shoreline by Sheila Squillante

A Woman Traces the ShorelineSheila Squillante; dancing girl press 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
First read: WTF? Is that it?

Second read: Oh, I get it. It’s about trying to write a pregnancy poem, and merely “tracing the shoreline,” while seated in a soulless retail shopping environment — specifically a bookstore cafe next to a Bed Bath & Beyond still under construction and covered by scaffolding. A little meta, but O.K. “This is ritual.” There are seagulls and a woman picking through a dumpster. There are dreams and cravings for poems by women, and there’s a desire to “include too much.” The shoreline when it first appears is a metaphor for “the edges of heat rash … from shoulder to fingertips.” A few pages later “She waits, tracing the shoreline of her body, a heat rash of expectation.” And two pages after that, “I trace the shoreline of my own exhaustion. It grieves me to prepare so effectively.”

Interlude: I hear a barred owl through the closed door and step out onto the porch to listen. It’s gotten a little cool out. Venus glimmers in the west. After a minute or two, the owl calls again; it’s very close. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? A pause of another couple minutes, then it calls again, still from the same location. That expectant feeling, attention focused but relaxed, staring into the darkness as if that will aid the hearing — then, intellectual that I am, analyzing this, still clutching the open book in my left hand like a talisman against the night. Once more the owl calls, then silence. Is that it? Yes. Yes it is.

Third read: This spare prose-poem spread out over 17 pages is about expecting, in the broadest possible sense. It only makes sense then that it would challenge our expectations of what a poem (or sequence of untitled poems?) should be. Is it, are they, finished? Clearly not. “I coexist. I am becoming, they tell me, ‘wholer.'” “This rash, these shore birds. Scaffolded, skeletal.” Shorelines themselves are never finished, perpetually under construction by waves and currents. One stands on the shore to wait for the ship, for the hero without or within. “I feel the hero fighting. I am the hero fighting.”

Waiting is a kind of kenosis. Her cookies eaten, the narrator faces “the empty plate, page.” She stares at her “belly and breasts, crumbling shoreline of retail need.” The last words on the last page suggest that this has, after all, been a quest narrative: “We quest and billow. We wait.”

With just a few sentences marooned in the top part of each page, it occurs to me I’ve been following a shoreline back and forth through this oddly affecting and thought-provoking book.

April 19, 2012March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Dreaming in Red by Howie Good

Dreaming in RedHowie Good; right hand pointing 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
Howie Good’s latest full-length collection, his fourth, is the first book issued by the online magazine right hand pointing, and it was produced to benefit the Crisis Center in Birmingham, Alabama. 100 percent of the profits, about $5.50 per book, go to support the center’s work, which includes suicide counseling, services to victims of sexual assault, day treatment for the indigent mentally ill, and other services. You can get it through Lulu.com.

Is the book worth reading, though? If you like spare, haunting poems with dystopian themes and a healthy dash of surrealism, absolutely. As with most of the other books I’ve been reading this month, I read it to Rachel over Skype, which was an interesting experience for both of us. While I’ve read many of Howie Good’s books and chapbooks over the years, this was her first — and the first one I’ve read out loud. My pauses were rarely long enough for the full meanings to sink in. It made me appreciate just how much time is required to absorb Howie’s poems.

Rachel admitted to confusion about some of the leaps between stanzas or sections of poems, but said she was impressed by how well the poems captured the sort of everyday paranoia in which we are all enmeshed. As a volunteer at a similar organization to the Crisis Center, she fields phone calls from true paranoiacs and other highly disturbed people on a daily basis, and said she thought the book did a great job of illuminating the very fine line between ordinary thinking and madness.

I doubt the poems were chosen with the Crisis Center in mind; Good just happens to be a very noir-ish poet. Dreaming in Red is an excellent title, though: blood or the color red figure in many of the poems. 20th-century nightmares mingle with 21st-century premonitions of worse to come. “The city is full of smoke, dust, fever, flies, parading and singing and holding banners aloft” (“History is Silent”), and “To get red, you need dust and haze. Pollution makes the sky so beautiful” (“A Walk on the Moon”).

Instead of a standard review, I thought I’d try an imitation of Howie’s style as a kind of homage to this very distinctive poet whose poetry and work ethic are such an inspiration to me. Following that, I’ll embed a video that the Belgian artist Swoon Bildos made for three of the poems in the collection. Enjoy.

Good Times

after Howie Good

1.
All the clocks have guilty faces because they are being watched by secret police. You show me the new finger you had grafted on in prison, still red and slightly swollen. When we shake hands I feel it twitching spasmodically, a dog dreaming about its previous owner who shot things with it and made it point.

2.
It’s always disconcerting to learn that you’ve been blind from birth, and everything you thought you saw was merely something suggested by the prosecuting attorneys of your better nature. Then again, here on Mars, two colors capture everything. Paradise has been postponed indefinitely due to the shortage of fruit.

3.
The information paradigm followed by the mass media is fundamentally Euclidian, you said. We were cleaning out the rabbit pens with an air compressor. Even the dried blood wanted to fly. The monastery had switched from bells to sirens, so a 3:00 a.m. siren could mean fire, prayer, or both. Time hasn’t been the same since it was used to regulate trains.

Watch on Vimeo

April 18, 2012April 27, 2012 by Dave Bonta

We Are Clay by Russell Evatt

We Are ClayRussell Evatt; Epiphany Editions 2012WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
The title poem, I learn from Google, was originally titled “That We Are Clay.” Would it be too far-fetched to suggest that losing the “that” is emblematic of this poet’s progress from the slough of bull-slinging toward a firmer ground of revelation? Yes, it would. Still, winning the first chapbook contest from a magazine called Epiphany ought to count for something — especially when the hand-sewn, letterpress-printed result is as beautiful as this one is. And the element of bull still present in the otherwise unaltered text of the poem could well constitute an evasive maneuver. It begins:

We Are Clay

I am a city pigeon. One
step ahead
of dogs. Always
on the lookout
for bread.
Don’t test me.

He’s kidding himself, right? Clay pigeons are targets for shotgun practice. But this pigeon tries to distract us by retreating into the realm of the theoretical:

I wonder what you are
if I am a bird.
The lady throwing
bread, breaking it off
in pieces? The crumbs
falling to the ground?
This is sex. I’m not
the pigeon. I’m
the clown
with the camera.

Clowns were once numbered among the priests and shamans; clowning can be a serious business. “The bigger the room, the louder God’s voice.” That’s the whole of a tiny poem titled “Huge Catholic Cathedral.” Another poem, “A Playground Skirmish as the Beginnings of War,” betrays the influence of Vasko Popa’s Games:

The men stand in a circle until they realize
this isn’t a conducive scrimmage
and disband. One plays hopscotch. Another jumps
a thick rope.
Still another does the hula.
One man sees this and tries it with barbed wire.
Doesn’t work.

In “Man,” the games become more serious yet. A boy dislocates his little finger in a neighborhood game of football, and his father turns away from his Sunday television and “wrapped his arms around the boy so he couldn’t move as the pinkie was popped back into place.” The boy thinks he hates football now, but soon enough he’s back playing with his fingers taped together “because that’s just what he needed, to get back out there, not let anything stop him.” So American, this vignette. Especially given its placement in the collection between “Victims’ Bodies Arrive at Airport” and “Bad Water.”

One of the things that sets the U.S. apart as a developed nation, of course, is the extent to which religious discourse and belief permeate our society. It’s always bothered me that so few of our poets seem willing to grapple with this aspect of the culture. So I was especially pleased to see Evatts returning time and again to religion, as in “Ancient Civilization”:

When you say
missionary

I think of sex
then God.

Is this important?
Is the hour

upon us?

This is in the context of a relationship between lovers who do not want to commit and barely manage to communicate, which might or might not be a metaphor for something else. In “Noise Control,” the poet himself pauses to wonder if the central image is a metaphor, which I might’ve found annoying if that image (of a deep-sea “monster” that may be killed simply by bringing it to the surface) hadn’t been so compelling. Still, this kind of mock-wrestling with meaning is all too common these days, especially among younger poets, and therefore probably wouldn’t interest me so much if it weren’t for the counterpoint it offers to the truth claims of religion referenced in so many of the poems. The book ends with a shopping trip for “Groceries in the Afterlife,”

a place where you wander, pushing a cold steel cart in front of you with a stuck wheel, a place where the lights flicker and the freezer units hum hum hum.

I read the book to Rachel over Skype, and we each liked a number of the poems, but often not the same ones — which is unusual for us. I think that speaks to the high level of experimentation here. Evatt rarely plays it safe, and he never shows all his cards. How seriously are we to take poems such as “Huge Catholic Cathedral,” or one called “I Told You So Sonnet” with its 14 extremely short, unrhymed lines about what would happen if the sky actually fell? Is he putting us on? Does it matter?

Perhaps we readers are like the people in “Sketching People” — but which ones? Because, as the protagonist explains, there were two kinds of people: those whom he tried and failed to depict on paper, and the ones he actually did depict who failed to appear, and may not even exist. “My drawings would not change this.” It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from a failed god — which is to say, a clown.

April 17, 2012April 18, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Birds Nobody Loves by James Brush

Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & GracklesJames Brush; Coyote Mercury Press 2012WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
This evening was our local Audubon chapter’s annual spring banquet, featuring a presentation called “Confessions of a Reluctant Birder” by naturalist-blogger Jennifer Scott Schlick, so how better to prepare myself this morning than by reading another blogger-friend’s graceful and entertaining new book of poems about grackles and vultures? James Brush is from Austin, Texas, where grackles are almost as despised as the Texas state legislature, though I think they are in session at least twice as often. Years ago, when my brother Mark was getting his M.A. from the University of Texas, I took the bus down to visit him a couple of times and was deeply impressed by the size of the grackle flocks and the variety of interesting sounds the birds could produce. Watching them come into roost along the riverbank at dusk was an impressive sight, rivaling as a spectacle the emergence of the Mexican free-tailed bats from underneath the Congress Avenue Bridge on the other side of the river. Oddly, though, few of the people gathered to wait for the bats did more than glance in the grackles’ direction. Why not?

James Brush’s poems offer a few clues. A humorous haibun, “The Grackle Tree,” begins: “After a few days under the grackle tree, the blue sedan began to develop a white pox, which spread with each passing night.” People fire shotgun blanks into the tree with little effect, and

After a month, no one remembered what color the car had been, and no one ever discussed its owners or what became of them.

grackle tree
boughs shake and chatter
at the cars

Brush uses hyperbole to good effect. In one poem he imagines fundamentalists from Kansas coming down to Austin to demonstrate with signs that read “God hates grackles.” In another, “Quiscalus Mexicanus,” the Mexican great-tailed grackles come under fire on right-wing talk radio:

Grackles are socialists. They weren’t born in the U.S. Grackles do what Hitler did. Shouldn’t even call ’em passerines; they’re not even birds. Sub-birds at best.

Another poem describes the reactions of various people when Brush tells them his greyhound Joey ate a grackle: “Yuck, but your dog will be fine,” says animal emergency. “Ewww,” says another veterinarian. And a friend relishes the dog’s new appetite: “Thank goodness. Grackles are awful.” For his part, the author simply notes how much more attentive Joey has become to his daily filling of the fird feeders. Dog and master share a new tie, bound by their appreciation for this “bird nobody loves.”

Grackle poems alternate with poems about turkey vultures and black vultures — both species that we have here in central Pennsylvania, as well. I don’t know that these birds are as disregarded by serious birders as Brush says they are in Texas, perhaps because we’re on the Eastern Flyway and people at the spring and autumn hawk watches tally migrating vultures with as much enthusiasm as anything else. Also, there’s nothing more elegant in flight than a turkey vulture, its wings curved up in a very shallow V, rocking back and forth in the wind or circling on thermals but rarely flapping. Brush captures some of this grace in his micropoem sequence, “A Committee of Vultures”:

shadows
across a brown field
vultures circling

[…]

in a cloudless sky
a vulture circles the prairie
seeking an ending

Of course, vultures can be somewhat repulsive, too: “We shit on our own feet,” begins “Creed for Cathartes Aura.” And black vultures clustered around a corpse seem to be plotting how to hone their predatory skills.

Straightening their ties, they discuss
elaborate plans to go public. Someday,
they claim, they will become hawks or eagles.
(“Good Authority”)

Since some of the poems are autobiographical, I couldn’t help wondering whether Brush might’ve put a bit of himself in “Lines Discovered in an Aging Ornithologist’s Field Journal”:

When the end comes, don’t
plant me in the ground, trapped
in just one piece of earth.

Why not leave me by
the highway for the vultures
and maybe for the crows
who will take my unseeing eyes.

Then, at last, I could soar,
finally fly on dusky wings
outstretched,

buried in the sky.

This is a fun book, and light-weight enough to slip easily in a knapsack with the field guides.

April 16, 2012April 19, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Weaving a New Eden by Sherry Chandler

Weaving a New EdenSherry Chandler; Wind Publications 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder
Weaving a New Eden is two books in one, with an additional prologue and epilogue. The first major section, “The Grandmothers,” consists of poems about — and mostly in the voices of — the author’s female ancestors, who were pioneers and rural women in the hills and hollows of Kentucky. This is followed by “The Frontier,” which reimagines the life of Rebecca Boone, Daniel’s wife. In addition to the common setting, Chandler uses the imagery of weaving to connect these sections into a more cohesive whole, as she points out in her prose introduction.

I also found myself writing weaving forms of poetry — sestinas, pantoums, a sonnet crown — and I consider the weaving chorus of voices in “The Grandmother Acrostics” a tapestry of Kentucky history.

Chandler’s mastery of poetic forms is rivaled only by her command of Kentucky history and genealogy. And when I say “mastery,” I mean she makes it seem effortless. In less expert hands, the exigencies of poetic forms sometimes force odd constructions and word choices, which can of course be made to seem edgy or hip — it’s always easier to be difficult than to be clear. But there’s no way such an approach would’ve worked with poems about what the Foxfire books used to call “plain living.” “How to Cook a Chicken,” for example, for all that it conforms to the intricate arrangement of a traditional sestina, never deviates from plain-spokenness. Here’s the penultimate stanza:

Disjoint the legs, first step in cutting up a chicken,
bend the thigh joint till the bones shine through the skin
like a knuckle, aim the shining edge of the dark
blade at the highest, whitest part, cut. Plunge
blade into flesh at the breastbone’s high point, dress
out the wishbone, later to be split by daughter’s hands.

This unforced quality was equally present in the aforementioned “Grandmother Acrostics,” a 10-page, 17-poem sequence that was the high point of the book for me, and easily could have made a satisfying chapbook by itself. And many of the women whose voices we hear in this sequence also appeared in other poems earlier in the section, adding to the impression of interwovenness.

Chandler isn’t just a traditionalist, though: the book includes two found poems, as well, suggesting perhaps the influence of Charles Reznikoff. One was a series of postcard messages from her grandmother on a Greyhound bus trip out to California in 1957, with “original spelling and grammar transcribed as written.” Given the “lost Eden” theme of the book, “Card 8: Greetings from Paradise” seemed especially resonant:

Then on October 9 Elezbith Aunt Nanie Mae
and I went to Pardise
we saw the gold Minds
and Elezbith and I helt hands and looked down in the minds

Throughout the book, Chandler is keen to give voices to the overlooked and forgotten, both among her own ancestors and in the more well-known narratives from Kentucky history: a nameless “old Dutch woman” from an Indian captive story; a slave woman named Dolly; the Boone family cat; the mysterious Ellen Tingle whose name, birthplace, number of children, appearance and manner of death have all been forgotten by her descendents. I was fascinated to see how Chandler dealt with the gaps in knowledge. The cat plays its bit part, mentioned in the chronicles,

Then Jemima came running in. “Daddy!” she cried
and I disappeared again into the fogs of history.

“Calloway’s Dolly” and “The Old Dutch Woman” both actively question the official record — how reliable can it be, if it couldn’t even supply them with proper names? The latter refuses to confirm or deny whether she harbored cannibalistic impulses toward her more famous fellow escaped captive Mary Draper Ingles, as Ingles claimed.

She says I tried to murder her. She says
I wanted to eat her. That may be true.
[…]
I could blame it on the roots we dug.
Who knows what poison we ate to stop our guts
from cramping. I could blame the bloddy flux,
the fever. Or I could blame the story. Always
the strong hero must have a weak companion.

Ellen Tingle protests more plaintively about the forgetfulness of her descendents:

They’ve forgotten how I looked, how I smelled, how
I held them against my heart and kissed away their fears.
No, surely once I tingled in Ben Lusby’s blood.
Give me that.

Even “Rebecca Boone’s Loom Has Its Say” in a six-stanza pantoum:

Though Boone’s Ticklicker wove the tales men love,
those Long Knives would turn tail with breechless butts.
My cloth provided cover for a conquest.
Wilderness can’t be tamed when men run bare.

Historical poetry is a fascinating genre. As with historical fiction, the leeway it provides for the exercise of the author’s imagination can make the past come to life in a way it seldom can in straight history. I’ve certainly read books of historical and biographical poetry that were more lyrical, more rich in metaphor and simile than Weaving a New Eden, but I can’t remember any that felt as comprehensive, or wove together as many different moods and modes: comic as well as lyric, elegy as well as ballad, limerick, ode. Reading it in one sitting, out loud, as I did this afternoon, might not be the best way to take it in, however. Its complex tapestry rewards the slow and attentive reader.