Category: Poets and poetry

Writing about craft, poetry book reviews and appreciations, and anything else that isn’t an original poem.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Signals by Ed Madden

Signals SignalsEd Madden; University of South Carolina Press 2008WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
I was very lucky that I got to read about three-quarters of this book to Rachel over Skype this afternoon, because the high craftsmanship of these poems really emerges when you read them out loud. Try reading, for example, this passage from “Coastal” about fiddler crabs:

They skitter
sideways, claws raised. The ground is riddled

with burrows, claws extruding. The claw comes out
first—an attitude. Lights come on in the house

behind me. I lift a crab shell, cracked open,
sun-bleached chitin, its ridges crisp and unbroken,

dry husk of history, the inside still pearlescent.
My step raises a hundred claws of threat.

And notice how Madden slipped in that phrase “dry husk of history” without making it sound at all sententious? This is a good example of the kind of mischief he’s up to in this book, his first full-length collection but already the work of a mature poet who knows exactly what he’s doing. The book won the South Carolina Poetry Prize, and appropriately so: many of the poems are set in his adopted state of South Carolina, and he tackles issues of race and sexual orientation in the deftest possible manner. “Coastal” appears in the most explicitly political section of the book, and is the second of a pair of poems in the middle of that section that both hearken back to the calmer waters at the beginning of the book, while also suggesting the degree to which political awareness and activism can color our perceptions of even the most innocent of scenes: a white wedding, a walk along the beach of a barrier island. Here’s how that poem concludes:

A stomp sends them scuttling thru the grass.
I imagine crushing one—the crunch of carapace,

small gush of guts in my fist. And if
I dropped it in the dark, others would find it,

their claws tugging at bits of brother meat.

I got to know Ed Madden originally through an email correspondence about The Morning Porch, and his own attention to the natural world is in evidence throughout the book. I like poets who know the names of things, and I like books that begin outdoors and get the reader situated in the landscape before anything else. Like the Sherry O’Keefe chapbook I blogged about yesterday, this is (mostly) autobiographical, place-based poetry at its finest. Not all the poems are set in South Carolina; in the middle section, Ed and his partner Bert travel to exotic places such as Paris and Pennsylvania (the Mütter Museum!) and in the final section, a couple poems take us back to the author’s childhood in Arkansas.

At the AWP conference in Chicago last month, I attended a panel discussion moderated by the editor of Orion about how poets might write about politics without getting terminally didactic. It was called, I think, “Not With a Bang But a Whisper,” and included Dorianne Laux and Lia Purpura, as well as some great back-and-forth with the audience. I think Madden should’ve been on that panel; certainly his poems follow two of the panel’s strongest recommendations (if I remember correctly): keep it personal and write from where you live (Laux), and cultivate a quality of attention that lets you notice suffering and respond in a human manner (Purpura). And Signals suggests a third strategy: arrange your poems carefully for maximum impact. Madden’s understated attention to natural and human details throughout the book builds up a reservoir of trust in the reader, preparing one to listen more receptively to the awkward truths about race relations in the last part of the book: poems such “Roots: an Essay on Race,” and “Here, or the White Boy on the Bus.”

The latter poem recounts an incident where the African American civil rights and gay rights activist Bayard Rustin gets arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus in 1942 — a decade before Rosa Parks. Madden personalizes the poem by addressing Rustin in the second person, then imagines himself as the white kid he singled out as he was being led away (“If I move, this child / will not know that injustice is taking place / here”).

I watch

the police lift you from your seat—
Bayard, black angel, troublemaker—

force you to the street. The bus pulls away,
folks turn back to their business,

a white man takes the seat, looks at
that boy, wondering what he knows.

And wondering, it seems to me, is precisely where the understated political poem derives its power, a power so often squandered by those who deal mainly in outrage and don’t let time’s alembic work its magic. You have to preserve some core of wonder or you risk the calcifying of your politics along with your poetry, I think. In the final part, “Transom,” of the somewhat ironically titled “Three Poems on Politics,” Madden focuses at first on “A vase of tulips … pink / anomalies on a table filled with tracts.” Then:

The question that we’re sniffing toward,
said the old black man, is this:

Can capitalism reform itself?
The window above the door is dark—

a thin transparent film to screen
the light. The sun is bright outside.

The clouds boil in slow swirls.

Over the transom they sneak their hard questions in, these poems. I expect they’ll stay with me for a long time.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Making Good Use of August by Sherry O’Keefe

Making Good Use of August Making Good Use of AugustSherry O’Keefe; Finishing Line Press 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
I read two chapbooks today, of which this was the second and much the more profound despite its lack of pretention (which the other had in spades). I’ve gotten to know Sherry’s writing through her blog, too much august not enough snow, which is consistently wonderful. This book of poems — her first — was no different. Like her nonfiction, her poetry is lyrical, narrative, and deeply rooted in a landscape that most of us think of as a vacation destination, when we think of it at all, but Montana is O’Keefe’s ancestral home. And while she clearly loves the land and spending time outdoors, she doesn’t try to pretty it up. When she was a kid, and her own family struggled to get by, a school-bus friend

lived in a shack with a two inch gap
around the front door. Dark winter mornings
kerosene light leaked out. She stayed warm
by wearing three dresses while she slept.
She told me she switched them so it seemed
as though she changed her clothes.
(“Bus 16”)

O’Keefe’s tales are often laconic and leave the reader with some work to do, which I like. I had to mull over “Approaching Strangers” for a couple of minutes after I read it, and I’m still not entirely sure I understand what the protagonists were up to.

He tells us he is lost.
I reach through the window as though to draw
a map in the margin of yesterday’s newspaper.
How to get to where you never wanted to go.

Add to this necessity of sitting with the poems for a little while to unpuzzle them, the sheer variety of ways in which O’Keefe plumbs the mysteries of human motives, and the book ends up seeming much longer than its 25 pages; there’s a spaciousness to it. What exactly is “the story behind my neighbor’s blue spruce,” you may find yourself wondering on first read of the piece so titled. Does she in fact cut down the tree as she seems to want to, and if so, why? Then the fact that it’s a blue spruce begins to sink in…

I’ve been re-reading the Icelandic sagas lately, something I do every few years, and marveling as I always do that such great works of literature could’ve emerged from a land so rural and thinly settled that there was not a single village, let alone a market town or city — things we tend to assume are essential for literary culture to thrive. But perhaps extreme landscapes select for unique and extraordinary characters. In her bio, O’Keefe “credits/blames her Irish heritage for her story-telling ways,” but what made her ancestors choose to stay in Montana?

For as anyone who’s ever grown up way out in the country can tell you, leaving isn’t hard. It’s choosing to be content where you are that requires a little extra grit. I agreed with “Gas Station Guy.” He likes to describe the weather in terms of distant places:

“There is a touch of Seattle
in the air today, but tomorrow Phoenix
will blow in.” He shook his head ‘no’ when I asked
if he ever wished he could breathe
the real Pacific air, feel the Arizona heat. The trick
to life, he said, is to like it where you live.

In “The Way My Wipers Work,” a cloudburst forces the protagonists to pull over because the windshield wipers in her old pickup truck stop working, as they are wont to do. The travelers decide to take shelter under a tarp in the bed “to listen and share shivers.” In this poem, as in the title poem, a broken thing is regarded as source of good fortune: the couple gets closer under the tarp.

The wind
jostled and the rain dumped down. Thunder
snapped around us. I curled into his quiet
faith of living head-on, trusting
in the storm.

Making Good Use of August, too, is a book to curl up with. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to visit Yellowstone country for real, but reading O’Keefe seems like the next best thing.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Almost “Almost Invisible” by Mark Strand

Almost invisible Almost invisibleMark Strand; Alfred A Knopf 2012WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
Let’s say that night has come and the wind has died down and a male cardinal, his iconic crest and red feathers invisible in the darkness, flutters overhead in the portico rafters as you step outside and pass quickly to the garden walk beyond to avoid getting shat on, and the noise of the wings reminds you of the riffling of pages by a disappointed reader of a new book, ordered in hardcover because it was on sale at Amazon and how could you go wrong with such an author, who once served as Poet Laureate and who translated one of your favorite Spanish poets, Rafael Albertí — besides which it’s prose poetry, one of your favorite things; and let’s say that your nostrils prickle at the smell of rain and you remember as you sometimes do an incident long ago, in the 4th or 5th Grade, when the fastest runner in the school ridiculed your assertion that rain could have any kind of smell, and because you wanted to like him you said nothing, though his arrogance rankled and this very minor exchange stuck with you and continues to color the pleasure you take in the smell of rain even four decades later, adding a dash of melancholy as you unzip and begin to urinate into the darkness on the far side of the driveway and a sharper, earthier odor begins to take its place, and you recall what your girlfriend said earlier about the poet’s heavy, elephantine playfulness lurching bathetically into a kind of Dr. Zhivago-esque mood which seemed not only out-of-place but unearned, because isn’t that really how this whole spring has felt so far — the absurdly early heat wave followed by a cold April; now let’s say that there is a halogen flashlight in the house and you toy with the idea of fetching it and scanning the edge of the woods, where you’d probably pick up the eye-shine of a deer or two, or possibly a raccoon, but remembering the poet’s words, you intone the dark is my freedom and my happiness, zip up and go back inside to peer into the glowing well of your ancient and cumbersome computer.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Between Careen and Caution by Heather Burns

Between Careen and Caution Between Careen and Caution: PoemsHeather Burns; Seven Kitchens Press 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
This is one of the more aptly titled collections of poetry I’ve read in a while. It comes from a line in a poem called “Mile Marker 25,” which begins:

Am I on danger’s road, thoughts in motion
Toward the washed-out bridge around the blind curve?
Quick, choose between careen and caution,
Count what I want most, what I’d lose, now swerve
To miss the fox and clip my ghost instead.

And the book does do some wild swerving between poems that are stylistically and semantically cautious and those that threaten to fly apart at the seams. In the former category is a poem like “Comet,” a perfectly comprehensible and well-constructed pantoum, which I must admit, despite my distaste for pantoums and villanelles in general, makes very good use of the typically claustrophobic effect of all those repeating lines, describing a couple’s failure to get out of their too-small apartment to drive out into the country and view a comet. In the latter category, “Bringing in Laundry Before Storm” begins with a fairly random grab-bag of words, and only begins to make sense in the second stanza:

Thunder bulge tree’s crown
Maroon sky hum surgical thread loom

Porch dark as orchard
Cats flick and thump tails

So suffice it to say that Burns covers a lot of ground in just 21 poems, from the sonnet in the voice of a Confederate soldier that begins the book to the wonderful “At a Loss for Words” with which it concludes. Her favorite image (if that’s the word) is wind and her favorite topic is language and the difficulty of communication — and yes, sometimes they come together, as in the poem “General Delivery”:

I left home because Isabelle asked: What is West?
In part, it’s the porous bone of sky bleached and beached in red sand.

The wind plays its little jokes at the canyon rim,
Hurls itself down like a suicide, then yells for help.
You see it on the other side, laughing at its
Throw-the-voice trick.

(Read the whole poem on the publisher’s website.)

Burns is also good at conjuring shape-shifters, such as the “half-minding thin child” in “A Made Place” who “hides with her shadow / Between sheets on the clothesline” and eventually becomes

green inside,
Springy like crisp grass.
Shimmies the trunk of the skeleton tree
And hangs a picture of the sky on the sky.

The day itself is imagined as a shape-shifter in another poem, “Drunk Sun.”

The moon’s eye is half-shut and day hopes that nag
Won’t be looking for a good time tonight—ah—night’s
Now and day’s misthought its bounds again.

A restless, experimental spirit animates this fine first collection, which in its variety mirrors The Seven Kitchens Press Editor’s Series as a whole. Kudos to editor/publisher Ron Mohring for selecting it… and then working his usual magic on the design and execution.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Exit Strategies: a videopoem chapbook by David Tomaloff and Swoon Bildos

Exit Strategies (A bloodletting)

by Swoon Bildos
Videopoem chapbook for Exit Strategies [PDF] by David Tomaloff (Gold Wake Press, 2011)

Entry. We are submerged in motion, unable to stop or focus. A shadowy figure in the near background draws our gaze — the only still thing, until it starts slowly walking out through what look like waves. The colors are warm and the instruments in the soundtrack seemingly acoustic, though difficult to identify beyond genus. Simultaneous with the beginning of the poem recitation, a female face appears. She too eventually turns away from us and begins moving away. “Exit Strategies.” Is she the same as the first figure at an earlier point in time? Regardless, is this not how we perceive ourselves moving through familiar spaces, memories of previous journeys over-layering, adding thickness and nuance like ghosts of our own past? The poem says:

You are never alone in the being alone, and the wolves will open up, show you the light if you let them. … Steady now, and breathe. A circular motion. The turning of a screw. A radio going silent in the warehouse of a mind.

Wave. In this second video, the movement is more frenetic, swooping, diving, but there’s a pattern to it, a kind of Tourette’s. The colors are darker and redder; it might be sunset. “Maybe the trees will take us for granted. Maybe they already have.” First a fire plug and then a bulbous water tower dance in and out of view. “You and I … you and I…” The refrain-like structure of the poem is echoed by the film’s repeated sequence of a flag or stringless kite billowing and falling to the ground. “Nearer to the edge of the forest” says Tomaloff, and there are trees visible on the screen. This unusual conjunction of word and image seems like an accident, maybe an oversight comparable to Swoon’s misspelling of the publisher’s name in the credits. In the poem, you and I might be returning with our weapons. This might be a poem in which we are stealers of souls.

Drag. (Swoon notes in a feature on this series at the Atticus Review, “I wanted each video to have a title that was a single word from the text of its poem. Those words/titles gave me a first direction about where to go to with these.”) The most painterly of the videos so far, with soft colors and textures. As for the text, it’s my favorite of the six poems.

The buildings are silver bullies in the daylight, hulking graveyards by night. Please send a flare, a map, or a compass. Send me a slingshot, or a prayer. … There is a flood on the horizon tonight, and the guards have begun to desert their towers. THE WATER HAS REVEALED US IN WAYS WE COULD NEVER HAVE IMAGINED.

That last line puts me in mind of New Orleans after Katrina. But throughout the series of videos I feel underwater or at sea. Fortunately, I enjoy that sort of thing — surrendering to time and chance, getting good and lost. At the very end of this video, a snippet of found sound: “Actually trusting my body to do what it’s supposed to do,” a woman says in an unplaceable American accent. She could be from anywhere or from nowhere — which is to say, the suburbs.

Asylum. Black and white, this one, with intrusions of color — a pastel blue, shockingly out-of-place, which turns out to be the dress on a walking figure. Creaking noises in the soundtrack while Tomaloff hints at an interrogation from “the authorities.” Oases of blurred, almost-stillness in which someone might be going out or coming in. Then back to the nervous motion, the walker’s legs crossing thin lines of shadows which, due to the video treatment, seem almost to pierce them. If I didn’t know the text came first, I might’ve thought it was a commentary on the filmmaker’s technique:

I drew pictures of women and men doing their best to relate to one another, like lines drawing lines upon lines, over and over again, insecure. … The rafters are humming; bullhorns, relentless; the fields are dividing; they know me by this name: Penance. Vibrant lights scribble non sequiturs across cracked plaster.

We catch brief glimpses of a face in full color appearing to study something. “The men in plainclothes finish cigarettes while we wait.”

Attic. An uncomfortable head-on gaze of a male face behind the usual elusive moving surfaces, which this time include many brief artifacts from old movies. “Some sort of perdition, some rules for the road.” And: “A team of ghost prayer horses.” Just after the conclusion of the reading the soundtrack begins to catch and stutter, as if overwhelmed by the glut of textures.

Sum. The orchestral beginning almost evokes the swelling soundtrack in a classic movie as the lovers ride off into the sunset. And indeed we are travelling, possibly by train, among soft blurs and warm colors. The fit of text to image is as good as it gets in these videos. The poem begins,

O SOLEMNLY STAY THIS, MY FILM PROJECTOR HEART. I WROTE THAT SENTENCE FOR A FIRE ONCE. I built a fire from a forgotten friend. I drew ghost water from a lover and took it to bed, a train. This is my machina, with its gears softly turning beneath the rolling of a forest floor.

Brief moments of sharp focus startle. Which might be just about the most realistic thing I’ve ever seen in a film, because isn’t that in fact the way we experience our lives? Always dreaming of exit strategies, and very seldom pausing long enough to see where the hell we are. In these videopoems, as in the e-chapbook that spawned them, coherence is fleeting but all the dearer for the effort we must make to achieve it. And the dialogue between filmmaker and poet makes me listen more carefully to poems I might otherwise have dismissed as hopelessly obscure.

*

I feel even more insecure about my film reviewing than I do about my poetry reviewing, but given that this is probably the most ambitious online videopoem chapbook anyone’s yet made, I couldn’t let the month go by without attempting to say something about it, no matter how incoherent. And in case you’re thinking I got off easy today since there were only six poems in the chapbook, I did watch them three times in succession, only reading the text after the first viewing.

Do watch the videos yourself, and check out the feature on the first three at Atticus Review. (I’ll be posting them all to Moving Poems soon.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Capable Heart by Ann E. Michael

The Capable Heart The Capable HeartAnn E. Michael; FootHills Publishing 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
This quietly powerful collection made me care about horses — and not merely because the title derives from a translation of a passage in my favorite work of philosophy, Zhuangzi. Though I have some friends who are into horses, the horse-riding culture has always been pretty alien to me, and on rare close encounters with the beasts I’ve felt a bit intimidated, to be honest. But the narrator, too, was a stranger to horses, as she explains in “Ways We Are Alike”:

I wanted a way to embrace
my daughter’s fascination.

to overcome my own fear, with carrots,
with a lead rope and soft brush.

I touched the withers and the
warm, broad chest;

I held the lead. Let pulsing lips
explore my hands, my jacket.

Horse and author go on to explore each other, in this poem and as the cycle progresses. Michael ponders the attraction that girls and women have toward horses:

Women who have re-centered their lives owing, in part, to horses,
are shy of nothing, strong as horses…
(“Horsewomen”)

She also examines the interplay between domestication or domesticity and rebellion, as in “Domestic Mutinies”:

Sometimes my outrage gallops
hard inside my ribs
and I feel like Chuang Tzu’s
outlaw horses: domesticated, enslaved,
& utterly capable, in their hearts.

“Dancing Horses” come into their own in a snowstorm:

Now
manes are streaming, necks arched,
an unrestrained blizzard
in the corral where they
toss off the long-bred bit
that is obedience.

Sublimating domesticity,
the screaming stallion wind:
their unbroken past.

In “Boss Mare,” a woman named Rosie embodies the strong individualism of a lead horse.

I can just see her cribbing
her stall, bossing the other mares around: stay back,
do things my way.

Not that the other horses mind. She wields the lead ropes,
she calls at the corral gate and most of them come running—
she’s boss mare.

Is it a sign of the author’s own rebellious streak that she never writes the most obvious poem: about riding a horse herself? The rider is always the daughter, and though sometimes the author or narrator takes the place of the horse, as in “Mare’s Nest” —

Notes and
photos, music, a belt
or rumpled jeans, slippers
slipped off, on, entropy
maybe. Lie in straw, back
toward the stall door. Sniff,
huff, wicker, snore.

— other times, as in “The Indoor Ring,” her gaze shifts away from horses, and she turns to watch swallows diving instead, or — in “Watching a Child Ride Horseback Through Snow” — gets distracted by a preening blue jay and loses sight of horse and rider. The domesticity-vs.-rebellion theme is developed strongly enough that a couple of poems, “Housekeeping” and “Anger Good As Hope,” avoid mentioning horses altogether. But even then, the reader feels the warm breath of the horse and hears it nicker.

This is, above all, a wise book — even if the author would probably disavow any personal store of wisdom, and attribute what lessons she’s gleaned to the horses themselves. As in Zhuangzi, they are teachers by dint of the purity of their natures and their connection to the earth over which they fly, but as such they are not to be taken too seriously. “Evolution of the Horse” ends on a pun; “Stray Horses” are capable of “astonishing vulgarity” and are “pitiable, oafish, indelible as my own failures”; and the “big quarterhorse” in the closing poem, “Riding-School Zendo,” mimes a Zen master with his horsehair whisk.

The stories we tell about horses can never encompass the full strangeness of their being, of course, as poems such as “Putting Down the Mare” and “The Difficult Birth” remind us. And this too is a source of wisdom for those who pay attention as well as Michael does:

We survive drought. Or we do not.
The paint goes back to her grazing,
unencumbered by memory. Perhaps,
next May, I will tell a different story.
Perhaps not.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dark Things by Novica Tadić (translated by Charles Simic)

Dark Things Dark ThingsNovica Tadić; BOA Editions, Ltd. 2009WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
4012 A.D. An archaeologist from Alpha Centauri who specializes in the Late Anthropocene has uncovered a strange text. Dark Things, it’s called — the work of a Serbian poet and a Serbian-American translator. She knows little of the wars and genocides that convulsed Serbia in this period, and only fragments of 20th-century poetry have survived — mostly copies of A Coney Island of the Mind, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and Jewel Kilcher’s A Night Without Armor — so she is not sure how to classify the writings in this miraculously well-preserved text. But based on existing knowledge, she and her colleagues generate several competing theories about its origin and purpose:

1. It’s the collected sayings of a Zen or Sufi teacher. The combination of standard syntax, non-specialist language and recondite, gnomic or hermetic meanings strongly suggest utterances intended for an audience of initiates to some religious mystery. How else are we to understand lines such as:

Poor us, we are all kings
when we gaze at the starry sky.
(“Night Passes”)

The rabbit is in the pot, the broom is behind the door.
(“While You Count The Stars”)

Strangers came and took my sheepskin coat.
Now, what will I cover myself with? Only with prayers
and with the light, trembling wings of a moth.
(“Sheepskin Coat”)

Under his coat, next to his ribs,
the collected work of some classic would fit.

Without a friend or acquaintance,
alone like a bone in a soup plate…
(“Book Thief”)

2. These are clearly lyrics for an otherwise unknown death metal band named Novica Tadić, who had an old man as a mascot. Consider:

I’m a cross of human flesh
on which nothingness is crucified.
(“Soldier’s Song”)

You are all-powerful, you are a giant.
No mother gave you birth.

Every street is too narrow for you.

You pull back your shadows, burn holes with your eyes.

Everyone gets out of your way.
(“You Are Mighty”)

We’ll drink each other’s blood
as we have always done
and won’t dream of it anymore.
(“Someone Whispered to Me in a Dream”)

Time races on, bearing you along
toward your last
wretched breath.
(“Ten Fingers”)

3. It’s a reporter’s notebook from the global conflict between reason and irrationality, which eventually spawned the Endless War:

an ocean of hatred splashes over me
every day
(“Hatred”)

Dark things open my eyes,
raise my hand, knot my fingers.

They are close and far away,
in a safe hideaway
beyond nine hills.
(“Dark Things”)

Out of some old thing
(a hideous ruin of a building)
people peek outside

They slap their heads,
chatter, stick their tongues out

Twist their mouths
in every direction
(“Out of Some Old Thing”)

4. These are Wikileaked communiqués from the Serbian ambassador to an unnamed superpower, possibly Hades.

Tonight he shows me
his wire-glass-and-flower hairdo
double-edged lips
five-pointed tongue

Ah he unbuttons
his silk vest
ah, even so, he has a body—
and a gold watch
(“No One”)

We don’t know what he did,
where he went, what he suffered.
He stares at us crossly,
answers to the name of Rat.
(“The Seventh Brother”)

He needs to be an infamous and marked man—
it makes no difference for what reason.
(“He Needs”)

A bird started to sing
on a clear day
over the gallows

[…]

Wind lifted the ashes
and spread them
over other ashes
(“A Bird Started to Sing”)

A straitjacket
is being woven
and cut to measure
on you.
(“Straightjacket”)

5. This is a 20th-century version of a much older text, a lost gospel attributed to the risen Lazarus.

On a low chair, the book
opened by itself.
A gust of air blew—
it was the Lord’s breath.
(“Book, Dream”)

May the earth be easy on him,
since it was only today that we noticed
he was alive.
(“About the Dead, Briefly”)

it’s not easy for the dead to carry water
oh black she-goats black goatherd
oh Lazarus

you need to put your life in order Lazarus
make it clean as death
oh sun
oh you risen from the dead
(“Whisk Broom 50”)

I wandered everywhere
like a God’s fool.
Whatever I acquired—I lost.
what I gave life to—died.
(“Stepmother”)

Go into town and buy a spade
as if intending to turn over a garden.

Instead, find your humble place
in the village graveyard,
swing high and dig yourself a grave.

Set it up, decorate it, write on it.

Find your humble place
in a world gone mad.
(“Spade”)

6. Finally, and most convincingly of all, a scholar of 20th-century children’s literature suggested that this was a children’s book that had grown up and gone wrong, after an abusive childhood.

Again that dangerous confusion
of things and people.
I see an ashtray next to a dozing armchair
and say it’s a baby-ashtray.
In the pantry: bottles-maidens.
[…]
In the tavern I spoke with a human cash register.
(“Again That”)

Midnight lady
covered with nets and shining scales
walks down the hallway
beating a drum full of mice
(“Midnight Lady”)

Old shoes in the rain
next to a dumpster
wait for the one who will pass this way

[…]

Carrying the shoes in his hand,
he’ll find my room and bed
and will lie down in it and then vanish
just as my dream about him comes to a close.
(“Old Shoes”)

I found an empty cardboard box
and sat down in it

My mad old sweetie
will pass this way and buy me
(“In Front of a Supermarket”)

Hey, little marsh, reed, cattail and water lily.
flies flies the gray crow.
[…]
here, there, there’s no one in the rotted boat.
[…]
let’s set out for the open waters.
let’s turn and lie on our backs forever.
(“Big Mud”)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt by Karen J. Weyant

Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt Wearing Heels in the Rust BeltKaren J. Weyant; Main Street Rag Publishing Company 2012WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
Is there such a thing as a coming-of-age poetry chapbook? This is that and more. Although the narrator appears to change from poem to poem, she is always female, rural or small-town working-class in the Rust Belt. The collection won Main Street Rag’s 2011 chapbook contest, and I can see why: the poems are richly evocative, and mingle lyricism and gritty realism in just the right proportions.

I grew up in the Rust Belt myself, and Weyant’s portrayals ring true to me. I was reminded a bit of Jeff Walt’s Soot, thought I think Weyant’s characters are a bit less hopeless, a bit more fully realized. This is also a more ambitious collection: Weyant sets out to define a Rust Belt aesthetic in the opening poem, “Ways of Writing Rust,” introducing themes and imagery that will re-occur throughout. It begins:

Use a red pen. Push October’s full moon through every line.
Scribble down an old barn and a children’s game of tag

that ends with a nail’s scratch and tetanus shot.
Remember to cross all your t’s.

Save the graffiti, the sharp letters, the language,
even if you are not sure if the words are a Bible verse

or lyrics from an old rock-n-roll song.
Scrawl down corner bars and closed stores.

This is one of three poems in the hortatory mode, incidentally, which may explain why I liked it so much. The others are “How to Be a Rust Belt Feminist” and “Advice For All the Rust Belt Cassandras” — the closing poem. Most of the other poems are first-person narratives, almost all of them just about a page long. The almost-title poem, “How We Learned to Wear Heels in the Rust Belt,” actually brought a tear to my eye, I’m not sure why — I guess because the determination simultaneously to learn toughness and cultivate traditional femininity seems so desperate and doomed.

Our world a catwalk, we practiced balancing on construction planks,
railroad ties, backporch banisters. […]

We swaggered our thin hips and thighs,
every strut full of defiant assurance.

But if conformity to social norms seems a stretch, that’s because in other poems girls question religious orthodoxy, collect bees and bones, throw stones at porn shop signs, carry knives for protection, and are troubled by the shunning of the children of scab workers:

I learned grownups knew how to punch,
how to kick, how to spit, how to yell
bad names, like the boys at recess
who threw rocks and sticks at Danny Pontzer
calling him Scab Spawn. I learned
the power of silence, like the way the girls
shunned Stacey Mitchell at recess.
(“Sacrificing Scabs for the Union Gods”)

The poems have their share of natural imagery, too, though much of it’s fairly bleak: a shrike’s victims found during a dry spell impaled on barbed wire and thistle, gypsy moth caterpillars defoliating oak trees on Bear Mountain, and an off-beat portrayal of a gang of dead-animal enthusiasts in “Roadkill Girls”:

For every antler or loose feather, we found
groundhog teeth, a set of claws, soft wisps
of a rabbit’s tail. Sometimes, we grew brave,
flicking maggots from fresh kill, the dull thud
of soft bodies hitting tree bark reminding us
of June bugs hurling against back doors
and bedroom windows. […]
With every bone, we planned our new world,
starting with a single rib from a raccoon.

And I suppose that quote, which includes the closing lines of the poem, serves as well as any to showcase the subtlety of Weyant’s political stance. Whatever I might’ve thought I was going to get with a title like “Roadkill Girls,” this was something altogether more surprising — and disturbing. Starkly realistic as the poems in this collection may be, this is not old-school social realism with the characters flattened to conform to some ideological agenda. Instead, there’s a generous and imaginative humanism at work.

By the end, the lives and thoughts of these working-class girls and women seem not only compelling but admirable and worthy of emulation. In a literary tradition dominated until quite recently by men of privilege, and still largely the province of the middle class, such lives are nearly invisible. So I’m really glad that Karen Weyant has put together such a strong collection, and I hope there are many more to come.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Thirty Years in the Rain: Nikiforos Vrettakos as translated by Robert Zaller and Lili Bita

Thirty Years in the Rain Thirty Years in the Rain: The Selected Poetry of Nikiforos VrettakosNikiforos Vrettakos; Somerset Hall Press 2005WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
Diamond-like and deceptively simple: that’s how Rachel described the dozen or so poems I had time to read to her from this book today. I concur. These poems combine the plain-spoken lyricism of, say, José Martí’s Versos Sencillos, the fierce affirmation of Jorge Guillén’s Cántico and the pellucid quality and light-drenched landscapes of Eugénio de Andrade’s best work.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Who the hell are Eugénio de Andrade and Jorge Guillén?” If so, you’re hardly alone: poetry in translation is an extremely minor concern of American publishers, and few Anglophone poetry fans seem aware of much beyond our own linguistic borders, save for a few luminaries such as Neruda, Rilke and Lorca. That’s a shame, because Greece alone has produced many great poets this past century: C.P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos, Angelos Sikelianos, and Odysseas Elytis all deserve a place on any poetry-lover’s shelf. Add to that roster Nikiforos Vrettakos, a member of the “Generation of the 30s” evidently as revered in Greece as any of the others I’ve just listed, but unknown here until Robert Zaller and Lili Bita began to collaborate on the English translations collected in Thirty Years in the Rain. I hadn’t heard of him myself until just last month, when I happened on this blog post:

January 1st marked the centenary of the birth of the Laconian poet, fiction writer, essayist, translator, Athens Academy member, and Nobel Prize Nominee, Nikiforos Vrettakos. Therefore the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and tourism has declared 2012 Nikiforos Vrettakos Year.

Since he didn’t win a Nobel Prize for Literature like his two contemporaries Odysseas Elytis and George Seferis, Nikiforos Vrettakos is less-known abroad. In Greece though, he is a poetry giant, taught in schools, and many of his poems are set into music. People go back to his poetry for “his tenderness and boundless humanism”.

Working my way through Thirty Years in the Rain, I found many things to admire. Vrettakos returns again and again to the rugged massif of his childhood, the storied Taygetos. As a nearly life-long dweller in the considerably less rugged Appalachians, naturally I appreciated this kind of imagery. His most direct treatment comes in “Stone Petals”:

“Taygetos isn’t a mountain.” I didn’t
discover it, but found it beside me
when I was born. It stood by. Later
I dreamt of it as a kind of church—
at the center of the earth.

Its bells chiming, scattering
petals over the nations.

This short poem also demonstrates two other things I liked about the book: Vrettakos seems very comfortable with religion as a repository of mystery and wonder (without necessarily being a believer himself, I gather), and his poetry betrays a certain attraction to the via negativa — which wouldn’t be at all surprising for someone from the Eastern Orthodox homeland. This latter tendency expresses itself in his nuanced appreciation for darkness and silence, which is all the more striking for its contrast with his general heliotropism. Take for instance “Liberation”:

My soul dances today, winged,
looking to alight on a branch
of light, to hear, see, say
whatever can be heard, seen, said.
It’s good to know, and know well,
that the thing you are
was hatched out of darkness.

As for silence, he imagines in one poem, “Beside the Others,” an entire “volume of silence” among his collected works. (Vrettakos was apparently a very prolific author.)

In it is everything I hid
and everything within me that
hadn’t had time for the long journey to the light.
The pages are huge, too heavy
to lift. No one will read it.
God will take it as it is
and put it in his heavenly library.

Nor is silence without its perils:

If silence spoke,
erupted, exploded—it would level
every tree in the standing world.
(“Chorale”)

And in “Inexplicable,” the eyes of an unnamed beloved contain “A silence / filled with what can and can’t / be deciphered.”

Vrettakos was a leftist, like most Greek intellectuals of his generation, but departed from the party line on many issues. I particularly appreciated the poems on peace, which he often seemed to equate with poetry as a natural impulse of all life:

I’m immersed in each brook on whose flow
the word Peace runs like a psalm.
(Because the waters are a thinking sun).
(“Address to a Peace Conference”)

But his apophatic instincts led him to decry the fetishization of peace, too:

All that’s left of peace
is an empty word, a shed garment.
It’s scrawled everywhere, as if
to mock its own countenance:
the divine plenitude, the sap that flows
from flower to flower, the poetry.

Yet still I wouldn’t want
to find it among my own pages,
like a white corpse in a casket.
(“The Empty Word”)

Vrettakos himself describes his work best: he is an overflowing cistern whose waters come “half from / earth’s grief, the rest from its miracle” (“Cistern”). Toward the end of his life, he wrote:

I’ve said my piece,
it’s enough to know that
here and there, now and then,
I’ve added my song to the birds’.
(“All I’ve Said”)

I think I want to be Nikiforos Vrettakos when I grow up.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Book Four by Niina Pollari

Book Four. Book Four.Niina Pollari; Hyacinth Girl Press 2011WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder 
What are we to think of books of poetry that are deliberately odd? Book Four, for example, does not appear to be preceded by Books 1-3 by the same author. The editor/publisher, Margaret Bashaar, has added completely non-functional stitching and a large button to the cover (and varies this from one copy to the next — compare with the photo on the ordering page). And the poems are replete with metaphors and similes that confound rather than elucidate, following a strategy I’ve come to think of as “surrealism squared.”

This was, more or less, the question that Rachel and I found ourselves grappling with this afternoon as we read our way through the collection. I think our most common response was: “I really liked that, but I’m not sure why.” Which is, to my way of thinking, perfectly fine: it’s my reaction to most modern art, for example. Why hold the verbal arts to a tougher standard of immediate accessibility? It definitely helped to have a reading partner, though, to help suss out many of these poems. And reading them out loud clarified not only the aesthetic appeal of the language, but the extent to which the poems do seem to cohere, even if their coherence is not immediately obvious.

That’s a funny thing, because with Gary Barwin the other day, there were a number of poems where the imagery and language appeared to be somewhat random. That wasn’t the case with these poems. Even when we didn’t entirely understand what they were saying, they still seemed to be going somewhere — they had not only energy but gravity and direction.

When it moved like a pterodactyl inside you,
you knew the world you knew was leaving
and left. You tore the world like a ligament
still in you, and still, somehow. In the memorial
plaza of body parts, there are never enough heads.
(p. 21)

Naturally we had our favorites. Let me quote the short poem on page 10 (they’re all untitled) in full:

Turn antisolar. To a hill you’ve never been down.

Thunder and wildness, maybe the end of the world. On the horizon,
a raw wound’s labium: the bristling day blinks shut

like a cat eye, concealing the blaze-bulb pupil. Now that you’ve left it, you know

what home is like.

Pollari returns to a number of images in multiple poems, lending them a certain talismanic quality — and helping to unify the collection. She seems especially fond of edges, pits, oil, birds and secrets. Her landscapes are stark and often frightening, ablaze with visions which she seems unwilling either to affirm or deny: “I contain // an upside-down rain,” says one poem. Another laments “all these inconvenient spells.” An interlocutor sees angels and wants the narrator to share his/her doubts. “You wanted fuck your faulty / eyes, it was nothing like that. Which I couldn’t give.”

I don’t think I’m imagining an environmental consciousness at work in many of these poems — another thing that added to my pleasure. Here for example is how the poem on page 7 begins:

When the green world begins to leak
is when it begins. Someone pours buckets of black oil
into a canal. Liquid clings to things with skins and pores

and feathers, a girl turns white and sick just watching it.

The fact is that the world doesn’t make sense, and it isn’t necessarily the job of poets to invent new stories so we can continue to feed our delusion that we understand much of anything. Sometimes we learn more by living with the questions, even — or especially — when they’re unsettling, and implicate us in the world’s continual undoing.

Watch the broken down TV
in the dark, drink down the dark
malt liquor: it’s nobody’s
fault, we’ve all just stopped
in here, lit as a TV, blooming like tissue
in a trash fire. […]
How does an ecosystem sustain.
Where can I drive to. What sweet
buds do we have left to pick
my love, my love.
(p. 14)

Perhaps the oddness isn’t as deliberate as I thought; perhaps it’s unavoidable. And for all I know, this really is Niina Pollari’s fourth book. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for whatever she publishes next.