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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Trill & Mordent by Luisa A. Igloria

Trill & Mordent coverThis is the second of four books that Kristin Berkey-Abbott and I are encouraging others to also read and blog about this month. If you do so anytime before the end of the month, please send me the link and I’ll update this post to include it, right up here at the top:

[4/14] Kristin Berkey-Abbot: “The Hungers that Crochet Us Together”

[4/14] mole: “Braid”

[4/17] Velveteen Rabbi: “Luisa Igloria’s ‘Trill and Mordent'”

[4/20] mole: “Seasons (More on Trill & Mordent)”

Fresh from a dream of trees bent by the wind, I open Luisa’s next-to-most-recent book and read the opening lines about trees bent by the wind. This is surprising but not astonishing: many and varied are the images in any given dream and in any given poem by Luisa A. Igloria, so the chance of overlap isn’t as slim as it might initially seem.

A pair of trees on one side of the walk, leaning
now into the wind in a stance we’d call involuntary—
I can see them from the kitchen window, as I take meat
out of the oven and hold my palms above the crust, darkened
with burnt sugar. Nailed with cloves, small earth of flesh
still smoldering from its furnace. In truth I want to take it
into the garden and bury it in soil.
(“Regarding History”)

The day is dank and cold and I am forced to read inside, holding the book to the window to save on electricity. When it starts to rain, it’s as if the outside air is trying to answer the shimmer of text on page. I read some of the poems standing up to improve my concentration, but however I read them, these are not poems to give up all their meanings on the first or second read.

Someone walks with you a little
each day, and you feel that you begin
to know a little more—the way she holds
her head, the way he asks a question. You walk
a little more and listen, nothing more—until
the language of question and answer begins to sound
familiar as the plink of water, begins to resemble
the space cleared as a lamp is lit in a room, into which
the shy guest, crossing the threshold, can enter.
(“The Right to Capture”)

It’s odd: when I finished Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke last week, I felt as if it had been two or three times too long. I loved the poems, but felt they were just too intense, too concentrated for a collection of that length. With Igloria’s work, by contrast, I just want to keep reading.

In a book I’m re-reading tonight, a poet questions
any plenitude that seems to come too soon,
or easily.
(“Manifestations”)

Even now, I am having trouble writing this because I keep stopping to read the book again. This isn’t because we’re friends and I publish her poems here; I felt this way long before we were even Facebook friends. There’s a richness of allusions and points of reference, an almost Borgesian love of all manner of arcana (as signaled by the very title of the book), which may in part be due to where Luisa grew up, the Philippines being such a crossroads.

At the beginning of the new
year, I slid open all the drawers
in my house and found a nostalgia
which was the color and odor of a different
season in another country—
preserved skeletons of flowers,
brittle as dry wings; sheets of hand-
writing, ambiguous as the sea.
(“Tree of Prophecy”)

Then too she is constantly varying the style, much as she does here at Via Negativa, following heavy with light, speculative with narrative, prose poem with airy three-line stanzas. I think of other favorite poets such as Jim Harrison and James Wright, and how much fun it can be to lose myself in volumes of their collected works — especially while traveling. How much longer do we have to wait for the Collected Poems of Luisa A. Igloria, vol. I?

In a hotel with cobalt paint and yellow trim, one room had only books and windows, and no clocks by which to tell the time. One room was a well within a shaded garden. Another had only silence for furniture. One room once held a prisoner of war—its walls covered with messages he scratched on stone with his bare hands before he escaped into the sunlight, disguised as a bird.
(“A String of Days”)

The rain drums its corrido on the four roofs of my house — a marimba with four bars. I brew a little more coffee to chase the sleep from my eyes, though drinking coffee any time after supper isn’t something I want to make a habit of. These are poems well worth burning the midnight oil to re-read.

You could lift the hem of rain and enter its grotto. Habit is what blurs gesture into allotment and enclosure. Fold it between times with a monk’s cord of silence, just a slick of candle fat. That way the next becomes sacrament.
(“Parsing”)

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Villanelle of the Red Maple

This entry is part 24 of 92 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Spring 2011

Like a question surfacing in the mind of winter,
at last the red maple blossoms are open.
Rich red anthers, puffs of orange pollen—

they are why the white-throated sparrow sings
without stopping in the rain. How does such love happen
like a question surfacing in the mind of winter?

I trail my hand in shallow water, and dredge up
questions no one can answer. I have no weapon
against the richness of red, the puffs of orange pollen.

The lover asks, What need for questions,
when the soul has met its answer? Fire might dampen,
doubt flicker in the mind’s unfinished winter.

The bird sings its pure white carol in the leaves,
singing, singing— as if the heart knew no other burden,
only the richness of red, the tenderness of orange pollen.

I let it sing, I let you come to me as you have all these years.
I had been tired, I had been lonely. I wanted to open
like a question meeting its answer at the end of winter:
heart rich with red, its joys stippled like puffs of orange pollen.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Trojan Horse

What is this gift whose innocent acceptance precipitates the horror that we know is coming: our transformation after dark into mindless flesh-eaters? It doesn’t seem to matter. We cling to each other, the tattooed woman and I, instant lovers — until the knock comes from the top of the stairs and the searchlight finds us and we are history, one with the zombie masses swarming the gates. I turn in my sleep, not quite surfacing. Now we are in the Channel Islands, and there is a possibility of escape. Our helicopter looks for a place to land, fighting the wind, which is so strong all the trees grow parallel to the ground. In this conference room, we will be safe. Colonel Gaddafi and President Obama are here with their entourages, each making a great show of being relaxed and in control, preparing for a chess match that will end the war.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Thirty-for-Sixty by Al Pittman

Thirty-for-Sixty coverThis is going to sound bad, but my favorite thing about this book is the way I can unfold the flaps on the sturdy paper covers, tuck them into each other, and stand the book spine-up in the shape of an A-frame. That’s the kind of sturdiness I expect from a book published in Newfoundland, as part of a Newfoundland Poetry Series, the last volume of a major Newfoundland poet and playwright published before his death by the press he helped found in Newfoundland. My faith was soon tested by the book’s contents, though, which I found to be riddled with typos, making it seem rather ramshackle by the time I got through.

The poems are narrative, autobiographical, and apparently designed for an audience that laughs easily, which is of course an admirable trait in audiences. A poem called “Gnomes” describes the blossoms of an unnamed tree at night:

They have red or purple
hair and green beards. And terribly
twisted faces. They have no bodies.
They are grotesque, gargoyled heads
hanging and swinging in the mild, wild
south-west summer wind.

As much as I like things floral and full
of leaves, I’d not go near those blossoms
without a weapon to combat their threats
now or any night like this.

Whoever strolls, staggers, or stumbles by
will be devoured before they know they
are gone or what it was that ended them.

And so on. This is the kind of poetry that gives the lie to the prevalent notion that Billy Collins’ work is unsophisticated.

For all its simplicity and grating slyness, though, the book did have images that appealed to me. For example, in the otherwise unremarkable “Wanderlust,” I liked:

Coming away from love is a difficult
descent from the summit of yourself
back to base camp and the basics
that await you there.

I liked the whole of “A River Runs Through Her,” in which the protagonist spies on his 83-year-old mother out fishing on a boat as darkness comes on. It ends:

Though she is my mother
I know nothing of this woman.
I know only that a river runs through her.

And I splash in her blood like a fish.

That last example shows one way to make simplicity and apparent artlessness really work in a poem: by introducing an unexpectedly bizarre or surrealist image and catching the reader off-guard. “The Joy of Cooking” was the stand-out poem in this regard. It starts off with the protagonist lamenting that he can’t always procure cinnamon in Newfoundland, and so can’t rival the seductive powers of Michael Ondaatje’s cinnamon peeler. Then it takes a sudden lurch into stranger seas:

For this uncertain occasion
I’ve prepared an adequate meal.
John the Baptist’s head has been marinating
in the fridge for three days.
Now it’s on the table and Salome Smith
and I are ready to dine.

It promises not to be another wasted weekend.

Tentatively she takes the tiniest taste.
Then the lovely Ms. Smith looks at me
(seduction written all over) and says
“This is delicious”.

Needless to say, if the whole book were like this, I’d be a much bigger fan.

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read just four of those books. Details here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 36: Diane Lockward

Diane Lockward

For the first of our Poetry Month conversations, Kristin Berkey-Abbott and I talked by phone with Diane Lockward, whose most recent book of poems, Temptation by Water, we had both recently read (or re-read, in Kristin’s case). For links to all three of Diane’s books, see her website. She blogs about poetry at Blogalicious.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

This Room Has a Ghost by Stephanie Goehring

This Room Has a Ghost (cover)The poet writes biographies in small sections of an arc, lucid-dreams, and slings moons and tongues like a short-order cook. She plays teeth as if they were keys on a piano left out in the rain. If she starts sententious, she ends with a phonographic spiral into a language of clicks. If she starts silly, we all end up together on a flight of missing stairs, growing wings as rapidly as we can. Every word is an origin, says she who wants to be called Ophelia and who looks for wrong in all the love places:

Even with the turbid fog I shouldn’t
look at the sun but I do and briefly
a yellow ellipse is burned everywhere
you used to be.
(“Ophelia When I Burn”)

She lets others — wasps, god, a fungus — do the remembering; her job is to dismember and make love to open wounds.

This is where the birds come to die,
heads sideways on the concrete
like little sleeping men.
(“Because We Call It a Vulture”)

Poems of deep play take greater risks than the safer kind, especially since most American readers have a bad habit of mistaking play for work.

When George Washington said he couldn’t tell a lie, his father should’ve taught him how.
(“Biography of a Carpenter in Nine Degrees“)

And how! It’s like the siren tells her:

“I’m not a liar;
I make confessions that aren’t mine.”
(“No. 2”)

This of course is hardly endemic to sopranos. Ghosts can be stillborn, and can pass through poems as easily as moonlight or hummingbirds, though they generally choose to be more circumspect. Authorship sits heavily, one suspects, like coins on the eyelids of someone taken for dead:

I want to touch you with my eyelashes.
(“Biography of a Body in Twelve Degrees“)

The poet appears to believe in the interchangeability of trees and atoms. She drowns the ocean in her dreams like a sack of soft onions.

When Pandora opened the box, she was only looking to crawl inside.
(“Biography of an Actress in Twelve Degrees“)

I wish I knew Braille so I could read this book with my eyes shut.

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read just four of those books. Details here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Link roundup: Advice for writers, Planned Parenthood, public radio poetry, treeblogging and the King of the Porcupines

Austin Kleon: “How to Steal Like an Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)”
I usually hate advice posts, but this one is gold. For example:

There was a video going around the internet last year of Rainn Wilson, the guy who plays Dwight on The Office. He was talking about creative block, and he said this thing that drove me nuts, because I feel like it’s a license for so many people to put off making things: “If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative.”

If I waited to know “who I was” or “what I was about” before I started “being creative”, well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.

Marly Youmans: “The House of Words (no. 11): One writer’s lessons”
The most popular post in Marly’s on-going series to date. I particularly liked this part:

Every book purchase says you want to read a certain writer and that the publisher should have confidence in him or her. In the case of poetry, a modicum of readers voting this way may even mean that a house decides to retain its poetry line rather than jettisoning it.

The comment thread for that post is also well worth reading.

Busily Seeking… Continual Change: “The Perils of Planned Parenthood”
A very different — and, I would argue, crucial — perspective on “choice,” Planned Parenthood and legislative priorities.

North Country Public Radio: “One April”
Wow, this public radio station’s web manager is doing NaPoWriMo! And they’re good poems, too. Yet another reason to move to the Adirondacks.

Call for Submissions: Festival of the Trees 59 with Spirit Whispers
For Festival 59 our host Suzanne of the Spirit Whispers blog asks, how do trees inspire you?


Watch on YouYube
via Peaceful Societies: “Lepcha Magazine Provides a Cultural Feast”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Broken Sonnets by Kathleen Kirk

Broken Sonnets coverSonnets bore me, to put it mildly. The 16th century is over, and it’s time to move on. It would be as if symphony orchestras still played nothing but music from the 18th and 19th centuries… Oh, right. Never mind.

Kathleen sent me two of her chapbooks, but when I saw Broken Sonnets, I was all like, Fuck yeah! It’s about time someone busted the sonnet upside the head. The opening poem, “Damage,” looked suspiciously like an unbroken, traditional sonnet, much as I liked its celebration of brokenness: so Old Testament, so heavy metal.

Pain is a song I’ve sung
so long you can’t even hear it now. Open

your own broken heart. Look!

(Notice how I’m sparing you the sonnetesque end-rhymes.)

From there, the collection went right into some sexy poems about married love, if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron for y’all, and the only things reminiscent of sonnets from then on out, except for a few poems that made a side-swipe at the proper rhyme-scheme and meter, were the approximate length (14-ish lines) and the approximate mood, subject matter and approach (personal relationships, kinda metaphysical, seemed like they might go well with clavichord accompaniment). I read the first half of the book sober and the second half drunk, so don’t ask me about the second half. Actually, the book looked really good by the end of the night. I was ready to go home with it.

Seriously, there are some kick-ass poems here. “Roof Leak, Mima Calls” is the best poem I’ve ever read about ice dams.

Phone rings: your mother with the news.
Ceiling shifts: it wants to open.
Cancer: nothing falls, not even the sky.
Your voice is a long wooden level, its yellow tube
tipping the bubble of air toward hope
and back, until you hang up the phone and cry.

The last couplet of the last poem in the book “rhymes” eros with rose, which I had to admit was a pretty cool move. But four pages back, “Prose Sonnet to the Silent Father” gets into some deep emotional waters, and really grabbed my attention when I re-read it under the influence. An excerpt won’t quite do it justice:

9. You are like a poetry teacher.

10. I need to learn how to say the opposite of what I mean but without irony

11. (a prose tactic, yours).

12. I need to learn how to leave silence at the center

13. and still be able to sign my name to it

14. as if it were written by me.

In “Here in Paradise,” the protagonist and her husband fish and eat fish in (I think) Florida, and I could smell the brine —

I cannot speak, nor close my stinging mouth.
This is how I pray, across the burning sands.

— which quote, by the way, shows off Kirk’s skill with caesuras. The intra-line breaks are so regular, in fact, I wonder if that might not be part of what makes the poems “broken.” Especially since there is a poem called “Caesura.” (Nothing gets by me, does it?) Here’s the latter 8/14ths of it:

Now she sings as red October bleeds
from the edges of the day, a dull race

the night always winds. Why should I dread
these yellow leaves? I don’t believe in suffering

as a path to heaven. I walk on leaden
claws, vulture the earth into feathering

a nest for me that can cradle my bones
as they disintegrate, one by brittle one.

That’s pretty wonderful, is it not? Just don’t tell me it’s a goddamn sonnet.

*

UPDATE (next morning): With all my kvetching about sonnets, I forgot to mention my favorite poem in the chapbook, which communicates a mother’s experience of childbirth in the most vivid language imaginable. I hope Kathleen won’t mind if I reproduce the entire poem here. Among other things, it really carries forward the idea of breaking as a creative and necessary thing:

An Answer

Childbirth: the crashing of a steel girder
to the floor,
one room
breaking into two.
Your hips, sharp handles
on a silver cup.
Your pelvis,
a wishbone
snapping.
An ocean forces itself into the wineskin that is you.
A holy book you read again and again, aloud,
on your knees.

It makes a silence, a sky

splayed open by milky stars.

* * *

I’m reading a book a day for Poetry Month, but I’m also hoping some folks will join me and fellow poet-blogger Kristin Berkey-Abbott to read just four of those books. Details here.