Slope Editions, 2005
Reviewed by Sandra Simonds
There is something distinctly off-kilter about the interior and exterior landscapes of Sam White’s The Goddess of the Hunt is Not Herself. Lines like “And though the hot air balloon / was an afterthought of farmland, / it contained our deepest wish / for agreement.” and “Confetti is the hand that tosses it” reveal an incongruous world where notions of unity and agreement are desired, but not fulfilled, and this schism propels the book along a strange and beautiful path. As he says in the last line of the book’s title poem, “Whatever happens next is your kiss.” “To live here” he writes in “The Cycle of Life,” “you must be celebrant. You must be equal parts water and confetti” and the book feels its way through the emptiness of its odd prescription.
White’s writing is spare but precise. Ennui is matched with mystery but a sense of humor is also present and the following long title definitely had me laughing: “Lower the Dachshund into the Mountainous Panorama; It was the Missing Segment and Now Bravely Yips into the Frontier.” White creates a place of what is out of place. What I enjoy the most about this book is the loneliness that is addressed from such unusual angles. His world is vibrant and continually transforms, as in these lines from “Creation Myth”: “In one short day the finch is swapped for an owl / the owl for a ghost” yet there is no obvious reason why. “So much goes horribly unsaid,” White says in “Announcement” and this might be the radiant crux of the world made inside these poems.
***
SAM WHITE graduated from Colby College and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has published poems in such journals as The Boston Review, The Paris Review,The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, American Letters & Commentary and elsewhere. He founded and helped coordinate the Jubilat Reading Series with publisher Robert Casper in Somerville, MA. His adventures reading ten great poems to passersby in Times Square, New York City, were chronicled in Poets & Writers magazine. He currently lives at Monohasset Mill, an artist community housed in a historic mill complex in Providence, RI, where he's condo association president. He serves on the board of directors for The Steel Yard, an abutting industrial arts nonprofit. He also teaches at the University of Rhode Island, and is at work on his second book poems and a graphic novel of some proportion.
**
SANDRA SIMONDS lives in Tallahassee, Florida where she is a PhD student in Creative Writing, and the editor of the forthcoming Wildlife Poetry Magazine. She graduated from UCLA in 2000 and the University of Montana in 2003. She has poems forthcoming in Volt, The Canary, Seneca Review and New Orleans Review.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Monday, May 08, 2006
Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in My Mouth) by Tenney Nathanson
O Books, 2005
Reviewed by Paul Klinger
In Tenney Nathanson’s Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in my Mouth), you will quickly notice a preoccupation with eructions, sieves, and bags (not to mention the word crenellated). What you might not notice amid all the fireworks is how far Nathanson extends the simple gesture of the poem’s subtitle. The Night Sky with Stars in my Mouth takes a syntactical cue from various self-portraits by separating the self from the subject or center of a title. The articulation of the relationship inverts the importance of the self and its surroundings. The poem follows suit, as this first move sets the stage for all manner of reflexive activities.
Moving through these 108 cantos without the help of page numbers is no small job. A broad swath of intertexts, listed as end credits, pop up in every song, but by no means does this list prove exhaustive, as you can find Frank O’Hara mixing it up with Hart Crane or Ron Silliman in a small cameo on the bus. It is the vast machinery of Nathanson's poem that demands a special attention, which must be paid out through the ear. Musical changes signal a gear shift, as the poet flops between the transmission of memories and his own commentary about the poem. The poem immediately displays a fondness for directing its own traffic. Observe:
Commentary on this two parts. In the first the mind that is moving
is nearly arrested by the framing portion of stuccoed brick wall, lush
plants within a natural reticule.
commentary from the story and then in the second part directly and
clearly the mind is moving the foolish argument gold when playing
for iron
Commentary and instructions aren't the only help Nathanson offers. He
anticipates multiple readings of his work, as in Canto 15 when he preempts the
dismissive reader:
thinking this guy is weird won't get you out of this one yet sutured
grass your adventure in pointillism but you merged like zoom
“Pointillism” is no clumsy description of the reader’s experience. The ruptures that occur in these two lines are common and become a pleasure, as Nathanson gracefully punctuates his long poem with this comic timing. These slippages allow for various forms of bumbling to develop, including a disintegrated view of confession:
begin short torqued ending phrase no longer
satisfaction if it end. think so That we are a brute
Similar in effect to these lines is each occurrence of the word "verbatim" in
the poem, as it fronts the seizure of some phrase in an effort to keep the
reader from sinking too far below the surface he is paving over these texts.
That surface is the self-portrait, as Nathanson’s effort to transmit a self drives the poem's constant shifting through the sprawling range of the poem's title.
Nathanson haunts the subjects of appropriation and transmission. His approach to the intertexts often poses trepidation as a kind of wrapping. In other words, consistent reminders of how he feels about what he is doing serve as "angels," which often preside at the outset or closing of a particular song. The following occurs towards the beginning of Canto 48:
if use be mention, saying seeing, sewing: sueing for misappropriation
direct experience of, the ghostly shriveled finger should scare you
shitless:
whenever the source dignified quiet
The quietness of his sources, or intertexts, cannot be overstated. They have
been "transmitted and waxed," though not necessarily in that order. Throughout the poem, one gets the sense of overhearing the problems of the poem's process, particularly the problems posed by the poet's long-standing relationship with
his material:
grammatical and continuous thread, the genius of translation is necessary
the original connected with worries, disappointments, obedience,
clingings of the divine no hankerings speak of these passing cha-
racters. replace the present with utmost rapidity.
The "genius of translation" fleshes out Nathanson's presentation of his sources. The task he seemingly assigns himself as translator is to "change reverence into inapproachability of truth." What he chooses to translate about each source text seems less important than the large-scale leveling of these texts into a bonded aggregate, chips off the old block.
When a chip doesn't seem to fit, that is when it approaches something easy, Nathanson jumps on the opportunity: “Who let this into the house? To macadam the macaw.” What poses as non-sequitur is a koan that lays bare an overriding concern of the poem: the translation of mimicry into self-expression. In the final canto, Nathanson says, "You end by beginning on your own. Words in your mouth." As in the subtitle, the mouth becomes a locus of authority, though Nathanson is careful to reassert the wildness that resides in the process of mouthing words with a bevy of sound effects (dings and booms galore). Towards the close of the poem, Nathanson acknowledges the effect of this wildness while surveying his finished work:
I thought it would be different, more reflective and melodramatic
at once - could have picked some other restaurant, book, sky, cohort,
place, and - uh uh
With a characteristic grunt, Nathanson shuts off before he presses too long after something inapproachable. This sensitivity to duration becomes one of the more revealing gestures of a portrait which ultimately unsettles the relation of selfhood to home.
***
TENNEY NATHANSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where from 1993-1996 he served as Director of the PhD program in Literature and Coordinator of Graduate Studies for the Department of English. His poems have appeared in such journals as Jacket, Kenning, Antennae, can we have our ball back?,The LA Review, Social Text, The Massachusetts Review, Ironwood, Sonora Review, Caterpillar, Tamarisk, RIF/T3 and RIF/T5. He has published two chapbooks, The Book of Death (Membrane Press, 1975) and One Block Over (Chax Press, 1998), and the full-length Erased Art, also from Chax Press.
**
PAUL KLINGER was born in Baytown, Texas. He is a member of Tucson's POG Collective. Some of his poems can be read at Dusie, hutt, and Snorkel. He is now at work on a website called White Buildings and an erasure of P.J. Bailey's "Festus." Check out his blog, Sea Quills, here.
Reviewed by Paul Klinger
In Tenney Nathanson’s Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in my Mouth), you will quickly notice a preoccupation with eructions, sieves, and bags (not to mention the word crenellated). What you might not notice amid all the fireworks is how far Nathanson extends the simple gesture of the poem’s subtitle. The Night Sky with Stars in my Mouth takes a syntactical cue from various self-portraits by separating the self from the subject or center of a title. The articulation of the relationship inverts the importance of the self and its surroundings. The poem follows suit, as this first move sets the stage for all manner of reflexive activities.
Moving through these 108 cantos without the help of page numbers is no small job. A broad swath of intertexts, listed as end credits, pop up in every song, but by no means does this list prove exhaustive, as you can find Frank O’Hara mixing it up with Hart Crane or Ron Silliman in a small cameo on the bus. It is the vast machinery of Nathanson's poem that demands a special attention, which must be paid out through the ear. Musical changes signal a gear shift, as the poet flops between the transmission of memories and his own commentary about the poem. The poem immediately displays a fondness for directing its own traffic. Observe:
Commentary on this two parts. In the first the mind that is moving
is nearly arrested by the framing portion of stuccoed brick wall, lush
plants within a natural reticule.
commentary from the story and then in the second part directly and
clearly the mind is moving the foolish argument gold when playing
for iron
Commentary and instructions aren't the only help Nathanson offers. He
anticipates multiple readings of his work, as in Canto 15 when he preempts the
dismissive reader:
thinking this guy is weird won't get you out of this one yet sutured
grass your adventure in pointillism but you merged like zoom
“Pointillism” is no clumsy description of the reader’s experience. The ruptures that occur in these two lines are common and become a pleasure, as Nathanson gracefully punctuates his long poem with this comic timing. These slippages allow for various forms of bumbling to develop, including a disintegrated view of confession:
begin short torqued ending phrase no longer
satisfaction if it end. think so That we are a brute
Similar in effect to these lines is each occurrence of the word "verbatim" in
the poem, as it fronts the seizure of some phrase in an effort to keep the
reader from sinking too far below the surface he is paving over these texts.
That surface is the self-portrait, as Nathanson’s effort to transmit a self drives the poem's constant shifting through the sprawling range of the poem's title.
Nathanson haunts the subjects of appropriation and transmission. His approach to the intertexts often poses trepidation as a kind of wrapping. In other words, consistent reminders of how he feels about what he is doing serve as "angels," which often preside at the outset or closing of a particular song. The following occurs towards the beginning of Canto 48:
if use be mention, saying seeing, sewing: sueing for misappropriation
direct experience of, the ghostly shriveled finger should scare you
shitless:
whenever the source dignified quiet
The quietness of his sources, or intertexts, cannot be overstated. They have
been "transmitted and waxed," though not necessarily in that order. Throughout the poem, one gets the sense of overhearing the problems of the poem's process, particularly the problems posed by the poet's long-standing relationship with
his material:
grammatical and continuous thread, the genius of translation is necessary
the original connected with worries, disappointments, obedience,
clingings of the divine no hankerings speak of these passing cha-
racters. replace the present with utmost rapidity.
The "genius of translation" fleshes out Nathanson's presentation of his sources. The task he seemingly assigns himself as translator is to "change reverence into inapproachability of truth." What he chooses to translate about each source text seems less important than the large-scale leveling of these texts into a bonded aggregate, chips off the old block.
When a chip doesn't seem to fit, that is when it approaches something easy, Nathanson jumps on the opportunity: “Who let this into the house? To macadam the macaw.” What poses as non-sequitur is a koan that lays bare an overriding concern of the poem: the translation of mimicry into self-expression. In the final canto, Nathanson says, "You end by beginning on your own. Words in your mouth." As in the subtitle, the mouth becomes a locus of authority, though Nathanson is careful to reassert the wildness that resides in the process of mouthing words with a bevy of sound effects (dings and booms galore). Towards the close of the poem, Nathanson acknowledges the effect of this wildness while surveying his finished work:
I thought it would be different, more reflective and melodramatic
at once - could have picked some other restaurant, book, sky, cohort,
place, and - uh uh
With a characteristic grunt, Nathanson shuts off before he presses too long after something inapproachable. This sensitivity to duration becomes one of the more revealing gestures of a portrait which ultimately unsettles the relation of selfhood to home.
***
TENNEY NATHANSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where from 1993-1996 he served as Director of the PhD program in Literature and Coordinator of Graduate Studies for the Department of English. His poems have appeared in such journals as Jacket, Kenning, Antennae, can we have our ball back?,The LA Review, Social Text, The Massachusetts Review, Ironwood, Sonora Review, Caterpillar, Tamarisk, RIF/T3 and RIF/T5. He has published two chapbooks, The Book of Death (Membrane Press, 1975) and One Block Over (Chax Press, 1998), and the full-length Erased Art, also from Chax Press.
**
PAUL KLINGER was born in Baytown, Texas. He is a member of Tucson's POG Collective. Some of his poems can be read at Dusie, hutt, and Snorkel. He is now at work on a website called White Buildings and an erasure of P.J. Bailey's "Festus." Check out his blog, Sea Quills, here.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft’s Secret Self by Joe Wenderoth
Verse Press, 2005
Reviewed by Adam Golaski
"Letters from the American Poet" is a collection of emails written by an editor at American Poet to Joe Wenderoth regarding a solicited submission. They are the letters of an editor who has no real editorial power, an editor who wishes to support a solicited author, but who must please his/her readership. The editor attempts to work with Wenderoth to edit the submission. Judging by the editor’s letters (Wenderoth does not include the emails he wrote), Wenderoth seems amenable to censoring his work, but not to the extent necessary for publication. Wenderoth’s solicited essay doesn’t run in American Poet.
The essay in question is “The Holy Spirit of Life.” The essay begins:
What Wenderoth is struck by is that “reverence [is] implicit in my alleged irreverences.” Wenderoth proceeds to write an apologia for his poetry, specifically the poem, “Semiotics: Dehiscence Is Never/Always Sought.”
“Semiotics…” features Jesus Christ as a woman “initiating an orgy of sorts” with the apostles, who are shocked to discover that Jesus is a woman. American Poet chose not to run the essay because of Wenderoth’s description of his own poem—at least that’s what the editor from American Poet tells Wenderoth. Reading the essay “The Holy Spirit of Life,” I can’t help but wonder if the editors of American Poet opted not to publish Wenderoth’s essay because it’s such a silly bit of writing.
The essay’s logic: irreverence is reverence for what The Authorities (a term left undefined) find taboo, impolite, not Christian, etc. Wenderoth’s example is the poem “Semiotics….” He writes, “One poem I wrote last year can be traced to the watching of pornography. In the pornography I’ve watched, there is sometimes a woman doubly or triply penetrated. I revere this woman.” What Wenderoth tends to do is to mock: as he says—“I understand the current rules of Conventional Reverence, and I chose to mock them…” he tries, then, to claim to do more than “merely to have mocked them.” He argues, defensively, that he has created a Jesus—a female porn actress Jesus—who is worthy of reverence, who he reveres.
He concludes his essay with a note that his essay was eventually published in Fence and that the poem “Semiotics…” was “enthusiastically accepted for publication” by Nerve.com but eventually rejected, “…due to an editor’s fear of controversy.” (Did Nerve.com give “fear of controversy” as their reason for rejecting the poem? Given the opportunity, I would have rejected the poem based on the mediocrity of Wenderoth’s language.) Wenderoth’s note concludes, “I neglected to archive the small string of email I got from Nerve.com, as they were not imbued with much more than unselfconscious cowardice.” This is petty. Publishing the emails from the editor at American Poet is petty.
To what purpose does Wenderoth include “Letters from the American Poet” in his book? My suspicion is that Wenderoth sees himself as a chastised crusader for free speech, as a writer punished for challenging the status quo, and he wants his readers to see him that way too.
The second part of Wenderoth’s book begins with another note from the author. Wenderoth feels the need to tell his readers how to read his essays—an act of cowardice on his part. He writes:
In other words, any political activity on the part of the author was merely a reaction to where he found himself. He didn’t move to Marshall to confront white Christianity with his ballsy ideas, he moved to Marshall “to teach in the English Department at what was then called Southwest State University.” To claim that residing in Marshall was a form of activism is revisionist fantasy.
He berates himself for “drifting in and out of shameful silences” in the face of “capitalist, white supremacist, homophobic, Christian-privileging patriarchy.” When he snapped out of his shameful silences, he wrote little articles for the local and the campus newspaper.
“Bringing Freaks to Campus” is the best of the essays in this section, and in the book. Wenderoth is rightly annoyed that a liberal-arts university is spending money to bring in speakers who present little educational value—a former The Real World participant and a parent who lost a child during the massacre at Columbine. Wenderoth ends this essay with a vague and pitiful attempt to preserve his cool: “Please believe me when I tell you that I am not against freak shows—and not even necessarily against self-righteous superstitious freak shows.”
In “The Souls of White Folk,” he suggests we “transform our image of Martin Luther King Jr.” by producing images of MLK as Caucasian. Wenderoth is ironically suggesting that while white people like MLK, white people would love him if he were re-imaged white. As is typical of Wenderoth’s essays, he fails to go beyond his startling concept, he fails to push deeper. At this point in my reading, I began to suspect that Wenderoth fails to press beyond the superficial because he can’t: as a thinker, there’s nothing more to Wenderoth than the first spark of idea.
The provocatively titled “Twenty-Five Ways to Make Love Without Having Sex” is among the biggest disappointments in the book. Calling this piece of writing an essay is a stretch (it’s a stretch to call many of the pieces in this book essays). “Twenty-Five Ways…” is a list, a list made by a heterosexual male who has a very narrow idea of what sex is, i.e., he believes sex equals penetration of the vagina by a penis. This is evidenced by his inclusion of oral sex (“6. Eat your partner out.”) as not “having sex.” This list also displays a narrow concept of what making love is, i.e., that love-making is physical or involves watching people engaged in sexual intercourse. Call me a romantic or old-fashioned, but I believe making love includes oh-so-much more: serenading, holding hands, etc.
The press-release for The Holy Spirit of Life describes what topics Wenderoth tackles, a list that concludes, “and of course, poetics.” Of course. The third part of Wenderoth’s book is a hodge-podge of materials, some of which discuss poetry. I don’t see a real poetic presented in the book, except that for Wenderoth, poems are like magic elves that sneak up on you when you’re day-dreaming (I paraphrase, of course).
He writes about a Robert Hass poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a well-known poem that begins with the lines, “All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Wenderoth’s description of and comments on Hass’s poems are tedious reading indeed. He writes,
Wenderoth reveals himself as one who glorifies those who do not think, who live only in the world of physical pleasure, immediate gratification and emotion. Wenderoth claims to be a clever animal, farting, fucking, and regurgitating without thought applied to any experience/reaction he has. And yet, if this were true, he would not bother to analyze a poem, he would only let us know if he liked it or didn’t. Which, in fact, he fails to do. Ultimately, his analysis comes across—in the context of this book—as a failed attempt to show intellectual gravitas, as yet another pose to impress his readers.
He then follows this essay with a parody of the Hass poem. This is an unfortunate decision. By locating the parody after a dry swipe at seriousness, Wenderoth gave me the impression that the Hass essay was only a set-up for a gag—a dumb gag. The parody inserts into Hass’s poem drugs where loss was, and mixes in some dirty words “poopy, pussy, peenie…”
Included in this section are several Wenderoth poems, the “Semiotics…” poem, the Hass parody, “Ex-Lover Somewhere,” and “Outside the Hospital.” The last two poems appear within essays; as with “Semiotics…,” he cites these poems as examples of various ideas he’s had—so, though the poems may have stood on their own somewhere, here he explains his poetry. Perhaps his own poetry is the only poetry he is capable of talking about with any intelligence and vibrancy. I find that that the essays in which he discusses his own work read like answers to interview questions: witty enough, but off-the-cuff and without depth.
Wenderoth’s collection of essays, prose nick-knacks and poems reveal the author as insecure and self-righteous, and demonstrates his inability to push an idea beyond superficiality. The Holy Sprit of Life is a book that John Ashcroft would love: he would love it because it purports to be intelligent liberal thought, but is in fact inarticulate and crude. A shot in the foot for those struggling against the ignorance and complicity of so many Americans.
I was baffled by Ben Marcus’s jacket blurb: “Joe Wenderoth is a brilliant writer, original and subversive, sensitive and strange. I read his work with awe and admiration.” I was baffled because Marcus is a much better writer than Wenderoth, and should know better. (To give Marcus the benefit of the doubt, I assume all the quotes Verse Press are using are responses to Letters to Wendy’s, Wenderoth’s previous book from Verse Press, which, while greatly overrated, produced a few real moments of quality.)
Let Ben Marcus’s blurb serve as a segue. There is brilliant, original and subversive work, doing what Wenderoth only wishes he could do. Ben Marcus’s book, The Age of Wire and String is worth reading. Diane Williamson's This is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate is flawed, but is more often than not successful. Brian Evenson’s The Wavering Knife, is also imperfect but powered by a real mind, a thinker who is forging a unique and lonely path. Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti. Anything by Mary Caponegro—who is one of the best fiction writers working today. Her The Star Café shames most contemporary fiction. Read an issue of The New York Review of Books, and you’ll see how shabby Wenderoth’s essay writing is. Read John Taggart’s Songs of Degrees, and you’ll see that essays about poetry can be direct, plainly written, and yet complex and thoughtful. Pick up some good poetry, too: Taggart’s Pastorelles, The Tunnel by Russel Edson, Ali Warren’s chapbook Hounds. Do not waste your time with Joe Wenderoth. In this world, beauty is subversive. Kindness, rare. As is reading and thinking; to be angry is not to be right; to be angry is common. To be crass is not honest. Thinking for oneself is in itself radical behavior.
***
JOE WENDEROTH grew up near Baltimore. Wesleyan University Press has published his first two books of poems: Disfortune (1995), and It Is If I Speak (2000). Shortline Editions published a chapbook, The Endearment (1999), and Verse Press published Letters to Wendys (2000). He is Associate Professor English at the University of California, Davis, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
**
ADAM GOLASKI is one-half of Flim Forum, an independant press for the publication of contemporary poetry. He also edits New Genre, a literary journal devoted to science and horror fiction. His work has been published in a number of journals including McSweeney's, LVNG, American Letters & Commentary, Supernatural Tales, word/for word and Lit. His short story "Weird Furka" appeared in the Ash-Tree Press anthology, Acquainted with the Night.
Reviewed by Adam Golaski
"Letters from the American Poet" is a collection of emails written by an editor at American Poet to Joe Wenderoth regarding a solicited submission. They are the letters of an editor who has no real editorial power, an editor who wishes to support a solicited author, but who must please his/her readership. The editor attempts to work with Wenderoth to edit the submission. Judging by the editor’s letters (Wenderoth does not include the emails he wrote), Wenderoth seems amenable to censoring his work, but not to the extent necessary for publication. Wenderoth’s solicited essay doesn’t run in American Poet.
The essay in question is “The Holy Spirit of Life.” The essay begins:
The question of irreverence, of course, is the question of reverence. To revere… or to refuse to revere…. From the point of view of The Authorities, to refuse to revere is a dangerous thing, a thing to be punished. This kind of thing—the censor as a punisher—is not, however, what I want to talk about in this essay. Looking at the irreverence I am given credit for, I am struck by something more important.
What Wenderoth is struck by is that “reverence [is] implicit in my alleged irreverences.” Wenderoth proceeds to write an apologia for his poetry, specifically the poem, “Semiotics: Dehiscence Is Never/Always Sought.”
“Semiotics…” features Jesus Christ as a woman “initiating an orgy of sorts” with the apostles, who are shocked to discover that Jesus is a woman. American Poet chose not to run the essay because of Wenderoth’s description of his own poem—at least that’s what the editor from American Poet tells Wenderoth. Reading the essay “The Holy Spirit of Life,” I can’t help but wonder if the editors of American Poet opted not to publish Wenderoth’s essay because it’s such a silly bit of writing.
The essay’s logic: irreverence is reverence for what The Authorities (a term left undefined) find taboo, impolite, not Christian, etc. Wenderoth’s example is the poem “Semiotics….” He writes, “One poem I wrote last year can be traced to the watching of pornography. In the pornography I’ve watched, there is sometimes a woman doubly or triply penetrated. I revere this woman.” What Wenderoth tends to do is to mock: as he says—“I understand the current rules of Conventional Reverence, and I chose to mock them…” he tries, then, to claim to do more than “merely to have mocked them.” He argues, defensively, that he has created a Jesus—a female porn actress Jesus—who is worthy of reverence, who he reveres.
He concludes his essay with a note that his essay was eventually published in Fence and that the poem “Semiotics…” was “enthusiastically accepted for publication” by Nerve.com but eventually rejected, “…due to an editor’s fear of controversy.” (Did Nerve.com give “fear of controversy” as their reason for rejecting the poem? Given the opportunity, I would have rejected the poem based on the mediocrity of Wenderoth’s language.) Wenderoth’s note concludes, “I neglected to archive the small string of email I got from Nerve.com, as they were not imbued with much more than unselfconscious cowardice.” This is petty. Publishing the emails from the editor at American Poet is petty.
To what purpose does Wenderoth include “Letters from the American Poet” in his book? My suspicion is that Wenderoth sees himself as a chastised crusader for free speech, as a writer punished for challenging the status quo, and he wants his readers to see him that way too.
The second part of Wenderoth’s book begins with another note from the author. Wenderoth feels the need to tell his readers how to read his essays—an act of cowardice on his part. He writes:
...they [the essays] are more explicitly political than the other essays in this book. For me, just residing in Marshall [Minnesota] was a kind of political activism, and perhaps the best kind: largely spontaneous and uncontrived.
In other words, any political activity on the part of the author was merely a reaction to where he found himself. He didn’t move to Marshall to confront white Christianity with his ballsy ideas, he moved to Marshall “to teach in the English Department at what was then called Southwest State University.” To claim that residing in Marshall was a form of activism is revisionist fantasy.
He berates himself for “drifting in and out of shameful silences” in the face of “capitalist, white supremacist, homophobic, Christian-privileging patriarchy.” When he snapped out of his shameful silences, he wrote little articles for the local and the campus newspaper.
“Bringing Freaks to Campus” is the best of the essays in this section, and in the book. Wenderoth is rightly annoyed that a liberal-arts university is spending money to bring in speakers who present little educational value—a former The Real World participant and a parent who lost a child during the massacre at Columbine. Wenderoth ends this essay with a vague and pitiful attempt to preserve his cool: “Please believe me when I tell you that I am not against freak shows—and not even necessarily against self-righteous superstitious freak shows.”
In “The Souls of White Folk,” he suggests we “transform our image of Martin Luther King Jr.” by producing images of MLK as Caucasian. Wenderoth is ironically suggesting that while white people like MLK, white people would love him if he were re-imaged white. As is typical of Wenderoth’s essays, he fails to go beyond his startling concept, he fails to push deeper. At this point in my reading, I began to suspect that Wenderoth fails to press beyond the superficial because he can’t: as a thinker, there’s nothing more to Wenderoth than the first spark of idea.
The provocatively titled “Twenty-Five Ways to Make Love Without Having Sex” is among the biggest disappointments in the book. Calling this piece of writing an essay is a stretch (it’s a stretch to call many of the pieces in this book essays). “Twenty-Five Ways…” is a list, a list made by a heterosexual male who has a very narrow idea of what sex is, i.e., he believes sex equals penetration of the vagina by a penis. This is evidenced by his inclusion of oral sex (“6. Eat your partner out.”) as not “having sex.” This list also displays a narrow concept of what making love is, i.e., that love-making is physical or involves watching people engaged in sexual intercourse. Call me a romantic or old-fashioned, but I believe making love includes oh-so-much more: serenading, holding hands, etc.
The press-release for The Holy Spirit of Life describes what topics Wenderoth tackles, a list that concludes, “and of course, poetics.” Of course. The third part of Wenderoth’s book is a hodge-podge of materials, some of which discuss poetry. I don’t see a real poetic presented in the book, except that for Wenderoth, poems are like magic elves that sneak up on you when you’re day-dreaming (I paraphrase, of course).
He writes about a Robert Hass poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a well-known poem that begins with the lines, “All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Wenderoth’s description of and comments on Hass’s poems are tedious reading indeed. He writes,
When he says that ‘everything dissolves,’ he means that, in ‘thinking,’ or in poetry that is the careful articulation of the coming of a scene that can’t be kept, there is ultimately nothing meaningful—that all meaning, all being, is simply dissolved by such a poetry. 'Thinking’ ‘about loss,’ then, for those of us who always grasp the world in its truly radiant specificity, is a simple waste of time; thinking might even be implied as an irresponsibility, a failure to celebrate our good essence, our being the good keepers of the genuine realm.
Wenderoth reveals himself as one who glorifies those who do not think, who live only in the world of physical pleasure, immediate gratification and emotion. Wenderoth claims to be a clever animal, farting, fucking, and regurgitating without thought applied to any experience/reaction he has. And yet, if this were true, he would not bother to analyze a poem, he would only let us know if he liked it or didn’t. Which, in fact, he fails to do. Ultimately, his analysis comes across—in the context of this book—as a failed attempt to show intellectual gravitas, as yet another pose to impress his readers.
He then follows this essay with a parody of the Hass poem. This is an unfortunate decision. By locating the parody after a dry swipe at seriousness, Wenderoth gave me the impression that the Hass essay was only a set-up for a gag—a dumb gag. The parody inserts into Hass’s poem drugs where loss was, and mixes in some dirty words “poopy, pussy, peenie…”
Included in this section are several Wenderoth poems, the “Semiotics…” poem, the Hass parody, “Ex-Lover Somewhere,” and “Outside the Hospital.” The last two poems appear within essays; as with “Semiotics…,” he cites these poems as examples of various ideas he’s had—so, though the poems may have stood on their own somewhere, here he explains his poetry. Perhaps his own poetry is the only poetry he is capable of talking about with any intelligence and vibrancy. I find that that the essays in which he discusses his own work read like answers to interview questions: witty enough, but off-the-cuff and without depth.
Wenderoth’s collection of essays, prose nick-knacks and poems reveal the author as insecure and self-righteous, and demonstrates his inability to push an idea beyond superficiality. The Holy Sprit of Life is a book that John Ashcroft would love: he would love it because it purports to be intelligent liberal thought, but is in fact inarticulate and crude. A shot in the foot for those struggling against the ignorance and complicity of so many Americans.
I was baffled by Ben Marcus’s jacket blurb: “Joe Wenderoth is a brilliant writer, original and subversive, sensitive and strange. I read his work with awe and admiration.” I was baffled because Marcus is a much better writer than Wenderoth, and should know better. (To give Marcus the benefit of the doubt, I assume all the quotes Verse Press are using are responses to Letters to Wendy’s, Wenderoth’s previous book from Verse Press, which, while greatly overrated, produced a few real moments of quality.)
Let Ben Marcus’s blurb serve as a segue. There is brilliant, original and subversive work, doing what Wenderoth only wishes he could do. Ben Marcus’s book, The Age of Wire and String is worth reading. Diane Williamson's This is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate is flawed, but is more often than not successful. Brian Evenson’s The Wavering Knife, is also imperfect but powered by a real mind, a thinker who is forging a unique and lonely path. Songs of a Dead Dreamer by Thomas Ligotti. Anything by Mary Caponegro—who is one of the best fiction writers working today. Her The Star Café shames most contemporary fiction. Read an issue of The New York Review of Books, and you’ll see how shabby Wenderoth’s essay writing is. Read John Taggart’s Songs of Degrees, and you’ll see that essays about poetry can be direct, plainly written, and yet complex and thoughtful. Pick up some good poetry, too: Taggart’s Pastorelles, The Tunnel by Russel Edson, Ali Warren’s chapbook Hounds. Do not waste your time with Joe Wenderoth. In this world, beauty is subversive. Kindness, rare. As is reading and thinking; to be angry is not to be right; to be angry is common. To be crass is not honest. Thinking for oneself is in itself radical behavior.
***
JOE WENDEROTH grew up near Baltimore. Wesleyan University Press has published his first two books of poems: Disfortune (1995), and It Is If I Speak (2000). Shortline Editions published a chapbook, The Endearment (1999), and Verse Press published Letters to Wendys (2000). He is Associate Professor English at the University of California, Davis, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
**
ADAM GOLASKI is one-half of Flim Forum, an independant press for the publication of contemporary poetry. He also edits New Genre, a literary journal devoted to science and horror fiction. His work has been published in a number of journals including McSweeney's, LVNG, American Letters & Commentary, Supernatural Tales, word/for word and Lit. His short story "Weird Furka" appeared in the Ash-Tree Press anthology, Acquainted with the Night.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Tougher Disguises Press: Circulation Flowers by Chuck Stebelton and Telling the Future Off by Stephanie Young
Tougher Disguises, 2005
Reviewed by Geraldine Kim
Tougher Disguises Press, publishing poetry since 2002, is consistently erupting with fresh texts whose concerns range from flarf (Deer Head Nation by K. Silem Mohammad) to radio frequencies (The Frequencies by Noah Eli Gordon). Now based in San Diego, TDP has sung beyond its own octaves again with its two recent books, Circulation Flowers by Chuck Stebelton and Telling the Future Off by Stephanie Young. Both texts thrive on the contradiction and the abstraction of the conventional in (divergent yet) similar ways.
The poetry in Circulation Flowers, by Chuck Stebelton (Winner of the Jack Spicer Award,) can be best described as anti- “poems of decorative emptiness… [or against poems that appeal] to the convention” (from Chris Stroffolino’s introduction). In “TROUT LILIES ARE BULBOUS PLANTS,” the anti-decorative/conventional is replaced by the simultaneously transparent/opaque:
Asiatic dayflower is a commelina.
This flower grows on wooded slopes
The fire pink is a catchfly of rocky hillsides.
Beautiful flowers of the coral gum.
Each space between the lines is a turn, a flash, possibly an image—asking us to empty the flower of its social connotations—and focus on its flower-ness, a privileging of the quality of things over the things themselves—something (non-) imagistic. Through turning the trite into something undiscovered, the flower becomes transparent in its opacity, a contradiction that circulates back and forth with/between itself.
“The trout lily replicates a masked replica” is another line from the poem that supports this idea. Through having the flower replicate the image of itself, the process of emptying the flower from its social/conventional space transforms the flower into something more and more like a mess of molecules under an X-ray microscope—a “masked” abstraction whose process, while apparently transparent, challenges the reader with its foreign landscape.
Almost every poem in Circulation Flowers seems to share this same concern but does not necessarily deal with flowers. In “POEM (TU FU)” the subject in question is the poem itself:
In this couplet the subjects, flowers and birds, come third
in the line, while the following couplet compound fires
and letters from home come at the beginning of the line.
The lines themselves are abstractions in need of focusing/concretion—this project confounds itself since the subject of the first line is “flowers and birds” when it says in the second and third line that “fires / and letters from home” should be in the first line. One can only assume “beginning of the line” refers to the first line. And how can a couplet have three lines? Regardless, neither “fires / and letters from home” nor “flowers and birds” are where they say they should be.
The irrevocability of place in a line asks us the same question of metaphor for flowers—should the metaphor and the flower occupy the same space? But how can two concepts (one imagistic and one mired in social connotation/convention) be singular? Is it possible to separate the conception of a thing from the thing itself? Circulation Flowers says “yes,” “yes,” and “yes” while it shakes its head “no.”
The call for transparency in poetry’s abstractions while being aware of the contradiction in that call is a sentiment shared by Stephanie Young’s book, Telling the Future Off. In “THERE’S LANGUAGE IN HER EYE, HER CHEEK, HER LIP—NAY, HER FOOT SPEAKS,” the last few lines demand command in the concretion of abstraction (in this case, it is the female body):
…Exacting my labor with the spade
and research documents passing as freely through a transparent body
in the voidest space…
I am the rightful owner, I demand to know the cause of your sorrow
and appeal to the popular girls, likewise, like Marilyn
a young woman of an artificial school
with a message I must deliver in person
in my loud and authoritative voice
This poem ends without punctuation, without any “sense” of command/authority. This voice that demands ownership of the female image lacks the authority/ownership of its own voice—a contradiction.
However, contradiction, while conventionally used as proof of the falsity of a statement (reductio ad absurdum), is a point of hope/a justification in this poem (as in Circulation Flowers). The labor is done with a spade/”spayed”-- something that unearths for further fertilization/erases the sex of a female object—allowing it to become something sexually neutral and consequently, a (bodiless) body with power.
Through this spaying, the body becomes abstract, again, but not in the gendered way the female body is abstracted. “It” (both the body and the poem) is bodiless, “the voidest space.” “It” is a black hole, a mathematical singularity that defies conception and observation but commands the movement of its surrounding context through its non-existence.
In “TODAY I WILL BE A MODEL OF CONSISTENCY,” the use of the contradiction as a mode of making the abstract concrete is used again, this time by replacement of semantic terms:
I know now that I should have tried harder
to be a body in a car
who gestures at another body
in another car
stripped of artifice, conversation, a raincoat
which if worn too long during a chemical attack
will increase the danger of heatstroke.
I have never seen this clothing
but believe it is useless
against anything
including weather, after all
The car is “stripped” of its “artifice” and is left to become something that could be best described as not-car—something that can be easily replaced by a “conversation, a raincoat”-- which is then rendered un-raincoat since a raincoat’s existence is defined by its function against weather—leaving what (if anything)? The poem ends “to open my head / and water rushed the cavity.” Through its “cavity” or “combination of openings” (line 22), the speaker’s existence is defined by its non-existence.
While both Circulation Flowers and Telling the Future Off have analogous projects in terms of abstracting the abstract to make it concrete and use of the contradiction as justification, Telling the Future Off acts through non/presence while Circulation Flowers focuses closer and closer in the concrete to render it unimaginable (and/or vice versa).
**
CHUCK STEBELTON is the author of Precious (Answer Tag, 2005). He co-curates the Myopic Poetry Series at Myopic Books in Chicago, and works as Literary Program Manager at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.
**
STEPHANIE YOUNG lives in Oakland and performs a wide variety of secretarial and poetic activities. She is the editor of Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2005) and has published her writing in a number of magazines and collaborative postcard poem chapbooks from Poetry Espresso. Find her online at http://stephanieyoung.durationpress.com
**
GERALDINE KIM was born in 1983 in West Boylston, Massachusetts. A graduate of New York University, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction and Poetry at San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in Dicey Brown and Fourteen Hills and her play, Donning Cheadle, was chosen to be produced for the SFSU One-Act Festival and SPT Poet's Theater. Her first book, Povel, was the winner of Fence Books' 2005 Modern Poets Series and was named as one of the top 25 favorite books of 2005 by the Village Voice.
Reviewed by Geraldine Kim
Tougher Disguises Press, publishing poetry since 2002, is consistently erupting with fresh texts whose concerns range from flarf (Deer Head Nation by K. Silem Mohammad) to radio frequencies (The Frequencies by Noah Eli Gordon). Now based in San Diego, TDP has sung beyond its own octaves again with its two recent books, Circulation Flowers by Chuck Stebelton and Telling the Future Off by Stephanie Young. Both texts thrive on the contradiction and the abstraction of the conventional in (divergent yet) similar ways.
The poetry in Circulation Flowers, by Chuck Stebelton (Winner of the Jack Spicer Award,) can be best described as anti- “poems of decorative emptiness… [or against poems that appeal] to the convention” (from Chris Stroffolino’s introduction). In “TROUT LILIES ARE BULBOUS PLANTS,” the anti-decorative/conventional is replaced by the simultaneously transparent/opaque:
Asiatic dayflower is a commelina.
This flower grows on wooded slopes
The fire pink is a catchfly of rocky hillsides.
Beautiful flowers of the coral gum.
Each space between the lines is a turn, a flash, possibly an image—asking us to empty the flower of its social connotations—and focus on its flower-ness, a privileging of the quality of things over the things themselves—something (non-) imagistic. Through turning the trite into something undiscovered, the flower becomes transparent in its opacity, a contradiction that circulates back and forth with/between itself.
“The trout lily replicates a masked replica” is another line from the poem that supports this idea. Through having the flower replicate the image of itself, the process of emptying the flower from its social/conventional space transforms the flower into something more and more like a mess of molecules under an X-ray microscope—a “masked” abstraction whose process, while apparently transparent, challenges the reader with its foreign landscape.
Almost every poem in Circulation Flowers seems to share this same concern but does not necessarily deal with flowers. In “POEM (TU FU)” the subject in question is the poem itself:
In this couplet the subjects, flowers and birds, come third
in the line, while the following couplet compound fires
and letters from home come at the beginning of the line.
The lines themselves are abstractions in need of focusing/concretion—this project confounds itself since the subject of the first line is “flowers and birds” when it says in the second and third line that “fires / and letters from home” should be in the first line. One can only assume “beginning of the line” refers to the first line. And how can a couplet have three lines? Regardless, neither “fires / and letters from home” nor “flowers and birds” are where they say they should be.
The irrevocability of place in a line asks us the same question of metaphor for flowers—should the metaphor and the flower occupy the same space? But how can two concepts (one imagistic and one mired in social connotation/convention) be singular? Is it possible to separate the conception of a thing from the thing itself? Circulation Flowers says “yes,” “yes,” and “yes” while it shakes its head “no.”
The call for transparency in poetry’s abstractions while being aware of the contradiction in that call is a sentiment shared by Stephanie Young’s book, Telling the Future Off. In “THERE’S LANGUAGE IN HER EYE, HER CHEEK, HER LIP—NAY, HER FOOT SPEAKS,” the last few lines demand command in the concretion of abstraction (in this case, it is the female body):
…Exacting my labor with the spade
and research documents passing as freely through a transparent body
in the voidest space…
I am the rightful owner, I demand to know the cause of your sorrow
and appeal to the popular girls, likewise, like Marilyn
a young woman of an artificial school
with a message I must deliver in person
in my loud and authoritative voice
This poem ends without punctuation, without any “sense” of command/authority. This voice that demands ownership of the female image lacks the authority/ownership of its own voice—a contradiction.
However, contradiction, while conventionally used as proof of the falsity of a statement (reductio ad absurdum), is a point of hope/a justification in this poem (as in Circulation Flowers). The labor is done with a spade/”spayed”-- something that unearths for further fertilization/erases the sex of a female object—allowing it to become something sexually neutral and consequently, a (bodiless) body with power.
Through this spaying, the body becomes abstract, again, but not in the gendered way the female body is abstracted. “It” (both the body and the poem) is bodiless, “the voidest space.” “It” is a black hole, a mathematical singularity that defies conception and observation but commands the movement of its surrounding context through its non-existence.
In “TODAY I WILL BE A MODEL OF CONSISTENCY,” the use of the contradiction as a mode of making the abstract concrete is used again, this time by replacement of semantic terms:
I know now that I should have tried harder
to be a body in a car
who gestures at another body
in another car
stripped of artifice, conversation, a raincoat
which if worn too long during a chemical attack
will increase the danger of heatstroke.
I have never seen this clothing
but believe it is useless
against anything
including weather, after all
The car is “stripped” of its “artifice” and is left to become something that could be best described as not-car—something that can be easily replaced by a “conversation, a raincoat”-- which is then rendered un-raincoat since a raincoat’s existence is defined by its function against weather—leaving what (if anything)? The poem ends “to open my head / and water rushed the cavity.” Through its “cavity” or “combination of openings” (line 22), the speaker’s existence is defined by its non-existence.
While both Circulation Flowers and Telling the Future Off have analogous projects in terms of abstracting the abstract to make it concrete and use of the contradiction as justification, Telling the Future Off acts through non/presence while Circulation Flowers focuses closer and closer in the concrete to render it unimaginable (and/or vice versa).
**
CHUCK STEBELTON is the author of Precious (Answer Tag, 2005). He co-curates the Myopic Poetry Series at Myopic Books in Chicago, and works as Literary Program Manager at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.
**
STEPHANIE YOUNG lives in Oakland and performs a wide variety of secretarial and poetic activities. She is the editor of Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2005) and has published her writing in a number of magazines and collaborative postcard poem chapbooks from Poetry Espresso. Find her online at http://stephanieyoung.durationpress.com
**
GERALDINE KIM was born in 1983 in West Boylston, Massachusetts. A graduate of New York University, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction and Poetry at San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in Dicey Brown and Fourteen Hills and her play, Donning Cheadle, was chosen to be produced for the SFSU One-Act Festival and SPT Poet's Theater. Her first book, Povel, was the winner of Fence Books' 2005 Modern Poets Series and was named as one of the top 25 favorite books of 2005 by the Village Voice.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
CUTBANK POETRY 65
featuring the poetry of Britta Ameel, Jaye Bartell, Cal Bedient, Adam Clay, Phil Cordelli, Jennifer K. Dick, Greg Glazner, Arielle Greenberg, Kate Greenstreet, Bob Hicok, Janet Holmes, Lisa Jarnot, Kimberly Johnson, Amy King, Katy Lederer, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Jill Magi, Aaron McCollough, Gina Myers, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, John Niekrasz, Carl Phillips, D.A. Powell, Peter Richards, Elizabeth Robinson, Matthew Rohrer, Ken Rumble, Cindy Savett, Leslie Scalapino, Evie Shockley, Stacy Szymaszek, Eileen Tabios, Jon Thompson, Susan Tichy, and Greta Wrolstad
with translations of Phan Nhien Hao and Phan Huyen Thu (by Linh Dinh), Daniil Kharms (by Matvei Yankelevich and Ilya Bernstein), Pablo Neruda (by William O’Daly), Jaime Siles (by Miles Waggener), Virgil (by Kimberly Johnson)
an excerpt from a science fiction novella by Joyelle McSweeney
a long poem/chapbook by Dan Beachy-Quick
an interview with D.A. Powell
critical reviews including Craig Morgan Teicher on Andrea Baker, Adam Clay on Jen Benka, Nathan Bartel on Aase Berg, Jeremy Pataky on Suzanne Buffam, Joshua Corey on Shanna Compton, Haines Eason on Kevin Connolly, Ron Silliman on Forrest Gander, Jen Tynes on Kate Greenstreet, Anthony Hawley on Barbara Guest, Britta Ameel on Christine Hume, Helen Losse on Anne Marie Macari, Marcus Slease on Dan Machlin, Alex Lemon on Ted Mathys, Chris Dombrowski on W.S. Merwin, Chad Blair on Jane Miller, Nabil Kashyap on Ange Mlinko, Sandra Simonds on Geoffrey Nutter, Gina Myers on Jeni Olin, Monica Fambrough on Juliana Spahr, Carly Sachs on Dara Wier
and photographs by, with a tribute to, Greta Wrolstad (1981-2005), a poet, friend, artist, and former poetry editor of CutBank.
Copies are available for USD $10.00. Checks can be made payable to “CutBank” and sent to: CutBank, Attn: Poetry 65 Order, Department of English, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.
Monday, April 03, 2006
That We Come to a Consensus by Noah Eli Gordon and Sara Veglahn
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005
Reviewed by J'Lyn Chapman
As the grammatical structure of the title That We Come to a Consensus suggests, this collaboration is one fashioned with indefinites, provisional language, and relativity. The subordinate clause of the title is multiplied toward the end of the poem when the speakers—and even this pronouncement is ambiguous—make twenty statements, each missing its antecedent. Yet, exacting language undercuts grammatical vagueness.
that we are not like fast machines
that we were crossing streets
that we exited through the kitchen
The effect of this is a wonderful, lilting imprecision that suggests that the written text performs the consensus of the “we,” and as the first line of the long poem states, the act of writing and of partnership is “to come to understanding.”
Yet, there is an implicit knowledge in the lines that follow that to come to understand is less about agreement than it is about empathy. On one hand, the voice of the poem maintains a level of innocuousness, never falling into distinguishing traits that would differentiate voice. The voice is often conversational and humorous; idiomatic lines are reminiscent of Ashbery’s. And the conversational slips into an alarming tenderness
…say we meet at the airport
as an appendix to an apology
you arriving in a sombrero
me wearing a white carnation
a kind of greeting
this part might be imagined
The voice of the poem has no qualms about its neutrality, and yet, it is simultaneously playful and emotive as in the lines, “I confess to about half of the worst mistakes / it was spring & I was sad.”
On the other hand, this speaker, who uses both pronouns “he” and “she” (note the strange line: “the boy was almost him or herself) and yet never identifies itself as either, is gracious and humble as it works out the seemingly incommensurate facets of the relationship. That there exists incommensurability is one thing, but what is particularly interesting is how the poem negotiates this.
There are two recurring themes throughout the poem: travel and writing. We might even identify writing as the overarching theme that includes travel, for writing in this way is characterized as both that which signifies and that which creates space for movement. For instance, signification allows the individual partners to pose themselves differently, to create the possibility of a new subjectivity
here’s me in the summertime
& you in late light
The speaker in these lines points to a possible world outside itself. In the following lines, the speaker posits an alternative way of being and its means call for an initial devastation
a better way to save face might be to forget entirely
give up the domestic plunder
& build your own mannequin
standard weather calls for more provocative side-trips
redemptive cloud redemptive lake redemptive avalanche
nothing as bright as the afternoon sun to stall a crash-landing
Further, there are trains, that semi-rapid transportation, that moving complacency, and hotels, those spaces of feigned domesticity, of temporary keeping. The fiction occurs both in the positing of the speaker and in the self-conscious realization that to write is to burgeon both possibility and containment
Say I have a hotel catastrophe
in a fiction the hotel collapses
boots & rags branded & back tomorrow
one way to assassinate the newly canonized
is written from memory
speaks only English in every other line
the boy recorded somewhere
the girl imagining pictures
these names for partner
It would seem that signification is how partners come to agreement. As the theory of semiotics instructs us – and what we seem to know so explicitly in this poem without any overt appeal to literary theory as such – “agreement” between sign and referent is not produced through exacting mimesis as the following line suggests: “in a fiction I wrote with my left hand.” Rather, slippage produces meaning, all of those possibilities that erupt from utterance: “look at the way I write / your name in this fiction / even I’ve been called a man from behind.”
The form of the poem exacerbates this eruption of meaning by creating a visual parataxis. There are no stanza breaks, no punctuation, and the lines are short so that half of the page is text and the other is space. The poem looks harnessed, but the voice is so persistent and exploratory that there exists a smooth trajectory forward.
This is the trajectory of language to signify, and it is the trajectory of collaboration that endures the distance between otherness to produce an understanding.
***
NOAH ELI GORDON'S books include The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004), The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises Press, 2003), That We Come To A Consensus (in collaboration with Sara Veglahn, Ugly Duckling Press), and the e-book notes toward the spectacle (Duration Press).
**
SARA VEGLAHN is the author of two chapbooks: Another Random Heart (Margin to Margin, 2002) and Falling Forward (Braincase Press, 2003), and is co-author of the chapbook That We Come to a Consensus (Ugly Duckling Press 2006), a collaboration with the poet Noah Eli Gordon. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Conjunctions, Fence, 26 Magazine, 580 Split, POM2, Fairy Tale Review, Word for/word, Castagraf, Free Verse and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver, where she also teaches English. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2005.
**
J'LYN CHAPMAN is a Literary Studies PhD student at the University of Denver. She is currently at work on a dissertation on photography and text in the works of W.G. Sebald and a book of poetry about wild bears. Her fancy drawings can be found in A Ghost as King of the Rabbits, a chapbook by Joshua Marie Wilkinson.
Reviewed by J'Lyn Chapman
As the grammatical structure of the title That We Come to a Consensus suggests, this collaboration is one fashioned with indefinites, provisional language, and relativity. The subordinate clause of the title is multiplied toward the end of the poem when the speakers—and even this pronouncement is ambiguous—make twenty statements, each missing its antecedent. Yet, exacting language undercuts grammatical vagueness.
that we are not like fast machines
that we were crossing streets
that we exited through the kitchen
The effect of this is a wonderful, lilting imprecision that suggests that the written text performs the consensus of the “we,” and as the first line of the long poem states, the act of writing and of partnership is “to come to understanding.”
Yet, there is an implicit knowledge in the lines that follow that to come to understand is less about agreement than it is about empathy. On one hand, the voice of the poem maintains a level of innocuousness, never falling into distinguishing traits that would differentiate voice. The voice is often conversational and humorous; idiomatic lines are reminiscent of Ashbery’s. And the conversational slips into an alarming tenderness
…say we meet at the airport
as an appendix to an apology
you arriving in a sombrero
me wearing a white carnation
a kind of greeting
this part might be imagined
The voice of the poem has no qualms about its neutrality, and yet, it is simultaneously playful and emotive as in the lines, “I confess to about half of the worst mistakes / it was spring & I was sad.”
On the other hand, this speaker, who uses both pronouns “he” and “she” (note the strange line: “the boy was almost him or herself) and yet never identifies itself as either, is gracious and humble as it works out the seemingly incommensurate facets of the relationship. That there exists incommensurability is one thing, but what is particularly interesting is how the poem negotiates this.
There are two recurring themes throughout the poem: travel and writing. We might even identify writing as the overarching theme that includes travel, for writing in this way is characterized as both that which signifies and that which creates space for movement. For instance, signification allows the individual partners to pose themselves differently, to create the possibility of a new subjectivity
here’s me in the summertime
& you in late light
The speaker in these lines points to a possible world outside itself. In the following lines, the speaker posits an alternative way of being and its means call for an initial devastation
a better way to save face might be to forget entirely
give up the domestic plunder
& build your own mannequin
standard weather calls for more provocative side-trips
redemptive cloud redemptive lake redemptive avalanche
nothing as bright as the afternoon sun to stall a crash-landing
Further, there are trains, that semi-rapid transportation, that moving complacency, and hotels, those spaces of feigned domesticity, of temporary keeping. The fiction occurs both in the positing of the speaker and in the self-conscious realization that to write is to burgeon both possibility and containment
Say I have a hotel catastrophe
in a fiction the hotel collapses
boots & rags branded & back tomorrow
one way to assassinate the newly canonized
is written from memory
speaks only English in every other line
the boy recorded somewhere
the girl imagining pictures
these names for partner
It would seem that signification is how partners come to agreement. As the theory of semiotics instructs us – and what we seem to know so explicitly in this poem without any overt appeal to literary theory as such – “agreement” between sign and referent is not produced through exacting mimesis as the following line suggests: “in a fiction I wrote with my left hand.” Rather, slippage produces meaning, all of those possibilities that erupt from utterance: “look at the way I write / your name in this fiction / even I’ve been called a man from behind.”
The form of the poem exacerbates this eruption of meaning by creating a visual parataxis. There are no stanza breaks, no punctuation, and the lines are short so that half of the page is text and the other is space. The poem looks harnessed, but the voice is so persistent and exploratory that there exists a smooth trajectory forward.
This is the trajectory of language to signify, and it is the trajectory of collaboration that endures the distance between otherness to produce an understanding.
***
NOAH ELI GORDON'S books include The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004), The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises Press, 2003), That We Come To A Consensus (in collaboration with Sara Veglahn, Ugly Duckling Press), and the e-book notes toward the spectacle (Duration Press).
**
SARA VEGLAHN is the author of two chapbooks: Another Random Heart (Margin to Margin, 2002) and Falling Forward (Braincase Press, 2003), and is co-author of the chapbook That We Come to a Consensus (Ugly Duckling Press 2006), a collaboration with the poet Noah Eli Gordon. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Conjunctions, Fence, 26 Magazine, 580 Split, POM2, Fairy Tale Review, Word for/word, Castagraf, Free Verse and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver, where she also teaches English. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2005.
**
J'LYN CHAPMAN is a Literary Studies PhD student at the University of Denver. She is currently at work on a dissertation on photography and text in the works of W.G. Sebald and a book of poetry about wild bears. Her fancy drawings can be found in A Ghost as King of the Rabbits, a chapbook by Joshua Marie Wilkinson.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
DEAR FRIENDS OF THE CANARY
The Canary #5 is now available, and we couldn’t be happier. Inside it is great work by Jennifer Moxley, Alan Gilbert, Brenda Shaughnessy, Lynn Xu, Alice Notley, Samuel Amadon, Joshua Clover, Bill Manhire, Raymond McDaniel, Dara Wier, Andrew Mister, Maureen N. McLane, Anne Boyer, Michael Morse, William Fuller, Philip Jenks, Vincent Katz, Arda Collins, Bridget Cross, Joseph Donahue, Gillian Conoley, Timothy Donnelly, Carrie St. George Comer, Jasper Bernes, Matthew Zapruder, Megan Johnson, Amanda Nadelberg, James Meetze, Cyrus Console, Sandra Simonds, Rebecca Lehmann, Matthea Harvey, Robert Fernandez, Ed Go, Gina Myers, and Greta Wrolstad.
Also new are some features to our expanding website: www.thecanary.org
You can now click on each issue’s number to see who contributed; and you may purchase copies or subscribe at the new order page. Bulk orders for any sort of educational purposes are available at cost, just e-mail us at: info@thecanary.org
In about a month, we’ll begin a Close Reading page at which a few poems from the current issue will meet with their readers’ prose.
Your support is invaluable to our little magazine, so please keep it coming and tell your friends about us. Thanks!
All best wishes,
Josh, Tony, & Nick
Editors, The Canary
* P.S. Congratulations to Danielle Pafunda, whose poem “Small Town Rocker,” from The Canary #4, will appear in Best American Poetry 2006, and to by Amanda Nadelberg, whose work from #5 will be featured on Poetry Daily, on April 1.
Also new are some features to our expanding website: www.thecanary.org
You can now click on each issue’s number to see who contributed; and you may purchase copies or subscribe at the new order page. Bulk orders for any sort of educational purposes are available at cost, just e-mail us at: info@thecanary.org
In about a month, we’ll begin a Close Reading page at which a few poems from the current issue will meet with their readers’ prose.
Your support is invaluable to our little magazine, so please keep it coming and tell your friends about us. Thanks!
All best wishes,
Josh, Tony, & Nick
Editors, The Canary
* P.S. Congratulations to Danielle Pafunda, whose poem “Small Town Rocker,” from The Canary #4, will appear in Best American Poetry 2006, and to by Amanda Nadelberg, whose work from #5 will be featured on Poetry Daily, on April 1.
Cutbank 63/64
featuring the poetry of Carl Adamshick, Britta Ameel, Adam Clay, Lisa Fishman, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Erika Howsare & Jen Tynes, Quinn Latimer, Mark Levine, Cate Marvin, Orlando Richardo Menes, Jonathan Minton, Sawako Nakayasu, Kathleen Peirce, and Zachary Schomburg; the prose of Donald Anderson, Jacob Appel, Michael FitzGerald, and Matthew Scott Healey; interviews with Diana Abu-Jaber and Emily Wilson; and artwork by Eben Goff
Copies are available for USD $10.00. Checks can be made payable to “CutBank" and sent to: CutBank, Attn: 63/64 Order, Department of English, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.
Friday, March 17, 2006
The Gales by Ryan Murphy
Pound for Pound Press, 2005
Reviewed by Zachary Schomburg
The poems in Ryan Murphy’s chapbook The Gales are very quiet and fragile, cleverly turning words and phrases like haiku that unravels itself down the light blue page. I choose “haiku” for comparison here because these poems are inherently Japanese, calling on a character named Kinoko, fourth-generation Japanese-American figure skater, Kristy Yamaguchi, Nintendo, and eating jello with chopsticks. The chapbooks last line reads, “Sincerely, Hokusai,” which perhaps sets these poems on the shores of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, a widely known Japanese woodblock painting of a large blue wave curling over itself toward land. Murphy certainly dips into the same perfectly-off color palette as Hokusai when he paints the trees that “stain/the edges of the afternoon” blue. These poems also belong on that shore because Murphy is calling for “the gales” to usher in a storm to stir the lonely silences. In “City of the Big Bang”:
First the wish for rain
in humidity
then rain and hail
damaging the blossoms
and fine cherry harvest
and in a few other poems, Hurricane Isabelle “works up the coast/coastal flooding, property damage.”
In “Florescent Flowers”, all of the narrator’s (and Kinoko’s) activities are quiet and fragile until he is caught, at the poem’s end, in a different kind of storm:
There are few who sleep as I do
in the Metropolitan Museum.
Kinoko, you and I
standing on the Bow bridge
dressed in the purple of nightfall.
Kinoko, you and I
shaving our legs before the swim-meet.
Fluorescence floral –
It has begun to February
in your eyes.
The first calligraphic pen-stroke
revealed the error of my ways.
Drunk, Theraflu, passing through
the pale blue snow of television.
If it were legal for Japanese storms, like tsunami’s, to marry Baseball, The Gales would be in that short line outside the courthouse. The spouses of this arrangement would not be completely foreign to one another—baseball is the national sport of Japan, though the heart of his chapbook “from Poems for Pitchers” is, interestingly, nearly the only poem explicitly un-Japanese. But there is a poem for a Jew, an African-American, a Cuban Socialist, an infamous overweight spit-baller, and Charlie Hough (Sandy Koufax, Dontrelle Willis, Fidel Castro, Gaylord Perry, and Charlie Hough).
In “Dear Charlie Hough,” Murphy compares Hurricane Isabelle to Charlie Hough’s pitching style
The opulent ruin of rotation
The pure delivery, the mechanism of
Hurricane Isabel
And again, at the end of The Gales’ first poem, Murphy uses a wave (you should imagine Hokusai’s), a concept attached to both storms and baseball. Both varieties begin very small and very quietly:
A wave is not The Wave
when you’re the only one standing.
Like the wave, Murphy is the only one standing here, completely alone, beckoning the crowd and the sea to stand up and take action. In fact, Murphy conveys loneliness in all these poems because The Gales is written much like a letter (which itself is often a product of solitude) from the painter of The Great Wave, with its cold sea water and cold sky and absence of people or even houses, and as a letter partly to baseball pitchers, famous and dead strangers, which receives no reply. Without the promise of a wave (the baseball or storm variety) there is no cure for Murphy’s loneliness. He writes, even “too much time alone is also lonely.”
***
RYAN MURPHY is the author of Down With The Ship (Seismicity Editions 2006), and is the recipient of a Chelsea Magazine Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Denver Quarterly, The Paris Review, and other publications. He lives in New York.
**
ZACHARY SCHOMBURG other reviews can be read at Octopus Magazine. His most recent poems are forthcoming in Typo, Washington Square Review, Same Storm, Action Yes, Parakeet, CutBank, and The Hat. His chapbook, Abraham Lincoln Death Scene will be published by Horse Less Press in late 2006. He is currently a Creative Writing PhD student in Lincoln, NE, where he lives in a tiny home with A, M, S, and G.
Reviewed by Zachary Schomburg
The poems in Ryan Murphy’s chapbook The Gales are very quiet and fragile, cleverly turning words and phrases like haiku that unravels itself down the light blue page. I choose “haiku” for comparison here because these poems are inherently Japanese, calling on a character named Kinoko, fourth-generation Japanese-American figure skater, Kristy Yamaguchi, Nintendo, and eating jello with chopsticks. The chapbooks last line reads, “Sincerely, Hokusai,” which perhaps sets these poems on the shores of Hokusai’s The Great Wave, a widely known Japanese woodblock painting of a large blue wave curling over itself toward land. Murphy certainly dips into the same perfectly-off color palette as Hokusai when he paints the trees that “stain/the edges of the afternoon” blue. These poems also belong on that shore because Murphy is calling for “the gales” to usher in a storm to stir the lonely silences. In “City of the Big Bang”:
First the wish for rain
in humidity
then rain and hail
damaging the blossoms
and fine cherry harvest
and in a few other poems, Hurricane Isabelle “works up the coast/coastal flooding, property damage.”
In “Florescent Flowers”, all of the narrator’s (and Kinoko’s) activities are quiet and fragile until he is caught, at the poem’s end, in a different kind of storm:
There are few who sleep as I do
in the Metropolitan Museum.
Kinoko, you and I
standing on the Bow bridge
dressed in the purple of nightfall.
Kinoko, you and I
shaving our legs before the swim-meet.
Fluorescence floral –
It has begun to February
in your eyes.
The first calligraphic pen-stroke
revealed the error of my ways.
Drunk, Theraflu, passing through
the pale blue snow of television.
If it were legal for Japanese storms, like tsunami’s, to marry Baseball, The Gales would be in that short line outside the courthouse. The spouses of this arrangement would not be completely foreign to one another—baseball is the national sport of Japan, though the heart of his chapbook “from Poems for Pitchers” is, interestingly, nearly the only poem explicitly un-Japanese. But there is a poem for a Jew, an African-American, a Cuban Socialist, an infamous overweight spit-baller, and Charlie Hough (Sandy Koufax, Dontrelle Willis, Fidel Castro, Gaylord Perry, and Charlie Hough).
In “Dear Charlie Hough,” Murphy compares Hurricane Isabelle to Charlie Hough’s pitching style
The opulent ruin of rotation
The pure delivery, the mechanism of
Hurricane Isabel
And again, at the end of The Gales’ first poem, Murphy uses a wave (you should imagine Hokusai’s), a concept attached to both storms and baseball. Both varieties begin very small and very quietly:
A wave is not The Wave
when you’re the only one standing.
Like the wave, Murphy is the only one standing here, completely alone, beckoning the crowd and the sea to stand up and take action. In fact, Murphy conveys loneliness in all these poems because The Gales is written much like a letter (which itself is often a product of solitude) from the painter of The Great Wave, with its cold sea water and cold sky and absence of people or even houses, and as a letter partly to baseball pitchers, famous and dead strangers, which receives no reply. Without the promise of a wave (the baseball or storm variety) there is no cure for Murphy’s loneliness. He writes, even “too much time alone is also lonely.”
***
RYAN MURPHY is the author of Down With The Ship (Seismicity Editions 2006), and is the recipient of a Chelsea Magazine Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Denver Quarterly, The Paris Review, and other publications. He lives in New York.
**
ZACHARY SCHOMBURG other reviews can be read at Octopus Magazine. His most recent poems are forthcoming in Typo, Washington Square Review, Same Storm, Action Yes, Parakeet, CutBank, and The Hat. His chapbook, Abraham Lincoln Death Scene will be published by Horse Less Press in late 2006. He is currently a Creative Writing PhD student in Lincoln, NE, where he lives in a tiny home with A, M, S, and G.
Monday, March 13, 2006
CutBank 66: Prose
edited by Sarah Aswell and Elisabeth Benjamin,
featuring the fiction of Steve Almond, Jenny Dunning, Josh Emmons, W. Tsung-Yan Kwong, Shena McAuliffe, VIncent Precht, Joe B. Sills, and Kellie Wells; the nonfiction of William J. Cobb; an interview with Jim Shephard; and portraits by Joel Sager
Copies are available for USD $10.00. Checks can be made payable to “CutBank" and sent to: CutBank, Attn: Prose 66 Order, Department of English, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Alaskaphrenia by Christine Hume
New Issues Press, 2004
Reviewed by Britta Ameel
There are 39 poems in Christine Hume’s Alaskaphrenia, 72 words between “language” and “landscape” in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Alaska is the 49th state at a latitude of 54° 40' N to 71° 50' N and a longitude 130° W to 173° E. Hume counts, maps, mines, names, explores, lists, categorizes as the surveyor of her Alaska-of-the-mind landscape. She surveys not only the literal landscape replete with bears and moose and ice caves, ocean, mountains, planes. Hume surveys the “poetic” language meant to arrange our uncontrollable internal states, our Alaska on the inside, where we “will be a bellwether bomber, you dream-bomb the last place: a dogsled dream, campfire dream, pioneer dream, pioneer, lynx, lynx, lynx.”
This surveyed Alaskan consciousness is under-punctuated, grammatically wild, written on scraps of paper edged with fire and water, folded several hundred times to fit in a pocket. Hume has “adopted an Alaskan ear long before; with it, it’s not unusual to hear from inside the hammer: stampeded terrain, yea, avalanche.” The inside of this hammer sounds, indeed, like avalanche: words shape-shift and metaphors crumble under sound:
“Under these circulations
You could not wear cirrus the way cows do
Always your mange meant to be smoke
molting, moonglow”
This associational, sound-driven logic (lynx, lynx, lynx) powers the surveyor’s 4x4, which explores the transformative nature of consciousness. This particular Alaskan consciousness is ultimately poetic, circular, fractured, though reliant on prosaic and instructional structures: documents like brochures, diagrams, comprehension questions; indices, instructions, explanations, translations, dialogues, do’s and don’ts. These are the maps pinned under otherwise confounding experience, and Hume instructs: “If you cannot work the Eskimo yo-yo, you must walk around and create a map inside your muscles. There, a secret heat makes air remember birds. In their flight, your absurd hands go to seed. Only the other day your pacing made something stop sleeping; it made nowhere a shook-out place.” And again: “Never let what you think fool you.”
The parallel Hume draws between the surveyor’s language and poetic language feels at every turn right for complicated consciousness. Yet, what startles most is the fact that both languages are essentially inaccurate, and indeed almost violate the very areas and emotions they are meant to represent. Hume’s act of surveying, though, exposes the rich veins of landscape and mind, which, though perhaps inaccurate, are made once again original and exquisite. This reader wouldn’t want it any other way, for Hume has
“…outened the world
to show you real barenness:
a void a light
warps into want and then wants
until it warps all it glances.”
Warp away, Hume, we’re with you on this expedition, counting as we go.
***
CHRISTINE HUME is the author of Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award. Her reviews and critical work has been published in American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan UP, 2002), American Letters & Commentary, Chicago Review, Context, Verse, and online for Constant Critic/Fence, How2, and Slope. The Colorado Council on the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Fund for Poetry, and the Wurlitzer Foundation have awarded her fellowships and grants.
**
BRITTA AMEEL has lived most of her life west of the continental divide. Her current stint in Ann Arbor, where she teaches and writes at the University of Michigan, makes her miss the mountains and the ocean. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in em, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Fugue.
Reviewed by Britta Ameel
There are 39 poems in Christine Hume’s Alaskaphrenia, 72 words between “language” and “landscape” in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Alaska is the 49th state at a latitude of 54° 40' N to 71° 50' N and a longitude 130° W to 173° E. Hume counts, maps, mines, names, explores, lists, categorizes as the surveyor of her Alaska-of-the-mind landscape. She surveys not only the literal landscape replete with bears and moose and ice caves, ocean, mountains, planes. Hume surveys the “poetic” language meant to arrange our uncontrollable internal states, our Alaska on the inside, where we “will be a bellwether bomber, you dream-bomb the last place: a dogsled dream, campfire dream, pioneer dream, pioneer, lynx, lynx, lynx.”
This surveyed Alaskan consciousness is under-punctuated, grammatically wild, written on scraps of paper edged with fire and water, folded several hundred times to fit in a pocket. Hume has “adopted an Alaskan ear long before; with it, it’s not unusual to hear from inside the hammer: stampeded terrain, yea, avalanche.” The inside of this hammer sounds, indeed, like avalanche: words shape-shift and metaphors crumble under sound:
“Under these circulations
You could not wear cirrus the way cows do
Always your mange meant to be smoke
molting, moonglow”
This associational, sound-driven logic (lynx, lynx, lynx) powers the surveyor’s 4x4, which explores the transformative nature of consciousness. This particular Alaskan consciousness is ultimately poetic, circular, fractured, though reliant on prosaic and instructional structures: documents like brochures, diagrams, comprehension questions; indices, instructions, explanations, translations, dialogues, do’s and don’ts. These are the maps pinned under otherwise confounding experience, and Hume instructs: “If you cannot work the Eskimo yo-yo, you must walk around and create a map inside your muscles. There, a secret heat makes air remember birds. In their flight, your absurd hands go to seed. Only the other day your pacing made something stop sleeping; it made nowhere a shook-out place.” And again: “Never let what you think fool you.”
The parallel Hume draws between the surveyor’s language and poetic language feels at every turn right for complicated consciousness. Yet, what startles most is the fact that both languages are essentially inaccurate, and indeed almost violate the very areas and emotions they are meant to represent. Hume’s act of surveying, though, exposes the rich veins of landscape and mind, which, though perhaps inaccurate, are made once again original and exquisite. This reader wouldn’t want it any other way, for Hume has
“…outened the world
to show you real barenness:
a void a light
warps into want and then wants
until it warps all it glances.”
Warp away, Hume, we’re with you on this expedition, counting as we go.
***
CHRISTINE HUME is the author of Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award. Her reviews and critical work has been published in American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan UP, 2002), American Letters & Commentary, Chicago Review, Context, Verse, and online for Constant Critic/Fence, How2, and Slope. The Colorado Council on the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Fund for Poetry, and the Wurlitzer Foundation have awarded her fellowships and grants.
**
BRITTA AMEEL has lived most of her life west of the continental divide. Her current stint in Ann Arbor, where she teaches and writes at the University of Michigan, makes her miss the mountains and the ocean. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in em, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Fugue.
Fascicle 2, Winter 05/06
You are invited to check out the second issue of Fascicle, an online journal that focuses on a global and historical view of innovative poetry. Included in its 400+ pages:
* A portfolio of new poems from China edited by Zhang Er, from the forthcoming Talisman Anthology of Chinese poetry. Focusing on poets born since 1960, this portfolio also features some of the most interesting contemporary poets as contributing translators, including Charles Borkhuis, Caroline Crumpacker, Mark Wallace, Rachel Levitsky and Joseph Donahue.
* A supplement to Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery's Imagining Language (MIT Press 1998), one of the most fascinating and distinctive anthologies of recent memory. The supplement, compiled by Tony Tost, includes an interview with Jed Rasula, as well as poetry, prose and art by Ronald Johnson, Kurt Schwitters, Andre Breton, Edna Sarah Beardsley, Jacob Boehme, Eugene Jolas and others.
* A selection of new collaborative work by Lyn Hejinian & Anne Tardos, Aaron McCollough & Kent Johnson, Geraldine Monk & John Donne, Hank Lazer & Pak, Brian Howe & Marcus Slease, among others.
* Critical essays and prose, including Lisa Jarnot on Robert Duncan; Tom Orange on Clark Coolidge; Dodie Bellamy on Narrative & Body Language; Laura Moriarty on A Tonalist Thinking; Clayton Eshleman on Hart Crane, Andrew Joron & Jeff Clark; Stan Mir on Brian Kim Stefans; Nate Pritts on Robert Penn Warren; Graham Foust on Poetry's Neighborly Enemy Mind; Morgan Lucas Schuldt on Harryette Mullen; and more.
* Peter Cole interviewed by Leonard Schwartz.
* Visual work by Anne Tardos, Buck Downs, Cathy Eisenhower, and Michael Winkler.
* Plays by Chris Vitiello and Andrew Schelling.
* Translations of Francis Ponge (tr. Serge Gavronsky), Laura Solórzano (tr. Jen Hofer), Ernst Herbeck (tr. Gary Sullivan), Bertolt Brecht (tr. Pauline Fan), Andrea Zanzotto (tr. Wayne Chambliss), Hans Thill (tr. Tony Frazer), among others.
* Poetry and prose by Andrew Joron, Laura Moriarty, Lee Ann Brown, Stephanie Young, Rodrigo Toscano, Brenda Coultas, JL Jacobs, Mary Burger, Carl Martin, Matthew Henriksen, Brenda Iijima, Mairead Byrne, Lance Phillips, and many others.
Hope you'll enjoy!
Sincerely,
Tony Tost, editor
Chris Vitiello, Ken Rumble, Brent Cunningham, contributing editors
* A portfolio of new poems from China edited by Zhang Er, from the forthcoming Talisman Anthology of Chinese poetry. Focusing on poets born since 1960, this portfolio also features some of the most interesting contemporary poets as contributing translators, including Charles Borkhuis, Caroline Crumpacker, Mark Wallace, Rachel Levitsky and Joseph Donahue.
* A supplement to Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery's Imagining Language (MIT Press 1998), one of the most fascinating and distinctive anthologies of recent memory. The supplement, compiled by Tony Tost, includes an interview with Jed Rasula, as well as poetry, prose and art by Ronald Johnson, Kurt Schwitters, Andre Breton, Edna Sarah Beardsley, Jacob Boehme, Eugene Jolas and others.
* A selection of new collaborative work by Lyn Hejinian & Anne Tardos, Aaron McCollough & Kent Johnson, Geraldine Monk & John Donne, Hank Lazer & Pak, Brian Howe & Marcus Slease, among others.
* Critical essays and prose, including Lisa Jarnot on Robert Duncan; Tom Orange on Clark Coolidge; Dodie Bellamy on Narrative & Body Language; Laura Moriarty on A Tonalist Thinking; Clayton Eshleman on Hart Crane, Andrew Joron & Jeff Clark; Stan Mir on Brian Kim Stefans; Nate Pritts on Robert Penn Warren; Graham Foust on Poetry's Neighborly Enemy Mind; Morgan Lucas Schuldt on Harryette Mullen; and more.
* Peter Cole interviewed by Leonard Schwartz.
* Visual work by Anne Tardos, Buck Downs, Cathy Eisenhower, and Michael Winkler.
* Plays by Chris Vitiello and Andrew Schelling.
* Translations of Francis Ponge (tr. Serge Gavronsky), Laura Solórzano (tr. Jen Hofer), Ernst Herbeck (tr. Gary Sullivan), Bertolt Brecht (tr. Pauline Fan), Andrea Zanzotto (tr. Wayne Chambliss), Hans Thill (tr. Tony Frazer), among others.
* Poetry and prose by Andrew Joron, Laura Moriarty, Lee Ann Brown, Stephanie Young, Rodrigo Toscano, Brenda Coultas, JL Jacobs, Mary Burger, Carl Martin, Matthew Henriksen, Brenda Iijima, Mairead Byrne, Lance Phillips, and many others.
Hope you'll enjoy!
Sincerely,
Tony Tost, editor
Chris Vitiello, Ken Rumble, Brent Cunningham, contributing editors
GutCult Winter 2006
The new issue of GutCult is up, containing work by:
Donald Revell, Isaac Sullivan, Catherine Theis, Janet Holmes, Jared Stanley, Kent Johnson, Kathleen Peterson, Robert Strong, Lauren Levin, Broc Rossell, Jim Goar, Martin Corless-Smith, Nathan Parker, John Mercuri Dooley, Brandon Shimoda (a review of Stan Apps' Soft Hands), and Randall Williams (a review of Anna Eyre's Metaplastic)
This may well be the last issue based on zones of the calendar. In the future, look for a more open-ended set of "thematically"-based issues.
Aaron McCollough, editor
Donald Revell, Isaac Sullivan, Catherine Theis, Janet Holmes, Jared Stanley, Kent Johnson, Kathleen Peterson, Robert Strong, Lauren Levin, Broc Rossell, Jim Goar, Martin Corless-Smith, Nathan Parker, John Mercuri Dooley, Brandon Shimoda (a review of Stan Apps' Soft Hands), and Randall Williams (a review of Anna Eyre's Metaplastic)
This may well be the last issue based on zones of the calendar. In the future, look for a more open-ended set of "thematically"-based issues.
Aaron McCollough, editor
Monday, February 13, 2006
The First Composer: On Merwin's Migration: New and Selected Poems and Present Company
Copper Canyon Press, 2005
A review by Chris Dombrowski
“don’t lose your arrogance yet…/” Berryman famously tells a young Merwin, “you can do that when you’re older / lose it too soon and you may / merely replace it with vanity” (“Berryman”). Author of a stiflingly huge body of work - 24 books of poems, 22 translations, 7 prose books - and recipient of countless prizes including the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Merwin asserts with Migration that he has lost over the last half-century none of Berryman’s requisite boldness, and has found no room in his lines for vanity.
Although a practitioner of formal verse in his early years (Auden selected A Mask for Janus — only one poem from the volume is included in Migration — for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952) and linked with the Deep Image poets of the 70’s, Merwin, who said in a 1998 Paris Review interview that “writing is something I know little about,” is our indisputably campless master. Here are the first stanzas of two poems written fifty years apart:
TO THE SOUL
Is anyone there
if so
are you real
either way are you
one or several
if the latter
are you all at once
or do you
take turns not answering
*
DICTUM
There will be the cough before the silence, then
Expectation; and the hush of portent
Must be welcomed by a diffident music
Lisping and dividing its renewals;
Shadows will lengthen and sway, and, casually
As in a latitude of diversion
Where growth is topiary, and the relaxed horizons
Are accustomed to the trespass of surprise,
One with the mask of Ignorance will appear
Musing on the wind’s strange pregnancy.
The reader less familiar with Merwin’s work (he dispensed with poetic punctuation in 1963 stating later that he “wanted…the movement and lightness of the spoken word”) might wonder which of the poems was published during the Korean War, and which during the current U.S invasion of Iraq. It’s curious, anyway, to note how much “Dictum,” (1952) with its density, dialogism, and formalistic leanings, resembles a good deal of what’s popular in poetry today. “To The Soul,” (2005) on the other hand, with its curious, short-lined directness, recalls Neruda’s 1954 Odas Elementales, many of which Merwin translated.
Appearing in the “New Poems” section of Migration, “To the Soul” also shows up in the 134-page volume Present Company, a collection of addresses to people (“The Surgeon Kevin Lin”), objects (“Zbigniew Herbert’s Bicycle”), places (“That Stretch of Canal”), abstractions (“Lingering Regrets”), and other nouns. Limpid, void sometimes of images, open in their form, many of these intimate pieces show Merwin at his visionary best. But as Louise Gluck has said of her own process, “What begins as vision degenerates into mannerism,” and the rhetoric of address, even when delivered by one of our finest poets, begins to age after eighty pages or so. What the reader will likely find most enduring and endearing in these poems is their infinitely generous central-consciousness; they are, like so many of Merwin’s poems, offerings: “…I do / not know that anyone / else is waiting for these / words that I hoped might seem / as though they had occurred / to you and you would take / them with you as your own” (“Cover Note”).
At the heart of Merwin’s work is a pervading sense of connectedness—to an other, be it the reader, a lark, the light in September—that links it undeniably to prayer. But not prayer in the conventional Western sense which, as Merwin has stated “is usually construed as making a connection. I don’t think that connection has to be made; it’s already there. Poetry probably has to do with recognizing that connection.” The ease with which the poet realizes this link, both perceptively and prosodically (“if you find you no longer believe/ enlarge the temple”; “every moment/ arrive somewhere”) will remain one of his work’s many major feats.
Logistically, Migration’s major feat is its length; at 529 pages, it could have been much longer — the seminal Second Four Books of Poems, for instance, totaled 300 pages when originally published. As with all such massive collections, the reader inevitably reaches a point where the poem he’s reading begins to sound much like one he read a dozen pages previous. There are many occasions in Migration where the poet “look(s) up to see” or is found “at a bright window” where “all at once” something happens, but just when the reader thinks she has the poems’ endings—with their often winged- or shadow dappled-hush—pinned, Merwin surprises with something stabbingly ironic like this from “Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field”: “do you think there is a future in pineapple”.
“What survives of the artist,” Renoir said, “is the feeling he gives by means of objects,” and while Mewin’s objects—birds, light, stone walls, leaves, water, hills—appear recurrently, his range of emotion is limitless. With all its fluidity, grace, and fleetingness, Merwin’s poetry reminds us that it is, like the world it bows to, “always beginning as it goes” (“To This May”). In the brief “Memory of Spring” (originally published in The Carrier of Ladders and not included in Migration), Merwin hints at the privacy and devotion such a poetry requires of its maker: “The first composer/ could hear only what he could write”.
***
W.S. MERWIN was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He has written many books of poems, prose, and translations. He has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (of which he is now a Chancellor), the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry; most recently he has received the Governor's Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Merwin was recently awarded the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems.
**
CHRIS DOMBROWSKI’S work appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, Neo, Seneca Review, and others. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.
A review by Chris Dombrowski
“don’t lose your arrogance yet…/” Berryman famously tells a young Merwin, “you can do that when you’re older / lose it too soon and you may / merely replace it with vanity” (“Berryman”). Author of a stiflingly huge body of work - 24 books of poems, 22 translations, 7 prose books - and recipient of countless prizes including the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Merwin asserts with Migration that he has lost over the last half-century none of Berryman’s requisite boldness, and has found no room in his lines for vanity.
Although a practitioner of formal verse in his early years (Auden selected A Mask for Janus — only one poem from the volume is included in Migration — for the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1952) and linked with the Deep Image poets of the 70’s, Merwin, who said in a 1998 Paris Review interview that “writing is something I know little about,” is our indisputably campless master. Here are the first stanzas of two poems written fifty years apart:
TO THE SOUL
Is anyone there
if so
are you real
either way are you
one or several
if the latter
are you all at once
or do you
take turns not answering
*
DICTUM
There will be the cough before the silence, then
Expectation; and the hush of portent
Must be welcomed by a diffident music
Lisping and dividing its renewals;
Shadows will lengthen and sway, and, casually
As in a latitude of diversion
Where growth is topiary, and the relaxed horizons
Are accustomed to the trespass of surprise,
One with the mask of Ignorance will appear
Musing on the wind’s strange pregnancy.
The reader less familiar with Merwin’s work (he dispensed with poetic punctuation in 1963 stating later that he “wanted…the movement and lightness of the spoken word”) might wonder which of the poems was published during the Korean War, and which during the current U.S invasion of Iraq. It’s curious, anyway, to note how much “Dictum,” (1952) with its density, dialogism, and formalistic leanings, resembles a good deal of what’s popular in poetry today. “To The Soul,” (2005) on the other hand, with its curious, short-lined directness, recalls Neruda’s 1954 Odas Elementales, many of which Merwin translated.
Appearing in the “New Poems” section of Migration, “To the Soul” also shows up in the 134-page volume Present Company, a collection of addresses to people (“The Surgeon Kevin Lin”), objects (“Zbigniew Herbert’s Bicycle”), places (“That Stretch of Canal”), abstractions (“Lingering Regrets”), and other nouns. Limpid, void sometimes of images, open in their form, many of these intimate pieces show Merwin at his visionary best. But as Louise Gluck has said of her own process, “What begins as vision degenerates into mannerism,” and the rhetoric of address, even when delivered by one of our finest poets, begins to age after eighty pages or so. What the reader will likely find most enduring and endearing in these poems is their infinitely generous central-consciousness; they are, like so many of Merwin’s poems, offerings: “…I do / not know that anyone / else is waiting for these / words that I hoped might seem / as though they had occurred / to you and you would take / them with you as your own” (“Cover Note”).
At the heart of Merwin’s work is a pervading sense of connectedness—to an other, be it the reader, a lark, the light in September—that links it undeniably to prayer. But not prayer in the conventional Western sense which, as Merwin has stated “is usually construed as making a connection. I don’t think that connection has to be made; it’s already there. Poetry probably has to do with recognizing that connection.” The ease with which the poet realizes this link, both perceptively and prosodically (“if you find you no longer believe/ enlarge the temple”; “every moment/ arrive somewhere”) will remain one of his work’s many major feats.
Logistically, Migration’s major feat is its length; at 529 pages, it could have been much longer — the seminal Second Four Books of Poems, for instance, totaled 300 pages when originally published. As with all such massive collections, the reader inevitably reaches a point where the poem he’s reading begins to sound much like one he read a dozen pages previous. There are many occasions in Migration where the poet “look(s) up to see” or is found “at a bright window” where “all at once” something happens, but just when the reader thinks she has the poems’ endings—with their often winged- or shadow dappled-hush—pinned, Merwin surprises with something stabbingly ironic like this from “Questions to Tourists Stopped by a Pineapple Field”: “do you think there is a future in pineapple”.
“What survives of the artist,” Renoir said, “is the feeling he gives by means of objects,” and while Mewin’s objects—birds, light, stone walls, leaves, water, hills—appear recurrently, his range of emotion is limitless. With all its fluidity, grace, and fleetingness, Merwin’s poetry reminds us that it is, like the world it bows to, “always beginning as it goes” (“To This May”). In the brief “Memory of Spring” (originally published in The Carrier of Ladders and not included in Migration), Merwin hints at the privacy and devotion such a poetry requires of its maker: “The first composer/ could hear only what he could write”.
***
W.S. MERWIN was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He has written many books of poems, prose, and translations. He has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (of which he is now a Chancellor), the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry; most recently he has received the Governor's Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Merwin was recently awarded the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems.
**
CHRIS DOMBROWSKI’S work appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, Neo, Seneca Review, and others. He lives with his family in Missoula, Montana.
field stone by Catherine Kasper
Winnow Press, 2005
Reviewed by Jen Tynes
The stones that Catherine Kasper references in her epigraph seem solid, though illuminated, straight-shooters. But the stones that I imagine, reading these poems, are the stones of land-art: stones arranged in spirals, waves, undulating lines. In the first section of this book, minimal use of end punctuation contrasts with mostly-conventional sentence structure to create poems like snakes, stones, like waves. From “Unearthing”:
Both boxes could fit in your hand at the same time
tiny—but I imagine—heavy
snakes curving in eights or lifting a cobra head
In a glass case, Kohl sticks turn turquoise with age
as miniature patoikos figures, green and bald
These poems are ekphrastic, of observance — of foreign places, other people, ways of being. The general “you” at the beginning of “Unearthing” becomes more specific and mysterious later in the poem: “something you meant once / like migraine flashes—“ and “I though I had lost you.” In the first fourteen poems of “Blueprints of the City,” a you that flickers between general and specific turns suddenly into “we,” and the change is explosive. These poems say “from other places we could imagine ourselves anywhere” and “in line for a single hour we notice the white imperfections in our fingernails” and “there is a game of distance played between two people.”
There are collections in these poems — museums, objects from nature, colors of paint and the further objects they resemble. The collections, like collections of stones, become guides, pathways along the “distance...between two people.” These pathways are bridges, they are equally uniting and dividing: they hold a tension between them. When, in the third section of the book, the speaker of “Number 1: Another Sunday” says “I wanted something/ more monastic” it’s the want that resonates, the outside that crackles.
***
CATHERINE KASPER is the author of Optical Projections, a chapbook of short stories (Obscure Publications, 2004). Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Ohio Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Leviathan and Is This Forever or What? (Greenwillow/Harper Collins, 2004). Her awards include a PEN Texas Award and AWP Intro Award, and a Writer's League of Texas fellowship. She is presently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
**
JEN TYNES lives in Providence, Rhode Island and edits Horse Less Press. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, No Tell Motel, DIAGRAM and H_NGM_N. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The End of Rude Handles, will be available from Red Morning Press in early 2006.
Reviewed by Jen Tynes
The stones that Catherine Kasper references in her epigraph seem solid, though illuminated, straight-shooters. But the stones that I imagine, reading these poems, are the stones of land-art: stones arranged in spirals, waves, undulating lines. In the first section of this book, minimal use of end punctuation contrasts with mostly-conventional sentence structure to create poems like snakes, stones, like waves. From “Unearthing”:
Both boxes could fit in your hand at the same time
tiny—but I imagine—heavy
snakes curving in eights or lifting a cobra head
In a glass case, Kohl sticks turn turquoise with age
as miniature patoikos figures, green and bald
These poems are ekphrastic, of observance — of foreign places, other people, ways of being. The general “you” at the beginning of “Unearthing” becomes more specific and mysterious later in the poem: “something you meant once / like migraine flashes—“ and “I though I had lost you.” In the first fourteen poems of “Blueprints of the City,” a you that flickers between general and specific turns suddenly into “we,” and the change is explosive. These poems say “from other places we could imagine ourselves anywhere” and “in line for a single hour we notice the white imperfections in our fingernails” and “there is a game of distance played between two people.”
There are collections in these poems — museums, objects from nature, colors of paint and the further objects they resemble. The collections, like collections of stones, become guides, pathways along the “distance...between two people.” These pathways are bridges, they are equally uniting and dividing: they hold a tension between them. When, in the third section of the book, the speaker of “Number 1: Another Sunday” says “I wanted something/ more monastic” it’s the want that resonates, the outside that crackles.
***
CATHERINE KASPER is the author of Optical Projections, a chapbook of short stories (Obscure Publications, 2004). Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Ohio Review, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Leviathan and Is This Forever or What? (Greenwillow/Harper Collins, 2004). Her awards include a PEN Texas Award and AWP Intro Award, and a Writer's League of Texas fellowship. She is presently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
**
JEN TYNES lives in Providence, Rhode Island and edits Horse Less Press. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, No Tell Motel, DIAGRAM and H_NGM_N. Her first full-length collection of poetry, The End of Rude Handles, will be available from Red Morning Press in early 2006.
Monday, February 06, 2006
TYPO MAGAZINE, ISSUE 7: MODERN SWEDISH VERSE
After many months of sweat and tears, TYPO 7 is alive.
Curated by Johannes Göransson, this issue highlights Modern Swedish Poetry and features the work of:
EDITH SÖDERGRAN
GUNNAR BJÖRLING
HENRY PARLAND
GÖRAN SONNEVI
GUNNAR HARDING
ANN JÄDERLUND
JACQUES WERUP
LARS MIKAEL RAATTAMAA
JOHAN JÖNSSON
AASE BERG
JAN SJÖLUND
JENNY TUNEDAL
We hope you enjoy.
yrs,
--TYPO eds.
Curated by Johannes Göransson, this issue highlights Modern Swedish Poetry and features the work of:
EDITH SÖDERGRAN
GUNNAR BJÖRLING
HENRY PARLAND
GÖRAN SONNEVI
GUNNAR HARDING
ANN JÄDERLUND
JACQUES WERUP
LARS MIKAEL RAATTAMAA
JOHAN JÖNSSON
AASE BERG
JAN SJÖLUND
JENNY TUNEDAL
We hope you enjoy.
yrs,
--TYPO eds.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Introducing WAVE BOOKS
Dear Friends of Verse Press and Wave Books,
As you may know, in 2005 Verse Press joined forces with Wave Books, taking on a new name and additional staff and resources. Continuing the mission of Verse Press, Wave Books will publish the best in contemporary poetry and bring that work to audiences across the country. Read more about our upcoming titles and current books, find author events, and much more at our new website:
www.wavepoetry.com
READING PERIOD
In lieu of the Verse Prize, Wave Books will hold a yearly reading period each February. Please see complete submission guidelines on wavepoetry.com.
RECENT TITLES
Read more about these Fall titles from Verse Press and purchase them at wavepoetry.com:
**
Joe Wenderoth's first book since Letters to Wendy's is now here!
The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self by Joe Wenderoth
Joe's outrageous premises and piercing insights are again put to work on subjects including poetry, pornography, politics, drinking games, religion, and various other forms of transcendence . . . Publishers Weekly calls it "disorientingly smart and funny."
**
leadbelly: poems by Tyehimba Jess
Winner of the National Poetry Series (selected by Brigit Pegeen Kelly)
**
Water’s Leaves and Other Poems by Geoffrey Nutter
Winner of the 2004 Verse Prize
**
FORTHCOMING TITLES
Wave Books will release its debut season of books in Spring 2006, including new work by Joshua Beckman, Noelle Kocot, Anthony McCann, and Mary Ruefle. Look for our upcoming announcement of these titles as soon as they’re released.
As you may know, in 2005 Verse Press joined forces with Wave Books, taking on a new name and additional staff and resources. Continuing the mission of Verse Press, Wave Books will publish the best in contemporary poetry and bring that work to audiences across the country. Read more about our upcoming titles and current books, find author events, and much more at our new website:
www.wavepoetry.com
READING PERIOD
In lieu of the Verse Prize, Wave Books will hold a yearly reading period each February. Please see complete submission guidelines on wavepoetry.com.
RECENT TITLES
Read more about these Fall titles from Verse Press and purchase them at wavepoetry.com:
**
Joe Wenderoth's first book since Letters to Wendy's is now here!
The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written for John Ashcroft's Secret Self by Joe Wenderoth
Joe's outrageous premises and piercing insights are again put to work on subjects including poetry, pornography, politics, drinking games, religion, and various other forms of transcendence . . . Publishers Weekly calls it "disorientingly smart and funny."
**
leadbelly: poems by Tyehimba Jess
Winner of the National Poetry Series (selected by Brigit Pegeen Kelly)
**
Water’s Leaves and Other Poems by Geoffrey Nutter
Winner of the 2004 Verse Prize
**
FORTHCOMING TITLES
Wave Books will release its debut season of books in Spring 2006, including new work by Joshua Beckman, Noelle Kocot, Anthony McCann, and Mary Ruefle. Look for our upcoming announcement of these titles as soon as they’re released.
Friday, February 03, 2006
APOSTROPHE BOOKS: Call for Manuscripts
We are interested in writing that expands the potential definitions of poetry. With this in mind, we actively seek work that investigates language, and consciousness in language, in innovative and/or subversive ways. APOSTROPHE strives to publish work that complicates and challenges the idea of a "well-crafted" poem by disclosing its own operations and undermining presumptions about what actually constitutes a poem. This means we are pursuing writing that challenges the categories and generic distinctions most often associated with poetry. The editors find poetic writing that intersects theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and/or pataphysics to be especially compelling.
We are currently accepting manuscripts. Please send ONE book length manuscript (48 pages or more) to each address below:
Richard Greenfield
104 Poplar Hill Ext.
Johnson City, TN 37604
Mark Tursi
66 Lenox Ave.
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301
DEADLINE to submit: April 1st, 2006
Manuscripts will be chosen by mid-June and you will be notified shortly after. Please include an SASE, an email address and/or a phone number. Manuscripts will not be returned, so please do not send your only copy. Electronic submissions will not be accepted.
For more information, visit the website at: apostrophebooks.org
We are currently accepting manuscripts. Please send ONE book length manuscript (48 pages or more) to each address below:
Richard Greenfield
104 Poplar Hill Ext.
Johnson City, TN 37604
Mark Tursi
66 Lenox Ave.
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301
DEADLINE to submit: April 1st, 2006
Manuscripts will be chosen by mid-June and you will be notified shortly after. Please include an SASE, an email address and/or a phone number. Manuscripts will not be returned, so please do not send your only copy. Electronic submissions will not be accepted.
For more information, visit the website at: apostrophebooks.org
Friday, January 20, 2006
DIAGRAM 5.6
http://thediagram.com/5_6
:: CONTENTS
TEXT, GRAPHIC POEMS, AND IMAGES FROM: Lucy Corin, Ian Finch, Sarah Goldstein, Jessica Goodfellow, Rae Gouirand, Amira Hanafi, Elliot Harmon,Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, Melissa Koosmann, Lorene Lamothe, Courtney Mandryk,Tara Moyle, Jason Nelson, JoAnna Novak, Chad Parmenter, Simon Perchik, Frederick Pollack, Michael Rerick, Ely Shipley, Matthew Thorburn, Greg Williard, and Angela Woodward.
REVIEWS OF: Benjamin Vogt's INDELIBLE MARKS and Jane Unrue's ATLASSED.
and MORE.
Thanks fer yr attention,
Ander Monson, Editor
DIAGRAM / New Michigan Press
648 Crescent NE :: Grand Rapids, MI 49503
prose submissions to: prose@thediagram.com [NEW email]
poetry submissions to: poems@thediagram.com [NEW email]
reviews and queries to: reviews@thediagram.com
other correspondence to: editor@thediagram.com
:: CONTENTS
TEXT, GRAPHIC POEMS, AND IMAGES FROM: Lucy Corin, Ian Finch, Sarah Goldstein, Jessica Goodfellow, Rae Gouirand, Amira Hanafi, Elliot Harmon,Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, Melissa Koosmann, Lorene Lamothe, Courtney Mandryk,Tara Moyle, Jason Nelson, JoAnna Novak, Chad Parmenter, Simon Perchik, Frederick Pollack, Michael Rerick, Ely Shipley, Matthew Thorburn, Greg Williard, and Angela Woodward.
REVIEWS OF: Benjamin Vogt's INDELIBLE MARKS and Jane Unrue's ATLASSED.
and MORE.
Thanks fer yr attention,
Ander Monson, Editor
DIAGRAM / New Michigan Press
648 Crescent NE :: Grand Rapids, MI 49503
prose submissions to: prose@thediagram.com [NEW email]
poetry submissions to: poems@thediagram.com [NEW email]
reviews and queries to: reviews@thediagram.com
other correspondence to: editor@thediagram.com
Thursday, January 12, 2006
OCTOPUS MAGAZINE #7
Octopus #7 is here — free, and for the people:
Poetry by Sara Smith, Tina Celona, Bill Cassidy, Anna Moschovakis, Timothy Liu, Genya Turovskaya, Anne Boyer, Amanda Nadelberg, Brandon Downing, Julia Cohen, Michael Robins, Bruna Mori, Anthony Hawley, Paul Guest, Day Hoy, Peter Davis, Ken Rumble, Christian Peet, Erica Fiedler, Jim Goar, Alex Smith, Emma Ramey, Jonah Winter, Nathan Parker, Matthea Harvey, Noah Eli Gordon, Sabrina Orah Mark, Lara Glenum, Hank Lazer and Dean Young.
Translations of Daniil Kharms by Eugene Ostashevsky, and Saburo Kuroda by Marianne Tarcov.
Reviews of Pieces of Air in the Epic by Brenda Hillman, Sundays on the Phone by Mark Rudman, Like Wind Loves a Window by Andrea Baker, Natural History by Dan Chiasson, My Kafka Century by Arielle Greenberg, The Thorn by David Larsen, Pretty Young Thing by Danielle Pafunda, Crush by Richard Siken, The Last Clear Narrative by Rachel Zucker, The Book of a Hundred Hands by Cole Swensen, Antidotes for an Alibi by Amy King, Free Again by Joseph Lease, Iowa by Travis Nichols, The Hatmaker’s Wife by Dorothea Lasky, Secret Architecture by Aaron Kunin, and Iterature by Eugene Ostashevsky.
An interview with Brenda Hillman by Jen Tynes.
Recovery Projects of Bad Boats (1977) by Laura Jensen and Idea (1987) by Paul Hoover.
The second volume of Matvei Yankelevich’s essay “The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Field Notes on Russian-American Poets”.
Also, be sure to check out the submission guidelines for Octopus’ new print project: Issue #8.
A special thank you to Brandon Shimoda for a few months worth of grueling editorial work, and to the handful of #7’s astute readers: Mathias Svalina, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Adam Clay, Craig Morgan Teicher, and Christopher Deweese.
Enjoy,
Zachary Schomburg, editor
Denny Schmickle, design
Octopus
www.octopusmagazine.com
Poetry by Sara Smith, Tina Celona, Bill Cassidy, Anna Moschovakis, Timothy Liu, Genya Turovskaya, Anne Boyer, Amanda Nadelberg, Brandon Downing, Julia Cohen, Michael Robins, Bruna Mori, Anthony Hawley, Paul Guest, Day Hoy, Peter Davis, Ken Rumble, Christian Peet, Erica Fiedler, Jim Goar, Alex Smith, Emma Ramey, Jonah Winter, Nathan Parker, Matthea Harvey, Noah Eli Gordon, Sabrina Orah Mark, Lara Glenum, Hank Lazer and Dean Young.
Translations of Daniil Kharms by Eugene Ostashevsky, and Saburo Kuroda by Marianne Tarcov.
Reviews of Pieces of Air in the Epic by Brenda Hillman, Sundays on the Phone by Mark Rudman, Like Wind Loves a Window by Andrea Baker, Natural History by Dan Chiasson, My Kafka Century by Arielle Greenberg, The Thorn by David Larsen, Pretty Young Thing by Danielle Pafunda, Crush by Richard Siken, The Last Clear Narrative by Rachel Zucker, The Book of a Hundred Hands by Cole Swensen, Antidotes for an Alibi by Amy King, Free Again by Joseph Lease, Iowa by Travis Nichols, The Hatmaker’s Wife by Dorothea Lasky, Secret Architecture by Aaron Kunin, and Iterature by Eugene Ostashevsky.
An interview with Brenda Hillman by Jen Tynes.
Recovery Projects of Bad Boats (1977) by Laura Jensen and Idea (1987) by Paul Hoover.
The second volume of Matvei Yankelevich’s essay “The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Field Notes on Russian-American Poets”.
Also, be sure to check out the submission guidelines for Octopus’ new print project: Issue #8.
A special thank you to Brandon Shimoda for a few months worth of grueling editorial work, and to the handful of #7’s astute readers: Mathias Svalina, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Adam Clay, Craig Morgan Teicher, and Christopher Deweese.
Enjoy,
Zachary Schomburg, editor
Denny Schmickle, design
Octopus
www.octopusmagazine.com
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