you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin

Action Books, 2006

Reviewed by Mike Young



Thanks to a recent book by a Princeton philosophy professor, we can now feel swell about incorporating one of our best words into critical dialogue: bullshit. In Tao Lin's first book of poems, you are a little bit happier than i am, Lin attempts to dismantle the bullshit of self-deception.

But dismantle seems like a tame word. Really, this book drops a calm, neutral-faced sledgehammer asteroid on many of lyric poetry's familiar gestures: assured speakers, linguistic sweetening, and any attempt to convince the reader of the world's latent morality, the wise old sea coddling the boat. Not that Lin isn't looking. He just doesn't want to lie. In "book reviewers always praise books as ‘life-affirming’ because the more humans there are on earth the better," Lin describes a video of a bull's death. The reader watches along, winces, ready for the poet to sing us all out of our guilt. And here comes the end:

      and now the bullfighter is cutting off the bull's ears
      from behind, and the bull is on the ground, and shivering
      as if it were cold, and just wanted a blanket, and a bed
      and i deleted this line
      and i deleted this line, too, in revisions
      and i deleted this line that was talking about god
      and this line was also talking about god and it said something about the
      universe and i deleted it
      and this line kept talking about semantics and i deleted it

Wait, what happened? What happened to rhetoric that pats our head and "lets us off the hook"? This spirit of bullshit omission—revising not just lines of poetry but also fuzzy-headed thinking—gives these poems a tone of totalitarian sincerity. Which is scary, sure, and a little annoying. As Lin puts it in the long prose poem "i Am 'i Don't Know What i Am' And You Are Afraid Of Me And So Am i": "I am so afraid of myself that my afraidness scares you more than it scares me."

Speaking of philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas sometimes floats through these poems (see: "i am 'you' to you"), Lin reminding us that we can't quite get from Self to You. In his poem "in manhattan on 29th street across the avenue then over the railing there is a little beach," Lin speaks to his friend: "you had cancer or something so they excised your flesh / there were other problems with your lymph nodes." This isn't immature or sloppy language; this is a true transcription of interminable doubt, of sitting on a plastic stool next to a hospital bed and trying to attach the name of the disease to the shaky hands in front of you, pretending with your own hands and knowing, really, that you aren't even close. Yet Lin is almost sure, like us, that a real knowledge of love would still the terror of seeing and being an Other: "There should be something about you / in this poem. But // there is just me, being stupid."

That takes care of about 3/4 of these poems. Thankfully, even with the saucer-eyed, frightened moose philosophy, Lin is still alive. And that means he is finding some way to reckon. This reckoning arrives via somersaults of wit and imagination that recall the Kenneths Patchen and Koch, giddy with caffeine. Which means: tangerines, elves, laundry machines sending emails, hamsters assembling outside Tokyo, bears "climbing buildings and falling off and falling on baby carriages and old women," genies, secret passageways, ninjas, and beach balls. Why is this not bullshit? Because if the universe is really so cruel and indifferent, we can retaliate by replacing "bullshit" with "talking shit." And Lin talks shit about the "absurd" with the pure and brilliant relish of the best escapist, euphoric now and then to be alone in his head.

To explain this blend of murk and mirth is pretty much impossible. That blend is the book, its identity and strength. On one hand, yes, Lin favors flat and accurate articulation of feeling over language play: one of his favorite phrases and things to think about is the "side of your face," which with every repetition becomes less clunky and scientific, until finally defamiliarizing and reigniting the whole idea of "beauty." But Lin doesn't need to dazzle to entertain. To dazzle, anyway, is to blind. Lin would rather return the reader to the clarity of silliness. Tao Lin is not a robot. Several poems addressed to particular people—old friends who work at Circuit City, who are stuck in smalltown Florida—are so hot with empathy that they stir you dizzy and drained, in the way of that favorite sad song over and over, that way of feeling distant but okay.

In this book, Lin doesn't really feel okay. Sometimes he gets close, but most of the time he recognizes that he is, in the parlance of all annoyingly accurate punks, "fucked." Yet after their monotone bleakness, Lin's poems deliver the indifferent universe and the bullshit of rhetoric a shit-faced grin, polite and giving enough to hope that the reader ends up okay. We are with Lin the whole time, in a "yes, oh wow, I hope no one's looking, I've been there" sort of way, especially with him in bed, at 4:30 am, in his poem "4:30 AM:"

      i am fucked existentially
      i am fucked existentially
      i am fucked existentially
      i am fucked existentially
      i am fucked existentially
      i am fucked existentially
      i am fucked existentially
      i am fucked existentially

And so on for a page and a half, the blink and click of it all, until, finally:

      thank you for reading my poem

I am probably a little bit happier than Tao Lin, but I am glad his poems are here to call me on my bullshit, to make me think about the rhetoric of my happiness, and to give me—just before running away—a nervous high-five.

**

Tao Lin (b. 1983) is the author of a novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, and a story-collection, Bed, (Melville House, 2007). Tao's blog is Reader of Depressing Books.

**

Mike Young co-edits NOÖ Journal , a free literary/political magazine. His own fiction and poetry have appeared in Juked, elimae, MiPOesias, BlazeVOX, Pindeldyboz, and elsewhere. Visit him at "Dragonfly on a Dog Chain."

Black Box by Erin Belieu

Copper Canyon Press, 2006

Reviewed by Rya Pagliughi





Erin Belieu’s newest book, Black Box, is a hurricane of pent-up anger, frustration, and sadness, but also a celebration of all things disastrous, wrong, or messy. Belieu works with raw, unfettered emotion, never allowing it to overwhelm or become maudlin. Her wry, insightful voice is a controlled tempest: turbulent, unapologetic, funny, and eminently readable. The pieces don’t head toward the morose or chaotic because the perspective is always colloquial, sardonic, approachable, and slightly vulnerable. One example is the poem “I Heart Your Dog’s Head,” where the speaker announces that, “I hate football / in a hyperbolic and clinically revealing way, / but I hate Bill Parcells more, / because he is the illuminated manuscript / of cruel, successful men, those with the slitty eyes of ancient reptiles, / who wear their smugness like a tight white turtleneck / and revel in their lack of empathy / for any living thing.” These lines function as a microcosm of the manuscript; they are thick with emotion, revealing, and funny. The opinionated speaker is never gagged, but rather allowed full reign, letting the reader ride shot-gun through the whirling text.

Broken into four sections, the book is compact and compressed, both in terms of concept and composition. It bears mentioning that the long poem, “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral” is one entire section of the book. Whereas the preceding two sections are collections of individual poems, Belieu makes a statement about the subject matter and the formal experimentations with this dynamic long poem. The fourth and final section of the book is one piece, “At Last,” that is neither as formally experimental as section three nor as conservative at section one; this hybrid strategy works well as the culmination of the text. It is a clean ending that brings the fervor of the book to an unsettling, but peaceful close.

In section one of Black Box, the poem “Last Trip to the Island,” the speaker addresses an unidentified second person. Belieu takes the changeable nature of the ocean and relates it in a curving way to the relationship taking place. She addresses this second person, telling them that, “[u]nlike your ocean, / there’s nothing sneaky about a field. I like their / ugly-girl frankness. I like that, sitting in the dirt, // I can hear what’s coming between the stalks”. The possession of “your ocean,” by default makes the field belong to the speaker. The dichotomies of your/mine and man/woman seem to reappear throughout the text. Belieu subtly personifies these elements and gives the masculine, the oceanic, the addressee, a menacing feeling. Likewise, the recurrence of apertures in the manuscript seems as ominous as the open grave that later appears. Belieu’s speaker often cites “openedmouthed”, “lips parted”, and “holes”. These fissures seem to speak to the splintered self in the wake of marital infidelity, which is clearly a central axis of the collection. Belieu’s dry humor and simple language lend a sense of immediacy to the text, and diffuses a subject matter ripe for sentimentality. In section four of the long poem, “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral,” Belieu’s cynical, vulnerable, and snarky speaker states that, “the truth doesn’t win, but it makes an appearance, / though it’s a foreign cavalry famous for bad timing and / half-assed horsemanship”. The language here isn’t elevated, academic, or difficult. Instead of feeling pedantic, these lines seem more like a maxim because of the colloquial speech and a feeling of general truth about them. The straightforwardness of these lines is what makes the poem successful--they are naked and honest, brave and smart-mouthed. Section seven of the same poem is a direct address to the lover who has recently died. At the funeral the speaker tells him,

          I was never your Intended,
          never meant to be the official widow
          like that plain, chinless girl I refused to recognize
          or comprehend.

          But the plain ones are patient, aren’t they?

          I’ll admit she earned her orchestra seats
          at this burial the old-fashioned way.

          […]

          But later, once the ladies go,
          I’ll climb down to you again.

          I’ll come to you in that dirty box
          where we’ve already slept for years,
          keeping our silent house
          under the avalanche of flowers.

It is the juxtaposition of the silence of the affair with the avalanche of flowers that makes this the most compelling of the sections. The speaker doesn’t apologize for the affair, doesn’t feel sorry for the wife, only feels sorry for the type of woman the wife is. It is in this section that Belieu most effectively uses spare language to make a complex point. In the situation of this poem, just as in life, no one is entirely faultless and no one is entirely at fault.

Belieu’s work is richly textured, formally varied, and filled with non-sentimental emotion. She handles the language well, imbuing it with strength, vulnerability, and power. Black Box is a book one can’t put down without finishing, and will come back to time and time again. Belieu uses brutal honesty to turn a series of painful experiences into a beautiful collection. Black Box is a dark indulgence, it is offensive and endearing, brash and vulnerable; it is a book with guts, heart, and a wry smile throughout.


**

Erin Belieu was born and raised in Nebraska and educated at the University of Nebraska, The Ohio State University, and Boston University. A former editor at AGNI, she currently serves as a contributing editor to The Kenyon Review. She has taught at Washington University, Boston University, Kenyon College, and currently teaches at Ohio University. Her book Infanta was chosen for the 1994 National Poetry Series.

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Rya Pagliughi grew up on Long Island, NY. She received her Bachelor's in English Literature & Creative Writing from Binghamton University and recently finished her Master's in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She currently lives in Boulder Colorado.

A Map of the City: on Anca Vlasopolos' Penguins in a Warming World

Ragged Sky Press, 2006

Reviewed by Jonathan Morse

Detroit is an exceptional city in this respect among others: in the matter of traffic, it has not only formulated, but begun to materialize, a system of superhighways conceived in dimensions of the future. Here is an instance in which the City of Tomorrow is comprehended and definitely foreshadowed by the City of Today.
— Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929)

At first glance, the cover of Penguins in a Warming World, with its schoolbook font and its photograph of penguins on a floe, appears to be an invitation to a taxidermic allegory. Like penguins in a warming world, like canaries in a mine, like Stanley Kunitz’s brain-damaged robin or the captive quail slaughtered by Texas politicians too busy with their manhood to worry about a warming world, these poems might seem to qualify as portents. But the natural world of Vlasopolos’ verse is something other than allegorical. Allegory, after all, is about making representation invulnerable to ambiguity. The margins of The Pilgrim’s Progress are filled with scriptural citations whose intent is to make clear exactly what goes on in Doubting Castle or the Slough of Despond, nothing more and nothing less. An allegorical architect would attempt to make the walls of his buildings both indestructible and transparent. But Vlasopolos doesn’t build that way, and the natural unit of her architecture is not the house but the street.

Her poem “Conversations with the Dead,” for example, begins with an incident that a contemporary sculptor would call site-specific: a woman looking for a beauty shop on St. Clair Street in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe winds up on St. Clair Street in Detroit proper. There, not unkindly, the locals warn her to turn around and leave. Thus far, the anecdote depends on local color. At a reading in southeastern Michigan, everyone would have arrived in the auditorium with the prior understanding that Grosse Pointe is rich, white, and immediately contiguous to black and desperately poor Detroit. In the course of the evening, Vlasopolos’ term “beauty shop” would then add one more easy irony to the poem’s already abundant supply, and why not? In principle, all it takes is one real poem to slip St. Clair Street into the select geography that now includes Troy and Montmartre.

But the geography of this poem isn’t just Michigan, or just literature. The anecdote continues:

        you kept saying
        why should they not
        instead
        have done me violence
        how could they know
        you said
        your skin
        though lighter
        was not ever white
        enough

— and here the prior understandings we bring to the story begin ramifying. Older members of that southeastern Michigan audience, but only older members, may know that Grosse Pointe used to be cited in textbooks as a paradigm of restrictive real estate covenants: no blacks or Jews allowed, of course, but also no Polish-Americans unless they were rated acceptable by a detective agency. Beyond that, elsewhere – elsewhere in the book, elsewhere in Vlasopolos’ other work, elsewhere on the Web, but always elsewhere – we can learn that the woman in the poem (“you”) is Vlasopolos’ mother, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz.

That might explain the phrase about whiteness, and also the title’s phrase “the dead.” Among other things, white is color of the shroud in which a Jewish corpse is buried. However, glosses like that one are absent from the poem itself. “Conversations with the Dead” starts out local, then narrows itself down to the personal, then disappears into hint, secrecy, and silence. Its skinny lines track down the page like last intelligible footprints in an obliterating wash of snow. The same disappearance or refusal to appear is detectible in poem after poem by Vlasopolos. The words that the poet allows us to see on her page emerge from a matrix of words not written: withheld from us readers as, perhaps, they have been withheld from their own author. When Vlasopolos allots a word of quantitative measurement like “enough” a line all to itself, the effort implies that this poet’s prosody is based not just on textual form but on an unarticulated but implicit content.

This hiddenness of an originating source of emotion seems characteristic of Vlasopolos’ work, though in another of this book’s anecdotal poems, “Snow Break,” the source at least rises close to the surface of the explicit in the form of a conventional symbol and a recognizable social problem. Thinking of herself as a near-native of Detroit’s terrain, the narrator of “Snow Break” is surprised and terrified to realize that she has become lost near her own home, disoriented by snow cover,

        only breaks the hulks burned
        left to slow lick of entropy

The statistic underlying this image of obliteration is that Detroit’s population has declined from more than 2 million in the 1950s to less than 1 million now, and whole square blocks of the once great city lie abandoned and in ruins — some of them mercifully bulldozed, some not. Detroit in 2007 is a landscape out of Piranesi, and in its content “Snow Break” is a poem of that landscape. However, the horror at the heart of “Snow Break” is an emotion shared by everyone who experiences Detroit, and a poem about that shared emotion is all but compelled to share the emotion’s shared conventions of expression. Writing a conventional poem here, Vlasopolos writes a conventional free verse, two beats to the line.

But her line lengths vary again to powerful effect when Vlasopolos turns away from the dead calm of Detroit and listens to herself speaking the tragicomically complex language which has been history’s bequest to her. In her unambiguously autobiographical “Unprofessional Exile,” the Rumanian-born Vlasopolos sardonically compares her perfect American accent with Andrei Codrescu’s in a series of stanzas beginning “I should have . . .” and concludes, after a last “I should have”:

        settled in an apartment, expensive, cramped,
        in Manhattan from where I could issue pronouncements
        from a throat sodden with whiskey, voicebox thick
        with smoke
        so East-European
        but I wanted to forget

        now, now that I have irrevocably lost
        my foreign r’s, acquired neither nicotine stains
        on teeth and fingers nor a taste for undiluted liquor
        now that I almost sometimes briefly
        pass
        for genuine
        I find myself
        caught fast
        in a dementia of whiffs of words
        bitters of vowels, proverb poundings,
        twists of that tongue
        those longings for what
        was it I wanted to forget

Those lines, long for the Rumanian half of Vlasopolos’ voice and short for the American half, enact their inability to communicate with one another. The difference between the short lines and the long is like the shock of green you experience when you cross Cadieux Road and find yourself suddenly out of Detroit and under leafy trees in Grosse Pointe. The flash isn’t on any map, but maps have come into being around it. Vlasopolos is the poet of that momentary yet permanent geography.


**

Anca Vlasopolos publications include Penguins in a Warming World (poetry; Ragged Sky Press, 2007) and No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University Press, 2000), which was awarded the YMCA Writer’s Voice Grant for Creative Non-Fiction in 2001, the Wayne State University Board of Governors Award and the Arts Achievement Award in 2002. Forthcoming publications include the historical novel The New Bedford Samurai (Twilight Times Books, 2007); the poetry chapbooks, Through the Straits, at Large and The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel, Missing Members. Vlasopolos, a 2006 Pushcart Prize nominee, has also published poems and short stories work in literary magazines such as The Rambler, Porcupine, Typo, Perigee, Poetry International, Barrow Street, Adagio, Avatar, Terrain, Nidus,, Short Story, Natural Bridge, Center, Evansville Review, Santa Barbara Review, River Styx, Spoon River Poetry Quarterly, Weber Review, among others.

**

Jonathan Morse became acquainted with the work of Anca Vlasopolos when he taught with her at Wayne State University. A professor of English
at the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus, he specializes in literature
of the modernist period and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. His
photography can be viewed here.

The Wash by Adam Clay

Parlor Press, 2006

Reviewed by Andy Grace


The poems in Adam Clay’s first book, The Wash have a porcelain-like quality about them, not in the sense of fragility, but in that they are at once common and luminous. Here is the entirety of his poem “Elegy”:

      I took cold water from the river in my hands, drank,
      And looked down to see a rock black with the memory of my face.

This poem, which appears early on in the collection, acts as a precursor to the book’s central piece “Elegy for the Self-Portrait,” a series of seventeen unnumbered lyrics, none longer than ten lines. Brevity is obviously a quality that Clay values. He even goes as far as playfully tempting his reader to question the slightness of his work in the opening line to “Dominion”: “Things in miniature form seem oddly attainable.” But these poems resist certainty upon initial interpretation, even those that are two lines long, or even one. Through turns of syntax and logic, along with the accrual of meaning of certain images throughout the journey of the book, Clay manages to create a complexity of project, while maintaining simplicity of language. Along with Saskia Hamilton, the contemporary poet whom to my mind Clay is most comparable, Clay often writes in a high-lyric minimalism in line with the best hyper-brief contemporary American poems, like W.S. Merwin’s own “Elegy,” Charles Wright’s “Bygones” and countless poems by Robert Grenier.

Throughout the book, water and avian imagery are the foremost subjects of Clay’s attention. The voice of the naturalist appears repeatedly, both in Clay’s own observations of nature and some appropriated from other texts, primarily travel journals from the 19th century. But the naturalism of The Wash is anything but a straightforward account of the exterior world. Here is an excerpt from the book’s opening poem “[Caught No Fish]”:

      Caught no fish last night or night before Last,
      Shot an Autumnal Warbler […]

                              The Warbler (I was in My Dream)
      Gained the Power of Observation, and If My Eyes
      Did not err, my Own face as Seen
      Through the Bird’s was Filled with the Glow
      Of A Church Bell ringing. Once I killed a Fish Crow
      And hundreds flew to him and appeared as if about to Carry him off.

The presence of italics and such archaisms as the capitalization of nouns made me think that at least some of the language was found text. There are no endnotes in The Wash, but a Google search of some of the phrases of the poem show, or at least strongly suggest, that language has been appropriated from elsewhere. “Caught no fish last night” appears to be from a journal of Asbury C. Jaquess, a deckhand on Davy Crockett’s journey to New Orleans in 1834: “We caught no fish last night but Mike who is the steward of the two boats caught a couple of beautiful chickens for us.” “Shot an Autumnal Warbler” is from Audubon’s journal entry from October 12th, 1820 on the Ohio River: “Shot an Autumnal Warbler as Mr. A. Wilson is pleased to designate the young of the Yellow rumpled Warbler [...]. “Killed a Fish Crow” appears to be from the 1874 diary of ornithologist Edwin I. Shores: “My first shot at Ft. Capron killed a Fish Crow and a Turkey Buzzard.” “Church Bell ringing” (the phrase that I am least sure is appropriated, but Audubon has appeared earlier, and Clay has Southern roots) could be from Audubon’s journal of his time in New Orleans, 1821: “[…] the Church Bell ringing [and] the Billiard Balls Knocking, the Guns heard all around.” The collage of 19th century language, woven together by Clay’s own voice creates a text that attempts to reconcile self-recognition through nature with the simultaneous destruction of nature. The speaker of “[Caught No Fish]” dreams that the bird he has killed has acquired human powers of observation, and, beholding his killer, sees in his visage a holy luminosity.

This imagined, self-aggrandizing example of the pathetic fallacy is quickly countered by the last sentence, which describes a collective mourning of birds over one of their own, almost an avian laying-on-of-hands. These two contradictory elevations, first of the killer, then of the fallen, speak to the complications of self-portraiture through nature. In her blurb for the book, Joyelle McSweeney claims that Clay is a “naturalist who knows himself excluded from Nature’s mirror,” which is not to say that Clay does not test himself in this mirror, but that he acknowledges that whatever appears is generated from his own psyche. Nature can do no more or less than obey its own laws, or, as Clay puts it,

                  A male bird cannot help but sing

      A male bird cannot help but sing

                  A male bird cannot help but sing

      and softly add to the confusion.

This anti-pastoral strain in Clay’s work, coupled with an obvious passion for Nature, makes the poems in this book seem both Romantic and utterly contemporary.

What makes Clay’s nature poems experimental is not any linguistic innovation or visual formatting of the work, but rather his approach to narrative. Here is where Clay’s talents most overlap with Saskia Hamilton’s: both of them establish repeated images that accrue meaning throughout a book. Each discrete poem is dependant on the unified whole of the piece. Which is why rereading seems to be crucial in the understanding of both poets. The resonance of the image of a river on page early in the book is enhanced/undermined by the image of a river on towards the end. There are poems in The Wash that do feel too slight, that is, if you consider them out of the context of the book. But considered as links in a web, these poems are essential connective tissue: if you took them out, the web would go slack.

This long-view of narrative (as in an emotional journey, not a storyline) over the course of the book contrasts with the unconventional narratives in many of the individual poems, which frequently use non-sequitur and fragmentation. Take the ninth section of “Elegy for the Self-Portrait”:

      The trees still bent from this winter’s ice.
      The joke of ten thousand years retreats
      to the debris of its own punchline.
      Tomorrow figures to be the passion of dirt.
      Today is a bucket around which this house is built.

The exact situation is difficult to determine. We know it is late winter, perhaps early spring. The defeated posture of the ice-weighted trees becomes bleaker with the next two lines. Whatever “the joke” is, it seems that the joke has been on us, and its retreat into debris is ominous. The fourth line suggests two opposite readings: “the passion of dirt” could mean fecundity/regeneration, or its opposite, which is the embrace of dirt, e.g. death. Finally, we are given a line that is, unlike the others, wholly of the present, which is centered on a homely, utilitarian image, the bucket, around which we organize our lives. This poem stands on its own: it is a poem that attempts to situate a mind in time. The past has chosen to keep its secret, the future is ambiguous is its transformations, but the present, bucket-like temporary container as it is, can be the only place of habitation.

But then consider how the poem resonates with the previous imagery in the book. The section immediately preceding the one quoted above reads simply

      Ten laughs in the space where one should be.

This laughter could be that of the past, lording over us the private nature of all of its punchlines. Given the context of the poem that follows it, these ten laughs are haunting. That they occupy a space where only one should be make the reverberations of this retreated joke overwhelming. Thus the necessity of rereading Clay’s work: sometimes the echo comes before the utterance. And the echoes do not end: in the first stanza of “Bones and Wandering,” an early poem in the book, laughter is once again portrayed as an ill omen:

      The grave of light is now underwater. Scoundrels curve
      Along the riverside and laugh so loud it remains night
      For three days.
                                                This laughter serves to cover up
      Their true purpose: searching to remedy the curse
      Of their contorted faces.

And again in the first two lines of “Tiny Eclipse”:

      Born into a beehive of clarity, bedtime and endtime
      Are the laugh inside a shotgun barrel


In the first example, laughter once more is related negatively to time: it brings on a three-day darkness meant to temporarily mask ugliness. In the second example, laughter is the symbol of an immanent violence. So by the time we reach “Ten laughs in the space where one should be,” we know, or, at least, we suspect, that this does not does not describe a moment of sudden happiness, made all the more intense for its not being expected. Thus the subsequent retreated “joke” of ten thousand years can connote nothing to the reader but an irrevocable rescinding of an era, one that leaves us with only our capacity for work and tolerance of uncertainty to get us through.

In the imagistic vocabulary of the book, Clay has managed to turn laughter into a harbinger of loss, the aural indicator of endtime. The arc of the book is constructed in this and other repeated images: I could trace similar through-lines with birds, rivers, pianos, reflections, bones, etc. This mode of narrative through repetition of imagery is like setting stepping stones across a river: they are the sure ground under which the various concerns of the book (the problematics of naturalism, the irresistible urge towards and impossibility of self-portraiture, how language can be at once spare and innovative) can pass under.

Clay has entitled the opening section of the book “The Most Careful Music” and the poems live up to that label. There is hardly a willful phrase to be found here. While the physical scale of the poems in The Wash is often small, Clay has written a formidable first book that demands rereading.

**

Adam Clay's poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Fascicle, CutBank, New Orleans Review, Conduit, Octopus Magazine, Free Verse, and elsewhere. A chapbook, Canoe, is available from horse less press. With Matt Henriksen, he edits TYPO Magazine. Born and raised in Mississippi, he holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and an MA from The Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his wife, Kimberely.

**

Andy Grace is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and his poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Poetry Daily, TriQuarterly, Iowa Review, and Crab Orchard Review among others. His first book A Belonging Field is out from Salt Publishing.

Fruitlands by Kate Colby

Litmus Press, 2006

Reviewed by Sommer Browning







        Claptrap reflections,
        or nothing lies
        the first time around.

        In binocular trafficking
        of pools
        in badlands shadow
        and pinhole flats,
        a lightning field
        of poles.


In 1977, Walter De Maria erected The Lightning Field in southwestern New Mexico. It is an earthwork; a sculpture of 400 lightning rods spread across an expanse of high desert measuring 1 mile by 1 kilometer. I don’t assume Kate Colby is referencing De Maria’s sculpture, but whether she is or not, it’s good to keep a field of lighting rods around when discussing her debut book, Fruitlands. The Lightning Field is the kind of conceptual project that is grander in the mind than in reality. In my imagination 400 lightning bolts strike each pole at once, transforming the desert into an explosion of science, but in reality there’s never enough lightning. In some way, my conceptual explosion is fueled by the reality of the steel poles stuck and scattered across a desert field; the figment depends upon The Lightning Field being a place I could visit. If the imagined doesn’t necessitate the real, it’s certainly heightened by it, somehow enlarged and made greater by it—the imagined made real by the real? Despite its naturalness, despite every quality that makes The Lightning Field an “earthwork,” it is also an entirely contrived destination; a patch of desert that derives its uniqueness from human ingenuity. The history of electricity is a great network of human discovery, of scientists and experimenters, inventors, and centuries of observation. This legacy was needed to turn a patch of lightning-struck desert into an even more lightning-struck patch of desert, to turn it into something absolutely contrived and yet, “super” natural. So what is reality’s role in the conceptual? What is our own? What are our relationships with human contrivances, such as science and art and language? How is the natural world involved in these relationships? If these questions have a dialect, Fruitlands speaks in it.


        The sky a boundless blue screen, flickering,
        the intonations of immortality.
        And our skin crawls
        with mites,
        which we brush off in favor of;

        such that, peering over the edge,
        the mirroring sea becomes us.


I see the similar relationship between the lightning rod and the desert in the passage above. The “becomes us” in the last line at once suggests transformation and it complements. The sea and us are mutually absorbed; we’ve become each other. And simultaneously, the sea complements us, becomes us, amends us so we are better suited (“super” human), than we were when we were without the sea. Together we form something greater than each of us separately.

Fruitlands takes it title from a Transcendentalist utopian community created by Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father, between 1843-1844. The goal of these contrived, planned communities, which had their heyday in the mid 1800’s, was to create an improved and more natural state of human society. There was a sense that through the use of our essentially human abilities and traits, and with the guidance and inspiration of the natural world, we could overcome human failing and become better humans, super humans. Through this kind of becoming, in both senses of the word, we could get closer to perfection. In Fruitlands, the book (though the same may pertain to the community), the human abilities seem to be science and language.


        …The beard

        is in line with the charming hat and the mirroring
        plate glass and this needling problem, lately arranged

        in mathematical terms of ratios or a simple state
        of one-to-one. It is now several years after I first

        attempted to figure the problem (not figure
        out), which became necessary because I was
        getting older and bleeding.


In Colby’s world, mathematics and inventions and science are incorporated smoothly into the more nuanced human world of charming hats and beards. She places all of these things in the same plane of importance so that a beard equals a charming hat equals a mirror equals a mathematically arranged problem. We trust her in the equation, enough to sit beside her as she tries to “figure the problem” rather than figure it out, before it’s too late. This figuring is the artist’s project, the seeker’s, the individual’s, and nature can lend us half of the clues if we employ our human abilities, in the following case language, and read it:


        On a wall of morning glories
        espaliered
        we’d read them splayed
        and stripped in the evening.


Most compelling and strange and beautiful is when her poems transform their prosy, scientific minded selves and strike out with unabashed humanness, as in the last line of the second stanza here:


        They call it earthquake weather, a day like this, of reflected light
        and leveling heat of no relief, of corners around which
        and angles of incidence jellied in consommé,
        molded in amber lunches of tea and
        impossibles: no incidents or tension, no reflection.

        No striations; rather, a bangle, a broken shoelace
        and what are we going to do about that hair?


The reflections and leveling and angles, incidents and striations are deftly undercut with the conversational line: “and what are we going to do about that hair?” I love the kind of gasp it causes in me, the mind at once sighing with relief and catching its breath. I’m reminded of some of Jane Miller’s poems, especially from American Odalisque, the way they play with remoteness, but Colby pulls us in more often, and not quite as abruptly. Consider another little gasp, in this delicate progression of the language of indelicate disease:

        Let down, rather
        than recoiled
        from time
        in time for the local pandemic

        of porchlight, inoculating
        a revival of whist
        under the weather.

        What’s more:
        her paper fan-shaped frock
        unfolding
        into little dead places.


This passage also has another mark of Colby’s, her tendency to keep language tidy and constrained—we’re comfortable and lulled with sing-songy words like “pandemic” ‘inoculating” “under the weather”—until it must burst its container. Like a plant whose roots have outgrown its pot, the line, “into little dead places,” is thrust out there, grasping for footing with that concrete, heavy “dead.”

Besides Colby’s interesting thematic projects, Fruitlands bears smaller traces of her fingerprints: her obsession with the color blue, the quote she uses from one of my favorite Built to Spill songs (No one wants to hear / what you dreamt about / unless you dreamt about / them), her references to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruno Schulz. These moments are so delightful and unique, they feel comfortably inscrutable. Or, just as likely, I realized there was something harsh, even disingenuous, in asking the question “why?” when they felt just right.

**

Kate Colby grew up in Massachusetts and lives in San Francisco, where she works as a copywriter and editor. She is the author of Rock of Ages (Anadama Press, 2005) and a new book-length poem entitled A Banner Year. Currently, she is writing about Jane Bowles.

**

Sommer Browning graduated from the University of Arizona MFA program. Now, she writes poems and draws comix in Brooklyn, New York. Her poems can or will soon be found in spork, The New York Quarterly, Forklift, Ohio, word for/word and elsewhere. Visit her at Asthma Chronicles or, if you're ever in Brooklyn, at the poetry series she hosts at Pete's Candy Store.

The End of Rude Handles by Jen Tynes

Red Morning Press, 2006

Reviewed by Marc McKee



Appended to the opening four part cycle of Jen Tynes’ debut, The End of Rude Handles, is a lyrically essayistic meander set off by the heading “Ways of Contrariness” and further subheadings like "To improvise is to pull out of thick air" and "All the italics are mine." Whereas it may have been customary for regular readers of poetry to assume that poems teach us how to read them, these sections do not leave that sort of decoding strictly in our hands. Though superlatively engaging in the ways that artists revealing their practices and intentions can be, the risk in including such an appendage in the same book as the work it describes (or in Tynes’ case, refers to in slant-wise fashion) can be the limits it sets for the reader. This might have been more of a problem if it didn’t feel quite so much like the appending is itself a fold-out, a map that is more a part of the cycle and thus a facet of the work, rather than just the recommended 3-D glasses. In fact, it is difficult not to see it as the culmination of the cycle.

To begin at the beginning, however, The End of Rude Handles makes its way as a kaleidoscopic collage in four parts, each constructed of declaratives, exchanges and interchanges which are figured over time on or against an overdetermined ground. Put more simply, the poem makes material in language the process of making itself. In the prefatory segment of the poem preceding part I, the speaker reveals that “when I speak of you some object is / also formed in the light of that. // I enfold the brimming object to you.” While this in some way seems to disclose a speaker addressing a “you,” it instead indicates, as the successive passages will show us, that the effort to address this “you” becomes its own object which the speaker can only ever offer “brimming.” Hence, the effort to address is given shape rather than the speaker or the “you,” and instead of the performance of a message delivered in a communally agreed upon lexicon, the reader is presented with evidence of an inquiry of the space between the reader and the speaker. This is further informed (and complicated) by Tynes’ use of other material, especially from (one presumes) the book to which she doffs her hat in her acknowledgments, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, and further ordered by her use of capitalization, italics, and white space. The first section sets up the system, beginning after the Roman numeral I with:

        Between times

        I took care
        of small business: shining
        blue eggs, fighting with a glass
        jaw. …

The opposing page finds italicized phrases scattered across the white space, also in italics, presumably lifted from the Handicrafts’ appendix: Zion Rose Single // Chariot Wheel Ocean // Wave Acres of Diamonds. The following page is set off by the semblance of a title in all caps: THE UNIVERSAL LOVE OF COLOR. This pattern is repeated throughout the first two sections before in the third and fourth sections all caps phrase fragments are added to the facing pages on the right side. The effect which is produced is of a process that is scrupulously made and scrupulously self-reflexive in the process of being made. In the second section the self-awareness seems to proceed nearly from the text itself. In the opening segment of part II comes the question “Do you think this // is sound.” A few pages later, we are told that “[a] figure / is a popular thrill.” These small, assertive thunderclaps of revelation—the duality of sound as logical and/or musical, the desire even in the most abstracted deserts of the Real for a recognizable object or subject—rise from a mostly perplexing anti-conversation conversation. To wit:

        THE KEEN UNPASSIONED BEAUTY OF THE GREAT MACHINE

        Propelled by hand
        and eventually back

        home to me. A figure
        is a popular thrill.
        The three of them

        kept coming
        to supper.
        Kept eating

        at me til gone: a follicle,
        the shape
        of my kin again.
        Leaving

        the natural horns
        in foliage,
        kissing

        babies in
        the face. The rosy
        pucker when
        I try.

        Your ornery biddy
        saves bones.

By deploying flat declaratives that are completely devoid of rhetorical swagger, a passage like this encourages the reader to feel its associative logic as inevitable, even after we read it a couple of times and realize that it can only be inevitable to one particularly temporal self. Nevertheless, this is not a solipsistic personal history recollected in tranquility; the mere appearance of the possessive pronoun “your” presumes an other. Depending on whether or not this sort of thing is your bag, Tynes has demonstrated here the ways in which language figures the speaker and the reader, since surely in our desire to be in this loop or to make any kind of sense here, we begin to orient ourselves toward the way the text is, in her phrase, “caught in the act of emphasizing.”

As the sections progress, the language and poetics seem to relax. It becomes apparent that the recurrent word “animal” is a figure for other, whether sentient or constructed, and the deployment of italicized fragments and all caps titles which imply the ongoing extension of lyric segments begin to feel familiar and give rise to a sense of historical location both in a personal and public sense. While some might find the technique and realization of such poems estranging, what is actually happening is an arrangement of the estranged world that commends itself to us as worthy of habitation and consideration. Once and again, too, there is the shock of realization to keep us going: “I am a harness // I use to keep myself / collected”; or “To call a snake a garden // variety and duck / into these handicrafts / for the evening is a gash / in me, I cannot pronounce an end / to naming it.” It is by surfaced assertions like these that the surrounding materials are galvanized. Perhaps it is a problem of our age; it may be that in a perfect world, the materiality of poetic inquiry might be enough, but nowadays we want to see not only the strings being pulled and how, but the sorry and exhilarated puppet master. Then again, maybe it’s just because we don’t wish to see ourselves as the puppets.

The final segment of part IV, which bears the title of the book, finds the speaker admitting that she “burn[s] [her] own / mark into each animal / long after thinking it,” and this is the last motion we get before the appending essayistic sections mentioned above. These sections are far more chatty than the poem cycle that comes before, even as they contain recurrences from the cycle itself; even the heading “Ways of Contrariness” has already appeared in the poem. If one were to suggest a weakness in this book, one might point to this section, but simply because it addresses us with more familiarity and wears its verve and sass on its sleeve; even as it deploys and unveils its strategies as a crafty intelligence, it proves ultimately more interesting (if only to this reader) than the admittedly assured and skillful (and sometimes breath-taking) poem that precedes it. Perhaps this is why it is at the end: Tynes has built and figured a landscape, she has mattered language, and it is ways of contrariness, between she and us, that now animates it.

That said, there are more than enough fascinations and gifts to recommend this collection, though it may address itself by need to selective tribes on the poetryscape. Those readers who like their books peopled with clear equations and traditionally acceptable relationships between this, that and the other may want to steer clear. If, on the other hand, you ever over-poured your coffee cup while wondering what it would be like for C.D. Wright to cover Tender Buttons, then The End of Rude Handles will suit your taste for the outer limns.


**

Jen Tynes edits horse less press and is the author of The End of Rude Handles (Red Morning Press, 2006), See Also Electric Light (Dancing Girl Press, 2007) and, with Erika Howsare, The Ohio System (Octopus Books, 2007). Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Lit, Denver Quarterly, Typo, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel: Second Floor.

**

Mark McKee has an MFA from the University of Houston, and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia. Recent work appears in Backwards City Review, LIT, Pleiades, The Journal, and is forthcoming from Forklift, Ohio.

Exiliana by Mariela Griffor

Luna Publications, 2006

Reviewed by Anca Vlasopolos




Exiliana—-the resonant, mellifluous title announces the heart of this first poetry book by Mariela Griffor. Its very foreignness extends, like the tall grasses of the evocative cover painting, into seemingly endless space. The poems in this book cluster around Griffor’s enduring theme: the personal is political, and, in this book, the political, too, is so personal as to invade the core of mind and body. One could call this collection a series of elegies, for the violently murdered lover, father of the child whose birth he does not live to see, for the body of the beloved country, especially its capital, Santiago, for the friends of childhood and youth whom the poet does not get to see grow older.

Griffor speaks with the voice of the world’s many exiles; her lament is the exile’s universal lament. In describing the mother tongue, she writes, “It comes sweet and strong/ with syllables I recognize,/ its delicious sounds,” and she acknowledges her somewhat unwilling thrall to those sounds. As other exiles, in the moods of weather of foreign places the poet is constantly reminded of home, existing in a halved awareness of the here being but a distorted replica of the there, the lost home: “The sound of the rain in Michigan/ reminds me of the rugged winters in my old country:/ the cold feet in old shoes,/ the fast sound of the water hitting the ground/ the smell of eucalyptus in the air.”

Ultimately, however, Griffor with this book of poetry returns us to the beginnings of the lyric: these are love poems, mostly for a lost young love that survives the death of the lover to go on haunting the living with excruciating longing, as in “Heartland”:

      I wish I could put my heart
      under the faucet in the sink
      and with the running water
      wash away the thumping
      thoughts you evoke.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

      After years of draining
      the arteries of my
      heart, they come full
      again every morning as our first encounter,
      insisting on the memory of you.

Despite the cri de coeur in this poem as in the overtly political ones, where the poet becomes the accuser—“What kind of country is this/that falls in love with death/ every time freedom disappears/ from its core?/ What kind of country is this/ that kills its own sons and daughters?”, the song of love is heard from within the bitterness and loss. In a tradition that is, alas, not common to many women poets writing in English, Griffor explores the erotic in the context of fierce love: “I remember your lukewarm hands/ between the pleats of my beige skirt . . . . despite the passing of years,/ I still feel your hand/ between the pleats of my skirt.”

Yet, unlike many exiles who long only for the lost homeland, Griffor turns her creative energies to describing the places she has inhabited since, “Along the Cold Streets of Scandinavia,” as well as along the mean streets of Detroit, and her take on these new landscapes is generous and large. She enjoins Detroit to “Leave your vinegar grief behind.” In Uppsala, she sings of the spring of a second love: “In a mantle of spring/ you approach slowly”; “Love that has been asleep . . . / turns from the colors of grey . . . to the red of living sap.”

But turning a generous eye toward one’s refuge does not mean abandoning the burden of remembrance, of witnessing the horrors of deaths, disappearances, and tortures in the homeland or the various wounds and amputations of exile, and Griffor best summarizes the desolation in a short poem, “How Chaos Begins,” perhaps the most powerful of the collection: “A butterfly flying in the streets/ of Santiago on a September day.”


**

Mariela Griffor was born in the city of Concepcion in southern Chile. She attended the University of Santiago and the Catholic University of Rio de Janiero. Griffor left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden until 1985. She and her American husband returned to the United States in 1998 with their two daughters. They live in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. She is co-founder of The Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University and Publisher of Marick Press. Her work has appeared in periodicals across Latin America and the United States. Griffor holds a BA in Journalism and an MA in Communications from Wayne State University. Exiliana is her first book. For more information visit

**

Anca Vlasopolos' publications include Penguins in a Warming World (poetry; Ragged Sky Press, 2007) and No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University Press, 2000), which was awarded the YMCA Writer’s Voice Grant for Creative Non-Fiction in 2001, the Wayne State University Board of Governors Award and the Arts Achievement Award in 2002. Forthcoming publications include the historical novel The New Bedford Samurai (Twilight Times Books, 2007); the poetry chapbooks, Through the Straits, at Large and The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel, Missing Members. Vlasopolos, a 2006 Pushcart Prize nominee, has also published poems and short stories work in literary magazines such as The Rambler, Porcupine, Typo, Perigee, Poetry International, Barrow Street, Adagio, Avatar, Terrain, Nidus,, Short Story, Natural Bridge, Center, Evansville Review, Santa Barbara Review, River Styx, Spoon River Poetry Quarterly, Weber Review, among others.

Forth a Raven by Christina Davis

Alice James Books, 2006

Reviewed by Melissa Koosmann





In her new book, Forth a Raven, Christina Davis keeps the stakes consistently high. In nearly every poem, Davis directly invokes emotionally charged concepts that most contemporary poets would refer to more obliquely. For example, the first poem, which shares the book’s title, contains the words “god,” “love,” and “die” inside twelve short lines. Impressively, the poem stands up to the words. The fundamental concepts they represent exist within a dreamlike world where emotional power is wielded and perceived in unexpected ways, so that the conventional meanings of the words feel freshly altered. Throughout the book, the conflict this creates puts stress on the poems, building a constant feeling of reverence and pressure.

This pattern begins in the first line, in which the boundaries between god and the world are redefined: “In the dream, we take god out of the attic and put back the birds.” God, here, can be physically contained and physically discarded. Birds can occupy the role of deities. People possess an immense power, an ability to move gods around, but the whole line is confused and otherworldly. Also, the emotional charge of the word “god” leaks into the more mundane words. “Attic,” for instance, becomes associated with heaven; the image of birds in an attic is not just a pretty picture, but an unsettling one, because the birds are replacing god, or rather, taking their rightful place where god has been. Reading the line raises questions. Where does god go? Who took the birds out of the attic in the first place? What are they going to do there now?

The poem does not answer these questions. Instead, it asks its own. Davis writes, “Every question/ I have ever asked could be ground down to/ Do you love me? Will I die?” These two large questions hover over the rest of the book, so that the act of questioning itself takes on consequence in every poem. This is true of the hard questions (“Are you beginning/ to go away?” a lover asks a lover), and also of the more simple ones (“West what?” asks a confused speaker who is called on to give directions). The questions create a sense of expectancy, a desperate desire for answers.

Answers, however, are not the point. The cryptic answers that the poems offer are always aiming at an unfathomable something they can never fully state in words. The first set of questions (“Do you love me? Will I die?) receives the following response:

        We came in full view

        of an island
        or a continent, for we knew

        not whether.

Though she focuses on new perspectives of god, love, and so on throughout the book, Davis does not try to define or explain these concepts. Instead, she impresses on us the immensity of uncertainty. The speakers of her poems not only do not know the answers to their questions; they know they do not know, they think about what it means not to know, and they conclude, at last, that not knowing is an essential part of the human experience. But this unknown is not just something to wrestle with. It inhabits its own space and takes on its own beauty.

Unlike human beings, who can only glimpse this mysterious space, the birds in the poems inhabit it. Birds hold a position of power, and although they do not provide understandable answers, they do lend perspective. One version of every life “is told from the point/ of view of the sky.” This bird’s-eye view is without self-interest, and its perspective encompasses not only the living person, but also everything around that person. Partly because of this larger perspective, birds provide a link to reverence and mystery:

        The field quiet and birded, across it a deer has fled
        and then turned back
        as if it left some part of itself behind,
        the part that feared me.

“Birded,” here, is more appropriate than the more standard “full of birds.” The word emphasizes the birds’ presence and significance; for the reader, the “birded” field is larger and sharper than a field “full of birds.” This image creates a powerful emotional space to accommodate the deer’s passage. Perhaps more importantly, it gives the sense that some part of the mysterious unknowable world can occasionally leak into the known one.

The human speakers of the poems aspire to the birds’ breadth of perspective but never achieve it. The speaker in “The Sadness of the Lingua Franca,” for instance, cannot master the language she needs to express what she thinks the birds know: “In Bird, I speak brokenly. Hiss and flail and never learn.” The English language, on the other hand, is overused and arrogant:

        The language is famous and followed,
        it has no loneliness left.

        It has made it to the moon. It has got god
        to speak it. It will get
        to everything first, if it can.

Pinned between the flaws of her own language and her flawed understanding of a foreign one, this speaker nevertheless refuses to accept imperfection. Instead, she cobbles together a language of her own: “But not the swan, pale as a page/ I will never have written.” This syntactically odd fragment creates an illogical but somewhat satisfying conclusion to her dilemma, even though it does not quite solve it. The beautiful thing she sees before her is similar to something she will never create, and so it does not quite fit into the real world. However, addressing a beautiful unreality is a way for her to appeal to the unknowable realm that so fascinates her. She does not always have to wait for it to come to her (as it does with the deer in the passage above); she can probe it from the outside, to a limited extent, by using language that has a connection both to her own world and to the other one.

There are a few places in the book where the overall pressure lets up a bit. By far the weakest poems are those that deal with personal romances. In “The Primer,” for instance, a man chooses to remain quiet rather than tell a woman he loves her, and the woman reflects, “In the history of language/ the first obscenity was silence.” Here, Davis gives up some of her control. She does not create the dreamlike, associative background that controls the way it is possible to read the words in her other poems. Instead, she invokes the common experience of feeling unloved, leaving the reader’s personal associations to fill in the gaps in her writing.

In spite of its small weaknesses, Forth a Raven is worth reading more than once. It never feels frivolous, it never shies away from complexities, and it rewards the work of reflection.

**

Christina Davis received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.Phil. in Modernist Literature from the University of Oxford. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Jubilat, LIT, The May Anthologies (selected by Ted Hughes), New England Review, New Republic, Paris Review, and Provincetown Arts (selected by Susan Mitchell). The recipient of several residencies to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, she currently works at Poets House and lives in the heart of Greenwich Village.

**

Melissa Koosmann's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona MFA Program in Poetry, and she currently lives in Tucson, Arizona.

The Totality for Kids by Joshua Clover

University of California Press / New California Poetry, 2006

Reviewed by Christopher Burawa









Joshua Clover’s new collection, The Totality for Kids, reminds me of a favorite quotation of mine, that appears in an ars poetica by A.R. Ammons, which goes: “freedom engages, / or chooses not to, what in the world is / to be engaged.” And this quote seems an apropos way to begin a discussion about Clover’s second book because he clearly stakes out what he is engaged with—the city; the urban scene and its byways. That he’s capable of incorporating a host of influences/sources into a poem deftly, and quite often brilliantly, should be no surprise to anyone who read his first book, Madonna anno domini, where in the poem, “Map of the City,” he had already begun his preliminary explorations of the urban scene. And we can use some of that work to begin guiding us through this new book. Clover ends the poem by stating:

                                ....If everything
      has already happened, I may be
      writing to you from the City
      of the Dead, the white-bodied buildings,
      then the birds launching over
      & over again as if disturbed,
      it’s not so bad here, I’ve been
      befriended by several beggars
      who seem to treat me as an equal,
      we talk & talk about it, I agree
      with all the words except “New”

I trust that I am addressing fearless readers, who are afraid neither of intellect nor a broken ceramic curiosity, because this book places demands upon the reader. That said, the casual reader might simply read it to enjoy Clover’s amazing facility with language. The passage above, from his first book, shows much more conventional lyrical traits: enjambment and leaps in image that present a “personal” perspective. But what the poet proposes in this new book is that we lose that sense of self that judges what a poem is and what it is supposed to do. Take, for example, the poem, “At the Atelier Teleology,” where the poet compounds (and confounds) the lyric possibilities with truly radical leaps of logic.

      The sun tutoyers me! Adrift beyond heroic realism
      In the postmodern sublime where every window can lie
      Like a priest, adrift in the utopia for bourgeois kittens
      Having of late learned the trick of how to listen to two
      Songs at once—double your measure double your fun!—
      It seems to defy death and still the commodity
      Is not cast down.

What he has arrived at is a line that might seem lyrical but does not develop the personal story or perspective. It is a world we have to understand for ourselves. We have to find our way into this world alone; he doesn’t provide any cues.

I am a firm believer in the interplay of opposites, and do not buy into the construct of fixed dualities that are the hallmark of our society (blue-red; patriotic-unpatriotic, etc.). Opposites by their nature coexist and intermingle—coming together and then separating, over and over. What we can understand as truth lies in the merging of the two, but also, paradoxically, in their act of separating. The upshot is that by looking at this activity and how it works, we can get a better sense of how our world really works. Clover’s ability to write about this concept through poetry speaks to his strength as an original thinker about contemporary poetics.

Of the opposites explored by Clover, one pair in particular fascinates me: the world of the past and of the future. These opposites can come together because they involve the city of the past—City of the Dead—and the city of the future—“New” Babylon. The past includes, of course, the ruins upon which we continue to build; but it is also evident in the architecture that survives:

      The famous and the dead have learned to fall between our eyes
      And their forms in heaven: a philosophical eclipse
      Which edges them in light, like bodies in the nineteenth-century
      Photo plates enwrapped in their emanations and pale shrouds.
      They have their own cities called Necropolis and New York
      Built of what they are said, the famous and the dead.

            (“Feral Floats The Form in Heaven and of Light”)

You might think that the reaction to the past is to envision (and sometimes to try to create) a utopia. However, for Clover the city of Utopia is a nostalgic construct, as he illustrates in the first section of “Poem (I come across the paving stones)”. He ingeniously develops this idea by sandwiching one line of personal story between layers of concrete (orange soda, watermelon) images and abstracted (theory of red, scrawled changes) impressionistic description.

      The brief capital of disturbances.
      And within that city lies the city
      Utopia with its little sojourns
      And orange soda, Utopia with
      Its watermelons and televisions.
      Inside, city that holds the happiest
      Disturbances of my youth behind gold
      Facades. Staggering up from the river
      Full of forget in the flare of evening
      One sees a city where the negative
      Held its court. And inside that, city which
      Is little more than a theory of red
      In everyday life: red suburbs, rouge
      Of nostalgia, series of scrawled changes.

Clover recycles the idea of utopia and thereby redefines it. Utopia then becomes the mind’s construct of the mind looking back on the pleasant and sometimes complicated past (as in “disturbances of my youth”) which, however, upon investigation is more like a silhouette; memory, or forgetfulness, often soften and simplify past events. And seeing beyond this, red and shades of red, which to me represent the strong but primitive desires through which we develop our sense of need. Yet it’s this same nostalgic impetus that feeds the visionary, the one envisioning the future city or New Babylon.

Essentially, this utopian form that is birthed in our gut also meets the future in our gut. I might say that here is where desires meet intellect; and interestingly, they arise from the same source. The only reference we have to New Babylon (aside from the cover art by the same name) is found in the prose poem “OMA”:

      …Beware ye th’electroglide downward to our constant New Babylon,
      The City of the Captive Globe. Night comes to the name. Orpheus
            night,
      Soi distant by les locals: smell of 20th cen. vomit, taste of dried
            flowers.

What is fascinating about this quote is how both past and future cities are places of the dead. And, if you think about it, the poet is right. Clover has clearly examined for himself the dynamic interchanges of these worlds, as well as each of them individually. What makes me convinced that he understands this interaction of worlds is in how he writes about the present world.

The present that Clover shows us is something like a “floating world,” much like the modern Ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) of the city. And I don’t think my association is coincidental (he uses the word “floating” quite a few times throughout the book). The story of this art form, the woodblock print, concerns the commodifying of art for a growing middle-type class in Edo Japan. However, by the twentieth century, artists were using the prints to depict a nostalgic past, colorfully elegant. And that was the beginning of the end in a sense because it also happened to reflect the growing nationalistic military-industrial philosophies—reclaiming or reestablishing the might the country once had. The warping of art to achieve social-political ends, as in our government’s touting of American abstract art in the 50s and 60s as a reflection of our freedoms, stands as a subtle undercurrent within this book as in “Year Zero,” where “Nothing is true everything is the case.” Who are we in this age of spin, where fact is a debatable entity? You may not like the answer, as this final section of the poem suggests.

      Now must begin again it must be new time.

      In the morning of the sign lying in bed in cold Utopia and alone under
      the black square.

      Your ears swelled with flowers a corpse in your mouth.

      You are free though a freedom with its ribs showing.

But we have a choice. If we do not engage with events in everyday life, we are simply floating through our world. This is Clover’s warning to us.


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Joshua Clover is the author of The Matrix (British Film Institute, 2004), Their Ambiguity (Quemadura, 2003) and Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State University, 1997). He is Associate Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, Davis, and is a contributing writer for the Village Voice and The New York Times. He maintains himself here.

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Christopher Burawa is a 2007 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature in Translation Fellowship. His first collection, The Small Mystery of Lapses (2006), won the Cleveland State University Poetry Prize. His chapbook of translations Of the Same Mind (2005) won the Toad Press International Chapbook Competition. Burawa has also received MacDowell Colony and Witter Bynner fellowships.

The Selected Poems of Wang Wei translated by David Hinton

New Directions, 2006

Reviewed by John Cotter


English permits Wang Wei only one or two levels of allusion, even in the hands of a translator as good as David Hinton. Were we able to read these poems in Classical Chinese (were we able to read them a thousand years ago) each word would spiral with connotations. But because the culture is alien, the translation is new, and the poems over a millennium old, we are bound to approach them cautiously.

        Beside this spring lake deep and wide, I find
        myself waiting for your light boat to return:

        duckweed slowly drifted together behind you,
        and now hanging willows sweep it open again.

Hinton’s versions feel like Classical Chinese poetry alright: the brief depth, the spare illustrations of nature, the ambiguous finish sending us back into the center of the poem. That Hinton is our most accomplished translator of Classical Chinese is no longer in question: in addition to his ten thousand other projects, Hinton has now completed versions of all three great T’ang era poets for New Directions. But where Tu Fu and Li Po feel and think in voices like our own, Wei is a deeply impersonal writer.

        up in those gorges, who would guess the great human drama even
                exists?
        And when people in town gaze out, they see distant empty-cloud                 mountains.

Our surviving knowledge of Wang Wei’s life isn’t encyclopedic, but we know a little. He was born of the governing class around 699 AD and worked as a high-level official in one of the most prosperous and advanced cities in the world, Ch’ang-an. The arts of poetry and painting (both of which he practiced and—like Blake—married) were highly developed, and the city in which he spent his life numbered two million souls. The Analects of Confucius and the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu would have felt far more ancient to Wei than the King James Bible does to us. These are not the poems of a simple man in a simple time, but of a highly skilled mind and a great era. To escape the city, meditate and to write, Wei would periodically visit his mountain retreat by Wheel-Rim River. This is the landscape of his poetry.

        Done struggling for a place in that human realm, I’m just this
        Old-timer of the wilds. So why are these seagulls still suspicious?

Hinton, in his too-brief introduction, is on point when he writes that “the distinction between human and nature is entirely foreign” to Wei’s art. To approach these poems nearer to the way the were intended we must remove ourselves from the Christian context in which, like it or not, we read most English language poetry. For all their differences, Wei’s philosophy would have more in common with that of Horace than it would Wordsworth, or Robert Creeley. The “Dragon,” often referenced by Wei is very like the horned god of the European pagans; Wei’s C’han Buddhism much like (and a precursor to) what we know today as Zen. In the poem, “A Meal with Kettle-Fold Mountain Monks,” Wei tidies up his cabin and prepares a meal of pine nuts for some visiting monks. Later:

                                                                Lamps are lit,
        And then at nightfall, chime-stones sing out

        And I understand how stillness is itself pure
        Joy. Life here has idleness enough and more:

        How deep could thoughts of return be, when
        A lifetime is empty appearance emptied out?


Although cold to the touch, Wei’s is a real wisdom that has passed straight through the worldly. It is the disciplined art of the educated city-dweller re-encountering nature:

        Out beyond the river it goes all the way:
        Grief and sorrow, a lone plume of smoke,

        And you think of going back, of offering
        Your lofty talent to those who need you.

        But nothing’s left of ancestral villages now.
        Out beyond cloud, it’s all empty as origin.

Opening this new book, I turned first to the famous poem, Deer Park. This is due entirely to Elliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz’s scalpel-edged Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (Moyer Bell, 1987). Paz and Weinberger are strict constructionists of Wei’s poetry and they are merciless with 20th Century translators who’s sense of the single poem Deer Park drifts by so much as a microtone from Wei’s original. As Classical Chinese is a dense, allusive language stripped of articles and tenses, words can be defined only in context, and scholars continue to debate the content and color of Wei’s mountainscapes. Perhaps with Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei in mind, Hinton finishes his introduction with his own transliteration of the famous poem. In the sequence of the text, he presents a more polished version:

        No one seen. Among empty mountains,
        hints of drifting voice, faint, no more.

        Entering these deep woods, late sunlight
        flares on green moss again, and rises.

It becomes clear that Hinton, without violating Wei’s originals, intends to write clear and (at least linguistically) unambiguous English poems. Hinton is far more faithful to his original material than Ezra Pound in the revolutionary Cathay, say, but it’s fair to say that his interest lies in simplifying the poems as much as possible so as to ease the digestion of the Western reader. Even if we plan to investigate the venerable Pauline Yu’s more scholarly translations (Indiana, 1980), complete with thorough notes and capacious apparatus, Hinton’s book is a fine place to start. It’s as far as many of us will want to go, it’s far enough to get a sense of the place.

        Now autumn tightens cricket song. It echoes into my thatch hut.
        And up in these mountains, cicadas grieve clear through dusk.

        No one visits my bramble gate. Isolate silence deepens, deepens.
        Alone in all this empty forest, I meet white clouds for company.

There are places where Hinton could have enlarged his notes, which appear sparse when compared with his detailed explanations of Tu Fu from 1989 (fifty pages of notes accompany Tu Fu’s poems where a dozen seem to serve for Wei’s). A note explaining Ch’an Buddhist meditation, for example, feels a little thin. And when Wei complains of his lack of talent, we have no way of knowing how ironic he might have intended to be. But we have other editions of Wei to consult, and where Pauline Yu’s notes are more compendious, Hinton’s translations are more mellifluous. If Wei’s cold mountains are going to attract modern English readers, they will do so here.

        Grasses cushion legs sitting ch’an stillness
        up here. Towering pines echo pure chants.

        Inhabiting emptiness beyond dharma cloud,
        we see through human realms to unborn life.

Hinton’s English line is strong and deceptively artful. He repeats words for emphasis, rather than sticking them with needless adjectives. He doesn’t mind at all if his language sounds euphonious, matching Wei’s complex simplicity with English’s riches. It goes down smooth.

I found myself more absorbed by the poems toward the end of the book, those in which Wei seems to let his desolate emotions fill the landscape in a way he hadn’t before. But it’s his humanity, not his philosophy, I think I’m responding to. For poems of overflowing humanity, we must turn away from Wang Wei’s mountain retreat and instead to Hinton’s masterful versions of Tu Fu and Li Po.

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Wang Wei (701-761 C.E.) was from Taiyuan, the capital of Shansi province, and moved to Ch'ang-an as a young man. After passing the civil service exam he rose through the ranks and, despite the occasional banishment, eventually reached the post of vice prime minister. However, his interest in Buddhism blunted any political ambitions, and whenever he had time he preferred to wander in the Chungnan Mountains south of the capital. Wang was not only one of the greatest poets of the T'ang, but also a skilled musician and one of the dynasty's greatest landscape artists. (adapted from Red Pine, Poems of the Masters).

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David Hinton, whose much-acclaimed translations of Li Po and Tu Fu have become classics, now completes the triumvirate of China's greatest poets with The Selected Poems of Wang Wei.

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John Cotter has published work in 3rd Bed, Goodfoot, Hanging Loose, failbetter, Pebble Lake, Coconut Poetry, The Columbia Journal of American Studies, and others. He lives in Cambridge where he's about to start shopping around his first novel, small excerpts of which can be read on his website, here. In 2007 his work will appear in Volt, Unpleasant Event Schedule, word for/word, MIPOesias and Oh One Arrow, the new anthology from Flim Forum Press.