Ardor by Karen An-hwei Lee

Tupelo Press, 2008
Reviewed by Fiona Sze-Lorrain


A Polyphonic Collage of Dream, Prayer, and Letter

For those seeking a pure or distinct narrative arc, Ardor, at first glance, seems to be a complicated reading enterprise. In an invented but dense structure that interweaves “dreams,” “prayers,” and “letters,” Karen An-hwei Lee has crafted an experimental aesthetic: an utterance. One that focuses on the limits of language. One that stretches the visual boundaries of images — real or surreal — testing the sonic depths of each of her chosen words.

Only one poem prevails throughout this book, though its three modes are in constant dialogue with one another. It opens with a lush, lyrical allusion to the love that Lee is about to unfold by borrowing references from nature and mathematics, the Christian religion, human and avian anatomy:

…
Calque alphabet
Modulation with avian equivalence of hands
Translation perched around a white rose
Photographic grapheme of cardioid delight
Water potential, a hidden sonnet whose
Permissible boundary of closed form
Is a sequence or open cycle in
A heart-shaped curve traced by a point
On the circumference of a circle rolling
Around an equal fixed circle, general equation
ρ = a(1 + cos θ) in polar coordinates
…

Here we see the overriding feature that we are to encounter for the rest of the book: each line contains at least one image. Occasionally an imperative, the line may break with a surprising twist. Always it reads with a rhythm that is hard to classify. Irregular? Syncopated? Yet it flows with a strong beat that seems to drive the voice somewhere else. A background pulse is thus ready for some sort of monologue, utterance, or chant, like a voice, both the same and different, in mutated form — a dream, a prayer, or letter. One cannot help but wonder if each is in fact a figment of all.

An interesting paradox in Ardor is that despite being intricately intertwined, each segment can also stand independently. Texts that read as “prayer” or “letter” may be as short as an interrogative statement (e.g. “Word open, a red geode. Where?”— p.39) or a two-word heading (e.g. “Circumstantial events” — p.53). And yet, one can also find traces of Gertrude Stein’s linguistic play in some of the “dream” passages which contain more explicit narrative cues:

The blind woman, turning in her sleep miles north,
leans over my dream to see whether I am awake. I,
too, am sleeping and lean over her dream, sheltering
her. We are one another’s present skin. Present kin,
she says. Your blood is my blood. Your blood is from
Asia as mine eons ago when everything was internally
bridged, one aortic root. One mitochondrial missus,
original woman (22).

This “blind woman” reappears frequently, and Lee threads these reocurrences with direct references to Gray’s Anatomy, bird biology, and the Bible, as well as lines by the Chinese woman poet, Li Qingzhao (Song Dynasty, 1084 — ca. 1151). Who is this “blind woman”? Is she Lee herself? Someone she has known? Or simply an imaginary personage? The mystery stays intact.

In general, Lee’s word choice is deliberate and sophisticated. In keeping it so, however, she perhaps risks rendering the already polyphonic and surreal texts more inaccessible to an honest read. That said, her poetic personae are many — birds in flight; the blind woman’s infant daughter; an old gardener; the kwashiorkor, famished red boy; among others. Each is transformed through the simple metaphor of love — a human heart — all of them seeking the genesis of poetic language. This, as an endeavour to write, is already an unusual beginning.

**

Ardor is Karen An-hwei Lee’s second book-length poetry publication. Her first book, In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), was winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her chapbook, God's One Hundred Promises, received the Swan Scythe Press Prize. The recipient of an NEA Feollowship, Karen lives and teaches on the West Coast.

**

Fiona Sze-Lorrain writes poetry under her nom-de-plume, Greta Aart. Some of her recent work appears in Raven Chronicles, New Politics, Oak Bend Review, La Fovea, etc. She is also the editor of Silhouette/Shadow: The Cinematic Art of Gao Xingjian (2007), a translation of Gao Xingjian’s poetry from the French. Fiona lives in France. (www.fionasze.com)

Holy Land by Rauan Klassnik

Black Ocean, 2008
Reviewed by Phil Hopkins


In Rauan Klassnik's new book of short prose poems, Holy Land, the first piece brings us a child in a ditch, possibly bleeding, alongside machetes with angels sharpening the blades, and beasts stomping and spitting. "You belong to them," the voice of the narrator assures us, in reference to the beasts. The world Klassnik conjures over the course of the book follows the promise of this poem closely.

The angels do not disappear, nor do the children or the blood or the beasts. All are held together in excruciating juxtaposition. Excruciating in just the way the poet intends. Nightmares pervade his Holy Land, dream images of a lover's smashed face and the green of contemporary Auschwitz.

"Blood, like the tail of a horse, splashed all over my chest," we are told in the poem featuring the lover's smashed face, which appears in the book's first section, called Wounded. Through all these untitled poems, blood layers thickly over a dystopian landscape where even "the sound of leaves turning red" takes on a sanguinary tinge. The word blood appears in every other poem though certain sections of the book. W.S. Merwin comes to mind, his broken-necked mice pushing balls of blood seeming to shadow Klassnik's images.

The poems line up before the reader and open fire, but not all at once. In careful succession, they rip into the flesh. Unlike those prose poems which lose tension and concision in the absence of line breaks, and whose composition seems perhaps too casual, Klassnik's works are dense and tightly packed with blunt themes. Made of five to ten short sentences strung together in a paragraph, their thematic unities are death, blood, wounds, alienation, brutal sex and divine abdication. To the latter theme, one poem begins "Talking to God's like jerking off."

Yet the poems, for all their unity, maintain distinct identities through the force of their individuated settings, sound, action, and images. These are cinematic pieces, little Buñuel films that slice the eyeballs of the viewer and awaken her ears to their pulse. The sound of the poems is carefully managed, rhythmically taut, and unafraid of grabbing the attention with loud notes at key moments; "We splash, shout, and chase it out."

Given the subject of the works, the broken rhythms often come like blows, though a brief reverie on the skill of a sushi chef provides a moment ecstatic reflection: "Everything he does - each wrap, each cut - says we are immortal." The center of the poem yields "eternity tightening around us" as the narrator sits with his wife in the restaurant marveling at his surroundings. But it is framed by a beginning sentence depicting a man who is waiting to be hung, and a final sentence on him going to the gallows, accompanied by the couple.

What are we to make of contrasts like this? The poet means to highlight subtler ironies than simply the simultaneity of death in life. His violence has a deeper purpose. But it is not until the book begins to sink in that this becomes evident. The sushi/hangman poem offers us, in addition to a dead lobster on a plate of ice and presumably some delicious tuna rolls, the hope of the condemned. He looks at his guards "as though they would tell him he had a chance," and proceeds singing to his demise. It is not a wholly cruel hope here, but rather one of the poet's essential virtues, the chant of the living against time. That the couple accompanies the man to the gallows demonstrates a solidarity with his circumstance that elevates the living by association with death, at least one met in song.

Death by the end of the book becomes one of Klassnik's vices, but his repeated indulgence in it reveals more to us than the vices of many of his contemporaries. The legion of poets raised imitating Ashbery's "Daffy Duck in Hollywood" don't seem part of the same world as Klassnik. His influences seem to come to him through the realm of Ted Hughes and Robert Bly more than the New York School.

Perhaps sex is also a vice here, where kissing takes place in an abattoir, and "to really break someone in requires abuse, confinement, systematic rape." But relationships, for all the nightmares they inspire in these pages, are also the locus of greatest redemption in the book. A poem about driving through the trees indicates a narrator who has become light, who encourages us to "hold each other and kiss.” This admonition resonates all the more deeply by its placement in the middle of a book which also says "Her body is perfect. Bruised and broken." A short poem about girls carrying kittens in a cage over a rocky landscape also, in a touchingly simple way, sustains whatever innocence is left by the time we arrive at the heart of Klassnik's Holy Land. New life is possible, but only when carefully conveyed over a treacherous frontier. Klassnik has written a book full of dark preoccupations that is worth our time to contemplate and understand.

**

Rauan Klassnik was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Now he spends most of his time in Mexico looking after birds and dogs with his wife Edith. His poems have appeared in such journals The North American Review, MiPoesias, No Tell Motel, Caesura, Sentence, Tex!, Pilot Poetry, and Hunger Mountain.

**

Phil Hopkins is a poet and playwright in New York City whose plays have been read and produced at Access Theater, 78th Street Theatre Workshop, Sanctuary: Playwrights Theatre and elsewhere. His poetry has been published at identitytheory.com

Perfect Palinodes: on Justin Marks' [Summer insular] and Ana Bozicevic-Bowling's Document

horse less press, 2007
Octopus Books, 2007
Reviewed by Alexander Dickow


Since my review of Ana Bozicevic-Bowling’s Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006) and Justin Marks’ You Being You by Proxy (Kitchen Press, 2005),(1. Footnotes below) both poets have released a second chapbook. The present review therefore represents “part two” of an ongoing dialogue with these poets, whose work has developed in unexpected and complementary directions.

*

Justin Marks’ second chapbook, [Summer insular] quietly signals its departure from the poetics of Marks’ previous work within its first few lines:

yet I’ve never
given myself over

to I’m giving over
to now in a way

but I can’t be sure
(I haven’t done this before) [...]

The parenthetical notation, “I haven’t done this before” announces his intention to abandon paths familiar to him, such as those explored in his first chapbook, You Being You by Proxy. Since poets grow excessively fond of their verbal tics and their endlessly rewritten poem, Marks’ gesture of reinvention in fact entails a certain daring, despite the humility and simplicity with which Marks masks the risk and sacrifice involved. Although we have grown to associate “experimental poetics” with explosive verbal ostentation, Marks’ chapbook salvages the notion of experiment as a search for uncomfortable territory, as an abandonment of the writer’s established style and procedures.

Marks suggests that his own experiment will involve “giving himself over to now”, sacrificing craft for immediacy (immediacy of the writing process and of the writer’s relation to himself and his surroundings). But he assumes a posture of skepticism towards this immediacy (“I can’t be sure”); a healthy posture, since the minimalist promise of a de-stylized, objective, or de-sublimated language invariably conceals a re-stylization. Marks develops the implications of this problem by suggesting that his “bare” language takes its cue not from the real or from “immediate” experience, but from literary models:

I’m aware
from whom I borrow

(steal outright)
and don’t

No need
to name names

Marks hints (almost paronomastically: borrow / barrow?) at a variety of possible models, such as William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” or “This Is Just to Say,” or Pound’s famous imagist miniature, “In a Station of the Metro” (a dash of the “wet, black bough” and a pinch of Shakespeare’s missing choirs):

One painting: a bare
black tree pressed

into
black canvas

Marks’ nods to literary forebears demystify minimalism(2) as merely one more style, rather than a fresh, unmediated view onto the world or the self (which should not suggest he does not desire such immediacy). In an inverted version of the Emperor’s new clothes, the nudity of language betrays itself as a costume – indeed, an especially prestigious costume, rather than the rags of (linguistic) poverty.

The minimalist tradition may tend by its very nature to recycle the same small, essential set of issues – the immediate vs. the mediate, spontaneity vs. artifice, surface vs. depth, etc. Paradoxically, the mark of [Summer insular]’s success as a collection lies not in the “newness” of its language (since it apparently admits its own status as a particularly ambiguous, self-conscious and sophisticated form of pastiche), but in its critique of its own procedures, as it exposes the limits and contradictions of a minimalist poetics.

I would like to indicate one object of Marks’ critique whose relevance extends to contemporary poetry in general, and that I view as Marks’ most important contribution to my own reflection on contemporary writing. [Summer insular] consistently resists images, both as metaphor and as allusion to objects or to the speaker’s environment. In the example quoted above (one of the few “poetic” images in the collection) the “black tree” constitutes a kind of non-image, since the tree’s “visibility” is no more than a linguistic fiction. As a reply to this first “painting”, Marks writes:

Another painting:
six large shoreline rocks

no shore
no sea

Once again, the “shoreline” has only linguistic existence (one may easily relate these elegant allegories of linguistic virtuality to Mallarmé’s poetry and poetics). Aside from occasional exceptions such as these (exceptions which question the notion or the possibility of the poetic “image”), Marks’ collection employs a strikingly abstract vocabulary. In the absence of imagery, Marks notably exploits the resources of syntactic ambiguity. These ambiguities spring from (and motivate) the near-absence of punctuation in [Summer insular]:

I return to certain habits of mind
which are a part of what I want

but not all Happiness
for example is lacking [...]

Is “Happiness” entirely lacking, or is there some happiness, since “not all Happiness” is lacking? Or:

No help we can’t
provide for ourselves [...]

Is there “no help” for us, are we unable to “provide for ourselves”? Or does no help exist that we cannot provide for ourselves? Such ambiguities,(3) frequent in [Summer insular], displace the poetics of image and the senses in favor of a poetry that seeks to follow the often contradictory movements of consciousness (in this sense, [Summer insular]’s poetics prolong the work of You Being You by Proxy)(4) and of “ordinary” speech. As Marks writes,

The mind having little else
to see to exert its energies on

except itself –
regardless of what its gaze falls on –

sees mainly itself [...]

Marks’ exploration of alternatives to the image offers a healthy dose of perspective on our implicit definitions of the poetic. Williams’ excessively famous maxim, “No ideas but in things,” definitively removed from its context and thoroughly trivialized, seems to have become little more than an authoritative version of the familiar pedagogical injunction “show, don’t tell.” The material, the senses – things, with or without ideas – have dominated the poetry of the 20th Century, so much so that André Breton could scornfully dismiss every rhetorical figure as insignificant and irrelevant to poetry, save metaphor. Some contemporary poetry resembles a concatenation of stuff, a meticulous and tedious mosaic of fleeting sense-impressions: Marks’ chapbook offers a refreshing and salutary reminder that language offers poetic resources other than the sometimes suffocating abundance of the senses.

***

Like Justin Marks, Ana Bozicevic-Bowling’s second chapbook, Document, also explores territory deeply different from her first effort, Morning News. Her trajectory has taken her in a direction directly opposed to that of Marks’ work, away from “understated lyrics of the quotidian,” and toward the marvelous (and the image...) – without, however, forsaking the hushed, allusive style that helped make Morning News a successful collection.

The vocabulary of travel, of the poet’s trajectory, directions and departures, fits Document particularly well, since the book, itself fashioned in its now (alas)(5) out-of-print first edition as a fabulous, baroque passport, offers the reader a voyage, one which provides remarkable cohesion to the book (“book,” rather than “collection”; Document is a single poem more than a series of distinct pieces). Although individual poems sometimes resist organic unity in favor of (apparent) discontinuity, certain memorable emblems, such as the traveler’s “hat” housing his “small family,” recur periodically, building beautifully slender rope bridges between the poems (“Rhode Island,” “Then I write a letter in your handwriting”). Perhaps the most central of these emblems is the “pocketheart”: as the neologism suggests, this heart doubles as the pocket-sized book the reader holds: at once keepsake (the term “pocketheart” appears in “Locket-portrait at the Tavern”) and the token that grants us passage. The true voyage, Document suggests, accomplishes something akin to Petrarch's exchange of hearts – or, inversely, an exchange of hearts is already a kind of travel:

Oh show! me the traveler, in tapdance down the waves.

Our bones may reverse. ("The Messenger")

The displacement of the exclamation point leads to a brief hesitation: is the speaker the traveler ("me the traveler"), or does the speaker ask us to "show [her] the traveler"? The final line of "The Messenger" justifies this hesitation by suggesting that "you" and "I", speaker and addressee, do not merely reverse roles, but exchange their very bodies.

Recurrent characters such as the Traveler, the Messenger, and fleeting figures such as a certain "little yellow clerk" all contribute to Document's enigmatic narrative, which also includes powerfully evocative settings such as "Rhode Island"'s jetty-shrine and the Glass Tavern. Bozicevic-Bowling offers us a story's exquisite silhouette, just enough to produce what the French might call the "effet-monde"(6) (literally "world-effect") of fiction: the impression of a fictional universe which extends far beyond the written page, one of the principal sources of the wonder storytelling (of the best kind) can provoke. Although contemporary poets have abundantly explored the possibilities of fragmentary or partial narrative in recent years (especially in the form of the crimes and investigations of the mystery genre), Bozicevic-Bowling is an unparalleled master of elliptical suggestion. Since the Document experience relies on the poems' interrelations, I can hardly do justice to it, but I will attempt nonetheless to display some part of the poignant subtlety at work in the book's eponymic poem, "Document" (which, forsaking my usual reviewer's restraint, I believe has the makings of a lyrical masterpiece).

Document

The roses are so still. Their nightly heads navigate
a tub of unease, star-tall.

Who stamped the passports of these hordes of spring?
The traveler's oarless, crests on a promise.

The blue chart rolls off the cabin table.
(Shhh.) Ship sheds boats. The roses were too much.

He can always find work as a statue, or moonlight
as museum night-guard. Through greenery, days,

he still walks the park, in a scarf,
unaware he was made to endure...

And look: roses wait, the widowers.
Their brief terms are Nordic, a violin concerto.

Each is a number: an ardor in order.
Like them he is measured against pearly histories.

Releases that rudder. A little bit lower –
(You've almost forgotten -- ): There, we've both signed it.

He plays at being a thorn.

To tie the poem together, Bozicevic-Bowling employs the most hoary of poetic emblems: roses. Perhaps these are the same red and white roses used to play chess with a vagrant in the previous poem ("Air-raid on Washington Square"), arranged mathematically on their chessboard ("Each is a number: an ardor in order": the oxymoron plays their natural geometry against the disorder of the passions with which the tradition associates them). The "tub of unease" in which they grow or float hesitates to become the celestial tub ("star-tall") or the Earthly ship in which we also travel.(7) But "the roses were too much": the ship sheds (life)boats as though the weight of the roses – and the poetic tradition they imply -- threatened to capsize the tub/ship. The traveler reappears once again, this time addressed in the third person. Bozicevic-Bowling often takes advantage of the potential of shifting address: here, the third-person strongly suggests an oblique second person, a feint, an address to the reader by way of a surrogate or proxy (the traveler-as-character). The traveler is "unaware" that he, in fact, is the poem and the poem's object, "made to endure"; similarly, the third person masks our own implication in the poem's address.

The traveler parallels, as I noted before, the Washington Square park vagrant in the previous poem, "Air-raid on Washington Square," and these two figures overlap almost perfectly. A vagrant in the strictest sense, the traveler also "walks the park", "oarless" and without destination. Like the vagrant, the traveler is destitute, in between various odd-jobs: "He can always find work as a statue, or moonlight / as museum night-guard." The brilliant sylleptic enjambment ("He can always find work as...moonlight") introduces a second well-worn poetic motif (moonlight), but renews the cliché by converting it into a verb.

The vocabulary of destitution and solitude in fact subtends the entire poem, which proposes a highly organized allegory of estrangement (and reconciliation). At the poem's opening, the roses "navigate" as "hordes",(8) collectively. The ship's disintegration into many individual boats sends each rose-passenger catastrophically adrift (like the Traveler-vagrant, also a kind of "widower"), as though the bonds of sodality were definitively severed.(9) As the Traveler wanders, the roses wait for him, for his return ("And look: roses wait, the widowers."), like the "promise" of recovery which sustains the Traveler ("The traveler's oarless, crests on a promise").

In the final lines, Bozicevic-Bowling deftly hints at the realization of this promise. "Releases that rudder. A little bit lower -- / (You've almost forgotten --): There, we've both signed it." The metaphor of the rudder as pen, implicitly likening the boat’s wake to an (ephemeral) signature, sketches a compelling scene of re-learning, as the speaker instructs the traveler, directionless a moment ago, how to guide his vessel. The absence of subject – “Releases that rudder” – conflates or confuses Traveler and poet, and suggests companionship and collaboration as an antidote to dereliction.

“He plays at being a thorn”: Perhaps the Traveler’s prickly temperament suspends or challenges the poem’s narrative of rescue; perhaps the Traveler only plays at enmity. In any event, the enigmatic final line tempers the poem’s utopian resonance; reconciliation appears as part of the imaginative game of metaphor.

*

I hope to have demonstrated how Bozicevic-Bowling weaves her images into an evocative story: in short, how the fleeting sense impressions of Document amount to much more than a “concatenation of stuff”; poetry has not, and will not exhaust the resources of the marvelous. And this example hardly exhausts the riches of this brief collection. In a recent blog entry, Ana Bozicevic-Bowling expressed the hope that Document’s reviewers would criticize the collection: “I for one long for a critic who'd poke a kind hole in the balloon of my poetic and essayist strategies (those with review copies of Document, take note)... F it, I want to evolve!”(10) I regret that my immoderate admiration for the book prevents me from voicing more than a certain disappointment at Document’s brevity; my voyage ended too soon!(11) But Document’s differences from Morning News, as well as from her post-Document work, suggest Bozicevic-Bowling, like Marks, has no need of such a critic to evolve in unexpected directions: let us hope they will continue to do so.

----------------------------------------------------
1 See my review on the DIY Publishing Cooperative Weblog, “Four Kitchen Press Chaps.”

2 I am aware that Pound (if not Williams as well) hardly qualifies as “minimalist” beyond a few poems, and that I have (partly out of ignorance, because of my principally French references) neglected many other examples such as Robert Creeley, Aram Saroyan, haiku and a few visual poets. I have chosen these examples as particularly relevant to Marks’ book, and for the purposes of my discussion, I have inevitably reduced “minimalism” to an excessively general and monolithic category. Insofar as minimalism suggests a reduction to the barest, most essential features of a medium, my reductive gesture is perhaps more defensible than usual. By way of nuance, I may add that Marks’ own variety of minimalism avoids pitfalls I’ve observed in poets with whose work I am familiar: a tendency toward the gnomic and the sententious, and an obsession with material objects (see below. For examples of the excesses I just mentioned, see the work of French “minimalist” poets André du Bouchet and Eugène Guillevic, for instance).

3. These examples seem particularly effective to me, since these ambiguities produce two antithetical statements.

4. See my review of Justin Marks’ first chapbook..

5. A selection of poems from Document can be found online in Octopus Magazine, issue 8. “Document” has also appeared in The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel: Second Floor anthology, which also features work by Justin Marks. Let us hope Document will soon become available once again in its entirety.

6. I encountered this expression in the work of Classical philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin, but the term evokes recent theories of fiction such as those of Thomas Pavel. See Barbara Cassin, L'Effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995) 13.

7. The "blue chart" rolling "off the cabin table" likewise conceals a cosmological metaphor, if we read it in light of "Legal Counsel": "They carry also a Map: a / blueprint or astronomer's plan of night sky. These charts are stitched on blue canvas: Architecture, Stars." This blue chart, rolling away, might prefigure the traveler's disorientation: he has lost his Map. Representation appears occasionally as a theme of reflection in Document, as in the relation of the map to the mapped, or the jetty to its “shrine” (“Rhode Island”); unfortunately, this issue falls beyond the scope of my discussion: read Document.

8. I can't resist noting that this admirable line, "Who stamped the passports of these hordes of spring?" is in iambic pentameter.

9. At a recent conference, in San Diego, the French contemporary poet Nathalie Quintane discussed our generation's inability to construct a "we". In this light, Bozicevic-Bowling's emblem of many solitary individuals without community illustrates a significant problem indeed.

10. http://quoileternite.blogspot.com/2008/02/thanks-to-all-who-sent-me-their.html.

11. I will add one critical remark: I fail to understand what justifies the archaic spelling “replayd” in the first line of “The Messenger”. Since such play with archaism has appeared occasionally in more recent poems, a request that these archaisms be justified may serve some purpose.

**

Justin Marks’s poems have recently appeared in Cannibal, Soft Targets, Tarpaulin Sky and the Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel – Second Floor, and are forthcoming in Handsome, the New York Quarterly and Wildlife Poetry Magazine. He is the founder and Editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks and lives in New York City.

**

Ana Bozicevic-Bowling is a Croatian poet writing in English & the author of two chapbooks: Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006) and Document (Octopus Books, 2007). Her recent poems are or will be in Octopus Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, In Posse, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor and Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. She coedits RealPoetik and lives and works in New York City.

**

Alexander Dickow grew up in Moscow, Idaho, and writes poetry in French and English. His reviews have appeared in Jacket, Galatea Resurrects, Sitaudis and the DIY Publishing Cooperative weblog. A bilingual collection, Caramboles, will be released in October 2008 by Argol Editions. He also irregularly maintains a mostly bilingual poetry blog, Voix Off.

Dog Girl by Heidi Lynn Staples

Ahsahta Press, 2007
Reviewed by Heather Sweeney


Dog Girl growls, grumbles, yippees and pouts all in the same breath. Heidi Lynn Staples’ newest collection swells and weaves, pounces and pinwheels. It is a plentiful package busting at the rhymes and merry at the seams. Staples brings it sassily: “…I think that this woman is a struggling hopeful” (65).

Her work is informed by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, a celebration of all things impermanent and imperfect. She embraces uncertainty and relays deep disappointments. Her subject matter is often familiar but her delivery is dizzying: “What stump./Hurts wound and hurts wind/blither him into./Inside world knocks, we die, and dying remember/a star springing into freedom” (64).

Within a daze of cartoon stars, a ping pong game of puns is played. “He untaught my eye” (8) and “o let’s go for our sun say drive,” (9) serve as opening lines respectively. And just as the reader is about to cozy up to fantastical rhymes and word games (“uber tuber super doper doplar radar”) there is a realization of something fierce and eerily animalistic circling many of these poems.

The collection’s title is named for a feral child. The real-life “dog girl,” Oxana Malaya, was raised, in large part, by a pack of dogs in her Ukrainian village. When she was found by authorities at the age of eight, she could hardly speak. This type of neglect is rarely documented. That Staples alludes to Malaya as an aspect of her darkest self is revealed in “”Fonder a Care Kept”:

I was barn. I was razed.

I was mot this flame with no’s sum else blue’s blame noir yearning down the
house.

No, it was I and I blank I bandit blather that louse that fiddle-dee-dee little lame
chimera that came as the name yes different.

I wracked my refrain, that blousy souse.

I was bard. I was crazed.

I was dog girl’s shame.

So, I culled my main. My maze read, you heave to rip rove your aim (she knock-
knocks my nows and raves my here a quickened tousle), spell your dreams with
a big and, play for the game.

I was har. I was phrase

I was aroused by many’s uttered same.

(26)

Many of Staples’ poems touch upon the capabilities and the limitations of language and the body: “His hands touched me with a whole science. I accepted it. His eyes shined with hacker. I opened my codes.” (8). Here, certainty assembles. Lines are precise and rhythmically attuned. However, Staples makes the reader aware that her phonetic hijinks and careful cadence do not replace her core emotions or the inability to express them.

Grief and impermanence are explored through wit and homonym in poems like “Not, You No.” The late-term, miscarried baby is named dei—“organism weaving cellular faction…” (52). It is as if her circus art word play is a coping device. Is this, perhaps, the only way to broach the subject? Staples herself has affirmed that “even employing iambic could not get the joy’s nor the grief’s measure.” The process of grief is beautifully interrogated in “Get Caught, 2005:”

This little catch, leafless brush, is the last of our great kinship; whenever will I see you: and you, this time was limited, live on among the breeze own the horizon as evergreen.

Through the gamut from glee to tragedy, formal forms collide with months and do handstands. We are handed an obscure calendar complete with “Janimerick,” “Februallad,” “Maiku” and “Novekphrasis.” “Octanka” is dotted with slashes, inverted V’s, and asterisks to assemble birds, snowflakes, rain and wind. The poem is a space where a “flaming mind at the crown wings” (39) meets the “wet sweets slicker streets” (41). Staples transforms again and becomes a grim Grimm sister in “Junquain:” “the house/its tv blares/far from friends and family/mother who cut her child into/quarters” (18).

The mundane and the everyday are illuminated with repetition: “The husband and/the coughing. The sun is shining./The soup on the tray. The soup/on the spoon ” (4). Poems like these, which read like trance-induced poetic exercise, lean up against lines you wish you wrote: “in my dream you were church regulated” (33) and starkly philosophical assertions: “our bodies/radiate war” (47). Lines are laced with domestic observations, pop culture and passion. All of it pops and is propelled by song.

Dog Girl is a slurred doggerel. It is burlesque. Styled, but comical Staples crafts keenly. She is super-phonic. The book ends appropriately, “O please, she said, don’t stop…” .

**

Heidi Lynn Staples was born in Florida and raised in the rural southeast. She received degrees from Syracuse University and the University of Georgia. She has served as an assistant editor and/or editor at Salt Hill, Verse, Parakeet and The Georgia Review. She is the author of Guess Can Gallop, Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake and Dog Girl, and has published poems widely, in such magazines as Argotist (U.K.), Best American Poetry 2004, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Free Verse, Green Mountains Review, La Petite Zine, No Tell Motel, Poetry Daily, Ploughshares, Slope, and Verse Daily. She lives in a coastal Irish village, Rosslare Strand, with her husband and young daughter.

**

Heather Sweeney lives in San Diego with her husband and beloved dog where she teaches writing and yoga.

Acquaintance with an Asymptote: on Analfabeto/An Alphabet by Ellen Baxt

Shearsman Books, 2008
Reviewed by Charlotte Grider


Analfabeto /An Alphabet, the title of Ellen Baxt’s latest book, is a false cognate—also known as a “false friend”; it is a title that invites the reader into a rumination on sound, meaning, and relationships. Although “analfabeto” sounds suspiciously like “an alphabet,” this Portuguese adjective actually means “illiterate.” This contradiction is an apt introduction to Ellen, the narrator, writer, and English teacher, who, as a visitor to Brazil, is a linguistic other as she learns Portuguese and reflects on the oddities of idioms in her native English. “False friend” also describes the myriad people that Ellen meets during her stay—such as the man on the street who asks to kiss her (14) or the woman who asks, “I ring your finger?” (57). Ellen seeks solace in language play and “keeps herself company in her own language” (46) by writing in her notebook, often pondering false cognates and words and phrases that confound English language learners.

Analfabeto/An Alphabet is a unified series of poems or tableaux of the narrator’s visit to Brazil, including her encounters with the paradoxical landscape, the culture, the history, and her lovers. But this book is as much about the narrator’s relationship to English as it is a portrait of Brazil.

Most of the poems are very short, perhaps what we might call “flash poetry,” but they are evocative. There are no superfluous words; every word, every character has been deliberately placed. Even the blank space on a page takes on significance as Baxt employs a variety of structures and works with the geography of the page. One page, for example, bears only three lines of text, which appear at the bottom of an otherwise blank page: “Stay, you must to stay the night. The bus doesn’t pass. Goes only/ to Port of Hens, not the city. Do not worry. Tomorrow will/return you. Tomorrow” (35). The space at the top of the page may signify the time that has elapsed since the previous scene, or perhaps it is the unspoken moment of a sexual encounter with the speaker. The blank space enhances interpretive possibilities.

The snippets of text in Portuguese do the same. The text is inviting for Portuguese or Spanish speakers and for inquisitive readers who will not be discomfited by foreign words and phrases. Some of the Portuguese words are translated into English, but these meanings must be culled from the poetry. Readers who favor close-reading will want to find a good Portuguese-English dictionary.

The narrator combines phrases from English lessons and everyday conversations, often meditating on the sound, form, and elasticity of language. Some of the best interpretive spaces exist in broken English or between idioms and their literal translations (English and Portuguese) and between the literal translations of grammatical constructions that involve a change in syntax; this is because, as Ellen says, “Translation is not an equation. The equation is an asymptote” (65). The asymptote metaphor implies that even an accurate translation cannot replicate the shades of meaning found in the original. Like the curved lines of the asymptote, they can be infinitely close, but they will never be one and the same. It is in this infinitesimal space that Ellen finds poetry. In the following excerpt, she calls attention to the common metaphorical usage of “to bleed” in English, which cannot be accurately translated into Portuguese (“sangrar” means to bleed, and “secar” is to dry):

            Sangrar         To bleed or drain
                                 soap, skirt
                                 To know by heart
                                 I’m homesick (for my
                                 country)
                                 salt and wit
            Secar            To bleed, dry (70)

These lines suggest that words carry with them history, geography, and culture that cannot be translated.

As the poet experiments with the elasticity of language, the reader must stretch to the mind’s outer-limits to decode these texts. Interpretation, like translation, is an asymptote: even the best critical analysis will not yield a reading that replicates the author’s “intent.” Readers construct significance. There are, however, some cryptic passages in Analfabeto/An Alphabet that may puzzle the best of critics. Try this one: “When he heard the fox, he recognized this handwriting. Teeth/were reduced to ashes under the tugboat. I will tugboat this reduce” (66).

Well, it’s something to work on.

**

Ellen Baxt has published several chapbooks including Since I Last Wrote (Sona Books), Tender Chemistry (Sona Books), The day is a ladle (Press Toe) and Enumeration of colonies is not EPA approved (Press Toe). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in How2, the tiny, Saint Elizabeth Street and the Outside Voices Younger Poets Anthology. She lives in her hometown of Brooklyn, New York.

**

Charlotte S. Grider writes essays and fiction, and, on occasion, when her right brain breaks the left-brain spell, she writes poetry. Her work has been published in a few literary journals and in one anthology, Washing the Color of Water Golden. She also serves as a staff writer for a weekly newspaper, The St. Joseph Telegraph.

"No Poem Works": A Review of Anthony Hawley's Forget Reading

Shearsman Books, 2008
Reviewed by Mathias Svalina


The sonnet is a poetic form that was invented in 1964 by a young man named Ted Berrigan. Ted Berrigan liked to look at a lot of things. He liked his friends. He liked pronouncements. He liked the stuff he thought about. Especially poetry. All of these things went into the poems he invented; the poems that he named sonnets. The sonnet consists of 14 lines. The sonnet is a poem that is only found in the presence of many others of its kind. Just as the zebra’s stripes make the individual indistinguishable from the mass of black & white movement, the sonnet’s 14 lines make it both an individual poem & part of the wheel & bang of multitude. No lion can kill a sonnet, because the sonnet has ever so many hearts. They beat like quivering mercury.

The sonnet is very similar to another poetic form called the sonnet. The sonnet has a slightly longer tradition, spanning back to the 13th century. The sonnet also consists of 14 lines, which is why it is often mistaken for the sonnet & vice versa. The sonnet is a poem about rhetoric; it is an argument encased in regular rhyme & meter, gut-punched by the volta. Love is a famous form of rhetoric. These sonnets can be found both as individuals & as packs. When a lion attacks one of these sonnets, the other sonnets watch the beast rip the sonnet’s throat out. The smell of the blood is familiar to them, but it is not actually their blood. You can often find this sonnet outside of a poem, such as in a textbook or in the tanline revealed when a man removes his watch. There are many shapes of containers in the world.

Anthony Hawley writes sonnets. His new book, Forget Reading, consists of 74 sonnets divided into 7 sections. Four of those sections are all called “P(r)etty Sonnets,” one of those sections is called “Apple Silence,” one “Record-Breakers” & one “Productive Suffix.” The opening section of P(r)etty Sonnets begins:

      a weathervane
      knows more about poetry
      even though a thermometer
      tells when bones hurt
      frosted window
      who just took a shower

In these six short opening lines the poem jumps from association to digression to sudden image or memory. These jumps are indicative of Hawley’s approach to poetry. His poems become nexus points of attention. The poem that ends this first series of sonnets begins:

      once a turnstile always a turnstile
      the manner by which wind rifles and plexiglass globes
      and ghost-men mounting the memorabilia
      underneath the hothouse lights we look like eels

It closes:

      every off-center photograph
      is a one-act opera in someone’s time zone
      have a seat beside the pennants
      your autographs will arrive shortly
      caller number ten takes home a free pair of season tickets

Sentences are one way that writers control idea. Hawley’s poems resist the sentence. They resist control. But at the same time there is something stable in the poems, something that I call Anthony Hawley.

In these series Hawley creates an autobiography via outward movement rather than the revelation of the internal experience. He is interested in things he sees, things he thinks about, images or phrases from pop culture, high culture and poetry culture. Witness how much ground he stampedes over in one especially jumpy poem:

      and how does the crowd enter the game
      knit together at the radio close knees
      we all grow up to wear hair tonic but only some of us
      seek to temper it with stunt doubles
      unidentifiable vapors found in the earth’s atmosphere
      the political arena’s eyewitnesses
      a one-armed man in malta
      together in the nursery of insatiable disrepair
      which is to say short drink long drink something neat

The sonnet as a form works as a container; it contains the range of attentions, allowing the newspaper headline, the joke & the detail to work on equal levels. Every new thing that Hawley attends to in this sonnet is another stripe on the zebra’s hide.

Hawley is especially attentive to what poems don’t or can’t do well. What they can & cannot contain. He returns to this again & again, tempering the jumpiness of the poems with a reflective & didactic turn. He writes:

      radio is our love
      and we are trapped
      not in wide open space
      but each rely on stations to play one song
      over and over radio can barely hold so much
      the idea of Albuquerque
      won’t fit into a poem

It is not that the idea of a city will not fit in a poem, or that city. It is that an idea itself does not fit into a poem. A poem is part of poetry for an individual, a blip in a larger argument about how one makes the world happen. The individual poem is meaningless outside the herd. In the fourth series of P(r)etty Sonnets, which close the book, Hawley writes:

      no poem works
      but may try and be some
      may try and dig a ditch
      may try and rig a memorable tall thing
      called city, called obelisk
      or president’s head
      what an error what a dumb rational
      gig when poem is better off
      jobless everywhere
      even with shovel and drill
      poem cannot build so useful
      a drawer
      poem is no tomb
      but loiters and makes new time

Hawley’s four series of P(r)etty Sonnets work as rag & bone shops of experience but they also work like the moment in which the subjects of a documentary forget the camera is in their room. The film becomes about documentation, the eye works by accretion rather than narrative. It’s Herzog’s aesthetic in The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner & other films in which his presence an ordinary part of the film. As I read these poems I follow Hawley’s attention & participate in the epistemology of looking at & thinking about stuff. The jumps in attention make the individual mind present. It's a sense of the "I" that does not need sentimental presence.

The other three sections of Forget Reading reveal another aspect of the form that we talk about as the sonnet: each poet who writes a sonnet must create a new form & call it the sonnet. There are many forms called the sonnet. In recent years the poetry world has been introduced to new forms invented by Karen Volkmann, Laynie Brown & Gerard Manley Hopkins among others. Each poet named her or his new discovery the sonnet. Each one of them discovered a new set of formal & process techniques, creating a new kind of poem. They all bear similarities to each other. You can only distinguish between them by the smell of their blood.

In his P(r)etty Sonnets series Hawley is taking a lot from Berrigan’s sonnet & occasionally referencing Dante’s rhetorical sonnet. But in “Apple Silence,” “Record-Breakers” & “Productive Suffix” he discovers three new kinds of sonnets by moving toward the aesthetic extremes of what plays out in a more balanced manner in the P(r)etty Sonnets.

In Apple Silence, Hawley reduces the poem to associations & juxtapositions, forefronting the jumps that occur in the P(r)etty Sonnets. The poems in this series function as much by sound & silliness as they do by concerted world-creation:

      alphabet overdrive
      numeric sing
      ping pong
      all my praxis
      I give over
      to love’s six cylinder
      mother-of-pearl open up
      inlay inlay
      the room
      given to reverb
      so vacancies
      there you have it
      weird the fog
      i was i was

The Apple Silence series sets an opposite spectrum end to the sonnets Hawley writes in Record-Breakers. These depend on rhetorical thickness, on statement & reflection, for instance he opens one poem “an obvious attempt to masquerade fears / with the mawkish ardor of a maypole.” This is a dramatically different kind of speaking than in Apple Silence, but also different from the quickness of sound & sleekness of statement found in the P(r)etty Sonnets. But Record-Breakers are not argument sonnets, guided by the mismatched hemispheres above & below the volta. The rhetorical thickness of these poems opens up to the world through the pelts of sounds the words conjure. They are a linguistic complexity of memory.

Productive Suffix series takes the open terseness of Apple Silence further by spreading each set of 14 lines across the page. The white space of the page both rearranges the connections between lines & phrases. See how this space (or an approximation of the formatting for this page) reduces the stanzas to their own individual moment, yet the connectivity of the entire form, the knowledge that it is a sonnet, requires us to see both the whole & the discrete:

      ever the furtive
      zones




birds eat
birds





      I climb
      back


to memories
in fountains





masquerade
of water






            what little
            percentage
         of us



is more than holes

By separating the lines these poems draw attention to the formal obedience, they attempt to be sonnets at the moment of nearly not being sonnets. But they also replicate the individual-to-whole relationship of the sonnet series.

These three series are not merely “experiments” with the sonnet parameters or in any way “merely.” They are attempts to use the poem to represent a range of experiences—from the intellectualized memory to the imagist & linguistic immediacy. But just like the P(r)etty Sonnets, they depend on the series for meaning & survival. Individually, they are poems of interesting sound or idea, but collectively they resist the attacks of the lion.

Unlike the sonnet, Hawley’s sonnet is not a poem. The sonnet is a series that works by containment. The more consistently the sonnet defines the space between what is & what is not a poem, the more it allows into the poem.

The herd contains the zebras. Each zebra contains its stripes. But also blood & bone & food & fear. I contain many things. Most of them I’d prefer not to talk about. Politics is a kind of container because it is speaking & speaking is teaching because it connects two things & teaching is a form that requires at least two writers for every poem & if you continue to extend you can see that when you begin to write a poem you could keep on writing until the meat of your hands slide off the bone like a soft, loose cotton sock.

Poetry is unlike politics in many ways, but it is also speaking. The work of being a poet is partially choosing what to not write about. The sonnet works to keep the world out of the poem, but the sonnet series seeks to allow the world into the poems.

**

Anthony Hawley is the author of two full-length collections of poetry Forget Reading (2008) and The Concerto Form (2006) and four chapbooks Autobiography/Oughtabiography (Counterpath Press 2007), Record-breakers (Ori is the New Apple Press 2007), Afield (Ugly Duckling Presse 2004) and Vocative (Phylum Press 2004). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Hat, The Tiny, 26, 1913, and Verse. He currently teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

**

All of the Mathias Svalina found today in North America--and they number in the range of 1--are descendants of approximately 100 such prior Svalina's introduced in New York City's Central Park in the early 1890s. A society dedicated to introducing into America all of the Mathias Svalina mentioned in the works of Shakespeare set this Svalina free.

How To Be Perfect by Ron Padgett

Coffee House Press, 2007
Reviewed by John Findura


For those who are already fans of Ron Padgett, reading a review of his newest book, How To Be Perfect, is not going to tell them anything they don’t already know (although they are more than welcome to stick around for this one). Padgett is one of a select few poets who manage to be authentically funny while digging deep into an internal wisdom, and still be able to maintain the all important “street cred.” He speaks in a next-door-neighbor frankness that somehow manages to bounce back and forth between the mundane and the absurd, but with a gentleness that urges the reader on like the calling of a warm bed on a cold night.

Padgett writes about things like washing dishes (“Rinso”), playing with a top (“Tops”), and anxiety over The Swiss Family Robinson, and all are enjoyable. As Padgett writes in “The Swiss Family Robinson”, “it’s interesting not to know / something that everyone else knows.” That is one of the most interesting things I’ve heard a poet say in a long time, and it makes me feel better that I’ve never seen an episode of Lost. In an age where technology brings you the facts as fast as you can type in the search words, managing to somehow keep away from that constant stream of information is a work of art in itself. Yet later in the poem, he comes to the discovery that “I would know something that / most people don’t know.” Anyone reading How To Be Perfect can leave with that phrase ringing in their ears.

Humor is one of Padgett’s greatest assets, from the obvious groans of

      And they entered the ark
      two by two

      except for the studs
      which were two by four

to the more cerebral

      I think that Geoffrey Chaucer did not move
      the way a modern person moves.
      He moved only an inch at a time
      […]
      […] time moved in short lurches
      and was slightly jagged and had fewer colors
      for them to be in. But that was good. Humanity
      has to take it one step at a time.

Padgett takes all the steps in one single leap, because he is that sure of his poetic footing.

The centerpiece of the collection is poem “How To Be Perfect.” It is a simple list of ways that you, too, can achieve perfection. The first directive is “Get some sleep” followed immediately by “Don’t give advice.” The poem starts to snowball from there to things like “Make eye contact with a tree” and “Design activities so that they show a pleasing balance / and variety.” It begins to hit its stride at the time of

      Be kind to old people, even if they are obnoxious. When you
      become old, be kind to young people. Do not throw your cane at
      them when they call you grandpa. They are your grandchildren!

My favorite trio appear within the space of four lines: “Calm down”, “Visit foreign countries, except those whose inhabitants have / expressed a desire to kill you” and my own personal choice, “Look at that bird over there.” Perhaps a close second would be “Do not wander through train stations muttering “We’re all / going to die!”” or “Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across / the street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are / trapped in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic.” If his membership of the New York School was not apparent before, at least his connection to New York City is crystal clear in those lines.

It’s no secret that most writers, poets and novelists included, almost always attempt to address the big picture. They ask the big questions, focus on the big scenarios, and expect to connect with a big audience who also wants answers about these big things. But what really connects people are the small things, the overlooked things, and ultimately this is what How To Be Perfect focuses on. From Shecky Greene to the Virgin Mary’s toenails in paintings of the Italian renaissance, it is these small moments that really bond the reader to the poet. Even sex in Edwardian England seems to be an everyday natural occurrence in Padgett’s world.

Go, pick up How To Be Perfect, and just enjoy it. But first, look at that bird over there.

**

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1942, Ron Padgett is the author of numerous works including the poetry collections Great Balls of Fire, Triangles in the Afternoon, and The Big Something; a volume of selected prose entitled Blood Work; and translations of books by Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Marcel Duchamp. He lives in New York City, where he is the Publications Director for Teachers and Writers Collaborative.

**

John Findura holds an MFA in Poetry from The New School. His poetry and criticism can be found or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, GlitterPony, and The Fortean Times, among others. He teaches in Northern New Jersey and lives with his wife, their puppy, and a charm of finches.

Histories of Bodies by Mariko Nagai

Red Hen Press, 2007
Reviewed by Karen Rigby


Mariko Nagai’s award-winning book illuminates desire, grief, faith, the fallibility of words, family and other timeless themes, often using the contemplative voice established in the title poem: “In this early morning, words / are bodies / heaped up high, each body imprinted with past, they are remembrance. But we have / already turned our eyes inward, we do not hear.”

Reading Histories of Bodies is like delving into the nautilus. We spiral into the space Nagai creates, returning to repeated images and ideas like cicadas, physicality, and memory. She draws you in with lines that surprise you: “The snow falls like the knife of the butcher cutting the meat into glorious names, like the / plums left unplucked, warped with bruises hidden underneath their raw skin” (“Practical Truth”, p. 51). Here, the contrast between falling snow and the violence of the knife, the sheer weight of the plums, is hard to visualize, especially when subsequent lines describe the snow as being “light”. This could seem like a surreal simile pushed too far. How would snow fall like the knife of a butcher? What are the glorious names? Nevertheless, the poet succeeds by way of Pope’s “sound before sense”.

Sometimes the force in poetry comes from a source beyond us, sometimes the best poetry is possessed by strangeness, like the prophet Ezekiel eating the scroll in the Bible, or Christopher Smart exclaiming in “Jubilate Agno”. Nagai’s strongest poems enter the psychological territory where the “real” that grounds us to the world begins to blur with mystery.

On occasion, the language is less polished. One poem is titled “Untitled”. A paper crane is likened to a butterfly—“See how their wings are evermore fragile, / a buttefly” (p. 25) —which is too similar to produce the spark of wonder the best metaphors can. In another poem “walls are thin like a torso of a woman / with anorexia nervosa” (p. 37). Now and then, too, the closing lines of the poems explain a shade too much. Apart from these minor instances, most of the poems unfold gracefully without faltering.

One of the more memorable poems is “Many Are Called”, with its echoes of Matthew 3:17. In Nagai’s poem we’re given an omniscient view of a crowded train in Tokyo:

MANY ARE CALLED

Underneath this city, there is another city, one more modern, more recent in its origin. Here, in these dark tunnels where pomegranates fall, all these thoughts fly around like moths, lured by light, by sweet smell of decay, trapping themselves by their own free choice in the confined space of their making: It can’t already be June, it can’t already be Monday, that’s what they say, that’s what people keep muttering to themselves this morning as they cradle the last of the sleep in their coffee cups, for the precious moments in which they huddle in themselves before they must sign off their lives to something they don’t believe in, to something they think they cannot escape from. As they rock in the rhythm of the train, someone thinks, A moth in spider’s nest, though she does not see the intricate weaving of the thin threads, ready to untangle between our fingers, snapping the threads. But it’s like this: It’s already June, I’m already 28 and I haven’t done anything, many are talking, comforting us in these minutes of our lives when we descend down to darkness, to darkness so dark that we are helpless, our bodies swaying left to right, left to right as if we’re rocking in prayer, but we are not praying. We’re boxed in the freight, we’re boxed in a subway car, this is the death train, but unlike them, forced away from their homes because of blood, we chose this train, we chose to be on it, we are boxed in, we’re as helpless, we tell ourselves, positioning ourselves to the gravity, the pull of the train. Our highest dreams thrown out like our last night’s dinner, a woman’s dream flies past, landing silently on the subway floor like the last note of an aria, I wish someone loved me, I wish He loved me, a thought so light it floats quietly down, hovers an inch or two above the floor, then lands, landing as someone steps on it. I wish somebody loved me, but I’m not pretty enough, I’m not smart enough, she closes her thoughts from us, she looks down to the book on her lap, the thick one, heavy like her sadness, but she doesn’t stop her reading, the thick book stays where it is, the woman, though, reads so little, doesn’t really read, just daydreams, her hopes going where we are going, she stays where she is, on the seat across. We are all going somewhere we have to each day, pulled by the invisible strings, and we say, I can go no other place, this is where I belong. No, we go to places only if we must, but must is a habit, after all, we can go anywhere as long as we let ourselves, anywhere we want to, only if we want to, she can stretch her arms as if in flight, and leave, leave this train, this city…only if she wants to. We think there’s no way out, our lives guided by some invisible lines only fate has right to hold, right to control. But we are closer to grace, we are closer to where we were before we were born, before we forgot the songs, before we forgot the promises, we are closer to grace in the darkness of our own making, we are not of time—only if we let it, only if we let the watch unshackle us, but we forget, as we have forgotten, as soon as we open our eyes. Many are called and many do not hear.

—Tokyo, Japan, December 2002

Here, Nagai uses pathos and gentle humor to explore what popular culture coins the “quarter-life crisis”—a phenomenon wherein the post-college crowd worries about the future, accomplishments, partnerships, or lack thereof. Immediate problems always seem urgent to the person involved, but Nagai reminds us that our daily concerns are not insurmountable. There is more to the world than the tangible, there is another world, not one of platitudes, but one of beauty and terror and surrender, the place we could reach if we would let time “unshackle” us.

At its core, this is a book about making one’s way through the multiple layers that define us. We can only see the future when we reconcile the past. The poet says it best in “The Acceptable Death” (p. 62): “Here are two cities, we live in two worlds. / One of our familiar, one of our imagination.” In “A City of Absent Lovers” (p. 54) we glimpse this world of imagination again: “…you imagine that there is some connection between love and beauty, something so intangible that this is where all the songs come from, and, when the last note lingers like a lost memory, where they go.” This where, this place where all songs originate, this place “before we were born” can be thought of as the more sophisticated version of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “stately mansions”.

Like the nautilus, Nagai’s poetry is both intimate and otherworldly. What appears to be coolly elegant at first draws you towards it and carries a roar, what appears to be built from simple images is, on a second reading, iridescent.

**

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Mariko Nagai has lived in Europe and America most of her life, earning a Masters of Arts degree in Creative Writing with a concentration in poetry from New York University, where she was the Erich Maria Remarque Poetry Fellow. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Pushcart Award twice, in both poetry and short story, and has received numerous fellowships and scholarships from art foundations and writers’ conferences. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She also translates modern and contemporary Japanese poems and fiction into English. Currently, she teaches creative writing and literature at Temple University Japan Campus, where she also directs the Writing Programs.

**

Karen Rigby received a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota in 2004. Her second chapbook, Savage Machinery, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Sight Progress by Zhang Er, translated by Rachel Levitsky, with the author

Pleasure Boat Studio, 2006
Reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson


The Emily Cheung's art on the cover of Sight Progress gives a useful indication of what poet Zhang Er means by "sight" and "progress." The image billows and circles, as though it is both rising above and surrounding three brightly colored "targets," each a nexus in itself. One of the billows is smoky, threatening to dissipate into the atmosphere, while another is a black outline, both better defined and more empty, ephemeral, than its counterpart. Thus it manifests that for Zhang Er, vision–-in both its literal and imaginative terms–-does not function in the mode of linear narrative, but like a rhythmic or melodic pattern, "a thin and tender female voice trailing, almost child-like as it drifts from the other shore as a white wave or mist, coming close, then closer, before slipping away." In keeping with that vision, Zhang Er's poems in this collection couple sharp (especially visual) perceptions with a tidal sense of forward movement and retraction.

The collection, a series of prose poems, makes maximal use of linearity implied in narrative and prose constructions. The language is direct and mostly quite plainspoken. Rachel Levitsky's translation seems right on the mark in this sense, as it abets the poems in doing their work without fuss or unnecessary adornment (though at times it might have been helpful to more strongly assert an idiomatic English syntax). Form and translation coalesce to underline the forward movement of prose even as the poems continually voice doubt at the possibility of such 'progress.' The tone of this writing is consistently controlled and never showy, yet the tension between forward movement and the aporia that places a drag on such motion slowly wraps around the reader to create a compelling tension. The poem "Today," for instance "Goes straight into history, to a day in the future when I'll look back on it. I'll remember how the sea rises, how the heavens condescend, and the moment they meet, a little cloudy . . ." The projective movement into the future is immediately turned on its head as the speaker, in a feat of the paradoxical, anticipates looking back on it. The seam of future and past meets only cloudily, or perhaps as a palimpsest, the writing of which recommences over and over, as in "Begin Again" when one must "Turn over the page, full with writing, begin again on the back with a new line." Here, the meeting of past and present acquires a literally and figuratively painful aspect, as the page flips and "an accidental slice, the hand bleeding again at paper's edge." Thus the tug between future and past, between affirmation and pessimism leads to the necessity of the present, a seam that is variously cloudy and cutting but is, in the end, all that we have. Zhang Er then refashions necessity as resourcefulness, "Only necessity, imagination's necessity, to stretch beyond the restriction of a lifetime."

The reader enters this poetry as a swirling current that moves with acuity, and even frequent pleasure, amid the material details of the world while the poems question what, if anything, moves at the center of experience: "It all happened here. Yet, nothing happens here." Coupled with that doubt is a muted yet insistent critique of the woman's role in society. Often this thematic thread is connected with Zhang Er's Chinese heritage, but opens outward as well to a pointed examination at the feminine in other realms– western religion or familial arrangements in which wives and daughters are expected to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of men. The aptly titled "Sacrifice," makes this especially evident. Zhang Er writes that the woman's "endurance, the drudgery, bearing the weight while abstaining . . . grows his career, social advance, wealth, not her fortitude." At a time when many younger women step back from allying themselves with feminism, even claiming (wrongly, in my view) that gender discrimination is no longer an issue, Zhang Er's certitude is bracing and admonitory: for a woman, "success is survival, not self-sacrifice."

A relevant peculiarity of these poems is that the sentence construction frequently effaces the subject (e.g. "One Just Divorced and the Other Just Married" begins: "Driving together up the rambling, circuitous mountain road . . ."). This may be an artifact of the poem's origins in the syntax of another language; I can't comment knowledgeably on this. However, the results mark the poems in interesting ways. Firstly, by omitting a subject, the reader is implicated in the process of the poem, becoming that subject; at the same time, identity or subjectivity emerges slowly, so that in the aforementioned poem, it only slowly develops that the protagonists are females traveling in Italy. There's a small shock at the end, when one of the emergent protagonists of the poem "notices everyone looking. At the two of them, the only women there." The absent subject is suddenly quite present, multiple, and female. It's a striking way to get across the continuing otherness of feminine experience.

The book works its own expansion and contraction through varying subjectivities, eras, geographies, and cultures. Zhang Er peers steadfastly into the details that comprise incident and meaning without forcing final conclusions upon what she's absorbed. "Like wind," she writes, "you can hear it, feel its very temperature, but you can't grab its form." At times, this elusiveness elicits feelings of oppression, terror, perhaps awe. To be a an untethered explorer of the world has its perils; "Out past the sight of shore you lose your direction, your focus/aim" and find yourself displaced, "lacking all anchor of support." The risk required here comes of that necessity inherent to survival. And it has its payoff, for in pushing at the boundaries, beyond the progress of what one can daily cull by sight, the explorer makes for a more elastic, if sometimes overwhelming, world. Zhang Er writes, "There is a saying,' Imagination needs room to make art that lives.'" Sight Progress offers a brave and honest engagement at the border crossing of imagination and survival.

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Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to New York City in 1986. Her poetry, non-fiction writing, and essays have appeared in publications in Taiwan, China, the American émigré community and in a number of American journals. She is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She has read from her work at international festivals, conferences, reading series and universities in China, France, Portugal, Russia, Peru, Singapore, Hong Kong as well as in the U.S. She currently teaches at Evergreen-Tacoma.

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Elizabeth Robinson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Pure Descent, winner of the National Poetry Series, Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series, Under that Silky Roof, House Made of Silver, and Bed of Lists. She has been awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. She is co-editor of 26, a magazine of poetry and poetics, EtherDome, a press dedicated to publishing the work of emerging women poets, and Instance Press.

Chanteuse/Cantatrice by Catherine Daly

Factory School, 2007
Reviewed by Laura Goldstein


Catherine Daly’s 2007 publication Chanteuse/Cantatrice asks readers to grapple with the concept of the binary as soon as they encounter the book itself: the book has two names, two covers and, as listed in the table of contents, each poem has two titles. This very basic setup soon proliferates into a multitude of possibilities for reading and interpreting the text. Daly offers a comment about the book on Powells.com in an attempt to clarify:

It is called Chanteuse / Cantatrice. It is a two sided book; it can be read either front to back, top of the page to bottom (as one generally reads English) but for a completely different but also "written" book, it can be read from back to front, bottom to top. Hence the odd-seeming title; it is two titles, for two books in one! It is a book of political poetry about collaboration!

Although her statement helps to begin to consider the doubling in the framework as a basis for interpretation, it doesn’t seem to actually be possible to follow these directions. Attempting to read the book from “back to front, bottom to top”, all of the words are upside-down. However, this openness suggests a crucial consideration about our modern political role as citizens given directives: each individual (individual person, individual reader) must ultimately find their own way to cope with the material that composes their lives. The book is ostensibly an extended meditation on war-- its impact, its language, and the difficulty of using language to describe it. Making this an apparent task that can be explored through reading as well, Daly raises the political stakes of the book as she claims that

      The book is a privileged method of exchange
                                          medium

This said (or written) early on, she constructs a space in which she can remain aware of her own involvement in historical process as a poet. Also, through such innovative spacing, she insists on the importance of structure as meaning in the political nature of text as well, and demands that the reader become an active participant.

With both titles, she has announced that she has stepped into the role of singer along with that of poet. The role of the singer is also split in the titles: the word “chanteuse” and the word “cantatrice” have almost the same meaning of “female singer”. However, “chanteuse” tends to imply that the singing takes place in a bar or club, while “cantatrice” refers to an opera singer. So which venue is this, high verse or common language? Daly’s language constantly oscillates, blends and finds new spaces within both, searching for a juncture that may somehow adequately describe our real experiences that exist between ideals and the mundane.

The first section of the book, called “Chanteuse” is a prelude that lays out the terms of the project by flipping between description and demonstration. Like Muriel Rukeyser, Daly uses both form and content to convey these political messages. In her use of voice, she finds it imperative to include self-examination in this mode. She immediately locates the question driving her method, asking “is singing saying?”(1) Soon, the answers start to roll in on continually varying metaphors connecting the evolution of song to subjects in the world that are in motion, that make sound themselves:

      Croon amphibious landing craft,
      Subatomic particle, we navigate by sound and range

The poems are themselves suggestions for how one may respond, by finding the sound within language and using it to answer back to forces that act upon one in the world.

In this way, a singer uses the element of projected voice to express personal and social concerns, making the personally traumatic a cause for public examination. In the book, her primary voice consistently breaks into other voices, showing that a contemporary subjectivity has absorbed and must include many. Daly constructs a complex melody that follows traditions, but also strays and surprises. She develops a unique form for these poems throughout the book by creating patterns of text and space, where single words become emphasized in the course of her song, and spaces provide a rhythm.

This kind of play between voice and silence is at the whirling core of her use and examination of the binary, exacerbated into a deep divide between those we identify as other in times of war. In poem after poem, Daly finds ways to use doubling as a poetic that might provide an antidote. For instance, she repeats elements of language in the retelling of an event in order to reveal the double nature of identity when hiding oneself during war:

            accidentally dropped her handbag
      packed with a handgun
      an officer reached to pick it up            for her—
      she managed to beat him to it,
            not beat him with it (4)

So how can the other that is created in war be resolved or what is “collaboration linked with peace”? (20) We are challenged to become her collaborators by bridging the traditional binary created between writer and reader, contributing our decisions about reading in various ways and joining her in this project. Although her directions can’t be followed to the letter to read the book in two ways, the gestures towards such conditions open up even subtler poetics. A new title at the end of each poem provides a profoundly “other” tone for the space after reading a poem, suggesting that rereading it “backwards” means remembering it in the context of the new title. In this new definition, Daly reconsiders the stigma that has been placed on the word “collaboration” as it emerges from contexts of war by showing that war isolates us as far as it can—first into groups and finally into a state of fierce survival as individuals. She writes, “we worked/ together to make/ collaboration a dirty word” (17). However, we are asked to participate in a resurrection of the term and social activity of collaboration, by preventing the song that has emerged from trauma from remaining an individual voice that is simple and directive, and that merely perpetuates the dynamic of trauma. Daly asks us to help transform the poetry into a message that we must not only listen to from many perspectives but must add to with our own actions.

Her procedure is itself a method that ”upsets inherited modes of life, loosens control of traditional authorities” (4) and ultimately provides many layers for various types of readers to gain access to the piece using language play, self-reference, page space, the structure of the book itself and direct political content. Above all, Daly demonstrates the height of human creative freedom through critical thinking that she finds the lack of the most criminal aspect of war, as well as possibly the cause of it. Here, her form creates an awareness of the value and importance of other viewpoints, actually providing gestures towards answers that can only be completed through collaboration.

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Catherine Daly is the author of a number of poetry collections, including DaDaDa (Salt Publishing, 2003), Locket (Tupelo Press, 2005), Secret Kitty (Ahadada Press, 2006), Paper Craft (Moria Press, 2006), To Delite and Instruct (blue lion books, 2006), Chanteuse/Cantatrice (factory school, 2007), and the forthcoming Vauxhall (Shearsman Press, 2008). She is a teacher and software developer of online business applications for various clients, shttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifuch as Fox, Goldman Sachs, NASA, and Universal. She has been teaching on and off since an undergraduate teacher’s assistantship in the History of Mathematics. Daly taught the first online poetry workshops in the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program in addition to critical theory, women’s studies, and literature courses at UCLA Extension, Antioch LA, West LA College, LA Southwest College, and elsewhere. She has written a longtime blog titled “A List, A Misc.”

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Laura Goldstein is an experimental writer and multi-media artist whose poems have been published in print journals as well as online. Recent work can be found at The Little Magazine and PFS Post. She teaches writing at Loyola University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and performs in Chicago. Her first chapbook, Ice In Intervals, is due out from Hex Press this summer.

I'm The Man Who Loves You by Amy King

BlazeVOX [books], 2007
Reviewed by Brandi Homan





The title poem from Amy King’s I’m The Man Who Loves You serves as an example of one of King’s true strengths: her confidence. She says:

I began this day by celebrating the hour of my conception
and a simultaneous abandonment of complete non-existence; (34)

Such self-confidence is evident throughout the rest of the work as well, but let’s be clear that it is not arrogance, either unearned or earned—it’s exuberance. King has an unabashed willingness to abandon “non-existence,” to claim her space in the world. “She won’t adhere / to personal space. / She won’t appear / as a potted plant” (71).

As we continue to wade through the aftermath resulting from Chicago Review’s recent articles questioning the nature of the relationship between gender and (especially “experimental” or “avant-garde”) poetry, King’s desire to dive in and both embrace and upend traditional gender roles is refreshing. She continues:

I put on my long black dream and stepped into the world of women
to live among my female brothers who know how to grow
up on ink that occasionally vanishes & candles that eat at the wick;
(34)

The choice of the phrase “female brothers” presents readers with a quandary—Is King intentionally playing with the notion that feminism has been accused of trying to give women “masculine” traits in order to ascertain status? Why not “sisters”? Or is she self-consciously attempting to feminize male writers by assigning their fraternity the “female” title? Instead, the compounding of the two words draws attention to the ever-confusing, and ultimately failing, terminology surrounding gender roles, here specifically among artists.

As much as King, throughout, urges us (and in the previous quote, women writers in particular) to step forward and accept our lives and ourselves, she does so in a way that is disarmingly inclusive, reminding us to “Be small, o person” (74). She looks at our species with a beneficent eye, saying “…it’s amazing how children never quite come to resemble / their grown-up-middle-aged bodies” (64). While these lines could be interpreted as simply name-calling (adults behaving like children), the phrasing suggests that we are, at our most basic, children who should be looked upon with kindness stemming from that very fact—much like how we view our own children. Not that this tendency toward compassion is surprising from King, consider the community-building work that she does with the well-recognized online journal, MiPOesias.

Yet King is not naïve about the relentless potential for expanse (resulting from both human nature and the advent of the digital age) and cruelty that lies between humans in contemporary society:

… The smallest story of two people coming
Together imitates a circus tent in winter holding
Everyone beneath it. (15)

Here, King is acknowledging the “infinite distances” between even the closest people that Rilke has referred to, continuing on elsewhere to complicate the shakiness of relationships further by bringing in that which has the utmost potential for disembodiment: technology.

In his book Some Ether, Nick Flynn refers to the term “Angelization” (coined by Marshall McLuhan), which Flynn describes as “the process / by which any technology disembodies us.” King addresses this erosion several times throughout I’m The Man Who Loves You, compiling examples of answering machines, cables, hybrid vehicles, and digital photos, as in the following:

…I’m attaching a computer-shot photograph
so you know what I mean or can at least see
a pixilated version of my face as it thinks
your name… (77)

King brings the two ideas together—the instability of our relations with one another resulting from nature as well as technology—in phrases like:

…Someone should study
The extracting power one has with another: only everything’s
A signal when you turn your radar on. (15)

I’m The Man Who Loves You is just such a study, with just such a predicament. With so much happening so fast, so often, in today’s society, how are we to determine which signals ultimately have meaning?

King’s underlying compassion does not, however, keep her from being sharp-nosed about the state of the world and our country. In a book filled with highly charged, subversive political commentary, she knows what we’re up against:

…Ultimately, what
is this for—what is it: days of finger clipping,
an elbow of personal risk to maintain state-wide
funding, and a gun using things
you love against you. (56)

But King’s promotion of self and species—plus her slant toward the political—are big-picture issues, and I’m The Man Who Loves You provides many more concrete lyrical pleasures. The book is varied, from often startling word choices to the different lengths/styles/subjects King employs. I’m The Man Who Loves You is organized alphabetically, which is potentially a risk; however, because the work itself takes so many risks, leaps, this choice seems congruent with the scope of her project.

Juxtaposed with outlandish detail, her declarative, assertive moments work well, keeping the poems from being too tongue-in-cheek or abstract. Similarly, moments of mini-narrative help keep readers grounded. Her blunt, apt titles are thoroughly enjoyable (a few favorites being “I’ve Only Got One of Me in Here” and “Yes, You”). She also frequently plays with sound, as evidenced by these lines from “On the Way to Dinner, An Objective Remark Written Down,” combining sibilance, alliteration, and assonance into a veritable aural bouquet:

…A cunning clay
can, a little pan, red devil hot pulp kiss and then the gin’s
sheen lipped across your streaming teeth slips back lick. (53)

Even though King does something that there should be more of in contemporary poetry—addresses the sociopolitical aspects of life in the 21st century head on—I’m The Man Who Loves You accomplishes much more. It is disjointed, beautifully grotesque, and unsparing, yet it is ultimately hopeful, kind, and entertaining. In “I Used to Be Amy King,” King says, “…we are bred to be the best neglected fun, forthcoming” (32). Believe you me, King is this type of fun. I’m The Man Who Loves You is not to be neglected. This book is for anyone who has ever stepped into, or wanted to step into, their own “long black dream.”

**

Amy King is the author of I’m The Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books, The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press), and most recently, Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press). She is the editor of the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania) and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry. Amy King was also the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. She is currently editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School.

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Brandi Homan is the author of Hard Reds, forthcoming from Shearsman Books in September, and Two Kinds of Arson, a chapbook from dancing girl press. She is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books.