| Mostly
Books, January 28, 2010
Calling All Muses
 a
review by Lucille Lang Day
The Sister from Below: When the Muse
Gets Her Way, a memoir with poems, by Naomi
Ruth Lowinsky, Fisher King Press, Carmel, California,
2009, 248 pages, $25 paperback, www.fisherkingpress.com.
The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her
Way, by poet and Jungian analyst Naomi Ruth
Lowinsky, is a multi-faceted book. First, it is
a book about becoming a poet, about summoning one’s
muses. But it is much more than that: it’s
also a memoir and family story, a book about coming
to terms with the events and experiences of one’s
life. Most broadly, it’s a book about self-realization,
finding one’s deepest self, and discovering
the connections between one’s life and the
timeless realm of myths. For Lowinsky, this quest
includes exploration of and learning to embody a
feminist spirituality. Finally, for fans (and prospective
fans!) of Lowinsky’s poetry, The Sister
from Below discusses many of the poems from
her two collections, red clay is talking
and crimes of the dreamer, and her chapbook,
a maze, and thus serves as a guide to her
poems and their genesis.
The
Sister is Lowinsky’s muse in her many guises.
She can take the form of actual people, living or
dead, mythical figures, or individuals drawn wholly
from Lowinsky’s imagination: an Italian nurse
who tended Lowinsky in early childhood, Lowinsky’s
grandmother who died in the Holocaust, Sappho, Eurydice,
Old Mother India, the biblical Naomi, and many others.
The muse can even appear as a male figure, such
as one of Lowinsky’s early lovers or the mysterious
Shaman of the Stones.
Lowinsky’s
muses speak through her, and she speaks to them.
In “a grandmother speaks from the other side,”
from red clay is talking, her grandmother/muse
says:
| |
don’t leave me out
you don’t know how often
I’ve touched you
since I first felt you leap
fish out of the blue
in the new world
|
In another poem, “muse,” from a
maze, Lowinsky speaks to this grandmother:
Ultimately, who or what is the muse? Lowinsky
suggests that the muse could be the soul, the Self
as in Jungian psychology, inspiration, a lover,
a god or goddess, an intermediary between worlds,
or all of the above. Wisely, she does not try to
pin the muse down to a single definition or explanation,
but instead focuses on conveying her own experiences
in which the muse “lifts the veil on other
realities.”
Lowinsky
was the first child born in America to a Jewish
family that fled the Holocaust in Europe. Many of
her father’s relatives, including his parents,
did not survive. Thus, Lowinsky grew up surrounded
by great hope, expectation, sorrow, and fear. Creativity
also abounded around her: her father was a brilliant
professor of music, her maternal grandmother a painter.
Lowinsky married young, bore two children, and traveled
to India with her husband, a Peace Corps physician.
There, they adopted a ten-month old Indian girl
who had been abandoned by her impoverished mother,
and Lowinsky learned about the gods, goddesses,
and sacred practices of Hinduism. Back in the U.S.,
Lowinsky’s marriage unraveled, and ultimately,
with struggle and self-questioning, she developed
her identity as a poet and Jungian. This is a bare-bones
outline of the rich family and personal story that
Lowinsky tells in The Sister from Below,
and which informs her poetry.
“Elephant
Blessing,” a poem from red clay is talking
that recounts events from a trip back to India with
her daughter Shanti, now an adult, concludes ecstatically:
This poem illustrates how, for Lowinsky, the sacred
becomes feminine and erotic. Sex, orgasm, birth,
motherhood, and milk are all manifestations of the
divine. In a chapter entitled “The Book of
Ruth: Naomi’s Version,” Ruth and Naomi
bring the Goddess back to Judaism, and we learn
that in the poem “in the real story,”
from crimes of the dreamer, the “Ur
Naomi” is speaking to the poet:
| |
you are a dancing girl
a devadesi from the temple at Jaipur
or maybe it is Ur
the sacred fire’s been lit
I’ve taught you how
to catch your own sweet pulse—
|
Who
should read The Sister from Below? Poets,
feminists, Jungians, seekers, artists of all kinds,
people interested in alternative spirituality or
engaged in the struggle to weave the threads of
their own lives into a beautiful, coherent whole.
It’s a unique and uplifting journey, an inspiring
read.
Lucille Lang Day’s new
book of poetry is The Curvature of Blue. She
is the founder and director of Scarlet Tanager Books,
which published two poetry books by Naomi Lowinsky
mentioned in this review, red clay is talking
and crimes of the dreamer. Lucille Lang
Day lives in Oakland, California.
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Mostly Books, November 23,
2009
Pockets Empty,
Pockets Full
a review by Sharon Coleman
A Pocketful of Voices/Un Bolsillo de
Voces: The Best of Poetry Inside Out,
2009 anthology, edited by Anita Sagástegui
and John Oliver Simon, 197 pages. Published by Center
for the Art of Translation, San Francisco, California,
www.catranslation.org.
 Just
over fifteen or so years ago, U. S. academia began
discovering a discipline that has been vibrant across
the globe for quite awhile: translation studies.
Classes began to be sporadically offered in various
literature departments, but more recently a few
degree programs in translation have been developed.
Filling spots with qualified students, those with
a deep understanding of other languages, however,
remains a problem. So perhaps the next generation
of translators (and poets) will not spring from
prestigious or even not-so-prestigious universities.
As so well shown in Poetry Inside Out’s newest
anthology A Pocketful of Voices/Un Bolsillo
de Voces, that generation is presently coming
of age in mostly public grade schools, often under
funded schools filled by children of immigrants
and of the American lower and middle classes.
Mariana
Reyes Cruz, 3rd grade, translates Frederico García
Lorca:
| |
Horseman’s Song
Córdoba.
So far away and lonely.
Black pony, big moon,
and olives in my saddlebag.
Though I know the roads
I’ll never get to Córdoba.
Over the valleys, with the wind,
black pony, red moon.
Death is watching me
from Córdoba’s towers.
What a long road!
What a brave pony!
How death waits for me,
before I get to Córdoba.
Córdoba.
So far away and lonely.
|
Yeeit
Vargas, 7th grade, translates Alberto Blanco:
|
|
Eastern Tanka
I behold the light
of the primeval star
within me
between ocean and atmosphere
looking glass of words
|
This
is the seventh anthology from Poetry Inside Out
(P.I.O.), an independent educational project run
by the Center for the Art of Translation in San
Francisco that conducts weekly sessions with classes
at various Bay Area schools. Started by Michael
Ray, P.I.O. is now run by Anita Sagástegui,
Instructor and Curriculum Specialist, and John Oliver
Simon, Artistic Director. Pocketful of Voices/Un
Bolsillo de Voces showcases translations done
the previous two years by single student translators
or pairs of translators or even group translations.
Students range from third to ninth grade. Alongside
the translations are their own poems, written sometimes
in Spanish, sometimes in English, and either self-translated
or translated by fellow students (or sometimes the
editors). The anthology is completely bilingual
in Spanish and English with some poetry in Vietnamese,
Basque, and German.
But
it’s also much more than an anthology, a collection
of student works; it puts those works into pedagogical
context. Pocketful of Voices/Un Bolsillo de
Voces summarizes the entire year’s curriculum.
Each chapter focuses on one area of poetic language
or translation and then presents several topics,
each exemplified by a well-known poet. Yeeit Vargas’s
translation of Alberto Blanco’s Tanka is found
in the section of the chapter “Poetic Form
and Structure” that presents “Haiku
and Tanka” with a short biography of Blanco
and examples with translations of his work. After
translating, the students write poems of their own,
using the poet’s work as a model. Then they
translate their words or those of a friend. Straightforward,
methodical, multi-faceted—the curriculum works
like Miracle Gro for young minds, teaching them
poetic elements and forms, translation and nuance
in meaning, other languages and cultures, and many
great writers. It also allows schooling to nurture
children’s natural creativity rather than
to dull it by shaping their language to be simply
conventional.
But
perhaps the most powerful aspect of the curriculum
and program is how it shifts students’ (self)
perception of living between two languages. Too
often our institutions and teachers operate under
the assumption that children speaking another language
at home are at a disadvantage. And children sometimes
accept that perception. P.I.O. activates and engages
all the knowledge of these children. It shifts the
disadvantage into an advantage. In a mixed classroom,
all of a sudden the bilingual children become the
experts; now they have special and valued knowledge
to share with the other students. How students consider
themselves and each other changes rapidly both inside
and outside the classroom.
They
work on team translations, as did Julian Greenhill,
fourth grade, and Jessica Cortez, fifth grade, to
come to this English version of Maybell Lebron’s
poem:
| |
Without Ever Having
Seen Each Other
Without ever having seen each other
we recognized each other;
and our footprints were partners,
and our blood formed children,
we cried with our sadnesses,
together we knew the clean sun,
and today,
sitting face to face,
we admire each other,
without knowing what to say.
|
And the students compare their equally excellent
but quite different translations of a single poem
as three translators in the third grade do with
“El Sol” by Dulce María Loynaz:
After students write their own poems in either
language, they translate them into the other one,
or a classmate translates. Here’s a poem written
by a fifth grader and translated by a classmate:
Although these original poems appear after the
professional ones that inspired them, the anthology
also includes a final chapter “Student Voices”
dedicated just to their poems.
P.I.O.
is about translating and validating not only language
but also experience—the varied experiences
recent immigrants and inner-city children go through.
As Oscar Bermeo of Lighthouse Community Charter
School in Oakland attests, John Oliver Simon does
not hold back on or gloss over these topics as other
teachers sometimes do. Rather, they are presented
in professional poems and come alive in students’
work. On the other hand, Bermeo recounts when a
young girl protested, “But Mr. Simon, there’s
no graffiti or gun shots where I live. What do I
write about?” And he helped her find
topics important to her.
This
year P.I.O. has taken this transformation of the
educational space further by setting up classrooms
into “translation circles.” Each circle
includes both students who know the source language
and those who do not. The students with the source
language first work together to do a word for word
translation. Then the other students work to make
that translation into a poem that flows; they can
check with the native speakers to be sure they’ve
got the meaning right but only after they guess
among themselves. Finally each circle presents their
translation and defends the choices they made. This
process allows for greater inclusion of those students
who do not speak the source language. In a fourth
grade class in Sobrante Park Elementary, Oakland,
after an African American girl with little knowledge
of Spanish got through with a translation, the Latino
students applauded her.
P.I.O.’s
translation program can also help students whose
home language is Spanglish, a mix of English and
Spanish, to distinguish the two languages and to
increase writing skills in each one individually
but not separately. P.I.O. does not encourage “code
switching,” the sudden shift from one language
to another (although occasionally poems that do
so are presented). When difficult words arise in
Spanish, the instructor first gives the definition
in Spanish and then synonyms in English and vice
versa.
Beyond
the bilingual classroom, the curriculum in this
anthology can be somewhat altered by any instructor
incorporating poetry writing in their classes or
any poet wanting to expand her or his poetic practice
through world poetry. It gives a wealth of ideas
for conducting poetry workshops.
The
entire program has been so successful in the handful
of Bay Area schools that host it that P.O.I. has
received requests from across the country for access
to the program. As it’s difficult to expand
to multiple locations with limited staff and funds,
P.I.O. is considering different models such as a
residency program: educators would come to spend
some weeks with P.I.O. instructors and observe the
classes. But for now, it’s a gift for these
children and their future. As third grader Zuleyma
Márquez reminds us: “Stars are children
/ with invisible names.”
Sharon Coleman is a poet who
teaches at Berkeley City College, where she is faculty
coordinator of the literary and art journal
Mivia Street. She is a contributing editor to
Poetry Flash.
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Mostly Books, November 10,
2009
A Porch Light at Dawn
a
review by Clara Mitchell
MOUTH, by Lisa Chen, Kaya Press,
New York City, $13.95 paperback, www.kaya.com.
Lisa Chen will read from
her work on Thursday, April 1, 2010, noon, at Lunch
Poems, Morrison Library, University of California,
Berkeley campus.
If, as Lisa Chen herself advises in “Translator’s
Apologia,” you “…Enter these pages
with / The lowered expectations of a prison guard,”
you may be pleasantly surprised by the pointed coherence
that frequently emerges from Chen’s fantastic
verbiage. Similes strike, snapping ideas into sudden
focus just when the experimental structure or disjointed
syntax begins to float a poem away from the comprehensible.
For instance, Chen laments in “Songs of Gold
Mountain” that: “…all your / finery
on a moonless night, the joy you hide in your sleeve,
flutter / and vanish through his mind like a crumpled
theater ticket” and “In the Street”:
“…a sheer shirt / Slung over the lampshade
like the whole room / Got into her blouse.…”
In fact, much of the sparkle in Lisa Chen’s
work is generated by these crisp comparisons, by
her skillful creation of poetic detail in the everyday
and her use of such details to open fresh channels
of understanding in her very nonlinear poems. My
favorite such moment happens in the three-line poem
“The Wagon” which closes with: “…The
look / on his face as I leave is a porch light left
burning at dawn.”
Over and over in Mouth we experience Chen’s
refusal to elaborate, her clear choice to leave
context behind. “The Wagon” demonstrates
this strategy at its finest: the spareness of the
scene is its power, the demand for interpretation
its authority, its pull. At times, however, Chen’s
cryptic scenarios ease into vagueness; for example,
the questions raised by the series of non sequiturs
strung together in “I Didn’t Always
Look This Way” detract from its pleasure.
By its close, it can become a bit wearying to keep
up with Chen’s imaginative leaps without some
kind of contextual clue on which to regain one’s
footing:
I didn’t always look this way
The grin on that cow that shills for glue
I didn’t always look this way
Stay calm. Stay very, very calm
Mouth is characterized by an overarching
tone of assertiveness: these poems are rife with
commands, as in the series of authoritative notes-to-self
in “Interior Monologue”: “Leave
house. Walk five blocks to the bus stop. / Take
bus across town…” or the rapid-fire
delivery of opinions as fact in “Solution”:
“The solution is to have sexual intercourse
in lieu of awkward / silences. // The solution is.…”
Throughout this collection, the frequent use of
end stopped lines and simple declarative sentences
show its authorial self-confidence. Lisa Chen’s
conviction in her vision does not waver from start
to finish in this book. In the end, it is the reader,
perhaps hesitant at first to trust Chen’s
method, whose confidence in Chen’s purpose
rises steadily with each poem.
Clara Mitchell was Poetry
Flash’s summer 2009 editorial intern.
She is currently a student at Indiana University
in Bloomington, Indiana.
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Mostly Books, October 19,
2009
No Tigers
a
review by Richard Silberg
ONE SUN STORM, by
Endi Bogue Hartigan, The Center for Literary Publishing,
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado,
2008, 83 pages, $15.95 paperback. Winner of the
Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Martha Ronk.
Endi Bogue Hartigan will
read from her work on Thursday, November 5, 7:30,
Poetry Flash at Moe’s Books, Berkeley,
California.
There’s a mesmeric quality to this book, the
sense of things, states of affairs, sets of actions
held in the mind, brought to the page and seen,
and seen, and truly seen:
The musical repetition of those lines, as if to
deepen by an incremental restatement; the spacious
arrangement of the lines against the white of the
page—so that, for instance, “the chartreuse
floating” does, as we read the break, have
a long, silent way to float before it hooks to “down
the street”—are typical of this book
as, in its particularity, is the phrase “the
fact of its crest in the sunlight.” That scientific
or forensic word, “fact,” linked to
“its crest”—whose color and float
we’ve already experienced—“in
the sunlight,” sets up a quick, subconscious
contrast between two opposite modes, dry, empirical
and imaginative, sensual and so helps to break us
through to the condition of wonder and indeed of
love in which these poems take their life. As she
says in the concluding lines of “Exaggeration
Diary”: “The stone has two holes straight
through it, made by the sea. / It is easier to speak
of the blood-red starfish, clung. / It is safer
to speak of the stone I brought home for my son
than to speak of God.” Or, in “Avalanches,”
she uses an epigraph from Blake, repeated in italics
throughout the poem:
|
|
And are not the gifts of the Spirit everything to Man?
And is not the forming of sand drifts?
And are not the winds against which
a child works in the sand?
And are not the gifts of the Spirit everything
to Man?
And are not the winds for the gulls?
And is not the sea house
caught winnowing, windows falling?
|
 So
One Sun Storm can be thought of as the
poetic conversion of ‘facts’ into ‘spirit’;
these poems are “gifts of the Spirit”
for Hartigan and for the reader. However sappy and
Joyce Kilmer-ish that may sound, though, there’s
nothing sappy about her work; it’s distinguished
for me by the depth and purity of its seeing and
feeling.
Let’s
look at one more poem, “Tiger Entries,”
last in the book and, for me, its masterpiece. The
poem, in prose paragraphs, two to a page, the only
nonlineated form in the book, begins, “It
was suggested I go to the field where tigers dip
their heads in tall grass and stand glowing through
it, half revealed. I have wanted all my life to
create a field. If anything my life is to be a field
in which a person may speak.” Here are the
last two paragraphs:
Once
I saw a whale breach a white lily on the sea, but
try to speak of witnessing the whale and almost
anything you say will reduce the heart and literalize.
Speak and they want to know the species, the bay
in which it was witnessed, whether it was alone,
feeding, breeding, in calm seas or rough, unexpected
or sought, talk about the whale and even its breech,
the still surface, then the gesture of it sweeping
the sea is deeply embedded in man and lost
There
were no tigers, not a single tiger lifting his head
through the grass, I peeled open branches in search
of the tigers. I half drowned in rivers, roamed
through shadows, stared through ice cube fractures
non-nights, fled to the shore, touched a praying
mantis in the sand, I said I want to encompass the
tigers, I’ll encompass tigers. But still there
were no tigers and I gave up, thought here is a
world without tigers, and I walked through the field
without tigers and because there were no tigers,
I knew tigers
Appropriate
echoes there of both Robert Duncan’s The
Opening of the Field and of Blake, though the
voice and conception are her own. We seem to be
coming on ‘fact’ in “Tiger Entries”
from the other side of mind, from dream, and that
word “dream’ is used a number of times
through the poem. Once (page 74) she even says,
“’This field’s imagined, this
field is death.’” So the poem seems
to turn on the deeper knowing that grounds her work.
In the first paragraph, then, we have “almost
anything you say will reduce the heart and literalize”;
we have the whale’s “gesture”
“embedded in man and lost.” And in the
second paragraph tigers are known through yearning
for them, through dreaming of them and searching
for them in their absence. “Tiger Entries”
becomes an allegory of her writing, perhaps of spiritual
knowing in general. But we’re in danger of
‘literalizing’ it; the poem like all
fine ones exists in its words and their play, in
what it sees and the pure, mesmeric float of its
saying.
Richard Silberg
is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash. His
most recent book of poetry is Deconstruction
of the Blues; he co-translated, with Clare You,
The Three Way Tavern by Korean poet Ko
Un.
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Mostly Books, September 7,
2009
Ish Klein: UNION!
a
review by Nicole
Pollentier
UNION!
by Ish Klein, Canarium Books, Ann
Arbor, Iowa City, Shanghai,
sponsored by The University of
Michigan Creative Writing
Program, 2009, 85 pages, $14
paperback,
www.canariumbooks.org.
Like the title of her first book UNION!, poet
Ish Klein’s name deserves to be followed by
an exclamation point. Make that three of them. Such
is the enthusiasm I feel after seeing her read twice
during the week of February 9-14, at off-site events
surrounding the 2009 Association of Writers &
Writing Programs conference, hosted in Chicago this
year.
At a joint reading for Make: A Chicago Literary
Magazine, Zoland Books, and Canarium Books,
hosted by Danny’s Reading Series, which for
more than eight years has operated out of Danny’s
Tavern in Bucktown, Klein was part of a stellar
line-up that included poets Rebecca Wolff, Lewis
Warsh, Simone Muench and Philip Jenks, Nick Twemlow,
Chris Glomski, and John High. A few days later,
Klein read in the company of Rikki Ducornet, August
Kleinzahler, Robyn Schiff, and Tod Marshall at Stop
Smiling Storefront, the headquarters for Stop
Smiling magazine in Wicker Park. The event
was titled after one of Klein’s films, The
Mentalist’s Mental Cabinet of Vengeance! and
was, in part, a celebration of the launch of UNION!
The film was screened between two sets of readings.
Klein’s work connects well to a live audience
and can even hold its own in a tavern setting. With
an impish voice and a captivating presence, she
reads every line of her poetry like a declaration,
with a momentum that is contagious. Poems like,
“I’m Amazing, I’m a Fireman,”
drew big cheers from the audience. The conversational
ease of Klein’s language is refreshing, and
the often quirky thread of her narrative is disarming,
“I come to at the Clinic—/ a blood test,
a boxed lunch, it’s baloney. / It’s
my mommy, I say, / waiting, waiting, waiting, I
fade.” Ultimately, however, what is most striking
about Klein’s poetry is the deep lyric sensibility
that pervades her work, “I’m a flame!
// I’m a card, a king! // A burning king card
with a heart! // With many hearts.”
Klein’s poetry is immediate and commands attention.
When she writes, “The light through / her
is how it all / gets beautiful. / I’ve seen
this so I know.” (“World’s End
With Sympathy”) I believe her. When Klein
states, “Now, out of synch with all but three
things. / That I dream and that I am a dream and
that without my love / my soul runs into the sun.
Hey, wait for me! But no. It is a crazy mofo.”
(“My Love Has Left Me I Have No Home”)
I get it. When she laments, “What won’t
be still inside me is what calls to you, little
birdie.” (“There Was a Bird Out There”)
I know what that feels like, we all do. We know.
Like Walt Whitman’s exclamatory “Camerado,
I give you my hand!” the poems in Union!
are an invitation to the reader. Klein finds a vocabulary
for a poetics of inclusion. She writes, “So
what I’m saying is if you know someone like
this, / if you know them and you notice these things
and you like them, / why don’t you be nice
to them? / Because they are just about out. // .
. .it is cold at the extremity, / blasted, vast
and echoing, / this world was not meant to be borne
alone.” (“For the People Exposed”)
In Klein’s own words, each poem in UNION!
is “a step towards Union!”
The collection is divided into four sections: “Amid
Ocean,” “Dry Land,” “Hard
Earth,” and “Up and Away!” In
an interview with PhillySound, Klein describes
the concept that informs the structure of the book.
“It begins in water because of times when
I thought I was drowned but I came back to life.
It ends with the poem ‘Act I: Against Death.’
That poem is a reminder that I am a result of other
forces beyond my ego and they have some ownership
of my territory.”
UNION! was released on February 9, 2009.
It is one of two premiere single-author volumes
published by Canarium Books, sponsored by The University
of Michigan Creative Writing Program. Canarium,
established in 2008, is the editorial project of
Joshua Edwards, Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, and
Lynn Xu. Edwards and Twemlow are former co-editors
of the journal The Canary, where some of
Klein’s poetry originally appeared.
A graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, Klein currently lives in Philadelphia,
where she produces a You Tube show called THE
BOO SHOW! and plans to make movies about her
bike and the birth of the soul. In addition to writing
poetry, Klein makes films and video pieces, constructs
stage sets in her kitchen, and creates puppets to
star in her films and “to have little creatures
to love,” among a community of actively creative
friends.
Nicole
Pollentier is a poet and curator
whose work has appeared in or is
forthcoming from alice blue
review, Bird Dog, Fourteen Hills,
Commonweal, Border Senses, Crazy
Child Scribbler, and
Transfer Magazine, among
others. She is the author of two
book-length poems, the frog
poem project and the
place where you were foreign.
The recipient of a Fulbright
Fellowship, she spent a year
living in Reykjavík,
Iceland, and currently lives in
Chicago.
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Mostly
Books, August 17, 2009
Staying
Awake Inside:
New Books
from Airlie Press in Oregon's
Willamette Valley
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
THE
EDDY FENCE: POEMS, by Donna
Henderson, Airlie Press, 2009, 71
pages, $15 paperback.
LAST APPLES OF LATE
EMPIRES, by Jessica Lamb,
Airlie Press, 2009, 73 pages,
$15.00 paperback.
Airlie Press, P.O. Box 434,
Monmouth, Oregon 97361,
www.airliepress.org.
The Airlee Press website says,
“We are a nonprofit publishing collective dedicated to
cultivating and sustaining fine
contemporary poetry. Our intent
is to produce beautiful and
compelling books by Willamette
Valley poets; our mission is to
offer writers working in our
particular habitat a local,
shared-work publishing
alternative.” Indeed, the
first two books, by two of the
press’s founding members,
hot off the Airlie Press press,
live up to the goals of that
mission statement.
Inside the handsome cover of The Eddy Fence,
Donna Henderson’s poems weave back and
forth between personal narrative about her mother’s
illness and death, and broader yet very personal
encounters with the natural world. The dilemmas
and calamities that befall the physical environment
become part of the inner landscape: St. Helen’s
with its amputated peak, stands in for and speaks
to the end of a love affair, “Anyone who’d
never known the top / before it blew would see a
summit…”; the devastating poem “Deposition,”
about a badly wounded yearling caught in a wire
fence, becomes a testimony about and against suffering
and death.
The animal is writhing in pain when she and a companion
come upon it.
|
|
His snagged leg had
twisted about
off its hoof, and the
hoof
snapped and flipped like
a rabbit’s
foot
strung on a chain each
time he pushed off,
pushed off again.
|
She’s confronted with
the horrible reality:
|
|
And I tell you I
wanted to run from, not
to him—
But we were it
that day, the only ones
there,
and he was bleating and
lunging so explicitly
toward us—
So, while my love pried
his gristle and hide
from the wire, I held
the whole hanging rest
of the body
to keep him still.
|
When they do manage to pry him loose from the fence,
they see he’s so badly injured—“…his
sides—little bellows—/ heaving and caving…”—they
understand:
|
|
we’d have to
kill him and couldn’t—
while we couldn’t
we held him until we
could,
then while he jerked,
arched, died&
until the syrupy blood
of him cooled
and stilled we held him—
|
This poem comes near the end
of a section devoted mostly to
the mother’s death and is
followed two poems later by “My
Mother’s Teeth,”
where the speaker must force her
dead mother’s false teeth
back into her mouth before the
undertakers arrive.
|
|
…it shocked me a little,
how intimate this felt;
more than washing the violet folds of her
vulva,
changing the bandage that covered her bedsore,
tracing the paths of her chemo-scarred veins.
|
Each poem throbs with the
separate pain and awful duties of
death.
Another thread through the book
involves the clear-cutting of an
adjacent forest. The speaker,
forced to witness the
destruction, imagines the cut
lumber becoming something
beautiful:
|
|
When I can’t bear to hear
anymore what I cannot
stop (not without violence) I imagine
the logs ending up in Hokkaido,
their wood nailed into zendos,
each with its portion of leaf-sieved light,
the spacious cool of its rooms, their peace,
inside of which more monks than ever will
meditate,
watching their breath for the sake of all
beings…
(from
“Zazen”)
|
She chooses to concentrate on what the
felled trees may build, “watching as violence
rises and passes, / staying awake inside.”
The last section of the three in
Henderson’s collection is
less satisfying—as though
the book needed a few more poems
to flesh out a seventy pager.
Despite that, I find here an
authentic, hard-won clarity, a
brutal and at the same time
most-loving honesty.
•
Jessica Lamb’s book, Last Apples of Late
Empires, is about the secret interiors of ordinary
moments. Inner landscape is everything, no matter
what the exteriors appear to be, and the painterly
cover portrays an apple peeled away to reveal the
earth itself, alive with swirling currents.
The second poem of the book (from which it takes
it’s title), “Night Feeding,”
sets the direction; it’s about the birth of
a son, and the speaker begins: “I don’t
recall how I came to this country / but what does
it matter? I’ve borne / a son…”
The second section of the poem goes on to explore
the complexity of conflicting emotions included
but not always acknowledged in that web of events.
|
|
A tulip,
purple-black, expiring
on the sill
above the sink, petals
enormously splayed.
My husband calls for a
drink. I rinse a
glass
carefully, the stigma’s
red so frankly
genital. A bead of juice
collects
in the cleft, the
anthers’ six black
fingers
dusted with dark
seeds.
|
And then
|
|
He wants me to make
love to him
somehow. I’m
listening to the hum of
things:
water turning in a
glass, tulip
bowing toward decay.
Whatever I promised
I could not have
promised this.
|
The mother in the poem has become a stranger in
a strange new land; she is alien, even to her own
body. The last section closes with a frozen woods,
“deathly still white-sheeted…ahum /
with disembodied sounds,” where the “night’s
goods”—the “last apples of late
empire”—are passed along and “small
ravening lips take hold.”
It’s a collection about the sacrifices life
sometimes demands of us as we mature into responsibility.
“First Rain” is an example that might
be read as a précis for the book as a whole:
|
|
Yellow plum in the
path like a lost
egg.
Being no one’s
mother this morning
I devour it as rains
begin to fall.
Pockets filled with more
than I
could ever need I dash
my spoils home
listening as the parched
earth drinks
and drinks. It isn’t
enough. The first rain
of
autumn never is. Skin
bruised, my plums
have turned a sickly
brown by afternoon.
In no time my ravenous
son
will appear at the
door.
For all I claim as mine
what more
will be asked of me?
|
The cycle of the poems begins and ends with different
forms of hunger—the basic animal hunger of
the child for the mother’s milk, the hunger
of the lovers for each other’s bodies (“Newlyweds”),
the hunger for self-knowing as in the Neruda-esque
“A Few Questions Before I Continue”:
“If this is my one life by which door do I
enter?…When the waters have subsided what
will I / have held?” and finally, the hunger
for life itself, despite the obstacles:
|
|
And so I have
lasted
another winter.
Do not hold
it against me
darkness,
for I am still
your creature
though my
pitiable body
can’t help
itself
begging for always
more light
even up to the last
day’s last
hour.
(from
“Seven Days”)
|
Occasionally the poems can seem a little cranky,
as if the poet’s irritation with the unexpected
things that so often hijack us takes over the pen.
Mostly though, the poems here are, as the book’s
back cover states, “an ear trained to rumblings
beneath the placid appearances of marriage and motherhood…discovering
small signs of promise.”
Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a Sacramento
poet who teaches at UC Davis
Extension. Her recent book of
poetry is The Fortunate
Islands; she is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly
Books, August 3, 2009
Survivor
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
THE
DOWNSTAIRS DANCE FLOOR, by
Taylor Graham, Robert Phillips
Poetry Chapbook Prize, Texas
Review Press, English Department,
Sam Houston State University,
Huntsville, Texas 77341-2146,
2006, 29 pages, $8.95
paperback.
It is easy to see why Taylor
Graham’s latest collection,
The Downstairs Dance Floor,
won the 2005 Robert Phillips
Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas
Review Press. Here one finds
sonnets, a villanelle, a pantoum—
‘turns’ at the ends of poems that feel visceral, like
movements on a dance floor. At
the same time the voice of these
poems is tough; the tone is wry,
ironic, gritty, wise—the
words of a survivor. As the blurb
on the Texas Review Press website
explains, these poems “are
inhabited by family survivors”
but:
In “Wed by the Justice
of the Peace,” the wedding
couple arrives to find a chaotic
scene. Here Graham’s
camera-like focus and her use of
colloquial diction frame a future
without much romance. It’s
a poem worth quoting in its
entirety.
|
|
Wed by the Justice of
the Peace
who just enjoyed a
pretty good
supper, by the looks of
it—plates
smeared with gravy on
the stained white
cloth, and drumsticks
gnawed to the bone.
As if they hadn’t
called ahead, as if
they caught the Justice
by surprise
with his vest
unbuttoned, eying
the Pope’s nose
across the platter;
his missus wiping a
child’s crumbed
face
before she clears the
table.
And does it matter, for
a bride
whose hemline’s
longer than the
fashion,
gray frock worn thin at
the collar,
her bouquet a bunch of
roadside chicory?
Let her recite her vows
before the altar
of pushed-back chairs
and crumpled
napkins. For witnesses,
stuffed bellies
already hungering for
tomorrow’s
breakfast biscuits, and
these ever-
lasting dishes. Dirty
dishes. Let her
learn right now what
marriage is about
|
Two poems later “Fire in
the Fingers” describes a
young man who refuses to stay
home and become a dairy farmer as
his family expects; instead he
moves to the city, becomes a
musician, earning his bread
tuning other people’s
pianos. The poem explores the
realities of the working
artist:
|
|
“$5 a month for treatments
for catarrh
through the long satiric winter in St. Paul,
1895. The Smith & Barnes upright piano
rents for $3 a month, music being cheaper
than health. She’s a slattern mistress
who keeps you tuning other people’s
pianos…”
|
“Celebrations” examines a black
and white photograph of a birthday party—“five
little girls / in sun-dresses” who forget
to smile when someone poses them for the camera.
The poem’s wry conclusion suddenly includes
us:
|
|
…It’s somebody’s
birthday and they ought to be glad,
there’s favors and cake and
not just the birthday-girl’s
getting older.”
|
Grouped together for the
photograph, the girls are told to
“look off into the distance”; the result is funny sad,
and prophetic.
Taylor Graham worked for many
years as a volunteer
search-and-rescuer. (One of her
earlier collections bears a
picture of her being lowered into
a shaft while training other
rescuers.) Not surprisingly then,
one of Graham’s themes is
isolation. Her people are cast
together upon metaphorical desert
islands where camaraderie is
haphazard if not enforced, where
the alienation of the self is
permanent. Much as one character
might reach out to another, they
remain “Lost in Two Cars,”
like the family in the poem, who
become separated while driving
across the desert. The mother in
the poem waits on the shoulder of
the highway for her “second
husband” to “miss her
in the rearview mirror”:
|
|
That’s the
thing about
traveling
in pairs. Even though my
father
turned
around at last
with enough daylight
left
to fix the flat, and
then,
late as it was, find a
motel
with a vacancy and a
double bed,
and a cot for the child—even
then,
it wasn’t the way
she intended
the trip to turn
out.
|
As we see elsewhere in the book, the child appears
almost an afterthought—a child of older parents
who have lived long lives before “the
child’s” arrival—a child described
clearly and without sentimentality in the pantoum
“An Only Daughter,” as “ancient…staring
from the shadow of [her] eyes.”
For the old man in the poem “Longshoreman,”
the isolation is within; here someone who “used
to have a perfect jigsaw mind” no longer remembers
anything, not even “…D-Day, a big bang
that shaped the world / as he knew it….”
Likewise the couple in “A Pair of Photographs”
are “two faces surely meant to gaze together
/ from a single frame” but, alone together
on a mountain road, they can only photograph each
other separately; there is “no one else to
prove they stood together.”
I love the quirkiness of many of these poems, poems
like “Sky-Blue Tiles” and “The
Diner,” which are full of almost-surrealistic
surprises—like “Jacaranda,” where
the speaker fills out “a hundred papers”
as part of an elder’s admission to a nursing
home and then unexpectedly concludes:
|
|
Imagine her in
blue
boas, flamenco on a
breeze.
Imagine
so we can’t
forget.
At the tip of every
twig
a castanet.
|
Many of the scenes in this book are “grainy
and dark” as the picture of the old man in
“90th Birthday”—propped up in
his hospital chair while the “oxygen canister
/ stands guard” —surrounded by good
will as surfeit—in this case, “Balloons
in bunches,” a table “heaped with goodies
/ he can’t eat.”
Although Graham’s consistent use of contractions
adds authority to the savvy vernacular of her speakers,
one exception is the omniscient narrator of “A
Woven Line,” the penultimate poem of the book.
The voice here is more polished, unabashedly lyrical,
a voice that could stand in for the poet herself:
|
|
He wakes from dreams
of knots, or nets,
a sort of word-play in
which lines entwine
into a sling for
catching unstrung
rhymes.
The rocking sing-song
teases him from
sleep.
And so he lies here on
the dark-side of
dawn,
under a great dry ocean
of stars—those
bright
over-hands across the
intervals of night.
|
The book concludes by imagining its main character,
“Death the Linguist,” who calls the
speaker “Querida”—the
“’d’ that sounds / like ‘th’
not quite touching / behind the teeth,” though
“he [Death] hasn’t even got
a tongue.” Here Death speaks for a land where
“all languages are fluent and all genders
agree,” and the speaker is able at last to
relax—close her eyes, open her lips and “let
the tongue float free.”
The poems are left dancing together on the pages
of this handsome book, floating free; the antithesis
of the parents in the first poem, “The Dead
Dancing,” who
|
|
…take each other’s
hand in a wordless
foxtrot, measuring out the downstairs dance-
floor all those years.
|
Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a Sacramento
poet who teaches at UC Davis
Extension. Her recent book of
poetry is The Fortunate
Islands; she is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly
Books, June 30, 2009
Workers
&
Wannabes
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
ORDINARY
GENIUS, A GUIDE FOR THE POET
WITHIN,
by Kim Addonizio, W.W. Norton
& Company, New York, NY,
2009,
311 pages, $16.95
paperback.
It’s a long time (1974)
since the likes of John Frederick
Nims’ canonical book on
craft, Western Wind,
broke onto the scene, aimed
at “students and teachers”
as well as budding poets. Since
then there has been an explosion
of craft books targeted at both
academic audiences and the public
at large—including those
Kim Addonizio, in her new poetic
craft book Ordinary
Genius, calls “wannabes”—folks
who want to write but don’t
necessarily want to do the hard
work. “Maybe you’re
one of those people who writes
poems, but rarely reads them. Let
me put this as delicately as I
can: If you don’t read,
your writing is going to suck.”
Ordinary Genius is an
extraordinary mixture of personal
memoir, freshly conceived writing
prompts, and ingenious insights
into form and creative process. I
have read and used many craft
books over the years (I can count
about seventy-five on my own
shelf right now) including
The Poet’s
Companion, which Addonizio
co-authored with Dorianne Laux
some years back. This book is
different, perhaps because it
arises so directly out of
Addonizio’s own struggle
and desire to write
authentically, to master her
craft and “make it new.”
Addonizio incorporates
philosophy, spiritual fervor,
plain talk about sex and
addiction; she addresses race,
class and gender, in the service
of illuminating the work involved
in writing good poetry.
She also reminds us there will
always be an element of
mystery in mastery—we
can work and work and work, but
we cannot predict when a poem
might take that magical leap into
the kingdom of great art.
(Reading her chapter on revision,
I was reminded of a time when I
read through the many drafts of
Elizabeth Bishop’s famous
villanelle “One Art”—how
that poem struggled and straggled
along—a word changed here,
something crossed out there, and
then: That leap! A poem that
seemed to have materialized whole
upon the page.)
What I like so much about this
book is that, even when she is
breaking things down into parts
for her reader, when she is
analyzing (meter, for instance)
or systematizing (syntactical
structure), or listing her
innovative writing prompts,
Addonizio keeps her passion for
poetry (and for us, her readers)
very much alive on the page.
Ordinary Genius is an
extraordinary work—a gift
to us all.
Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a Sacramento
poet who teaches at UC Davis
Extension. Her recent book of
poetry is The Fortunate
Islands; she is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly
Books, May 15, 2009
“Flashes”
brief
takes by
Dawn-Michelle
Baude
NEUTRALITY,
by Keston Sutherland, Barque
Press, 2004
Upon
returning from eighteen years
abroad, I asked two poets ten
years my junior what book I
should buy. They put
Neutrality into my
grasping hand. Hence I
encountered Sutherland’s
work for the first time and fell
in love, literally, with the
whoosh-plop-boom of that
verbal cascade. It surges from
its source with a delightful
rhythm, to the point that I
suspect the layout on the page
provides the syllogistic pretext
for the argument of the poem
without exerting a durable impact
on the prosody (this bears
further consideration). I like
the fact that this work doesn’t
take itself too seriously, an
important consideration when a
lot of what's available to read
in the U.S. seems to move from a
homogenous, self-congratulatory
careerism.
THE
BEGINNING OF BEAUTY, by Mel
Nichols, Edge Books,
2007
Nichols
is one of my favorite poets, and
this book is full of what she
does best: the insightful
quotidian of being human,
combined with a wacky, prickly
sense of humor and inflected with
a staunch political acumen—Kyger
and Notley reververate here, with
a little of Hejinian and Darragh
in the mix. Nichols is capable of
range—The Beginning of
Beauty has an acerbic wit
that takes a back seat in her “Day
Poem” series, where the
mood is quieter and engages a
flexible, compeling query into
the new humanism—I’m
a devoted fan of the “Day
Poems.” Beauty is, of
course, beautiful—a joy to
hold, with its intimate,
polysemous blue secret. That
tip-in* is so erotic.
[*
As in printing: To attach
(an insert) in a book by gluing
along the binding edge: tip in a
color plate.]
THE
NIAGARA MAGAZINE: ROBERT CREELEY—A
DIALOGUE, 1978
Oh Lord—what a gem—everything
so deeply, irrevocably Creeley,
in conversation with Kevin Power
in Buffalo in 1976. If a book had
arms, I’d want to crawl
into them here. I found this
issue which managed, somehow, to
survive the pulverizing fists of
time at a very cool secondhand
bookshop specializing in
impossibily hard-to-find poetry
publications—Heritage—in
Beacon, Lower Hudson Valley.
Maybe you can find another gem of
your own there:
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/new-england-bookstores-and-the-hermitage-beacon.
BROKEN
WORLD, by Joseph Lease,
Coffee House Press, 2007
I’ve carried this book
from country to country for the
last year an a half, picking it
up whenever I need to think—or
rather hear—the poem. Lease
has something of Palmer in him,
something of Creeley, a bit of
Spicer. The argument of the book
is chilling, and sad, and
somehow, redemptive. I’m
into reading books where I
actually feel a poet on the other
side, the flesh and blood one,
who knows when to cast identity
upon the page like a stone tossed
into the lake. I read a book like
this, and I want to borrow some
of his moves and drink a glass of
Merlot.
THE GRAND PIANO: AN
EXPERIMENT IN COLLECTIVE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, ten volumes (seven
volumes so far), by Bob Perelman,
Barrett Watten, Steve Benson,
Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron
Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn
Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted
Pearson, Mode A/This Press,
2007-2008
Basically, anywhere that
Barrett Watten’s brain has
been I want to check out. It’s
like going in for an oil change—are
we thinking? Really thinking? As
someone who’s had a voyeur’s
view of the Language Poets from
the get-go, I like to keep an eye
on them, all of them. And the
Grand Piano series is not a
disappointment. If I could
recuperate the world ‘panoptic’
to employ in a
pre-Foucaultian/Bentham sense, I
would. But the quantum viewpoint
might be better to describe this
document in collective
autobiography. At any rate for a
movement that has consistently
faced accusations of mannerism
(and a lot worse), the embodied
narratives of grand Piano provide
the waves that those hard-copy
particles need. Give a Language
Poet a hug.
LET IT RIP, by
Buck Downs, BuckDowns.com, Washington D.C., 2007
I came across these poems this summer and I
had to re-read. Downs’s line is so
tight, the torque between words so high, the potential
energy would seem a bit dangerous, were it not for
lyric commitments. Tenderness, especially. The focus
on juxtaposition of grammatical units functions
differently from the trajectories we’re accustomed
to follow, given the predictable paratactic idioms
of our age. You have to read these poems slowly,
word by word, as if the conditions of their making
required more than a casual performative reconstruction.
There’s wit here, in abundance, and keen social
commentary, and a kind of revelatory intimacy, too.
WILD
FORM & SAVAGE GRAMMAR,
by Andrew Schelling,
La Alameda Press,
2003
I didn’t
know the U.S. had any kind of
Ecological movement in poetry
until I recently came across this
book. The question that Schelling
poses—how
can we have a writing that also
commits to the compelling issues
of Ecology—is
certainly worth considering, even
(or especially) at this belated
standpoint. Since Ecology is not,
as far as I can ascertain,
anywhere near the heart of
contemporary poetics, Schelling
turns often to Asia for ideas
that were waylaid in history, a
tendency that endears me to this
book since many U.S. poets have
truncated their connection to the
past as a source of meaningful
information and finally end-up
looking awfully provincial.
Schelling is a good, clear
essayist, so he took me places I
hadn’t
been before.
THE
GOLDEN AGE OF PARAPHERNALIA ,
by Ken Davies, Edge,
2008
Sharp, witty, incisive—this
book has a lot to keep me busy.
The prosody (the driving issue
for this reader) catches my eye
because Davies has a lot of
textured variation. The main
thrust, so to speak, of the poet’s
concerns is contemporary social
commentary, and this commentary
is rich and informed. But it’s
the reoccurring pig
image/references that hooked me!
Since I’ve been out of the
country for so long, Davies is a
wonderful discovery.
Dawn
Michelle-Baude’s latest
poetry collections are
Finally: A Calendar
(Mindmade Books, 2009)
and The Flying
House (Parlor Press,
2008). Her work has appeared
in First Intensity, Slope,
New American Writing, and
Verse. She will be
returning to the Bay Area in
October 2009 for a Van Gogh’s
Ear reading, the Paris-based
literary journal she has recently
guest-edited.
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mostly Books, May 12,
2009
At the
Border of
Words
a
review by Richard
Silberg
THE
EARTH IN THE ATTIC, by Fady
Joudah, Yale University Press,
New Haven, 2008, 77 pages, $16;
winner of the 2007 Yale Series of
Younger Poets competition,
selected by Louise
Glück.
|
|
Say
I found you and god
On the same day at the
border
Of words, better two
late birds than
The stone that hit
them.
Say the stone is my
death, when we met,
You and I, near the
cross
Of the iv pole and
fell
In love with the
other
Side of the
hammer…
(from
“Love Poem”)
|
The
velocity of Fady Joudah’s
language, the leaps he makes and
the lovely conceptions entailed
in those dizzy spaces, seem to me
the signature of his lyric voice.
But it’s a complex voice,
as well, an amalgam of elements.
For one, he sees with the eye of
a medical doctor—viz. that “iv
pole”—a field member
of Doctors Without Borders. For
another, he’s a
Palestinian-American. These two
condition everything in the book:
|
|
Children cheering on
both sides
Of the upright road.
Which goes along
With a story about my
mother
When she was a newborn:
They
Ran back to the tent
And found her cooing,
next
To a bomb that didn’t
explode. And so
They named her the
amusing one.
I do not say the
shelling
Scattered them, I do not
say
What Daniel my friend
told me: how
He fled across four
borders,
And with each
A cerebral malaria that
nearly killed him.
The ducks, however,
Get it right from the
first time.
The goats, less so,
run
Straight ahead of the
car for a while.
Before they find their
sidestep. The
drivers
Slow down, or gun it,
and grin.
(from
“Landscape”)
|
Still moving fast, past to
present, story to story, this
poem clings closer to the earth,
to its people and creatures, than
the first. We can feel the
speaker’s connection to
this land of his mother’s
birth; we can feel his empathy
and his keen eye, ducks versus
goats, and particularly that
wonderful last line and a half,
the alliteration “gun it,
and grin,” catching and
swiftly opening out the drivers’
playful machismo. It’s not
that common to find the high,
word-flown lyricism of the first
quote and the savvy detail of the
second between the covers of the
same book.
Along with the swiftness that
characterizes The Earth in
the Attic, its elliptic
flights, comes a concision, a
sense of the powerfully under
said. And in this cut-back mode
Joudah is able to fuse two more
qualities not often found in a
single book, let alone a debut,
namely deeply felt emotion and
the tang of philosophy, of
intellectual overview. Let’s
close, then, with one more quote,
the ending of “Moon Grass
Rain,” that wreathes this
all together:
|
|
14.
The translation of a
medical interview
Is not a poem to be
written
Come recite a verse from
childhood with me
I see you’re
unable to weep, does
love
Have no command over
you?
The sea’s like
the desert
Neither quenches the
thirst
15.
Here, dry grass burns
the moon
Here, a clearing of
grass is a clearing of
snakes
16.
And the rain has already
been cleansed from the
sky
The clinic is empty,
soon
The earth will unseal
like a jar
Harvest is the season
that fills the belly
17.
Here, I ride my bicycle
invisible
Except for a crescent
shadow and the Milky
Way
Is already past
18.
And a mirror gives the
moon back to the
moon
Home is an epilogue:
Which came first
Memory or words?
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Richard
Silberg is Associate Editor of
Poetry Flash. His most
recent book of poetry is
Deconstruction of the
Blues; he co-translated, with
Clare You, The Three Way
Tavern by Korean poet Ko
Un.
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Mostly
Books , March 12, 2009
Elegiac
Poetry by Northwest Poets:
Two New Books
a
review by Susan
Kelly-DeWitt
TO
CURVE, by Michael Daley, Word
Press, P.O. Box 541106,
Cincinatti, OH 45254-1106, 2008,
92 pages, $18,
www.word-press.com.
The
poems in Michael Daley's new
book, To Curve, are full
of what inhabits so many of us in
the last half of life: Regret.
In
“The
Moon & Mt. Ranier,”
Daley imagines picking up two
hitchhikers, ghosts of a former
time alluded to earlier in the
collection:
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Just
so the days
pass like geese
startled by
cloudburst.
Everything comes
back,
trudging over frozen
ground
of decades. I could be
the girl
thumbing a ride, the
boy
behind her in windy
light.
Now they're huddled in
my back seat.
Christ, they sound so
hopeless.
I'm no help. I suggest
things
even I would never
do.
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Looking
back, seeing what one didn’t
see but should have, is a theme
that loops and threads through
Daley's book. What redemption
there is arises from a fellowship
and presence to the fleeting
world: geese, clouds, a bushtit,
the moon—and
from our ability to consciously
enter into it. Whatever wisdom
there is resides there: “I
pass a mare and colt loose in the
road./ So right. So assured their
place along the shadow./ Stepping
light, keeping close.”
(“Driving
Home in Fog”)
The fog is spiritual of course,
and the poems are about finding
one’s way through and out
the labyrinths of it.
Least
successful are the poems about
family relationships in the first
section of the book. Too
self-referential, private and
diary-esque, they fail to lead
somewhere that includes us. The
third section manages better with
poems like “Preparing
the Emergency Kit for My Son in
Kindergarten,”
which captures the interior panic
any parent in the nuclear age, in
earthquake, flood or fire
country, in tornado or cyclone
weather, cannot help but feel,
along with an irrational,
stubborn hope:
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The
instructions help me see
him with survivors.
When I turn on the news
they pull him
from rubble; each photo
is peeled from his
skin;
he waves from the
stretcher;
a bomb gives up the
sleeve of his
shirt.
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To Curve includes
several powerful poems with political-historical
underpinnings: “Fallen”
refers to Kennedy’s assassination and the
speaker's Catholic childhood when “…Father
Cardillo climbed the stairs, / out of breath, and
entered American / Literature with Dallas’
news,” and “Hibakusha”
about the ordeal of the Hiroshima survivors (“A
great light from the sky / crushed the house, the
city fell down.”)
The speaker is running from the city with many others.
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The
gums bleed, hair falls
out,
then purple spots like
snakebites
along the skin. My
sister, her mouth
closing around a small
cake of coal,
and my husband who had
never
been to the dentist. A
set of teeth
in perfect
condition.
They could have been
his.
I buried the teeth in
his grave.
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The
poems reenter the momentous with
humility and empathy.
Many
shorter, more straightforward
poems leap from the ‘natural’
world—“Nettles,”
“Cloud
Work,”
“Dunlins,”
“Luna,”
for example; there’s a
clarity of vision in these that I
admire, but also a quirkiness
that sets them apart in an
engaging way.
•••
TO
THE ARCHAEOLOGIST WHO FINDS
US, by Gary Thompson, Turning
Point Press (Word Press), P.O.
Box 541106, Cincinnati, OH
45254-1106, 2008, 800 pages, $18,
www.word-press.com.
Let me say up-front: Gary
Thompson and I are old friends—the
kind of old friends who see each other every decade
or so, catch up briefly, then part again warmly,
promising to stay closer in touch, which we never
seem to do. The work is different though. I have
followed Thompson’s work over decades, from
his first chapbook, Hold Fast, published
in 1984, to this latest collection, To the Archaeologist
Who Finds Us; which is full of the dilemma and
layered complexity one comes to expect from Thompson’s
work. The poems here acknowledge that “Sadness
Comes”—“It
inches in, drifts / like fog he watches cross the
Sound/…”
But mornings like the one
in “Charm”
also arrive, when the “Scotch
broom’s sudden-yellow / charms the black dog
off our usual path…”
though they have their own underlayers of question
built in:
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Isn’t
yellow, in books, the
color of
grief, and black,
despair? How is it we
are dancing?
Charm, I suppose, and
charmed, and maybe it's
true
that we—dog,
crows, buttercup, and
broom—are
mere trinkets dangling
from the wrist of the
goddess,
and she jangles us as
she pleases, but aren’t
we
beautiful this
day?
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We need
such charm(s), plural—for
aren't they talismans as
well?—especially
when we acknowledge, as “This
Morning's Shiver”
does:
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It
turns out we were made
small
animals shivering
over this earth with
hearts
that pump blue
stars.
Our frail gravity, at
birth,
was buried like seeds in
our eyes.
That is our
right.
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Claiming
that right—to
wholeness—to
the shiver and the charm—and
claiming also the right to
capture it inside language, is
what Thompson’s book is
about.
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I
was thinking about
words
and how they can skip
off the water and
you
were tanned and
splashing your hand—
the two of us, father
and daughter,
afloat in something we
created
and believe
in.
(“The
Book”)
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This
right to claim our truths in
language is especially important
when doublespeak is everywhere:
on TV news, in commercials, in
the Senate and the House of
Representatives. A culture that
perverts and debases language,
one that fails to honor the
history of our words, is bound to
end up as artifact; as the title
poem says:
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We
used language
up. Words broke
or collected decades of
dust
and had to be
trucked
off to the dump
with the rest of our
refuse.
(“To
the Archaeologist Who
Finds Us”)
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Thompson’s
poems look ahead by looking back;
they refuse to throw things away;
they insist on finding a language
that remakes, renews, something
that incorporates the
losses—to
love, to time, to
death.
One poem
that I find particularly touching
is “Dear
Chrysalis.”
In it the speaker approaches his
elderly mother, who barely
recognizes him at first. I’ll
end with this poem in its
entirety:
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Dear
Chrysalis
I
enter the room
my mother has
become,
dear chrysalis that she
is.
I
am a familiar face,
and hers, a face of blue
eyes
staring back, searching
mine
to discover my name—
who exactly I
am.
We
slide by on silence,
the vaguely awkward and
re-lived silence
of a mother and
son's
faint kiss.
Gary
I whisper.
Her face empties
slowly,
but then something
flickers—
Oh Gary, she says,
and her eyes crinkle
blue
in
this moment,
the room we are
in.
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Susan
Kelly De-Witt is a Sacramento
poet who teaches at UC Davis
Extension. Her recent book of
poetry is The Fortunate
Islands; she is a
contributing editor of
Poetry Flash.
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Mostly
Books, January 10,
2009
Books of
Peace
a
review by Sharon
Coleman
The Fifth Book of
Peace, a fusion of dance,
theater, and music presented by
Danse Lumière, conceived
and choreographed by Kathryn
Roszak: October 24-26, 2008,
Dance Mission Theater, San
Francisco, California, and
November 6, 2008, Dominican
University, San Rafael,
California. These productions
were co-sponsored by Poetry
Flash, and were adapted from
and inspired by The Fifth
Book of Peace, a book by
Maxine Hong Kingston.
EVEN IF THE TROOPS WERE CALLED
BACK FROM THE
occupation of Iraq tomorrow, it
would take a lifetime to insure
no soldier, man or woman, is left
behind. The psychological toll on
soldiers changes with each war as
new technologies and strategies
render unexpected results,
another version of “friendly
fire.” With the Vietnam
War, soldiers were trained into “killing
machines” as never before,
and their target became
civilians, more and more. Add to
that chemical warfare and
guerilla tactics and drug
addiction and demoralization and
then a Veterans Health
Administration unprepared and
sometimes unwilling to treat our
mental casualties. A few veterans
turned to writing. A noted
example is the writing group of
Vietnam vets facilitated by East
Bay writer Maxine Hong Kingston,
and which she describes in her
memoir, The Fifth Book of
Peace. Their work is
anthologized in Veterans of
War, Veterans of Peace,
which she edited. As history
repeats itself, their writings’
value is self-evident.
This fall the poems and stories
of this group escaped the bound
pages of the book and transformed
into a mixed- media performance
of dance, theater, music,
lighting, followed by discussion.
Danse Lumière, directed by
performer and choreographer
Kathryn Roszak, is dedicated to
mounting literary works into
dance and theater productions.
The Fifth Book of Peace
is perhaps the company’s
most ambitious project, both in
its current social context and in
its multilayered, multifaceted
production. It brings together a
Bay Area panoply of artists and
writers. LINES Ballet and
Dominican University’s
program in dance provided
talented young dancers able to
well carry out the depth of
acting demanded of the roles,
which is rare in dancers so
young. Ron van Leeuwaard, a
composer originally from Suriname
who has collaborated with a
number of world music bands and
theater companies, created a
score based on electronic music,
ambient sounds of helicopters,
bullets and ocean waves,
traditional Asian music, flute,
percussion, and rifts of popular
music of the time period. The
script, adapted by Katherine
Roszak, is based on the writings
of Maxine Hong Kingston, on the
stories of award-winning novelist
James Janko and other
participants of Kingston’s
Vietnam vet writing group, and on
the written testimony of Pauline
Laurent in Grief Denied, a
Vietnam Widow’s Story.
Daniel Ellsberg, revealer of
the “Pentagon Papers”
and renowned nonfiction author,
held a post-performance
discussion at the November
performance. And the list of
those involved goes on.
On stage, The Fifth Book of
Peace poetically narrates
the journey “back home”
of an “Old Vet.”
Played by actor Steve Ortiz, the
Old Vet exists in a psychic no
man’s land and is guided to
tell his story, to exorcise the
memories, by the female and male
incarnations of Kwan Yin, the
Bodhisattva of compassion, whose
twin aspects are played by
Kathryn Roszak and martial artist
Ben Tang. Tableaux of the Old Vet’s
flash backs are danced so that
actors and dancers double the
older and younger selves. Whether
narrative, gesture, pure emotion,
abstract movement or symbolic
action, the dance with its poetic
subtlety and range truly carries
the performance. Add costumes
silkscreened by Kaibrina Sky Buck
that transform dancers into a
forest or a ghost to the
choreography (also by Roszak),
and the visuals are enthralling.
Perhaps the most captivating
parts are when the ensemble
dances the role of the jungle.
They become an array of
symmetrical and asymmetrical
moves morphing from ballet to
modern to animal-like steps, a
place of unexpected lyrical
motion and mortal danger. If
there is one critique, it’s
that the script lacks the nuance,
range, and lyricism of the
choreography and that the words
are delivered in almost uniform
tones of declaration and
command.
But the message and stories are
clear: clear and, unfortunately,
enduring.
Sharon
Coleman is a poet who teaches at
Berkeley City College. She is an
editor of Poetry
Flash.
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