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Number 286 September October 2000 New & Noted RICHARD SILBERG Copyright © 2000 Poetry Flash Index for this issue: Pastoral by Carl Phillips Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2000. One Above & One Below by Erin Belieu Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 2000. To Do As Adam Did Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson Talisman House, Publishers, Jersey City, New Jersey, 2000. Blues For Unemployed Secret Police by Doug Anderson Curbstone Press, Willimantic, Connecticut, 2000. Then, Suddenly-- by Lynn Emanuel University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Pastoral, by Carl Phillips, Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2000, 80 pages, $14.00 paper. Carl Phillips is a latter day projective versifier. One of the book's two epigraphs is from Robert Duncan, the other from George Herbert--projective, then, and devotional, in a more general secular sense. Returning, for a moment, to the projective side of things, you can almost hear the characteristic Creeley stammer in the above quote and the circumstantial syntax, "…making / of an act…" Phillips isn't so staccato and edgy, though; he's softer, more muted, a hesitant, reflective speaker, stopping, twining round, so that the reader leans in, almost, to catch these vanishing passions: The poetry is paradoxical, as poetry so often is, spare in its means, slender against the whiteness of the page, simple in diction and in what it gives the reader to 'see', and yet the writing is also lush, languorous. Phillips is a master of cadence, so that breath fills the writing, both in the projectivist sense of a living phrase, measure, and in the Hindu sense of prana, breath of life and desire. This second sense is the heart: Carl Phillips's devotional poetry celebrates love, the romantic, sexual, but also the invisible, spiritual ground of our being: "…I think on / that immediate and last gesture // of the fish leaving water / for flesh, for guarantee / they will die, and I cannot // rest on what to call it. / Not generosity, or / a blindness, trust, brute // stupidity. Not the soul / distracted from its natural / prayer, which is attention,//for in the story they are / paying attention. They / lose themselves eyes open." ("Parable") Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

One Above & One Below, by Erin Belieu, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington, 2000, 88 pages, $14.00 paper. Coming on the first poem in this book, "Timing is Everything," I perked up for reading a tough, smart, wiseguy: "Just as I've got him / going down, his soul tidy / as a presbyterian, the clean / bubble rising from his tongue, / that's when she says, // The drowned man / doesn't drown…. // The drowned man / doesn't drown? // She's like the gorgeous dykes / who rule my health-club locker room, / who own their skin like landlords, / with bodies beautiful as doom." But third poem in here's "Plainsong": "He lived in a sod house, / a formal nest of grass / that wove green thread / around his soul, a bed / of mud and cellulose. // And she was small. She / never grew; the empty / wind that blew and reared / had bent her to the plains she cared / so little for. But he, // he didn't seem to mind / her size, he'd found / a shape to love there; / and she was spare where / he was generous as sand, the kind // of man…" --formal, hovering around iambic trimeter, a fixed rhyme scheme, the whole an ironic, cameo elegy. Then, ending the book's first section, we've got social commentary, "I Can't Write a Poem about Class Rage"; this is the ending: "…Even Keats, purged of his Cockney / accent, couldn't salvage a poem out of / my best friend's nephew, a kid too broke / to buy even half a billable hour, buried // away in a county lockup of some / unheard-of-by-their-own-standards / corner of Oklahoma, falsely accused / of raping an infant since the baby's / crank-addled mother had a score to settle / with the nephew's ex-wife. That won't / melt one stick of butter with / the versifying trust-fund crowd. // So I can't write a poem about class rage / without my own (no doubt) illicit motives / being called into question, and who am I / to take such a hectoring tone, to rant, / about someone else's baby or nephew, / and where are my credentials? What makes me / think I could throw a legislator's stone?" So who is this Erin Belieu? Obviously all of the above, and more, a vastly entertaining, supply skillful poet: "…I'd have the words / that droning bee has just now written at / the throat of lakeside goldenrod. They must / be intimate--see how he calms between her? // His body, only evolution's hunt / for agitation, yet the way he gentles at / her feathered mouth. Let's call that…what? // Biology is obvious. Or choose / another name. No matter how you speak, / what language we might settle on, / / the woodpecker won't stop her rhythmic knocking / inside the arms of tamarack, // and we've arrived at birds and bees again. / But nothing is as simple, is it?" ("My Field Guide") Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

To Do As Adam Did, Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson, Talisman House, Publishers, Jersey City, New Jersey, 2000, 154+ xiv pages, $16.95 paper. Ronald Johnson is one of those poets of 'inner fame', best known to the cognoscenti for his book ARK , a long poem in many sections that he wrote over twenty years, in the same genre as The Cantos or The Maximus Poems. Pound and Olson were among his influences, as were Williams, Zukofsky, Robert Duncan, as well as many older, 'traditional' poets, especially the visionaries, like Dante, Blake, Wordsworth, and Whitman. Johnson was visionary to the core, as Peter O'Leary explicates in his excellent introduction, "in a spiritual as well as a literal (optic) sense," "at once expansive and minutely particular." Born 1935 in a small town in western Kansas, he got a Bachelor's at Columbia, living in New York in the late fifties, moved for twenty-five years to San Francisco, then returned to Kansas where he died in 1998. This rich, wonderful book traces his development from a flush left, projectivist lineation in his early books of the sixties, through the concrete poetry of Songs of the Earth in 1970, two books of the seventies, a selection from ARK, 1996, with his centered, bilaterally symmetrical lines, and finally a selection of short, previously unpublished poems titled The Shrubberies. O'Leary emphasizes the joyous quality of his work, its omission of the autobiographical, let alone confessional, his method of collaging quotations and observations, and his mastery of the page as a visual composition. No way, of course to give any substantial sense of that here, but let's look at two radiant small poems. This is the first of his concrete poems in Songs of the Earth: about which he says, "Earthearthearth is a linkage of ear to hear to heart. Art and hearth are also hid in it. All is at the core of fall. Even the stones here have overtones and the clouds may speak." (p. 65) And here from ARK is "ARK 58, Balloon on Being 50"&emdash;I'll just let it speak for itself: Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Blues For Unemployed Secret Police, by Doug Anderson, Curbstone Press, Willimantic, Connecticut, 2000, 84 pages, $12.95 paper. This is a very tasty book, a book that cuts through a lot of you know what with its humor and its violence. But it's also the book of a real poet on a serious quest: "The world / and its counterweight / silence. How / a shout brings up flesh. / Don't even / call them mysteries, / call them facts. / Like the filament of blood / where scalpel / touches skin / and the baby is / swung by its ankles / over the wound. / Like the fact of rain / or the burnt honey / of her neck. / Sometimes / when I sing / I feel the word / drag its rusty anchor / through the muck." ("Ars Poetica Blues") Doug Anderson is a Vietnam vet, who wrote a boggling, kickass first book of poems (Moon Reflected Fire) about that war, which is only his violent particular of the more general case: trying to use words to bust through words, our own, and the skillions and skillions written by others before and to come. Anderson succeeds at this patent impossibility far better than most, and along the way he bubbles up many iridescent phantasms to give his reader pause, rumination, and animal enjoyment: "I am not so sure you are stewardess as you say. / I think you are a psychic terrorist, / uncommonly sweet, but you lift weights. / I have never loved a woman whose biceps, triceps, / trapezius, latissimus dorsi, deltoids, abductor, adductor / and, oh, your vastus internus, / so differentiate themselves, so glisten, / so move like slow-motion shot of an earthquake / through a stretch of desert. / I do not believe your degree is in metaphysics, / that you write children's animation films / during stopovers in Hong Kong, nor / that your father was shot down over Burma / in the Big War, and as a humanitarian gesture, / a tribal chieftain sent you his head. / I say, Liar, and how your eyes incandesce, / starfruit in deep amber, how your oiled hands / ply the plastic explosive thighs, / now stroking rictus muscle, down into / the fire that, unshaven, spills out of your pelvis, / appropriates the dunes, the iliac crests." ("Lies") Return to Top of Page • Archive Index

Then, Suddenly-- , by Lynn Emanuel, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999, 68 pages, $12.95 paper. Lynn Emanuel has become quite a celebrity, considering that she's a poet, subject of magazine articles, sought out for interviews. It's rare enough that she's a brilliant, innovative poet who's also a pleasure to read; rarer still, she's a poet who seems to have found a striking new path for her work at mid-career. Her first two books Hotel Fiesta and The Dig were, as I remember them, essentially 'realistic' books, i.e., about the world that we all live in 'out there'. Then, Suddenly--, though, is self-reflexive writing, making itself up as it goes, whose subject, if we can call it that, is the divinity of its own process: "…Get back / in the grave, for god's sake, Father! I tell him. / And he tells me, I hate this poem about the fire. // I never write from experience, / but halfway through the poem the fire bit me. / Just as I was feeding it the log that looks / like an autopsy performed on a telephone / pole, the fire turned on me like a sick dog. / Bitch. Bastard. What's fire's gender? / Bachelard says fire is the daughter of two / logs. Okay, so, I am writing a poem in / which I am peering down the long dark / road of a sentence and I hear my father saying / I knew a woman whose mind was like a / white veranda across which her thoughts / could glide in brilliant congress with one / another. Who are you dating? // The log I've named Gretel wells up dully, / her hair is a yellow fire struggling. / When it comes to Gretel, I am God." ("These Days") And there you have it, in overall approach, anyway. The thing about this book, though, is that Emanuel just keeps on inventing and inventing all the way through, cover to cover. Delicious. I'll have to content myself, perforce, with one more long quote: " I am giving a lecture on poetry / to the painters who creak like saddles / in their black leather jackets; in the studio, / where a fire is burning like the painting of / a fire, I am explaining my current work / on the erotics of narrative. It is night. / Overhead the moon's naked heel dents / the sky, the crickets ignite themselves / into a snore, and the painters yawn / lavishly waiting for me to say Something / About Painting, the way your dog, when / you are talking, listens for the words Good Dog. // 'Your indifference draws me like horses draw flies,' / I say while noticing in the window the peonies / throbbing with pulses, the cindery crows seething / over the lawn. 'Nevertheless,' I continue, 'I call / your attention to the fact that, in this poem, what was / once just a pronoun is now a pronoun talking about / a peony while you sit in a room somewhere unmoved / by this. And that's okay. Gertrude Stein said America / was a space filled with moving, but I hate being moving. / If you want to feel, go to the movies, because poetry / has no intention of being moving; it is perhaps one / of the few things left in America that is not moving." ("In English in a Poem") And that's not all; the poem keeps on inventing from there. Richard Silberg is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash. Doubleness is his new poetry book from the California Poetry Series/The Roundhouse Press. He teaches "Writing and Appreciating Contemporary Poetry" at UC Berkeley Extension. Return to Top of Page • Archive Index