The poems work through
sound, establishing a meaning quite apart from the literal/what the words say.
Through sound a landscape is made that reflects the natural world. The poems
are all, in a word, sensation. By this I mean of the senses. I feel them more
than read them. Ears, visual simplicity on the page, even the tactile, heavy
board of the letterpressed cover. Again, this book is an object, art in and of
itself, nevermind the words inside. I mean, of course they work together.
When the bees build themselves
inside the hive
there is no exit—
they sting each
other
to survive
-
Though all the poems
are of the natural world, I couldn’t help but see the human in many of them
(this one, for example). But then, I’m always attributing human emotion to my
dog as well and I’m told I shouldn’t do that. This little book made me want to
read more Dan Beachy-Quick tout de suite, which is good because I bought
another one of his books at AWP and will be reading it soon. (I am not filing
the AWP stack away until I read them; the pile is slowly going down / the
poetry section is slowly encroaching into the fiction section of my built-in
(by me) bookshelves.)
Oh, also about Overtakelessness: play on the red
wheelbarrow and a play on Liz Waldner’s A
Point is that Which has No Part (“a point being that which has no heart”
etc).
Oh, and how is this
for a stutteringly stellar close:
-
What is it to be about something, what
is it to be to be about what is it
to be something to be about something
what is it
to be to be about what is
it to
be about what is about what
-
Eye Against Eye did not slay me the way Science & Steepleflower did, but I have decided I would follow
Forrest Gander into whatever woods he wandered in. Fatherhood, 9/11, Mayan
architecture, end of the world, fatherhood, and 10 Sally Mann photographs.
from “Present Tense”:
This is going to be a fast trip
alligator-cracks in the macadam and
fist-sized chunks of road torn out by wind
grey-black backs and bulbous snouts of
northern right whales
cut the swell beyond Fire Island
each repeating sun a comet
world of physical event and mind’s world
indissoluble
but who will thrust a hand in to fit the mo-lo
the veins and arteries of it
a sobering enthusiasm for the unmoored
no longer defining narrative
(25)
Also this:
pulls at grass and the treeline wavers
like something proposed and forgotten
(from “Argosy for Rock
and Grass”)
Hrm. I read most of
it. Well, more than half (it’s 120 pages!), but I want it to count because it
was very hard to get through. And because I left where I was staying and took a daylong hike and only brought two books: this and the Forrest Gander.
I should never leave the house with less than three books. I don’t know when I
will learn this conclusively.
At first I thought I
wanted someone to explain the draw of this book to me, but I think I get it. It
has all the right elements. It’s interested in human creativity / art, there
are sections on music, visual art, gardening, theater, natural history. I did
like all the animals in the book. And being on the beach was the right location
to read the first poem—“The Great Deluge and Its Coming.” But there were so
many adjectives and adverbs that I nearly lost my mind. From just the first
poem:
roughly, vicious,
cruelly, racing, bald, multiple, hairy, woolly, scaly, momentarily, hoary,
weasel-like, grizzled, flooding, fear-whitened (said of the blue-faced
mandrill—so I was totally okay and in fact pretty charmed with this one), harsh,
mangy, long, hanging, numerous, wingless, constantly, white, really white,
wide, silently, simply, deeper, moonlit, calm, ultimate, dependable, finally,
slowly, growing, open
This I liked from the
deluge poem: “Direction was destiny.” Actually, I think that could be the whole
poem.
What I did take away
from this book is that it really knows how to slow down a moment, something I
could use at times. I am told by some I am a bit too paratactic.
I found this book
quite funny, at times rather nonsensical, but plain speech & place names /
peoples names & declarative syntax allows a looseness in its authority. Or
rather: a looseness while maintaining authority. The highlight for me was “Flor
Ars Hippocratica,” but that’s a long one. Also “Homage to Hat & Uncle Guido & Eliot”:
Also, I read this entire book over the phone, start to finish in one
sitting. It was late, a Thursday night. I had been drinking whiskey.
Plain language. More
story/prose than poem (not sure what it’s categorized as, but I found it on the
poetry shelves in the house I was staying in), but quiet, lyrical, stunning. Two
sisters (one young? without language? developmentally delayed?) run away from home
into the woods to avoid sexual abuse by their mother’s boyfriend.
Dark hard. — And quiet, I say. Not a word to
Mother, not to anyone.
Get it.
Otherwise you are dead dead.
25. O New York – Trey
Sager (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Another find on the
chapbook shelf. I picked this one up because I was planning on going to New
York at the end of April (and then didn’t end up going).
late for the box
we are thought
inside of
-
the city
back peddling
& cc’ing me
yr huddled
massive hands
This is what happens
when Emma Lazarus, John Dos Passos, and a hipster barista get together and birth a letterpressed
baby. That is to say I both loved it and wanted more from it. I discovered you
can actually read the whole thing here: http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/archive/online-reading/o-new-york-by-trey-sager/
“Cross-Country” was
the first poem in the book to make me go: “whoa.” Like, literally, out loud, I
said whoa to an empty room. All of the book feels urgent, as though the speaker
is grabbing onto your sleeve and looking intently at you while telling you
things. Urgency and an just-barely-controlled energy that propels the poems
line to line and the book poem to poem. I did not once put this book down until
I’d finished it. There is variation to the poems, but always this intensity and
motion.
Many of these poems also
made me think about how often poems, some of mine included, just seem to get
tired and so go into the dismount rather than fully work toward, discover, and
ratchet up the kernel of knowledge or experience the poem has set up for the
poet to use. In this I am privileging the intelligence of the poem over that of
the poet. And yes, I believe this to be a true thing, regardless of poem,
regardless of poet. The great poets are those who have
poems that move in brilliance along some higher plane and they climb up to meet them there. I felt this way about so many of Reeves's poems. And even the ones that didn’t have this sense
of perfect completion, were still incredible poems.
There was much in asylum
& blindness recurring, weird things from the sea animal world; “Thinking of
Anne Frank in the Middle of Winter” was another favorite moment.
Conceptually the book
weakens for me slightly with the turn towards travel, though poems like
“Brazil” and “Exit Interview” do much to unify this complication of place from
site of America to site of the body (which is arguably where we have been all
along). In any case, King Me is a
brilliant debut.
A few lines that won’t
leave me: “More than once I’ve been a bell broken / Against its own ringing”
and “How else / Shall ruin announce itself if not in one body touching
another?”
SOME YOUNG KINGS
The Mike Tyson in me
sings like a narwhal
minus the nasally
twang of sleeping in a cold ocean,
the unsightly
barnacles latched to the mattress
of skin just below my
eye, the white horn
jutting out from the
top of my head--
oh god bless us
mutts—the basset-blood-
hound mulattoes, the
pug-mixed puppies
left behind the dog
pound’s cinder-block walls
as German Shepherds,
Labradoodles,
and Portuguese
Water-Dogs turn their inbred behinds
and narrow backs at
our small-mouthed blues.
It’s hard to smile
with an ear in your mouth,
two names, and a
daughter hanging by a thread
from the railing of a
treadmill. Oh neck
and North Carolina and
a white coat of paint
for all the faces of
my negro friends
hanging from trees in
Salisbury.
Greensboro. And
Guilford County.
The hummingbirds
inside my chest,
with their
needle-nosed pliers for tongues
and hammer-heavy wings,
have left a mess
of ticks in my lungs
and a punctured lullaby
in my throat. Little
boy blue come blow
your horn. The cow’s
in the meadow.
And Dorothy’s alone in
the corn with Jack,
his black fingers, the
brass of his lips,
the half-moons of his
fingernails clicking
along her legs until
she howls--
Charlie Parker.
Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker.
Oz is a man with a
mute body
on an HBO original
show that I am too afraid to watch
for fear of finding my
uncle,
or a man that looks
like my uncle,
which means finding a
man that looks like me
in another man’s
embrace or slumped over a shiv
made from a mattress
coil and a bar of Ivory soap.
Most young kings
return home without their heads.
It’s 1941, and Jack
Johnson still loves white women,
and my mother won’t
forgive him.
If she can’t use
your comb, don’t bring her home,
my mother says in
1998. It’s 2009,
and I still love white
women.
Charlie Parker.
Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker.
Often, I click the
heels of my Nikes together
when talking to the
police, I am a cricket
crushed beneath a
car’s balding black tires.
Most young kings
return home without their heads.
Oh the mixed emotions
of The Pedestrians. It’s really two
books. The (more than) first half “the fables” is a prose work divided into
separate “fables,” which are really all of one story. It rains. There is
distance. A lonely marriage. Children. A brief running away to the “house that
was not her house.” A return. The quiet sadness of the everyday domestic is
palpable here. For every bit that I loved it however, I disliked “the
pedestrians” (poems) almost as much. The title (and the title poem) makes me
wonder if Zucker is being tongue-in-cheek. Museum
of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009) tells me her poetry is capable of so much
more. I plan to buy The Pedestrians
for the first half though, which was really, really incredible work. And is also
an excellent example of how to build a complete narrative from flash fiction or
nonfiction pieces. A book I look forward to teaching one day.
28. One Big Self:Prisoners of Louisiana – Deborah Luster & C.D. Wright (Twin Palms Publishers, 2003)
I had only ever
seen/read Copper Canyon’s 2007 edition of the book, without the images. It was
given to me more than two years ago by Linda Bierds who thought (rightly so)
that I would find it useful to my own work. And thus began my love affair with
C.D. Wright's work. I was on the couch at the house where I was housesitting,
reading Rachel Zucker when I noticed the Twin Palms edition on the art bookshelf across the room. And would spend the next several hours slowly paging
through it.
The experience of
reading Wright’s words while images of the prisoners hovered at the periphery
of my vision gave the work a distinctly different and real feeling. There is no
abstract anymore, no imagined faces, when one is faced with the actual
portraits. There is a greater immediacy, which made me immediately seek out
more examples of text operating in conjunction with image (as evidenced by the
next few books I read).
Beneath each portrait
was some information on the prisoner, which varied depending on how much
information the prisoner had been willing to provide: date of birth, place of
birth, where located (which prison), when incarcerated, length of sentence, and
how many children they had. Included nowhere was any explanation of what crime had been committed.
I found myself trying
to guess the sentence by the eyes. The LIFErs I could almost always tell. The
ones with short sentences too, except for a few.
Dear night dear shade dear executioner
Fears:
snakes madness
falling
Dear Errant Kid,
Remember the almighty
finger on the wrong
answer button.
-
Sophie Calle finds an
address book and calls up / meets with / interviews as many of the people in
the address book as she can to gain an understanding of the owner of the address
book in that way.
Not life-changing, but
definitely interesting. Some of the photographs were fantastic, though there
was little surprise to their fantasticness since I’m already pretty familiar
with Calle’s work.
The most exciting part
to me was the mention of the Big Chief pinball machine, as that was the one B
and I had in our living room, and which I fixed the cord and plug of, and which
I have played so very many times.
“I turn to collage to
get away from words.”
This is the house I did not build.
This is the room at the top of the stairs in
a house I didn’t build.
This is the desk—from a different
generation—wedged in the window-nook of an upstairs room in a house someone
else built.
This is the mess I’ve made. Under it all is a
fire I did not set.
In the noise the world makes there is no
window and here I lay my words in the loud, in the burning, the built. This is
a fire from before ever fire came down.
This is my mess, over the noise of fire,
window, desk, stair, house.
(76)
It was a Saturday
morning. I’d been at the house on the peninsula for a week at this point. Had
just listened to an upsetting voicemail about my mother’s condition. Did not
call the caller back. Went back to sleep. Woke up an hour later. Did not call
the caller back. Rolled over and spied Marilyn Hacker on the bookshelf and
thought, “I’ve never read Marilyn Hacker before. Why?” I knew she was gay. [Though she was once married to Samuel Delany!] I
knew it was pretty narrative stuff (maybe why I hadn’t read her before). But
the stories! Oh my goodness! While there were great lines like: “What changes nothing changes
everything” and “Does anybody not die uncomforted?” what I was drawn to most in
Going Back to the River actually was the narrative.
The stories were
fascinating, like someone I’d love to hang out with, and the intimacy with
which she told them, I kind of did feel like she was in the room talking to me,
and then on the beach talking to me, and then downtown PT talking to me. Downtown
sitting on a bench where I was reading the last few poems after spending a sad
and overly sunny and warm Saturday afternoon walking around PT and then to
reach the last page and understand why it had called to me from the shelf next
to the bed:
…I am at a loss
for words to name what my loss of you is,
what it will be, or even what it was.
what it will be, or even what it was.
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