Levon Helm by Jason Morris (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018)
Look: tiny orange butterflies crown clover bees inspect every angle for the nectar, their little jewelers’ lupes eyeing clovers’ coronas starbursts it is these animals to whom I owe a debt of gratitude larger than poetry (from “Raw Umber”) What’s in a name? Music, insight, courage, and a fame matched by death and history and the instantaneous. Levon Helm the individual, the musician, the icon, positively notorious and storied, is as mysteriously absent from Jason Morris’s first full-length as he might be considerably present. There is difficulty in knowing the truth, and perhaps as a ghost or an analogy we might find the figure’s energies throbbing and glissading through and across the pages by default, by knowing or unknowing, by potential. Either way, or both ways, Morris’s voice is what fills this book first and foremost and it’s his voice that resonates with a severe beauty of scurry and scrawl from cover to cover. A quality that holds Morris’s book together through this book, as a collection, is its patchwork of diverse senses of self and the voices that represent those senses. Morris as poet approaches a documented world through an applied plethora of lenses, angles, and curiosities. Subject matter is scattered and wizened by its range; as a collection, his poems are pervasive and capable of maintaining a subtly inquisitive purity. Emotion is balanced and arcing in concision. Heights of explorative hyperbolism, through joy or fear or trauma or distaste, rarely find a presence. Morris’s work is a soft glow, a resonant hum, the realm of the residence of the voice in a lively and respectable world. This paradigm, consistent with the Californian bioregionalism I’ve most recently been reminded of by way of Schelling, is utterly pleasant and hypnotically realized. There is a trapping and a phantasmagoric engulf that sways and docks the reader into the poetic bob. Morris’s language is a whispering throat, a delicate pendulum, a soft tide, built upon music and inventory. To choose not to pick up phone & scroll anyway through Dear old dreary daylit world, dull repetition of daily news, look up instead to see a world newly cathected, autochthonous in clouds, in ones and threes. (from “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”) It is fascinating to find Morris’s poetry in 2018. It sits extensively from the 1970s or 80s, echoing along the decades and gathering evidence of a world slowly creeping. Technological advances are more humdrum and ordinary than explosive and shocking. The search engine is as commonplace as the hummingbird. The social media as blandly bountiful as the juicy red cherry and the spitting out of the pit. Technology, the digital, the contemporary where we find ourselves does not have to be of significant consequence, is how I read its acting space within Morris’s poems. It might be anticlimactic or slightly stark in a mild burden of melodrama. But it comes and goes, lifted meditatively from the poet’s grasp. A flighty assurance of this temporal non-reliance is filled with equal parts quirk and mythic. “Google” meets “Demeter” in the same span of the 80 pages that make up Levon Helm. What else makes up the book’s mythologies? The inspirations of the young poet’s language make brief but intentional appearances: through Mike Watt & Thurston Moore to Lyn Hejinian to Creeley & Olson to Clark Coolidge to Dashiell Hammett, there’s the presence of a musical and literary world scraping by the notebooks and moments of Morris and his incisive glaze of language. And beyond the questions of Sonic Youth, beyond the tracks and the chords and the concerts and the stanzas and the books and the readings, or perhaps, ultimately, from within, the cast of characters expands to include those individuals of the biographic present, the alive and the nearby, those close and of community, familial and intimate, resonantly personal while all the time brushed across the canvas in tiny, expiring bubbles. Morris’s imagery of voice is hurried and tireless, yet the persistence of intentionality indicates a stationing and situating of the self, a ghosting of the self, lapsing and relapsing through the daily experience. What haunts me (& maybe “Providence,” too) is an oblivion of memory; that the loss of the bits might prefigure a larger loss. By taping this message & making for it a memorial of decimated piano chords, tape-hiss & distortion; by putting it right in the middle of the album, the music recognizes that. Memory is an oblivion in which only ephemera floats to the surface. (from “Providence”) A poetics grasping collage by the throat, wringing collection like a towel to loosen the liquidous core contained within, Morris’s pitter-pattering lines fall into place but not without a determined effort of work and challenge. His writing contains a fullness of demonstrated craft and revision. As a collection of poems, this significant investment of the poet may not benefit the reader with any immediacy, and yet there is a feeling, a shadowy current that follows each poem, indicating the historical treatments contributing to the book’s final form. Language of obscurity, references of placement and displacement, allusions and quotations determinately ambiguous, and unexpected moments of exquisite flourish and precision are all features that flank and surround the overall identity and vision of Morris’s voice. As such, much is surprising and to be gained through the patterns of readership without much expectancy and predictability. Through elements both magical and mysterious, Morris has a sincere, macrocosmic effect of discovery and arousal dispersed throughout Levon Helm. Perhaps, like the thorough and intangible life of the man that the book is named after, this effect is one representing an unburdening-yet-burgeoning empathy of worldly creation.
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YR #51: Letters So That Happiness by Arnaldo Calveyra, Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Zuba9/19/2018
Letters So That Happiness by Arnaldo Calveyra, Translated from the Spanish by Elizabeth Zuba (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018)
Lost Literature Series #22 Everything rising came up from the eucalyptus, showering clean ash autumn from the burn. (41) A skinny volume filled with squat, postcard-sized prose poems, Letters So That Happiness is as much about the worlds within each of its cartas as it is about the act of letter-writing itself. Arnaldo Calveyra’s first volume is also, coincidentally, contributing to the “lost literature” series of Ugly Duckling Presse. Curiously, Letters feels as lost (and searching) through its language as it may be lost in the English-language literary canon. Each poem fades in, mesmerizing cascades of scene-setting and environment-growing established within breaths, only to fade out toward the next blank space. The effect is an uncanny, paralyzing sense of grounded representation, flourished with pastoral roots and yet delivered with a bold and casual sense of realism. Calveyra, raised in a rural, agrarian setting, son and grandson to cowboy culture, relays in this first book the setting for growth and cultivation. A surrealist farming of the mind, Letters explores and satisfies that essence of acknowledgment before and during the presented story, the periods of wakefulness and sharing. As such, the fleeting feeling of these works also feels staunchly intentional and directed, under the control of the poet. To think that the famous writer who lived through conflict and exile found flashing moments of grace and stability in an aroused, ethereal world of memory, wonder, and persistence envelopes the book in an aura of revelation and epiphany. The paradox of this eruptive sense is that the book never rings out with sensationalism, extremity, or even, more positively, ecstasy. The book seems ironically positioned in a relatively humble space for its young author; where the youthful energy would typically reign with arrogance and posturing, we instead find a book that is gentle, sorted, and withdrawn. And again, curiously, stable. Suddenly, how wonderful! I came looking through loose autumn and slowed to a thistle beside the slide piled high with dead leaves. Wild! recently bloomed and gone into the raw milk. (29) The searching, the seeking, the hum of a daily spirit finds anonymity in both voice and recipient of the letter form. The letters are not dated and do not contain anything but the messages themselves Though many of the scenes and characters within Calveyra’s poems in this book feel specific, feel explicitly known and thoroughly explored, the results of Calveyra’s poetics crafts more exuberant openness. A muffled beg of invitation, a soft plea for the transformed and transited, this is a book that further surprises with its direction of tone and messaging. The flutter feels surreal in its interpretable beginning, and it also feels drastically contextual in its leading qualities, its trims, its finer and more resplendent details. The reader may get what they give, as in the subtle splashes of our more intimately shared memories and dreams and interpretations, that sense of the vulnerable and the sealed shut coming together as an edge. A smell that slipped early through the wooden slats, the wind’s latch: in the highest branches of all; the bustle of coming from water, that is, the change from wave to wind when it just can’t much more those few meters of beach. (9) Poet and translator Elizabeth Zuba has admiringly carried this work into its full fruition, with direct help from both Arnaldo Calveyra and his son, Beltran. Zuba has demonstrated an inspiring diligence in working intensively through the original works, not just the cartas, to know Calveyra and to know him thoroughly. Her passage through Calveyra’s world by way of the poetry has been supplemented by his biography (included in this book), which is additionally mesmerizing and awestriking. As Zuba’s lengthy exploration reveals, knowing the poet’s miraculous life and the process to the creation of this English translation are nearly as momentous as the poems themselves. Much like Calveyra spent many of his early years befriending and learning from Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Mastronardi, Zuba found a mirrored experience in getting to know and understand Calveyra through friendship and storytelling. Calveyra’s agreement to commit to the English translation is one of the reasons for the translation existing to begin with, says Zuba in the book’s conclusive remarks. Following his father’s 2015 death, Beltran Calveyra provided similarly significant information and influence as well, indicating additional, contextual qualities of legacy, respect, and the captivation of filial connection found through Letters. Details of the translation process, which explore Calveyra’s unique grammatical methods, complement the book’s inclusion of the original Spanish text. I remember the kitchen in the boil of cold pockets and the mouth in the steam singing good morning. (13) As with its achievement as a spellbinding set of poems that would go on to influence individual mid-20th Century writers and an Argentinian subculture of leftist political rebellion, the new achievement of this English translation has the potential to provide levels of influence and curiosity. From the canon of South American literature as a whole, to the =milieu of political poetry of the 20th Century, particularly in a complex Latin America infused with violence and expulsion, this book is a valuable addition. The whispered, beautiful testaments within Letters explores the juxtaposition that is reality for Calveyra and so many other poets: at the core of difficulty, challenge, and migration there are entrancing and rescuing moments of calm, joy, and illustrative movements toward a grounded, intact center.
Rules for Walking Out by Crysta Casey (Cave Moon Press, 2017)
He shot himself in the chest and stomach on the night of last month’s full moon. That was the day before he turned 50. Now, he keeps writing the same letter over again and sleeps a lot. (from “Hell and Heaven”) Does war ever satisfy? Does the military ever satisfy? Does the institution of recovery for veterans ever satisfy? Does mental health ever satisfy? I suppose what it takes is to define “satisfaction.” Crysta Casey’s poems, which tackle the aforementioned topics and much, much more, rarely feel satisfying, and yet they do feel emblematic and carry weight to cherish, pity, and endow energies of sympathy. Rules for Walking Out extends to the realms of painfully familiar and frighteningly relevant in this 2018. They are poems that are sad, often to the point of hilarity: one option is to laugh off the grim realities of those who were forsaken, abused, and derailed. These poems are poems of clarity and vision, and perhaps the clearest and most illuminating moments of sickeningly stark reality are indeed the clutch of satisfaction after all. The book is not incessant. It is not long to the point of exhaustion. It is difficult from the beginning, through the middle, and to the end. But it is not a lengthy journey by ways of the stories as poems. It is the entire grand finale of explosive works of fire giving light to the shadowy night. It is grotesque. It is the writhing tendril and lit fuses. It is a collection of poems as real as poems can be. It highlights the buoyant statement of Graves, who claimed the difference between those poets and those insane is that poets write it all down. And in this case, doing so is to create a reality that is invisible, marginalized, and regularly forgotten. The victims. The servitude of those victims, who have somehow crawled into their own corners and stood, stupefied and unable to integrate into the fortress of the mainstream. No, not just being unable, but rather, quite defiantly, refusing to, even by asking questions, thinking spiritually, greeting and integrating the best intentions, the holiest friendships, and grandest circumstances. “Are you a wanderer too?” the doctor asks me. I don’t answer, but run barefoot ten times around the cement rectangular sundeck, ducking umbrellas. (from “Glass Houses”) In Rules for Walking Out, it is almost as though Casey’s collected works work to track and advertise all the cruelties and distinctions that appeared before her own individuality, her life and attempts at living. The book, I should say, is autobiographical and reads like a notebook: uncut, uncensored, unafraid. Casey’s life moved from a mediocre early adulthood to serving in the Marine Corps, where she fell into inequity and became entrapped amongst the dominating, pimping masculinity of her superiors. A dualistic shift happened: responding to the abuse of the system and its sexualized pockets, and being encouraged to create, Casey declared herself a “Poet in Residence” and was promptly discharged. Her biography takes her to the mental health ward of a Californian hospital (where, symbolically and intensely, she learns of her mother’s failing physical health and corresponding in-patient reality in a hospital nearby) and, inevitably, up to a very anticlimactic Seattle. The poverty-stricken Seattle wastes of the 20th Century, and Casey’s time within them, form descriptions of a continuation of the frightening and of the marginalization she experienced in her life’s prior chapters. Consequentially, the poems of her Seattle period also work, and they work through a poignant and balanced direction to confront the ugliest, meanest face of the state of the VA (as a system) and those humans who suffer (regularly) through it. These poems are flashes, to be sure, of a much larger and undescribed life, which is almost imaginably intolerable and/or awash by way of prescription medication, depression, and other ways of making sense and staying alive. And that there is so much existing beyond the poems make the poems themselves that much larger and conceptually fantastical, despite their harsh naturalism. The sailboat on my wall is forever sailing. If we are its crew, we have fallen overboard, our drowned bodies floating in life jackets on the surface. (from “Hell and Heaven”) Almost along the lines of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, much of Rules for Walking Out can be read like a collection of faces and identities as much as it can be read as Casey’s memoirs. It is, in a way, communal. This indicative quality of the writing demonstrates Casey’s commitment toward her role as a poet, which ultimately is the role of a community’s leader. Though action is often reserved, Casey floats about among her peers and, through documentation and acknowledgment, releases them from injustices. At least in her own, timeless, allegorical way. And I can’t help but think that perhaps this process, as brief and intense as it is having been collected and focused in Rules for Walking Out, may be of significant potential when it comes to analyzing War. War, like the wars we fight each day by way of those who bring us conflict, oppression, and harm, may be relieved (if not healed) by steps toward that acknowledgment. That is, following in Casey’s footsteps we may have the opportunity to revitalize our understanding of the forms War takes, and its systemic and unbelievably antagonistic persistence toward the individuals within and surrounding it. And I couldn’t tell them—I would not be able to tell anyone until the news was officially released. I would go home with murder on my mind. (from “Rude Awakening in the Public Affairs Office”) Rules for Walking Out, in its prologue and four sections of poems, leads the reader on an examining that is worth the brief and enduring push—every second of it. The book additionally includes sections written by Casey’s peers and mentors, including Deborah Woodard, Trisha Ready, and Esther Altshul Helfgott. Not merely a memorial for Casey, who passed away in 2008, these additional writings are insightful critiques that demonstrate the powerful, empowering and inspiring qualities of a community of writers that truly learned from Casey and continue to learn through her published, available words. This counterpoint to the bulk of the work and its unsettling nature serves as its own expanse. There are boundaries here and they are clearly identified, and there is a positively-charged relief in the wake of such grave shadows, be they absurd or truly entrenched in terror. I imagine those who follow Casey’s line of writing will find many opportunities to embrace this holistic and inclusive structure in many more ways than one individual can imagine. Even that potential makes this book doubly so in its ability to satisfy and define satisfaction. I gave my name rank and serial number, said I was a poet. Beyond that I refused to speak. (from “A Curse”)
Something for Everybody by Anselm Berrigan (Wave Books, 2018)
May I have a sip of your cigarette, asleep in all my clothes, crying, uselessly, as your singularity apologizes for & preserves our long way around to an open muted slightly flittering love? (from “The Parliament of Reality”) The greatest act of truth in Anselm Berrigan’s eight book of poems, Something for Everybody, occurs in the book’s final piece. The poem, “& What Does ‘Need’ Mean?”, is a grotesque and grizzly ramble of a poem that shows Berrigan’s strongest and weakest qualities in its twelve pages. Those qualities, the poetic rampage and the incessant confessionalism, are seen intertwined and summate the otherwise messy and stale preceding contents of the book. In “& What Does ‘Need’ Mean?”, the reader encounters a dedication to and homage for St. Mark’s Church in New York, and it is here that the image of the center for the poet, the “downtown” brought into question through the poem’s concept (which was part of a generative, thematic exercise created by the Poetry Project, entitled “(Re)Defining Downtown” in 2016), is portrayed. Partway through the poem, Berrigan writes: “I keep going and coming / back to this place for that & by / the way, you do get, right, how / truly fucking strange, if ordinary / it is, to be breathing, here, doing / this with a voice?” The truth of this set of lines, arguably prose boxed in and controlled in the narrow columnar style the poet has mastered, is a truth revealing crisis. Berrigan’s poems breathe in and out, accepting and pushing past crisis upon crisis. These moments of urgency and dramatic interjection are often buried beneath circumstance and pure image. That the poems of Berrigan often appear to be haphazard journal entries, scrawls upon a palm or a page in the middle of a park or a train terminal, reflect the speed and directive of their creation and the poet’s processing. This is pure New York, in all its tragic, unending anti-glory. Then it was as if I didn’t speak for another year, & that’s a feeling, not another fucking metaphor. (from “& What Does ‘Need’ Mean?”) When I started reading Something for Everybody, I felt the tame, erratic tones of Berrigan that his previous seven books contain. The forms were slightly estranged and kaleidoscopic (and ironically-cum-disappointment there most likely isn’t something for “everybody” in the book), but otherwise this is Berrigan’s hallmark style, his calling card representation of the world once again butting and jutting its way into focus through “the book” format. This book, however, feels slightly worse, though, and by worse, it is good. It is mildly exciting, a mediocrity and extravagance at once, that demonstrates the flattened reality of New York City. It is, thus, sickening and necessary at the same time; a book I can hardly recommend anyone read but can feel confident and describing should someone care to read it. Earlier in the book, Berrigan has composed a list of “mini-essays” that are in the style of and taking the language from Joe Brainard. One essay struck me as an epitome of Berrigan’s structured gaze toward craft. “Turns” reads like this: “My work never turns out like I think it is going to. I start something. It turns into a big mess. And then I clear up the mess.” (From: “17 Mini-Essays on The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard.) Another piece of the puzzle in decoding, understanding, and learning to accept Anselm Berrigan and his barrage of bluster and agony is to understand his poems as rough patches that have been cleaned up. The poems, which combine the hackneyed influences of various generations of the New York School, language poets, beats, and other “poetry movements,” are poems that do much with too little. The poems are often directly derived from or referencing writers whose souls should be at rest but whose corpses and works continue to be dug up and sifted through. In our era of technology and movements towards equity, the result of this vacuous reliance upon the past is blustering and is agonizing. Just as The Poetry Project attempted to define its role in 2016 following the emergence of a new face of tyranny, there is an attempt for the poet to define his role too, using whatever is at his disposal. And yet, the disposing act never quite makes it, as we spin, and spin, and spin through 20th Century Poetics. That said, Berrigan is a family man who brings his family into the poems, just as he brings the outside world into his poems, and this interconnected, networked self contains some saving graces. The most brittle act of antiquated New York poetry is juxtaposed with (or, forgivingly, balanced by) interposed moments of the now, the new, and the emerging (“Tap for more tweets, munch / In the preserved meatlight” goes “Inward Branding Mechanism 2: Lonesome Sabotage”). Perhaps a comment on the antiquity of New York as a place and idea more than Berrigan as a poet following and honoring various lineages, every fresh image and idea related to contemporary communication and information exchange in the United States often gets dwarfed by pigeons and decaying train lines that have little to no relevance beyond themselves and the New Yorker devotees that may or may not identify with them to the degree we find Berrigan identifying. Those moments of tweets and social media, of the web, of current socio-political phenomenon are absurdly dim and overpowered by the vortex of New York and the faceless urban living that so many New York poets have described again, and again, and again. This obsession or trap or fate is not new for Berrigan, as any reader of his would expect, and its descriptions are important if only to serve as footnote. This is what’s going on over there in New York. The loop continues. Hurrah, hurrah. for the nod out in collaboration with medical relocation I’m always a touch late to ten baroque minutes away from a bad repair job in gravel kittywalks where unnameable fluidity unlimited only by the flow of your distressed clarity of material (from “Asheville”) My criticism on the most important city in the world aside, the poems in this particular collection have plenty of shining moments that any poet actively studying and pursuing poetry would benefit from engaging. From “Speech,” a light concept piece containing four words (“SMASH THEM. / EAT THEM.”) to the typically morbid and self-/society-defeating “To a Copy” that scrolls down the page like a spiraled staircase, “Nothing / gets to be real / or realized / or reality-based / or filmed as if happening / or rendered realistically / or branded contemporary / or performed spontaneously” (and so on), the poems range wildly as per the book’s name-sake. And often the language does appear sparking and vaguely refreshing. But then there is the constant mess, and the jumble, and the shrouds of tones that inspire a feeling of decay and disrepair. Halfway through the book, I found myself feeling a reminiscence of depression, a weight of the ugly and relentless machine: poetry as chore, as weight, as grumble. Most of Berrigan’s poems, when not fuddling through tricks in phrasing and lingual aerobics, are often situated as pure exhaust. The poet is shuffling around in a sea of images that carry as much meaning as breathing. And the breathing is for the poet, not the reader. So what is the point of these poems for the reader? I return to this question time and time again throughout the book. For example, I ask it when I see “June at One on Ave A,” which reads: “Bus! / Bus! / O bus. . . . .” the text falling down the page, like a dull, pseudo-apocalyptic nightmare. Similarly, I ask about intention and affect when I read the long blocks of text in “New Note” that can’t help me sigh with more exhaustion. The text is composed in huge paragraphs that could just as easily be pages and pages of columns, but it perhaps doesn’t matter. There is a resulting nihilism as I read “the song’s importance retelling what you’ve witnessed undersea, out windows at declines” . . . which has its own, rusty charm. Perhaps Berrigan’s calling card, then, is a sorrow that can now be quintessentially branded into a fetish. This poetics is a poetics of industrialized pity, meeting mechanized repression, and a holistically-realistic essence of mental illness intersecting with blinding flashes of awe. Thanks to language, of course. And thanks to today’s undead: a bleached, ruptured Americana beyond and yet bound to the mind. And that is truth, a single man’s truth, who haunts the streets and histories of New York, and continues to document his own, regardless of the implications and disastrous messes to be made.
Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems by Jennifer S. Cheng (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2018)
once she was crawling through a tunnel made of fabric unable to see the sky. to find a tear in the cloth, an eyelet of fear, which is to say, what is the body in transit? a pilgrimage-- (from “Her Dreams At Night”) The latest collection of writings from Jennifer S. Cheng comes by way of the illuminating and mythological Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems. Broken into a neatly layered and dauntingly dense five sections, a prelude, and an interlude, the book of poetry and prose draws upon a plethora of Chinese myths, most notably The Lady of the Moon, Chang’e, of which the book is named, but also including stories of Nü Wa, Tin Hau, and others. Moon represents an intelligent, matured phase of writing for the poet. Containing a mutuality of intellection and empathy, it follows its incredible predecessor, the acclaimed House A, which explored intimately the ether and disintegration of location, identity, homemaking, and familial lineage. To encounter Cheng’s newest work and ever-expanding relationship with the world via Moon is a beautifully transformative and profound reading experience. In Moon, Cheng’s words are incredibly inspired, fearless, and empowered by the fluctuations of that which surrounds her; and also, there is an integration and confidence that shows significant growth, appreciation, and resolve for the complexities of experience and endurance. Much like the Lady of the Moon, Chang’e, the proto-feminist archetype who is the subject of many ancient Chinese stories, Cheng is demonstrably capable of surviving, understanding, and acting against hardship and challenge and insight. This understanding of causation and achievement toward and of autonomy, both distinctly different and yet also bound in concept, inform many of the works and their monologues; these are writings of process, writings to embrace identity. Process and identity are significant themes throughout Cheng’s work, but here, in Moon, they are urged forward through the bold, unfaltering poet’s commitment and persistence to progress, knowledge, and freedom. Sometimes we begin as flood & gradually learn to shore. It is the process perhaps of looking at things alone. Unwoven, the body builds an altar loose, saturated in it (from “October”) Far from egotistical, the core divinity within these works represents a clear, sisterly (and, curiously, motherly) direction of empathy unrevealed so fully in previous works. Her previous movements in House A indicated a fascinating and inspiring relationship to space and the roots of home (as an idea and as an actualized, physical place with actual familial relationships and intimacies). In Moon, transition and migration are still very much resonating ideas; but they feel very much intentional and desirable. This intentionality and rational, firm placement is paired with the sense of wild and unknown that exists all around the poet. Between her homeland in San Francisco to her other homelands in Hong Kong and mainland China, to other, less-identified spaces, the reader is taken into the periphery of those authorial certainties. Environmental factors like heat and humidity trigger actions beyond the enveloping and into the charge of the writer: to find release and pace, to seek inward moments of reflection and protection. For me, the experience of seeing the poet leverage the awe of the myths and imbue a daily life of communication, work, and insight with those myths gives way to powerful moment of witness. The readers of Moon are granted great opportunities in encountering Cheng’s methodologies. Cheng’s work is heightened to the point of a ceaseless blend with the incredible and extraordinary, and yet we as contemporary humans need not find the old writings and storytelling to be completely beyond our current context. From bus stops to parks to apartments to boats to islands to marinas, the world is full of contexts that can and do mimic the archetypal. In other words, there is a precise, transcendental unity with history here. Cheng’s work pulls those strings, pulls out those ideas, merging them through her own turns along the path. When I read that the book contains “maps,” I became aware of the interpretation of the map as the abstract wayfinding moment contained within the beautiful truth of each poetic experience happening in the past and fortified through the act of writing: that what was still is, and vice versa. (If a closure of lines is always a lie. If shadows are multiple because the body is multiple. If, then, a continuation, the moon in its phases. Bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collections.) (from “Prelude, part i.”) In some cases, these merges of old and new are most prophetically balanced by the image of the moon. As a symbol with an endless array of meanings, that which is lunar and orbiting in the fullest declaration of gravity serves the poet and the reader both with the energy of reflection. Astrologically haven-like, the moon is where Chang’e was made to be, to live, to continue, grown and growing, following transgression and complication. Cheng explores Chang’e’s movement to the moon and there are as many reasons why it was not Chang’e’s choice as there are reasons that she had to go. And yet, despite this ambiguity of positive or negative triggering acts that inspire Chang’e’s timeline and journey and resulting emotional circumstances, the effect of the movement to the moon, at least partially, is an embodying of the necessary learning, growth, and subsequent liberation. As hard as it was, and continues to be, from a remarkable number of angles and interpretations, this movement and relationship with the moon is still representing epiphany, insight, and progression. That moment of the epiphany, of the transformation by way of reflection and reaction, is balanced throughout the book, allowing the floods of verisimilitude to open and close like a hinge. Let me quarry the hemispheric drift Let me curdle the nightfall home (from “Creation Myth) The form of Moon offers another integration of truth. Its five sections indicate more qualities of mapping, trajectory, and an indication of that process towards reclaiming space for growth and independence. The book begins before the five sections with a prelude, “Sequesterings,” that is enormously enjoyable to read without any context of the mythologies of the book. It is abstract and abundantly self-sustaining, providing a splinter of what follows: “Iterations,” “Artifacts,” “Biography of Women in the Sea,” “Interlude: Weather Reports,” “Love Letters,” and “From the Voice of the Lady in the Moon.” The five sections, split with their interlude, each offer unique angles on the precision of Cheng’s experience. They serve as their own waypoints in the map, but also serve as individual maps of life and the Chinese mythos pulling in characters in some cases and leaving out characters in other cases. They are pillars, pylons, temples that create that visual boundary between the lines of thought that the poet traces. For as long as the stars do not seem to align in an orderly manner, as long as such lost light sources make their way into the spinning crevices of her lungs, she will continue to ask herself: How does one make a habitation of it? What is the relationship between a woman’s fragments and her desire for wholeness? (from “Chang ‘E”) Tracing is one of Cheng’s poetry’s best qualities, from my point of view. Being able to shift and create a poetics that contains both the exquisitely researched and the dutifully exploratory, as a representation of confidence (as opposed to anxiety, unsureness, and pretension), allows a floating essence throughout the book. Like her previous works, this engagement is deeply serious and focused, yet also open to that which is profound and that which is profoundly unexpected. As such, the book contains moments of surprise and delight; there were moments for me, as the average reader, where the book opened up and changed directions and followed leads, or took rests and pauses and meditations, and being within them as the reader felt secretive and empoweringly inspirational in its own way. In this spectra of Cheng’s poetics, the result is ecstatically authentic, ironically personal even when mythological, and awe-inducing. The book, it appears, is a gift being given to the readers just as it is a gift given to the poet. There is a sense of award and reconciliation contained within that floaty, tracing spirit that lingers within the pages. [. . .] if you take how she journeyed in utter silence, sailing in no particular direction across an endless and unbounded sea, dully lukewarm water melting into overcast sky, waiting for the waters to recede, waiting to land, somewhere, anywhere—you will remember, above all else, how she is—motherless, childless, godless-the last girl on earth—how the story of the world begins with her, a body in the marshes, sleeping, alone. (from “Nü Wa”) Despite one’s knowledge or lack of knowledge of the Chinese stories that are contained within Moon, the book is a significant next step for Cheng and a significant contribution to American poetry in general. It will, I’m sure, be recognized for its respect for an elevation of the adapted Lady of the Moon stories, inclusive of their feminist edge and elevation of the female spirit. The fascinating form and the revealing of Cheng’s continued growth and forward momentum as a writer are also worth noting again, as those who left House A will be amazed at where the poet exists in this work. And beyond all this context and these implications, the work stands on its own in stunning, absorptive independence. Like the reflection of the moon on a body of water, there is nothing quite like Moon, nor do I think there ever will be something like it by Jennifer S. Cheng or any other writer.
The Last Mosaic by Elizabeth Cooperman and Thomas Walton (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2018)
We love to think that various spaces are haunted, as we ourselves are haunted spaces. (from “Last Breath of Color”) The Last Mosaic is a collection of poetic statements and musing describing travels in Rome by poet-authors Elizabeth Cooperman and Thomas Walton. This collection is the first major collaboration between these two poets, and one that sticks timely as a footnote (or page rip or cobblestone trip) in the long history of representation of humankind. Like Anne Carson or David Shields (both who literally show up in the book in various ways, along with countless other authors and inspiring minds), the words in The Last Mosaic are loosely clumped into a scattering of ideas, linked together loosely into themes. In other words, the poems (or sub-collections) serve as clusters of revelation and insight and ultimately as documentation of Cooperman and Walton’s witness and conclusion during their time in Italy. The words, then, serve to help the reader navigate the behemoth of consequence and history consistently present throughout the Rome and its surroundings. The book’s a marvelous feat, one that swirls around mystically and temporally. It is filled with context and subtext, direction and floatation, movement and stasis, evidence and obscurity. Every poet knows that poets steal. Mimicry is the great device of art. (from “If We Replaced These Bodies with Our Bodies”) Most notably and superficially, the poets have written their book about their visits to Rome, and on the surface, in the moment, in the contemporary, it’s a beautiful and hearty record of the encounters in that multifaceted, multicultural place. The zoom that fills the spaces between each image, however, is on the historic and on the complex. In this case of world history, there is the act of borrowing and utilization that becomes key to understanding authorial placement. For Cooperman and Walton, it is a pleasant exchange between knowing the act of being present, and the act of engaging multiple pasts. Here, in “the last” space, we have an extension of all the previous ideas, a la mosaic, and an understanding that those previous ideas can be roped together in some finality. In this case, the finality of the authors and their presence. The train rattles south, sometimes wailing, kneeling through the Tuscan countryside heavy with sunflowers, olives, hayfields, gold scarves folding, rolling rows of grapevines running over the undulant soil to Rome, Rome where every square foot of earth has its mouth full of stone. (from "Little Scratches in Tempera") The writing, fueled by countless vibrations of space and time in Rome, maintains a poetic form of theft. Literary theft, not nearly as morally impermissible, as identified by the authors themselves, is a form of stealing done and done intentionally to amplify thematic range. It’s curious to see where and how that process is discovered; the usage and bringing in of the external forces, the peripheral muses of the city life that buzzes around our poets, is a usage at once amplified and also distorted by origins. It’s a curiously muffled and uncertain position for Cooperman and Walton to take, but as their other works have indicated, seriousness and play are required of one another to exist at all. The journey into the feathery soul and spinal juices of Rome and its streets and peoples and figures is a journey of intentionality but open-mindedness, and despite the rigid consistency of form (on the higher level) of The Last Mosaic and its writing, the flexibility of content is arousing and not nervous or tense. The process of the poets and their actions, here, in this publication, is complex; as we see them, as readers, these two authors move throughout streets and galleries and museums and plazas effortlessly, evanescently, floating about, taking and adapting that which initiates conversation and thematic development. The writing forms a keystone of imagery (their own ciphering, their own conjuration), ultimately forming images which serve to hold together (unlocking through an assumed completion or stability) the greater image. This bigger picture and macrocosmic lens of Rome is also allowed, through selection and exasperation alike, to be elevated more importantly than the smaller pictures contained within. At times. It’s not entirely clear just how much value is put on the small and the big throughout the book, and maybe it does not need to be. Perhaps the interplay between the various heights of Rome analogically indicates one step further how much beauty there is within the refractive, existential reality of a place set far into the past and far into the future at the same time. I did not see for fifteen minutes the trick of blood at the old man's waist training his white robes smocked in black velvet. (from "Soot on the Left Foot of God") As I read The Last Mosaic, not having my own geo-psychological or emotional relationship to that area of Italy, I watched as the authors established and set forth an arranged system of values and hierarchies of authority and autonomy by way of discovery. More summative, they bumbled along, lived lively moments, and etched their own interpretation of the world around them, much like the many great artists that have continued to occupy Rome for centuries and centuries and centuries. Excitingly, thus, The Last Mosaic with its self-awareness and conceptual core (whether identified before, during, or after the writers’ experiences) is a fundamentally challenging book of these bold and autobiographically-dependent poetic statements; its core, like the city’s reality, is deservedly process-oriented, obsessive of and through history, and maintains a quasi-permanent concept of an umbrella positioning in a world where anthropological deconstruction is gravely suggestive of truth. There is no feeling inherent in language. The poetry in language is what makes us feel. We use poetry all the time, though poems are generally thought to be useless. (from “Sick Bacchus”) Moments like the one described above from “Sick Bacchus” indicate a hearty and realistic relationship between Cooperman and Walton and the poems. Beliefs such as the poetry as synonymous with feeling ultimately identify and characterize the views of art throughout Rome and how we, as humans today, can integrate them into our own sense of being, by way of feeling. The book connects images, ideas, and ponderable frameworks (via strings and other logical progressions) thoughtfully, and again, intentionally. There is a rhythm and a pacing to the book as a whole that keeps it intact and even, in a sense of the eruptive, is capable of breaking down the poems themselves. Poem titles become earmarks but not requirements to the book’s truths. The book, like our occupations of space everywhere we go, is a testimony towards movement, and as such it doubles as a comment on the movement we physically endure and the movement of the language (representation) we express. Here, then, the book’s flow, a linear and circular (circuitously moving between both narrative identities) collection of moments and epiphanies, serves as binding to the reader. Sucked into the ancient vortex of story, hero, and the archaic, the reader has the chance to hold on and watch as that mosaic moves back into the ether time and time again in anti-conclusion. A resulting effect that the authors may or may not have intended is an understanding of the powers that come with the privilege to move, and the privilege to be able to see that movement throughout history. As the artist, the awareness of intention can be matched with inattention; what power we yield and how we relate to it, or refuse to. The book on its surface is often about embrace, but I encountered strands of denial and refusal within the book as well. Negative capability can be thought of as seeing without a code explaining things. That is, no political agenda. (from “Content as Costume Jewelery”) Cooperman and Walton, like Keats, hone for some time on this value of negative capability and perhaps the sentiments of anti-conclusion or anti-conclusiveness are simply synonymous with the understanding of bringing in that which can be brought in, regardless of motive and desire from the conscious poetic mind. On one-hand, that makes for an exciting immersion into an exotic or otherworldly space in a country not of one’s own; on the other hand, the post-engagement approach, as it might be gleaned, could be an active rejection of that momentary weight of being within the privileged hierarchy. The tourist, who occupies space and has the weight of reconciling that space, can be, through the ambivalent, serendipitous encounter, transformed into a more unified, contributing being, who can be held accountable for their presence in that space. A mosaic implies participation and contribution to the entire image, and not a denial, invisibility, or exclusivity away from that entire image. Despite their definite outsider qualities, Cooperman and Walton have done a fine job being “one” with the city of their occupation. While movement is incredibly important in this book, so is its inverse (as with any book of writing on the page). The Last Mosaic includes the gasps of presence and the nature of the authors and their conjoined, unified, and synchronic flow, as explored, but also in the injunction of description and stillness that pervades a world of movement, action, and space-time blossoming. Specifically, we have the “still life” poems, minutiae of encountered objects painted onto the page. For example, in “One Should Always Be Lost,” there is the following: “Up in the trees, a claw of half-dried leaves, arthritic, grabs a painful shock of sun. Purple wildflower clumps dance in circles around the gnarled trunks of olive trees.” While this moment, like many others in the book, is deeply personal and reveals a polish of emotion, there is the sense of the author displaced, channeling like Keats or, later, Spicer, the explosivity of the world that surrounds us all. In Rome, as demonstrated by our authors, there is a very pertinent sense of the natural as causing that channeling. Could the roots and new growth emerging between the mosaic’s tiles, atop the fresco, or, like the grotesque refuse of today’s living birds and humans, serve as that conducive sense to move beyond history? Beyond, in this case, does not imply a dimming or degradation of history; for the core of The Last Mosaic, it is the point and the ultimate purpose. But throughout, the reader is challenged by the authors and where they can find sense and grounding amidst flash upon flash of their inspiration. Whether it’s identifying the relatively quiet morning moments or discovering an absurdly extraordinary pool of turtles, these triggering moments are exquisitely spliced throughout the otherwise rhetorical and didactic process of the book. Beauty is that which we want to repeat. (from “If We Replaced These Bodies with Our Bodies”) Didacticism and history become key components to gauging where Cooperman and Walton may explore going forward. Living in Seattle, a place incredibly different from Rome in both respect to history and outlook to the future, the authors may have answers, at least in the form of poetry, that may be worth visiting from their home grounds. As a place that demolishes historical buildings for efficiency, cost, and value, there may be issues in understand that which can be provided by the beauty of repetition directly called upon by the authors in the quote above. As a city that, despite its best efforts, fails to deliver significant respect to the many cultures that fill it and recognize the recent but complex layers of the past, perhaps there is much to be applied or projected via The Last Mosaic. Still, the book does not concern Seattle so much as the splitting moment of existence that occurred in Rome during the period of its writing. There is no pressure to look beyond the book or move forward from Rome’s streets; the book feels as solidified and territorial as geography itself. And yet perhaps such concentration means its lessons, values, and themes can maintain their harmony and impact all the easier as readers who do or do not care about Rome will find out as they get carried from balconies to cafes to gardens to squares to waterfronts to arenas by way of Cooperman, Walton, and the countless other voices of the same literary vortex. Yellow Rabbits Review #46: Defense of the Idol by Omar Cáceres, Translated by Mónica de la Torre7/17/2018
Defense of the Idol by Omar Cáceres, Translated by Mónica de la Torre (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018)
Lost Literature Series #23 Led to the buttress of your solid thirst, (headdress of frail waves, distressed hips), the meteorite of your body sets the seasons, from the empty arc of its skin. (from “Fickle Oracle”) In the 1943 prologue to Defense of the Idol, Vincente Huidobro invites the reader into the world of, the life of, Omar Cáceres with description, representation, introduction. “Outside your windows poetry crosses the universe like a lightning bolt,” Huidobro concluded, nearly 100 years ago, before stepping away and allowing the ethereality of the poet to take shape. It is with gusto and mystery that this statement of a poetry of crossing echoes into and beyond the pages of Defense of the Idol, a book that is as brief as a stirring morning and yet as magnificent as the oncoming storm. it barges in, appears, from this lamp, in pieces, a nocturnal poem I’ve scribbled in blurry handwriting, night of a bluish storm, oh incomparable righteousness. (from “The I’s Illumination”) The book’s presence as a mode of identification asserts a sense of recovery. That this “lost literature” has been recaptured in the contemporary is an act resounding like a signal or beacon. It is a call to history. A call to purer energy. As translation, the collection glints like a gemstone, with the young Chilean, Cáceres, brought up from the void in a ritual as Orphean as psychedelic. The words of Cáceres by way of Mónica de la Torre emanate like the aforementioned bolts of lightning. They pop and shatter and bounce. They are the emersion and emulsion of life itself. This life, what little we know of the details, was life the poet knew and described and opened the world to by way of the poems. as if we were spinning vertiginously in the spiral of our own selves, each one of us feels lonely, narrowly lonely, oh, infinite friends. (from “Opposite Anchors”) At roughly 60 pages in length, 30 devoted to the original text and 30 to de la Torre’s careful translations to English, the pamphlet-sized collection is as impactful as dynamite, as evaporative as teardrops, and as clutching as a vortex of memory. It represents what little has been known of Cáceres previously: his relationships with the avante garde in Chile and, spiritually, his intricate political ties to the Communist Party. These worldly, almost excessive biographic details are pushed and snuffed in the writing itself and in the publication; that is, they never find thorough exploration. And yet do they need it, or is the biography a plastication of the poet and his poetry? Is mystery today as it was, perhaps, in the 1930s? As demanding our attention is to the most objective realities possible, the presentation within Defense of the Idol sits glinting, remarking upon the world it finds itself within. The bubbling open of energies and stances in the poems gives all the represented life the poet needs. Love of a hundred women will not sate the anguish distilling its feverish buzz into my bloodstream; and if I found there were support for that hope, the voice of a precipice would have mercy on me. (from “Insomnia Near Dawn”) What has resulted is the collection: 16 poems, slyly positioned upon the page with dimples and craters of white space, capable of standing on their own, to proclaim, to shatter, and to disappear. There is the uncanny, the magical, and the pressure for resolve. There is beauty, homage, and commitment. There is attention. With Cáceres, we have an individual whose words spruce and spice and spit across our own spaces, our own peripheries—to wake, to trip, to collide in a poetry of ultimate infusive demands.
Take Out Delivery by Paul Siegell (Spuyten Devil, 2018)
Review by Greg Bem Paul Siegell is a writer and visual artist whose sounds tear from his poems and shoot out into the ether, merging into any ear they come across. These sounds are the sounds of action and of life. They have been, in various ways, from book to book. In Take Out Delivery, Siegell’s latest collection and concept, the sounds are from poems following the dangling length of emotion, brevity, and maturity. They spear and stick, spin and wobble. They zero in and fly off within moments. They are fleeting instants, and clever ones too, that bring the reader in with a linguistic energy. The book collects poems following two different formats. The first is a sexy entangling of characterizations, what might be deemed as Siegell’s “hot pepper people” poems. Partial ASCII vispo, partial minimalist comic, these poems dot across the book showcasing subtle typographical gestures and also bringing sense through Siegell’s linguistic dexterity. In the first “hot pepper people” poem of the book (which also is the first poem of the book), one “person” expresses: “i love / party?” while the other says “we make pizza of evening!” A caption beneath the characters themselves reads: “hot pepper people / discovering their doppelganger / reaching for the same door handle.” There is a cuteness to this poem, as with the others, that is so simple yet charming, yet fiery and eruptive too. Another reads: “scantily clad / free radicals?” and “post-apocalyptic pickpockets!” and “hot pepper people / running riot at a massive, / six-turntable spectacular” conjuring the provocative, the strange, the ridiculous. The “hot pepper people” poems contain a similar tone and a similar sound across the book, while dazzling with their own shiny, unique moments. While the sequence of “hot pepper people,” complete with mellow bites of absurdity and intoxication, could stand on its own, it spices up the book by being interspersed. The bulk of the “text” of Take Out Delivery are prose poems taking from Siegell’s life. In many ways, Siegell’s work arouses a sense of the whole. In this case, the “whole” of Philadelphia is the world that Siegell builds in these poems. There are references to artists and writers living their lives in the City of Brotherly Love. Place names. Cultural mentions and abstract artifacts. An entire landscape of city life is created in a whacky and profound space. Each poem begins with “We’ve Come for Your” which lends itself to the consumerist and idolatrist sensations of the American conditioning. It’s very American. It’s very funny and, with layers of subtext, gently critical. Mostly, Siegell’s exploring the world as he does best: through the intellection of language. In “We’ve Come for Your Birth of Wordplay,” Siegell writes: “Leaks happened when sounds happened when it was hard to see. When others uttered the purpose of sound that I was made, I made the yes of sound. Strange and then OK when someone else said yes to the sound that I was made because I listened enough to know what that sound was mine, but also his and shared.” The odd, jumbling focus of this poem represents one of Siegell’s greatest strengths: to take an image, idea, or logical premise for language, and alter it just slightly enough to make it completely revitalized. In this case, there is the epiphany of shared language. In another case, in “We’ve Come for Your Blood Test Results,” the quirk is the imagery: “On the bridge, the birdgirl waits with a weight in her ribcage. Symbolically, a sailor and his sweetheart. A sparrow pecking at a cigarette. A sparrow pecking at salt for snow.” Juxtapositions reach maximal surrealistic effect. Images become layers that mask their core as the poems continue. There is hiding, revealing, fantastical moments. Just as one truth is revealed, another truth is added, releasing or solidifying that which came first. Thankfully, Siegell in his brilliant tongue doesn’t hide behind the flash of the absurd and the language for the sake of language. Instead, there are moments of the political, the social, the equitable, and the yearn for an understanding of the spectra that life affords. In these ways, Siegell is an empathetic poet. His humor is laced with a profound stretch towards the underlying meaning of and from others. “After sucking his nails to taste the dirt from underneath, a homeless man tics, ‘It doesn’t it don’t most matter if I know the news or not.’” (from “We’ve Come for Your Veterans Affairs.”) Ultimately, that sense of vision must be balanced by the humorous musings of the poet. Siegell often creates situations in his poems that form an ars poetica, a device as inward as possible. The wording may come off as objective, or displaced, but commentary on the artistic process is present and arousingly personal, as in “We’ve Come for Your Unfathomable Fact”: “When he came to, the artist to a blank canvas raced and, as if an ominous grand piano silencing a star, he ferociously blackened everything out.” This poem, like many others in the book, is a dense offering from a poet whose youthful energy is matched by a mature introspection. Whether you have encountered Siegell’s works in the past or this is your first exploration, Take Out Delivery is a rewarding collection of poems of two very different formulas that amount to an enjoyable experience. As poetry of the 21st Century, it fits right in with the soft jabs and quick mesmerizations of our digitally-dependent lives. As poetry of Philadelphia, it emulates the livelihood of a broad swath of humanity. As poetry of the heart, it laughs and emphatically pushes things forward.
A Box of Crazy Toys by Peter Dellolio (Xenos Books, 2018)
Review by Greg Bem Silent films are projected upon the foreheads of children. The little ones vomit miniature skyscrapers made of exotic African woods. (from “Skeleton Accordions”) Entering the world of Peter Dellolio is a walk along the bridge between charming and disturbing. To read his short forays into narrative poetry is to be immersed in the dreamscapes of another’s twisted mind. The sensations of imagery as grotesque as they are marvelous are sensations disturbingly crystalline. The metaphors of these poems are enthralling but agonizingly elsewhere; a book as relentless as A Box of Crazy Toys may be one better to take in small bits rather than, as per my approach, read in a single go. The world among us is filled with a roaring blend of the absurd and the abstract, and Dellolio’s poems appear to meet that standardization, that landscape of normal weirdness, head-on. In reading A Box, I couldn’t help but find analogous contexts of the bizarre and spaces of the extreme like Magical Realism Bot, a Twitter account with the sheer purpose of going to the edges of understanding with heightened juxtapositions and realms of distortion. Likewise, I was reminded by the Surrealists, whose operations nearly 100 years ago found similar resolutions and conclusions through their own bending and prying of an emerging world of crisis and reaction. Indeed, Dellolio’s “box” appears to be in the same way a toolkit to showing readers what is possible through the mechanisms of an opened, unrepentant mind, a mind capable of agreeing to the extreme image and holding itself accountable to it as well. Cream puff nipples on the muscular breast of the lion tamer. (from “Maggot Wheels”) And yet despite these fervent commitments, these sequences of wrestling the lines toward new heights of interpreting and appreciating the booming world of this continuing bark of a 21st Century, there is a noticeable difference between the roots, the ancestors, the earliest writers taking these approaches. Indeed, while the Dadaists, Surrealists, Expressionists, and many other loud groups engaging the image as a form of triumph and call to understanding power, focusing on social evolution, and otherwise rewiring the poet’s voice, the work of Dellolio here appears to be softer, softly incandescent, and even withheld. A rigidity that strikes me as apolitical and even (at best) timid and (at worst) repressed emerges out of the miscellaneous craziness of Dellolio’s “toys.” The playfulness and the toying around does not strike me as youthful and childlike, but rather reflective of the consumerism and information overload serving the beck and call of the new Americanization of the 2010s. A space uprooted by search engines, fluttering social media posts, and submerged cellphone behavior. A moment in human bondage honoring and protecting displacement, quietude, and passivity. In some ways, these qualities of the shared, damned reality of so many appear as faux friendliness, but the inner conflicts that continue to cause crisis and discontent, evolved marginalization and demonization alike, pop out of the “box” much like the viral content, the glittering popularity, the potential for greatness. The irony of the “crazy toy” is that it’s most enjoyable but also most chaotic; it is, like Dellolio’s images and poetic instances, a presence both gravitational and destructive. To the book’s benefit and detriment, these poems are hardly self-referential, and hardly evoke a world beyond themselves. They are, like Magical Realism Bot, so far pushed into the absurd and abstract that their landscape is one of isolation; there is a protection and confinement that allows them to flourish and stand brightly on their own, but how they move beyond their own privileged cores is unnoticeable. And perhaps that’s the point, in reading A Box of Crazy Toys, in thinking about the ultimate constraint of poetry (perhaps now, perhaps always), that there is a context that will always be present and yet unavoidable. A context of constraint, an engagement of limitation, a necessary restriction to the dreams and desires of the poet themselves. The dolphin, weeping for its fallen brethren, slaughtered and fashioned into this artificial speaking device, dons a whipped cream space helmet and floats towards the rocket. (from “The Clown’s Three Large Buttons”) Pulling through what are quite clearly memories of actual places, situations, and circumstances, from his life and memories, Dellolio’s poems in A Box of Crazy Toys are, despite their level of the beyond, quite human. They are personal, they are funny, and they are communicative. I found myself laughing with these poems in ways I haven’t with poetry in some time. Despite the contentions the book aroused in my own understanding of a poetic present, this collection served with modes of entertainment, aesthetic appreciation, and a warmth toward fresh investigations of language. The yearning to keep reading made me question the antiquity of many forms of poetry, and where the poet may or may not be serving. I wonder if Dellolio has considered the effect of such poetry, in its extreme forms, as existing and affecting outside of itself, of continuing to expand beyond its own limitations once it infectiously brushes up against the reader. Where the poet may take their elements of the magical and of the real going forward is curious. How the conversation might be more directly woven beyond the poems themselves, if such a thing is possible, is even more curiouser.
Echo in Four Beats by Rita Banerjee (Finishing Line Press, 2018)
Review by Greg Bem For every moving shade, there was a jewel, a bunt cake, tea with honey, rubies, too, found them dead in a village near the Ganges, in some bastard king’s chest (from “Pygmalion & the Slippers") Rita Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats is a positive book. It is a book about positivity. It is a book about attraction. As much as it reflects the complex curiosities of the poet herself, this short, four-part poetry collection also reflects the curious ways extremely otherly and othered objects and cultures carry capacity and phenomenological connection with one another. East to West. The ancients to the contemporaries. Language and translation. These juxtapositions are arrived with Banerjee’s poetic presence, not quite lyrical, not quite narrative, not quite conceptual, which provides appropriate spaces and ranges to explore rather fully a world of integration. At its core, the book is about Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus, which serves as a fitting allegory for poetry in general, but also the landscape previously-described. A dualism within the speakers of these poems is a dualism of acceptance and rejection, of sequences of flight and iterations of home. There is sexuality and there is the sterility of that reflective promise. But complexly, Banerjee’s work carries that sterility into discoveries and modes of joy, fervor, and the interrogative push towards the refresh, towards the new, towards the validated and the enlivened. We were like that—lanterns in the midday sun, laughter against a white-noise wind, tongues circling salt-water stories, cliffs cocooned by the afternoon, cameras catching harbor fish, reptiles, serpents, impossible possibilities-- (from “Atlantis”) Much of the experience where these transformations are derived, carried by the mythic allegories the poet’s subtle adaptations of ancient lessons, is tangibly encountered in place and culture. While the back cover of Echo in Four Beats contains a quote by Jaswinder Bolina describing the book as “post-national,” I believe the antithesis is far more obvious. This is a book collecting poems that encounters and elevates individual nations, individual cultural histories, and appreciates them through their intertwining. In the ways the otherness in Echo and Narcissus is an otherness of affection and difference, so too is the distinct origins of the spaces and roots presented in this book. The curses (or constraints) of the mythological beings further iterate a substantive metaphor in Banerjee’s voices, which identifiably rely on the power of other people, other poems, other traditions, and even other languages to thrive. The occasional poem in Japanese and Hindi, as well as pulled in language from European languages (most commonly French) are important examples of graceful appropriation. There is accountability, responsibility, and a joyful positioning of attraction towards those spaces that existed before and separate from Banerjee and this book, and while the messiness of it in totality may appear “post-national,” I would use other, more appreciative words like “subtle” and “hazy” to describe the effect of the poet’s language on the embodied elements of multiple cultures. from all four directions, in the sky’s dance, the world appeared unreal, and in each broken piece of water, the moon remained, laughing-- (from “One Night” (translated from the Hindi by the poet)) Multiplicity is an important element of the book’s core for multiple reasons. Structurally, I found the book’s four quarters (or sections) of the book to parse the book’s fluttering, experiential nature in a way that complements rather than detracts. For the general reader, the book's sections are not entirely explained. Though there is a slight haze surrounding the segmentation, a general thematic trajectory brings the writing across culture and geography. The book opens with sequences of predominantly American writings (inclusive of music) that then move through glimpses of Japan and India. Within the last section Banerjee wraps the book up with a presentation of miscellaneous musings, though their collection at the end appears as a symbolic gesture of dissipation. Additional complexity to structure is added through a handful of erasures responding to A.S. Kline’s translations of The Metamorphoses, a handful of “mis-translation” poems riffing on the likes of an abundant variety of thematically-relevant sources, including a Romani folk poem, a Hebrew prayer, and a poem by Baudelaire. These fragments of voices, echoing across the cultural spectrum we all must, in reality, understand, elevates and amplifies and contributes to Echo in Four Beats. In Nevada, the stars throw down their silver bounty to the bear dancing on one leg, and when the sky comes down to devour us, it rains in quarters. (from "Currency") Those outside (external) images and ideas, while symbolic to the nature and inspiration of the book, do not completely overshadow or displace Banerjee and her own cunning use of language. I found most of the poems within the book that appear to lack direct references both compelling with memorable. The poet’s mind-shifting language include lines and stanzas incredibly capable of existing within their own, engrossing centers. Indeed, they emerge and disappear calmly, like distant lightning, and drag on, their memories moving from poem to poem, creating causality and a sense of overlapping resolution. Though not entirely sonic-oriented to be considered lyrical, these fragments within her poems are concise moments of implanting. They score and scourge, and represent, as objective language, as a sense of craft. And that craft moves along beneath the narrative trajectory of the book, a bubbling sense of the underneath, a layer of Thanatos and the urge toward definition and stillness. In sum, Banerjee’s Echo in Four Beats provides a poetic space somewhere between engrossing and lightly attractive. That positivity moves from theme and culture to the language within and beyond. It’s a pleasurable space that will hopefully serve to inform, serially, a future for the poet and her mind’s next conjured spaces of communication. We will supplicate, sublime, and let our bodies dance through reverence. (from “Thanatos”) |
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All reviews by Greg Bem unless marked otherwise.
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