BEFORE I CAME HOME NAKED
by Christina Olson

Spire Press
ISBN 978-1-934828-09-0
2010, 80 pp., $14.00
www.amazon.com

In a world where writers complain that people just don’t read poetry, the title of Christina Olson’s first full length collection of poetry, Before I Came Home Naked will certainly catch a reader’s eye. But it’s not the title that is superb about this collection: it’s the rich narratives that follow a narrator’s journeys and exploration for what it means to call a place home.

Olson’s collection is a travel book of sorts. Still, a reader should not venture through the pages expecting the typical “travel” poems. Instead, we experience meeting past hurricanes in “At the Hurricane Name Retirement Center.” Or, we get to visit Bigfoot in Texas in the poem “The Woolly Booger” through the lines “Because down there/everything’s bigger/and a guy can keep/himself to himself.” Finally, there’s even a visit to a ball of string in “Poem Written After an Hour Long Road Trip to Darwin, Minnesota, Home of the World’s Largest Ball of Twine Rolled by One Man.” Through these journeys, we see both humor and bewilderment, and sometimes even a bit of sadness, as found with this last poem when the narrator notes, “If I lived here I would free the world’s/largest ball of twine on a moonless night, cold//still air sitting sweetly in lungs, only sound/locomotives moaning eastbound to Dassel.”

Even more ordinary places get the star treatment. For instance, we find the narrator in the poem, “Buffalo: One Thousand Feet” where she observes, “If we’re going to lose//an engine, better do it right now/Let me fall from this altitude, let me/tumble towards gray so deep I can’t/tell city street from cloud, from lake.” In the poem, “Pompton Lake” the narrator explains that “When you are young even Jersey//can be fun” while offering a litany of memories (imagined or otherwise) of a rented home where “Jeff and I/like some things: the shaggy red stairs/the concrete gnome out front with house numbers/bolted to his belly.” Whether her journeys explore the exotic or more commonplace, the poet sums up her travels in “Ars Poetica” a poem that clearly anchors, and perhaps even explains the collection’s focus on travel:

Certainly I love places:
that last quarter
mile of Vermont gravel
that brought me

Home that summer;
all those jogged laps
over for another day. Or
the stark redness of silo

punctuating the Ohio
horizons. New York only
sleeps two hours a night –
early morning, honestly —

and when insomnia throttled
men in its scaled hand
I’d walk away five
to seven on the street:

everyone I passed was me:
their pacing, our shared
want for cigarettes,
coffee bean, sleep, eye

contact.

In between travel poems, we see snippets of everyday life. Some of the poems take the form of what might be perceived as simple (yet poetic) musings. For example, in “I Keep Goldfish” the poet smugly opens her poem with “because the lease says in its first clause/no pets” and “because/their bodies flush without pomp or plumbing/problems.” Light hearted yearnings turn darker to the end when the narrator explains her true admiration for this pet: “Because they’re the unsung/martyrs of long ago hazings. Because I envy anything//with a three second memory, because they can’t blink/and I look away first.”

Certainly, the poet also makes use of memory as part of her muse. In “After Learning that the Family Dog has Been Put Down” the narrator grapples with loss and grief. In “Family Recipe” the narrator bonds with her father over food. And in “Poem I Would Rather Your Mother Not Read” the narrator retells the story of a past relationship. Whether there’s humor or heartache, Olson presents each story, each memory, each feeling with an honesty that is often camouflaged in much of today’s written work.

Olson’s collection leaves the reader in a whirlwind. Out of breath, we reach the final pages only wanting more of a narrator who is a little lost and a little out of control, but always determined (and maybe, just maybe, a little stubborn). In Olson’s words, every place is worth celebrating, every journey a wonderful exploration. Certainly, with this fine first collection, Christina Olson is a poet to watch.

____________

Karen J. Weyant’s chapbook Stealing Dust was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press. Her most recent work can be seen in 5 AM, The Barn Owl Review, Copper Nickel, Harpur Palate, and Lake Effect. She lives in western Pennsylvania but teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. She blogs at www.thescrapperpoet.wordpress.com.

THE BLUE TOWER
by Tomaž Šalamun

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
215 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10003
ISBN 978-0-547-36476-6
2011, 96 pp., $22.00
www.hmhbooks.com

Why do I love poetry? (What a loaded question.) I love it, for one, because the world is strange and surprising, and poetry illuminates the experience of perception. But ignore that for a moment. Reading The Blue Tower, I felt a renewal of my initial thrill at discovering what poetry can do–that thrill I felt before trying, later in life, to articulate it.

In expressing reality through its inexpressible side, Tomaž Šalamun joins the lineage of surrealism (a Tristan Tzara quote nests within one poem). Yet he also has the conversational intimacy of the beat poets: “My bow of little rags doesn’t symbolize / black ones. Bow of little rags? / ‘What do you mean by that?’ Let’s say a / lasso, let’s say a net.” The speaker is confiding in me, and that feeling of intimacy is one of the great strengths of this collection. All too often, poetry with surrealist overtones can seem opaque and off-putting, yet here it truly becomes a way of seeing, of working through mystification, of finding joy in oddity. The off-kilter way in which Šalamun deploys language is counterbalanced by his clear, declarative sentences. “Brothers can’t sleep with each other,” he tells us cheekily.

Šalamun has a giddy fascination with words; he revels in language’s allusive and elusive charms. “A deep well and a shallow one,” he writes, “see how they / kiss. In-lining fox furs. Birds and flesh, / pierced with a wooden tip. You lick your lips.” Some readers might be tempted to tease out a concrete meaning in these lines, but I feel that explication, for Šalamun, would be at best redundant. The way the words respond to each other, the way the lines zip effortlessly down the page, and ideas jump from one to the next–there is an internal logic here, casual yet persuasive.

In one poem, I find the phrase “the caro anita of mankind.” Naturally it mystifies me, and I’m drawn to it. Clearly it must mean something. A cursory google search gave me no concrete explanation of “caro anita.” In Italian it means dear Anita; it could perhaps refer to a French painter named Anita de Caro. Because the speaker is so approachable, the multiplicity of meanings broadens, rather than restricts, the scope and pleasure of the poem. I can see how some readers might be frustrated by this kind of ambiguity, but to me, it suggests an unfolding of worlds (and of words) within the world we know.

One of the remarkable feats of this collection is the way in which, despite the aleatory style, a narrative is being told–not a conventional narrative, but a narrative nonetheless. Place-names abound, characters reappear, images recur like emblems, words become leitmotifs. There is a fullness of scope which beautifully complements the conversational tone. The poems cross-pollinate.

The mysteriousness of caro anita of mankind suggests a kind of mental stand-off between wanting to characterize experience and having no real frame of reference in which to do so. What poetry can do, and what Šalamun does amazingly well, is to bring us closer to experience, to show us the mystery of reality (e.g., Keats’ concept of negative capability), revealing meaning in mere perception. Šalamun doesn’t shy away from paradoxes–beauty and ugliness, pleasure and violence, memory and the momentary. Death belies our everyday concerns; the poem “Strange Dreams” closes: “Silken lives end with ‘I wouldn’t wish you a / splendid breakfast and a wretched supper,’ as / Professor Menase warned me. God warns me with death.”

Šalamun’s surprising, deft, and often delirious poems could be seen as meditations on a poetics of perception–-but that would seem to diminish the deep emotion that drives them. Things themselves have no inherent value; it is how we feel about them that determines their worth, their weight and luster. Expertly translated by Michael Biggins and the author, The Blue Tower is not only an essential work by Šalamun, it is quite simply an essential book of poems. Seldom is amazement conveyed with such gravity and such gusto. That caro anita, whatever it may be, is why we love poetry.

____________

Marc Jaffee is a poet and freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2004, Storyscape, The Saint Ann’s Review, and Spork.

ORPHEUS ON THE RED LINE
by Theodore Deppe

Tupelo Press
P.O. Box 1767
North Adams, MA 01247
ISBN 978-1-932195-75-0
2009, 74 pp., $16.95
www.tupelopress.org

Chance led me to the haunting and beautiful poems of Theodore Deppe, whose Orpheus on the Red Line was available for adoption at the summer 2011 Rattle publication party.

Those present were invited to pillage a box of books the magazine needed to clear out, and so I met Deppe’s Orpheus. The title drew my eye–I’ve always been a sucker for Greek mythology–but I didn’t read the book right away. It went into a stack by my favorite chair for a couple of months until one early morning I picked it up, intending to read just a little before getting down to my own writing. Soon I felt a prickle of excitement, hairs rising at the nape of the neck, and my morning plans went out the window.

Deppe’s poetry has not been much written about, although this is his fourth book. In 2003, in Poetry Ireland Review, one writer likened the work in his third collection, Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Press, 2002), to the poetry of Raymond Carver. Carver and Deppe do share a strong narrative drive, a tendency to work with material pulled from their own lives, an affinity with nature, lucidity, spareness and attention to the telling detail. However, these are not uncommon characteristics among contemporary American poets. In tone, style, form, material and theme Carver and Deppe are very dissimilar. I mean no disrespect to Carver, who was a ground-breaking writer of short stories that are profound and profoundly moving, and many of whose poems I find wonderful, particularly those collected in his last book, A New Path to the Waterfall (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989). But Deppe’s Orpheus poems go farther than Carver’s in the way in which they mingle personal history, the larger natural world, and the myths which have given possible meaning to people’s lives for centuries. The surprises, the classical magic of the music woven by Deppe, are entirely his own.

Music runs throughout Orpheus, beginning with the first poem, “The Singing,” in which nuthatches “chat” upside down on a pine tree bough before the telephone’s ring brings news of a daughter in distress thousands of miles away, a conversation during which the poet alone hears on the line a kind of chanting. The daughter is rescued by neighbors in the Greek village from which she has called and the poem turns, and turns again, arriving at a deceptively quiet ending which brings together the nuthatches, the humans, and a celebration of the necessity of immersion in the beauty of what we cannot keep:

There is a map and a clock and a humming in the room,
there is coffee, or champagne and kofta curry,

there is a family, or at least the hope that someone might, if not
rescue us, hear us. There is this chatting together

as we amble about upside down and try to get used
to the perspective. And there is this shared time,

which is the green bough, for which I am grateful.

Born in Minnesota, Deppe lived a rather peripatetic life before settling on the west coast of Ireland. He is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine, and directs an offshoot of the program in Ireland. Previously he worked for a couple of decades as a nurse in psychiatric hospitals and coronary care units. Those experiences generate many of his poems. He is haunted, for instance, by the memory of Marisol, an abused child (apparently the subject of several poems in one of those earlier books I’m going to have to look up), and in “Rowan” thinks of her whenever he sees a certain stunted tree in his Irish neighborhood, evoking the story of Daphne in the deft ending: “Nothing much left in this gale/but one hobbled tree. From which a girl might step.”

There are a couple of poems for and about Csezlaw Milosz, who is not named in the first one, “A Polish Poet in County Clare,” but is identifiable by his wild eyebrows and by that poem’s placement just before “Two-Minute Panel on Poetry and Truth,” in which Milosz is explicitly invoked. “Two-Minute Panel” describes a public dispute between an older poet, who sides with Milosz and believes that poetry must reflect the exact truth of a life, and a younger poet, who stands with Picasso in believing that “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” Deppe doesn’t overtly endorse either poet but seems to weigh in with the elder by giving him the last word: “You make up whatever you like,/but I’ll keep writing what happens in the city’s heart.”

Deppe is concerned with telling stories and with encouraging others to turn their experiences into art. Married to another poet, in “For Annie, Who Worries We’re Writing the Same Poem,” he notes that although they may share a history, what they write from that history will inevitably be very different:

I’ll write what you call my serpentine syntax
and you, I know, will risk
any word that gives a line some lift, so let’s say we do
light on the same image, won’t it be like
all these years together, shared
but not really the same at all, more like alto
and bass, different notes in the same chord,
a way to make the music bigger?

Only the penultimate poem of Orpheus, “The Red Line,” explicitly invokes the book’s namesake, but in a way the legendary lyre-player moves through the entire collection. In “The Red Line,” the speaker, traveling away from his hospitalized wife on public transportation in Boston, is seized by sudden fear and immediately rides the train back to her. His fear is doubled by the thought that, like the original Orpheus, in turning to look again he may be doing absolutely the wrong thing. But he tells himself:

                 I am not Orpheus:
turning back early does not
mean I’ll lose my wife.

I enter her room, find
they’ve helped her to a chair,
and she’s sitting at the window,

watching the gusting snow.
You look terrible, she says.
It’s good to see you.

Okay, so there is a little touch of Carver there. I can imagine the author of “Cathedral” writing, or wanting to write, an ending like that one.

Deppe’s three books before Orpheus are Children of the Air (Alice James Books, 1990), The Wandering King (Alice James Books, 1996) and Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems. He deserves to be better known.

____________

Penelope Moffet’s poetry has been published in The Missouri Review, Columbia, Pearl, Riverwind, The MacGuffin and other magazines. In another lifetime she was a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times.

HOODWINKED
by David Hernandez

Sarabande Books
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
ISBN 13 978-1-932511-96-3
2011, 75 pp., $14.95
www.sarabandebooks.org

I first came across the work of David Hernandez when I read “Mosul” in The Kenyon Review. I got that weird pang of jealousy mixed with awe every poet gets whenever they come across an amazing poem they wished they’d written. This is a poet who’s actually capable of writing memorable signature poems. And I say that knowing full well there’s a lot of poetry published today that contains absolutely nothing “signature.”

Poems like “On Aggression” and “Everything I’m About to Tell You Actually Happened” are instant classics in my book. The description in “On Aggression” of the speaker fighting to retrieve a bird from a cat’s mouth is both comical and disturbing, rendered with a light touch reminiscent of William Carlos Williams. In the final lines, after the speaker successfully retrieves the dying bird from the cat, Hernandez writes, “The world slowed then, the blood cooled./Far off, wind jostled wind chimes—/the sound of a broom/endlessly sweeping broken glass.” That last metaphor is masterful. I love the sound of wind chimes, and I particularly admire how the poet manages to work the chimes into a metaphor that is at once appropriate to the subject (the mundane quality of death), and at the same time conveys, at least for me, an international or worldly poetic spirit, perhaps because the sound of a sweeping broom is more ubiquitous in other parts of the globe than it is here in Southern California.

In “Everything I’m About to Tell You Actually Happened,” Hernandez again employs that light touch but toward describing a family during Christmas. How many poets have wanted to capture the smorgasbord of emotions, images, exchanges, and issues that arise during this time of year? Hernandez actually accomplishes that task, utilizing snappy, clipped lines, humor, and precision: “Doorbell rings. It’s Jesus. Drops of blood/fall from his body like a torn rag of rubies./Together we take him apart and seal him/inside a box labeled MR. KILL JOY.” All at once, Hernandez hits us with subtle religious commentary, a humorous depiction of this particular family’s manner of celebrating the holiday, and expert use of figurative language. Describing the blood as “a torn rag of rubies” is both reverent and over the top, echoing most tawdry religious depictions. But labeling Jesus “MR. KILL JOY” is what really elevates this poem to a work of art. Who thinks of Jesus in this way? Is it the family, the speaker, the world? Perhaps, all of the above. Christmas is reduced to an event that can be boxed and labeled. It’s just fast food.

At the end of “Everything I’m About to Tell You Actually Happened,” Hernandez reveals his opinion on the matter in a subtle, yet convincing way, which is another thing I enjoy about this poet. Hernandez is not afraid to state opinions, but he does so while remaining aware of the strict requirements of the artful poem. He writes, “Picture a cardboard box at the bottom/of the well. Guess who’s inside it.” I like how the last line is missing a question mark. It’s a statement. The poet muses on the death of meaning. He’s not proud of the way the holiday is spent. He tells us so. The speaker in the poem is, in my opinion, a bit hard on the family. He comes across as slightly pompous, especially when he points out the brother’s error describing the taste of arsenic, which the speaker informs is tasteless. But there’s real emotion here, and one should admire a poet that doesn’t let all of their work drift into the miasma of Keats’ negative capability.

Some of Hernandez’ poems, however, approach the theme of death in a manner that is too simplistic. Poems like “Hornet’s Nest” and “The Body You’re Suited-up In” further illustrate the point of death being mundane, unavoidable and scary, but they aren’t as successful in my view as the same theme covered in “Mosul,” albeit with a political edge, or “Housefly,” which contains a wonderful concluding metaphor. These flaws, if you can call them that, are minor and point to a fearlessness in the work of Hernandez which I admire. “Hoodwinked” also includes the occasional gaudy metaphor–“the sun lays/its golden head on the horizon’s guillotine” in “Head Case,” for example, but that doesn’t deter from the strength of the collection in the least. You may come across a few of these and then suddenly be hit with the stunning description of God as “a silence/that was there from the beginning.” Hernandez takes on Bukowski-like subjects, especially in “Married And,” and “Hangover,” and at times reads like Rilke, Williams, Dickinson, and even Stevens. It’s all in there—-but in the final analysis, he’s a poet with a gutsy voice all his own.

_______________

Alejandro Escudé is a husband, father, and teacher. He lives in Los Angeles and has a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis, where he won the 2003 UC Poet Laureate Award. Among other journals, his work has appeared in California Quarterly, The Lilliput Review, Main Street Rag, Phoebe, and Rattle. A chapbook entitled Where Else But Here was published by March Street Press, December 2005. Another chapbook, Unknown Physics, was published in 2007, also by March Street Press. He is originally from Argentina. He can be contacted at: ajescude@hotmail.com

TALKING INTO THE EAR OF A DONKEY
by Robert Bly

Norton
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10110
ISBN 978-0-939-08022-3
2011, 107 pp., $24.95
www.wwnorton.com

It is surprising to me, now I think of it, that there aren’t more Robert Blys walking around. All I mean is poets who throw themselves headlong into foreign poetry as a source for new ideas. Ezra Pound, of course, was one of these. But there really aren’t that many.

The juicy ideas are certainly out there for the grabbing. New forms, new openings on the chessboard. Also the poet can get permission to strike all kinds of attitudes he or she would ordinarily regard as illegal. (Take a look at Pound’s Cathay. The “illegal” attitude there was tenderness.)

The danger of taking Martian poetry (including English stuff from, like, the sixteenth century) as your model is that your poetry will end up sounding like a pastiche. You get all excited by Astrophil and Stella, for example, and then you write stuff that’s the poetic equivalent of going over to your friend’s house in an Elizabethan ruff. A certain kind of bright and promising undergraduate is compelled by the laws of physics to do this. Again: Pound was one of these.

The problem is it’s not easy to know precisely what you’re responding to, when you enjoy exotic poetry. Perhaps the poetry of the Mongolian yak herders is knocking you dead, not because it’s actually any good, but because you just like the idea of a little brown man making stuff up while milking a yak. So you wind up imitating the wrong thing.

Now, Bly is no fool, and definitely no beginner. He’s eighty-four, and he’s spent the last ten or twelve years steeped in Urdu and Persian ghazals. He’s been party to a couple of translations, one of Ghalib and one of Hafez. He’s also written three books of his own ghazal-like poems, each one worse than the last, but all three of ’em worth having and reading, at least for me.

I see these three books as a crazy mix of some of the most genuinely excellent stuff being done in American poetry, and some of the most affected and sickening. Let me explain.

The illegal attitude in these three books is that of the oracle. See, these old Muslim poets whom Bly is imitating were not at all shy about throwing down wisdom poetry. They thought the imparting of wisdom was at least half their job. And not just wisdom. Big, perverse, sexy wisdom. Cosmic wisdom.

This is not at all a common view among 21st-century American poets. Mostly what we do is dramatize more-or-less normal states of mind. Hafez and Ghalib do that too, of course, but they don’t like to carry on for more than, say, eight or ten lines without coining some bold paradox about the Universe . . . or Love . . . or God. They like large statements, and they like channeling superhuman authority.

Now, insofar as Bly really does have some genuinely nifty cosmic intuitions, he writes lines that are as bold and subversive and memorable as anything you’d find in an English translation of Hafez or Ghalib. But. He also insists on draping himself in gear out of National Geographic, and drawing up a stool so he can milk the yak. Very few of the poems are free from this oscillation between very good and very embarrassing. It is strange.

I keep going back to Pound. When you read the stuff from his first two or three books, you marvel at the relentless fakery, the Renaissance-Fair bric-a-brac—and then you marvel even more that, of all people, this guy was fated to snap out of it almost completely, and write all that good shit later. But at least that’s a linear narrative. With Bly, you don’t know what you’re looking at.

Send a helicopter over the following gallery of goodies. Every one of these passages is culled from The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001).

EXTRACTS: 1

•

It is the nature of shame to have many children.

•

Too many well-lit necks calls for the axe.

•

He’s baptized in water soaked in onions;

•

He rode all day with fire coming out of his ears [...]

EXTRACTS: 2

•

Centuries later, the Mesopotamian gods,
All curls and ears, showed up;

•

Understand this. The journey was a three-day trip,
But it took Pitzeem thirty years.

•

How many boulders had to be ground down
To produce one square inch of the Sahara!

•

When I see a book written two thousand years
Ago, I check to see if my name is mentioned [...]

EXTRACTS: 3

•

Swimmers, when they dive down to the pool floor,
Turn sometimes and look up toward the sky;
They see sunlight killing its bulls in the water.

•

I hope you’ve stopped saying that people
Are bad and animals good. Bees have their hives.
Every old frog is a son of Robespierre.

•

Naked men crawl into tunnels to retrieve the giant
Snakes. They don’t resist if pulled out backwards.
Ah, friends, the world pulls us out backwards [...]

Right? So, to my mind, all that stuff is A#1. It threatens to suck sometimes, but it just doesn’t. That thing about “every old frog is a son of Robespierre”? C’mon: that’s awesome. But now watch what Bly does. Watch him say (over and over) that it’s all right, that it doesn’t matter, nothing to worry about, everything’s gonna be OK. (These passages are all from the more recent book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. I’m ignoring line breaks.)

All right. I know that each of us will die alone. It doesn’t matter how loud or soft the sitar plays.

It doesn’t matter if we say our prayers or not.

It’s all right if we do nothing tonight.

It’s all right if we’re troubled by the night. It’s all right if we can’t recall our own name. It’s all right if this rough music keeps on playing.

I’ve given up worrying about men living alone.

New people have taken over the motel. It’s all right.

The renegade minister—the one they all gossip about—would see those waves too, after throwing his Sunday hat out the window. He’ll be all right.

It’s all right if you walk down to the shore.

“Oh, never mind about all that,” the donkey says.

It’s all right if I go to college; most people don’t. It’s all right to end up bringing your own father home. Just be quiet.

Let’s not try to cheer each other up. It’s all right.

Go on, be cheerful in autumn, be stoic, yes, be tranquil, calm [...]

Don’t be afraid. The great lettuce of the world is all around us.

My mother was afraid—oh not of the things you imagine—just tuberculosis, death, and my father. She did all right.

It’s all right if we keep forgetting the way home. It’s all right if we don’t remember when we were born. It’s all right if we write the same poem over and over.

It means our old teacher is still all right.

It’s all right if this suffering goes on for years. It’s all right if the hawk never finds its own nest. It’s all right if we never receive the love we want.

It’s all right if we listen to the sitar for hours.

It doesn’t matter if we regret our crimes or not.

It’s all right if we can’t remain cheerful all day.

It’s all right if people think we are idiots. It’s all right if we lie face down on the earth. It’s all right if we open the coffin and climb in.

It’s all right if I forget my own brother [...]

There is still time for the old days when the musician stayed inside his bubble of joy [...]

No one minds if we are scruffy and badly dressed.

I mean, obviously he knows he’s doing this. My point is only that his satisfaction with his formula here seems radically out of proportion to its value. I just keep thinking: Two or three times, OK, but Jesus. . .

Speaking of formulae, watch how Bly handles the words “hundreds” and “thousands.” He knows these words have a yak-herder ring to ’em. So watch him milk the yak ’til it looks like a deflated soccer ball:

HUNDRED(S)

We lost hundreds during the forgetfulness of birth [...]

[...] behind our house you’ll find a forest going on for hundreds of miles.

You’ve put yourself ahead of others for years, a hundred years.

Wherever he put his hands on earth the well water was sweet for a hundred miles.

The water of a hundred bowls is poured out on the ground.

A hundred boats are still looking for the shore.

It must be that we’ve already been grieving for a hundred years.

We can stay in grieving another hundred years.

It would be good to go back a hundred years, and recite some of Wordsworth’s sonnets to him.

And a hundred sufferings dissolve in a single chord.

He kept a hundred sorrows alive in him.

THOUSAND(S)

A thousand gifts were given to us in the womb.

[...] we are admired in a thousand galaxies for our grief.

[...] the cows will graze on a thousand acres of thought.

[...] but I believe a thousand pagan ministers will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.

A thousand acres are underwater.

This has been going on for thousands of years!

Perhaps monks a thousand years ago thought there.

You and I have tried in a thousand ingenious ways to keep up with the suffering expected of us.

Each day he fed a thousand Astrakhan lambs.

Do you see what I’m saying? I mean, it’s obvious Bly would look at these lists and say, “Yes, and?” He thinks it’s all pretty terrific. But to me it looks automatic, formulaic, uninspired, lazy as hell.

I’m going to go ahead and let all those empty hundreds and thousands stand for a lot. There are many, many moves in these books that are the same kind of thing. Poetry as conceived by a screenwriter for a Biblical blockbuster of the 1950s. Robe. Shepherd staff. Beard down to here.

Meanwhile, I just read in the latest American Poetry Review a longish interview with Bly. The level of self-approval was approximately infinite. I wondered what that conversation must look like to the dinosaurs who’ve been following Bly’s career ever since Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). That book’ll be fifty years old any minute. Today, the snowy fields are on the heads of Bly’s original readers . . .

I wonder if you’ve ever taken a look at that first book? It’s interesting. Written by this whole other centaur. I don’t know. Bly fascinates me. There’s not a single poem of his I want to type out and email to a friend, and yet he is a mighty deviser of lines and stanzas…

The case is complex, engaging.

Review by Bruce Whiteman

DARK ARCHIVE
by Laura Mullen

University of California Press
2120 Berkeley Way
Berkeley, CA 94704-1012
ISBN 978-0-520-26886-9
2011, 134 pp., $22.95
http://www.ucpress.edu

“…and the ghost always carries the message…that the gap between personal and social, public and private, objective and subjective is misleading in the first place. That is to say it is leading you elsewhere, it is making you see things you did not see before…your relation to things that seemed separate or invisible is changing.”

– Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (as cited on Laura Mullen’s blog)

Once upon a time in America, this qualified as a poem:

Metamorphosis

When water turns ice does it remember
one time it was water?
When ice turns back into water does it
remember it was ice?

These seem to be questions that a child might pose, although a child would be unlikely to think of the relationship between water and ice as a “metamorphosis.” A child might ramble more too, might go on to other questions of a similar nature. There is no music in these words, or none that I can hear at any rate. They comprise a jot, a verbal doodle. They are the product of a mind indulging in woolgathering, seemingly unafraid of the pathetic fallacy. The language is informal (“turns ice,” “one time”), and although it is arranged at a basic level to look like poetry, really it isn’t, unless one believes that if a poet says something is poetry, then it is. Free verse, after all, was not freed by anyone from being verse, it was just freed from certain conventions of meter and line structure so that the language could respond to time and music in a more open-ended and unpredictable fashion. Carl Sandburg–for he is the author of “Metamorphosis”–never really understood this, and he let loose a flood of artless and unmusical poetry, his own and that of succeeding generations, on the American landscape. William Carlos Williams called his poems “just talk” and complained that they lacked “invention” and “regenerative power.” He wrote off Sandburg’s Complete Poems of 1951 as “formless as a drift of desert sand.” “Metamorphosis” was included in Sandburg’s final book, Honey and Salt, which came out in 1963 when he was 85 years old.

Almost half a century later, Laura Mullen begins one of a series of poems that relate in various ways to Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” a poem she calls “Love (Stratus Opacus),” with these lines:

What erases the signs of the morning
Is the sign of erasure itself indistinct
Siren wah wah wah away
Where the visual logic reveals only
The viewer’s absence a lie many lies
A “thicket” where wandering lost
Bright flat featureless very pale grey
As if a day not begun had yet as if
I were writing this having had to turn
A light on in the middle of the night

This is unarguably the voice of poetry, although poetry of a very specific kind, and one that Sandberg would have had trouble recognizing. It shares nothing with what his notion of poetic language was, except, perhaps, the now less common but hitherto standard convention of capitalizing every line. Its logic is that of consciousness itself, constantly interrupting itself mid-thought and mid-sentence, following instinctual nudges, following sense perceptions as they are registered, and caring little finally for any notion of shape or completion. Punctuation is abandoned (thought doesn’t punctuate itself, after all), and the occasional puzzle is allowed to stand–why the word thicket is in quotation marks, for example. The poem turns into a beautiful piece about the loss of a lover, and if Mullen in general lets her mind wander (lonely as a stratus opacus cloud), as any abandoned disconsolate lover would; all the same the poem has four ten-line stanzas, as if a modicum of formal regularity has to be imposed on the language to keep the heart from breaking entirely.

The Wordsworth poem is not only used for its associations of solitude and romantic nature meditation. It is registered in fiercer contexts too, such as a poem called “I Wandered Networks like a Cloud,” where lines of the poem keep surfacing in a vignette of the poet watching war reporting on TV, “remote / In one hand, drink in the other.” This could seem like a bit of facile grandstanding–what would be easier than to contrast the pleasant English countryside as captured by a dreamy poet with the gritty and violent countryside in Iraq and Afghanistan as captured by a camera?–but in fact the effect is rather chilling, not to say self-critical.

Mullen’s afterword, entitled “Evaporation/Condensation,” addresses appropriation of voice, theft, and literary transformation of sources and of experience, all of which trouble her and provoke her to thought. She seems to chide Wordsworth for leaving his sister Dorothy out of his “well-known” poem, since it was based in part on her diary account of a walk the two siblings took on a roily spring day in 1802. Her own appropriation and transformation of the Wordsworth poem, then, form part of this act of questioning the distinction, if there is one, between “allusion” and “looting.” Bits of other well-known poetry rise to the surface from time to time–“a goddamn big car and” (Creeley), “the age demanded” (Pound), “the last syllable of recorded” (Shakespeare), “ghostlier demarcations” (Stevens) and so on–and she suggests radically near the end of a piece called “Own String” that “These words are not my own, more so than ever, I found them in a structure made of mirrors I dismantled, rewrote to raw fragment submitted to a procedure––remains I remain with.”

The concept of a “dark archive” comes from the digital world and refers to a copy of a data set to which almost no one has access and that is retained in remote storage against the possibility of disastrous loss. Disasters of several kinds haunt Laura Mullen’s book–the loss of love (“the failure to be there for each other”); Hurricane Katrina (she teaches at Louisiana State University); the death by exposure of her stepmother, the artist Ingrid Nickelsen. The “dark archive” is perhaps a kind of philosophical and emotional survival manual that instead of giving recipes for making nourishing soup out of old rope talks about humanness, redemption, persistence, love, “the future” (the italics are hers). It is not always easy to read and digest, but that it is the nature of experimental poetry. Mullen has written in an on-line piece about poetics that poetry goes “back and forth between sound and sense, public and private, nonsense and wisdom” (“Version Notes re: Verse,” at http://www.eveningwillcome.com/issue7-lmullen-p1.html), and the same can be said of the poems in Dark Archive. She lists Cy Twombly as an influence, and one is often reminded of the way that artist used texts. At times they are barely legible, and even when they can be read literally, their metaphorical propositions can be challenging to make out (“Under a thick white sky the impasto parents the edge loss”). Text emerging from chaos and darkness is in a sense how the dark archive is intended to function, and so do some of the poems in this collection. Some poems just swim in sound, like a collection of objects floating in a river that have a relationship but no observable aggregate meaning:

we wavers. See underwater and also under Under. Rum numbers, numb members. Another bad dad had by hurt, another bird in the band flown like water. A shroud of cloud tears to show how slow clowning around drowns distrusted intelligence out, like, it’s all in your head (waters). Blurred word in these submerged streets: bad weather for bed wetters is best for our bettors. [etc.]

Of course this poem, entitled “Code,” has to do with Katrina, but this kind of language prompted by similarity of sound becomes a welter where it is difficult for the reader to get beyond the raw material.

All the same, it and others like it seem to me to belong in that wide Sargasso Sea of poetics demarcated by Olson’s 1950 essay “Projective Verse” and its plumping for negative capability over the egotistical sublime, and that is a good thing. Poetry, Mullen says in the poetics essay, “enacts dualities to complicate and blur them or to reveal the way they are entangled and engaged.” In a piece called “Interpreting” she takes issue with Olson for his sexism (he calls poets “brothers” in the essay and consistently uses the male pronoun) and for using a hunting analogy as part of his argument about poetics. I too am deeply uneasy about the various ways in which the language of hunting and killing permeate our speech, but it seems a little unfair to collocate criticism of Olson with the murder of Robert Byrd, Jr., the Texas black man who was the victim of a horrible and violent hate crime, as she does. Yet her poetry creatively eschews “the conventions which logic has forced on syntax,” just as Olson suggested it should, and she clearly believes, as he did, that “every element in an open poem … must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem.” As she puts it in a piece called “The Author Is Not,”

The author is not lonely as a cad
As arias the areas of air we are arise
To spin within convention
Centers’ centers cannot hold
The hell of whole untolled
And where an urgent surge
Of suggestion floods the subject
With reflections sssssh he is still

The complex of thought and sound here is impressive, as Barthes, Yeats and Wordsworth as well as references to Katrina (the New Orleans Convention Center, the storm surge) coexist with contentions about poetry and the poet (“As arias the areas of air we are arise”) in a veritable flood of assonance.

Sadness pervades Dark Archive. In the first poem Mullen speaks of “my need / for meaning in this / life,” but the last words in the book, admittedly someone else’s, are “I’ve run out of tricks.” People are lost, property is destroyed, and lovers disappear. Yet the book does move toward some version of rescue. Its final poem, situated on PCH on the farthest west coast of the country, is prospective and sounds a note of almost cheerful resignation (“Nothing / I’d change”). In “Ghost Mist” (a wonderfully evocative title), time dissolves “in a damp / Salt / Slur of obscuring air.” Here as elsewhere Mullen’s fine ear makes music out of felt experience and hope proposed (“Come home / In gusts as guessed”). The dark archive is not forgotten but transformed into something of a living present, full of light and poetry.

THE PARIS POEMS
by Suzanne Burns

BlazeVOX
303 Bedford Avenue
Buffalo, NY 14216 USA
ISBN 9781609640460
2010, 84 pp., $16.00
www.blazevox.org

Suzanne Burns’ The Paris Poems is a tour of Paris via popular culture. Jim Morrison reappears throughout the collection while Louis Vuitton and Quasimodo figure prominently in others. Burns addresses Coco Chanel, and in “Walking with Victor Hugo,” compares her love for this man to the Americans’ belief that they love Mary Shelley. This collection, however, is not about popular culture or necessarily about Paris, but these poems could not have been written without incorporating both because they are the vehicles Burns uses to comment on how we travel at times, how we love at others, and how we view the world. This collection is thoroughly enjoyable at every turn, and I have had the pleasure of rereading several poems. Burns blends history with contemporary society and tells stories that ask us to think.

I have a fascination with Paris, and I picked this book up because of the title and because of the cover, which is primarily shades along the gray scale with a simple pink stripe near the bottom quarter of the cover where the title and author’s name appear. The focus of the cover for me is the elongated shadow of the person walking across the stone street. It is not clear to me whether the walker is male or female, and it doesn’t matter to me. It intrigued me enough to open the book, and I was certainly not disappointed. The cover, especially the shadow figure, acted as a guide at times.

The collection begins, appropriately, with “Arrival,” which advises travelers to “always arrive in Paris / on a Sunday afternoon / the skeleton of this fastened city / will become your bones.” Images and lines like these are what bring the greatest joy as I move through the book. She moves here from light lines that seem cheery and like something a guide might suggest to the third and fourth lines which become heavier, primarily through her use of sound and rhythm. By arriving on a Sunday, the traveler can perhaps view the city without the paintings, the souvenirs, and without the window dressing. “It’s just you and these abandoned streets,” writes Burns.

Her word choice is always interesting. The streets in this poem are “abandoned,” and she writes to arrive “with an empty heart.” I want to know why the streets have been abandoned, and I’ve always heard that Paris is for lovers, is the city of love, so it seems odd that I should be asked to arrive empty-hearted, yet the narrator later says that “you will feel alone among millions / fall in love with things / you never allowed yourself to see.” These lines are wonderful, yet I am left with a sense of foreboding, that perhaps reveals itself in the next poem, “Paris Can Never Be Our Poem,” where Burns writes that “it’s an ailment to mythologize / this European host.” She places Paris not in France, the country, but in Europe, the continent. I find this fascinating.

One of my favorite poems is “Louis Vuitton,” and some of my favorite lines are “the Americans [long] to get lost in Paris” and “the Parisians [long] to ignore the Eiffel Tower” and “the Eiffel Tower [longs] to climb to the top of itself and see what all the fuss is about.” Here, Burns seems to say that too often we fail to see the beauty in our own city. When was the last time, she might be asking, we ventured into our own town to see its sights? After reading this poem, I am more inclined to visit the sights within my city that visitors always want to see so that I can discover what makes them special.

In this same poem, Burns shows how the monogrammed souvenirs are not without politics. She writes that “the Champs-Έlysées / can barely contain your name / while China hears the silent sound / of children trained not to scream / when they sew thread into finger bones / making knock-offs of you.” She addresses the American’s need for designer products and the cost, not in dollars, in human suffering.
Throughout this collection, the poems ask us to look, to see, and intimate that we often do not look beyond the surface. Although often complicated by the inclusion of more than one voice or topic, the poems were easy to follow because Burns used her lines as guides, and those lines often made me stop and look a little closer at what was being said.

Near the end of the collection, “Pilgrimage,” a poem dedicated to Jim Morrison, shows the narrator as an American and shows how s/he views different groups of people visiting Morrison’s grave:

There is an eternal wake around Jim’s grave
everyone got the invite
               the assumed R.S.V.P.
the Italians are taking pictures and drinking wine
the Spaniards are smoking pot and crying
the dark man dressed like he stepped
from an avant-garde film
               springs his switchblade
               to slash the heart line of his palm
bleeding himself onto Jim’s final home.
the American are doing what we always do
               littering
               looking at watches
               lamenting the currency exchange
we always commemorate the one who got away.

The collection ends with “Faith,” and leaves us questioning where we place our faith when Burns writes “and how we store the idea of resurrection / in such a dark, brooking place / that seeking our fortune in a gypsy’s ring / might be enough salvation.” We look outside of ourselves, seeking something to believe in–Jim Morrison, a gypsy’s ring, monogrammed goods, Paris.

Suzanne Burns takes us through Paris, stopping by some of the most famous locations, and asks us to question our motives at each step. Her word choice is strong, which creates images that will remain long after finishing the book. Each poem is a story unto itself, and the collection is the poetic equivalent of a novel that should be read multiple times and shared.

____________

Trina L. Drotar obtained her MA in English-Creative Writing from CSUS where she studied with Doug Rice, Joshua McKinney, Mary Mackey, and Peter Grandbois. She has worked as editor of Calaveras Station and currently works as editor of Poetry Now. Her reviews and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Word Riot, Pirene’s Fountain, Ophidian I and II, and Medusa’s Kitchen. She is originally from San Francisco, CA and can be reached at trinaldrotar@gmail.com.