August 31, 2014

Art Inspiring Poetry

There’s a long tradition of poetry responding to visual art (and vice versa), and we thought it would be fun to post a challenge. For the first, Judy Keown, cover artist from issue #45, donated a photograph of an argiope spider. We gave poets a month to respond to this photograph in verse, and received 266 entries. Judy Keown and Rattle’s Timothy Green each selected their favorite poem from the submissions and published them online at Rattle.com.

Given how many people seemed to enjoy the Ekphrastic Challenge, we’ve decided to make it a monthly series, using open submissions of artwork when necessary. Visual artists who would like to participate can submit work now through the end of December, by going here.

If you’re a poet, come back to this page every month to find a new piece of art to inspire your poetry. You’ll have one month to write and submit your poems. Each month, two winners—one chosen by the artist and the other by Rattle’s editor—will receive online publication and $100 each.

For the month of August, our image is the piece below by Tammy Nara. Find more of the artist’s work on her website, but only write your poems about the image below.

Submission Deadline:
August 31st


submit

__________

Previous Winners

 

June 2024 – Kim Beckham’s “Terry’s Keys”

Artist’s Choice:
Bigger Than Us
Emily Walker

Editor’s Choice:
What You Thought You Lost
Wendy Videlock

 

May 2024 – Barbara Hageman Sarvis’s “Bird Ascending the Fire”

Artist’s Choice:
Wildfire Dreams
Linda Vandlac Smith

Editor’s Choice:
An Early Autumn Light That Unburies You
Steven Pan

 

April 2024 – Gerrie Paino’s “Night Train”

Artist’s Choice:
Of California, the Wild
Breonne Stiglitz

Editor’s Choice:
Tracks
Matthew Murrey

 

March 2024 – John Paul Caponigro’s “Alignment II”

Artist’s Choice:
The Space Between
Amelie Flagler

Editor’s Choice:
Synapses and Stardust
Brandy Norrbom

 

February 2024 – Christine Crockett’s “Graphing Uncertainty V”

Artist’s Choice:
Things That Collapse
Jonathan Harris

Editor’s Choice:
Shoulder MRI
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

 

January 2024 – G.J. Gillespie’s “Desperado”

Artist’s Choice:
Emergence
Chris Kaiser

Editor’s Choice:
Portrait of My Father as the Count of Monte Cristo
Joanna Preston

 

December 2023 – Jeanne Wilkinson’s “Cold Sun”

Artist’s Choice:
Curriculum Vitae
Dante Di Stefano

Editor’s Choice:
Watch This!
Tristan Roth

 

November 2023 – Scott Wiggerman’s “Aerial II”

Artist’s Choice:
Flying Back to England That First Time
Rose Lennard

Editor’s Choice:
(Sub)Division
Christine Crockett

 

October 2023 – Arthur Lawrence’s “Shadowland”

Artist’s Choice:
The Addiction Bird
Agnes Hanying Ong

Editor’s Choice:
Pilgrims of the Mound
Conal Abatangelo

 

September 2023 – Carla Paton’s “Yellow Flowers”

Artist’s Choice:
For a Robot
Alison Bailey

Editor’s Choice:
The Rote Stuff
Gary Glauber

 

August 2023 – Lily Prigioniero’s “Seamstress”

Artist’s Choice:
My Wife, Sewing at a Window
Eithne Longstaff

Editor’s Choice:
To the Child Watching His Grandmother Sew
Bradford Kimball

 

July 2023 – Elizabeth Hlookoff’s “Here I Go”

Artist’s Choice:
Fighting the Wind
Teresa Breeden

Editor’s Choice:
Aphorisms Thrown into the Eye of the Blizzard
Tamara Raidt

 

June 2023 – Judith Fox’s “Untold Stories”

Artist’s Choice:
Girl Is Glued to Door
William Ross

Editor’s Choice:
Image of a Woman Along a Sidewalk
Jason Brunner

 

May 2023 – Carmella Dolmer’s “A Lonesome Border”

Editor’s Choice:
What the Astrologer Failed to See in Our Stars
Dick Westheimer

Associate Editor’s Choice:
You Don’t Have to Choose
Beth Copeland

 

April 2023 – Lou Storey’s “All of Us”

Artist’s Choice:
Sestina
Amanda Quaid

Editor’s Choice:
The World Beneath
Devon Balwit

 

March 2023 – G.G. Silverman’s “Lighthouse at the Edge of the World”

Artist’s Choice:
I Asked the Chatbot to Write about a Lighthouse, but It Generated Lies
Pamela Lucinda Moss

Editor’s Choice:
Selah
Kristene Kaye Brown

 

February 2023 – JoAnne Tucker’s “The Kitchen Goddess”

Artist’s Choice:
The Rebirth of Venus
Luisa Giulianetti

Editor’s Choice:
Joy
Melissa Madenski

 

January 2023 – Susan MacMurdy’s “Dream House, Later”

Artist’s Choice:
Devotion
Brianna Locke

Editor’s Choice:
Cut Out
Sandra Nelson

 

December 2022 – J. Stormer’s “Unsatisfied Externals”

Artist’s Choice:
The Room as We See It
Andrew Payton

Editor’s Choice:
Resolution of Memory
Sara Dallmayr

 

November 2022 – Joshua Eric Williams’ “Humid”

Artist’s Choice:
Old Testament Family Tree
Kid Kassidy

Editor’s Choice:
In a Moment
J. A. Lagana

 

October 2022 – René Bohnen’s “Ballet Above the Bay”

Artist’s Choice:
Fault Lines
Margaret Malochleb

Editor’s Choice:
Wingspan
Christopher Shipman

 

September 2022 – Bonnie Riedinger’s “Take Heart”

Artist’s Choice:
Morning Glory
Dion O’Reilly

Editor’s Choice:
Fibers
Ashley Caspermeyer

 

August 2022 – Enne Tess’s “Worm”

Artist’s Choice:
Identity Politics
Drea

Editor’s Choice:
Haute Buttons
Kenton K. Yee

 

July 2022 – Jaundré van Breda’s “Blueprint of a Dream”

Artist’s Choice:
Balancing Act
Ajay Kumar

Editor’s Choice:
Driving in the Rain
Christopher Shipman

 

June 2022 – M-A Murphy’s “Kennedy Lake”

Artist’s Choice:
June 24, 2022
Sarah Russell

Editor’s Choice:
Poem with a Cloud and Frank Ocean Lyrics
José Felipe Ozuna

 

May 2022 – Danelle Rivas’s “El Camino de Esmeralda”

Artist’s Choice:
Camouflage
Katie Kemple

Editor’s Choice:
Laparoscopy, or a Half-Birth
Gabriella Graceffo

 

April 2022 – Greg Clary’s “Truck Stop Shell”

Artist’s Choice:
The Next Time
Byron Hoot

Editor’s Choice:
Broken Places by Daylight
Sandra Kasturi

 

March 2022 – Natascha Graham’s “Anonymous Was a Woman”

Assistant Editor’s Choice:
Her Vanity
Marc Alan Di Martino

Editor’s Choice:
Angular Bones
Jeanie Tomasko

 

February 2022 – Sarah-Jane Crowson’s “Diaphona”

Artist’s Choice:
Homemaker
Mary Meriam

Editor’s Choice:
My Animal Understudy Replaced Me in the School Production of The Tempest
Luigi Coppola

 

January 2022 – Matthew King’s “Dark Figures”

Artist’s Choice:
Emotional Self-Regulation with Birds and Gifted Child
Sean Kelbley

Editor’s Choice:
Why I Love That We’re Not Gods
Sean Keck

 

December 2021 – Bruce McClain’s “Nature People #8”

Artist’s Choice:
Last Reach
Wendell Smith

Editor’s Choice:
The Widower
Nick Bertelson

 

November 2021 – Shannon Jackson’s “Easy Like Sunday Morning”

Artist’s Choice:
This Room
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Study Abroad
Cassie Burkhardt

 

October 2021 – Gouri Prakash’s “Family”

Artist’s Choice:
Grief
Susan Carroll Jewell

Editor’s Choice:
On Getting Your Ducks in a Row
Matthew King

 

September 2021 – Rachel Slotnick’s “The Blood in the Veins”

Artist’s Choice:
Revelations
Sean Wang

Editor’s Choice:
Like Dust
Ian Opolski

 

August 2021 – Emily Rankin’s “Rosetta Stone”

Artist’s Choice:
Oracle
Robert E. Ray

Editor’s Choice:
Griefsong Heard at Sea
Shannon Mann

 

July 2021 – Lynn Tait’s “Waste”

Artist’s Choice:
Self-Doubt
Tamara Raidt

Editor’s Choice:
Aloft
Heidi Williamson

 

June 2021 – Annie Kuhn’s “Sunline”

Artist’s Choice:
Color / Off-Color
Emily Pease

Editor’s Choice:
Learning to Swim
C.J. Farnsworth

 

May 2021 – Neena Sethia’s “Contradictions of Being”

Artist’s Choice:
Gods, Monsters, and Complex PTSD
Elizabeth Train-Brown

Editor’s Choice:
What It Is Is What It Is Not and What It Is Not Is What It Is
Karan Kapoor

 

April 2021 – Jojo’s “While Thinking About Snow and Ice”

Artist’s Choice:
A Short Poem About Many Things
Lynn Robertson

Editor’s Choice:
White Spots
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

 

March 2021 – Susy Kamber’s “Into Thee”

Artist’s Choice:
Supernatural
Laura Theis

Editor’s Choice:
Darling
Jonathan Langley

 

February 2021 – Claire Ibarra’s “Cloud Dance”

Artist’s Choice:
Faces in the Clouds
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Telling It Through a Broken Lens
Bola Opaleke

 

January 2021 – Danny Masks’s “Bucket”

Artist’s Choice:
Call Me Boy on Saturdays
Jackson Jesse Nash

Editor’s Choice:
Bound for Glory
Melissa McKinstry

 

December 2020 – Dominique Dève’s “A Horizon Is Vague at a Distance”

Artist’s Choice:
Wilhelmina
Kyle Potvin

Editor’s Choice:
A Horizon Is Vague at a Distance
Martin Willitts Jr.

 

November 2020 – Kim Sosin’s “Leaping Crane”

Artist’s Choice:
Crane Possibly Walking on Water
Erin Newton Wells

Editor’s Choice:
Birdwoman
Lexi Pelle

 

October 2020 – Christopher Whitney’s “Dream Spirit”

Artist’s Choice:
One for Sorrow
Carmel Buckingham

Editor’s Choice:
Four Loaves of Stone, Ascending
Joel Vega

 

September 2020 – Pat Singer’s “Pool Head”

Artist’s Choice:
Visiting the Gardens at DePugh Nursing Center, Winter Park Florida
Vivian Shipley

Editor’s Choice:
In the Dream-Pool
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

August 2020 – Liz Magee’s “Blue Bowl”

Artist’s Choice:
Mantra
Michael Harty

Editor’s Choice:
A Duty to Look Beautiful
Patty Holloway

July 2020 – Aurore Uwase Munyabera’s “Conflict Resolution”

Artist’s Choice:
Stepfather
Anna Cianciolo

Editor’s Choice:
Circles
Nikita Parik

June 2020 – Denise Sedor’s “The Old Paper Mill”

Artist’s Choice:
Eulogy
Brenda Lee Ranta

Editor’s Choice:
Upstate
Marc Alan Di Martino

May 2020 – Megan Merchant’s “Shadowplay”

Artist’s Choice:
Copulations
Marjorie Thomsen

Editor’s Choice:
There Are Two of Us
Vasvi Kejriwal

April 2020 – Laura R. McCullough’s “Mund”

Artist’s Choice:
The Larger Half
Eric Kilpatrick

Editor’s Choice:
Presidential Fitness Test
Bill Hollands

March 2020 – Kenneth Borg’s “Cour des Voraces”

Artist’s Choice:
Vast Silence
Sally Cobau

Editor’s Choice:
Rain” (haiku)
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

February 2020 – Marc Alan Di Martino’s “Indietro”

Artist’s Choice:
They Tried to Cover Her Up
Stephanie Shlachtman

Editor’s Choice:
When Peeled Back
Mary Ann Honaker

January 2020 – Kate Peper’s “Open All Night”

Artist’s Choice:
An Index of Visitors
Ajay Kumar

Editor’s Choice:
Cheer
Sean Kelbley

December 2019 – Natalie Seabold’s “Bound”

Artist’s Choice:
Greetings Unanswered
Joshua Martin

Editor’s Choice:
Seeking Purpose
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

November 2019 – Alice Pettway’s “Dog Walking”

Artist’s Choice:
The Anatomy of Endings
Anoushka Subbaiah

Editor’s Choice:
A Caricature
Bola Opaleke

October 2019 – Dana St. Mary’s “Brainyo”

Artist’s Choice:
The Metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa
Jaime Mera

Editor’s Choice:
After the Extinction
Susan Carroll Jewell

September 2019 – Asher ReTech’s “Loss for Words”

Artist’s Choice:
Artifacts from the Buffalo Trunk Mfg. Co. (Defunct)
Rachel Welton

Editor’s Choice:
Budget Cuts
Danny Eisenberg

August 2019 – Kim Tedrow’s “Thai Bees”

Artist’s Choice:
Misinterpreting a Collage During Trump’s Presidency
Jaime Mera

Editor’s Choice:
Bee Sting in the Eye
James Valvis

July 2019 – B.A. Van Sise’s “Restricted | U.S. Air Force”

Artist’s Choice:
Time Travel
Alida Rol

Editor’s Choice:
Naming the Beasts
Elizabeth Morton

June 2019 – Nikki Zarate’s “Blue Whale”

Artist’s Choice:
Ink Blots
Matt Quinn

Editor’s Choice:
Kenai
Katherine Fallon

May 2019 – Ellen McCarthy’s “Desert Road”

Artist’s Choice:
The Years We Lived in the Desert
Megan Merchant

Editor’s Choice:
The Optimist
Emily Sperber

April 2019 – Denise Zygadlo’s “Kandinsky’s Slippers”

Artist’s Choice:
In the Nostalgia Chair
Matthew Murrey

Editor’s Choice:
Art Therapy
Aaric Tan Xiang Yeow

March 2019 – Betsy Mars’s “Floating”

Artist’s Choice:
Trompe L’oeil
Juliet Latham

Editor’s Choice:
Living in Space After a Break-Up
Jaime Mera

February 2019 – Justin Hamm’s “Work Gloves”

Artist’s Choice:
Tan Hides and Hard Stuff
Lisha Nasipak

Editor’s Choice:
Sometimes a Man Has to Get His Hands Dirty
Alexandre Mikano

January 2019 – Vasu Tolia’s “Belle of the Ball”

Artist’s Choice:
Self-Portrait
Rodrigo Dela Pena

Editor’s Choice:
My Mother Was a Dancer and She Never Looked Back
Luigi Coppola

December 2018 – Kari Gunter-Seymour’s “Untitled”

Artist’s Choice:
Substance
Peg Duthie

Editor’s Choice:
Shell Thick and Her Own Planet
Angie Mason

November 2018 – Nicolette Daskalakis’s “Eat Me”

Artist’s Choice:
Placebo
Jill M. Talbot

Editor’s Choice:
The Happy Game
Sean Kelbley

October 2018 – Courtney Carroll’s “Hanging Collage”

Artist’s Choice:
What Is Not Lost
Sharon Cote

Editor’s Choice:
Locked Brakes on Blacktop
Guinotte Wise

September 2018 – Karen Kraco’s “Back of the Beach”

Artist’s Choice:
Beer, Buoy, Boat, Board
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
The Happy Meditator
Katherine Huang

August 2018 – Alexis Rhone Fancher’s “Waiting”

Artist’s Choice:
That Bit Me
Matthew Murrey

Editor’s Choice:
Sonnet for the Night Shift
Kim Harvey

July 2018 – Bryan DeLae’s “What Once Was”

Artist’s Choice:
Relic
Ginny Lowe Connors

Editor’s Choice:
Grave of a Tourist’s Trap
Hannah V. Norman

June 2018 – Gretchen Rockwell’s “The Sound of Wings”

Artist’s Choice:
The Shape of Your Elbow
Jack McGavick

Editor’s Choice:
Love Poem to My Wife, with Pigeons
James Valvis

May 2018 – Jen Ninnis’s “Message in a Bottle”

Artist’s Choice:
Starfish
Michael Strand

Editor’s Choice:
Dispatch from an Inland University
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

April 2018 – Melody Carr’s “Through the Looking Glass”

Artist’s Choice:
Facial Recognition
Janice Zerfas

Editor’s Choice:
Your Favorite Writer Is Not Your Mother
Jill M. Talbot

March 2018 – Marion Clarke’s “Chickens!”

Artist’s Choice:
Wildflowers
Paul T. Corrigan

Editor’s Choice:
The Visitant
Marietta McGregor

February 2018 – Jeff Doleman’s “Nine Lives”

Artist’s Choice:
Cobalt Blue
Christine Michel

Editor’s Choice:
Bright Blue Muscle Car
Mike Good

January 2018 – Laura Christensen’s “Muse”

Artist’s Choice:
Half of Everything
James Valvis

Editor’s Choice:
Getting Sober
James Croal Jackson

December 2017 – Barbara Graff’s “Cinderella Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”

Artist’s Choice:
Cinderella Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Here, She Said
Chris Ransick

November 2017 – Phyllis Meredith’s “Wind-Blown Meadow”

Artist’s Choice:
Young Medusa in the Fall
J.P. Dancing Bear

Editor’s Choice:
Surf Days
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

October 2017 – Robb Shaffer’s “Biltmore Backyard”

Artist’s Choice:
You Moved Your Whole Town
Paul T. Corrigan

Editor’s Choice:
A Season of Bricks
Simon Costello

September 2017 – Jody Kennedy’s “Agnes Was Here”

Artist’s Choice:
Saved or Spared
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Sonnet for the Hole in the Glass
Zoë Brigley Thompson

August 2017 – Jennifer O’Neill Pickering’s “Street Folks”

Artist’s Choice:
Trajectory
Ann Giard-Chase

Editor’s Choice:
Mint in Pots
Ann Wuehler

July 2017 – Samantha Gee’s “Portrait of a Kitchen”

Artist’s Choice:
My First Body Is Beautiful Until
Reese Conner

Editor’s Choice:
After Cleaning the Kitchen Again, He Realizes
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

June 2017 – Ryan Schaufler’s “No Name #2”

Artist’s Choice:
Blue Rain Clouds, Reddish Ground, and Tall Crosses
Jose Rizal Reyes

Editor’s Choice:
A Thousand Possible Clouds
Valentina Gnup

May 2017 – Soren James’ “Pink Bird Corridor”

Artist’s Choice:
Birds of a Feather
Lianne Kamp

Editor’s Choice:
She Tells Him of Her Fears
Priyam Goswami Choudhury

April 2017 – Laura Jensen’s “And the Wolf”

Artist’s Choice:
The Woman and the Wolf
Melissa Fite Johnson

Editor’s Choice:
Coyote
Suzanne Langlois

March 2017 – Lisa Ortega’s “La Familia”

Artist’s Choice:
Chanclas, Find Our Ground
Gloria Amescua

Editor’s Choice:
Modern American Gothic
Stephen Harvey

February 2017 – Debbie McAfee’s “Hwy 41”

Artist’s Choice:
Tanka (Lonely Highway)
Tracy Davidson

Editor’s Choice:
Threading North and South
Matthew Murrey

January 2017 – Harry Wilson’s “Days in San Francisco #1, 1984”

Artist’s Choice:
A Town of Mirrors and Quaking Forty-Fours
Richard Manly Heiman

Editor’s Choice:
An Accounting
Joanna Preston

December 2016 – Chelsea Welsh’s “Caught in the Days Unraveling”

Artist’s Choice:
Menarche
Melina Papadopoulos

Editor’s Choice:
Haiku
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetango

November 2016 – Arushi Raj’s “Light”

Artist’s Choice:
The Surface of Light
Martin Willitts Jr.

Editor’s Choice:
Illuminated
Sherry Barker Abaldo

October 2016 – Alexandra de Kempf’s “Family Matters”

Artist’s Choice:
PTSD
Bill Glose

Editor’s Choice:
Nuclear Family Warfare
Jane Noel Dabate

September 2016 – Ilenia Pezzaniti’s “They All Slept Here”

Artist’s Choice:
Calendario
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
HotelReview.com – Stay Where You Are, Which Is Here!
T.J. Peters

August 2016 – Heshani Sothiraj Eddleston’s “Clay Hands”

Artist’s Choice:
What We Keep in Clay
Hannah Siobhan

Editor’s Choice:
Throwback at the Art Show
Carol Kanter

July 2016 – Suzanne Simmons’ “Trespass”

Artist’s Choice:
Eco Echo: An Oldster’s Tale
Devon Balwit

Editor’s Choice:
Memoria
Merlin Ural Rivera

June 2016 – James Croal Jackson’s “Go Your Own Way”

Artist’s Choice:
I Don’t Understand Poetry
Jill M. Talbot

Editor’s Choice:
The Climb
Jeffrey Bean

May 2016 – Catherine Edmund’s “Castlerigg”

Artist’s Choice:
Underneath a Car on the Highroad …
Alexander James

Editor’s Choice:
Alone in Love
Mary Meriam

April 2016 – Robert Dash’s “Into the Mystic”

Artist’s Choice:
Invisible
Ann Giard-Chase

Editor’s Choice:
[Here, said the ocean]
Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.

March 2016 – Thomas Terceira’s “Metamorphosis 2”

Artist’s Choice:
To Lose and Catch the Trail
Claire Kruesel

Editor’s Choice:
The Balcony Collapses and I Become a Bird
Rebecca Valley

February 2016 – Dave Thewlis’s “Met”

Artist’s Choice:
There, in Folded Space, We Must Have Met
Rommel Chrisden Samarita

Editor’s Choice:
In the Museum of Cold Ideas
Ginny Lowe Connors

January 2016 – Ruth Bavetta’s “Chonicle”

Artist’s Choice:
It Won’t Make the News
Rosemerry Trommer

Editor’s Choice:
Anatomy of a Fustercluck
Stephanie L. Harper

December 2015 – Colleen McLaughlin’s “Contrail”

Artist’s Choice:
Untitled
Angela Johnson

Editor’s Choice:
Contrails
D.R. James

November 2015 – Megan Tutolo’s “City Night”

Artist’s Choice:
Map to the Moon
Matthew Murrey

Editor’s Choice:
Divining
Rosemerry Trommer

October 2015 – Ana Prundaru’s “Beach”

Artist’s Choice:
Kamakura Beach, 1333
Mary Kendall

Editor’s Choice:
The View from the Café
Matt Quinn

September 2015 – Sarah Oyetunde’s “Moon”

Artist’s Choice:
Sister Moon
Jane Williams

Editor’s Choice:
Things You Cannot Answer
Margaret Donsbach Tomlinson

August 2015 – Howard R. Debs’ “Ice House”

Artist’s Choice:
Ice House
Ann Giard-Chase

Editor’s Choice:
Offering
Arnold Perrin

July 2015 – Aparna Pathak’s “Goats”

Artist’s Choice:
Ram Tested at Mount Vert
Grant Quackenbush

Editor’s Choice:
Cruelest of All Are the Gods Who Never Frown
Michael Meyerhofer

June 2015 – Alisa Golden’s “Bench”

Artist’s Choice:
People of the Megabus
Justin Barisich

Editor’s Choice:
Route 9
Martin Willitts, Jr.

May 2015 – Åsa Antalffy Eriksson’s “Forest”

Artist’s Choice:
Teeny Tiny
Matthew Murrey

Editor’s Choice:
Abduction
Kate Gaskin

Spring 2015 – Gail Goepfert’s “Friendship Flowers”

Artist’s Choice:
Potpourri
Liz N. Clift

Editor’s Choice:
Location’s Everything
Steven Dondlinger

. . .

Winter 2014 – James Bernal’s “Mysterious Figure”

Artist’s Choice:
Clean White Sheets
M

Editor’s Choice:
Carelessness
Michael Hallock

. . .

Fall 2014 – Judy Keown’s “Argiope Spider”

Artist’s Choice:
The Writing Spider
Paula Schulz

Editor’s Choice:
The Writing Spider (Haiku)
Caroline Giles Banks

September 25, 2013

Review by Gregory LoselleThe Body's Physics by Janee Baugher

THE BODY’S PHYSICS
by Janée Baugher

Tebot Bach
P.O. Box 7887
Huntington Beach, CA 92615-7887
ISBN: 9781893670006
2013, $16.00
tebotbach.org

Art imitates.  So art also, naturally, imitates art. How could it be otherwise?  The second cave painting must have emulated the first, and the second story ever told was a sequel.  We crave more—and more from—what delights us.  So when poetry crosses the boundaries of genre and takes as its subject another work, a visual work, we are in the realm of ekphrasis.

Ehphrastic poetry (the word is Greek and as old as the impulse it names) is a rejoinder; the first visual works must have illustrated, or embodied, myths.  Ekphrasis returns the favor, preserving the need of the viewer to speak back—to comment, to answer, to complain or correct, to revel.

In The Body’s Physics, the new book of ekphrastic verse by Janée Baugher, not all poems are ekphrastic, but the collection begins with the impulse to meditate on the object and, in a series of deeply meditative and lyrical works, plumbs the depths in which object and observation meet.  The eye is the constructor of sense and purpose here, and the voice of the poet, varied and fluent, speaks the sense of what she contemplates.

In considering Jackson Pollock’s Alchemy, for instance—a painting no less attractive for its own charms than for the transformation the title promises and Baugher’s poem enacts before us—the poet begins with imagining the artistic and alchemical Great Work at its outset:

Pollock parks the car-sized canvas on the floor

          And begins by circling it, searching for gold, perhaps

                    Like one who searches water for wine.

All of the necessary elements are there, so to speak: the search for gold that starts in the artist’s initial encounter with the blank space (the beckoning absence, the ‘not there yet’ that mimics the poet’s vision of the painted work as well as her own, initially blank page), the drawing of the magic circle that traces Pollock’s famous working methods as he will later circle the canvas with a dribbling brush or wooden rod, the search for gold—in both painting and poetry, and the sly reference to the Wedding Feast at Cana, where the first Christian miracle, one of transformation that hints at the shift from human to divine that will take place.  The “car-sized canvas” even evokes Pollock’s own death in an automobile accident—and his transformative resurrection through his enduring art.

But not just yet.  Baugher places us at the creation of the work, and we become her fellow-witness.  That is the transformation, in all its wonder, that she enacts for is—with us—through her work.

Similarly, we are present as “[a] ball of starlight unfurls itself/ and splays across dark, sulky water” in  Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Arles, and when she considers Picasso’s Guernica, not even the physical placement of the painting constrains us:

Though a metal bar holds us back fifteen feet. It seems possible
To mount the newsprint-patterned horse with a sword in its back, possible
To roll the decapitated open-eyed head from side to side, possible to hear
Wailing from the open-mouthed mother with limp babe in her arms.

Even if the poem eventually leaves us on “the gallery’s shiny floor,” we have walked, unscathed but not unaffected, through Picasso’s horrors.

So Janée Baugher has brought us into and out of a work with which we once thought ourselves familiar.  It is the magic of The Body’s Physics that it leaves us with a richer experience, not only of the works from which it takes off, but of our own reactions to them as well.

__________

Gregory Loselle is ther author of four chapbooks, the most recent of which, About the House is available from Finishing Line Press, and forthcoming in October. He holds an MFA from The University of Michigan, where he won four Hopwood Awards.

Rattle Logo

January 27, 2013

Norman Ball

BEING DIFFICULT

With all due respect to those preceding me on this poetry discussion thread, I see great efforts have been expended to assist your poem along what the consensus clearly feels should be a more linear track. There’s nothing like audience-provided cliff notes! I’m reminded of the old lady—approached at a busy intersection by a Boy Scout—who beats him senseless with her handbag. Everyone assumes the old dear will welcome a helping hand. In fact she relishes the thrill of reaching the other side unassisted.

The message to poets is, beware the kindness of strangers. Those who would rescue a poem from ‘incomprehensibility’ may actually be advancing death-by-explication. Poetic logic is its own animal existing outside the bounds of relatable (i.e. conversational) understanding. I’m guilty of offering dubious assistance in some of your prior efforts. But I find myself developing a comfort level with your opacity. To your credit many readers end their excoriations by allowing, sheepishly, that there is ‘something there’ (by itself, a tacit acknowledgement of poetic success), even as they suspect you of being willfully obscure or insensitive to their great sacrifice as readers. For me, at least part of the fascination of your poetry lies in its willful inaccessibility. I’m convinced you’ve constructed more here than a good game of hide-and-seek.

But first, a word for the much-maligned Internet poetry workshop as it offers the possibility for these marvelous rolling commentaries complete with ugly mob scenes that can develop in a flash. Short of the occasional letter to the editor, how can the Paris Review compete with this human cluster?

While it’s not in vogue, I level some blame at the audience. Even the most engaging preacher must contend with lazy congregants. For too many, difficulty is a tiresome abomination, a code to be cracked; really, they want their poetry fed to them in bite-sized morsels. Of course they’ll weather the broken flow of the stanza; the better to think themselves Poetry Appreciators (I capitalize this because I feel it is a genus, much like the Lesser Shrew.) There is a certain social value in being a Poetry Appreciator. I believe this is the philistinism Frost was rebuffing when, asked to explain one of his poems, he replied, “Would you have me say it in more or less-adequate words?” This obsequious reader has designs on poetry alright, but for all the wrong reasons (or is it simply just one of the many reasons?). He wants a cogent sound-bite to spice his cocktail chatter with, a haiku-kernel with which to impress his fellow mid-brows. I can hear him muttering, “To hell with art. Chicks dig poetry.” Far be it from me, saddled by my own nefarious agendas, to cast the first stone here.

I’d like to address attention spans—but only briefly. There is too much of the dashed-off vignette in poetry today. Difficulty can’t keep up with the penchant for brevity. I must single out the Internet again as, for all its salutary effects on artistic collaboration and community, it beckons with an immediacy that can be the undoing of careful composition. People want to take full advantage of a forum’s one-poem-a-day quota (a virtual gag order as unnatural to the erstwhile poet as China’s one-child policy is to that country’s fertile peasant class). The technology itself tempts at rushing a poem out there before its time. There is a propitious aspect to poetic composition. In the days of pen and ink, poets would put a poem in a drawer for a few years before returning to it at its appointed time. I’m reminded of the famous Gallo wine slogan “We will sell no wine before its time,” a thirty-second jingle that paradoxically extolled the virtues of unrushed maturation. The natural forbearance of good craft is tempted mightily in the Internet age.

Hurriedness is not a charge I lodge against you as I sense careful composition in your tiny enigmas. The question I would be asking myself if I were you is: “does my poem warrant its difficulty or am I a hopeless obscurantist?” Speaking as a reader, I find myself answering sometimes yes and sometimes no, depending on your poem. No different from any other poet, you approach the dais with a satchel stuffed with successes and failures. Who doesn’t?

Though I may struggle to comprehend it, I have no difficulty with difficult poetry on artistic grounds. In fact, we need more of it if for no other reason than to put our shrinking attention spans through their paces. For one thing, there’s our civic duty to consider. We are approaching an age when rapt attention to anything for a period exceeding sixty seconds will be a crime of the state, perhaps a proviso of Patriot Act III. George Bush’s prisons will soon be stuffed with people guilty of extended reflection. Bush, storekeeper for the New World Order, repeats the operative term with Pavlovian insistency: we must not cut and run. True, he is arguing for patience, but through the language of impulsivity—cut and run—what a fascinating dichotomy in the dark tradition of Orwellian doublespeak.

So we are being systematically curtailed. In this Age of Truncation, poetry should strive for the lonely promontory; stake out the oblique leisurely stroll, the unhurried voice of truth to power before being led away in hand-cuffs. Let the Gestapo goons beat their heads against the wall struggling to put into words the precise nature of the poet’s offense. His crimes should be impossible to explicate on a writ or a summons. To all real poets out there, I say: Your inscrutability is a birthright. Follow your destiny. Take the long way home.

T.S. Eliot, no great lover of the approachable masses, was all over difficult poetry. There is evidence he took great pleasure at the allusion-chasers who scoured The Waste Land searching for the Nile’s true source. But if the cartographer can plot the coordinates, then it’s probably Duluth, not poetry. The Waste Land gives nothing up over bagels and coffee. People rarely fall in love over this behemoth. More often they are rendered speechless. Yet it feels like a poem, filling us with the overwhelming sense we are experiencing something. There is no paragraphed synopsis to render this experience. This is as it should be.

Doomed though it is, debate is irresistible. In T. S. Eliot—An Author for All Seasons: Word of No Speech: Eliot and his Words, Lidia Vianu elicits Eliot’s dim view of understanding as a mainstay of poetic appreciation. “Word of no speech” is a line from Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, part II:

“The ‘seasoned’ reader,” Eliot begins, “does not bother about understanding when he first reads a poem.” This new image of a reader who enjoys before he has realized what he is reading is in keeping with what was new in the way of writing at the turn of the 20th century. The novelty lies in the poet’s consistently leaving out of the poem something that the reader is used to finding there. A “kind of meaning,” Eliot says, is willfully put aside, and its absence bewilders the reader. Eliot gets rid of that clarity which makes the paraphrase of the poem possible.

In short, a frothing at the mouth with apt rejoinders—i.e. the false-mastery of understanding—belongs to that narrow sphere of English majors, dilettantes and cocktail party show-offs. For the unabashed fancier of art, however, full poetic appreciation is entirely possible in the absence of full understanding. A successful poem—no less a cryptic one—should not be mere launching pad for dollops of explanatory cock-waddle. Like the falling tree in an empty forest, a poem is capable of its own noise, thank you very much. One can go further and suggest that a full understanding—so-called clarity—is the province of prose and not poetry at all. After all, why write a poem in the first place if the desired artistic effect lends itself better to prose? Why not write an essay instead? In his willful exclusion of certain narrative elements critical to a linear understanding, Eliot reserved for himself oodles of fun: There is no decoder ring. But keep looking because I’m busting a gut watching you guys scramble for it.

If I’ve helped you flesh out the trajectory of your own poetic inquiries, while stringing up a few pikers along the way, then this exposition has not been in vain. If you’re a true cynic, you’ll see I may have committed the same fallacy I sought to expose i.e. talking your poem to death. In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying your poetry to the extremities of my feeble understanding.

from Rattle e.3, Spring 2007

__________

Norman Ball is a Virginia-based writer and musician. His essays, articles and poetry have appeared in a variety of venues. “Being Difficult” was reprinted in a collection of essays, The Frantic Force. His song “Good Books” was selected for participation in the Neil Young Justice Through Music Project and he was honored to perform his song “Space Between the Notes” on behalf of ASCAP at the Kennedy Center for the Performng Arts in late 2006. (www.normanball.com)

Rattle Logo

April 30, 2012

Review by Carmen GermainFossil Honey by Charles Atkinson

FOSSIL HONEY
by Charles Atkinson

Hummingbird Press
2299 Mattison Lane
Santa Cruz, CA 95062-1821
ISBN 0-9716373-9-3
2006, 96 pages, $12.00
www.hummingbirdpresspoetry.com

Fossil Honey is the fourth collection of poetry by Charles Atkinson, who taught on the creative writing faculty of the University of California-Santa Cruz for twenty-five years before retiring in 2007. Among other awards, he has received of the Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize, the Stanford Prize, the Comstock Review Prize, and the Emily Dickinson Award.

Once and forever a Banana Slug, I was drawn to the book because of nostalgia for my daily hike through the redwoods to Kresge College and because I missed the slice of ocean view from our apartment in Family Student Housing. I never signed up for a class from Atkinson (so many professors and courses to choose from, and so little time), but after reading these poems, I wish I had.

Apostasy: if I could play an instrument well–a piano, a flute, a horn–would I write poetry? In western culture, music has the power of the minor key, the sound that exposes us. We’re vulnerable to certain memories. We have regrets. We wish and dream and want what can’t be given anywhere, by anyone. When language works this way, it’s a gift from the poet to those who can shut down the chatter of the world and listen. It’s a rare gift when poems take off the top of one’s head, and which poems those would be are, of course, subjective, as Emily would be sure to admit. But the poems in this collection reveal the human family and are personal and universal: we are all sons and daughters, and some of us are fathers and mothers, and some of us are lovers, husbands and wives.

The book is divided into four sections, each focused on relationships within the speaker’s family, and unfolds a coming-of-age narrative. This “growing up” does not have to do with years on earth but with facing responsibility for what life is.

Opening with “The Foolishness of a Map,” the book is a juxtaposition of mixed form that includes meditations, dream logs, the narrative, and the lyric–all serving to mirror the confusions, contradictions, and upheaval of a marriage that is over. The first poem, “Puer Aeternus,” works well as the introduction to the book and acts as its locus. The speaker is “[a]drift at a midsummer revel, its bonfire and/ cheer” and contrasts his past–“[y]ou were devoted to hearth and union—/ ancient role, to anneal you as a man”–with his present: “a drowsing boy turned toward the heat” of sexual desire and abandon. The “eternal boy” of Jungian archetype can be either positive (he’ll grow up; he’ll become wise), or negative (he refuses to grow up; he’ll always remain childlike in his approach to the world). In this poem, the lure of living forever as a boy is strong, “a beckoning zodiac/ in a dream that wants you never to wake—/ adored forever, love without limits at last.” The words “at last” create a world the speaker knows can never exist, but the dream of that world can suffice, for the time being, for the child-god.

What follows takes us out of this dream into the emotional realities of dismantling a family. Desire, grief, and longing haunt the poems, and we have glimpses into the characters in this drama and what they have done to bring about disillusionment. In “Fragmentary, ii. why,” the meditation foreshadows poems later in the collection that question what we must do in this life that too soon ends:

If you ask him–Why did you do it?–
he’ll say almost nothing, a cliché:
he’s dying too soon, he has to
say yes to whatever is left.

“Ring Ceremony” turns on its head the marriage rite of the exchange of rings; the husband and wife disband separately in their own rituals–“[s]he must have slipped it off in their room—/ after work, a shower—//forgot to put it back on;/ it was easy.” And the husband “holds/ the hand under cold water, soaps his knuckle/ to work the band free.” Years since I thought about what this felt like, the ring finger naked. Divorce, if you haven’t experienced it, is getting off a train in a foreign country you’ve never seen on a map. You don’t speak the language, you aren’t dressed for the weather, you don’t recognize the food. You wear a new label that sticks out of the neck of your coat. Atkinson fumbles around in this new place, and he helps readers remember its strangeness or sets them down in the station for the first time. The last poem in this section tells us more:

                                     Early summer alone.
The foolishness of a map. If only your life
were as clear as water on granite, if you
knew each plunge would take you where
you needed to go, you might begin again.

“Perfection Means to Hurt” moves the focus from divorce to the relationship of father and sons in the aftermath of divorce, but also explores how fathers live on in their sons, and how sons will grow to supplant their fathers. Again, as with the first section, no reliable maps exist for this journey, and the speaker in his need longs for the senex (in opposition to the puer) the Old Man, the wise one who can tell him what he needs to know to be a father, to be a man. The poems shift in tone here and show the opening into self-awareness. The father is beginning to understand his life, how he didn’t know how to show emotion to those he loved, emotion which means communication, which means this is what matters in human relationships. Atkinson has explored this idea before in other work, and the poems here recall Tony Hoagland (and others) who have also addressed the problem of men who consider “feeling” an “f” word and thus cannot or will not express emotion beyond anger. The great fear, of course, is of vulnerability. But Atkinson captures what is lost by this suppression in “Greeting Grown Sons,” a poem that most men have lived:

I used to study gestures
at the airport gates. This
is how the fathers do it:

clap a sunburnt arm
around a strapping shoulder—
one quick squeeze to skirt

the touch and silence—push
away and start the banter.
I know what’s expected.

but I’ve grown more impulsive
and wave my arms above
the crowd; I elbow forward,

strain, enfold his muscled
back without a word.
We rock back and forth,

eyes shut, a channel buoy
that cleaves the roiling current.
When we break I stammer—

At last…I’ve missed…ok?
Inadvertent croaks,
still, the tears surprise me.

The P.A. crackles, luggage
tumbles to the carousel.
All my father missed.

“Let Go” continues the exploration of family and serves to express love and trepidation regarding the mother. The poems frame young motherhood, aging, and death and reveal the mother’s mantra toward her son: “You can be better.” The poet now understands what this has meant, how the advice to encourage him has resulted in the opposite effect. He can never be good enough, can never meet her expectations. The poems continue to be self-revelatory but are never self-indulgent. They are the insights and sorrows of a mature man.

In “Grown Up,” the speaker faces his mother’s death when he has a birthday. Even if we are sixty when we celebrate our seasons, our mother or father, if we are fortunate to still have them, remind us of our place within our original family. Someone has said that we do not truly grow up until we have lost our parents. In this poem, the poet recalls the last card he received from his mother:

from her bed—a simple pen and ink, Canada geese
winging north–from a Longtime Admirer.
I was at the window. Thirty years and never
once had she said that, the treeline wavering,
my nose dripping—and I knew then how much
it would have helped to hear those words before.

Too late to tell her: all the years, and still I’d
never been quite good enough to make her glad.
Too late to chasten her, and maybe just as well–
by March I found what it meant to be
grown up in the world, no one left to blame.

So this is his understanding: In this life we are clumsy, dropping things, trying to get through the swamps of this uncharted land. We must forgive ourselves, forgive each other.

Poems for the poet’s father comprise the last division in the collection, “Reading the River,” as the poems come full circle back to their origin, the connection between boy and man, son and father. The poem that resonated with me–no, too inadequate a word–seared my skull, and (dare I use this word that shows such vulnerability?) my heart: “Avocados for My Father.” Very personal for Atkinson, very personal for me, and worth quoting in whole:

Diffident for years, he now tells perfect strangers—
This week I’ll be ninety!—amazing them, the way
he’d hoped. In honor, children and their children
arrive from other coasts, from their important lives,
convene at a long white table to celebrate a man for
what he did by avoiding harm—a childhood of hurt
he didn’t pass on. Here to witness the glacial
creep of generations toward the good—a raised fist
that doesn’t descend, the settling face across a table.

They jest at the awkward—neckties, jaunty toasts,
which fork for what—discourse on the soup, glazed
onions, steak and shrimp. Someone recalls lobster—
a picnic in Nantucket (one of them lugged avocadoes),
cherries from the Fingerlakes. They make the affable
chatter of those who choose to get along—seasons
and the tales of children.
                                            One of them, unsettled,
wants to tap a glass, rise and, face to face,
Thank you for your life, Old Man—I love you.
It would be indiscreet and spoil a genial meal.
He waits for the moment, longing to affirm it and,
diffident for years, he now tells perfect strangers.

Thus these last poems fulfill the promise of the book. Cycles can be broken. The poet has moved from the dream of life (its sweet and illusionary boy-song) to the more realistic promise of life: pleasure and suffering–faced and understood and expressed–have made him fully alive, fully human, fully grown. But there’s more here than one man’s journey to understand his life and the “fossil honey” of memory. The poems tell us again and again that we cannot take any of this for granted, that we have to say and feel and face what there is that makes this life worth its high price, the wages we must pay by our death. Don’t tell perfect strangers. Tell the ones you love.

Cherry Grove published Carmen Germain’s poetry collection These Things I Will Take with Me, and recent work has appeared in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and A Sense of Place, a Google Earth project featuring Washington state poets.

Rattle Logo

April 20, 2012

Review by J. Scott BrownleeI Live in a Hut by S.E. Smith

I LIVE IN A HUT
by S.E. Smith

Cleveland State University Poetry Center
2121 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44115-2214
ISBN 978-I-880834-98-5
2012, 62 pp., $15.95
www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter/

Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives
alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.

-Terrance Hayes

A week before I read S.E. Smith’s I Live in a Hut, I got a phone call from the director of NYU’s Creative Writing Program offering me a full ride and a completely unexpected fellowship. Shocked, disbelieving, and euphoric, I attended AWP several days later feeling strangely lightheaded and buoyant—both of which are words that aptly describe Smith’s debut collection, a suite of poems that are more concerned with surprise, misdirection, and creative flair than they are with the humdrum, conciliatory, another-day-another-dollar mindset most of us use to get through a prototypical day.

I first opened I Live in a Hut on an American Airlines flight from Chicago back to Austin, which, if you can manage to re-create, is a reading environment for this book I highly recommend. Smith, who has been publishing quirky, Dean-Young-esque poems with titles like “The Pony of Darkness,” “Big Slutty Bear,” and “Becky Home-Ecky and Her Fourteen Boyfriends” for years now, refuses to take about 80% of any given utterance seriously. This results in a first collection that is equal parts farce, diary-esque reflection, and satirical wit. Consistent in her balancing of seemingly incongruent poetic approaches, Smith weaves the ironic, intensely personal, and outrageously hilarious together with a consistent declarative line that makes zany leaps while remaining syntactically careful and clean.

“Un Peu,” a poem bemoaning the French people’s inability to gain weight juxtaposed alongside one of Smith’s failed romances, evidences the poet’s unique ability to work in several registers at the same time (something that is highly admirable, as well as distinct, about her work):

I would like to swap some of my eternity for some
of yours. I don’t know how but I love you so it may
be possible and the French are fat at last. Finally
they are fat. They move slowly, like bears. Maybe now
they’ll leave us alone, maybe now we can get on with it.

I was particularly moved by many of the love poems in I Live in a Hut—finding it easy to identify with their detached, performative, going-through-the-romantic-motions voices because, like them, I felt equally removed from the girl I was currently seeing—the shelf-life of our short-lived relationship made painfully apparent by my upcoming move to New York City.

To throw a tangential, completely out-of-place monkey wrench in this otherwise serious review, I was emotionally compromised when I read I Live in a Hut—in love with a girl I couldn’t stay with after my move to New York City—and there was nothing I could do to change that cosmic fact except read Smith’s book and feel passionately sorry for the speakers of her poems, many of whom lament similarly failed romantic experiences—albeit from a distance, and with a degree of dispassion that I doubted but remained effective, in part because Smith’s poetry evidences how unfortunately elliptical, illusory, and highbrow contemporary poetry expects capital-l Love to be. Aware of this expectation, Smith takes an enormous (and successful) risk by putting romantic expectation on display–poking, prodding, and otherwise dismantling it in these poems, ultimately revealing the vulnerability and concern present in even the most “contemporary” voice.

Heaven forbid our great loves be cliché, and we write honest, unapologetic lines like, “It is getting / dark. I love you,” as Smith does at the beginning of “Sturgeons,” a poem that has more to do with failed romantic interactions (“I propose that we / move on from this place”) and their sexy, metaphysical fallout even before they are allowed to begin (“Deep down I suspect I am a clock-watcher / anxious for this beautiful moment to end”) than it does with sturgeons, the Caspian Sea, or the Ohio River—all of which dominate the surface of what I would argue is the most important, heartfelt poem in the book.

Speaking of hearts . . . I went over to my girlfriend’s apartment when I got back from AWP to try to salvage whatever version of our relationship I could and should have read her Smith’s poem “Happiness,” although I didn’t because I was already too afraid of losing her. It has one of the best opening stanzas I’ve read in quite some time, and served as a welcome distraction from my own failure at attaining happiness during the difficult weeks of What if? after AWP:

Briefly, it is possible. The rain shines down,
the bucket is ready. It makes a nice click,
the last snap on the jacket. It doesn’t have
to be a particular kind of jacket. But it has
to be November, and you must be at the zoo.

I felt more than a bit like the speaker in “Vertical Lake” as well when I left my girlfriend’s apartment later that night, our kissing (and not being able to stop) juxtaposed sharply with the verticality of my body, the rigidity of it, as I forced the car door closed and drove away:

Okay, bye,
I said. I have to get going.

I was dead. It was snowing.
I was going into the vertical lake.

Several days before this it actually did snow in Chicago, and we had texted each other back-and-forth sporadically during AWP, apologizing that we couldn’t play more active roles in one another’s increasingly distant lives (she was on the verge of opening a hip Austin wine and cheese bar that kept her working 60-hour weeks, and I was, obviously, at AWP, meeting NYU students and faculty and trying to decide whether or not I would commit to an MFA.)

Long story short, I did commit. And we did break up. And Smith’s I Live in a Hut remained a beautiful, heartbreaking book throughout this simultaneously necessary and difficult process. While Smith took “history lessons / from a West Virginian horse thief / named Dirk,” I gave two-stepping lessons to the beautiful Jewish/Spanish/French girl I would eventually have to step away from irrevocably—and without even having the ability to repeatedly hurt her, or be hurt by her, or get in our first epic fight (which the unexpected NYU acceptance prevented us from ever having).

“Already we are off to a terrible start,” Smith says at the beginning of “Beauty,” and I couldn’t agree with her more as I thought about all of the possible ways I could manipulate the girl I loved into moving to New York City with me—eventually realizing that to do so would mean acting similarly to the speaker of “Fuck You,” who repeatedly “takes exasperated measures” and “saves [her lover] for later,” comparing his body, with its oils and sugar-sweet taste, to “a pastry . . . in a [metaphorical] bag” of possessiveness.

I had to leave the girl I loved, and Smith’s book—with its insistence on finding grace and beauty in even the most awkward, unfortunate break-ups—helped me understand why. I didn’t want to, but doing so was part of the painful (though altogether necessary) process of fully letting go.

Like the anthropomorphized truth in Smith’s “Your Scrappy Truth,” I “insisted / on taking the high narrow road / out of town.” I simply couldn’t manipulate my girlfriend and ever expect to live with myself afterwards, so I got off the plane (having finished I Live in a Hut) knowing what I had to do, realizing I had to break up with her in order to shatter completely the expectation that she drop everything in her life to accommodate me and my dreams in New York City–where I would be a poet, if only a bad one, in a city full of people far more selfish, witty, and strong-willed, even, than me, and where our hypothetical break-up would probably be three to four times as messy, eight to nine times as heartbreaking, and still—even then—not hold a candle to the raw emotional core burning at the center of Smith’s remarkable first book.

While my Rattle reviews typically tend to focus on the poet rather than his or her audience, in this particular instance I wanted to make clear the connection between Smith’s work and my own life. While such a critical leap might at first seem taboo and/or unwarranted, I think framing this review with a personal narrative is something Smith herself would applaud—her poems being, at their roots, intimate portraits of human awkwardness, honesty, and confusion. I Live in a Hut is a beautiful, delicate, daring, exquisite first effort—whether you identify with my sappy break-up story or not—one that helped me see beyond my own field of vision with a clarity I didn’t possess before reading it. I hope that, in my future writing (and life off the page), I can be half as daring, quick, and imaginative as S.E. Smith is. At the very least, reading her work, I’m encouraged to try.

____________

J. Scott Brownlee is a poet and poetry critic from Llano, Texas. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, RATTLE, Tar River Poetry, Front Porch, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Writers’ Bloc, Windhover, and elsewhere. Involved with several literary journal start-ups, he was the managing editor and co-founder of both Hothouse and The Raleigh Review. His current writing project, County Lines: The Llano Poems, explores small-town life in the Texas Hill Country.

Rattle Logo

August 20, 2011

Review by James E. Allman

TONY GLOEGGLER GREATEST HITS 1984 – 2009
by Tony Gloeggler

Pudding House Publishing
81 Shadymere Lane
Columbus, OH 43213
ISBN 1-58998-825-6
2009, 32 pp., $12.00
www.puddinghouse.com

Plain and simple, “1969.” I knew nothing of Tony Gloeggler except that solitary poem, which I first read on Rattle’s blog a few months back. I suppose Greatest Hits was an inevitable first purchase, then; just as knowing nothing of Dave Brubeck when I was 16 obliged me to buy a 2-disc greatest hits of the jazz master. This was before I knew that Darktown Strutter’s Ball was never supposed to follow Take Five, or, even, anything of the magic of the famed Brubeck/Desmond chemistry that I now hold in holy awe. Greatest hits, I believe, are about impatience or ignorance. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I really wanted to buy a Brubeck album that day, thumbing through stacks at the music store but perplexed—Time, Time Out, Time Further Out, Time Way Way Out, Time In, Time Changes—but I left with Dave Brubeck The Legacy Jazz Collection instead, a 28 song compilation of his “mainstays” that can be skipped if you are a longtime collector, but a good introduction, otherwise. Back to Tony Gloeggler Greatest Hits 1984 – 2009.

Back to 1969, which begins the chapbook and my interest in the author—is like a radio single that ends with a quick trip to Tower Records, in that way. Book in hand, I cracked the book open to read a short introduction by the poet, then quickly moved on to the first poem whose title is seemingly as nostalgic as all those radio-hits, albums, compact discs, brick-and-mortar-record-stores and retrospectives I remember. Rife nostalgia is an overall theme of the Greatest Hits series by Pudding House, and this poem—which speaks of Little-League baseball, first kisses & cigarettes, World Series games, Communion and Mustangs—is an appropriate opening. The poem seems, on the surface, to be about loss & death and a family’s grief & coping, though its theme is actually something quite different. In the poet’s introduction to the chapbook, Gloeggler says, “While I have two younger brothers, none of them have died in Viet Nam or anywhere else. Sometimes that fact has surprised, disappointed and pissed people off.” Maybe it doesn’t piss me off because the war in Viet Nam is not a direct memory of mine, as I wasn’t alive during that era. Nevertheless, the indirect memory of it is part of my psyche: 58,272 names carved on polished black granite, flag-draped caskets, Nixon and Johnson speeches replayed on PBS specials, F4 phantoms & Huey helicopters taking off and landing ad infinitum on TV, and Robert Duval proclaiming, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Rife nostalgia, or not even nostalgia, or nothing but nostalgia—Gloeggler admits it is a fabrication, though brought on by the symbols and liturgies of war that have affected him much as they affect me, as we are all affected by them. The poem shook me the first time I read it; it still shakes me, the way Johnny’s Mustang with his father sitting in it revving the engine shook “every tool hanging in the garage”. A host of car songs comes to mind, including Marc Cohn’s Silver Thunderbird: “Me I wanna go down/ in a silver Thunderbird…”

One thread connecting the poems in this collection is loss. Well, loss and something gristly. Greatest Hits is full of vulgarity and sex and masturbation and one very descriptive account of an abortion that made me cringe, uncomfortably. Despite that, “Scraping” is a good poem, packed with self-doubt, inner turmoil and rage, and, yes, the ability to turn my stomach. Quite good because I get the genuine sense that my discomfort in reading it is Gloeggler’s own—that here
we have honesty that hurts and a subconscious that is haunted. He’s unsettled, but at the time he “was young and dumb/and in love, and would have done anything/for her.” Like the Antlers’ song “Bear”: “We’re too old/We’re not old, old at all…We’ll be blind and dumb until we fall asleep.” Gloegger continues, “She wasn’t ready to be a mother.”

[And] I was happier to stay boyfriend and girlfriend, sit in the waiting room and turn pages in magazines while the doctor sucked
and scraped her insides clean.

The Antlers sing on as if in echo,

We’re not scared of making caves
Or finding food for him to eat
We’re terrified of one another
And terrified of what that means
But we’ll make only quick decisions
And you’ll just keep me in the waiting room.

It would be easy enough to question the morality of it all and the author’s complicity, but he appears, like Duvall’s character in Get Low (is this for real? 2 Duvall references in one article?), to have already passed judgment on himself. He lives with profound guilt for which being “young and dumb” isn’t enough of an excuse. “I want to know what it will take to stop/that god damn shovel from scraping the ground again.” It isn’t the shovel he hears. And there’s all the cynicism to remind him, and us, that there are no simple solutions. What if the lost “daughter or son” had grown up? Would he and the girl have worked harder to stay together, or as likely stayed together and “hurt each other even deeper”? Which takes us back to “Bear”: “When we get home we’re bigger strangers than we’ve ever been before/You sit in front of snowy television, suitcase on the floor.” Gloeggler wrestles candidly, and we shouldn’t intervene to add to or detract from it. We can instead share in the pain of his grief-stricken spirit; we can sing along.

There are a few truly heart felt moments, though no less gritty. Take “The Last Good Thing” or “Goodbye.” These moments are transcendent breaks in a compilation dominated by love defined by first-flushes of passion and sex. Here, Gloeggler is at his best, as he sutures frankness to vulnerability. In “The Last Good Thing” we see a father and son in an intimately sad space. A man once strong and looked upon “like he’s some God”, now needing to be undressed and held in the shower by his son and “soaped under his arms, between/his legs.” The son’s response:

…I tried not to cry
when he said he could stay
like this forever, stay
until he died, until
the hot water got cold.

And, as if in a role-reversal, the narrator in “Goodbye” is the father-like figure, still as caring as he was when a son—now doting on the autistic child of a lover. We know Joshua as the narrator picks him up from school for the last time, as we discover that the relationship which brought the two together has fallen apart, as she is moving with Joshua to Vermont. He wonders:

if he remembers that I moved
down the block, kept visiting him
while everyone I know told me
to let go and move on,
that I didn’t owe him a thing,
and no one seemed to accept
or understand I love Joshua,
that the way he will never fit
in the world reminds me of me
and I wish he was my son,
my eight year old boy.
My, my, mine.

In his introduction, Gloeggler tells us, “I still can’t get through it out loud without my heart starting to move differently, my voice catching and getting shaky.” It is my favorite poem in the compilation. It deserves a rest afterward like a moment of silence just like the silence necessary after the part in Bruce Springsteen’s Highway Patrolman where Sergeant Joe pulls over and watches his brother Frank’s fleeing “taillights disappear” into Canada all the while reflecting on how “nothin’ feels better than blood on blood” and when a “man turns his back on his family well he just ain’t no good.”

A humorous respite is required after something so heavy: something like a Cake song, something like “Stickshifts and Safetybelts.” “One Hit Wonder” and “Mid Life Poetry Crises” will do. In the former, Gloeggler tells us “no one remembers anyone for anything good” and the children of washed up rockers “cover their ears and say ‘Oh Dad no, not again?’” every time fingers are drummed to ancient rock standards. Bleak? Perhaps, but comical, as he ends the poem with “five fat bald guys…hurrying home from work/to meet in somebody’s garage…plugging in amps, picking up drumsticks,/strapping on the bass and guitar…nod” then count off “‘One.’ ‘Two.’ ‘Three.’ ‘Four.’” The poem ends there; how perfect! In “Mid Life Poetry Crises,” Gloeggler rants:

I’m tired of song titles,
retards, autistic kids,
old and new girlfriends,
battered valentines, baseball
metaphors, not getting
laid, subway stations,
working class families,
drunk drivers, dead fathers…

Aren’t these the very things he writes about? I believe a chortle is required. And he goes on “I want to open my mail/to submission requests/from the New Yorker and Poetry…Sell more books/than Billy Collins. And when he dies, the poet continues, “bored, tortured school kids will be forced to recite my poems during National Poetry Month.” Two chortles in one poem!? What fun.

The one thing I struggle with in this book is the vulgarity. It initially turned me off. I was told once by a comedian that vulgarity gets the easy laugh; what is challenging and artful in comedy is eliciting laughter without the crutch of the “F” bomb or crudeness. That has stuck with me. I’m no prude; vulgar words don’t register to my ears in movies or music, but in poetry I demand more. I’ve read that poetry is an attempt to constantly rejuvenate the language—to make it young and virile and exciting. As a poet I scoff at clichés and overused idioms. They mark an inferior poet. What are four-letter words but overused idioms? Yes, I’ve read poems in which vulgarity makes sense (the rules aren’t cut-and-dry here), but I believe it is the rarer instance. Of the 12 poems in the Greatest Hits collection, over half have swearwords or flat-out crude or offensive diction. It doesn’t seem judicious enough to me. Tony Gloeggler is talented, at times brilliant. I expect these tricks, I suppose, but from a mediocre poet, which Gloeggler is not. Of course, if I were him, I’d quote Duvall from True Grit (1969) at me, “I need a good judge!” Or better still, “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”

I can’t say that I’ve ever liked a greatest hits collection straight through. It’s been pieced together and is meant to be an overview of a career, rather than a stand-alone body of work. It’s like an amuse bouche at a fine restaurant, meant for whetting an appetite as opposed to satisfying it. Perhaps it is a sound check. Either way, after digesting a best-of album the next right step is a return trip to the record shop to hunt for the tracks you “dug,” only this time on an honest-to-god full-length record. Applying that maxim here, there are four such poems I’d look for: “1969,” “The Last Good Thing,” “Scraping” and “Goodbye.” They were enough to keep me interested in Tony Gloeggler. The chapbook might not be for everyone. It is gristly and bawdy, but so, too, is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. My advice comes from Duvall (by this point it’s too late to quote anyone else) as Felix Bush in Get Low: “If you don’t listen, you can’t hear nothing.” And some of Gloeggler’s work is music worth hearing.

____________

James E. Allman, Jr.’s credentials—degrees in biology and business—qualify him for an altogether different trade. However, he easily tires of the dissected and austerely economized. He is a dabbler with an expensive photography-habit and a poetry-dependency. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010, his work appears, or is forthcoming, in The Los Angeles  Review, decomP, Anemone Sidecar and Splash of  Red, amongst others.

Rattle Logo

January 20, 2011

Review by Lynn LevinThe Glass Book by Valerie Fox

THE GLASS BOOK
by Valerie Fox

Texture Press
1108 Westbrooke Terrace
Norman, OK 73072
ISBN 13 978-0-9797573-8-9
2010, 81 pages, $14.00
www.texturepress.org

As a reader and a writer, I have been striving to liberate myself from the literal, the grounded, and the logical. Toward this end, I’ve been exploring experimental poetry, and in this quest I was most fortunate to discover Valerie Fox’s enchanting new collection The Glass Book. Call these poems anti-narratives or lyrics of serendipitous moments, the poems, many of which are prose poems, tune into our clickable, branching, speeding, channel-changing lives. In this collection, her fourth, Fox pokes at memories and lets her poems vault from images of city streets and parks to old abodes, travels, and frequent references to cameras. The effect is fast-paced. The surprising juxtapositions often conjure the surreal. And while the poems love discontinuity, they are strung together by a sense of whimsy that is sometimes pleasurable, sometimes disturbing. Always through the chaos and trickiness, I feel the comfort of a moral sense.

Valerie Fox is, I believe, exploring the poetry of resistance, a term that Tony Hoagland uses in his essay “Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness” (Poetry, September 2010). Hoagland observes that contemporary poetry is bifurcating into two systems that seek “two different kinds of poetic meaning: Perspective versus Entanglement; the gong of recognition versus the bong of disorientation.” The latter type of poetry, says Hoagland, seeks “dis-arrangement.” It “aims to disrupt or re-arrange consciousness.” It resists conventional understanding and desires to draw “the reader into a condition of not-entirely-understanding.” Valerie Fox’s poems follow this spirit.

Take, for example, the title poem “The Glass Book,” in which the poetic speaker follows the rovings of a homeless and somewhat deranged woman through the outskirts of downtown Philadelphia.

Back in the city, the same woman was living on Green Street. Everyone was always saying how gentrification was happening so fact. Every day she saw it going slow.

She was having a slow life.

She sat in her own cave of warmth. Just a few minutes earlier she had been walking fast, searching and hungering for the word “I.”

The main text follows the homeless woman, but the poetic speaker interjects side statements that deliberately swerve from that lost soul to satirize the writing process or the literary or scholarly life. Many of these remarks, introduce themselves with the phrase, “I’m calling this page…”; and they are enclosed in parentheses. After a passage in which the homeless woman swings from thoughts about a particular street, her unborn children, a new hat, and farm food, the poet jars the reader with this self-ironizing observation:

(I’m calling this page, “What people really think about during times like job interviews”)

At another moment, Fox interjects:

(I’m calling this page, “Letters to real people and lyric poets”)

This longish poem strolls the city blocks glimpsing the violence and loneliness of the streets. It is embedded with compassion for its destitute and confused subject. Then every so often, it jumps from the streets to those satirical observations about life at the desk.

Fox’s interest in dreams and the subconscious meshes with the poet’s attraction to re-arranged awareness. A section of The Glass Book is called “The Dream Book” and includes such poems as “Dream Variations (For Tuesday)” and “Lecture on Dreams.” All the poems in the collection thrive on a mind open to randomness, and much of their delight comes from their constant movement and unpredictability. The poem “Arrange in an Order” offers the reader twelve lines that might variously be seen as hilarious, private, worried, or even everyday. Here are some samples:

you crossed some rivers, like 8 or 9 times

you are cooking this meat outside

you should delete that prison time from your resume

you must have been enchanted when you let go the mules

your fantasies are observing you

Should I try to rearrange them to make conventional sense? I don’t think that’s the point. Playfulness and deliberate re-arranging of consciousness is the point. The lines give me a disturbing kind of pleasure.

The surreal and a sense of threat brew in many poems. Take these lines from “Hotel Resident Artist”:

Then there’s a crow hovering outside my hotel
window. It dips close, red talons raised,
wearing not just fur, but blue fur
and shopped out wheezing under the weight
of its purchases. Walking around underground.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Tour of Old Haunts,” a poem that seems to combine private references to incidents in the speaker’s life with admonitions to self. The impression I get is of a person trying to gently coax herself into forming normal reactions and behaviors. And that would work just fine if events didn’t throw curve balls at her and life weren’t inherently so strange. On a return trip to an old neighborhood, the speaker announces:

She carried around the throwaway camera, all day, and there were many times to use it, though she didn’t.

There’s a lot of undeveloped film in her life, and film canisters.

Across from there they saw Fred’s Magic World. Twice she had to go on stage, once to tie someone up.

The above line about tying someone up in a magic show speaks to a normal event in a magic show, but the reference to the magic show itself casts the poem into a sort of paranormal world. And the poem, true to its subjectivity stays in that mysterious space until it ends with a visit to a retired philosophy professor who is dying and, in his final moments, asks a visitor to tell him who is he is. The idea of visiting one’s old haunts turns from memory to humor to the staging of magic to death and loss of self.

Fox’s poems embody a sly humor but also reference violence and loss. Her poetry of resistance beckons me outside my structured and conventional way of reading and perceiving. The poems tell me to be friends with the unpredictable. The poems say, don’t parse us, ride us.

____________

Lynn Levin’s newest poetry collection Fair Creatures of an Hour was a 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry. A review of it appeared in Rattle.

Rattle Logo