Michael Meyerhofer

January 4, 2011

“Dedication” by Michael MeyerhoferPosted by

Michael Meyerhofer

DEDICATION

In our house, not once did we hear
someone say you’re welcome
in answer to thanks. Instead—“it’s all right,”
backhanded reminder of the sacrifice
this or that Dollar Store trinket
cost folks well below the poverty line.
This is a hard habit to break.
“Don’t worry, it’s fine” when you thank me
for helping you move furniture
or coming to your reading,
your wedding, your beloved’s funeral.
“Oh, it’s all right” to students
when they thank me for margin comments,
for letting them turn in assignments
half a semester late. “It’s all right”—
the door held open a few seconds longer
for the jock on crutches,
for the blue-eyed girl breathing
into the straw fixed to her wheelchair.
I want to thank the moon for tilting
in time to highlight the rain
spilling off a parked windshield,
my body for keeping itself free
so far from cancer, diabetes, suicide.
I want to thank my fear of death
for melting whenever a beautiful woman
bends to drink from a fountain.
I want to thank the crows for mating
on any windowsill but mine.
And their answer, rising in chorus
with each day’s rusty sunset:
It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right.

—from Rattle #33, Summer 2010

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October 25, 2010

ZEPHYR by Susan BrownePosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferZephyr by Susan Browne

ZEPHYR
by Susan Browne

Steel Toe Books
Western Kentucky University
1906 College Heights Blvd. #11086
Bowling Green, KY 42101-1086
ISBN 978-0-9824169-4-5
2010, 92 pp, $12.00
www.steeltoebooks.com

The poems in Zephyr, winner of the 2009 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry (Editor’s Choice), by Susan Browne, reminded me right away of Bob Hicok’s work—and I mean that as the highest of compliments. Browne, like Hicok, is willing to take big risks in her poems. Unlike other established poets who begin to play it safe after awhile, Browne continuously pushes the envelope, betting the success of each poem on its next line. That makes these poems daring, authentic, and fun.

As the one-word title implies, there’s a certain directness to these poems, but it’s not the directness of Zen-like brevity; rather, it’s the directness of the snappy punch line; the elegant, quick turn of phrase; the wholly unexpected image that renders you unable to imagine a thing being described any other way. Take, for example, the everyday malaise described in “Mountain”: “Maybe a map is a good thing / On those days I feel / Like I’m riding a rhino up a mountain…”

Another fine example can be found in “Tuesday,” wherein Browne perfectly captures the combination of panic and numbness felt by someone who returns home to find her house has been broken into: “The front door’s smashed open, wood busted, / Hinges broken, a dusty space / Where the TV had been, / And what you feel is Oh. / ….Then the police arrive, their radios blaring. / Sorry, they say, but this happens every day. / Oh, you say. Just Oh, nodding, wearing all / your best jewelry at once.”

She is also a poet who knows how to use line breaks (to flush out double-meanings, to create tension, to set up a joke) in an era when many other poets struggle with basic punctuation. Take, for example, the first and last lines of “At Bloomingdale’s Grand Opening in San Francisco.” Here, the laugh-out-loud humor belies what seems to be a genuine, human struggle for identity in a postmodern world:

I can’t find my way out
of the new shopping center
which was added on to the old shopping center
and now covers two million square feet of earth.
….
I can never go outside again,
these doors only open onto other doors,
down into the funnel of more and more,
until I’m buried in denim, ten thousand different kinds of jeans,
a cross made of diamonds driven into my heart.

Further, the unexpected turn at the end is especially striking because it combines religious, commercial, and romantic imagery all at once (plus a nod to figurative vampirism); these lines simultaneously invoke a sense of tenderness and violence, humor and sadness, that could be seen as a microcosm of the entire poem (plus the entire book as a whole).

Another thing I admire about these poems is their sense of perspective. You get from Zephyr a sense that Browne is a poet who never pulls her punches; nor, though, is she a poet of glamorous self-indulgence and melodrama. Rather, she is able to strike right to the heart of an event, its deepest essence, by maintaining a multi-dimensional perspective—which is a fancy way of saying she takes poetry seriously but knows not to take herself too seriously. Take, for instance, these lines from “Sadness”: “You wanted to be happy / but got hooked on sadness. / ….Your one hope was to be the saddest person alive / and win an award,” or this opening from “To the Moment”: “Thank God you’re here, / eternal warrior who wrestles against the joyless / onslaught of mortal ugh.” We could use a lot more poems that poke fun at the need some (many?) artists have to outdo each other’s lamentations, to view their work as more pivotal than it actually is.

“Fairy Tale Elegy” (a poem reminiscent of Jeannine Hall Gailey) is another fine example: “Once upon a time in the Land of Sad, / a girl went on a journey. / She was not a princess, except to her mother… / Her father had vanished some tipsy moons ago, / kidnapped by the pirate Captain Smirnoff.” The girl goes on to find love, but reject it because “she had to return to the Land of Sad,” perhaps a roundabout acknowledgment of just how addictive depression and sadness are in the first place (especially for those of us who find themselves in this rather odd business of words).

Browne’s poems contain plenty of vulnerability, too, as in “Hard to Believe”: “We stood by our mother’s grave / in black silk sheathes…./ My younger sister couldn’t afford a dress / so had bought one at Nordstrom, / a store known to take everything back.” Here the humor, taken in contrast with the sadness of the opening, actually makes us feel a little guilty for laughing—which could itself serve as a metaphor for funerals, since everyone knows that it’s exactly when you’re supposed to be solemn that your lip starts twitching.

What I continuously return to in Browne’s poems, though, is her taut imagery, her imaginative leaps, as in her description of a dog’s fur “rippling in sunlight like black fire,”, or this ghoulishly awkward scene described in “On Our First Date”:

He ordered oxtail, heap of dark meat
he scooped with his hands off the white plate,
saying, The marrow has the best flavor…

It’s not just the imagery but the fantastic use of assonance (especially the ominous long-O sound) plus the close attention to stressed syllables that makes these opening lines especially vivid.

Equally worthy of note are Browne’s wry observations—such as in “The Nose on Your Face,” which points out that: “In all your life, you will never see your actual face. / If you close one eye, you can gaze / at the side of your nose, but that’s it.” I think we all secretly crave a good dose of wisdom from the poems we read; wisdom starts with observations, and the wryer the better. The trick, though, is finding a poet who won’t turn you off with their own sense of self-importance, their haughty overuse of language. No such concern with Browne; here, we have a smart poet who seems to genuinely care about her readers, who hopes (rather than insists) that we leave her book just a little better off than how we arrived.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Laureate Prize, the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, and four chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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February 5, 2010

THE SELECTED POEMS OF LI PO translated by David HintonPosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferThe Selected Poems of Li-Po tr. by David Hinton

THE SELECTED POEMS OF LI PO
translated by David Hinton

Anvil Press Poetry
Neptune House
70 Royal Hill
London SE10 8RF
UK
IBSN 978-0856462917
1998, 160 pp., $16.00
http://www.anvilpresspoetry.com

The elegant genius of Li Po hardly requires further mention here. As a long-time fan of Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation, I came to this book with great excitement and admittedly high expectations. That might have been my undoing. Despite the overwhelmingly beautiful imagery inherent in these deceptively simple poems, I found myself greatly distracted by the often strangled feel of David Hinton’s translations.

This is far from Hinton’s best work, I’m afraid. To be honest, I caught myself wondering more than once if these translations were done by one of my ESL students then just sent to press without much editing. I was surprised to learn that this book won the Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given that a large percentage of these translations are frankly very hard on the ears! I applaud Hinton’s efforts to bring still-greater attention to the fantastic poems of Li Po; unfortunately, the translator seems to have confused economy of language with playing fast with loose with basic grammar.

Case in point, a couple lines from Hinton’s translation of “Frontier Mountain Moon”: “A hundred thousand miles long, steady/wind scouring Jasper-Gate Pass howls.” Hinton’s translation forces a rather unnatural caesura after “Pass” and the whole line feels a bit overloaded, i.e. the wind is steady, scouring, AND howling without a single comma to let us catch our breath!

Now consider this alternative: “A hundred thousand miles long, steady/wind howls, scouring Jasper-Gate Pass.” Those simple changes are much easier on the ears and sacrifice none of the poem’s imagery.

Here’s another example, this time from “At Fang-ch’eng Monastery, Discussing Ch’an with Yuan Tan-ch’iu”: “It’s like boundless dream here in this/world, nothing anywhere to trouble us…. There’s a bird among blossoms calling…” The imagery is lovely but the syntax is unnecessarily rough. Again, consider a few simple changes: “This world is like a boundless dream,/nothing anywhere to trouble us…. There’s a bird calling among blossoms…” These slight alterations preserve the imagery and feel of the poem without completely losing the music of the lines.

Sometimes, the problem isn’t Hinton’s grammar so much as his word choice. Consider “Morning up near White River origins…” (“Written While Wandering the White River in Nan-Yang, After Climbing onto the Rocks”). To be fair, I don’t speak a lick of Chinese, but I can’t imagine Li Po intended the Chinese equivalent of as vague and bland a word as “origins.”

Another example is the odd choice of the word “distances” in “On heaven’s wind, a sea traveler/wanders by boat through distances” (“Song of the Merchant”). How on earth do you wander THROUGH distances? Why not just say, “On heaven’s wind, a sea traveler/wanders distances by boat”, or even the more liberal, “On heaven’s wind, a sea traveler/wanders great distances by boat”?

The point of a translation is to express the overall image and feel of the original work, given the rules and pitfalls of a different language. In other words, obviously some latitude must be taken on the part of the translator. Often, I get the feeling that Hinton was trying to pack each line with as many verbs and adverbs as possible.

Now and then, though, he gets it right. For example, in “At Yuan Tan-ch’iu’s Mountain Home,” he goes with “…still sound asleep under a midday sun…” instead of “still under a midday sun sound asleep…” which you might have expected, given his atrocious syntax elsewhere. I also really enjoyed his translation of Li Po’s four line poem, “Gazing at Crab-Apple Mountain”:

Up early, I watched the sun rise again.
At dusk, I watched birds return to roost.

A wanderer’s heart sours bitterly. And here
on Crab-Apple Mountain, it’s only worse.

In general, Hinton is at his best when Li Po is at his briefest. Another good example is “Written on a Wall at Summit-Top Temple,” also just four lines:

Staying the night at Summit-Top Temple,
you can reach out and touch the stars.

I venture no more than a low whisper,
afraid I’ll wake the people of heaven.

The use of the word “venture” is a bit strange, but far from a deal-breaker, given how Hinton manages to convey quite brilliantly the simple elegance of the poem as a whole. Still, there are times when the hiccups are just too hard to ignore.

Case in point: the final lines of “After Climbing Pa-ling Mountain, in the West Hall at K’al’yuan Monastery: Offered to a Monk Beyond this World on Heng Mountain”: “…I feed on kind winds,/ new blossoms teaching mind this vast.” I want to be clear on this: there’s a period after “vast.” Now, I don’t want to sound picky because I know that “vast” can technically be used as a noun, but aside from John Milton, you’d be very hard-pressed to find anyone who uses it as anything but an adjective. In other words, it’s unnecessarily and unproductively unusual, since I doubt Li Po had Milton in mind when he wrote it. A better word would be “vastness,” maybe “emptiness” or even “void” in the Zen sense. Also, “mind” requires “my” before it, since the poem is clearly referring to the narrator’s mind, not minds in general. I’m all for stylistic play with language, but this isn’t the place for it. This is Li Po, not e.e. cummings.

Overall, as much as I was irked by some of these translations, I still found merit in the book as a whole. As always, I applaud David Hinton for his work and influence. I just get the sense that these translations would be vastly improved with a little more time, a bit more polish, and maybe a bit more liberty on the part of the translator.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also won the James Wright Poetry Award, the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the Laureate Prize, and the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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January 10, 2010

THE ORIGIN OF THE MILKY WAY by Barbara Louise UngarPosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferBarbara Louise Ungar

THE ORIGIN OF THE MILKY WAY
by Barbara Louise Ungar

Gival Press
PO Box 3812
Arlington, VA 22203
ISBN 978-1-928589-39-6
2007, 70 pp, $15.00
http://www.givalpress.com/

My apparent lack of a womb means I’ll likely never know what it’s like to bear a child (maybe not an altogether bad thing) but reading the lyrically-rich, often darkly witty poems of Barbara Louise Ungar’s The Origin of the Milky Way, I experienced that payoff of truly great poetry: identifying with feelings and experiences altogether different from one’s own. This book—Ungar’s second, and winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award—is a most welcome addition to the stage of modern verse.

The first poem, “Embryology,” begins with these beautifully reflective lines: “Could it just be hormones, / this euphoria / as if someone rubbed petals / of opium poppy all over…” Interestingly, and perhaps what I like best about Ungar’s poetry, is that this description might just as easily apply to other acts of creation—say, to writing a successful poem, an act which for Ungar seems as natural as childbirth.

What hooked me, though, was the poem, “Riddle,” in which Ungar reflects on her unborn son: “There’s a penis deep inside me, / getting bigger every day. / I’m growing balls / & big teats at once.” What’s great about this poem is that it disarms you with its quirky humor then delivers knockout lines like: “I’ve got a pair / of hearts…. One womb, one way / in & out—the hard strait / he’ll have to take.” In this relatively short poem, Ungar successfully shifts from the oddity of having another living being growing inside her to the literal and metaphorical agony of separation. I also love the use of the word strait with its connotations of vying elements, of earth and water as neighboring opposites.

The anxiety of mothers (especially expectant mothers) is surely something that men, let alone men without children, can never fully hope to understand. However, I was deeply moved by the dark humor and intense worry present in “Dream at Twenty-three Weeks.” In this poem, the narrator gives birth to “a talking frog” that falls apart despite the narrator’s best efforts to love and care for it, prompting the narrator to think in dream-state: “What a terrible mother I am.” This poem has its real world compliment in “Prepartum Blues,” which begins: “I miss you / and you’re not even born yet.”

Another admirable quality of this book is its stylistic variations. Too often, poets write poems that all look virtually identical on the page. Not so with Ungar. Some have the short, breathy lines reminiscent of the shorter works of William Carlos Williams. Others (like “Blanche’s Tale”) have a longer, more narrative format that plays with dropped lines and italics. While this is chiefly a book about pregnancy and motherhood, there’s rich variation within that subject, as well. In “Prenatal Yoga,” the narrator ironically notes that the prenatal yoga teacher is the only woman in the room without two hearts. In “Transference,” Ungar writes of women who “…fall in love / with their obstetrician” whose “…small hands travel where no / others do… / while your husband turns away.”

One of the best, most ingenious poems here is “Izaak Laughing,” written to the poet’s son (now a toddler). The poem details the horrors described in the daily newspaper then goes on to say:

You pull yesterday’s horrors from the rack,
shred them, stuff some in your mouth
and work like cud. You sit
so beautifully, upright and plumb,
smiling young Buddha
who eats all suffering.

Given that “Izaak” comes from the Hebrew word for laughter (a fact noted in the beginning of the poem), “Izaak Laughing” can be seen as the melding of at least two major world religions, not to mention the acknowledgement of world suffering and, on a more personal level, the narrator’s honest, deeply human need for consolation—a consolation that comes in the form of her child doing what children do best. The loving humor of this poem belies its underlying motif of redemption from destruction. Ungar is a poet who successfully navigates the provocative waters of honesty and emotion without giving in to cliché and over-sentimentality—something too many contemporary poets are afraid to even try.

Another favorite of mine, “Why There Aren’t More Poems About Toddlers,” humorously describes similar child-wrought havoc:

…while you shower
he microwaves potholders, salts the teapot,
peppers the sofa, pours milk on rugs;
because he’s magnetized by knives
scissors water & electricity.

What seems at first to be just a funny, anxiety-tinged poem about a mother trying to find time to write while simultaneously keeping her child from destroying the house and/or himself (a common experience, say my writer-friends with children) then takes this heart-wrenching turn:

…with luck, he will leave
for school and break your heart.
And still you’ll wonder, where
did it all go?

What’s interesting and masterful about this poem is not just its seamless emotional turns but how the pronoun in the last line can be applied equally to all manner of things, from the writer’s inspiration (and writing supplies) to the actual havoc wrought by the toddler, which the narrator might one day grow to miss.

Although the poems of The Origin of the Milky Way all center on a similar theme, this book is a melting pot (or is salad the new, prevailing metaphor these days?) of many different emotions and insights, a labor of love in the truest sense. I’m glad to recommend these lyrical brave, often witty narratives to everyone, and I count myself lucky to have this thoroughly dog-eared volume on my shelf.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals. He can be contacted at: mrmeyerhofer@bsu.edu.

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August 25, 2009

AMERICAN FUTURE by Peter BethanisPosted by

Review by Michael Meyerhofer

AMERICAN FUTURE
by Peter Bethanis

Entasis Press
Suite 72
1901 Wyoming Avenue NW
Washington, DC
ISBN 978-0-9800999-4-2
2009, 100 pp., $12.00
www.entasispress.com

I am still reeling from Peter Bethanis’s American Childhood, a wonderfully refreshing book full of big, good poems that span a twenty year period (1988-2008) and range in topic from American consumerism to the life of Li Po, along the way addressing divorce, fatherhood, identity, and loneliness. Right out the gate, Bethanis dazzles us with his title poem:

In 1963 the morning probably seemed harmless enough
for my parents to sign on the dotted line
as the insurance man talked to them for over an hour
around a coffee table about our future.
“This roof wasn’t designed to withstand meteors,”
he told my father…

Here, we see Bethanis’s chief talents as a storyteller: subtle rhythm, imagery, and humor. Sincerity follows in abundance—in this poem and others, like these poignant lines from “Fishing with Grandfather”: “The doctors have given you three, / maybe four months, but nothing stops / your hands from bicycling in bass after bass, / each one flopping like an amp needle to the boat’s side.” These lines might label Bethanis a Deep Imagist, but there are meta-poems here, too, plus excellent turns of phrase like this opening to “The Sophist’s Cellar”: “The sophist stubs his toe / on the meaning of things.” Bethanis is clearly a man who owns many hats, and wears them all quite well.

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May 20, 2009

FAR FROM ALGIERS by Djelloul MarbrookPosted by

Review by Michael Meyerhofer

FAR FROM ALGIERS
by Djelloul Marbrook

Kent State University Press
307 Lowry Hall
P.O. Box 5190
Kent, Ohio 44242
ISBN 978-0-87338-987-7
2008, 72 pp., $14.00
http://upress.kent.edu

Djelloul Marbrook’s first book, Far From Algiers, is the kind of book you want to buy over and over—partly so you can support such a fine “emerging writer,” but mostly just so you can give copies of this humorous, heart-wrenching book as gifts for everyone you know. These are wry, insightful, accessible verses that shine with a lyrical wit often lacking in today’s poetry.

I had the great privilege of seeing Marbrook read at the AWP conference in Chicago. Honestly, I’d never heard of him before that, nor seen his work in journals. As I sat and listened, though, I was immediately floored by one thought: How on earth have I never heard of this guy before? Marbrook’s poems—grandfatherly, mortal, sometimes political but refreshingly free of proselytization—struck such a chord that I bought his book as fast as I could. Now, having just finished it, I’m writing this review at three in the morning because frankly, I don’t think I can sleep until I give just credit where credit is due.

Right away in the first poem, “Climate Control,” we realize Continue reading →

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December 5, 2008

OCTOPUS by Tom HunleyPosted by

Review by Michael Meyerhofer

OCTOPUS
by Tom Hunley

Logan House Press
Route 1 Box 154
Winside, NE 68790
ISBN – 978-0-9769935-3-7
2008, 80 pp., $12.00
www.loganhousepress.com

Tom Hunley’s Octopus is the kind of book that feels like the poet had just as much fun writing it as I had reading it. For me, a book of poetry has to pass the dog-ear test before I consider it one of my favorites; Octopus passed that test with ease. Here is a poet of sharp wit, integrity, and bittersweet intellect. He is also a fine craftsman of sharp imagery.

For example, in “Release,” Hunley gives voice to a captured rainbow trout: “I’m no wall trophy. / Let me go.” The poem goes on to mention Cho Seung Hoi, responsible for the infamous murders at Virginia Tech, but does so with poignant grace and respect, merely describing: “32 orange and white balloons / lifted up, launched into the night” (40).

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