O Bon O Boy!

Finally got and read O Bon, by Brandon Shimoda (Litmus 2011) - the poems have a combination of delicacy and creepiness that's hard to get over. I wish I could write poems that used syntactic disjunction and reversals to such precise effect/affect. I'm also very interested in the relation of narrative to lyric here - just enough of the former to generate the latter. It kind of reminds me of the m.o. of Susan Howe or Cecil Giscombe in that it's clear that the poems are "based in" or incited by research, but there's not too much of the actual research in the poems. They are more like an emotional or psychic distillate of the events. Which is why they have such force. You can get all of the narrative or sources that you need (or want -- or not) in the 5-page afterword.

The book is really an elegy for the poet's grandfather, a Japanese immigrant photographer, born in Hiroshima, interned during WWII. Japanese ritual and mythology provide much of the imagery and feeling-tone of the book -- for instance, the Corpse Eater, a former priest doomed to cannibalize the deceased (in Japan, this is folklore; in early modern Europe, it was real life). Shimoda is well aware of the Freudian link between cannibalism (symbolic) and melancholia: ". . . I have found myself, repeatedly and throughout O Bon, feasting off of what is resurrected, eating my grandfather's corpse, turning it over in my mouth, as the rest of my body burns out of the sound" (89). Like Genet in Funeral Rites, Shimoda in O Bon accepts, embraces, and explores the implications.

Now, in keeping with my practice of randomly selecting excerpts from books I am describing . . . from "In the Middle of Migration":

we find ourselves
turning --



recalcitrant in the ancient domain



masks simultaneously black
we know not
the sensible thing



sugar mammal, slit throat
thethered to the thickest spar
between home and adopted home



makes no difference in times like these
without bothering to unfold the map
or take it from its sleeve



climb the rungs of bone and limb
to pierce what version of skin or sky
the solvent leaks

(35)

I will admit to deliberately choosing left-justified lines for this passage -- which in fact characterize few of the poems -- in order to conform to the almighty Google formatting. But as the multiple spaces between stanzas suggest, these poems are composed of words and the spaces between the words. You should look at the book to get a sense of what Shimoda does with the space of the page. I can't replicate the indentations that "set off" this stanza (in more ways than one): "a visage / nettling the slack / foundation -- may I beg shelter for the night / misshapen where / shall I alight / the valley hymns in the crust" (23).

Want more? See Jerome Rothenberg's blog, where same can be found. Shimoda is interested in contemporary Japanese poetry (vide the poet's ANCIENTS project), from which he has undoubtedly drawn formal inspiration.

_Louise: Amended_ (and polished)

Just finished reading Louise: Amended, by Louise Krug (Black Balloon 2012). It is ostensibly about the author/protagonist's transformation from glamor girl to sadder, wiser neurological patient - due to the necessity to excise a "cavernous angioma" from the pons of her brain stem. But it's at least as much about all the other people in her life - the boyfriend, the parents, the step-parents, friends, brothers, etc. - about their reactions to having a loved one with a serious, debilitating illness, and what those reactions say about and do to their respective characters. By switching back and forth from first to (omniscient) third person, Krug can get inside their heads - and face what they were facing without (herself) flinching. This part is almost scarier than when she looks in the mirror with a half-paralyzed face. You might occasionally flinch, though, as a reader - the prose is spare, straightforward, colloquial, and doesn't pull any punches. Even her own thoughts at the time of her treatments are related in matter-of-fact style - perhaps the trace of having started a career in journalism in a previous life.

"When the bandages are unwound from my head it takes a long time to get to the end. The unwinding happens in circles, and it takes so long I worry that my face will come off, too."

This book feels like it has undergone multiple surgeries, too. Many of the chapters are composed of related, sutured-together vignettes, some of which switch point of view from one person to another. But I suspect it has also had a few "prose removal" operations; the writing is (to change the metaphor) sculptural, almost. Not many adjectives or scene-settings - and when there are, it's done via a single quirky detail in the periphery. And Krug uses the chapter as a unit of composition. Here, for instance, is Chapter Twelve:

"Warner and Janet email.

"The emails begin with 'Hi' and 'Dear.' They end with 'Best.'

"One thing about the trouble with their daughter: It has made them want to be kind."

End of chapter - with all the ambiguity of that last sentence left hanging for the next. Some chapters are longer, of course, but every single sentence is necessary, smart, and sometimes funny. Louise: Amended is a unique, kinetic, & finely-polished book that will be the envy of any of us who have ever tried to tell a life story.

On Goro Takano's _With One More Step Ahead_

Now that it is officially almost summer, I'm back at it - with my first "book description" of the new season. But how to describe With One More Step Ahead, by Goro Takano? It is certainly a charmingly weird book - a novel with a bibliography, which is addressed telepathically in English to a group of girls in Hawai'i by a Japanese woman or girl named Lulu who may have senile dementia or schizophrenia or may not, but who is under restraint of some kind, who purports to be "translating" the memoir of a paraplegic man from whom the girls in Hawai'i serve as amanuenses as he composes his musical scores by moving his eyeballs this way or that. With me so far? No? Me neither. But there's never a dull moment. "Mr. Onishi," the protagonist (?), is a sensationalist TV reporter turned English grad student (not unlike Takano himself) who becomes involved with a group called the Banyan Tree Society, which promotes world harmony via sexual intercourse. As the story unfolds, it appears there is more than one Lulu and multiple Onishi's - one Lulu will look to Onishi like his ex-wife, or vice-versa, for instance. Every so often, someone - Lulu? Onishi? Takano? An unnamed omniscient narrator? says:

    "Wait a minute.
     This is a goddamn lie. This should be a goddamn illusion.
     My life should not be like this.
     This should be somebody else's life.
     Somewhere, without my permission, somebody is revising my life. Rewriting my life. Translating my life into something else. Exchanging my life with somebody else's."

A lot of "edgy" novels these days aren't. But this is novel writing that hasn't forgotten John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, et al. It's narrative as carnival - and Takano is the master of digressions within digressions and flashback within flash-forward. The novel includes legends, a story-board, an essay on Dostoyevski's The Idiot, poems, and travelogue. It is a satire, in the sense of satura lanx, full plate. The fare most often has to do with Japanese history and contemporary Japanese culture, but it's also about (post)modernity writ large - the nature of subjectivity in a digital for-profit environment.

Appropriately enough, the English prose here is peppered with instances of non-native-speaker-type usages - such as the recurrent use of "cocksure" to mean "to be very certain." Given that the author possesses a PhD in English, one suspects that these are more or less intentional, and they give the texture of the novel a strangely manic quality - like a poorly-dubbed samuai movie that turns into a psychological thriller/comedy.

OK - that's the best I can do. This book is proof positive of Croce's dictum that every work of art is a unique aesthetic phenomenon.

_Old Women Look Like This_, by Susan M. Schultz

Old Women Look Like This, by Susan M. Schultz, is a (free!) e-chapbook that came out this year from Argotist Ebooks. It was inspired by, and partially ekphrastically responds to, paintings of elderly people by Elizabeth Berdann (one of which graces the front cover) – portraits framed by openings in the shape of a suite of cards (hearts, diamonds). Each of the old people in Schultz’ poems are identified only by first name and age. “Do not refer to them as them or as they or as those people, because we could be they as they could be someone else.” Indeed – and, demographically, if you live in the US, you have a pretty good chance of being one of those people – many of whom, in this book as in real life, suffer from dementia, Alzheimer’s, or just confusion.

While it would be an overstatement to say that Old Women Look Like This makes me want to slit my wrists to avoid growing old, let me put it this way: if I were the sort of person who liked to get drunk and drive real, real fast, this book would not be an argument for changing ways. “’Are you my mother?’ Martha asks them each, and they said no, they were not hers but someone else’s mother, sister, aunt, niece. ‘I took care of you,’ one said, ‘but I am not your mother . . ..’” Martha is 92, and she is not unlike the other women and men in the nursing home. Schultz paints their portraits to rather chilling effect, by playing off children’s books, Wallace Stevens (mashed up w/the Alzheimer’s Assoc. 2010 report), or by creating a scary, perfunctory, and breathless nursing-home soap opera. “Ronald Reagan (90) Remembers His Challenger Disaster Speech” samples and scrambles the (even-then-defamiliar) words of that president. There is an engaging variety of verse and prose forms here that tell the story of Juanita Goggins, first African-American woman elected to the South Carolina legislature, who freezes to death in the house where she lives alone.

The final poem, “Waiting Adults,” gives only initials for names (and ages, of course): “P (82) is sweet and kind and listens to Christian Radio. She misses her baby, and often cries over him.” “J (85) is well dressed and sports a mustache. He moves constantly, as if he has somewhere to go.” Perhaps the most poignant poem of the bunch is the second-to-last, “Anne of Manor Care Gables,” which depicts “the residents” as a group: “The residents are all relinquished./ . . . The residents do not recognize themselves, boxed up and memorialized beside their doors. . . ./ The residents are like children. No one says that children are like them.”

This book could be seen as a kind of coda (or sequel) to Schultz’ groundbreaking Dementia Blog, which is, in fact, the blog the author kept as her own mother slid into Alzheimer’s. Like that book, this one stares straight at you and at the “residents” at the same time, recognizing that you – and those you love – are them.

Khaled Mattawa's "Tocqueville"

Read a very interesting poem yesterday – “Tocqueville,” by Khaled Mattawa. I don’t know that it’s the Great Poem of the Era of Globalization, but it’s definitely a draft of part of that poem (which we are all writing, whether we leave a record of it or not). It is mostly a collage, drawn from materials as disparate as Franz Fanon, Robert Pinsky, and first-person accounts from Somali refugees. The work is composed of verse, found prose, and imagined dialogues. Mattawa manages to bring together the quotidian and the Big Events, the masses and the players, in a way that evokes the nature of neoliberal globalization – in particular, neo-colonialism and the global politics/psychology of race.

It also attempts to “get at” the psychology of the folks in the metropole – not least of all via Tocqueville himself:

“Such a government does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much from being born; it is not at all tyrannical but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies.”

It also puts into place tyrannical, destructive, will-breaking governments in subject territories. And sets those territories against each other. Just before the passage above:

“If you talk to the Chinese about cheap labor, they begin to complain about Vietnamese competitiveness.

“And who are the Vietnamese complaining about?

“Bangladesh. And the Bangladeshis are pissed at the Burmese.” (36)

A lot of the passages are deadpan accounts of unimaginable cynicism and cruelty, often recounted in an elliptical, allusive manner – along with the surreal, nightmarish mode one often finds in poetry dealing with the postcolonial condition:

“The wonder of it she’d sung,
the wonder she’s spring into the world singing,

and you say bless this goodness
wrung of amnesia, of the whips’ hieroglyphs,

this song rattling the creaking church,
this gale of cool air washing away the savannah’s moss.

Hearth in winter, Abel’s
blood streaming endless from your veins.” (40)

There are several voices, themes and sources that recur over the 25 pp. of the poem, which links the general and the particular, as well as different parts of the world to one another, via the principle of montage. To his credit, Mattawa doesn’t exempt those who live in seeming “safe havens” (like Ann Arbor, Michigan) from scrutiny. Then there is the rest of the eponymous book, in which Mattawa presents some fascinating and disconcerting experimental work.

“And these idiots still think we lost Vietnam.”

The Plot Junkie

I keep meaning to write some “book descriptions” (a.k.a. chickenshit pseudo-reviews) – and indeed, I have a stack of books on my desk awaiting just such a fate. But I’ve actually been too busy – a.) working on my writing or b.) getting really depressed about my writing.

But I’m going to break down and write one today – about Gilliam Conoley’s The Plot Genie – not new new (2009), but new enough, right? Anyway, this book is inspired by what I gather were a series of books by Wycliffe A. Hill (his real name?), a silent-film director who titled the series (yep) The Plot Genie. I further gather than it presented one with options for story elements at any given stage of a plot – maybe a 1930s version of hyper-fiction.

That’s what I gather – based on Conoley’s notes in the back. But it’s not a docupoem. It’s a reflection about plot and plotting – about narrative and narrativization – how we tell ourselves about ourselves accordingly – successfully or un.

There is a cast of characters: Comedy Boy, Tyger, Miss Jane Sloane, Handsome Dead Man (I “gather” this phrase actually appears in the original P.G.), Redhead, E., and R. (a couple – either more so or once again – get it?). Where one ends and another begins is sometimes in doubt.

Stories begin in these poems, only to slip into a different story and then a third, fourth, etc. – until there’s really no “story arc” at all – only arcs that form a kind of squiggly curve (or wheel – see p. 24 – I Gather that there might have been some kind of wheel device included w/the original PG – maybe as a random plot-element generator):

drain the pond to see the fish.
Or sometimes tortoises, gulls, empty vials of human growth –
maybe a messenger – a slope nosed boxer on a junket
in a satin cape. In an alley – speaking out the side of his mouth –
I am thy father’s spirit,
doomed once more and for a certain time
to walk the earth – quipped
Comedy Boy, darkening the door

And so, “with one journey finished,/ so begins another, and with another over, so starts// the next, asn on, on into//the long intolerable arc,/no hour of doom to come” (this just after a passage from The Postman Always Rings Twice - maybe they are interchangeable). It’s just one damn thing after another – which is what Hayden White would call the Ironic or Satirical mode of historiography, I reckon. Which also means there are bigger stakes, i.e.: “That’s precisely how antagonists wreck one’s mind./ To feel no identity aright except/ one first stirred/ by becoming someone else – // which does not so much relieve/ my hunger to become,// as keep it immortal in me . . .” So the storyteller and character are uncomfortably close, as is that character to all the others. If the story is a wheel, it don’t never stop. “The future is a probe, tied to its fear/ of stopped time . . .” Got to keep the story moving. So get up in the morning. I guess – anyway, I get the sense of a pathological and irresistible demand for plot – for story and more story being drawn out of - language? the subject? the author? – in this book – which I guess is what the 1001 Nights is (are) about, except that Scheherazade stays Scheherazade in that one. The end, for now.

2 By Rachel Zolf

I’ve been meaning for some time to write something about Rachel Zolf’s book Masque (Mercury Press 2004), and now she’s come out with another one, Neighbour Procedure (Coach House 2010). The first is a “masked” memoir in the form of verse dialogue. The second deals with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; it was occasioned by a trip to “Israel-Palestine” and contains “some of the journey’s mad affects.”

Masque is large – 10x8” pages – and the verse is spread out over the pages. It is “spoken” by various characters – The Media Man (who is also The Father, the egomaniacal reporter/TV personality, Benny Z-d); The Daughter; The Philosopher (who is mostly Marshall McLuhan); The Censor (who “redacts” certain words); The Whisper (which says things like “you fucking screaming idiot”), and so on. At first some of the voices occur on separate pages, then in consecutive dialogue. But finally, they mostly are all talking at the same time, by way of interlined stanzas; the names in the right and left margins alert the reader to the first line of the character’s speech, but the parts are written in alternating lines. Sometimes there are just a few short lines crouching in the upper left-hand corner of the page; sometimes there is one column of text that is left-justified, one that is right-justified, and one coming down the center. There are even drawings and extended etymologies. I’m not going to try to reproduce this method on Blogger. Suffice it to say that Zolf depicts a very complex set of relationships within and beyond a family in a few (colloquial) words. Much of the material is taken from Canadian Broadcasting Corporation footage, as well as newspapers which her father – who just happens to be a Media Man, too – wrote for.

Neighbour Procedure is rather different. The title refers to the practice by the Israeli army of using residents of Palestinian neighborhoods as de facto human shields. Again, much of the material comes from “found” sources: newscasts, web sites, commercials, the Qur’an, Judith Butler, etc. The first section reminds me of the ghazal form – that is, the juxtaposing of lines of verse that do not follow one from the other, but which have a lot to do with each other. (In this respect, it reminds me of Susan Tichy’s Gallowglass, except that there it is the American-Iraqui conflict that is the source). Other poems are lists of numbers and names, or a mosaic of the words “car [mule, belt, bike] bomb” with musical notations added. The middle section is composed of white-out poems from Ibn Barun’s 11th c. “Book of Comparisons” of Arabic and Hebrew words, as a method of glossing the Torah (mixed in with the poet-speaker’s own stutterings). The rest are various mash-ups and docupoems – one section is composed of “word maps.” And the notes at the end are well worth reading.

The barber

One soldier danced into the shop, 'Nice, nice'

Whose faces were painted certain images don't appear

Cutting in random lines the machine touched my scalp

Can you be gentle I'm not an expert open your mouth

A group of children stones his weapon on my shoulder

Intolerable eruption patting his chest, 'Now I'll tell you my name'

Sometimes staccato sometimes continuous

The soldier left the barbershop with the scissors

The soldier left the hair on my lips

_plagiarism/outsource, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Untitled Heath Ledger Project, a history of the search engine, disco OS_, by Tan Lin, et al.

I seem to be drawn to generically ambiguous, uncut, reflexive, abecederian works. I've been reading Anatomy of Melancholy, for chrissakes.

But it was hard for me to get started on Tan Lin’s book plagiarism/outsource, &c.(zasterle) – I re-read the first few pages a few times before I had my sea-legs – but the farther I got into it, the smarter it seemed. Call it conceptual poetry or performance art, verily, it enacts the problems with “intellectual property” and the culture it creates. For starters, it’s really authored by Lin and eight other people (seven workshop participants and a graphic designer). Secondly, it’s copylefted, not copyrighted. Thirdly, it takes the liberty of reproducing large chunks of (theoretically) open-source text (about Samuel Pepys), along with chunks of (theoretically) copyrighted text and images (about Heath Ledger, amongst others).

Hey, take it to the Supreme Court . . .

There is also a fair amount of source code/html mark-up – and google search results, etc.

“As Pepys and Heath and Helena and Mike and Jean, and Ina, and Soo-Young and Jennifer, and Tamiko noted, because ‘anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely

“each morning at the Pickwick was narrowly descriptive and ‘as inert as possible,’ subject to erasure or re-distribution

“i.e. her feelings like his were hand-written or like everything else approximate or obstreperous and narrow like an itinerary post(ed) opposite the reception desk

"i.e. their (their) writing (writing) was like (like) an elevator opening

"as a result

"Heath: or Samuel: was not ‘ something inserted into the video: they were watching on You Tube ‘ ‘ (i.e. storage) but something taken away or outsourced (dissemination), i.e. the process was more like erasing each other (plagiarism) rather than viewing.”

This from section (?) 1, “unread novel.” The “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” part of the title of the book, is a sho-nuff treatise:

“likewise, with a book she was carrying around all that week Heath died,

“you shouldn’t have to read it because everything in it has already been read by her,

“in this sense, the death is what intellectual property lawyers term ‘derivative;’ [sic] it encourages no detrimental reliance i.e. it would not render or caused you not to read something else since it is, technically, ‘something else’ subject to non-writers who are readers and any future non-readers who are writers working in a domain of what relaxed copyright advocates call @copyleft and so they decided because everything is plainly beautiful and

“indiscriminately ugly in unlimited distribution,

“the non-logocentric, non-literary project shares much with what George C. Williams, the evolutionary biologist, describes as the principal functioning of the gene: ‘that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency’ . . .”

And the blocks of project Gutenberg text (not least the “small print” copyright instructions and disclaimers). And the “Entertainment Story” is a damn good imitation of an entertainment RSS feed, if it isn’t really one.

they or the texts they are writing can be [mythical] like a [tourist] destination

they can be [programmatic] without being confined to a single practice,

< XTRA GREEN Green Tea Beverage Mix >

notice the lack of quotation marks

This is a heady blurring of authorial authority and ownership. So when I say:

genre = brands,

you don’t know if Tan said it or Michael or Ina or Sooyoung or Jennifer or Helena or Tamiko or Jean or Danielle or Heath or Samuel or Joe. Or all or none.

[“I,” for one, definitely believe it to be true]

"In this system, creating content is less useful than passing on existing content or re-creating a context for re-use. Plagiarism, despite its 'contested normative significance' is one parameter to define this recontextualizing mode. Ditto with outsourcing or image defamiliarization. Having sex changes the group dynamic."

– “Emily,” from Historia de mi Vida Triste

I’m glad I wrote that in my blog, b/c what better place for matter of uncertain authorship. Yo, originality is the last remaining waste product of creative practices and remains to be eliminated within aesthetic production and/or distribution systems.

What he said.

Two Types of Political Poetry

. . . both from Barbara Jane Reyes, from her fascinating book Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish).

This, from page 74:

Queen of fallen angels, pray for us.
Queen of patriarchs, pray for us.
Queen of dictators, pray for us.
Queen of race riots, pray for us.
Queen of heathens' torched flesh, pray for us.

Et cetera. Then, on the facing page, the poem "calles de los dolores y trastorno de tensión postraumática":

your methods are unacceptable :: beyond human restraint :: things get confused i know :: the heart's a white sepulcher and no man guards its doors :: against the growing dark :: incessant blades beat air :: incessant blades :: what means are available to terminate :: gook names :: with extreme prejudice :: you may use those :: blades beat :: easier than learning their gook names :: your boys don't know any better than :: gook names . . .

and it ends with "blades beat :: dead men hanging :: gook names :: no sin committeed :: no dead men :: to forgive."

The first poem is what I'd call a declamatory poem, both in the form (ironical litany, end-stopped lines) and content. But the second poem is more interesting to me, b/c it in effect gets inside the head of a veteran (of Vietnam? Korea? even Iraq?) with PTSD -- not to exculpate him, but to see what makes him tick -- and at the same time, comments upon that project. The "tick" of the "::" as a pacing device cuts off thoughts mid-stream - which often obsessively come back. Anyway, that was the one that grabbed me, of these two. Maybe that's my "modernist" training -- I gravitate to the dramatic monologue, the innovative form, the psychological and temporal subjectivity, the showing not telling. Would probably be different, were I Pilipina(American).

In any event, the book contains more of the latter type of poem than the former. Tho Reyes does make some very good use of litany - in English, Spanish, and Tagalog - as she shuttles between the Mission District of SFCA (her home town) and Manila (her birthplace). And the whole creates a quasi-narrative (a recurrent one, in the examples above) that is more than the sum of its parts. It expanded my attention span - wanted to read it - unlike this post . . .

Steensen's _Method_ and Madness

Poets often personify abstractions, but rarely is the abstraction a series of mathematical formulae. But the protagonist of Sasha Steensen’s The Method is a cross between:

- Caliban
- The 10,000-Year-Old Man
- Frankenstein’s Monster
- Henry.

[I felt vindicated in this last observation when I saw the poem “A Second Offence for John Berryman”]

But it’s not his fault (& he is male – Archimedes conjured him, after all). He’s the Mathematician’s golem, starting life as a founding document of rationalism, and ending up as scrap-parchment for a monk to write “a prayer book for sick and unclean spirits upon.” Now M. is a tattooed palimpsest (and a commodity, passing from hand to hand).

If you could give me the right place to stand, I could lift this book with a lever (not that it's big, just dense). If you can’t – well, I ain’t that smart. I can say what I like about this book, which is its incredibly inventive use of language (look – I’m referring to a book as a character!). Not to mention its variety of forms: closed form, open form, columns, prose discursus.

Now comes that moment that explains why I don’t write many real book reviews. How does one pick the one or two extra-special passages that truly exemplify the heart and soul of a book – the Ultimate Synechdoche?

Hmm – esp. hard to do, with such a multiform book with a multiform absent center. So I’ll revert to the list, one of my favorite forms:

From “The Complete Sentence for My Father”

This is a complete sentence.
Does not frighten me.
The story of the dwarf,
confined forever,
to a complete sentence,
for his robbery, robby. . . .
He’ll be left
behind. behead.
ed.
When we watch
the dwarf
take a page.
Completely for the Method.
If we say, Stop!
That is a complete
sentence . . .

[And what poet doesn’t have a father who’s said “So whattaya, afraid of writing complete sentences or something”?]

From “The Future of an Illusion”:

“In the distance, I hear America swimming. It is a hot day, and we are circling the island. They find his inflatable crocodile humorous, and they point and chuckle among themselves. Method began to keep track of such embarrassments by writing a Souda, a compilation of compilations. In it he includes etymological ponderings, such as the relationship between ‘moor,’ to secure a ship, and the Moors. A ship is moored when she rides by two anchors. Mooring chains and Morning chains, he chants softly as he floats.”

Like the future (and the present of much US poetry), this poem is floating away.

No? OK, try “Me Thee Odes”:

He is his own he.
He is.
His is dead and gone,
and his comes along
very scary. Boo
hoo.

His is one too many.

He is an object that looks like an object.
I love an object that looks like an object.
He is an object that looks like an object.
He is not.

See? Those excerpts give a completely distorted idea of this book. OK, that’s enough. But I’m not going to tell you how many poppyseeds it takes to fill the known universe.

Where is the “known universe,” anyways?

_CRICKET ONLINE REVIEW_ V:1

So, I have no idea how one would “review” a periodical as eclectic as Cricket Online Review, so I’m just going to provide one-line descriptions of the poetry (and some concrete/vizpo). I will identify each piece by title, sans author, so you’ll have to look at the issue to see who wrote it (except in cases where there is more than one piece by a single author, in which case I’ve used the author’s name).

- Taut – implied narrative (scary), lyricized.
- One-Letter – a month-long abecederian romp!
- Somera – scrambled nature poems for the hip-hop gen.
- The Mole – scrambled nature poem for surredadists
- Human/Nature – that’s precisely the point. And theory etc. keeps spoiling the view
- Sanders – wish these were programmable to produce randomly generated animated syntax
- Simplicity – Yes
- $0.What – an able contribution to the poesie du skrilla
- Animate/in/animate – IT’S ALIVE! (and partially upside-down)
- That Desk – plain English, unfinished
- Things Come On – a sad symptom of the degeneration of a once-booming genre
- Gridpattern – Zoom and zoom again – it’s worth it. Docupoem surrounding that which will never disambiguate (by design).
- Huth – NOT Longfellow. Really visual fun.
- Topel – true cut-ups
- Mother-Infant Room – Too close to home, these days
- Tarantino – light! color! action!
- Chirot – indeed.
- Brunet – never mind the bullocks, here’s some collagepo to finish you off.

Best of all, it’s all free

Agoos' Property

I Read Julie Agoos’ Property (Ausable) this week. Fairly representational narrative poems about New England, written in loose blank verse: hmm . . . who does this remind me of . . .

Actually, the book diverges from Frost in some important ways, and that has made all the difference. First, the narratives end rather abruptly – almost in media res, just as the story gets going. I like that, b/c stories ought to make you think about why they end – and begin – where and as they do. Not only does one have to piece together a narrative from the shorter poems, one also has to think beyond the ending.

In addition, these poems actually deal with history. With actual history, I mean – tho sometimes quotes are transported into totally different historical contexts. As I’ve said in these pages before, it’s hard to write about the Pequot War, for instance, without some readers’ thinking of Susan Howe, and these are definitely not Howe poems: for one thing, they really do tell stories, albeit slant (the “Reading of the Pequot War,” for instance, fast-forwards to later anti-immigrant sentiment at the end).

The best thing in the book is the long poem “Deposition,” composed of 21 “transcripts” – really snippets of imagined cross-examination in a trial. Not only does Agoos maintain her more-or-less consistent blank-verse template, she also (at the same time) presents an Altman-esque rendering of people talking over one another and at cross purposes:

Q: I mean, where had they emigrated from?

From?

Q: Where were they from?

What –

Q: Place.

- place? – Or did you mean –

Q: Where had they come from?

Attorney for the Defense: Let the witness answer.

-- what the last place was?

Q: Yes.

And that’s the entirety of “Transcript II”; some of these exchanges are worthy of Howard Baker and John Dean’s during the Watergate hearings. “Deposition” is not a Reznikoff deposition – indeed, it reads more like a mystery novel.

At other points in Property, the verse sounds a little (little) like North of Boston:

[they] should have foreseen, the signs all in
as they always are after the fact,
when the story becomes like the story again
of the universe starting: never before
was there something like this, at no time, no sir, ask anyone.

There are worse things to sound like. The transcript poems are worth the price of admission.

Lydick Mastering the Dream

Read an interesting book recently – Mastering the Dream, by Kelly Lydick. It’s published by Mary Burger and Second Story Press, which you should become acquainted with, if you’re interested in innovative narrative forms. Lydick’s book, for instance, alternates between first person (journal entries and dream narratives), second person (letters to self), and (in the second half of the book), third-person narration. All in prose (except for some poems in the letters), interspersed with single quotes from rabbis on otherwise blank pages. Taken together, it forms a story of the protagonist, “Marie,” who seems to be recovering from a suicide attempt, a failed love, but, more importantly, a generalized desire to connect the metaphysical dots (“technically, it is a fallacy to try to look for constellations on my body [freckles], because the mirror shows only the reverse image. // Shin. Mem. Aleph.”). Those last (reversed), “[a]ccording to some mystics . . . comprise what are known as the three ‘mother letters’” – analogous to A-U-M, one gathers. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis, solid-liquid-gas.

In any case, Aleph-Mem-Shin spells “yesternight,” a word that haunts the book. Thankfully, there’s no final word or how-to mysticism here. In fact, you the reader are asked to connect the dots of the story and the reflections (if I may) that punctuate the story. I’m finding it hard to quote anything – I didn’t underline, as is my wont – and many of the sentences describe the sort of routine thoughts that make up one’s day – if one thinks about things like being and non-being. I’d call the writing “simply good.”

If the universe is 99.9% empty space, then “[m]y identity is part of the 0.1% of matter.” Worth bearing in mind. Try tracing the space occupied by your body, for instance: “I try to meditate, Aleph, Mem, Shin, but it’s difficult to do looking only at the ink on the mirror instead of my body.”

If this were a real review (or universe), there would be an ending somewhere.

Barrett's Boston

One of the other books that I started reading on the Airbus that I thought was going down was Kevin White, by Ed Barrett (from Pressed Wafer), the first volume of a multi-part project re: Boston. I really liked the writing, in these prose poems - the movement from one thought/image to the next, often within the same sentence, and the rapid shifts between registers of language.

It also made me wish I knew more about Boston. The poems are as dense with allusions to Bostonia as they are imaginatively nimble. I know who Nomar Garciaparra is ("No-mah"). And Fanny Howe and John Wieners (tho these two function more as personages than historical people). But, unlike Nomar, a lot of it got past me. I mean, I'm sure I could write a series of poems about Memphis, full of Dancin' Jimmys and Henry Loebs and Little Laura Dukeses, going to hear the Klitz at the Well, blah blah blah, and the people my age back home might get a kick out of it, and the rest of you would be going wtf is he talking about.

Not that that's a bad thing. I don't know if Kevin White is Slow Poetry, but it is LoPo (local poetry). There's something attractive about really well-written poems directed to a local audience - and if the rest of us don't get it - well, spend more time in Beantown, dammit!

All of which is to say that maybe the "prose poem novel" is not (as the back cover suggests) the appropriate generic label. At least the novel part. There are recurrent personages and images, but it's hard to connect the dots. (I'm currently reading Sherre Myers' Green Ink Wings [Elixir], which, altho discontinuous - and multi-genre - clearly involves the same 4 main characters)

Nonetheless, there are some persons I "know" (like the Virgin Mary and the Prodigal Son), from the section entitled "The Big Dig":

"Underworlds right under our noses, intelligence gathering without recognition or knowledge. ProdigalSon15_22 posts his blog on Luke.com, but even that gets boring: JPEGS of harlots, slopping pigs under the entry 'I went to Harvard for this?' online predators who want to meet on the Fenway. It gets old, there's no heartbeat in Google's 0 and 1 digital iambic to carry DNA over fiber optic cable, wireless broadband packets arrowing out of the sky right into your inner chamber with its kneeling post. The good son studies Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, Mary's face turned to the side in neither disbelief nor wonder. That's how to react, Mickey Roache instructs the Boston PD. Mary was a true cop."

I dunno . . . I think that's pretty good, myself . . .

Big Christian Trip

". . . if I cannot be the good citizen, I will settle for the money" - Christian Peet

So, like I said, I read Christian Peet's Big American Trip (Shearsman Books 2009) on the way back from Las Vegas, which both was and wasn't the best time to read it. Was, in the sense that LV concentrates a lot of the America the postcard-writing protagonist of the book travels through and reveals, from Seattle to Brooklyn. Wasn't, b/c we were flying through thunderstorms and I thought I was going to die. One wants to read something more - well, comforting - at a moment like that.

(BTW, a major American literary event occurred in the comments to my last post - viz., Mr. P. wrote a new "post" from Las Vegas (of the Mind, anyhow). Really. Check it - it's good.)

So, since this is a book description and not a book review, I feel no compulsion to connect my thoughts - and frankly, I think it's bad form to do so, on a blog.

- A propos the epigraph, there are so many quotable quotes, it's not funny. Actually, some of them are quite funny, now that I think of it.

- It's horizontal - I mean "landscape." It's composed of postcards. Some of them are addressed to real organizations (did you really send them, C? - like Lazlo Toth?), but we never see the pictures on the other side.

- Some of the postcards have what look like "real" descriptions on the top - e.g., from "Downtown Big Timber, MT" ("And how is city 'Big Timber' with no tree?")

- Some don't

- The terms "restrictive" and "nonrestrictive" take on political and grammatical meaning at once, in this book. It is overrun by aliens.

- Lyrics from Foreigner song: "Whale, I'm HOP LOADED/ Czech in sea// Zygote a viva/ or 103" Who knew.

- Echoes of other American boy-poets on the road (sans !!'s):

Montana of the God spiteful, my hooded destiny . . .
Montana, you are difficult to see. You are wet
crystals of sun. Montana of Clark Forks
and no end of miles. Montana, I am not to cry.

or:

I am tired without one more day a home.
I am tired without one more day a friend.

My home, which is not the house, does not exist.

- It's all in Plain English, with some in Spanish, French, and German.

- It ends with "the agreement of the bodega" in "The Nation of Brooklyn." Unfortunately, the Orthogonian Flyovers (or Drivepasts) are part of the same political nation (cf. Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein). A trip from Wichita to Lincoln might be real different, for instance. Worth bearing in mind.

- Lots of appropriated material (with 3-postcard bibliography) - we like that, here at Blog of Myself(s).

- The font bugs - all caps, and someone's idea of handwriting. Too bad it isn't real Peet handwriting. Second edition, maybe.

- I really like the "raw" feel of it. Reminds me of G. Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook. Only shorter (postcards v. notebooks).

- It's a drive. It's always a drive. And:

The Drive is "Welcome to" and "Thank You"

The Drive is bison disappear to the hills.

The Drive is abandoned, condom in the rest area

The Drive is no backyard hill or stump

The Drive is find the long definition home

The Drive is steel & tar & oil & gas & coffee

The Drive is under the weather as under the law

The Drive is beyond me

The Drive is Heartland into stone

- No more description, kids - time to get the book and read it.

Fact-Simile 2:1

OK - so I'm going to write a description (as opposed to a "review" - see previous post, below) of Fact-Simile 2:1 (summer 2009). Well, as with previous issues, much of it is in the open form/field tradition - lots of white space, structural/sculptural lines. But there are other experiments with spatial form, e.g., Michael Leong's "Elementary Morality," which makes use of columns (I'm not even going to try to reproduce it on Blogger). I like this mag b/c the poems aren't in code. For instance, Andrew Peterson writes:

George Washington died of a colonist's disease.
Him and his high horse.
Distasteful as money in the mouth is.
(I still play for quarters, occasionally.)
Wound open late nights.

So OK, the slide from lines two to three and three to four are only very vaguely topical, and the "wound" could mean "wrapped around" or an open gash. But the diction is pretty straightforward. That's the combination I'm drawn to, here. One poem even comes with helpful instructions for reading.

There's prose, too - prose poems, and Sara Nolan's wonderfully generically ambiguous "Because Everyone Is Going To":

"My second grade teacher told us EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE EVENTUALLY and MEDITATE ON YOUR POO. Then she stood there and LOOKED at us. We were supposed to be having math - we already had our Workbooks out. . . .

"DON'T LET ANYONE LOOK AT YOU IN A WAY THAT IS NOT OK WITH YOU. Said my mother. Who was accidentally a feminist the way our goldfish was accidentally dead: CIRCUMSTANCES.

"I don't want to look at Poo, cried Betsey. We were in the principal's office. . . .

"But at home, my mother said SHE MEANT WELL."

If you've read Anise' (Anna Louise Strong) poems . . . well, you ought to, if this appeals to you at all. Anyway, why can't "creative" nonfiction read more like this? Isn't this more fun than some deadly-serious self-important sleeper that isn't supposed to be fiction but reads like the most conventional fiction ever told? Which is what this isn't.

There are some people here whose work I know (Rosemarie Waldrop, Leong, Marie Larson, Donald Illich), and a lot of people I'm glad to make the acquaintance of.

Last but not least (and first, in pagination) is a wonderful interview w/Kristin Prevallet re: mourning, ethics, and aesthetics, that is required reading. Again: no sketchy, high-fallutin diction for its own sake, but some disarmingly direct declarations and connections.

So, there - not a review, but a description. More like a revue, perhaps.

no negative reviews? no problem. call them what they are.

Many a critic has complained about critics – you know, the way we never write bad reviews except of books by people we loathe and fear. It’s mutually-assured destruction out there: you pan my book, I pan yours (hold fingers together and move hand back and forth). And, of course, we tend to review books and journals by people we like.

This all seems perfectly natural to me. I mean, what are ya, Alexander Pope or something? And then there’s Wilde’s dictum about not prejudicing oneself. (In How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard has an hilarious riff along these lines, vis-à-vis Paul Valéry – indeed, the whole book is hilarious – & also more serious than it sounds).

Anyway, how about this: how about instead of calling them “book reviews,” we call them “book descriptions.” I’m not talking Cliff Notes or Cartoon Classics here – no siree. But more detail than a mere blurb. I mean people who are good readers giving an overall impression of a book or journal that you’re probably not going to read anyway. Or – if it’s something that’s up your alley, maybe you will, if the description is detailed and vivid.

So, shazam – I just invented a new genre. Isn’t that wonderful? The world doesn’t have enough genres, does it? And we better make sure that no writing goes un-genred. You’re welcome!

Tomorrow: Joe describes journals that publish his stuff . . .

Loden v. (or qua?) Nixon

OK, I’m a little intimidated talking about Rachel Loden’s new book, Dick of the Dead (Ahsahta Press, 2009). I could say it’s bigger and (even) better than Hotel Imperium, but that’s pretty shallow, so I won’t. But I do want to let you all know that you should get it and read it.

As in H.I., Loden [OK - Rachel - hi, Rachel!] lets her inner formalist come out to play. A lot of these poems are almost already on the verge of rhyming – or they are rhyming, but you can’t figure out how – which is the mark of a fine musician. But often the playground seems like the political unconscious. Or cultural shadowland. Or something. (She’s a lot more eloquent than I am, anyway).

Anyway, the Dick of the title is the dead Dick Nixon, of course; he is the (oh shitse! there is some latin or French term for this) you know, - well, Nixon is to this book what Tiresias is to the Waste Land, let’s just leave it at that. But I get the impression that “Nixon” isn’t always the biographical disaster who was president from 1969-1974. Rather, that name is a composite persona – a very dark shade – a kind of Henry Bones or shadow Maximus. And, of course, there’s Dick Cheney, too, and Belial (fine distinction, I know). And Betsey Ross, I think. Et alia.

Now, if this were a real review, this would be the place where I quote sections of poems. And this is deerintheheadlights time – how does one choose. Granted, I like some more than others, but really. Well, some of these poems are rewritings (redactions? travesties?) of other poems. For instance, Wallace Stevens’ “Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” ends with:

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

In Loden’s “Milhous as King of the Ghosts,” the creepy bunny becomes the CREeP-y president:

I become an empire that fills the oleaginous pipelines
Of the earth. The bitch is still yapping
By gravestone-light and I am whipped high, whipped

Up, sculpted higher and higher, cool as a sphinx –
I sit with my head like a Rushmore in space
And the scrofulous hound smelling blood on my wings.

[google “Nixon AND Checkers,” kids] So, likewise, “I Knew a Man” becomes “I Knew a Brand” (the Jaguar XKR, as it turns out).

But there’s a lot more right-brain stuff going on in this book: that is, there are poems that may or may not be polished to a lapidary sheen, but that seem straight from the Martians (or the psychic Plumbers). Like that “Belial” poem:

Have you tasted me yet with the black hairs of your feet?

You lay your tiny, lilliput eggs in a basket: Easter fungi. . . .

Shall I compare your intentions to a giant cod which when split open, reveals a severed head?

They say your smegma is a delicacy in some countries, so give us a wet kiss –

Your fruiting body with its lacy gills, your stinger with its sweet paralysis.

Yeow. Or the “Richard Nixon Snow Globe” (which, apparently doesn’t really exist anywhere in the wide world’s web, despite an exhaustive search) made by a man who had to, “So he could see Dick’s head inside a dome/ While hoodoo snow is falling/ On the baby bush tricked out with lights/ In his rancho home sweet ovum.” Further deponent sayeth not.

Loden is one of the few poets around who can pull off addressing “big” issues in the res publica in a serious way – deftly, making traditional forms her own, at that – without sounding sententious. I think that’s b/c it’s too weird. Her stuff seems at least as close to Andre Breton as to “public poetry” in the US of the late 40s. And that’s the reason to read, not for me but for yourselves, o daughters of Sargon!

ZURAWSKI, KUNIN, CONRAD

Maggie, Aaron, and CA, that is - all of whom read last night at 6 Gallery in Lawrence. Verdict?

Kurawski - Read from novel The Bruise. Like Gertrude Stein with affect. Says things about having a body and feelings and stuff without being hokey. Terrific use of insistence and variation to propel narrative. Has haircut that, when turning her head to her left while reading (which she did) puts a curtain of hair between her and the audience. Good reading voice, tho.

Kunin - Read from novel The Mandarin. Like South Park for adults (over 30) - and funnier, b/c the writing is better. Even my partner, who doesn't go in for this sort of thing, really liked it! (Not a lot happens in The Mandarin, but that's the point, see?). Nobody fell asleep, that's fer sure. Good deadpan patter and stage persona.

Conrad - I had never heard CA Conrad read before, so I don't know what I expected. Somebody less personable, maybe. But like the others, he seems like a genuinely nice person (who in this case happens to drink crystal-infused water and walk around with semen on his forehead [occasionally]). Anyway, I liked his stuff beforehand, and like the new (very short, narrative) Frank poems were a hoot. A "high reader"; but lots of context patter at normal speaking voice.

Five stars. And some of them even like ice cream, as it turns out. Even the series organizers will at least walk into an ice cream parlor, which is awright, in my book.

William Zanzinger, Hattie Carroll, H.L. Hix, and G.W. Bush

Last week, William Zanzinger died in Richmond, Virginia. Who, you may ask, was William Zanzinger? Well, William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll, as Bob Dylan sang, and got off with 6 months - b/c, the ballad explains, he was rich and white, and she was a poor black servant woman. This is one form of historic commemoration - or commemoration of "current events" - the way the news traveled and the way legends were preserved, back in the day. If you couldn't read, you listened to someone who could. If you could read and not sing, you read it to someone who could (to the tune of . . .). And the broadsides which the ballads were printed on cost a penny, ha'penny, or less.

Another form of poetic commemoration is on view in the poems of God Bless, by H.L. Hix (Etruscan Press, 2007), which "are constructed entirely of passages from speeches, executive orders, and other public statements of George W. Bush" - or, in some cases, Osama bin Laden. So sure, there are some juicy bushisms. But, by and large, Hix has done a yeomanlike job of making poems (sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, no less) out of what must be some of the most incredibly boring discourse ever devised by the mind of man (or lack thereof). For instance, the title is a phrase that was repeated obsessively by the President, in multiple variants - not to mention other tedious iterations of every conceivable reference to an already overworked Deity:

We honor their service to America and we pray
their families will receive God's comfort and God's grace.

We pray for their speedy and safe return.
May God bless our country and all who defend her.

We pray for those families who mourn the loss of life.
We believe freedom is - is a gift from the Almighty God.

And so on. There is something about staying "on message" that seems inherently inimical to poetry (interesting poetry, anyway), and Hix has done about as well as I could imagine anyone doing in trying to turn this stuff into something resembling art. The stuff from bin Laden is also predictable, but it's such a nice break. When you go into the next Bush poem, you think, O - him again!

But it certainly gets the message across - or rather the distilled and concentrated flavor of those days of officialdom from the beginning of 2001 through 2004. The repetition (NOT insistence) is the rhetoric of running in circles - not inappropriate prosody for the war of terror.

Another, subsidiary question, this volume raises is: can this kind of found poetry be "political" by itself, without commentary? And if so, how? Hix follows the poems by a series of interviews that deal with both his poems and other people's books that deal with similar themes. This is perhaps the same issue Benjamin deals with in the "Matter-of-Fact" school of photography. In "The Artist as Producer," he comes to the conclusion that, without the caption, the image is open to appropriation by any political tendency - not least of all "apolitical" art. For much experimental poetry of the last 200+ years, prefaces, manifestos, interviews, etc., have functioned as "captions" - alleviating the burden of Art to convey the Message. That is why Lyrical Ballads had to be explained first, in 1800, but Dylan's ballad lyrics do not, in the 1960s or 2000s.